Which is why political parties love these voters. Because they'll vote straight party line ticket every single time. They make an effort to identify these people and physically drag them to the polls if necessary.

Back in the day before New York got rid of our battleship gray lever machines it was easy as pie to identify these voters. "*click* *click* *click* *click* *click*" as they pulled the levers across their party line without even bothering to read the names of the candidates they were voting for. In and out in 5 seconds flat with 15+ offices on the ballot.

There is no way that you can conduct online voting and ensure that the voter is not being intimidated. Offsite voting is a necessary evil for certain people (the handicapped and those who are unavoidably out of town on election day) but it does not need to be expanded to cover everyone. Here in New York we very specifically keep those most likely to intimidate you out of the voting booth, i.e., your employer and union official. The people that can hold a financial gun to your head if you don't vote the way they want. With online voting (or offsite voting on paper, i.e., absentee ballots) there is no way to actually ensure that the voter doesn't have a gun (real or proverbial) aimed at their head when they click 'submit.' For this reason alone I will always oppose it and other measures (vote by mail) that take people out of the polling place.

The summary also makes the assumption that low voter turnout is a big problem. This is an oft-repeated claim but there's zero evidence to suggest that increased participation rates equate to better results. People choose not to vote for many reasons; apathy likely being the biggest one, followed closely by a generalized disgust with the available options. "None of the above" is a perfectly valid option in an election, whether exercised via the write-in for "Mickey Mouse" or by staying home on Election Day.

Why? I love G+ when compared against the competition; better software, a slicker interface, higher signal to noise ratio, it's better than Facebook in every metric except for the minor little detail that hardly anybody uses it. I was hoping that they would mount a serious challenge to FB but it seems unlikely that is going to happen, barring some huge mistake on FB that alienates a critical mass of people.

Wouldn't it be better to treat them like PCs and remove the OEMs from the equation entirely? Why should I have to rely on Motorola/Samsung/LG/Nokia (or worse, Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile/Sprint) to get patches for my Android operating system? I don't have to wait for Dell to push out Microsoft's latest round of security patches, I download them directly from Microsoft and install them myself.

There's no reason phones need to work any differently than PCs have worked for the last two decades except a desire by the carriers and handset manufacturers for planned obsolescence. If Google had any backbone whatsoever they would push the ecosystem in this direction, they've certainly got enough of a user base now to throw their weight around as Apple has done since the very beginning.

That's because the unwritten "Right Not To Be Offended" trumps the written "Right To Free Speech" in the United States. I particularly love the irony of seeing college kids chanting "Je suis Charlie" while they simultaneously shout down speakers that they don't agree with and do their utmost to get them banned from speaking at their universities.

Would you make the same statement if we were talking about Scientology and the target of the attack was Comedy Central?

Because, once again, our feckless President doesn't understand the importance of symbolism outside of political campaigns. As an American who has friends scattered all over the EU I'm extremely disappointed that he couldn't be bothered to make the trip.

"Abusive" and "hateful" speech are not limited in the United States. You must be confusing us with Europe and/or Canada.

That's an awesome find. Thank you very much for sharing it. :)

Chuck Norris is a cute reference but in reality there are a nearly infinite number of factors that come into play. Gender, size, training, existing injuries, number of opponents, and so on. A fight might even start out as a normal fisticuffs where deadly force would not be permissible but escalate to a situation where the defending party is too injured to continue to defend themselves without resorting to deadly force. If you beat the snot out of me to the point that I'm about to pass out I'm well within my rights to shoot you, since I'll no longer be able to defend myself whilst unconscious. If you come after me with three of your friends I'm well within my rights to resort to deadly force, since even a well trained individual is not likely to prevail against 4 to 1 odds. Ditto if you've got 200 pounds on me. The relevant term is "disparity of force" and it seems to have applied in the incident in Ferguson.

Which is what happens the lion's share of the time. Cases where the suspect surrenders without a fight don't make the news though.

Grand Jury is part of the prosecution in the United States. Before you can be prosecuted for a felony offense the Government needs to secure an indictment against you. This is the job of the Grand Jury. The standard they must meet is significantly lower than a Petit Jury at trial, which must find beyond a reasonable doubt with a unanimous ruling that you committed the crime in question. The Grand Jury need only find that there's probable cause you committed the crime in question. They do not need a unanimous ruling to do this, simply a majority of the empaneled Grand Jurors must vote for indictment. The State is allowed to introduce evidence at Grand Jury that it would not be allowed to use at trial, like hearsay or illegally obtained evidence, and the deck is further stacked against the defendant in that if he chooses to testify he waives his right to be represented by counsel and his right to refuse to answer questions that might incriminate him.

If the State can't meet this simplified burden of proof under rules that greatly favor it then what is the point of preceding to trial? More than 90% of cases presented before the Grand Jury result in indictment. The remaining cases are so exceedingly weak that there's less than zero chance they would result in conviction at trial were the Grand Jury system to be abolished. Additionally, it's mandated by our Constitution, so the process of abolishing it is not a simple one.

If you read the summary you'll note that concern was with regards to when these cameras should be on vs. when they should be off. Should they be on while the officer is sitting in his patrol car doing paperwork, bitching to his partner about the litany of mundane things (both work related and personal) that co-workers across all professions bitch to one another about? I have friends and family in law enforcement and I'm generally supportive of body cams, but they're going to fundamentally change the nature of policing and not always for the better. Do you think you're going to get the polite "Please slow down." admonishment when you get pulled over by an officer wearing a body cam? Think your pot smoking kid gets the joint taken from him, ground into the dirt, and an admonishment to shape up his act? Not likely. It's going to be letter of the law by the book policing, with all the pros and cons that go along with that. On balance it's for the best but let's not pretend there won't be drawbacks to it or that there aren't legitimate concerns about the best way to implement such technology.

Unarmed has nothing to do with whether or not someone is a threat that warrants the use of deadly force. There are a litany of informative articles that you can read on the subject if you're so inclined. Start by Googling "disparity of force" and "ability, opportunity, and jeopardy." Those are the standards taught to law enforcement (and armed civilians, incidentally) in all 50 States. If you're alluding to what happened in Missouri, I read the Grand Jury transcripts in their entirety, and if the Officer's testimony is to be believed his actions were completely justified. The Grand Jury apparently thought they were and the Feds haven't bothered to bring charges against him.

I wonder what will happen to the "Hands up, don't shoot!" movement when we see another such incident happen with a body cam wearing officer who turns out to be completely justified in his actions? Will we still see the parade of childhood pictures of some 280 pound thug? Attention seeking asshats (*cough* Sharpton *cough*) jumping in for their share of the headline? Riots in the streets? I'm guessing that all of those things will happen, because these things have never been about justice, but are rather precipitated by a handful of assholes taking advantage of legitimate longstanding grievances in disadvantaged communities. It fits a narrative so let's run with it, never mind what the actual facts are on the ground.

It was a minor annoyance; I certainly understand it even though it annoyed the piss out of me for about two weeks. Probably wouldn't have cared but for my Rube Goldberg setup of different profiles for different sites that I only launch every few days, so I kept running into it again and again. :)

I wish them luck, they're up against some powerful players. I use their mobile browser too FWIW; I find that it's better than Chrome on my Kitkat device, though of course Chrome is my fallback for the handful of sites that don't like Firefox mobile for whatever reason. On my desktop they get 95+% of my browsing, Chrome there is confined to G+ and a handful of other Google sites I access regularly.

Thank them? They changed the default search provider on all my existing Firefox profiles without my permission during the last update. I have about twelve different Firefox profiles for different things (-no-remote is your friend) and I was quite annoyed to have to change it back to my preferred setting on every single one of them. I don't begrudge them for the search deal, it was bound to happen with Google pushing Chrome so heavily, but leave the existing people alone, mmm'kay?

That's a possibility. The amplification attacks seemingly cropped up out of nowhere (even though the vulnerability was well known and discussed for years prior) in late 2013/early 2014. It was quite the topic of discussion on the NTP Pool mailing lists. Most people had sensible configurations that put 'noquery' in the default line but there were obviously enough servers out there answering monlist queries to make it profitable for attackers to target all of us. My server ends up rate-limiting anywhere from 15% to 40% of her hourly queries. but I'm guessing most of those are poorly configured clients, not DDoS attempts. It's also possible that some of them are machines behind NAT sharing the same IP, which all appear as one client from ntpd's perspective.

There's nothing wrong with using public time servers. You can certainly pick out better ones (in terms of latency and hop count) doing it yourself than you'll ever get out of the NTP Pool DNS round robin. Or you can do the same by picking servers manually out of the round robin. The pool mainly exists as a load balancing system that's easy to include in default configurations. I've only got my other server using it because I believe in eating my own dog food. :) That server would itself be serving time in the pool if it wasn't on the same network as the box I've already got in the pool.

reddit

*duck*