Somehow "Just like...Obama" isn't very encouraging to me

Very much this; mod parent up. I wonder what the consequences of an ad-less approach would be, however.

It may become harder for certain widget-making companies to achieve the sort of market penetration we see today when starting from scratch without using nuke-from-orbit style marketing. This could mean a greater duplication of effort in creating products (less economies of scale, potentially increasing the price of goods) and therefore less monopolization (potentially decreasing the price of goods), but also potentially makes it more difficult for small businesses to grow which may maintain established monopolies/oligarchies.

At any rate, I don't expect the results of forcing the current market into an ad-less or nearly ad-less state to be like anything that existed before.

Not entirely true. Wall street did back Romney much more than Obama, but Obama was also primarily supported by the 1%, just not to the extent that Mitt was. A quick search shows that large tech firms (M$, Apple, Google), the MPIAA firms (Disney, Time Warner, etc.), and various finance firms (many were also top Romney supporters) among Obama's top supporters.

Doesn't everyone know that

Indeed, I'm only running an intel CPU right now because the Bulldozer architecture...lets say it needs work.

Actually, I haven't seen any evidence recently that the democrats aren't just as supportive of the military front as the republicans.

Don't forget Ubuntu.

While what you said is all true, instruments are also much less likely to give false positives just because the handler wants it to do so. I agree that dogs can be reliable when used well, but in situations where the true positive rate is less than 0.01%, there are other issues with dogs.

It isn't that there should be a very light sentence for reckless actions unless injury occurs, it is that no reckless action of this type has *ever* caused detectable injury despite thousands of instances of this reckless action occurring. Think for a moment about what is necessary to cause injury.

The laser can only cause injury when shone directly into an area of a few square centimeters (although the actual target area may be larger if the beam is somewhat diffuse, but still sufficiently focused). And this from a distance that would likely need to be half of a mile away (unless the plane is just taking off or landing, in which case its probably more like a quarter-mile). In addition, this is only possible if the aircraft is flying more or less directly towards the laser source. In any case, anyone who succeeds in such marksmanship should probably be offered a large salary by a military contractor as soon as they get out of jail. The person would probably even be enough of an idiot to accept.

Prosecution, fine. What these people are doing *can* cause harm. Three years is idiotic.

So what exactly are you proposing then, a Russian revolution? Seriously, what *can* they do? They have no governmental authority outside of a vote, and even supposing Putin steps down (itself a ridiculous proposition) they still will have no governmental authority. All they would be able to do, without guns and ammo, is make some noise and hope his replacement listens.

They already have a plan of action and it is shout into the wind and hope people hear. Perhaps enough people will hear so that Putin won't win the next election, perhaps Putin will make some effort to be less of a PITA for them, and perhaps Putin's eventual replacement will take note of their discontent more than he does. Year sure, they can hope Putin will step down, but who among the protestors really think that's gonna happen. Remember that Putin in all likelihood won the vote without direct fraud, so making noise in public really is an end to itself right now.

Indeed. To give the government that kind of moral power seems to be a bit of a slippery slope to me.

Mod parent up.

Hrm, the article refers to DNA evidence as a "gold standard". I suppose its better than fingerprint analysis, but I do wonder if DNA evidence is also trusted too far.

Hrm, that "litany of lies" seems rather informative to me...

911 may be ambiguous for phone systems where you must dial 9 to get to the outside. For instance, at my workplace we had serious trouble with employees dialing 911 by accident. People dialed 9 to get out, then 1 for international, then another 1 either by mistake, or as the first part of an area code. The emergency services were not amused.