Nice to see that American politicians are not the only crooks with too much power. Now what do we do about it?

When US politicians try to ban online gambling, it's not to drive business to government gambling sites, but rather to drive business to Sheldon Adelson. I guess they figure if you're going to be corrupt, you might as well be corrupt for someone who pays better than the government.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

With all the clever hacks and workarounds people are posting, I'm ashamed to say my best is using a steak knife as a screwdriver.

Don't forget, ACME smart appliances all require you to agree to letting ACME access your address book, location, browsing history and other personal information. But their website says "We take your privacy seriously".

I'll be interested in the Internet of Things as soon as I can get an IPv6 address for my balls.

> The way a drone strike works is a drone loiters on station for
> weeks on end. During this time the drone's pilots figure out who
> is in the house when [...] the Girl Scouts [...] teenage daughter
> has a boyfriend who sneaks in [...] civilian population [...]

Seriously? Do you belive this? It looks like some soap opera TV drama applied to military actions. I don't think it works like that. For what I see nobody cares about the civilians unless it would be a publicity stunt. For what I see the drone killing policy is just plain chaos fueled by special forces intel - and the chain of command - general the target is in the building - just blow it the fuck up and we have a success, then the order goes down and further down and then it is the sole drone pilot who is given an order to blow something up - but he has objections, maybe the said, hypothetical boyfriend is right now banging, but he has orders - what to do? Run it up the chain of command to the general who has his orders from the intel? Are you joking? Etc.

What you have written would be true if secret intel operations were flawless but for what we know it is just a chaotic bullshit. Man USA invaded another country based on wrong/or misleading political interpretations of wrong intel (I am wrigting about Iraq and Bush administration) and also USA is a big mess of Xteen top secret organisations/agencies and employing about a milion people with access to top secret information...

In general this whole machine powers decisions to use drone killing. Paranoia I would say.

It seems to me that it's a waste of resources to keep cabs in low-demand areas on the off-chance that someone's grandmother wants to use one.

It might be a "waste of resources" to give your grandmother medical care too, but as a society, we're uncomfortable with people being left out.

When the libertarian caliphate comes to power, then we can let grandma go dangle. Until then, it's probably to our benefit to look out for her.

I don't know how you function in what I presume is USA but here in Poland in small to mid sized companies nobody would even consider buying general purpose office printer without knowing that there are cheap substitute toners aviable for that model. I work in small company and we only buy printers for which we can get cheap toners. And the price difference is like 1/2 (!). Right now we go only with Lexmark and annually we do a market research to emerge the cheapest company to supply us with substitute toners. Once we have a contract with such company they are more than willing to take old toner cases from us. And they also do all the paperwork for us to give us receipts of old toners recovery since it is required by law to have such. I don't know anybody who was controlled about this but it is illegal here tu just dump the e-waste in thrash - you ought to have a receipt for every piece of electronics/e-waste you dispose (and also you need it for fiscal reasons).

So I am a bit shocked reading about your toner accumulation policy and your urge to throw them away into trash. :)

Drone piolots have no doubt done somethings history won't look kindly on but so has basically every fighting man using whatever technology and tactics. Sure maybe some just do it for the pay check or lack of other options but most of the people that enlist in our volunteer armed services have some conviction about defending the nation.

I will challenge, "most". How would we know if their motivation was the defense of the nation or if they just needed a job and their best option was to enlist? And defense of the nation from what? The US hasn't fought a war in defense of the nation since the 19th century.

Let's stop romanticizing the military. This isn't GI Joe who was drafted off his daddy's farm to go fight the Fuhrer. This is a "professional military", remember? And there's a word for professional military. Mercenary. Just look at how eager these guys are to go work for Blackwater, or "Xe" or "Academi" or whatever the private contractor army is calling itself today.

I'm kind of surprised that the same people who look sideways with suspicion at anything Big Government does also romanticize the enforcement arm of that Big Government by becoming military groupies or police buffs. Every member of the military and every member of every police force in the United States fits the dictionary definition of "bureaucrat", plus they get to use deadly force. Remember that the next time you hear someone talking about those damn "government bureaucrats".

Dogs can get this way around fireworks, thunderstorms, etc, by people thinking they're comforting the dog when it looks worried. Instead, the dog takes this as confirmation there's something to be worried about and it becomes an increasing cycle. The secret is to pay no attention to the dog's worrying behavior instead of petting and telling it everything is OK.

You may be right. My dog will try to climb into me or my wife's lap when the fireworks start, and if thunder happens at night, she'll try to climb into bed with us. We've always tried to comfort her. I'll take a different approach next time, but it might be too late for this one to adjust.

I don't have statistics on hand, but since WWII, I am aware of dog fights have played into air battles of the following wars with us pilots involved:

Korean War
Vietnam War (quite famously as we thought the days of day fighting were over.)
Kosivo et al.
First Gulf War.

Guam, Afghanistan, and Gulf War II did not , too my knowledge and I and not sure if there are others I've forgotten.

Yep. It would be much cheaper/safer to buy a few thousand fake positive reviews to drown out the negative ones.

Cue a bunch of ISPs playing games with the definition of "normal conditions".

We already have Playboy models advising the public on medicine and Fundamentalist Christians in charge of the National Science Curriculum so hey, why not?

Because anybody who has any aptitude at all for CS has usually been called on to configure Grandma's router, that's why.

If they've never done that then be very suspicious of their claimed interest in computing. You might be dealing with a bullshitting hipster who decided yesterday that computing might be a "good career move". Until he decides it's too much like real work.