While the linked to article, a US TV station news site, does call it a "draft notice", I suppose I should explain to the non-US people here that this is not technically correct. There has been no draft in the US since the end of the Vietnam War. For roughly 40 years now, the US has had an all volunteer army. What Selective Service is required to do is to contact US citizen males on their 18th birthday and advise them that for the next 10 years they need to let Selective Service know their new address every time they move because in theory, in a national emergency Congress could pass a law reinstating the military draft and Selective Service is required to maintain accurate records of those who might theoretically be subject to such a draft. Whether such a draft would ever be done again is a great question, given how Congress currently seems incapable of passing anything non-controversial, let alone something as controversial as reinstating the draft. A crackpot Congressman or two has tried to get the draft reinstated and it's never had enough support to even get a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. Whatever this is, technically speaking it's not a "draft notice".

Not to digress, but for those who don't know, the draft was very controversial during the Vietnam War, with the rich and powerful were able to get their sons exceptions to the draft or get them plum assignments in the National Guard that wouldn't require them to actually go to Vietnam. Listen to Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son", which was written about the practice. There was so much animosity about the unfairness of the draft and the compulsion to fight in a war that nobody but a small number of politicians seemed to want that the US switched to a voluntary system, but one of the deals cut to move to this system was that Selective Service had to know where to get young men should the draft ever get reinstated. And yes, female US citizens are not subject to this at all.

How do you know that they didn't? The only thing we saw in Slashdot a few days ago was some article without any sources that seemed to claim that US agents were going buck wild in Maldives and made the arrest themselves. I, and others, pointed out in that thread that the article was likely a very badly written summary and I was sure that the Maldives made any arrest and only after a valid arrest warrant came through. Yes, I told (some of) you so.

I disagree with your conclusions about computer chess, although you are quite right that it seems unlikely that if chess is ever "solved" (this is the correct term for what you talk about) so that the white player can always force a win that humans will be capable of remembering the data required to always force a win. And chess is a theoretically solvable game.

Computer chess at the highest levels like Deep Blue is little more than a highly specialized data base lookup. The laws of chess require you to have to make a move within time constraints, so if the program can't pick between equally good choices, it would have to rely on some kind of random choice that the programmer would have allowed for (ie. use a random number generator or pick the line likely to result in more exchange of material, etc.). In the early days of computing it was thought that for computers to get really good at chess, they would have to be able to use some kind of AI, but damn IBM for realizing that they could cheat and simply throw massive amounts of processors, computer memory and massive databases of moves at the problem rather than having to actually do real AI work for computers to beat humans at it. That Deep Thought is just a variation on Deep Blue where it's really good at searching through databases of stored information rather than being able to actually do any real kind of AI work. Basically Deep Blue and Deep Thought are brute forcing a solution through technology rather than actually breaking any kind of AI ground, although they may have some really cool and nifty search algorithms to do the job that others lack.

Yes, it's certainly possible for any chess game to get "out of book" and get a sequence of moves where the outcome isn't known, but that can easily by handled by programming approaches that have existed for decades. For example, a program may look to see if the opponent has left a piece undefended by mistake and simply grab it if it doesn't seem to be a deliberate sacrifice (ie. "If I take piece A, will that leave me vulnerable to a next move attack by a different piece?"), you can try to simply exchange material, evaluate positional strength and play to that (ie. "I'm strong on the king side and my opponent is weak there, so I'll push for a king side attack") and so on. These kinds of approaches have been in the best computer chess programs for decades now and there's nothing novel about them.

The famous "few attempts that have been made" originated in foreign countries, not in the USA. You admit that there is a "lack of effort". Huh. You'd like us to believe that this is because "teh TSA am stoopid" or something that amounts to that, but in fact it very well could be that the bad guys have decided that the likelihood of getting a bomb on a plane is not "100%" or close to it like you seem to believe but quite a bit below that. I'd say maybe a 5-10% chance of getting through security successfully. Suicide bombers are a limited quantity and the chance of failure could be a disaster because if the would be bomber gets caught by the TSA, the US government now has access to the type of bomb being used and may be able to get the failed terrorist to talk. This is exactly what happened with Richard Reid.

People have car alarms not because they believe that it makes their car impossible to break into but because it raises the bar so that it may be more trouble than it's worth. Actually I think the TSA is working because if it was truly as bad as you and other complainers claim, there would have been a successful attempt already. I think the bad guys have decided that the risk is too high that they won't get away with it and the success would not be worth the risk of getting caught.

I wish I could find out when the last time is that you even flew to/from/within the USA. I had a friend a few years ago who would go into a full blown hissy fit and rant about the TSA, making pretty much the same arguments as you. He last flew around 1998 and he is very likely to never in his life get on a plane again. It has nothing at all to do with the TSA - he has no reason or desire to ever travel by plane. Yet from all his complaining you'd think that he was some kind of hard core road warrior who was at a different US airport every week. I have found that in general the people who complain the most about the TSA are the people who fly the least.

Let's get this clear - it's not illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba. Not at all.

Got that? Good. Now what is illegal, thanks to President Kennedy, is for Americans to spend money there without prior authorization from the US Department of Treasury. This is how the US government "gets" people who go to Cuba without permission. See, Kennedy signed the order during the Cold War and to prevent the Communists from arguing that the US was repressive and taking away the freedom of its citizens to go to Cuba, Kennedy simply made it illegal to spend money there unless you got special authorization to do so. Very rarely are US citizens truly forbidden from traveling anyway. I think in the past there may have been a few places where we actually legally couldn't travel to, but I'm not sure if any exist any more. I suppose it's worth mentioning that generally it's only when a Republican is president that the US government gets interested in prosecuting citizens for spending money in Cuba without prior authorization. This has not been a high priority of the Clinton or Obama presidencies.

Granted the bit about being able to travel to Cuba legally but not able to spend money there without prior authorization is a fine line and essentially the legal cases against such travelers have involved the US government arguing (probably without proof) that the traveler couldn't go there and not spend money. It's all a crock. It's not well known but my understanding (I have no personal experience here) is that the Obama administration has made it much easier for US citizens to go to Cuba legally via authorized cultural travel groups so there's not really a reason to just skirt the law and go without permission. The Bush administration had much tighter restrictions on travel to Cuba and a history of prosecuting citizens who got caught going there without prior authorization.

You raise some good points and you may be right, but I wondering if this is actually a sign that the CCP is losing control over the PLA (People's Liberation Army). For years to keep the military at their beck and call, the CCP has been working the propaganda machine into overdrive. My experience is that the average Chinese person, at least those in the big cities and not rural people, doesn't really trust the government or believe everything they say, but the propaganda works really well for those who join the PLA. I feel that China's military is pretty unprofessional and looking to start trouble and this is because they've been indoctrinated to believe that everybody is against good old China because of jealousy and if China doesn't fight tooth and nail for everything, they'll wind up with nothing. Throw in a few references to treaties they don't like that were signed in the 1800s (none of which are in force today, by the way) to bolster the claim that they've always been the victim and you have a military that acts like a rabid dog. Also, it doesn't help that the constitution of China pledges the PLA to defend the CCP, not China itself. So the CCP is at once both the state and more important than the state at the same time. It may be that all these years of indoctrination are bearing their inevitable ugly fruit now and they have to keep them busy building islands so they don't try to force an invasion of Taiwan, something that would possibly result in the US and Japan attacking China over.

This is a pissing war. Both sides may be sincere and well intentioned, but it's still a pissing war. Here's a manager type summary. I'll use TC to represent the TC developer who responder and Forkers for the person representing the people who want to fork it.

Forkers: We'd like your permission to fork your code and get the rights to it. We could just fork it without your permission and others no doubt will if you refuse to comply. We want your trademarks and your OK to put the forked code into a different license then you used. We've started looking at your code and while we do agree that there are problems there that desperately need to be fixed, we feel strongly that fixing your broken code is a million times easier than writing this from scratch. So will you play ball with us?
TC: Our code is so broken that you need to start from scratch. That's why we abandoned it - didn't think it was possible to fix without doing a complete re-write. So no, we're not going to "play ball".

Actually, I think you're wrong on both accounts. The military in China is a little bit crazy. Did you know that they are pledged by the constitution to support the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) rather than China itself? Think about that for a while. The civilian CCP government does control the PLA (People's Liberation Army), but for years now the PLA has been gaining in influence. I'm not sure even the CCP government really cares all that much about its provocations any more because they don't believe anybody will stand up to them, not even the USA.

China and North Korea are stuck with each other. Russia had the good sense to get out of that crazy game of financially supporting them early in Yeltsin's presidency, and that left China holding the bag. China doesn't have as much influence as you might think, nor do they use what little they have as well as they could. It's not well known by the public, but China has a lot of business deals with North Korea where basically they get rare earths and other minerals for below market rates. These deals are very important to China and are the main reason they prop up North Korea. China is really tired of North Korea behaving badly and causing trouble in its backyard, but they fear even more a united democratic Korea that might (who knows?) have US troops stationed in it near the Chinese border. So like it or not, they are committed firmly to the status quo because it represents a "least evil" option to them. When China says that they want a nuclear free Korean peninsula, they are quite sincere about that. They don't trust North Korea to maybe not use a nuke against them in anger or by mistake as their missile systems might simply go the wrong way and blow up in China by accident. But they aren't willing to do anything to get rid of the Kims and the Kims aren't getting rid of their nukes because they believe that their family survival depends on it. The only ways that North Korea is ever going to be nuclear free is that either the US is going to attack them and gamble that they can destroy their few nuclear missiles before they leave North Korean airspace or (much less likely) the regime will collapse quickly for some unforeseen reason and the new government will get rid of the nukes.

Actually, it's not likely at all that either Japan or South Korea "have a few they don't talk about". Do I believe that both countries could possibly produce a nuclear weapon? Yes. But untested nukes are useless because they may not work. Neither country has ever carried out a test. Believe me, if they did, you would know about it. South Korea seems a bit iffier here because they've had some satellite launch problems so I've got a hunch that they may not necessarily be ready right now to make a nuke. With time? Yes. Absolutely. If I had to bet on it right now, I'd bet that Japan could probably produce one that would work correctly on a first try. The only only other country in Asia that was ever rumored to have nuclear weapon capability was Taiwan because they were strongly suspected of helping Israel and South Africa do nuclear testing decades ago, but as a Taiwan watcher I can say that if they ever had the capability, they abandoned it and it would be very difficult to impossible for them to quickly get that going again. In fact, I feel pretty confident that they don't have even one nuclear weapon and there is a chance that they simply don't have as much knowledge as Israel and South Africa did at the time. South Africa willingly became a nuclear free state but if you look carefully you find things where SA government officials admit that they know how to make nuclear weapons, but they chose not to do so.

For those who don't understand the reference, the Keystone Cops were incompetent policemen in a series of American silent movies. I read the article linked to in the article and basically Nokia dropped the money off in a paper bag in a parking lot and the police watched the pickup and then completely lost the blackmailer. To this day they have no idea at all who got the money and it seems that Nokia has only the word of the blackmailer that they wouldn't use the keys for nefarious purposes.

Good morning, Mr. Rip Van Winkle. There are mobile phones that run an OS called Android that you seem not to have heard of but exactly meet your criteria. You might want to check that out. You can actually buy those in the USA right now.

I was there in South Africa for the World Cup. Were you? If not, you don't get to pass off rumors as facts. And if you're one of those racist Afrikaners, your opinion means nothing because a lot of you are still living in the past.

I don't know where this "They almost literally declared martial law" stuff comes from. I stayed in the home of some South African friends, who by the way would have been classified as "colored" in the old Apartheid system, and other than having a lot more tourists, it was pretty much life goes on as usual there. I didn't see any unusual numbers of police or military anywhere. I went to two different major cities and even went with a friend to Kruger National Park for a few days and at no time did I see any unusual number of police or military, nor did I hear on the local news about tourists being the victims of crime. Yes, I'm sure that somewhere some tourist there got victimized in some way, but this suggestion that there was plenty of crime that got covered up is just nonsense. Your reference to the "mainstream media" troubles me quite a bit because that could suggest that you get your information from sources that the majority of us feel are unreliable and too politically oriented.

I can't speak for other countries where things may be different, but the US rules on exclusion that the Red Cross uses get more and more exclusionary every year and are now a bit nuts in my opinion. I was a regular blood donor and they used to call me and tell me that they liked to get my blood because it was "unusually clean" and was very suitable for giving to infants. Early this year I tried to donate and they deferred me for a year. Want to know why? It's because I rode on a train for no more than 60 minutes through a "malaria area". I traveled last year to China and I took a train ride of not more than 60 minutes between two large towns. The towns themselves were fine, but the area between them is supposedly a "malaria risk area". Even though I have had zero symptoms they consider my blood to be "at risk for malaria" and I can't donate until 1 year after the trip. So I'm sorry infants, but no blood from me for a while. The Red Cross had a worker who called me a few days after my deferral to talk to me about it and I told her that I felt that the Red Cross was far too exclusionary and she said she agreed with me, but there was nothing she could do about it. OK, maybe some of you will say that while there is little chance I have malaria, it's not zero and they need to be careful. OK, maybe - maybe - you have a point. Maybe. But are you aware that since last year there have been new exclusionary rules on women and now in the USA the majority of women who have ever been pregnant, even if they lost the baby, now cannot ever donate blood? Pregnant women may contain some kind of anti-body that a small number of blood recipients react violently towards so they've decided to ban something like 75% of pregnant women from ever donating again because that's about how many have this anti-body. It's going to reach the point where the only people the Red Cross in the US will ever take blood from are men who have never traveled outside the US even once. I predict that will be the next restriction.

It's even worse then you think. Here's the story that many believe on why it really got started.

EC Publications had a successful line of comics in the early 1950s that changed the industry. EC was very successful and they had some of the best artists ever to work in the comics such as Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Wally Wood, etc. EC's most successful comics were 3 horror comics - Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt Of Fear, and The Vault Of Horror. Anybody remember the old HBO TV series "Tales From The Crypt"? Well, they licensed the title and the concept from EC and even had some episodes based on stories that ran in the comics. EC had other comics such as crime story, war story and sci-fi. All are considered classics.

In an effort to give editor/writer/artist Harvey Kurtzman a chance to earn more money by giving him another comic to edit, Mad was created - as a comic book, not a magazine. Mad became a gigantic success and spawned quite a few imitators, including EC's own official imitation of Mad comic (yes, they really advertised it as such), Panic. Mad the comic did a lot of comics parodies and one they parodied was Archie. The story was called Starchie and they turned him into a juvenile delinquent. Now it is true that at the time some psychologists were actually suggesting that the reason so many kids were "juvenile delinquents" were that comics were warping their poor little minds. Desperate parents latched onto this explanation and the US Senate actually held hearings on it.

The story goes that the guy who published Archie just completely lost his mind over the Mad parody. In his fury, he got some other creators of (mostly less successful than EC) comics to create the Comics Code to "save the kids". Think about the children! Won't somebody think about the children! Well, it just so happens that the Code specifically forbade the use of certain words in comic book titles that just happened to be ones used by EC and they specifically forbade the types of stories that EC published. Was it coincidence? Revenge? I lean towards the latter. Remember, the US was a much less litigious place in those days. People didn't sue over anything and if you tried that, it often didn't work. EC responded by dropping all of their titles except Mad and putting out a new series of comics that had high quality art and conformed to the Code, but as these were nothing like their previous comics, they failed and nobody bought them. EC made one last gasp attempt to avoid the code with a series of "picto-fiction" magazines that had a few drawings and were mostly text, but nobody wanted those either. Mad became a magazine to avoid the Code altogether and the comics line was killed off by EC. So basically the story is that the Comics Code came into being to specifically punish EC Publications for doing a parody of Archie with the cover story being that the Code was there to "protect the children". Mad's original creator Harvey Kurtzman got into trouble with Archie again in the early 1960s when he did another parody starring Goodman Beaver and called "Goodman Goes Playboy". This parody featured Archie and various other characters now living the Playboy lifestyle. Archie's publisher sued again and forced a settlement where the copyright got transferred to him. The story vanished for decades but the copyright failed to be renewed and it's actually in the public domain now, one of the rare things that passed into public domain before the dreaded Bono Act made copyright renewal automatic.

You don't understand the event sequence, so you are wrong. It went like this.
1) Snowden steals a bunch of documents in secret. He flies to Hong Kong. At this point, nobody knows anything about him or what he has done except Snowden himself.
2) While in Hong Kong, Snowden gives a bunch of documents to various members of the press and holds a press conference to announce what he has done and to point out that he "had" to do it because it was the only way to let the American people know the truth.
3) The US government wakes up and realizes it has a really big problem on its hands. It's only now that the "traitor" charges begin and the US leans on China to send him back, instead prompting China to turn a blind eye as Russia agrees to make this its problem and headache to deal with. This gets China off the hook, although the Chinese have surely previously copied Snowden's stuff and possibly reached a deal with the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russia to share with each other what they find out.