Actually, in typical totalitarian societies, drug dealers usually make arrangements with the "authorities". The thing is that totalitarian societies care not one bit about the welfare of their citizens, they only keep up appearances. What then happens in addition is that everybody on drugs is known to the authorities and if any of them ever voices a critical thought, they will be publicly crucified. All that are behave like the sheep they are supposed to be are left alone.

So, no, expecting that crime against citizens is less in authoritarian societies is not realistic. The one exception are some theocracies and quasi-theocracies where they are true believers and even see thinking anything else than the church/party line is a capital offense. There you actually may get less crime. The cost is extreme, though.

Very much this. Polite and evil are not at all incompatible. Nice and evil are. The only thing surveillance will do is make hidden backstabbing more common.

And who exactly did any of the senior Nazis kill? Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and the whole senior gang were the directors of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Are you seriosulyt asserting that they did nothing wrong? After WWIz I don't think Hitler actually killed anyone personally.

Uhh, the blog post was by a medical doctor, and it was filled with facts.

Probably because his actions on a talk show aren't covered by malpractice.

Fine:

For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%.

"Near" keyword, logic constructs, all those nice features AltaVista (which was just a hardware-demo) had, and Google never managed. Google is borderline unusable these days and you strongly notice they do not care about good search but only about placing their adds and profiling you.

We've spent centuries arguing nonsense, from how three is equal to one for large values of three

three is equal to one even for regular values of three if you're working on the Galois field of integers mod 2. 3=1 is one of those ideas so mad that only a mathematician could have invented it. Yet modular arithmetic is enormously powerful and turns out to have some quite stuning practical applications too.

Yay pedantry!

So every passenger would have to checks the driver's license, registration, insurance and inspection report before getting into a cab? That is why there are taxi licenses so the passenger can be sure that these checks have already been done.

Fucking communists ruining everything for everyone. Look it's simple the bad taxi drivers will just go out of business. So, if a tax driver murders you and turns your skin into a leather jacket, just vote with your wallet and use a different company next time. Then you'll see the invisible hand do its job.

According to Google Drops Plus Sign from Search Operators

Up front confession: haven't read the article, but unless the diaries are in the public domain, isn't this pretty cut and dry?

In the USA there would also be the possibility of the extracts being fair use.

This seems highly unlikely given the pro-monopoly stance that the administration of Barack Hussein "Lawnchair" Obama has taken up to this point. They didn't stop any of the airline or bank mergers that we have seen since 2009. They didn't reign in the massive control that the insurance industry has over the consumer (indeed they gave the industry more power). They didn't stop telecoms from merging either. Why would they get involved in this?

This looks like window dressing more than anything. The Administration is trying to get some positive PR but eventually they will let it slide through because the free market is teh awesome!

This truncated headline would have been more pleasurable.

Yep if it's done even when nobody's watching, THAT's kindness. If it's only done because there are cameras, that's called fear.

I hear that the trains are very timely as well!

Summary: God went bowling to knock some sense into wayward particle clumps.

Just last month I watched a truck rear end a minivan at a stop light then decide to make a run for it. In the process he forced a girl to jump out of the way (or get run over) then flew over a sidewalk around a blind corner (if anyone had been walking there he could have killed them).

Fortunately several people caught the license plate, he had a record already and with this latest infraction he'll likely be off the roads for a while. That most definitely could save lives.

What you don't have it the right to arbitrarily declare the laws we don't like to be unjust. There are times when there's real rights involved and civil disobedience is justified, I don't think a novel way of running a taxi service qualifies.

Should the law be changed to allow Uber-like services? Probably.

But that doesn't mean Uber can simply ignore the current laws.