Sad you would choose to live somewhere you'd actually feel the need to depend on a gun. :(

BTW... I recently experimented a bit with guns. I can see it to be enjoyable to spend a day at the range... well if I could do something about the noise at least. I just could never see actually being intelligent enough to tie my own shoe laces, but being dumb enough to live somewhere I would actually need to use a gun for any purpose other than recreation or worst case, getting food... just gutting it sounds quite awful. But in either of those cases, while I might use the gun as a tool or toy, I can't see ever needing it to be so reliable I couldn't get a second chance to sort things out.

Well... I guess some people voluntarily prefer to put themselves into circumstances where they might get lucky and get a chance to kill another person.

Cool! You found a way to remove that last burden of free software which is free IT services. I'm guessing you're volunteering to work for free and install Linux and train all the users and support them over the long term all for free?

AWESOME!

Yes, and just like eyewitnesses to an accident, it's shown that such "points of view" are often wrong or misinterpreted.

Just one example of many: the statements by people near the Pentagon on 9/11 that it "sounded like a missile". How many of those people have actually ever even *heard* what a commercial jetliner sounds like traveling at nearly cruising speed just hundreds to dozens of feet off the ground "sounds like", much less a missile? This is then used as "proof" that it couldn't have been a plane, and probably was a "missile", despite all evidence to the contrary (including numerous statements from people saying they clearly saw the plane, sometimes in the same sentence as the cherry-picked quotes where they say it "sounded like a missile").

This is why we have professionally trained (usually) journalists and experts, because they do the filtering and analysis for us. I'm sorry, but NO individual is capable, his or her self, of becoming an authority on everything related to every major event that occurs with the end result being better analysis than what has already been done by investigators and task forces of experts. Sure, have a questioning mind and all that, but don't assume everyone in the "media" or the "government" is always lying to you, and random, out-of-context, and/or misinterpreted (or outright wrong) assertions by "citizen journalists" (or anyone else) are gospel.

You're acting as if information was "withheld"...it wasn't. There is no mechanism to release every single piece of evidence collected by every agency to the internet and "crowdsource" it.

What was "crowdsourced" was information that was already on the internet. Furthermore, the FBI did, in fact, release the relevant snippets of video and pictures from the private security cameras and other sources.

Sorry, but "crowdsourcing" is not always the answer, and this was not a success, much less a rousing one.

This has been a fascinating phenomenon, and it's only going to evolve more as time goes on.

Crowdsourcing or witch hunt? Reddit, 4chan users try to ID Boston bomb suspects

Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong

'I didn't do anything!' High school track runner forced to deny involvement in Boston Marathon bombings after a picture of him and his coach is widely circulated

Social media as breaking-news feed: Worse information, faster

Worse information, faster -- this neatly sums it up, and I'm a huge proponent of social media and its benefits, including to government.

And for the record, no, the FBI wasn't seeking to "censor" anyone, and the "next logical step" (as I have seen asserted elsewhere) won't be to "shut down" internet or social media resources during major public emergencies; however, law enforcement agencies absolutely can request, once they have identified suspects via investigative and legal processes, that people focus on those instead of playing CSI: Internet.

Sadly, the echo chamber of the internet enables some people, in seemingly increasing numbers, to go a step further and choose to believe everything is automatically a "false flag" conspiracy with the stated perpetrators "framed"â¦..

The "wisdom of crowds" can be a misnomer.

I used to buy a new laptop or desktop every 3 months. Now I buy I'm only upgrading ram or hard drive occasionally. My "Power House" laptop, a Core i7 with 16gigs of memory is from two summers ago. I have little or no interest in "POWER GAMING" machines. Instead, portability and battery life area far more interesting. Windows 8, who the hell needs to upgrade for that. I broke out old computers which were sluggish on Windows 7 and installed Windows 8 upgrades and they ran beautifully. Even gave them away to people who might have bought new machines otherwise.

These days, I tend to buy new toys like projectors and book binding machines. New PCs aren't that interesting.

That said... when I was in the states two weeks ago, I bought 3 Surface Pros... I should go back and buy 3 more :)

In other news (aside from the Twitter and Flickr accounts):

Sorry, Anonymous probably didn't hack North Korea's intranet

Sure, but those people aren't the ones who are the source of our problems. For what it's worth, from 2011 IRS data:

Category..........Top 0.1%....1%....5%...10%..25%..50%..Bot 50%
Income Req'd $........1.4M..344K..155K..112K..66K..32K....N/A
Income Share %...........8....17....32....43...66...87.....13
Effective tax rate %....24....24....20....18...15...12......2
Income tax share %......17....37....59....70...87...98......2

Also, you're comparing apple to oranges by saying that "you could [...] save enough in about 4-5 years to stop working and still be making 10 times what your average American makes." No, because they already have the income they have, and they have a different lifestyle -- and guess what? They haven't done anything wrong.

The place where anything that can be defined as actual unfair "abuse" is occurring is in the 0.01% and up, and it's not even all of those people. To wholesale target the "top 1/5/10%" as evil or the cause of our problems ignores the fact that the top 10% -- who themselves are making over $100,000/year -- are paying 70% of the federal income tax share.

Even if we could have the bottom, say, 50%, or even the bottom *90%* pay NO tax of any kind, including payroll, sales, or anything else, and shift that ENTIRE burden to the top 10% (which is absurd, but let's just roll with it for the sake of argument), there would still be a massive wealth disparity. The very poor would still be very poor.

What then? True wealth redistribution? I'm sorry, but no matter how noble that might be in the view of some, that is simply not compatible with a free society. That's the problem people have with this whole "the top 1% is evil" and/or "has more than they deserve" trope. It's not your business how much someone else has. Surely you can do with less; shall we take it away? Of course not.

What we should be targeting is actual ABUSE and people who are getting off scot-free...and hint, it's not the vast, vast, vast majority of people in the top 1%. So what happens when a certain element of the top 0.00X% are essentially flouting the system and operating outside the bounds of any of the regulations and laws to which the rest of are beholden? Apparently if we ask the Occupy crowd, it's to attack everyone who appears to have more than you as the enemy.

Actually, I know exactly where Occupy (née OWS) came from: the anti-US, anti-capitalist, anti-"consumerist", "culture-jamming" Canadian magazine Adbusters, which openly stated that the goal was to ride the discontent in the wake of the economic downturn to turn people against the "rich", in the form of the "top 1%".

They made absolutely no secrets about it, and were proud of it. The fact that the "Occupy" movement spread to places outside of the US is irrelevant, and happened after AdBusters seeded and initiated the movement within the US.

These are the kinds of people the Occupy crowd always railed on as the "top 1%". They may be /in/ the top 1%, but they're nowhere representative of it. These people are, quite literally, less than the top 1% /of/ the top 1%.

Of course, the Occupy folks don't care about this, as their true, stated aim was simply opposing capitalism, "consumerism", and pitting Americans against Americans in some kind of imagined class warfare, when the vast majority of the "top 1% are the employers and business owners who are part of the solution, not the imagined fat cats on yachts in top hats sipping champagne and lighting cigars with 100s.

In case you need a refresher from Schoolhouse Rock:

http://www.schooltube.com/video/fcde4d15a9276c9a09d3/

We could always count on WebKit being the universal web rendering engine across iOS and Android -- now, that will no longer be the case, and I guarantee you there will be instances where Google uses the inevitable differences between "Blink" and WebKit (which is also the core rendering engine for Mac OS X and Safari) for competitive advantage with Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android, al la Microsoft and IE... :-/

Nuclear power has the lowest deaths per TWh of any form of energy -- and that includes things like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the latter of which had a curious focus given that far, far, far more people were injured, displaced, or killed by the actual tsunami as opposed to any radiation events, now or in the future.

Direct deaths from fossil fuel sources -- including even naturally occurring radiation from conventional fossil fuel energy sources -- far outstrip any deaths that have ever occurred, or even will occur with even the most extreme statistical projections, from any nuclear power source, including accidents. That's right: there are more deaths from "radiation" from the byproducts of fossil fuel sources than there are from nuclear power, including accidents and waste.

This is what we should be worried about:

"Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according to a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of death worldwide. Figured another way, the researchers said, China's toll from pollution was the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population."

There is a reason China has 30 nuclear plants under construction, while the US just approved its first new plant in 30 years.

Cool story, bro.

Apparently your reading comprehension is a little lacking, as again, that has nothing to do with what Navy Information Warfare Officers do. At all.

But if it makes you feel better to believe that, be my guest. It's not at all uncommon to see slashdot commenters wish to wallow in ignorance.

You have no understanding whatsoever of Navy Information Warfare. This might give you an idea.

As I have explained on slashdot before, while most people look to a generic definition of "information warfare" and immediately think "propaganda" (which even then is only one small piece of IW, or what the US now calls "Information Operations" in doctrine), this actually has nothing to do with with 99% of Navy Information Warfare officers actually do.

The Navy Information Warfare Community was renamed from "Cryptology" a few years ago when everything "cyber" started getting big. Navy IW officers do signals intelligence (SIGINT), and "cyber" ("computer network operations", or CNO), to the exclusion of nearly everything else, against foreign adversary targets.

Yes, sometimes Navy IW Officers get put in billets where they are doing traditional "IO" (as they did in Iraq, for example), of which even then "propaganda" is a very small piece. But that has nothing to do with the job of nearly all Navy IW officers, and even when that happens, it's all in foreign theaters (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan).

When I post on slashdot, as I have done for about 15 years, I have always done so as myself. You might disagree with me, but that doesn't make me someone you imagine to be a shill. It makes me someone you disagree with. And no matter what my jobs are, I'm posting here on my own time, with my own opinions, as me.

I do find it amusing that so many on slashdot can't stomach the idea that it's possible for people to have differing views without being paid for them, or automatically assume politics. It illustrates one of my initial points about people falling neatly into political boxes quite nicely; thank you. It's also amusing that you believe, by default, that no developments in the world may ever be worthy of US military intervention.

No, I know, I know...you're one of those types who believes that "war" is all an excuse to line the pockets of some imagined elite, that what the US does is "no different" (or usually worse) than any other nation, and that the US is the source of evil and conflict in the world. It's an interesting, if bizarre, position, and it's always been fascinating to me.

I'm sure the modern world after WWII would have been quite free of major conflicts where millions of lives would be lost, and safe for principles of freedom and liberal democracy without significant US investment. After all, it's not like there was anything else in the world opposed to those views, and I'm sure Iran and North Korea represent no threat to these ideals, and that China's massively accelerating military spending and aspirations to replace the US as a global steward will leave the world in a better place, what with their shining record on personal freedom, freedom of information, and human rights.