I don't think the problem is people letting themselves be manipulated by advertising. I think the real problem is news networks letting themselves be pressured into bias in the 'news" by the threat of removing advertising. So you have news networks pushing whatever agenda anyway, but with even more pressure to maximize shareholder value by essentially lying to the masses. THAT'S the problem with advertising dollars in elections.

Disclamer: I will not research how well they keep their promises, or acts they voted for and against or sponsored. I do not endorse or oppose any of these candidates.

I looked at their website, mayday.us It referred me to a different site, repswith.us describing five proposals they support. The plan of Democrat Mr. Sarbanes was first. His site seems to directly address various issues, with little double-speak. The Government By the People Act is its own section of his site, listed under "issues", but in its own section. The plan hinges on a tax credit for political donations to encourage small donors. Also this:

"Allow candidates to earn additional public matching funds within 60 days of the election so that citizen-funded candidates can combat Super PAC"

which doesn't explain how superpac donations won't apply to the matching funds. To be fair I didn't look into it.

Next is Democrat David Price. His site isn't as straight-forward, but does present mostly solid stances on the issues. I couldn't find the Empowering Citizens Act(pdf warning) without using the search function, which tells me he's not staking his reputation on it. This one is more complicated but the main theme seems to be limiting per-donor donations. Obviously loopholes that allow present donors to give more than they need to declare (such as giving bonuses to employees who promise to donate most of the bonus) remain. It also limits total public funds available to candidates, which my intuition tells me will have the opposite effect. This plan looks pretty slimy to me. Your opinion may vary.

Republican Jim Rubens plan, Political Money Reform Proposal" isn't on his site at all, so the link is back to repswith.us. It involves a larger tax rebate for donations and "Require searchable, realtime online reporting of contributions above $200" and removes all political spending and contribution limits.

Republican Richard Painter literally wrote the bookon ethics reform. His site is his university's site, so wouldn't naturally have details on supported initiatives. According to repswith.us the Taxation Only With Representation Act involves a $200 tax rebait for private donations and nothing else.

Because doing it right involves a full fail-over test including transferring loads or test loads, DNS auto-reconfiguration, and possibly even paying extra to bring up extra capacity elsewhere. You need to make sure it happens right when it's needed. Extra paperwork, overtime, it's all in there.

Crystal meth is widely given out (especilly in the bad years) to starving people in North Korea, often enough as a curte-all. It helps keep the hunger pangs at bay if nothing else.

>inb4 beta

But that's what it is. They're taking their shitty Beta ideas from months ago, eliminating most, but not all, of the bugs, and putting them back in one at a time. Probably related to selling off Slashdot. The real idea is to give admins complete control over content and comments, which can't happen until they've screwed over the UI completely.

Little is more Orwellian among our government's many exploits than its attempts to break into our computer systems.

The ever-present security camera? That's bad, but it's still out in public. It's on the street, maybe in the stores. They're not in your home, not yet. Rubber stamp warrants? That's worse: It allows targeted invasions of privacy. But at least it requires a the resources of a human with a paycheck and his own sense of morals. But breaking into computer systems? They're in our pockets, in our homes, and have access to every bit of our modern lives. From shopping lists to love letters to medicine prescriptions they contain whole lives. Snippets from every trip you've taken are encoded there.

And a program doesn't have a sense of right and wrong. It will never refuse to spy on ethical grounds. It won't bring things up to the attention of oversight committees. It won't make anonymous calls to the ethics line. It won't refuse to work, leak information, or demand orders in writing. A program will quietly do as its told, wherever it can. Above all prying surveillance I believe ubiquitous IT access by the government needs to be contained.

People were poopooing the virus, but I think that's because they didn't read the report.

This is a highly sophisticated polymorphic virus using multiple forms of encryption in multiple layers against multiple attack vectors. It's really a piece of work. I don't know why someone would write it and then use it directly against Kaspersky but whoever did it had the cash to hire some very clever people, or was a team of programmers with a genius at the helm and amazing opsec.

Considering the sophistication of the virus I think it would be silly to speculate about who wrote it: whoever it is had to spend a good deal of effort covering their tracks and could easily have compromised multiple third parties just to create red herrings.

It's been extremely slow since this all started. I hope the finances work out such that they can get the capacity they need in time to scoop up freedom-loving users.

There's a certain critical mass of dissatisfaction in a user base/community. Until that point the site can be salvaged. It takes more than an unpopular move by admins/community leaders. There has to be BOTH:

• A significant percentage of users dissatisfied with admins. Not with something else, with the way the site is being run. It can't be external and it must be administrative.
• Administration unresponsive enough to make users even more unhappy

I think it can be generalized to other communities but for web sites in particular there has to be enough dissatisfaction to create a feedback loop of angry users being ignored leads to leadership blunders leads to more angry users. When meta-conversation overwhelms normal conversation there's a tipping point. Slashdot has almost been there. coughcoughbetacough But it takes more than that. At the tipping point administration must demonstrate such disregard for the users concerns that a revolt becomes meta-shared knowledge. Many users knowing isn't enough. They need to know that other users know. Only if that happens the site will descend into a digg-esque melt-down and hemorrhage users until admins capitulate or the site collapses.

I don't think Reddit has reached that point. In fact, I think this will serve as a safety valve. Users who strongly value freedom of expression will go to voat and everyone else will stay, and not see as many complaints. Obviously this makes the culture more brittle. Reddit is not in danger now but will lead to other problems down the road.

This is a big step toward Reddit becoming an echo chamber. New users will be less likely to stay and it will create its own cultural feedback loop. Those unwilling to toe the party line will find themselves shunned. Users will pretend to go along, hiding how they really feel, leading to a more intense echo chamber. Soon there will be prescribed viewpoints on almost any topic. Reddit will die then. Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Honest question: In the end does it seem likely robots that succeed at these tasks mostly do so because, as in other DARPA challenges, they're the ones with high-end hardware?

Some real science has been done on DNA data storage as relates to evidence of panspermia. The theory goes that if intelligent life deliberately seeded the universe it may have used DNA or RNA sequences that could be decoded into a message. So far science's tendency toward conservatism has prevented anyone from coming out and saying it but I think available evidence is more than sufficient reason for optimism and intense study.

As I said on another site, Not as bad as they try to make it sound. The red cross initially committed to building homes but when that didn't work out due to them not being able to buy land they spent the money on improving some homes, building a hospital, and helping out elsewhere as possible. It's true there was a lot of administrative waste, but that waste was due to careful management. The article echos complaints of hiring "lazy" locals. Then it criticizes them for hiring expensive ex-patriot workers. Then it criticizes them for contracting the work out to other companies causing high administrative costs. Well how the fuck were they supposed to do it? If they had advertised for volunteers they would have been criticized for spending the money in another country. It can cost a lot to assure money is spend effectively. Maybe they erred too far on the side of caution on this one, maybe they got as much done as was possible. I don't know. Neither do you. This is making a chicken out of a feather and makes me wonder what real news I'm missing out on.

America: If you can't afford lawyers, fuck you.

What US Prosecutors say is quite irrelevant to the law. Thank Goddess there are still a few checks on their kind of power.