Well, robbery would be a bit tougher than general mayhem. In the foreseeable future you'd probably need a human in the loop, for example to confirm that the victim actually complied with the order to "put ALL the money in the bag." Still that would remove the perpetrator from the scene of the crime. If there were an open or hackable wi-fi access point nearby it'd be tricky to hunt him down.

This kind of remote controlled drone mediated crime is very feasible now. It wouldn't take much technical savvy to figure out how to mount a shotgun shell on a quadcopter and fly it to a particular victim (if you have one). That's a lot less sophisticated than stuff terrorists do already; anyone with moderate technical aptitude could do it with off-the-shelf components. I'm sure we'll see our first non-state-actor controlled drone assassination in the next couple of years. Or maybe a hacktivist will detonate a party popper on the President or something like that.

Within our lifetime it'll surely be feasible for ordinary hackers to build autonomous systems that could fly into a general area and hunt down a particular victim using facial recognition. People have experimented with facial recognition with SBCs like the Raspberry Pi already.

You can forbid states from doing this all you want, but as technology advances the technology to do this won't be exotic. It'll be commonplace stuff used for work and even recreation.

Not necessarily a tyrant. Any psychopath with money.

They aren't exactly the same, because interstitial ads aren't just obtrustive, they're interfering. You can't simply mentally resolve to ignore them; if you want to continue you've got to either follow the ad or find a way to dismiss it. This presents the user with a Hobson's Choice: physically respond to the ad, or go back.

A lot depends on how motivated you are to get at the content. If it's something you've clicked out of idle curiosity, you'll back away. If it's something you really want to see you'll fight your way through. Since so much traffic on the Internet is driven by idle curiosity, the 69% figure doesn't surprise me at all. What would be interesting is to disaggregate that figure by types of target content.

Exactly right.

The incentive for people to contribute to a closed source project isn't all that much. Remember that open source isn't a gift by your company to the public, it is an offer of trade -- you let the public have the source, the public provides you with feedback (bug fixes, enhancements, etc.) and gets its suggestions provided back to it. It's a circle.

What you are suggesting sounds like you want the benefit of that deal, while negating the benefit for those who are doing work for you. Psychologically, it's a hard sell to say to someone -- "mow my lawn for me and I'll sell you a lemonade afterward at full price --- um yeah, I'd also sell you the lemonade at full price if you don't mow my lawn." You aren't going to get many takers for that deal, and the ones who do take it will have questionable motives (scoping out the property) or will just be naive and gullible (not a great foundation to build upon).

The statute the sent Oliver North to prison might apply here. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...

Paragraph b, aside from other punishments, bars a person from holding public office.

The way I see it, the emails were filed with a public officer of the united states as required by par. a (HRC was a public officer so the emails sent/received were filed with her personally) and by deleting the emails, they were certainly "mutilated, obliterated, or destroyed". If deleting emails filed with the SOS is illegal, then that's good for 3 years in the pokey.

Next, under par. b, it is clear that HRC had custody of the records and again, destroyed them. If she is found guilty of par. b, she simply can't be president -- she couldn't be dog catcher. She'd be fully and finally retired.

The Rethuglikans are freaking out about Hillary. Absolutely losing their shit in a big way.

Let's be clear hear. HRC is a warmongering neo-con wallstreet cocksucker on the Democrat team. Some warmongering neo-con wallstreet cocksuckers on the Republican team hate her because she is on the other team.

I hate them all because they are war mongering neo-con wallstreet cocksuckers. I don't give a fuck about what team they're on -- I care about what they stand for.

You are conflating a world that is becoming warmer with a world that just *is* warmer. It may be true (I take no position) that a world that is 4-5 C warmer is better for certain classes of poor people (e.g., subsistence farmers). But a world that is changing rapidly is a calimity to poor people tied to the land, especially in a modern world with national boundaries and private property where you just can't pick up and move like our paleolithic ancestors would have.

The high school level is a recommendation that is based on the teacher's evaluation, not on a test. There is a test, but schools can only adjust their recommendation upwards if a student exceeds expectations on the test, they cannot lower it if the student does badly. Not all schools will let you enroll at a level exceeding the recommendation, but some do if they feel grades and performance are sufficient. Some high schools that teach at multiple levels have a "bridge year" which is the same for everyone, after which they perform their own evaluation. So the system isn't as rigid as it seems. Even so, I do agree that the UK system is better if it can accommodate all those students taking classes at their own level (no idea how that works out in practice).

I'd like to add that I have never heard of anyone being viewed in a negative light for having climbed a level or two, on the contrary. First of all, it's not public knowledge and employers do not need to know. Second: going that route demonstrates perseverance... which is probably why not a single person I have ever met was hesitant to admit that they got a lower recommendation and later made up for it.

In the Netherlands, we have had something like that for a long time now. After elementary school (at 12 years), children receive a recommendation for one of the various levels of high school: from lower vocational education (VMBO, 4 years) to pre-university (VWO, 6 years). It is possible to go from one level to the next, by graduating and then enrolling in the last-but-one year of the next level. That means you lose a year going up each level, which gives you an idea of the difference between the levels. Some schools that teach at multiple levels will allow you to switch during your education, sometimes with some remedial summer school being necessary.

From what I understand, the schools in the UK teach each subject at various levels, and you can sort of decide for yourself to what level you want to take each subject. That could be even better if the class roster is flexible enough: good students could race ahead to the more advanced levels for some subjects, while taking the stuff they have more difficulty with at the regular pace. In a flexible system like that you do need to have strong and continuous guidance: some kids need a lot more structure and hand-holding, and for that age group you need to have some rules in place to ensure that each kid picks the classes and levels that they can cope with, and realises their maximum potential (instead of just coasting on an easy selection of subjects that isn't worth squat).

Another advantage of such a system is that a student does not need fear they'll flunk and are held back an entire year; if they get inadequate scores on a few subjects, they can just repeat those the next year and continue to level up in their other subjects.

Same thing happens in business and government. That's what you get if you let MBAs run things: management by the numbers. Insight is replaced by spreadsheets, performance is measured on pretty dashboards and delimited by SLAs... and the funny things is: in the end, those managers / politicians get exactly what they asked for. Too bad it's not what they wanted though.

Spot on.
Note to government: you may be my accountant, my arbiter, my bodyguard and my insurance agent, but you are not my dad. Stop acting like it.

This is marked funny, but the US Supreme Court recently affirmed that the joke is true.

http://thinkprogress.org/justi...

Ignorance of the law is not and has never been an excuse.

This is a legal principle that literally goes back to Greek antiquity.

How Heller-ishly convenient. There are so many criminal laws on the books, it is impossible to know them all (ask the ABA, they tried to simply count them, which is much less than _knowing_ them, and failed: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... ). And yet an individual person without ranks of lawyers to do the research, is presumed to know each and every one. This is extremely dangerous because it gives those in power the ability to lock up anyone they don't like, which means that an individual's freedom and liberty -- core American values right? -- are subject to the whim of any dickweed with a little power.

From now on we'll call them Carbon Deniers or some such.