If an insurance company thinks you're lying about a disability claim, they aren't going to bother with law enforcement or medical records or some dubious fitness app. They'll hire a $300/day private investigator to follow you around for a few days and get photos of you at the golf course. He'll be checking all of your social media, he's probably going to be in your credit and phone records as well, via legal gray areas. If it's a worker's comp claim, they'll have him tail you until the day you go back to work. Insurance will happily pay a PI $10K a month to follow a suspected fraudster on a $100K claim. They only have to win that bet one out of ten times to break even.

Internet operated drones? Even with the more modern RCs, even with higher-end transmitters, you still need line of sight to operate them; we're generally talking 2.4 GHz here. Aside from the military, I don't think anyone is sitting around in their flight ops chair controlling RCs miles away. If you encounter a "drone" somewhere, the operator is nearby.

Well there's one camp very actively pushing the speculation that North Koreans did this because they're butthurt about "The Interview." At the same time, several articles report there's evidence that the breach may have been ongoing for more than a year. These two things don't line up; "The Interview" hadn't been promoted or even publicly announced a year ago, so there would have been nothing for the North Koreans to be upset about.

I'm still waiting for the official announcement from Sony and Mandiant (wasn't that supposed to have happened already?) but in any event I'm not sold on the whole Nork idea.

Interesting. That points in a direction entirely separate from the "North Korea did it because they hate 'The Interview' film" narrative...

Who are you going to sue? The federal government must explicitly allow you to sue them. Guess what, they don't do that very often.

Trouble is they're all marked up with Sharpie around the outside...

In case anyone else was looking for the missing link in TFS, Kevin Roose's article at Fusion is here.

You've been calling Hezbollah tech support again?

Well that explains... Something. To me, that icon with three horizontal lines looks like it's supposed to be for paragraph layout or something, so I've never touched it. I had zero clue that's where the settings had gone to, I thought it was some kind of inline HTML formatter.

I could say the same for algebra, and yet I feel that I'm much better off for having learned it. French? Je parle ne plus pas, which isn't likely to be entirely accurate for "I don't speak very much," but I haven't studied it in 20 years and still know enough to get a few points across. I don't agree at all that "most people don't ever use this" is a valid reason not to teach something.

There is an entire generation of people, perhaps almost two now, who have grown up on the idea of text shortcuts and it's only getting worse. "lvu grl u hot af cu tmw" Many of the younger folks can communicate that way, does that mean that we should stop teaching English? That grammar is no longer important, and that it's no use teaching? I'm not on board with that, although I enjoy the idea of being forever in demand as someone capable of speaking and writing correctly. And even writing in cursive, should some arcane need arise.

Just show it your penis. The drone will overheat and self-destruct trying to zoom in far enough to get a good picture.

Please don't use left going forward, it's really confusing for the drivers behind you.

I agree, in that prosecutors shouldn't be able to threaten charges of more grievous crimes as a bargaining chip. But one problem is that even the truly applicable charges can compound just as quickly; even given a reasonable prosecutor, the law allows and sometimes requires that they file multiple charges for the same crime.

I'll give an example. About 10 years ago, I was called for jury duty and selected for a case. I was dismissed during voir dire after expressing favorable opinions about firearms, but I was around long enough that I got to learn a bit about the case, the defendant, and the charges. In a nutshell, some guy got pulled over for a traffic violation and the cop subsequently found a gun and a blunt in his car. It was his bad luck that the traffic stop took place near a school.

For this, there was a laundry list of charges; something like:

• Disregarding a traffic control device
• Reckless endangerment
• Motor vehicle violation in a designated school zone
• Possession of narcotics
• Possession of narcotics within 1 mile of a school
• Possession of drug paraphernalia
• Possession of drug paraphernalia within 1 mile of a school
• Unlawful possession of a firearm
• Unlawful possession of a firearm within 1 mile of a school
• Unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon
• Unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon within 1 mile of a school

Everything he did, he was charged for again because the event took place near a school. Having some weed got him 4 misdemeanor charges (the cigar portion of the blunt was "paraphernalia" so they charged for that in addition to the weed). Having one handgun on him got him 4 separate felony charges. And here's the one that blew my mind, there was another charge worded something like "going armed during the commission of a felony." The felony he committed was being armed; it's a felony for a convicted felon to have a gun. So because he was armed while he committed that crime - yeah, seriously! - they tacked on another charge.

Wrap your head around that one:

Because you were carrying a gun while you were carrying a gun, we're going to charge you again.

It's like people who get arrested for resisting arrest; the circular logic is a complete perversion of justice. IIRC, it was that "going armed during the commission of a felony" charge that threatened the longest possible sentence out of all the infractions, and it was a completely bullshit charge to begin with.

Anyway, my point here is that the problem runs deeper than the prosecutors. The problem begins with the laws themselves. There are a lot of prosecutors out there who don't go overboard and reach for the stars, charging a jaywalker with murder or what have you. They don't need to, most of the time; the "legitimate" charges will stack up to enormous sentences all by themselves. We aren't going to get away from that until we revisit the vast corpus of shitty laws out there, especially the ones that require mandatory charges and leave no discretion to the prosecutor.