Well, Louie Gohmert is at best eccentric and at worst stupid beyond belief. The fact that he keeps getting re-elected really says a lot about the voters in his district. Do a search on his name plus the words "terror babies" for one of his most, ahem, "interesting" fears. He's never gotten less than 61% of the vote while running for Congress.

Ron Paul is about as crazy as they come, unless you're a Libertarian, in which case he makes perfect sense and everybody else is insane. He's not a current member of Congress, but he inflicted his idiocy on D.C. for years. He didn't lose re-election - he simply retired or else he'd still be promoting his wacko ideas in DC today.

Sheila Jackson Lee is infamous for her use of staffers to do personal errands for her. One staffer was told by his doctor to quit or he would die from the stress. She has proposed more failed legislation than any current member of Congress according to one source. She's been in the top 3 every year in a poll of the meanest members of Congress to work for.

These are just a few of the "distinguished" representatives from Texas.

In the past, I'd have agreed with you, but not any more. Things have really changed in the credit card industry since what we call "the Great Recession" in the USA. In the past, I successfully protested several charges and one time got almost $400 taken off over a dispute with a Hong Kong hotel. Approximately 6 years ago, I bought 2 tickets on a European based airline. I don't want to name them, but let's just say it's not a major carrier and they aren't particularly well known unless you happen to live in the country where they are based. My at the time girlfriend was supposed to go with me on a trip. Her mother had to have emergency surgery and being an only child and her mother having divorced her husband many years ago, my girlfriend had to stay and help and miss the trip. I did not want to go by myself, so I contacted the airline. They said that the tickets were non-refundable. I then asked if I could just get a credit towards a future flight and they said no. So basically their position was that those tickets were only good for the exact flight I booked them and for no other flight. I was not advised of this at the time of purchase, so I protested it. It went on for months. I printed out copies of their entire website, showing the ticket buying process and showing that nowhere on the site did they state their policy about no-refunds, no credits. I provided copies of the email the airline sent me when I bought the tickets, showing that at no point did they mention no refunds, no changes, no credits. The airline's response to my submission was to simply say "We told him he couldn't have refunds" and offer no proof to back it up. After months of wrangling, my credit card company essentially told me that because the airline refused to refund the charge, I was stuck with it, despite my submission that they never told me their refund policy. The bottom line was that my credit card didn't want to eat the charges of the airline tickets and they were unwilling to rule in my favor because they would have had to eat the charges since the airline refused to do a refund. Granted, a hotel charge is a lot less, but I have to warn from my experience that if the hotel puts up even a half assed fight like that airline did against me, that may be enough to prevent you from getting the money back.

1. Not always the case. Some journals (or articles) are open access.

2. Many Slashdot readers have access to paywalled journal articles through our schools or employers.

3. Abstracts are virtually always free to access, and often still provide better information than news coverage.

4. Links are cheap, and there's no reason to avoid providing links to both the lay summary and the actual paper.

Direct link to PNAS abstract.

Why, why, why is it that Slashdot always reports on new scientific discoveries with a link to a lay press summary or a press release, and never gives us the useful link to the actual papers with the real words by actual scientists? Aaaargh.

It's not Google's problem to report that somebody else made a libelous claim any more than if you tell your neighbor "Hey, that guy John Doe down the street put on the internet that you're a convicted child molester but I know that's not true", your neighbor would have a legal claim against John Doe, not against you for telling him. The fact that Google reports a search result doesn't make them responsible for the content in the USA. Things might be different in Europe though.

I'm not defending Santorum at all because I think he's pretty stupid, but the right to privacy does not exist in the Constitution. It's never mentioned. The Supreme Court has ruled that such a right is inferred by the other things in the Constitution, but strictly speaking he does have a valid point. A different Supreme Court such as the current one might well have come to the other conclusion that if it's not mentioned explicitly, it doesn't exist.

John McCain has already said that while he thinks it's a waste of time to try to repeal Obamacare that so many new members of Congress promised to do it that they have to pass such a bill, wait for the President to veto it, and then get on with the serious business at hand so the new members can claim at re-election time that they tried to repeal it, but gosh darn it, just didn't have the votes to override the veto. He said he'd rather the time be spent trying to accomplish something like removing the medical device tax (some Democrats may actually be OK with this idea) than trying to repeal the entire thing, which is never going to happen.

Government isn't going to shrink and probably no libertarian concern you have will be met. My bet is that while the role of the Tea Party has been reduced, there's still too many of those crazy ideologues around and they're going to bog down Congress over trivial matters that most other Republicans don't care about. Congress allows far too much of what I call "tyranny of the minority" to happen, especially in the Senate, and all the obstructionist tactics the Senate Republicans tried recently are now going to be thrown right back at them. Expect a lot of bluster about how unfair this is and how the Republicans will conveniently forget that they used the exact same tactics themselves in this current Congress.

Oh, I don't know. The seriousness of the potential crime -- for which the police have genuine probable cause to suspect has occurred -- probably should have some bearing on the warrant that is issued. There is a balancing of interests here, which you actually have buried in your own comment. "How reasonable", in your words, likely includes "how horrifying" as one of its elements--you just saw an opportunity to try to score a cheap rhetorical point.

Unless, of course, you believe that a judge should award a warrant with the same breadth and alacrity whether the video shows a kidnapping or the theft of a candy bar.

I'm not as hostile towards Erica as some here, but I'm not as sympathetic either as you might think. I graduated college when Reagan was president and I've worked in IT all my professional career. I've had some jobs I liked a lot. I've had others that really sucked. My current job is pretty good and I like my employer a lot, but a few years ago things were different in the job and I was pretty unhappy. Things change in life. Some jobs start off good and get bad. Some start off bad and get good. Some are always good. Some are always bad. Erica started her career at a university in Alaska. Alaska is hardly a place with a lot of black people and university IT jobs are kind of infamous. Typically they don't pay well and they tend to attract certain types of people who aren't exactly go getters. Well, this has been my experience on the East Coast of the USA, but perhaps things are different elsewhere. Maybe in California, for example, university IT jobs are fantastic. But I've got a pretty good feeling that Erica didn't start off with a great job. That probably plays some role in her perceptions. She also worked in Windows which attracts different types of people than Unix/Linux type jobs do. That may also play a role in how things were for her.

Another thing I want to mention is that I work sometimes with other companies' IT departments to solve problems and there's a lot of variability there. Big companies usually have pretty competent IT groups. Small companies? Not always. I know that some small companies have badly overworked IT people who are doing the work of 2 or 3 people by themselves. Sometimes people in bad IT jobs won't leave for various reasons. They may fear change. They may work in an area with limited opportunities. One of my co-workers is a few years older than me and before joining our company he apparently didn't have any IT jobs that weren't horrible beyond belief. Maybe she just found a lot of bad jobs. It sounded like she was pretty happy in the job at Home Depot but got pissy over the pay and not being able to get promoted and left. If you want to work in IT and chase dollars, you can job hop and do that, but I can't promise you that the next job will be better or make you happy. You may get more money and have worse working conditions. And if you want to get promoted, you probably shouldn't go into IT at all. It's not exactly a career path to being CEO. Sounded like she was willing to trade a job that made her happy to try to get more money and she was never able to find a job she liked as much. It happens.

You won't find this in the Wikipedia article, but there are rumors in some intelligence circles that this flight was actually shot down by the Russians and Ukraine took the rap because they could play the "Duh! We so stupid! Not know what we doing! Soldiers were drunk!" card in exchange for some sort of special favor from Russia. That may not be true and it may be that Ukraine really shot it down through incompetence, but I just wanted to point out that there are some who don't buy the official explanation.

Did you talk about Hitler? I think I see a Hitler reference in that comment. Godwin's Law! Godwin's Law!

(This is meant to be a joke.)

I voted in a municipal election in Toronto, Canada earlier this week. Not on the voter's list? No problem--you can register at one of the city clerk's offices. There's five of them, serving a population of 2.6 million people. Oh, and they're open from 8:30am to 4:30pm, Monday to Friday. So that should be a snap to get to, as long as you don't have a full-time job, or a child to care for, or mobility issues. (You don't mind choosing between a couple of extra bus fares and eating lunch, do you?)

I followed the campaign closely, I was aware of the major issues of the day (as well as the minor issues that didn't get nearly enough coverage), I had strongly-held opinions based in thorough, extended research--and I registered to vote on the day of the election.

The notion that all people who didn't register in advance are somehow lazy, unworthy, and incompetent is canard that punishes the working poor, the single parents, the handicapped. Looking in from the outside, it's apparent that it's one piece of a larger Republican campaign to disenfranchise as many Democratic-leaning voters as possible. It's a story that is propagated by Fox News, the viewers of which are exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Let me give the experience of my best friend. He's probably in upper half of what one would call the Middle Class in the USA. I work for The Man so I've always had health insurance via my job. He is a small business owner. His business employees his wife and between 1 and 3 other employees at any given time, depending on a variety of factors. He does not offer health insurance to his employees. As a small business owner, he's had to get insurance on his own for himself, his wife and one child. He is a Republican voter who almost never votes Democratic. He's not a wing nut, but he is relatively conservative politically. He originally completely opposed "Obamacare", saying the usual Republican stuff about how it was going to be the worst thing ever, destroying the country once it got implemented. He admitted to me that now that he can use the state health exchange that his insurance payments per month have dropped about $300 over what he previously paid and he thinks he has better coverage now. He no longer complains about "Obamacare" although he's still going to vote Republican.

You know, I just put together now that "SJW" is intended to be an acronym for "Social Justice Warrior" (which is in turn intended to be a derogatory phrase meaning, as far as I can tell, "uppity feminist"). For some weeks now, I have been pondering what the internet has against straight (or single) Jewish women. Now it makes a lot more sense.

That the "reasonable" faction of the male IT world - that the parent poster would like to think he represents - seems to believe that the SJW caricature represents a non-trivial force that is conspiring against him is troubling. That the acronym SJW exists and is presumably widely understood in his circles is rather more revealing about (his part of) "IT culture" than he probably thinks.

Don't get me wrong, the parent poster is better than the grandparent asshole who believes all rapes are imaginary--but just being better than the anonymous trolling asshole isn't setting a high bar.

Nooooo!!! Who would flip the hamburgers then? :-)