For every assassination bounty hosted they should also host a corresponding anti-assassination bounty. The assassin would be paid the net pro-assassination value, that is, the difference between the two bounties, and the bounty hosting site would keep the remainder. For opposing interests of equal magnitude in a bidding war this would be hugely profitable for the bounty hosting site and also result in nobody actually getting assassinated. It would also be more equitable because it represents the opinions of both pro-assassination and anti-assassination sides, not just the pro-assassination side.

Though seriously, the entire subject is revolting. Almost every American, love Obama or hate Obama, love Bush or hate Bush, agrees that they do not want their President to be assassinated. Despite disagreements in American politics, there are essential fundamental core values which unite us all, and that we do not assassinate our leaders is one of them.

. . .and from the MakerPlane website:
"MakerPlane is an open source aviation organization which will enable people to build and fly their own safe, high quality, reasonable cost plane using advanced personal manufacturing equipment such as...3D printers."

According to the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, produced by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, the United States and Iceland are, respectively, the 10th and 23rd freest countries.

The top 10 positions are:

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Australia
4.New Zealand
5. Switzerland
6. Canada
7. Chile
8. Mauritius
9. Denmark
10. United States.

In addition to current rankings the index also reports trends. For example, economic freedom in the United States has declined since 2009, according to the graph on this page. In comparison, freedom in Chile is high and continues to climb, which makes it a popular destination for American expatriates such as "Simon Black" over at his Sovereign Man website.

The term for this is "shoot, shovel and shut up."

It could be reasonably argued that government officials hava a legitimate need for both publicly-facing published email addresses and private, unpublished email addresses for inter-governmental communication. Presumably the former would be handled by their staffs for public communication and the latter used for professional communications between government officials.

If that were the issue, there would be no scandal here, merely a difference of opinion between what is good practice. What makes this a scandal is not that the email addresses themselves were secret, but that 1). The practice of maintaining secret email accounts was itself secret 2.) With one single exception the agencies exempted the contents of the secret email accounts from FOI searches. 3) In violation of its own policy agencies sought to charge the AP fee, and quite a hight one.

So this looks like a widespread attempt by government officials to avoid transparency and accountability, not a pragmatic attempt to manage their inboxes efficiently.

Crowdsourcing did not fail because what occurred was not crowdsourcing.

There is a distinction between, on the one hand, the emergent behavior which spontaneously arises from ungoverned social interaction and, on the other hand, the management practice of dividing and framing a problem such that it can be solved by large, loosely-affiliated groups of anonymous individuals working in parallel. The latter is crowdsourcing. The former, in the case of attempts to identify Boston Marathon suspects in online fora such as reddit, is a vigilante mob.

At least that interpretation is consistent with the conventional usage of the term "crowdsourcing" up to this point. Consider well-known examples such as the Mechanical Turk, the search for the wreckage of Steve Fosset's plane and prediction markets such as Iowa Electonic Markets. In all case the role of any individual in the crowd is predefined and constrained in advance by design. Constraints can include the dimension of response and the information to be evaluated.

Open source advocate Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming has entered the Nature-Nurture debate, stating here:

And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist
bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard
deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. And
it gets worse: the average IQ of African blacks is lower
still, not far above what is considered the threshold of mental
retardation in the U.S. And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about
85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards
the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather
than nurturance effects.

For anyone who believe that racial equality is an important goal,
this is absolutely horrible news. Which is why a lot of
well-intentioned people refuse to look at these facts, and will
attempt to shout down anyone who speaks them in public. There have
been several occasions on which leading psychometricians have had
their books canceled or withdrawn by publishers who found the actual
scientific evidence about IQ so appalling that they refused to print
it.

Unfortunately, denial of the facts doesn’t make them go away.

So it looks like communities which choose to harm the environment by banning plastic bags might be killing themselves off with bacterial infections.

Environmentalism is self-correcting.

Actual figures comparing private and government funding on climate issues are given here.

A few observations:

• -Last October, prior to Obama's reelection, Kimberly Strassel writing in the Wall Street journal documented Barack Obama's record of consistency and dedication to principle.
• -More recently Daniel Kessler has assessed the promises Obama made when selling Obamacare, concluding "Every one of the main claims made for the law is turning out to be false."
• -Gun and ammunition sales surged immediately following Obama's reelection.
• -We have just learned President Obama has secretly granted himself the power to assassinate U.S citezens without due process.

Some people, with reasonable cause, do not trust Obama. Their suspicions have been vindicated.

So I live in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. Google fiber is not in offered in Overland Park yet, but because it is close by and spreading I checked out the prices and signed up for email notification when their service becomes available in my area.

The prices. Holy cow. It's free. A one time $300.00 installation fee but then it is free. So I was wondering for months how is that possible? Is Google taking a massive loss? Did Google invent a new technology which allows them to undercut their competitors?

Then on a drive across town to the local Fablab I was listening to the local public radio station which just happened to be interviewing Susan Crawford, author of the recently published book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. As the summary at Amazon states:

This important book by leading telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford explores why Americans are now paying much more but getting much less when it comes to high-speed Internet access.

Well as you might guess from the subtitle of the book, what she finds out when she explores is that internet and cable service in the U.S. are regional monopolies. Even when multiple internet and cable service providers operate in the same city they divide up the city into regions of monopolistic coverage and only overlap on small percentages of territory.

So Google offers such spectacularly low prices by undercutting monopolists, having enough clout to overcome barriers to entry which block startups, and Moore's law has reduced the cost of providing internet service to something pretty close to free. The inflated prices for internet broadband service which we have paid in the U.S. have not followed Moore's law because service provider are monopolies. Now with the disruption of that monopoly in one regional market prices are back on track with Moore's law there.

In his novel Mostly Harmless the late Douglas Adams wrote:

“In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.”

Is the practice of astrology acceptable to you on those terms?

Skeptics seem to divide into two categories. First, those who publicly reveal falsehoods and loudly denounce them as deceptions. Second, those who silently observe the willingness of the public to believe in absurd falsehoods and regard that as a financial opportunity.

As an example of the latter category, the golf industry has deceived the the public into the belief that hitting little white balls around in the grass with expensive sticks is very, very important. This falsehood is enormously lucrative. Tiger Woods earned $120 million from prize money and sponsorships during 2009. Between July 2011 and July 2012 the ten top-earning golf players made $236 million collectively.

A golf skeptic would claim that the positions of small white balls in grass fields is actually of no consequence whatsoever , that golfers are peddling flim-flam, and that the public is fooled out of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. A golfing apologist would say it is a personal preference and fans should have the freedom to spend on golf because they enjoy it.

Parapsychology, like an interest in golfing, is a personal lifestyle choice. If we denounce parapsychology, religion and astrology as irrational does not consistency demand that we also denounce all other manner of irrational human behavior such as golf? You denounce some forms of irrational behavior but undoubtedly carve out exceptions for other forms which you tolerate or even practice yourself. So like you, I could carve out an an exception to what forms of irrational behavior I will tolerate by selling Mayan end-of-the-world advent calendars. Why are specifically both gullibility and its financial exploitation not acceptable life style choices in a society which generally tolerates unquestioningly the financial exploitation of irrational behavior?

How does the fictional character Peter Venkman portrayed by Bill Murray in the 1984 hit film Ghostbusters compare to actual parapsychology researches?

When offerring a $1 million reward to anyone who successfully demonstrates proof of the paranormal you risk failing to debunk some paranormal claims, not because paranormal activity actually exists, but because the ruse is either so technologically advanced or clever that investigators fail to identify the means of deception. How concerned were you about this possibility and have you ever had any "close calls" where you almost failed to discover the trick?