It appears that the problem is assuming that taxes paid went up because tax rates went up. Greece has a huge problem with underpayment of taxes.

A study by researchers from the University of Chicago concluded that tax evasion in 2009 by self-employed professionals alone in Greece (accountants, dentists, lawyers, doctors, personal tutors and independent financial advisers) was â28 billion or 31% of the budget deficit that year.[1]

Property records are essentially non-existent. Taxes are difficult to assess. Corruption is extreme.

> I guess they should just wear them in the field.

What? As soon as they see your AIMBOT the enemy cries "CHEATER!!!" and you get disqualified, worst idea ever.

What's wrong with being classified as a rather violent but otherwise perfectly fine animal like an ape?
What about white men who risk being classified as Bill Gates, or Poettering? That would be really offensive.

Well, it's definitely troubling that the F-35 is getting its ass kicked in short-range battle but you're right. We're relying on stealth and advanced sensors along with next-generation AMRAAMS and ASRAAMS to get you the victory long before gun range.

Iran has enough centrifuges to make a nuclear bomb but not enough centrifuges to make nuclear fuel. Iran has also been caught making uranium purer than required for energy purposes.

Based on the nude male bicycle gang that passed us near Golden Gate Park when we were there on vacation a few weeks ago, I think the correct verb is "is".

because of control. It's control that drives innovation, not people's best interest.

So, while any sane person reasoning in a vacuum would eventually decide that the internet should be about sharing data on open protocols with a wealth of different clients so that hackers have no monocultures to study and attack, we have web browsers happily executing js from sites whose url is gotten by executing js (possibly to make noscript users give up) and the government of elbonia able to tell you that that yourbank.de certificate is legitimate.

This generation has to go through the same hell through which the previous one went with windows, and given the nature of the notifications in my sis' smartphone, we are near.

A hacker could go through all that trouble to reverse a hash but if the user changes the master password, then there's no compromise. So...the race is to have the user change passwords before the hacker hacks the hash. Should be easy to win, no?

Also, use two-factor. Seriously. No reason you shouldn't be using two-factor.

Many people seem to think that lawyers just popped into a case and started all this ruckus. However, that's not true. Attorneys represent parties with conflicts. The parties in conflict hate each other; that's why they're in court. So each attorney is trying to win the case for their client. Thus, each client thinks that the other side's attorney is a bad person because they are an extension of the other side.

Therein lies the problem. With most court cases, you will have one winner and one loser. Fifty percent of litigants, therefore, would hate litigation.

Courts hate issuing sanctions because if you lower the bar for sanctions, well, everyone and his mother would constantly file motions for sanctions. I mean, it's tough to get sanctions but lawyers routinely act like morons and threaten sanctions. Making it easier would only waste more time with parties trying to get sanctions.

Why shouldn't attorneys get paid for their time? Again, they're representing someone. And if they're on the verge of getting money from the other side, well, aren't they just doing their job? Of course, the guy who lost will think it sucks but the guy who won is pretty happy about it.

AT&T has given me an IPV6 address and routes traffic to certain destinations using it. I can tell because those destinations time out if I haven't visited them recently, then after a minute or so of trying (no matter how many windows, refreshes, etc. while other sites work fine), they suddenly start working - until I don't visit them for 10 minutes or so and they reset. Facebook, Google properties fall into this category.

According to the internet it's a know problem in AT&T's IPV6 implementation and I need to turn it off at the router. I keep meaning to take care of it but then again I keep thinking Google Fiber will get here and I won't have to bother.

So, while they deserve the year ban, the apology is nice. It's a shame we can never know what results a fair competition could have yielded ... and an even bigger shame that the media misreported Baidu as overpowering Google. I suppose the damage is done and the ILSVRC has made the right choice.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the classification problem but why isn't this run like most other classification problems (like Netflix and many other data challenges) where you get ~80% for training and the remaining 20% are held back for the final testing and scoring? Is the tagged data set too small to do this? Seems like wikimedia would contain a wealth of ripe public domain images for this purpose ...

The thing is, the number of people who want to regularly visit a site that looks like it was made in 1998 and mostly comments on decade-old inside jokes and features an increasingly libertarian slant is not growing because the number of people who fall into that category is not growing. Slashdot has four options:

1) Figure out how to grow their customer base without eliminating their existing customers (difficult; existing customers oppose change and tend to either directly be, or through their opinions appear to be, hostile to newcomers),

2) They should give up growing their customer base and just be the best they can for their existing base, trying to win back the Soylent News crowd. (This might work, but wouldn't grow the base. They'd be like "classic rock" stations or "oldies" stations before that, who were playing popular music when they started, but rather than keep up with pop they decide to freeze in time and mostly ride the same fan base to their mutual deaths. Plus this assumes the existing base was homogenous; it wasn't, and as some groups have gotten more vocal they have permanently chased others away.)

3) They could say "fuck it" to their existing customer base, make all the radical changes they want to make, and start over rebuilding a new crowd. (This usually doesn't make corporate overlords happy unless it's their brainchild idea, e.g. Napster, etc., and even then it rarely works.)

4) Cowboy Neal could pull the plug and shut the whole thing down. (I needed to include a decade-old inside joke here somewhere.)

Again, you're conflating two things that are significant enough that I don't see a simple one-to-one comparison here.

The clear difference here is that the trolls in the article are a nebulous entity whereas the media trolls are not. I know to laugh at Glenn Beck and Katie Couric. I know who they are. I recognize their blubbering stupid talking heads. They're a trainwreck of lies and half truths. On the other hand, you can't stop google from returning search results that confirm what you're looking for. When it's a "trending hastag" on Twitter, you can't figure out if it's legit or not. How do I know that podonski432 on Twitter is the same individual on Youtube named ashirefort posting videos of an explosion is the same person retweeting podonski432 and adding ashirefort's video to their tweet?

Mass media doesn't employ subterfuge and I sure as hell can stop reading the New York Post & Washington Times & CNSNews & Huffington Post and all that other drivel. I can't, however, identify easily that this account on Twitter is just the new troll account that tricked me last time.

You do know that it's news if the New York Times is caught lying or spreading known falsities, right? I watched Jon Stewart hold a "reporters" feet to the WMD fire on one of his recent episodes. There's no self-policing mechanism like that among trolls.

The law isn't so black and white. The government (and a judge, and a jury) would weigh the illegal uses of the service with the legal ones. They would also look to see how the service handled obvious and reported illegal uses. If, for example, eBay only sold stolen goods, and it was obvious (as in spelled out in the product descriptions) that they were stolen, and they did nothing when users reported the listings of stolen goods, then yeah, they would be breaking the law.

On the other hand, Craigslist has many legal users, and does block listings reported for selling drugs, etc. So even though you can buy drugs through Silk Road and Craigslist, one was shut down and the other one wasn't, with the same standards applied.

I'm not going to touch your Too Big To Fail corporate references as they have their own set of standards that do reflect actual problems with the legal and/or corporate governance system.

Well, astroturfing is no new tactic but ... I think what this article deals with is scale. 400 clearly skilled (bilingual at the least) individuals running multiple catfish personalities online day in and day out ... the whole thing on a budget of $400k a month? That level and size is probably unparalleled by ... say, Digg's conservative idiots.

You have one entity orchestrating the 12 hours a day work of 400 individuals on topics that are pro-Russian and tangentially pro-Russian. They are sophisticated enough to "hit play" at a certain time to unfold a natural disaster or assassination or anything to destabilize/confuse a region and they do so over many accounts on multiple social media platforms. They create video, screenshots, websites, etc. And they use proxies and sufficiently sophisticated means to appear to be disjoint at first glance.

They appear to have run an exercise on a rubber plant explosion in Louisiana for no other discernible purpose than to test out their new super powers or demonstrate their abilities to their customers/leaders.

Frankly put, I'm unaware of "American organized political trolling" that rivals this. This is paid. This is tightly controlled. This is prepared. This is unified. American organized political trolling is just a run-of-the-mill monkey shitfight with the occasional Koch Bros/Soros website (usually easily sourceable) thrown in.

Now if you can point me to a faked ISIS attack on American soil right before an election that was done by some political group stateside, I'd be interested to hear about it.