I get 100/100 fibre for about 40 bucks a month in Stockholm. No caps or throttling, either.

Idiot whines when he can't take what he can dish out. News at 11.

That suicide was just one that happened to get more news exposure for whatever reason. Yet it made no difference on the national level, unfortunately.

The Newtown massacre was also a giant demonstration of our national failings in mental health. It could have been prevented were it not for all the barriers we build as a nation towards access to mental health treatment. Even worse, when the gun lobby had an opportunity to help turn this in to a discussion on mental health they instead upped the paranoia and now we have more unstable people running around armed instead of fewer. I stated from day one that the massacre was a problem with mental health and all that was said in response was "ZOMG! Obama's after YOUR guns!".

On this regard it is useful to remember that access to mental health resources is often regulated by the same bastards that control access to physical health resources - the insurance industry. Hence if you seek mental health assistance, your insurance company knows about it and it goes into your electronic medical records. While your employer isn't supposed to be able to discriminate against you based on that, your insurance provider is certainly entitled to do so and can raise your rates (through your employer) to the point where your employer has no choice but to fire you - after which point you no longer have access and the downward spiral begins again.

Mental health access should become a national right, completely decoupled from physical health access. Of course we'll never see that happen as the conservatives running the show will declare it a socialist/communist/fascist/whatever-other-inaccurate-ist "takeover" of the industry and it will die at that moment.

Except the second amendment says nothing about self defense. It mentions

But it never says that these arms are for self defense. In fact, if we look at the full text

We see mentions of a Militia and a free State. We never see anything about self defense. The self defense notion is a product manufactured by the gun lobby.

Smitty I honestly don't see the connection here. Please, can you clarify what you mean by

In the context of it somehow being an explanation for

I think you are trying to somehow use the IRS as justification for your desire to outlaw union membership (at least, amongst government employees) but the connection just isn't there. What does the IRS have to do with unions?

I disagree completely with that assertion. It is in now way an "inescapable conclusion". Or are you trying to support a movement to set all government employees' pay to zero? While Citizens United did a great job of reducing the participation of non-wealthy people in government, setting government pay to zero would be a great final blow if that is your goal.

I can't say I've ever shared those particular links, but that is only because I had never seen them before now. I do advocate for mental health assistance and screening, and I have advocated for it previously here on slashdot as well.

Allow me to be direct; I believe that mental health needs vastly more attention and resources committed to it than what it currently gets in this country. Furthermore I believe that the stigma associated with it needs to go away.

Unfortunately I think the stigma is the bigger problem. It goes back generations and it continues to persist in the current age. It isn't like some of the other stigmas that have subsided over time, and in some pockets of culture it is genuinely getting worse. I have no idea how to counter that on a scale broader than my own family and community.

The challenge is in the accuracy. Generally a very small part of the brain has to be stimulated. Miss it and you could end up with a problem worse than the one you were trying to solve. When we figure out a way to more precisely target the right regions - a method that will likely take the surgeon out of the most precise part of the procedure - then we'll really be making great progress.

A receiver like that would have a power draw that is almost infinitessimal compared to the power draw of the motors. A simple radio receiver adequate for the job would possibly reduce the flight time by less than a second.

Then for you, as it is for me, it's Year Ten of the Linux Desktop.

Et voilà! How To Encrypt Everything.

Such delightful ambiguity. Would "they" happen to be the laws, or the government?

Then what the fuck do we even have it for?

... we might reach a similar level in the states with regards to taking mental health seriously. Hopefully we don't face too many more massacres before then.

This sounds remarkably like C.S.Lewis' description of hell in The Great Divorce.