Much of this change with the police occurred in the last 20 years with the militarization skyrocketing after 9/11. I don't know whether to call that rapid change or not -- it seems pretty rapid to me having occurred from my 20s to my 40s. Here in my smallish town of 80k, with many miles of fields and forests between it the next town of any consequence, the police have at least a two military vehicles. What is that for if not for practice and training as Police State Enforcers? If they aren't ready to take on that role now, how long would it take to train them as a paramilitary police force? Probably just a few years to hire up some of those desperate for a decent job and let them practice on the equipment they already have.

Mal. Bad. In the Latin.

I had parents, I'm white, have a graduate degree, make six figures. I think of the police as mother-fucking-pigs because they are they enforcement side of the Constitution destroying political regime we have. While I realize that I'm not their prime target -- at this point in time -- that doesn't make the police nice or moral people. I see the racial bias stuff as nothing more than the pigs practicing for full on police state, at which point everyone will be a target.

What will cause attitudes toward these assholes to change is when the police stop using SWAT to bust up home poker games, give up the military equipment, and start trying to _serve_ their community rather looking at us like enemies. The problem starts with the cops and the changes have to start in the pig stye.

Yeah ... banksters explain some part (certainly not all, but some for certain) of the immigration reform push:

Head of banking group pushes Republicans to back immigration reform

Wells Fargo Official Links Lending to Immigration Reform

Silicon Valley Bank: In Support of Immigration Reform

How Immigration Reform Will Help Fix The Housing Recovery

I wonder if the recent push open up immigration on all fronts, has something to do with the bank bailouts caused by the housing market crash. Basically, the banks now own a lot of useless foreclosed real estate and injection millions of people into the market, some percentage of which will do well enough to buy a house, may be seen as a good thing (by banks and elites).

Of course, it increases wage competition making it harder for working people to get ahead and is thus seen as a bad thing by such people.

I have no evidence, I'm not saying it is true, just mentioning it is some sort of possibility to explain why Democrats are so hell bent on opening the borders recently (aside from the obvious pandering to certain voting segments).

Far down on anyone's radar are environmental effects. There are enough people here already and the more we add, the more polluted and nasty our world gets.

Companies care about bottom lines.

Exactly and that's the point. If a flight of customers is going to make a business go under, that business is going to bitch to reps/senators and then something will happen.

To get there though, users must engage in flight to alternatives in a recognizable pattern. You think Google would totally not care if there was a demonstration day, where say google's usage rate dropped by a third and DuckDuckGo's septupled or whatever? Google would totally notice. So would DDG for that matter. Competition can also lead to better options.

krokodil more likely.

I'm anti-partisan. We basically have a single monolithic GOP: the Blue GOP favors gay rights and abortion, the Red GOP does not.

Exactly. Democrats are the new Nixons: perpetual war, Nixon's health care plan, mass surveillance beyond Nixon's fantasies. That liberals are not voting for Democrats is called being logical, and not voting against your beliefs.

I'm honestly very interested in openBSD and it is obviously better to have fewer rather than more vulnerabilities. How would a person figure out which parts of openBSD go through the auditing they're famous for? I wouldn't want to be one of those people who installs openBSD and then believes myself invulnerable because of that fact alone -- that is just smug ignorance. So for example, the openBSD website advertises "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" How much worse is that figure if I also install Gnome or KDE; xine or mplayer and all the codecs; etc. etc.? Anyway, is there a list of what is and what is not subjected to the openBSD audit process? I can't imagine they have the resources to look at absolutely everything.

So is there a point to using OpenBSD if you install flash? I'm not trolling, I'm curious and open to the fact that there is almost certainly something I haven't considered, but running OpenBSD and then installing flash feels like spending a million bucks on a safe, and then writing the combination code to open it on a sticky note attached to the backside of a painting hung on the wall next to the safe's door.

I finally googled "comma inside quotes not logical" and wouldn't you know it, there are two standards:

American style is to put commas and periods inside quotes (but not colons, semi-colons, question marks, etc.) and British style, also called interestingly enough "logical" style, is to put the punctuation inside the quotes if it existed in the original, but not to if it did not.

Anyway, this was sort of interesting, at least insofar as I am at work and avoiding seriously boring stuff by reading stuff that could be considered interesting in that context:

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

I'm not the above AC but I still don't understand why punctuation that is not a part of the quote, goes inside the quote. I purposely violate this "all punctuation inside the quote marks" rule because it simply makes no logical sense.

Here are three examples:

1. AC said "The comma goes inside the quotes."
2. AC used the word "comma".
3. AC used the word "comma."

The first is true, the second is true, but #3 is false because the AC did not _end_ his/her sentence on the word "comma" and so including the period (EOL marker) inside the quote marks is completely inaccurate because that is _not_ where AC ended the line. There is no reason to let illogical tradition be the rule and in reality, the rules of English follow usage to a large extent. You can fix this over time by using quotes logically.

Yes, but it is so much easier to just collect that info if it is all done on your own server through an interface you have total control over. It becomes possible, probably not easy, to blend in with the noise of the internet in general through a distributed system.

No it is not like craigslist because:

There is no central server system making user tracking trivial and no central entity who might behave not-evil today, but once they sellout, all bets are off on how users get treated and how that collected data gets used.

Buy focusing on the lack of transaction fees for selling stuff, you are looking solely at the surface and totally missing the underlying structure.