1) Limits the spread of sever incurable life altering diseases
2) Two adults provides a far more reliable and economically secure situation for raising children
3) Polyamory aside, most humans are jealous creatures and adultery and cheating in general frequently incite violence

Other than that no society really has no good reasons. Do you know what society is? Have you spent much time around other humans?

That right there though IS THE PROBLEM with BIG government. That sort of thinking. When it turned out the seat could not be easily sourced. Some other mandate to keep that particular air craft in service effectively put the government in a position of doing whatever it takes to keep that bird in the air.

Nobody stopped to say gee maybe we should just run the risk of using an 'out of spec toilet seat'. Its not likely to bring the plane down after all. How much could a injury law suit really cost us for this?

You get the point where the few ways to satisfy all the competing directives, agendas, rules box you into doing things that would be irrational in any other context.

Which is exactly why sequestration actually worked and why we need more of it.

There isn't political will to cut any specific program. Its like a comment up that page said "oh its only a nickle per tax payer" so the generally electorate does not get excited and won't vote for you because of you tough stance on support of Emu breading research. On the other hand the handful of Emu farmers and researchers out there will be very concerned about and run scary ads about how you are killing all the jobs in the Bumbfuck County [Insert Square State].

Congress is to freckles to deal with any specific budge line item or even any specific department level budget. On the other hand if you push big cross the board cuts it may leave all of our problems of in appropriate allocation in place, but at least you bring the aggregate numbers down.

In the best case:
Someone figures out away to save a few million by negotiating better contracts and eliminating some waste.

In the next best case:
That leaves the folks on the ground in a position to say well we don't have enough budget to do all this mandated activity lets divert resources from this effort we know really does not work so we can maintain this other that does or this other that is more important. Sure we have to "officially" still research Emu breading but will just have a intern book an hour to it once a month.

Worst case:
Some actually productive and beneficial program / policy gets short shrift-ed because the money isn't there even though plenty of money is still being foolish spent elsewhere.

Still this is the best we can do in the current state of political system. Until some real calamity forces people to get real I don't see things changing. I thought the financial crisis might have done it, but the pols managed to kick the can down the road by printing their way out and our biggest trade partners were sufficiently upside down as well that is kept a lit on inflation. With Asia now getting the shakes they can probably get away with it for another decade.

The next president is going to be one luck SOB or DOB? whoever it is. They going to get to continue to enjoy the real stimulative effects of the low interest rate, policy, and the benefits of all the medical industry growth which is already a sixth of the economy. Obama care is going to be good short term here. It will move a lot of money around. 9-10 years from now when the next guy is on his way out office though its going all come off the rails.

1) Demographics will be further screwed older
2) We will likely be even more a service economy having seen little growth in real wages
3) The Debt will be larger, meaning more borrowing will cost more
4) The once insatiable appetites for our bonds in foreign markets that is now gone will still be
5) Even if the dollar is still the reserve currency of many alternative currency markets for commodities like oil will probably exist.
6) Mandatory health insurance while having prevented a handful of personal bankruptcies will have further reduced the savings rate among the general population.

I don't think the formula from 2008-10, which barely worked then will get us out of the next hole

1) Set up a site for cheaters
2) Charge a subscription fee
3) Profit!
4) Accidentally leave some live shells open and ipkvm with a super weak password or easy vuln on a high port
5) Let 4 slip to cousin Jimmy at the family reunion if he will split the take
6) Confirm to the press the hack to place so black mail victims will take Jimmy seriously.
7) Profit! some more

See there is isn't even a ?? step and two Profit! steps!

I would think the answer would be a qualified yes. Athletes like marathon runners, hikers, swimmers, cyclists etc who participate at the competitive levels of their sports tend to consume a lot more calories and other folks at their same approximate height and weight; same for people who do physical labor, farm workers, construction etc.

So on some level more energy out, means you will get to put more energy in. I suspect however you can't just "plug in" you 80W smart phone and double you calorie intake. Our bodies are complex systems of feedback and hysteresis mechanisms. Athletes and workers build up to those metabolic levels. Your body probably won't react appropriately to such a sudden change in demands. It might be possible to "work up" to being your phones sole power source.

Then again I would be concerned about gadgets and the metabolic effects of disconnecting them or turning them off. An athlete does not put away the extra muscle tissue when its not in use. It might not consume as much energy as when its performing but its still there metabolizing and throwing energy off as waste heat. So for like a pace maker that is always on and goes everywhere you do this probably makes sense and would be something body adapts to like any other parasite. I don't want to plug in my phone and pass out from low blood sugar because my body isn't expecting the sudden load.

I live in a fairly rural area. A great deal of my driving is on unmarked roads (no speed signs) with no center lines etc. The implicit rule is there is a speed limit of 55 mph. If a road is not marked and not within an incorporated city/town. Just because the speed limit is 55 does not mean its safe to be going that fast.

Its also mountainous here, the result is there are many blind corners and crests you can't see over. Sometimes the roads are camel back profile and you can a ways down the road at the peak of one hill, and that there are no opportunities of other vehicles/cattle/tractors/etc to enter the road way across the next two hills or something so you can stay at speed even when you can't momentarily see far up the road. If that isn't the case though you just have to slow to speed that you could safely stop in a few tens of feet should you discover that is required.

People who are not from around here don't understand. You get tailgated by some yahoo that is just passing thru and does not know how to drive thinking he is going to cut a bunch of interstate miles and save all kinds of time zipping across the county assuming its going be 55mph the whole way. I am a lead foot there are frequently places I do 70 if its all clear but the blind spots I do 35.

Whats worse is when you don't get tailgated and that yahoo does clip about doing 60+ where he ought not be, the result is often an unfortunite collision with a pedestrian, cyclist, farm animal, farm implement, deer, etc.

Yes because there are many many situations where the only mutually supported cipher between two end points is RC4 be it used for SSL/TLS or any other protocol. RC4 is also much faster when you are working with something that does not have hardware accelerated crypto. It does not matter much if we are talking some big SSL offload device but can matter a great deal when its some tiny MIPS or ARM chip in your industrial controller.

Studying the possible attacks on RC4 make sense because there are lots of people who may be faced with a decision requiring large investments of time and money replacing hardware or software that is otherwise still meeting their needs. You need to have some understanding of just how risky RC4 might be to make that decision. Its easy in a security role to just say "RC4 == bad must fix", but that isn't providing great service. Understanding the value of what you are protecting and the potential consequences if the encryption is broken are critical the next part is understanding how easy it is to break.

If a successful attack requires 10's of thousands of known plain texts that you can't imagine the likely attackers have any way of getting, and will take months of key space searching with 100's of GPUs and special purpose build software, vs some guy with a couple Radeons and a stock copy of Kali can do it in hour with handfull of plain texts it might change the decision.

I would argue that "sequestration" has been one of the greatest political success going back to at least 2010 when the GOP and President dug in their heals over the AFCA.

The GOP wanted spending cuts. Could not even agree internally what to cut. The President/DNC wanted an appropriations bill that did not slaughter any of their sacred cows. Both sides got what they wanted. We don't have the political will cut ANYTHING. We don't have resources to keep going as we are.

While top down cross the board cuts might not be the optimal solution, they do recover the dollars and at least within agencies allow people closer to the ground to decide which activities are less important and less effective to divert resources from. Its worked, non of the chicken little the sky is falling outcomes that people opposed to sequestration have happened. We got a small but significant improvement in the deficit outlook.

That's my point though. Given current trends they are not going to get paid for the story anyone. A tiny number of people subscribe to traditional media and they they blog about it and that is what everyone else reads. The people who still subscribe to traditional media are either old, or really want the greater depth or research and professional analysis, you don't get elsewhere.

Just the headlines are no longer worth much. Being first isn't really as important as it use to be either. Being first used to mean you were literally the only source for that headline for hours. If you broke a story in the morning paper, the other news agencies could not even respond until the evening paper, evening news cast etc.

Now days you get the information regurgitated on blog 10min later or less.

All the freaking time when some kisses the wrong girls or grabs an ass they should not have.

I doubt it. I bet many of them specifically target other blacks, with full knowledge that a legacy of racism means authorities are much less likely to look into the matter fully and they stand a better chance of getting away with it. Most criminals are dumb but not completely. They burgle the house in the shitty neighborhood because they know odds are their isn't a patrol car as near by if someone calls the cops as their would likely be in a more affluent neighborhood, even in the spoils of a successful job won't be as great.

There should be no such thing as a hate crime. The concept has no place in a just society. All victims should matter equally. Why you were victimized should not be a factor. If someone is murdered/raped/robbed etc society should put equal effort into securing justice no matter who the victim is. When it comes to punishing or rehabilitating the perpetrator those are serious crime the commission of which means at a very fundamental level the prep is deranged and needs to be handled accordingly no matter what their 'reasons'. If they formed intent to do those types of harms why isn't important.

When people cry about a like of diversity 90% of the time what they mean is there are not enough other people LIKE me to be comfortable. They don't want diversity, they want to be less of a minority. Suppose you have a majority Orange city council. A Green person on the council wants to create a new at large position to "increase diversity" Now do suppose if the position is created and a Purple is elected they will be happy or did they really want another Green but just won't admit it.

I having trouble feeling sorry for the journalists. Yes the scoop is important but we are not selling papers by having young boys shout "EXTRA" from the street corners anymore. Any novel facts uncovered will be repeated by 100s of blogers the moment the story drops anyway. A huge portion of the would have been in the old days readership/viewership will get that news from there anyway. So whats the big deal if the facts usually accompanied by with more chaff than most folks are willing to sort thru drop one more place?

Where journalism is useful is analysis. They still have a leg up there. If you have been working a story you for which you had to file those requests than other facts and sources must have lead you there. You already have a bigger picture view than anyone else. You know what material you are looking for in those documents. The rest of us just have a 1000 pages of US Forestry Service reports and questions, for example.

I don't by a paper to learn the "CIA has over 300 black sites" I buy a paper because I expect an article that will tell me not only are there 300 black sites, but what a black site is, how they are used, some reasons I should be concerned about that and may be reasons I should not be, what the broader implications for international law enforcement and political relationships are, etc. If my interested ended with a few odd facts the only news I would need are Slashdot summaries anyway.

On the flip side this will be a nice resource to have that will make linking to original source materials be they to support a news story, scholarly paper, Internet rant, or whatever much easier. That will be a good thing, but it will mean for the issues your really do care about you'll have direct access to the evidence itself to for your own judgments. I think this could be very valuable.

Why is it acceptable for the your local news paper or TV news program to profit? You don't think reports on crimes are a good portion of what sell news papers and draws viewers to programs that sell ad time? "If it bleeds it leads" they at least used to say in the industry. On some level we have to allow the news agencies to be economically viable or we won't have them. We still need these organizations and the investigative reporting the provide to have a functioning democracy. Internet bloggers alone don't provide a full substitute for people on the ground discovering new facts and bringing them to light. Now this might be evolving now that every phone practically has a good quality camera, and we have outlets like wikileaks where people can put information they are not supposed to know the capabilities of citizen journalism are expanding.

They we get into your implied question about what are " legitimately secret" secrets. When it comes to government secrets democracy has challenges. How can I know my representatives are not just keeping secrets to serve their interests rather than ones that I would agree need to be kept. Unless at least from time to time there are leaks and I get a true inkling of the sort of secrets they have. People seem to forget that the US government has long hist of keeping secrets to hide its miss deeds and crimes. Many young people today are surprised learn that Nixon actually created most of our modern programs of declassification that have given the public access it never had before. Of course his motives were out of a self serving desire to expose the actions of political rivals, but that proves the point; secrets keep those in power where they are deservedly or otherwise. Given all the abuses by the US that have come to light how would you guess more oppressive regimes behave?

Next, at least traditionally something was deemed to be a crime because it had some harmful real or perceived impact on society. Everyone seems to be essentially agreed that these acts of digital trespass, privacy violations, etc are harmful why should we discard any possible benefit form them by not allowing journalists to publish and use the information? The harms is already done; except when it isnt. That is what brings us to News Corp. Where News Corp crossed the line is their relationship to the crimes became causal. They were not publishing things they learned after some non-associated hacker for whatever their own reasons might have been broke into peoples voice mails and dumped the data someplace. They were effectively paying people to do it. They were inducing the crimes.

One of the problems the software world faces is when is something 'done'.

Suppose and application was carefully designed and written 5 years ago and was free of problems like buffer overflows, logic errors, bad assumptions about input domain, bad assumptions about scale. If these things were true 5 years ago why would they be less true today? The questions than becomes does this application still meet the need today?

Software isn't like a house or machine. It does not require maintenance unless a problem is discovered or a need changes, than you remodel. Software does not weather, nor does it have wearing surfaces.

I saw tcpd on the list. How much attention should that get? I mean I used tcpd for the same things I have used tcpd for more than a decade. I don't really have any new uses for it. It supports ipv6. I am not sure what changes are need. Why should anyone spend time migrating it to git hub? What would that accomplish?