I don't know if you ever went to a school with other kids, but I don't think there's any school I ever went to where "restraining order" would have been even on the radar of anyone as a possibility to deal with bullying. Now there are more extreme forms of bullying--I suppose if someone is actually left black and blue all over and so on, for example, restraining orders and the like would be appropriate--but I think usually bullying is more about *social* violence, sometimes with a physical component, than it is about physical violence.

Students need to be taught to learn how to handle a problem if they have it--how to understand the options and their consequences. One of those can be making a formal report, but it is important also that they understand how to take control of the situation socially, because (1) they won't always be able to complain to someone else, and (2) most of our society sees "NARCs" and "Whistleblowers" and the like as bad things rather than good things, so there are *major* social penalties to complaining.

We do. We need more people in STEM generally, even if it results in too many people in STEM, because it's a lot better to have people trained to think rationally than not.

There is nothing new under the sun. It will teach kids how to bully without being direct about it; how to talk about suicide in a way a computer won't understand; how to mock teachers relentlessly while using code names. Human beings adapt to new rules--sometimes the adaptation is expensive and the result of painful lessons (much of the history of warfare, for example); other times it is fairly painless and done to avoid a teacher calling you in after school.

Party invites, for normal people, are frequently on facebook these days.

IIRC, Stage III failures are responsible for a very high percentage of launch failures.

Although IIRC, Clancy once wrote about one being faked in order to put a spy satellite into orbit without people realizing it was a spy satellite. Of course, the tech wasn't as good then...

No.

The United States Solicitor General's Office writes a *LOT* of these "op" briefs. Generally ten pages saying "This case isn't so magically important that SCOTUS should look at it among the thousands of cases people are asking to look at." Taking that position on a case is the default position and nothing should be read into it.

They are for the most part really top-tier professionals who are trying to make the decision based on what is best for the US Government as an institution. Not influenced very much by politics. They are widely considered the "tenth justice," and really care about (1) whether the case is important, (2) whether the case presents the issues it's about well (i.e. is it a good vehicle for the issue), (3) whether the case has facts that are favorable for getting to what the government thinks is in its interest, etc...

They do call around to get the opinions of the various affected agencies in determining whether to support an appeal. They probably talked to someone from the PTO when figuring out what the government position should be.

But at the end of the day, it's important to realize that SCOTUS can still take up the issue in another case if they want to--maybe one with better facts, etc...; and they won't be bound by the Federal Circuit's ruling here.

Negligence can cause death as easily as deliberate murder.

Yes. It's a difficult balance, and one that I think journalists should be looking at more closely. Putting a moratorium on certain types of news might help, even a brief one--you know the rush to sensationalize. Or maybe when you have an event that kills more than ten people, you require a review of coverage by a specialist on the lookout for that kind of problem. Obviously not a government person, but a psychologist who can say "we should probably play this down a little so it doesn't provoke more terrorism."

No, you're focusing on one part of a much bigger picture and saying that it was the problem. "Root cause" is a phrase that doesn't mean very much. It's pretty ambiguous when you're dealing with a lot of moving pieces.

If the Afghani royal family had been better able to steer the economy of their country in a positive direction and less interested in hollywood decades ago... if the Taliban hadn't been so anti-western... if the soviets hadn't invaded Afghanistan... if the CIA hadn't armed the mujahadeen... if Osama hadn't been related to the Saudi Royals... if he hadn't developed the personal networks he developed... if only he had died in a car accident.... if, if, if... there are *a lot* of causes to complex problems.

Reporting can be one of those causal links, something that inspires some jackass like Osama to hit the twin towers or some stupid kid to shoot up his school. If I tell a large audience all the stupid things someone could do or did do, it's reasonable to think someone might actually do that. So I should be aware and careful about how I report on it.

Single event vs. series of events might be a good first wave cut. Also, at least in the US and probably in many other places, journalism is one of the few professions that has ethical training and standards. What I'm suggesting is that when reporting on a single event, reporters and their publishers should be much more careful about the *consequences* of their reporting.

I'm not suggesting we have a board of censorship or anything like that.

Yes, much closer to a Montessori school than a country schoolhouse, although perhaps a bit more focused than I remember Kindergarten...

This. Security will be taken a little more seriously, which helps a little. There will be a *little* more oversight and pushback within government, which helps a little. It's not a fix; it's patch. What we're seeing is very similar to the response that small companies tend to make to a major security breach--they plug that particular hole, they tighten security a little bit, and they respond a little bit to public concern. It's a net positive but still not enough considering the risk of abuse of mass surveillance.

We only have evidence that they're abusing it a little bit right now--like for parallel construction, which is flagrantly unconstitutional. The concern, and the time when we'll see people more thoroughly changing their habits, will be when (1) people realize their phone calls are being coded or recorded or listened to (this will freak out EVERYONE on wall street, who make phone calls when they do illegal things), and (2) the government starts publicly using some of the information it collects to charge people, discredit people, or target people for being disappeared and people realize it.

That's how it works in the tyrannical states. We're not there yet, but we've been close in the past (think McCarthy or Hoover and what they could have done with this mass surveillance apparatus). We have a lot of great guys in intelligence and I hope that continues to be the case--but without strong institutional safeguards, that's not enough to count on.

Now our government could use the information more subtly, just to influence events by digging up dirt on key players. That will be much harder to stop and is less likely to change public use of the communications infrastructure.

I mean, do you seriously believe that the NSA doesn't have dirt on every single presidential candidate? They may not be using it out of respect for the integrity of the democratic process or out of knowledge of how bad the blowback could be, but still.

40 kb? So that's like one call to printf("%s",szMars) ...

But by making it available you take some responsibility for the consequences of the reporting.

A bunch of reporters were kidnapped in the middle east around the Iraq conflict until it stopped being news and became less common. Then soldiers were kidnapped (IIRC in the lead-up to the Israel-Lebanon war) and the Press made a big deal about it, so they started kidnapping more soldiers. The Press shares some responsibility for the increase in soldier kidnappings. Not as much as the people who kidnapped the soldiers, but still some, because *without the press they would not have been kidnapped.*

The same thing is true for school shootings after Columbine.

And the same thing is true for 9/11. Right after the 1993 WTC car bombing, the news media began explaining of course the towers didn't come down *because they were designed to withstand the impact of an airplane.* Osama Bin Laden followed western news about his attacks; this suggested to him the idea of flying planes into the towers. Without media coverage and publicizing the fact that the towers were designed to withstand the impact of a plane, we probably would not have had hijacked planes flown into the twin towers.

News is important; coverage of important issues matters. But coverage of *single events*, when done without regard to the consequences, can cost a lot of lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Which is more likely : (1) the best-funded signals intelligence apparatus in the world is lying by choosing their words carefully and, while they likely have *some* limits on how they are allowed to search US-based data, they still keep it or arrange for someone else to in case they have to search it later, or (2) this top secret program is being transparent and 100% non-deceptive?

Remember, they have a history of lying to Congress and the public, of conducting massive surveillance that is warrantless and/or authorized by a minimal number of broad-scope warrants. And they have incentives to do so. And they operate almost entirely without real oversight--their public oversight consists of elected representatives with generally *zero* technical ability.

I believe there are a lot of great guys there, but it doesn't take many bad apples for flagrantly illegal programs to keep going, with all the weight of institutional momentum behind them. Institutional momentum is hard enough to change in *transparent* institutions.

Hey, I hope I'm wrong, and most of the people I've met who've worked for intelligence have been really great people. But then you get people who are just real assholes, or who should never be trusted with important decisions. I remember one guy saying the American people weren't *ready* for the war on terror to be over, so we should keep having it--his whole view of the thing was as an exercise in propaganda that justified all of the government overreach we've seen, and that was okay with him. He was a junior guy, and I've met much better guys who work in the community, so I'm not willing to say he's representative--but it's concerning. It's an entirely understandable perspective intellectually, just morally bankrupt and contrary to values of freedom from a policy standpoint. Get the wrong guys like that at the top, and you're fucked, and there's no outlet for good transparency.

I don't think what Snowden did was okay. But I do think he should have been able to complain at the very least to the Intelligence Committee without fear of reprisal, because otherwise the wrong guys in charge inside the intelligence community and Democracy is fucked.