The point was: it looks nothing like the picture posted by that joke of an article (which looks more like some stock "mayan pyramid" picture). The size alone should be a dead giveaway.

And unlike some of the less dodgy sites out there that make a point to include a pointless picture in all their SEO articles, this one did not bother including a clarifying description ("Example of a Mayan temple"), instead going the flat-out-lie road.

So tell me again, why is the first link for that story a bulshitty post on a New Zealand rightwing blog, with a blatantly misidentified picture? (this is what the actual temple looks like)

For chrissake, the blog post starts with "Reports are coming in", as if it was written by some international news channel, not some guy in his underwear sitting on the opposite side of the world.

It just means that it takes a few generations for a culture that was smacked down to rise back up

Pro tip: if you have to assure your readership that you are not racist, not once, not twice, but three times in the course of your post, that's generally not a good sign.

I know single-video comment is bad form, but I cannot think of anything more fitting than this.

For an extra $100, ICANN will send you your TLD VIP package that includes instructions on how to get on the faster VIP internets and make your domain load up spontaneously on people's browser when they utter your brand's name.

"I had not selected any political orientation, yet these researchers were able to predict my Democrat leanings, merely based on my 'like' of Barack Obama's page. What witchcraft science is that!?"

From all I could read of these (repeated) stories, this is so basic it barely even count as data mining. Also, I'd really like to see the the type I and II errors in that thing: sure, the guys who 'liked' a dozen pages for disney musicals might have higher chances of turning out to be gay, but what about the handful who just really like musicals? Same for the hetero guys who support gay friends and will like gay rights pages. And better hope that absolutely nobody out there practices sarcastic liking (but we're safe, because really: who is ever sarcastic online these days).

Wake me up when we are talking actual science and real data-mining, not two-bit hacking and obvious results.

Right. It's a well-known fact that the burden of proof is on the reader, not the poster of unsourced claims (claims that even superficial research would tend to disprove). We all know that this is the way good debates are made. Hell, I wonder why Wikipedia does not have a '[find your own goddamn citation]' tag: it would make things so much easier.

Then again, instead of trying to engage and present whatever evidence you may have, you'd rather successively engage in passing anecdotes for universal truth and ad hominem. I particularly like your assertion that my wrong-headedness is beyond saving and not worthy of your research time, when I went extra lengths to point out that I had absolutely no love for Walmart and their documented repeated abuse of employees' rights. At the end of the day, questioning your loose claims and methods has to make me some jackbooted thug out to get the little man.

We might be on the overall same side of this debate, I still think we'd be a lot better off without self-righteous, "my guts tell me so", quick-off-the-handle people like you: you only make it easier for fox news-fed morons on the other side to point at your obvious reasoning flaws and claim it a draw.

Right... Because 'video capture' -> 'OCR' -> 'syntax parsing' (without language context) -> 'syntax correction' -> 'overlay video rendering'... would make so much more sense than a language-sensitive syntax-highlighting plugin in your text editor of choice.

> Walmart used to hire people with bad credit (after performing credit checks on applicants) because those employees are the closest to indentured servants

[citation needed]

Not that I can't believe Walmart would do absolutely anything to help their bottom line: they do have plenty of well-documented horrendous employment practices. But: 1) this makes little sense (people with large debt are objectively less responsible and less likely to feel any sense of responsibility toward their employer, not to mention more likely to engage in unethical behaviours to repay their debt) 2) anything I could find online pointed at the exact opposite (that Walmart was unlikely to hire people with bad credit history).

So please source your claims or stick to actual facts. Unsupported rumours only do disservice to the worthy cause of exposing the sociopathic behaviours of corporations like Walmart.

You are mixing personal ethics and ethical theories that can be applied to a community (of people/countries).

Given the question at hand, I'll venture a wild guess and say Military ethics are most applicable. You might know them (in large part) as the Nuremberg Code, Helsinki Declaration or the Geneva Convention. In the modern mainstream world (outside of religious/political nuts), there isn't a lot controversial about them. That is, until a country decides that breaking them might possibly give them an upper hand, thus effectively knowingly stepping outside defined ethical bounds.

> there's also the question of who gets to decide on the ethics

Yes. If only there was a body of work, say an entire branch of philosophy, dedicated to defining what ethics are, based on rigorous rational thinking and an axiomatic approach.

Had the same problem, except with very obnoxious scammy spams and the company in question was Bank of America (overnight, the dedicated address went from BofA only, to dozens of such spams).

My personal guess was that these morons must have sold their list to somebody (or cross-marketed, or whatever other stupid idea one of their coked-up marketing exec came up with) who in turn sold it and so on, all the way to the darker recesses of the internets. A chain is only as weak as its weakest leak, so once they decide to sell the data, you can be certain it will end up everywhere.

As someone who lived in Japan during the Great Eastern Earthquake, I can assure you that the people freaking out about nuclear death where mainly the rest of the world, not the Japanese.

Japanese were too busy trying to rescue people amidst entire cities swept by the tsunami, to really care about Fukushima anywhere as much as foreign newspapers did. And the most stridently panicky people in the streets of Tokyo were consistently foreigners or people getting their news from foreign media.

Now that the more urgent stuff is taken care of and the damage has been assessed in a somewhat rational fashion, you do indeed see unprecedented popular actions calling for less/no nuclear plants in the country. But that only happened a good year after the accident itself and could hardly be labelled "freaking out".

Step 1: Run like headless chickens promising a fiery death through radiation burns to anyone living within 1000 miles of Fukushima.

Step 2: Be somewhere else when scientific findings pour in, showing that the risk on the general population, save for some very specific cases (such as workers at the plant who heroically risked their health trying to fix things), pales by comparison with absolutely every other aspect of the catastrophe (starting with thousands of deaths, injuries and destroyed houses, for entirely non-nuclear reasons).

Step 3: Announce yourself vindicated when Step 1 results in a rash of PTSDs and other mental health issues.

Race To Mine Bitcoins Drives *Opportunistic Businesses* Into the Chip Making Business... There, fixed it for you.