Oh, if only!

Sadly, that was not their intent at all.

Yep. In fact IIRC, in an old interview Reznor once claimed he had to stop taking antidepressants precisely because it was adversely affecting his ability to compose.

I guess it's true what they say, you gotta suffer if you wanna play the blues. And industrial goth probably requires an even higher level of suffering than the blues.

Just because the cameras are in public places, that does NOT necessarily mean that the police are only surveilling public spaces. My city has many cameras at intersections etc.and I happen to know someone who's been in the control room for those cameras, he says they can zoom in on cars and see everything the driver and passengers are doing - the phrase he actually used was, "they can count the change in your pocket." I would submit that most people have a reasonable expectation that the little things they do and say in their private vehicles with the windows closed is not public activity. Similarly, a camera mounted on a power pole outside a residence might be aimed at the bedroom window, and when zoomed and filtered can certainly see what's going on in there. Obviously, what happens in bedrooms is private, or privacy means nothing. You can't just say that all cameras in public areas are non-intrusive because, well, it's public. Today's cameras have capabilities that render that argument invalid.

All true, but why should any of this surprise you? His music was always full of self-loathing, in fact it features prominently on "Hurt." So a guy who hates himself has finally managed to turn himself into something different - it's exactly what one would expect. It's just unfortunate for us all that the new Trent happens to be a music industry lapdog asshole, and doubly unfortunate that the new Trent can't seem to compose truly relevant music anymore, but hey, whatever works, right? The transition appears to be working for him on a personal level, so it's all good.

None that you know of. The point of the article is that there has been no way to be sure about what's really in there and what isn't. The code appears to have been deliberately obfuscated by Intel at a hardware level. It's true that this subsystem is not new and has been known about for years, but I gather the point of the article is not to announce its existence, rather he wants to say that he has figured out some (but not all) of the subsystem's functionality that was previously hidden, and he wants to eventually replace the whole thing with open source equivalents so that people will know for certain that there are indeed no Three Letter Agency backdoors. I think. I really only skimmed the article.

Yeah, the hypocrisy, selective blindness, whatever you want to call it, displayed by some of these people is unbelievable. You can’t argue on the one hand that big corporations have full free-speech 1st amendment rights that allow them to be as politically active as they want to be (or can afford to be) and then on the other hand get all upset when you discover one of those corporations exercising those exact rights in a way you disapprove of.

For the record, I don’t necessarily believe that corporations should have the same rights as people, and I don’t believe Google is manipulating search results for political reasons. It’s just that the whining over this issue coming from right-wing erstwhile free-market crusaders is driving me nuts, it’s what drove me to post. And yeah, there are indeed many other instances of similar selective blindness displayed by those on the far right - and to be fair, occasionally by those on the far left as well. It’s like logic just goes out the window whenever politics are involved.

I’m confused... Why shouldn’t Google be able to rank their search results any way they want to? Google is a private company, not a utility or common carrier, they can and should be able to manipulate their search results any way they want to, with whatever innate biases they feel are necessary to keep their users happy. Are the people that are complaining about supposed bias seriously saying that they think some government bureaucrat should police search engines and shut down the ones they don‘t like? Really?? Come on people, get a grip! Chill out and let the invisible hand of the market do its thing. If you don’t like Google’s search results, the solution is obvious: use another search engine!

There, problem solved.

There was a film called “AI", which was originally something Kubrick was working on from his own idea and script, a project he tinkered with for many years, filming bits of it here and there, but which was still a majorly unfinished work when he died. By some dark Hollywood juju it was eventually transformed into a Steven Spielberg movie, but if you were unfortunate enough to have seen it (as I have, regrettably) you know that the finished product wasn’t exactly a film partaking of the best ideas from both directors - more like the worst excesses of each, awkwardly jammed together by faceless studio bureaucrats. I wonder, though, if we might now be finally reaching the stage where a computer could really study the oeuvre of a director like Kubrick and emulate his style well enough to do a true finished script, something that would feel more like a real Kubrick film, as opposed to the pale imitation/desecration the Spielberg-ized product proved to be. Now that would be cool, a movie called “AI” about AI with a script written by a real AI - or the closest we can get to a real AI, in any event something more intelligent than the mindless sentence completing phrase-bot that penned the script for Sunspring, the film in the article. Sunspring is basically just a gimmick, but real advances in AI have been made in the last few years, and I would that guess a truly watchable movie scripted by a computer is not so far-fetched.

Three data points, not one. This guy represents three data points. We are looking at the occurrence of false accusations among women. This man is giving us three instances of that, by three different women. He may be unlucky, and certainly has poor choice of women friends, but it's a valid sample. If we knew the total number of women friends he's made over the years, we could then make a real prediction about the overall incidence of false accusation. Granted, even three data points only represents the bare minimum necessary, and as of now we're still missing data, but if he supplies that data it's completely valid statistically to make a prediction, albeit a very crude one.

Hmmm, that would explain Trump, and Hillary too! You may be onto something.

Wrong! Despite my intense dislike of the ACA, I'm quite willing to go on record saying that Obamacare quite literally saved my life. I had no insurance before the ACA, it was totally out of reach, and I don't qualify for medicaid (I know for a fact because you are forced to be evaluated before being given ACA credits). Within 2 weeks of signing up for a quite good silver plan that was also quite affordable (this was in the 1st year of Obamacare, it's much less good and affordable now) I came down with a rare disease that would have crippled or killed me without a doubt. I literally got my insurance ID number while on the way to the ER for the 2nd time in a week. Funny thing, now I had some insurance they decided to do an MRI "just in case," and discovered the infection. Without that MRI and subsequent diagnoses I would have been paralyzed or dead within days, and I have little doubt there wouldn't have been an MRI if I was still uninsured. As it was, I was hospitalized for months with the final bill well over a quarter million, which my silver plan promptly payed all but $500 of. Don't get me wrong, health care in this country is fucked and the ACA can't and won't fix it, but there's no doubt it saved my ass big time. So your facts are wrong, but your premise may be correct. We need to go single payer, the longer we put it off the harder it will be, and more people will die.

Yes, it's absolutely surging. Oh, wait...

Guess it depends on where you look. Although to be fair you may be right about the bollocks, the scenario in the article/study is probably unrealistic. The truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere in between.

The difference is this: under president Hillary nothing changes at all from what we have now, and under the Donald it's looking very likely to get worse but with a remote possibility that some small things might actually change.

Frankly, I don't know if I can bring myself to vote for either one of them, not even in protest of the other. It's fucking ridiculous, the Republicans are running a "Man of the People" who's a billionaire, and the Democrats are running the one single person in America so hated she could actually lose to him. The system is broken by definition if it's come to this.

And we are all thankful for it!

There are real problems with employee drug tests as currently practiced, problems that go way beyond identifying drug-free employees. As things stand now, when someone applies for a job - just applies, mind you, this process occurs well before anyone is actually offered a position - the prospective employee is routinely told to go get a drug test, usually at a local testing lab. Now, regardless of whether or not that person has in fact used any illegal drugs, the report that goes to the employer lists ALL the medication found in that person's system at the time of the test, pretty much every medication taken during the last few weeks. That's right, they get a full report on every prescription drug you are taking. Including, for example, antidepressants, or birth control... And they get this info BEFORE they decide to hire you. It's the equivalent of giving them full access to your medical records. Few people realize this glaring hole in our right to privacy exists, that potential employers will see this information before deciding whether or not to hire you. Just one more example of a seemingly sacred privacy right, now blown to the four winds, gone forever while no one was paying attention.