The US has never asked anyone to arrest him with the intention of extraditing him. We have nothing we can extradite him for. ... There is literally nothing we can extradite him for. He did not violate any US law that he is subject to.

Not entirely true. Assange has, in fact, been offically charged with aiding Manning in cracking passwords on classified government computers, not simply publishing the documents provided to wikileaks. Assuming the facts as presented by the prosecutor are correct, this hacking is the sort of crime which can be laid against anyone, regardless of nationality.

Right?!? If they didn't spell it out in the summary, I'd have assumed it meant "Massive Failure Architecture".

the god damned 'job creators' that we have been worshipping really don't have our needs in mind; they could not care less if we all starved and died on the streets.

If not caring for others is a flaw in the morality of 'job creators', then it's a flaw in 99% of humanity. In practically any given question (automotive or workplace safety; educational quality be it primary, secondary or post-secondary; health services; commute times; etc) the only time people actually think about the problem and seek the "best" choice is when their own outcome [or that of close friends/family] is clearly affected.

The reason I have inverted commas in that last sentence is the critical factor here: only the scant minority of choices are ones where either you expect that everyone will want the same thing (a safe workplace, for example), or the only practical way to have certain choices (safe driving conditions) is to restrict what choices other people make. For all others, there isn't a singular, universally agreed-upon answer which everyone desires. If you're a parent, the "best" house might be in a excellent school district; a retiree won't care that much about schools, but might prefer being close to their regular places of activity instead; for someone with limited mobility, the primary factor might be finding one which doesn't have any stairs. Jobs are another prime example of this: most people may want to maximize their pay, but perhaps you'd be willing to take a job which pays only 90% of the "going market rate" if it maximizes your personal/family time by guaranteeing limited overtime, or the location cuts your commute time in half.

So whenever I hear something like "Job creators don't care about employee pay" I have to ask: why should they-- or anybody else for that matter? Unlike the choice of a single person to drive a hazardous vehicle making the roads less safe for everyone, that same singular person taking a lower-paying job (for any reason whatsoever!) doesn't prevent you from affording your bills, or negotiating for the sort of salary you desire. [If enough people are underpaid that it does become a problem, then it's the job of unions -- not the business owners -- to fix the problem.] If you claim that other people need to care about the outcome of your decisions, you are in fact claiming that everyone needs to care about the outcome of every decision -- which either assumes a priori that only one outcome is permitted, or erects a psychologically unreachable standard.

You Cannot Give Offense, you can only take it.

Fuck you

Certainly -- before or after dinner?

I read the phrase "think that over" as meaning you disagree with the quoted text. However, your link does not contradicting that statement, unless you also believe Clinton employed less rhetoric during the campaign. Wikipedia defines rhetoric as "the art of discourse, wherein a writer or speaker strives to inform, persuade or motivate particular audiences in specific situations". Even if we use the less formal definition ("excessively flowery or emotional, often meaningless, speech") can you truly say Clinton employed fewer such devices?

I find such assertions ridiculous; the politician's primary job is to be persuasive, and the most effective tools to do so are the subtle, often trite, phrases which hook into their audience's existing biases. Someone arguing that a slogan, whether "Stronger Together" or MAGA, is not an attempt to persuade tells me more about their bias than it does the politician using it.

My question would be, just how high can you get before you miss a whole number?

Infinity (or whatever arbitrary limit of single-arity operations might be applied). I know it's considered gauche around here to read the source article, much less a video, but it gives the formula and process which allows any integer to be reached.

With "sqrt()" being the square root function:
The log base sqrt(4)/4 of [log base 4 of sqrt(4)] = 1.
The log base sqrt(4)/4 of [log base 4 of sqrt(sqrt(4))] = 2.
The log base sqrt(4)/4 of [log base 4 of sqrt(sqrt(sqrt(4)))] = 3.

The number of times the square root function has been applied in the inner logarithm, is the integer which results from the formula. Therefore, you can create any positive whole number with four fours (and an indefinite number of operations).

Plurality voting with single member districts leads to two party systems. It would require seriously amending the Constitution to change that.

Actually it wouldn't take amending the Constitution [which says nothing about requiring plurality or First-Past-the-Post voting], only changing Federal election laws, in order to completely break the plurality system.

First, there are two states (Maine and Nebraska) where the Electoral College vote can be split; increasing which states with this system would then magnify the value of 3rd-party efforts [as each such state greatly increases the odds of a minor candidate earning the one or two electoral vote(s) which might deadlock the EC, forcing the election to be determined by the House instead]. As seen by the fact this system already exists, this change could be implemented without requiring changes to the Constitution or federal election laws, only state laws.

Secondly, change could be instituted within the House of Representatives by revising the laws on how members are elected: Federal law requires the current separate district methodology but we could move towards a state-level proportional representation system. This would grant easier third-party access to Congress and, while not directly contributing to Presidential aspirations, would elevate the visibility of those platforms and policies. Again, this change would not require a Constitutional amendment, but only altering existing Federal election laws.

Because FPTP/plurality voting sustains the current two-party system even in the face of such hatred the electorate shows for Clinton and Trump, saying these changes do not require amending the Constitution does seem to discount the resistance these changes would face... but I believe the unprecedented hatred for those two candidates and the extreme partisanship on display by their supporters together indicate the importance of making them.

GP said more criminals, not bigger ones. [You also presume it would be valid to call Clinton criminal in advance of a conviction.]

Honestly, the only thing which has cumulatively had more security holes than Flash is Windows. I honestly don't know why people keep trusting it, because it really has been a terrible security risk forever, and disabling it is usually the first thing I do in a browser.

I expect a large portion of the Slashdot commentariat also have "disable Windows" as the first thing on their to-do list.

What I am claiming is that the difference between fatal and non-fatal injuries in a mass attack comes down to the same lottery luck as the election analogy. The (relative) skill of the attacker and defenders is more critical when determining the total number of victims, and less so when determining the extent of any particular injury.

Let me give you a second example.

Rather than taking the effort to tally all the votes cast in an election, let's throw all the ballots into a giant pile, mix them about (maybe in a cement mixer) so they're completely random, and pull one out. Whoever is on that ballot wins the election. If you fully believe that randomness is not bad for public policy, then you must conclude that there is no drawback to this voting system, and the lower work required to determine the winner makes it superior to the systems in use today.

What's wrong with your maths?

I could ask the same question of you—because from my perspective, the only difference between victims being injured or killed is a matter of luck. I consider it an error of the highest order to include that sort of randomness in the factors which drive public policy.

A person with issues made what might have been a final plea for help the night before and everyone just blew it off.

"Online" is such a vague description. Was this somewhere like Facebook or G+, where tying your activity to your offline location is simple, or was it on 4chan or Xbox Live where the "identity protections" in place may have prevented properly contacting the police department in the correct local area?

...do you think someone can commit mass murder on this scale with knives and baseball bats?

It does not matter what I think, I happen to know it has happened. While typically these events are "less fatal" I don't think a 0-deaths attack should be considered better if victim counts remain high. Personally, I wonder why you prioritize guns, when nearly every previous mass shooting perpetrator has shown poor mental health? (It's still a little early in the reporting cycle for a solid analysis in this latest attack.) Since this is such a universal factor, even past the availability of firearms, I would say improving our treatment of mental health issues should take a higher priority in responding to mass attacks.

I have a laptop running Gentoo as its' sole OS. The fact there is a cron service installed at all is because I wanted one. Whether the system boot manager is OpenRC or systemd was my choice, not somebody in charge of the distribution. For any compilation option that can be turned on or off, there is a good chance that it is exposed to the package manager and thus I chose its' state when installing. (If not, portage is the simplest manager I've seen when altering installation scripts, so overriding that choice is very easy.) Most packages don't automatically include their software into a runlevel: you also choose if (and when) they would run.

That control was why I chose Gentoo: not for privacy or a protest against "stealth software" (the Steam client is installed), but because by having to touch each and every part of the system I get a clearer idea of how these parts mesh. I would highly recommend setting up a machine in this fashion: it's a very educational experience.