Sure it can. A business is like a golem. It's animated by means of the laws written to establish what it is (notably laws of incorporation, otherwise there would be no business and the boss would be personally liable for everything)

So, write different runes in its head and it will do different things, unfailingly. If it acts like a raging asshole with the power of a million people, it's because you WANT it to act like a raging asshole for some reason, or because someone who wants that wrote the laws.

Personally, I'm cool with 'dissolve all the corporations and the rich CEOs can be personally liable for their misdeeds', but writing new laws to animate these golems is also a possible approach.

Why yes... yes it is.

Not a chance. A flying car even as an RC model won't look anything like that, not even close.

Wings, forget it: way way too small. Props? That size? No way. Stability on two rotors in those positions? Nope. And even if somehow you had something with engines that size that ran props that size and lifted a body that size which I don't think any engines or materials can do, no matter what they are it's depicted as not blasting the ground with unbearable prop wash. Think a Harrier jump jet, because the thrust sources are nowhere near as broad as those of say an Osprey.

Nope nope nope. But it's nice to see people still love the idea of a flying car :)

But they can't really alter votes themselves, not past a certain margin. There's exit polls and so on. All they can do is try to spin things so that people willingly act against their real preferences.

Bernie's already on the ballots. It's purely GOTV at this point, which we're motivated to do more than ever. I know it seems like a banana republic when stuff like this goes on, but we can still pull it back. That's how Romney didn't end up winning the country, selling it to Bain Capital, and bankrupting it to sell off for parts :)

Actually getting up and going to vote your preference, actually going out to volunteer for the campaign, actually working to inform yourself about what's happening: these things still have value. :)

Yeah, that's me. I am a low level data peon typing in the results of canvassing and phone-banking in Keene, New Hampshire. I'm from Vermont, which is how I know about Bernie, and I'm working directly for Bernie's campaign. It's cool, good people, much like the Obama campaigns except more successful.

I've donated to Bernie too :)

I've personally typed data into the VoteBuilder system that Bernie's not allowed to access now, so I'm taking it personally. _I_ typed that data in. I've also given money directly to Bernie's campaign. Do they propose to take that and award it to Hillary too?

I don't know the guy that accessed the data, but I know most of what's on those servers is the voter info, and lots of it is old and obsolete.

I just talked to my boss in the campaign and they're having some kind of meeting and press conference. We actually feel this is a sign that Bernie's doing better than expected and the DNC is panicking. We think they're probably going to give the data back because it's totally impossible to spin 'shutting off Bernie's whole campaign' over one guy who wasn't even a hacker and who went right to the company and told them what he'd done.

On the other hand, if the DNC are dicks and we can't get access to VoteBuilder, we've already seen enough to know the depth of support for Bernie, so we'll just have to go door-to-door without voter lists or data entry. Pure canvassing and ground game, the most important part.

We can tell them what the Democrats are doing to try and stop us (this is why they're bound to give the data back: trying to shut us down that way makes Hillary look very bad. Her people run the DNC and also that database company itself) and we don't technically need VoteBuilder, it just helps organize stuff. You might say maybe we should be knocking on ALL the doors anyway!

They can shut off the computers, but they can't shut off their own voters. And the Dem voters don't have to be turned off, we just need to get out there and talk to people. Bernie's an honest guy and has many great plans that will help the country, even as screwy as it is. We'll give people a chance to vote for Bernie: both in the primary, and then for President. And the country will start growing again, and rebuilding itself, which will put a lot of people to work.

Oh my GOD! it was him all along!

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids!

If it's not, why haven't they unlocked the Bernie data yet?

Pretty easy to look like a conspiracy to stop the Bern, when you 'suspend' the campaign and lock the guy out of his own data files. Do you think Hillary Clinton would have been locked out of access to her campaign's data files?

The real question is, for how long. It's an important time, just weeks before the first primaries, and every day counts. This is one day that Bernie's people can't work on getting out the vote, because their systems are down.

Well, not down: they're just not allowed to have them. Because it's totally democratic to handicap one entire campaign for a day or days or who knows HOW long, while allowing the other campaign to carry on canvassing.

Also, while yammering away about a guy and his exploit through a firewall he himself didn't shut down

The DNC are using this as an excuse to lock the Sanders campaign out of its OWN DATA until whenever.

That data is how we print up lists of voters, addresses, phone numbers, and how we record people's reactions and what they care about. It goes into an NGP-VAN server and will eventually be used by ALL the Dem candidates.

And for 'whatever reason', the Democratic National Committee has decided to tell NGP-VAN to lock the Bernie campaign out of its own data, when we are counting the days until the first primaries.

While arguing about the guy and how guilty he is of data intrusion, try to consider whether it's worth shutting down the whole campaign and locking them out of their computer systems until (unspecified impossible conditions here). Because this is looking like an intra-Democrat coup to coronate Hillary Clinton, and that really helps nobody.

From what the news stories are saying, this firewall-dropping was happening repeatedly. So:

NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.

A guy who’s now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. That’s a bad call but by information security standards it’s not unthinkable: it’d be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.

One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to ‘stealing’ on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. It’s the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder what’s up and more relevantly what’s being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewall’s going down like that.

The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasn’t hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.

I think that’s accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not it’s suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.

In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, that’s part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didn’t necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and he’s not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)

And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because it’s a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didn’t himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.

I don't think these words mean what you think they mean...

You're right, Obamacare suffers from working through a for-profit insurance system and for-profit healthcare system and it'd be a lot more efficient to go wholly singlepayer or better yet, nationalize the whole shebang.

As for deficits, it's meaningless to think of them unless you're thinking of them in the context of GDP. The track record for Eurozone countries trying to impose austerity has told us what happens: when you attack the structural implementation of civilization, you reduce the raw deficit through not spending, but GDP collapses even faster causing the deficit to be an even higher percentage of the country's balance sheet, which is counter-productive quite literally.

This is what happened to Greece. Doing some research might be good.

I realize it's difficult not to listen only to bankers these days (since money == power as well as money = power in our republic) but when the bankers are off base due to self-interest clashing with realism, you have to stop listening to them. Capital is SO HIGHLY LEVERAGED that it's impossible to justify supporting the bankers' world any longer. It's not only getting worse, it's getting exponentially worse and somebody's going to be the loser when everything breaks.

Bankers being the loser is actually the soft landing. What we're seeing is a scenario unfolding where everybody else collapses first and THEN the bankers lose everything. If your concept of how this stuff worked was valid, we wouldn't have seen the commercial paper market freeze up (ever). There are always enough practical people out there capable of asking questions like 'who is going to buy the products and services in which we invest?'

When they ask that question, increasingly the answer is 'absolutely nobody, therefore don't invest'.

The only answer is taking money from the rich and pumping it back into the economy to be used as a medium for consumer exchange. As a small businessman who has done the research I have hard data establishing that my consumer sales figures are markedly better when 'the poor' are, even briefly, less strapped for cash on the whole, and my sales tank when the rich are raking it in.

If you were running your own business and not just snarking on Slashdot you'd have figured this out too (or you'd have gone out of business). What's best to encourage the proliferation of INDEPENDENT small business and entrepreneurship, just the sort conservatives would like to believe possible, is an extensive redistribution system keeping the consumer base liquid. Then, you don't have to make government agencies to seed small business: the market does it.

You have it backwards. Get it straight. The only way to grow business is to water the lawn, and you're advocating the exact opposite of what will work, probably in the belief that business can only be created by megabillionaires angel-funding completely prefab business entities from scratch. Learn 2 business please.

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I'm not sure WHAT they could possibly change to rape screenwriters harder, in this, but by God if they think of something, you've already agreed to it! :D

And so another field of human endeavor is Uber-fied

Wait, what? I clicked on this in my Twitter feed without looking, thinking it was going to be the Onion.

Or when there's a real emergency and Uber shuts down rather than get stuck in an unprofitable or bad-PR situation. There are situations where their surge pricing would not be well received and where they'll switch right off, as France learned.

It's different in that when Paris was attacked by terrorists, regular taxi drivers rescued victims and people in danger of being killed, and Uber shut down and was gone during the crisis.

I suppose it could've been worse, they could have hit new highs for surge pricing.

Odd how Slashdot hasn't seen fit to mention this interesting data point...

I shot a drone in Reno.