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.

"If the results of professional regulating bodies and the years of inquiries are going to be discarded, then why have them in the first place?"

See, works like that too.

Listen: I know you (/the OP) love a nice feel-good hero story, and Armstrong was a made-for-TV one. But just a few things:

1) Armstrong gave up his rights to challenge the accusations of the USADA and lost all his legal challenges to their jurisdiction over the matter: he is guilty, end of story.
It does not matter whether you are "tired" of fighting accusations or whatever other excuses he could find: if you waive your right to present your case and challenge the accusations, you are implicitly admitting guilt. The USADA is not some Soviets-era corrupt body out to get him (as backed by a couple court decisions against Armstrong claims).

2) For a laugh, have a look at the many articles (have only seen some in French and German, but I'm sure English versions will pop up) that go over what the "revised" winners would be for all the Tour de France titles he might be stripped of: if you eliminate all the other riders who have since been convicted of doping, the actual winner is on average fourth or fifth in the ranking at the time (in one case, all up to the *9th* have been eliminated since).
While the fact that doping is widespread is nothing new, and does not prove in itself that Armstrong did it, think about it for a second: this means that he consistently beat between 3 and 7 people who *were* using doping products. Yea... I guess he was that good.

3) As shown above, doping is rarely detected during the races, but sometimes takes years to come up: sometimes by applying newer scientific methods to older samples, most often by uncovering doping networks (crooked doctors providing the products etc) and identifying the people tied to them. Many of the techniques Armstrong is accused of using (such as transfusions) are extremely difficult to detect, if at all. In such cases, it is perfectly valid to use testimonies.

4) Within the case built by the USADA against him, is a mention of his close relationship with the UCI (as one of their most generous donator) and personal friendship with its president. All things concurring to explain why he may have benefitted from some warnings ahead of tests, as well as unusual leniency when he failed to submit to testing.

5) Despite all that, there *were* two cases where Armstrong did test positive for doping substances. While he successfully (and not very convincingly) fought the first instance (1999), the second one (2005) is still very much outstanding and has not been disproven nor confirmed (due to the "unfortunate" lack of a duplicate sample).

So, yea, Science(tm)

You mean, like the difference between using a word and its abbreviation?

"dcwg.org"? seriously?

Let me get this straight: the FBI is recommending people go to a nondescript .org website to run a security check on their computer?

Can I next invite them to go to submit their information at fswrxt.net to check that their credit card wasn't hacked?