Well, most Hate Crime laws attach to existing laws (typically, Assault or Racketeering laws - the above example winds up under Assault) and add additional sanctions for specific kinds of attacks, just as many legal systems will distinguish between various kinds of homicide, theft, etc. I WILL admit I haven't checked the specific laws in this article, because who has that much time when you're not a lawyer, but I think there's a useful statement to be made about Hate Crime laws in the general here.

Never understood this argument. In some platonic, ideal realm, knowledge/ideas are not scarce, but a person's life/time is. A patent is (supposed to be - I acknowledge the modern system has serious issues) a recognition of the intersection between the time and effort spent on obtaining specialized knowledge, which is not generally available, and labour/time to develop their not-plainly-obvious innovation. The patent isn't acknowledging some form of ownership of an idea, it's a limited license on financial exploitability in recognition of effort. There's a lot of reasons that has gotten screwed up in the current system, but despite some serious issues and a small number of hideously bad actors, it's not a burn-it-down situation.

Facebook is, allegedly, attempting to do the whole 'trusted ad' thing with their bypass - they vet ads, they're served from Facebook servers, they don't allow JS, Flash, or other active content. Which ignores malicious images and buggy browser render engines which can allow them to run arbitrary code. So, you know, +5 for good intentions, -100000000 for failing to understand the attack surface.

Going to the police around sexual harassment has a poor track record of going anywhere, even with witnesses. Most of the time it winds up around competing accusations. Evidence is often scarce, and with charismatic folks involved, people may not realize the extent they've been manipulated until later. Abusers often target people who are not in a position to speak up, where their career could be at risk. Conventions are also a giant issue - doing all of this hundreds of miles distant even further reduces the odds of success, and ratchets up the stress. And, of course, the stress of spending the next few years being literally forced to deal with your abuser by the legal system.

That's before you get into things like real cases where police gaslighted a rape victim into recanting, prosecuted them for reporting the rape, and only come around once they catch the rapist who kept the physical evidence of the rape exactly as reported. Or the public attacks against the credibility of people who report to police, have witnesses, photographic and video evidence and pursue a restraining order, exactly as people tell them to. Or people assume you're lying because you don't react the way they expect you to (hint: many rape victims do not weep or rage - mostly, they dissaociate, and come across as calm and a little cold, because on many levels, they're avoiding emotional connection to the events as a coping mechanism. But guess what behavior is extremely likely to make people doubt your accusation?).

So people wind up not reporting, and maybe convince themselves it was a one time thing, or maybe she played too big a role in it, and he's too important... then someone else mentions something. And someone else. And a fourth person. And it snowballs, and you wind up in a situation where none of the victims can make effective claims in court, but something is obviously wrong. Remaining silent means that others are going to go into interactions with this person unprepared. So, people say something. Eventually, enough people, with enough credibility, step forward. Some stuff that other members of the board have seen goes from odd to seriously concerning, so they step down. Some of them, like you, don't want to see action without a legal conviction, so they step down. who knows what the rest thinks, but good odds they just decide to give the org a fresh start.

Going to the police around sexual harassment has a poor track record of going anywhere, even with witnesses. Most of the time it winds up around competing accusations. Evidence is often scarce, and with charismatic folks involved, people may not realize the extent they've been manipulated until later. Abusers often target people who are not in a position to speak up, where their career could be at risk. Conventions are also a giant issue - doing all of this hundreds of miles distant even further reduces the odds of success, and ratchets up the stress. And, of course, the stress of spending the next few years being literally forced to deal with your abuser by the legal system.

That's before you get into things like real cases where police gaslighted a rape victim into recanting, prosecuted them for reporting the rape, and only come around once they catch the rapist who kept the physical evidence of the rape exactly as reported. Or the public attacks against the credibility of people who report to police, have witnesses, photographic and video evidence and pursue a restraining order, exactly as people tell them to.

So you wind up not reporting, and maybe convince yourself it was a one time thing, or maybe you played too big a role in it, and he's too important... then someone else mentions something. And someone else. And a fourth person. And it snowballs, and you wind up in a situation where none of you can make effective claims in court, but something is obviously wrong. Remaining silent means that others are going to go into interactions with this person unprepared. So, you say something.

With playlists, of course. I hate to overgeneralize, but most of the folks I know who still use players like this can't stand the Media Library approach that most modern players use - we already have an organizational system that makes it easy to find files, and may have .mp3 from back in the ID3v1 days with inaccurate or incomplete data. We may have a LOT of it. We may not want to spend hours fixing these files to make the Library work efficiently for us when we have a system that lets us build (and save!) custom playlists efficiently already.

In this case, you really can't. That's a definite tradeoff, but it's one I am okay making.

Everyone loves the Power Glove. It's so BAD.

3.5m - 5% for failed Pledges = 175k - 10% for Kickstarter and Credit Processor Fees = 350k - 20% for Taxes (this is income!) = 700k Total received budget ~= 2.28m Now, figure 30% of that is shipping (684k), 40% of it is manufacturing (912k). Left over: $684K Now, common wisdom is that hiring one guy at $60k a year costs you $100k a year total in physical plant, HR, Payroll, benefits, etc. While I doubt they had ALL of that, let's say they're five guys, so now they have $184k to absorb any unexpected expenses and such. So if you have to do thee site visits due to QC issues, or have a supplier disappear (not entirely unlikely, but one of the less well known issues), or have to hire two or three extra people to handle the volume you just weren't prepared for, that's gone, you don't have any flex left. And those are the more common issues - imagine you do two site visits and then have to pay to have someone else do your manufacturing at 50% more: because it turns out everyone was lowballing their quotes, and when you go back to the other companies they tell you that they can't do it at that price. Not excusing them, but people tend to go "How could they lose [LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY]" when the answer is "Most of what the campaign made was already earmarked to known costs - each pledge did not make them a lot of money, because what they were doing was expensive!" And they made the same scheduling and budgeting mistakes everyone makes.

After they were originally issued in the 30s and 40s, there was a fad where people would have their SSN tattooed on their body as the government emphasized the importance of remembering them. The semi-public nature of the SSN is kind of interesting. Originally, they were basically intended to track your contribution to Social Security - what would you do, fraudulently contribute to someone else's retirement? Thus far, I don't believe they've been reissued, but we're likely pretty close, since they're NOT just random number combinations. Now, it only took them a few years before things went... strangely, but not badly, but their continued flow into general life means that a system designed to be semi-public has now gotten tendrils everywhere, and protection on them is not as good as it should be.

Planes generally average around 500mph, and the average plane flight time between SF and LA is... roughly 57 minutes. You'd have to hit much higher speeds to not be survivable. You're just going to be spending the last 15 minutes slowing down gradually.

There's still plenty of room for improvement. Spacing out races and/or changing rules to prevent horses from competing in 'back to back' races would be more humane with very limited impact on the sport. Switching races to synthetic courses which have been shown to reduce the number of horses who need to be put down. Hell, switch to a team based model where you decide who's going to race 48 hours before the event, so there's some room for unexpected injuries and such to be healed.... oh, wait, gambling would take a big hit there, so that'll never happen.

I think people are getting hung up on some (admittedly bad) phrasing. The statement "Editor's note: I just got back from a busy weekend to see that a bunch of people are freaking out that we're "burying" this story, so here it is." isn't why they delayed the story, but why they're posting it now. That is, they were trying to gather information before the weekend, the weekend happened, they came back, and posted it without the additional info because they were seeing the freakout.

Most hate crime laws are based on racketeering charges - effectively a hate crime is one which targets one person as a means to target a larger group. Racketeering was used against criminals who attack one business to make others pay up protection money. When shooting someone who is gay/black/jewish/russian, because they're gay/black/jewish/russian, the message that gets communicated to the rest of the gay/black/jewish/russian community is 'You are not safe, we will kill you, unless you leave'. Generally speaking, most of the time, Hate Crime laws aren't applied, largely because you need to establish that the goal wasn't just to get the person, but because you wanted to have a chilling effect on people who are gay/black/jewish/russian as well. In the US, as well, hate crimes typically have to be Punishment Enhancing - that is, they can only attach to an existing crime, not on their own, and make the sentence worse.