graedus

Well, now I'm curious. I hope some attentive lawyers are working on a "revision log".

I think it's worth keeping the question narrow in order to keep discussion focused on the topic at hand. Other countries have different sets of laws around elected officials, lobbying, campaign contributions and so on that probably give rise to somewhat different behavior for different reasons. I don't think that focus implies that the US has the least-trustworthy politicians.

Looks really nice. Am I blind or is there no volume control? Is there a reason you chose to exclude it?

For those that didn't click through, the (very entertaining) CNBC interview can be found here:

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000263252

She retained the money.

And then I called the wire transfer company and placed a stop on the payment.

It's unclear to me how this works. At first, it seems as though she and Anthony pursued this action independently, which would seem quite risky: risk of the apparently-fraudulent stop payment not being processed in time, or at all, resulting in the loss of 30k; risk of legal action from the seller, however seemingly ridiculous and unlikely, is scary. Later it sounds like maybe this was done with the FBI's blessing (point 5 under "Here's what to do").

Interesting move. Presumably, it's preferable to the NSA to let everyone know MYSTIC was implemented in Iraq, rather than deal with the (further) increased mistrust that might arise from suspicions that it was used on e.g. some European ally.

Iraq and Afghanistan were my top guesses.

Open in new incognito window works for me.

You see that the text is not highlightable. In Chrome, for example, you might right click that text and select "Inspect element". You can see that while you clicked on a paragraph of copy, the element that gets inspected is the #comments div, which should live below content of the article. Under the "Styles" tab of the right pane of the developer tools, you can modify existing css rules or enter new ones under element.style or #comments if you like. Adding a "clear: both" rule fixes the issue.

shift + mousewheel works for me in chrome (windows 7 and osx)

> just can't seem to get how it got so popular so quickly

The #1 most subscribed-to youtuber[0] (PewDiePie) did a video on this game right around the time its popularity skyrocketed.

[0] http://www.statsheep.com/pewdiepie

Not sure, but since at least 2011 :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_NBC_merger

(thanks for the link, interesting reading)

Because it's considered "vertical integration" and therefore not subject to anti-trust laws. Comcast merging with Time Warner would be considered horizontal; Comcast merging with NBCU was considered vertical and therefore allowed to go forward in January 2011.

I'm currently reading Susan Crawford's book Captive Audience, which is a detailed history of this exact topic. Recommended. Here's a talk she gave at Harvard summarizing the story and issues at stake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R4xhwy-1oI

It depends upon how you approach the game. If you try to navigate the game morally, treating all other players as humans, potential friends who you don't want to kill, you might find your experience frustrating. Personally, I found embracing a sort of wild west, shoot first, ask questions later approach was the most fun way to play, since indeed there is little reason to trust other players. Since DayZ was originally built as a mod for an FPS military simulator, it makes at least as much sense to view it primarily as a first person shooter as it does to view it as a social MMO experience.

OTOH, this article[0] about a player whose primary mission in the game is to act as a heavily armed, on-call doctor helping injured players in the field is what got me interested in the first place, so, different strokes.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/the-healing-touch-dr-w...

Yeah, I looked into it[0]:

Optimal resolution:

3840 x 2160 at 60 Hz (DP1.2*)

3840 x 2160 at 30Hz HDMI

Hmm, I think I'll stick with my $270 144hz 1080p 24" for a few more years.

[0] http://accessories.ap.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=hk&c... (tech specs tab)

Self-serving? Am I or anyone I know on the board of a corporation making morally reprehensible decisions? (Hint: no)

My point about shared/abstracted responsibility wasn't meant to defend or absolve anyone personally, but if you ever ask yourself how [CEO or board member of your favorite villainous corporation] sleeps at night, that was an attempt to explain it in broad terms. If responsibility is seen as shared, humans seem to have an increased psychological ability to internally deflect blame from themselves, in addition to the perception in some cases that they personally will not be punished or fined, rather the abstract corporation will. This in turn reduces the disincentive for behavior that they might not otherwise engage in.

If you'd prefer to believe instead that the problem is that people are running said corporations are simply evil to the core, feel free, but what do you plan to do about that? I tend to think any attempt at a solution should start with reducing the effect of corporate money on legislation and other areas of politics.

Well, that's the thing with corporations. They might be run by people who otherwise have a moral compass, but a corporation's responsibility is abstracted and shared such that in many cases no one person feels a great amount of guilt for actions taken by the corporation. Moral qualms are often suppressed in the pursuit of increasing profits.

Yeah, the number one autocomplete for 'nsa' in the nytimes search box is 'nsa israel', which is funny because they still haven't published anything on it.

> If that day comes, I'll might celebrate, because YouTube comments are mostly worthless, full of sexism, racism, insults, and sheer idiocy. I rarely come across a YouTube comment that imparted useful information.

One could argue two ways here. On one hand I think it's actually interesting and instructive to read comments from anonymous sources - what people "really" think, without the filter of being tied to their real identity. On the other hand, there are countless examples of people proudly posting/tweeting/etc horribly sexist, racist, insulting, and idiotic things under their real names along with a profile picture of themselves, so it's not so clear that removing anonymity will transform the comments section into a particularly erudite and informative place.

If nothing else, it's intimidating because if they can detain you under a terrorism law for doing journalism, it stands to reason that they can bend or abuse some other over-broad law to actually charge/imprison you depending on the interrogation. Also, you get to hand over every piece of electronics you're carrying for an indefinite period of time. If and when you get any of them back, you might as well assume they're bugged or otherwise compromised, so they're essentially useless unless you want to try your hand at finding any backdoors that might be there. Fun.

Interesting, that would be a different type of capture - partial capture, you could call it - and both potentially more insidious and far more difficult to prove. One: to the public the DEA still appears to be doing its job (and in a sense, it is), whereas the SEC often appears totally ineffectual in the face of massive and obvious fraud. Two: it would be far more difficult to trace any murky connections between the financiers of drug operations (who are presumably carefully laundering their money) and DEA officials, whereas the SEC regularly openly hires wall street execs and lawyers and vice versa, so the potential for conflicts of interest is obvious.

I wouldn't be too surprised if this was happening at some level in the DEA, but is there any information pointing to it or is it pure conjecture?

I think regulation of pharmaceutical industry falls primarily under the purview of the FDA, not the DEA.

I don't think the DEA is at nearly as much risk of being captured by those they're meant to regulate compared to the SEC. Power and money are extremely concentrated on wall street, and there is a well-documented revolving door between wall street and the SEC that I don't think exists between drug dealers and DEA officials. [0]

Totally agree with the rest of your posts.

[0] http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/sec-revolving-door.html

> So now the DEA is using it to bust drug dealers. Why isn't the SEC using it to bust criminals on Wall St.?

Because the SEC is captured. [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Similarly: my favorite one is that you're an order of magnitude more likely to get struck and killed by lightning than win the lottery.

Chris Hayes basically wrote this book already - Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

> Your points are well-taken, but in a democracy it's a hard argument to make to say: "people don't really think what they think they think because of the media."

It's not that hard an argument -- there have been probably hundreds of studies on the influence of media on people's opinions and resulting actions. Why do you think advertising is a nearly half-trillion dollar industry worldwide? It's a significant chunk of GDP in the US and UK, for example, and not without reason: advertising through various media consistently makes a measurable impact on the buying patterns of consumers, and it's not exactly a huge leap to apply this to politics[0].

That point aside, I appreciate the insight, and I think you're on the right track as far as thinking about how to make the issues more concrete to people in a personal way.

The other, perhaps over-broad human nature question is how to get people care about this shit even if it truly only affects "others" - people of other countries, other social classes, other races and other religions. There are middle-aged, upper class voting people, white ones even, who care deeply that their government detains and tortures mulsim men in secret and not-so-secret prisons without trial, who care if activists are targeted for intimidation or treated similarly to terrorists, who can look at history and see that pervasive surveillance without meaningful oversight is always, always abused at some point and who aren't so scared of terrorism that they vote all their own rights away in order to feel safe. That is a much harder battle.

[0] http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market...

I won't deny many such examples exist, but you can't deny that the MSM is nevertheless an influence on large swaths of Americans. Even those that are not so gullible as to accept what they hear on the news as fact unquestioningly, may be influenced more subtly by the range of opinions presented and how they are portrayed.

So maybe they invite three guests on to discuss a topic like privacy: one a DoD official, one from a conservative think tank and a centrist writer. Suddenly the range of "acceptable" viewpoints is conveniently narrowed and the remainder is implied to be "fringe".

Or maybe they massively inflate the actual threat of things like terrorist attacks (because fear and xenophobia get ratings too) and give it a disproportionate amount of coverage. Now everyone who watches or even flicks by that channel is maybe more likely to talk about it at the water cooler or whatever.

This can affect the broader culture, which can in turn influence people who don't even watch the news on TV*

So how do we get people to place a higher value on, say, their liberties and human rights instead of fear of the spectre of terrorism? Is it possible? Can we get people to understand and care about relevant historical examples?

* Not to imply this is the case with your Mom!

> Neither party cares about the issue because the people don't care

And why don't the people care? Corporate-owned media has a huge amount of influence on what people care about. But in the never ending search for ever increasing profits that is built into their structure by law, they, like the major political parties are "just giving people what they want" too by chasing ratings in order to gain larger market share and increase advertising revenue. So both intertwined systems, the political system and the mainstream media, are working fine, right?

The PRISM program, which requires cooperation from service providers, is just one of the methods they use to collect user data. "Upstream" collection (beam splitters on fiber, etc) is separate and distinct from this, and yields a different set of data.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slide...

Really great talk, thanks for the link.