Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.
Nearly thirty years after an international treaty banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons, the Antarctic ozone hole is finally starting to heal. By mid to late century, it should be fully recovered.
Scientists have been monitoring the Antarctic ozone hole, which opens every year in late August or early September and reaches its full size by October, since the 1980s. The size of the ozone hole varies widely from year to year, because the chemical reactions that destroy ozone are highly sensitive to changes in sunlight, temperature, and stratospheric cloud cover. For researchers interested in tracking ozone recovery, the challenge lies in pulling a faint signal out of a noisy background.
Empirical SCOTUS notes 5-4 Decisions and Equally Divided Votes Since 1946 "This Term was nothing if not unique. The Justices had to sort through a majority of the decisions with one Justice missing. With a Court of eight, the Justices could not possibly come to 5-4 decisions. The Supreme Court was officially set at the size of nine members in 1869 and Congress has not changed this number since that time. This Term in the Supreme Court there were zero 5-4 split decisions, including the cases where Justice Scalia voted. Some have speculated that this could be a unique occurrence; specifically a Term with nine Justices and no 5-4 votes."
Turns out it also happened in 1969, which the article doesn't note also had a vacant seat. Abe Fortas resigned May 14, 1969 and his replacement Harry Blackmun didn't start until June 9, 1970.
The New York Times writes When the Eight-Member Supreme Court Avoids Deadlocks, It Leans Left "The court issued liberal decisions in 56 percent of cases so far this term, according to a widely accepted standard developed by political scientists that considers signed decisions in argued cases. The share is only slightly lower than in the 2014-15 term, which had the highest share of liberal decisions since the court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s."
'This Is Not My Party': George Will Goes from GOP to Unaffiliated. "Conservative columnist George Will told PJM he has officially left the Republican Party and urged conservatives not to support presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump even if it leads to a Democratic victory in the 2016 presidential election."
Sadly, he's probably still not going to convince anyone to join him. They may figure it out on their own, but he's still not influencing anyone.
The Atlantic: Brexit FAQs: What Happens Next?. Some nice details like no the vote isn't not binding, but it looks like it's going to happen.
Then you get stupid things like this, Cornwall votes for Brexit then pleads to keep EU funding. “We will be insisting that Cornwall receives investment equal to that provided by the EU programme which has averaged £60m per year over the last ten years.”
Lots of articles today, too many of interest to link to. I read how it will be bad for everyone, scientists, young, bankers, automakers, David Cameron, the UK itself, etc. Here are a couple of others:
Mass shootings are so scary because they seem so unpredictable. They can happen anywhere and to anyone, and they are often carried out by men who have no criminal history that could have prevented them from buying a gun in the first place. But in fact, the majority of what could be called 'mass shootings' are all too predictable — and many victims are the women and children who find themselves entangled in the lives of violently abusive men.
More than half of mass shootings (defined as a shooting in which at least four people are killed with a gun) involve a current or former intimate partner or a family member. Most of the victims of those shootings, 81 percent, are women or children. And 70 percent of all mass shootings happen inside the home, not out in public. These shootings make the local news, but they are both so private and so sadly routine that they almost never get the massive national attention that rarer public shootings do."
So if we care about protecting victims, there’s already a lot of incentive to get guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. And indeed, there are already some laws in place to do this. Federal law prohibits the sale or possession of guns for anyone convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor, or anyone who is subject to a domestic violence restraining order. Some states have laws that allow or require law enforcement agents to seize any guns found at the scene of a domestic violence incident.
But not all states have the same laws, and federal law has significant limitations. Non-married partners who don’t live together are not protected, nor are family members other than children. It helps that federal law covers misdemeanors and restraining orders, since it’s difficult to get a felony conviction for domestic violence. But federal law only covers a full restraining order — and victims face the highest risk for violent retaliation from their abusers after an initial temporary restraining order is granted, and that comes before a full order.
South Korean scientists have created solar PV cells that are 1 micrometer thick, hundreds of times thinner than most PV and half again as thin as other kinds of thin-film PV. (The research is in a paper just published in Applied Physics Letters.)
With cells this thin, solar PV can be integrated in all sorts of "wearables" — clothes, glasses, hats, or backpacks with solar cells integrated, continuously feeding power to our portable electronics. More to the point, PV could be integrated into just about anything.
I love that Democrats are having sit-in on the House floor that's lasted almost 12 hours so far. Rep John Lewis (D-GA) I think started it, based on his old work from the civil rights movement in the 60s (read his comic books March books 1-3).
Paul Ryan had the CSPAN cameras turned off and Rep Scott Peters (D-CA) started streaming it it live over the Periscope app. An app that first came to some prominence so that people could live broadcast police abuse filmed by citizens (so that it wasn't just recorded to the phone which could be confiscated by the police). And C-SPAN quickly started broadcasting the periscope feed! I was annoyed that for most of the day the cable networks were ignoring it, instead talking about Trump the way they have every day for year.
Also I'm going to take some credit here. Peters was first broadcasting in portrait and about 10 mins after I tweeted him and commented on periscope to use landscape, he did. Also at one point another congressman sat down partially blocking the shot and stayed there for a few minutes. I commented to tell the guy to move and he did. I was watching all this on the C-SPAN periscope broadcast, and said it was fun telling the C-SPAN cameraman what to do having him do it!
To be clear, it's a stunt and a good one. The bills they're debating are just ok. Closing the gun show loophole is a good thing, they should also close the internet sale one. The #NoFlyNoBuy one is more problematic because the terrorist watch list is extra-judicial, meaning there's no transparency and no recourse if you're mistakingly put on it (and there are a few lists and as many as a million US citizens on it). It really shouldn't be used to keep people off planes but it could be useful if reformed. It's probably not suited to keep people from buying a gun, but if that law passed we would perhaps have a better shot at getting the list fixed. Maybe the NRA would lobby for this to protect the rights of their members who might find themselves on the list.
But still, even if a vote happens, these things are unlikely to pass, and the Dems know this. It's still a good stunt because they're putting the GOP on record as being against these simple provisions that most of the country is in favor of. These votes will be very useful during the upcoming election season. It's also nice to the see the Dems grow a pair and push for stuff they believe in. Representatives keep thanking Lewis for inspiring them, should have happened long ago. I'm hoping the Congressmen and women learn that it's better to be on the floor "debating" than sitting in cubicles making cold calls trying to raise money.
If you support this effort, call your representative, on the phone, an tell him or so.
The Atlantic has some posts about House Democrats Stage a Sit-in on the House Floor on Gun Control. Rep John Lewis (D-GA) organized a sit-in on the House floor to get common sense gun control passes. Speaker Ryan had CSPAN turn off their cameras. Seems like a story right?
I knew their first two points, that voters in smaller states have more sway than those in larger states and that given safe states it turns the election into a contest among just 10 or so swing states. I also knew that someone could win the electoral vote while losing the popular vote, as Bush did when he beat Gore in 2000. I didn't realize it was so skewed:
"A presidential candidate could be elected with as a little as 21.8% of the popular vote by getting just over 50% of the votes in DC and each of 39 small states. This is true even when everyone votes and there are only two candidates. In other words, a candidate could lose with 78.2% of the popular vote by getting just under 50% in small states and 100% in large states."
That's crazy. This is not how we should pick a president. Their last point I didn't know at all, that electors are not bound to vote based on their states vote.
While electors are generally extremely loyal to the party they align with, they don’t have to vote the way the people of their state instructed them to. In other words, just because a candidate won the popular vote in your state does not mean that your electors have to cast a vote for said candidate themselves. Electors that vote against the will of the people are called “faithless electors.”
As fairvote.org explains, “Since the founding of the Electoral College, there have been 157 faithless electors. 71 of these votes were changed because the original candidate died before the day on which the Electoral College cast its votes. Three of the votes were not cast at all as three electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The other 82 electoral votes were changed on the personal initiative of the elector.”
Twenty-nine states have legislation that penalizes faithless electors, though no faithless elector has ever been successfully prosecuted. 21 states do not mandate that an elector must vote for his or her party’s candidate.
While it doesn't come up often, it seems ridiculous that your vote isn't binding.
I found this while thinking about the Senate. I saw some article complain about not enough getting done when Obama had control of the both the House and the Senate and got annoyed because the person didn't realize or had forgotten that there was only a filibuster proof majority in the Senate for a couple of months and there was a lot of work to do already. And then I started to think of changing the filibuster rules because needing 60 votes to do anything is ridiculous. I thought that the better place for a conflict to be resolved was between Congress and the President rather than in one house. Perhaps we could tie changing the rules together. Make a filibuster rare (perhaps by returning to needing to actually stand and talk) and get rid of the electoral college and elect a president by popular vote. This way the Senate represents states, the House population by state and the president population nationwide. We still have to solve the gerrymandering problem in the House, but there are ways to do that.
Adam Feldman in Empirical SCOTUS wrote Odd Couples (and Trios). He tracks unusual combinations of justices in dissents this term. E.g.,
Now for one of the really intriguing combinations. In Bank Markazi v. Peterson, Justice Roberts wrote a dissenting opinion which Justice Sotomayor joined. This is a first for this combination that do not often align in their perspectives. In this case we do not see simultaneous dissents, but a single dissent where the two Justices agree in the rationale.
We see the favor repaid in Ocasio v. United States where Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Sotomayor dissented. Justice Thomas wrote one dissent, while Justice Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion that Chief Justice Roberts joined. For two Justices that so infrequently agree in dissent, these two cases present a possibility for a burgeoning voting relationship.
I wish he went into the rationales in the cases. Is there a legal principle that these two agree on? I'm also bothered by the use of "quite unique" but that's just me.
Kevin Drum yesterday on Donald Trump's terrible horrible, no good, very bad day, Donald Trump Is Broke "Today's big news is the overall implosion of the Donald Trump campaign. He's repeatedly melted down on the stump over the past month. He's trailing Hillary Clinton by a mile in the latest polls. He fired his campaign manager this morning. His ego apparently doesn't allow him to beg other people for money, so he's barely done any fundraising at all. The fight to stop him at the Republican convention now has the support of nearly 400 delegates. With the election only 20 weeks away, he still has virtually no staff. He's being hammered by negative advertising on TV and isn't doing anything to fight back. (So far he's run exactly zero ads.) Except for the personal meltdown stuff, all of this is basically a money problem. Trump doesn't have any."
As of 5/31, Trump had $1.3 million, Hillary had $40 million more. Also note, a lot of Trump's campaign expenses have gone to Trump organizations, Where is Donald Trump’s campaign money going? To Donald Trump.. In May, the campaign paid Trump businesses about $1 million. And note that much of the campaign's money was a loan from Trump, so he'll probably raise funds to pay himself back. Running for president as a business venture (more like a scam).
Yesterday the Supreme Court announced a decision in Utah v. Strieff. It's a case about whether to surpress evidence a cop found while illegally searching a suspect. Since 1961's Mapp v. Ohio, the Exclusionary rule applies to evidence obtained from illegal searches, it is excluded from trial because including it (a) isnt' fair to the defendant and (b) encourages police to perform future illegal searches. There are some exceptions (as we'll see a lot). Here are the facts of this case from the Syllabus:
Narcotics detective Douglas Fackrell conducted surveillance on a South Salt Lake City residence based on an anonymous tip about drug activity. The number of people he observed making brief visits to the house over the course of a week made him suspicious that the occupants were dealing drugs. After observing respondent Edward Strieff leave the residence, Officer Fackrell detained Strieff at a nearby parking lot, identifying himself and asking Strieff what he was doing at the house. He then requested Strieff’s identification and relayed the information to a police dispatcher, who informed him that Strieff had an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic violation. Officer Fackrell arrested Strieff, searched him, and found methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. Strieff moved to suppress the evidence, arguing that it was derived from an unlawful investigatory stop.
So everyone agrees that the detective could talk to Strieff on the street, but this was more than that, note the word "detained". The police can't "stop" or "detain" you without probable cause. Thomas' opinion says "Officer Fackrell should have asked Strieff whether he would speak with him, instead of demanding that Strieff do so." Thomas called this "a good-faith mistake". He went on to apply three factors in a decision process to see if the evidence needed to be excluded and concludes it doesn't.
It's not surprising that Alito, Roberts and Kennedy joined this opinion. Conservatives in general don't like the exclusionary rule. If there's evidence you commited a crime the law should use it to prosecute you. Apparently they don't agree with the idea of encouraging the police with incentives to not break the law. Sotomayor, Kagan and Ginsburg dissented. I don't know why Breyer joined the majority in this, in the past he's supported the exclusionary rule.
So both Kagan and Sotomayor argued against the majority's logic. The opinion and two dissents are short, 31 pages in all (including the Syllabus). Read those or Orin Kerr's excellent SCOTUSBlog post. But what is getting the post press is Sotomayor's "blistering dissent". This is referring to the last section, which is powerfully written (perhaps moreso after making it through Thomas' boring prose). Scalia would approve (though he clearly would have voted with the majority). Here is the last section of Sotomayor's dissent with the references turned into the best links I could find. The referenced cases are mostly Wikipedia pages, so you can find a summary about them.
Writing only for myself, and drawing on my professional experiences, I would add that unlawful “stops” have severe consequences much greater than the inconvenience suggested by the name. This Court has given officers an array of instruments to probe and examine you. When we condone officers’ use of these devices without adequate cause, we give them reason to target pedestrians in an arbitrary manner. We also risk treating members of our communities as second-class citizens.
Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more. This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact. Whren v. United States (1996). That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law, Terry, but it may factor in your ethnicity, United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, (1975), where you live, Adams v. Williams, (1972), what you were wearing, United States v. Sokolow, (1989), and how you behaved, Illinois v. Wardlow, (2000). The officer does not even need to know which law you might have broken so long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous. Devenpeck v. Alford, (2004); Heien v. North Carolina, (2014).
The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal. See Epp, Pulled Over. The officer may next ask for your “consent” to inspect your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline. See Florida v. Bostick, (1991). Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand “helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised.” Terry. If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then “frisk” you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may “‘feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’ ”.
The officer’s control over you does not end with the stop. If the officer chooses, he may handcuff you and take you to jail for doing nothing more than speeding, jaywalking, or “driving [your] pickup truck . . . with [your] 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter . . . without [your] seatbelt fastened.” Atwater v. Lago Vista, (2001). At the jail, he can fingerprint you, swab DNA from the inside of your mouth, and force you to “shower with a delousing agent” while you “lift [your] tongue, hold out [your] arms, turn around, and lift [your] genitals.” Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington; Maryland v. King, (2013). Even if you are innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest record and experience the “civil death” of discrimination by employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check. Chin, The New Civil Death, (2012); see J. Jacobs, The Eternal Criminal Record (2015); Young & Petersilia, Keeping Track, (2016). And, of course, if you fail to pay bail or appear for court, a judge will issue a warrant to render you “arrestable on sight” in the future. A. Goffman, On the Run (2014).
This case involves a suspicionless stop, one in which the officer initiated this chain of events without justification. As the Justice Department notes, supra, at 8, many innocent people are subjected to the humiliations of these unconstitutional searches. The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner. See M. Gottschalk, Caught 119–138 (2015). But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. See M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow 95–136 (2010). For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”— instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. See, e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963); T. Coates, Between the World and Me (2015).
By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. See L. Guinier & G. Torres, The Miner’s Canary 274–283 (2002). They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.
I don't really know what the answer is. We have a lot of guns in this country of all different types. AR-15s get a lot of press but handguns are used in far more crimes and have more restrictions on them than long guns because they're concealable. But here are some articles I found interesting recently.
There are lots of statistics you'll hear. Be sure to notice the difference between gun deaths and gun homicides, because suicide by gun is very common in America and for some reason doesn't get people all worked up. I think we need right to die laws. There was an older visualization that said More Americans killed by guns since 1968 than in all U.S. wars. That includes suicides, but they recently updated it and now point out, More Americans have died from guns since 2001 than in Korean and Vietnam wars and break out homicide, suicides, accidents, etc.
I liked this article by Jon Stokes, Why I Need an AR-15. He wrote a long Wired piece on the AR-15 after Newtown. He explains things for non-gun owners and points out that the AR-15 is used so frequently because it's the most popular gun in America, because it is easily customized to a lot of different purposes and is light and easy to use.
The AR-15 is less a model of rifle than it is an open-source, modular weapons platform that can be customized for a whole range of applications, from small pest control to taking out 500-pound feral hogs to urban combat. Everything about an individual AR-15 can be changed with aftermarket parts — the caliber of ammunition, recoil, range, weight, length, hold and grip, and on and on.
In a the pre-AR-15 era, if you wanted a gun for shooting little groundhogs, a gun for shooting giant feral hogs, and a gun for home defense, you’d buy three different guns in three different calibers and configurations. With the AR platform, a person with absolutely no gunsmithing expertise can buy one gun and a bunch of accessories, and optimize that gun for the application at hand.
Indeed, anyone who tells you that the AR-15 is bad for hunting and home defense has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, because by definition an AR is a gun that can be exquisitely adapted for those niches and many others.
If you’re serious about banning guns, you can talk about banning all semi-automatic guns, or about restricting guns to a list of approved models or actions. This is may not be politically realistic at the moment, but at least it’s consistent and rational. But talk of banning just the “AR-15” — as if that’s a specific model of gun that you can just up and ban — is technologically infeasible and ultimately counter-productive.
The 10 Newtown plaintiffs argue that the AR-15 is a weapon of war – its cousin, the M-16, was the rifle of choice in Vietnam — and therefore should never have been marketed to civilians. They say, in effect, that the availability of a high-velocity weapon capable of inflicting such rapid carnage constitutes such negligence.
“The novelty of the approach is that it doesn’t depend upon an argument that the manufacturer knows that a particular shooter is a high-risk buyer,” said Heidi Li Feldman, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, who has followed the Newtown litigation. “The novelty is that it substitutes the general public for a particular individual.”
Eighteen months after it was first filed, the lawsuit — naming the gun manufacturer, Remington; the wholesaler; and a local retailer — is still in the early stages. But the case has not yet been tossed out of court. Even some plaintiffs were startled when Judge Barbara N. Bellis of State Superior Court, who has yet to rule on a final effort to quash the case, set a trial date — two years from now — and ordered the defendants to disclose marketing materials and other internal documents.
See, this is the dirty secret that gun owners know. We know that, for the most part, non-gun owners don’t understand guns. We know that you don’t know how to deter these shootings. We know that non-gun owners will call for psych evals (the government can’t force people to go to the doctor to exercise a constitutional right), insurance (you can’t pass a law that alienates the poor from their constitutional rights), confiscation (who wants to be the first in line to confiscate 350 million weapons even if Congress did repeal the 2nd Amendment). We know that it is the things that cannot happen that will be the things gun control advocates will call for.
But there’s one thing that would put a dent in the number of mass shootings today and that’s restricting magazine sizes for the AR-15 and other semiautomatic rifles to 10 rounds. No more. Ten.
That requirement would have meant that the Orlando shooter would have had to carry 20 magazines on him and reload twenty times during his rampage to fire the 200+ rounds he fired. Instead he had several thirty round magazines and was able to afford himself both the time and space to carry out his murders. He was able to push people away from him with long bursts of gunfire and barely give his victims a chance to take that split second, when he was reloading, to leap on him and tear him apart.
I own an AR-15 and I am not ashamed of that. I am a Christian and I’m not ashamed of that. I have worked for the U.S. government overseas in Iraq and I’m not ashamed of that. I hunt and edited an entire book on the gun control debate and I’m not ashamed of that. But what I am ashamed of is the unwillingness on the part of so many gun owners to make this tiny concession that they know would have a dramatic impact on the outcomes of mass killings. What I am ashamed of is the press’s unwillingness to report that this is the change we need to make. What I am ashamed of is that gun rights advocates know that this change would cost lawful owners little and would deter the insane or fanatical.
Of course there are already plenty of large magazines out there and people have been making them on 3D printers for a few years now. I've seen a few of articles on how easy it is to buy a gun, of course it's legal so you'd expect it to be, but here are a couple saying perhaps it's too easy...
Buying an assault rifle is easy. You need not show formal identification, submit to a record check, experience any delay, provide a valid address or permit a record to be kept of your purchase. If you buy in the “shadow gun system” at a gun show, there are no requirements at all.
Opening even the most basic bank account is far more arduous. The process begins with a rigorous ID check. You must provide an address that will be checked out, as will the source of the funds deposited in your account. Depending on how risky you appear, there may be long delays, and the bank may insist on visiting your domicile. If you are not opening an account for an individual but for a small business, the process is far more involved. An elaborate regulatory system watches “the shadows” so you can’t store your money in a nonbank financial institution without being monitored.
I get that at a gun show it's people selling from individual to another and perhaps it's harder for them to know all the rules compared to a licensed dealer, but this shouldn't be hard to fix. A friend pointed out to me a couple of years ago that the argument about how would they do a check is invalid because they all quickly adopted to taking payments via Square. Isn't technology wonderful? And really I think it should be a service the gun show itself offers. If you want to buy, go to a centralized place where you're checked and given a wrist band and then individual dealers can just look for the band, just like bartenders at some clubs. Now I've never been to a gun show, for all I know this is what they do, but it didn't appear so in the above video.
But even if we add background checks or ban "assault rifles" (however you define them) or semi-automatics or extended clips, we have the problem that too many of these weapons are already out there. You need some kind of Gun buyback program and those have shown mixed success, but perhaps if it were national it would work better. Pro-gun people love to cite that Chicago has strict gun laws and high gun homicides, but they never mention the reason is that most of the guns used in homicides were bought just over the border in Indiana. There are probably about 5 million AR-15 type weapons owned by Americans now, a buy back would be expensive but doable.
Regardless if we're going to evaluate any of these ideas we need better research. As we learned a few mass shootings ago, the government doesn't keep nation-wide records on gun deaths (homicides or suicides). The media has started doing so, but the FBI or someone should be doing this. After we have some numbers we could starting doing some research. But the CDC is essentially based from researching gun deaths.
The story about how the CDC ban on gun research came about is really chilling. Pro-gun people often say that there should be research but the Center for Disease Control shouldn't do it is just an excuse. As pro-gun people point out, there's a big difference between gun homicides and gun violence, that a lot of our gun problem is due to suicides. The original study that led to the ban looked into some of that (though it found a 3x increase in both homicides and suicides in houses with guns). That scared the NRA and here we are. The CDC is a good place to do research, they do research on the health affects of cars and toys and other things, why not guns?
I don't really get why another agency (ATF or DHS) doesn't fund the research (though it seems that the ATF does gather trace data, they are not allowed to share it with anyone). The article suggests the CDC example has put off any other agency from funding the research in such a politically charged area. But the way you know it's just an excuse, is the people who say the CDC shouldn't do it, never suggest (or fund) someone else to do it.
Hemenway found that not only are self-defense gun uses rare -- people defended themselves with a gun in roughly 0.9 percent of crimes committed over this period -- but in many cases they don't lead to better outcomes for crime victims. "The likelihood of injury when there was a self-defense gun use (10.9%) was basically identical to the likelihood of injury when the victim took no action at all (11.0%)," Hemenway and co-author Sara J. Solnik found.
Looking at what happened after people took action to prevent a crime, Hemenway and Solnik found that people were far better off either running away, or calling the cops if possible, rather than attempting to stop a crime with a gun. "Running away and calling the police were associated with a reduced likelihood of injury after taking action; self-defense gun use was not," they write.
The use of guns were, however, were linked to better outcomes in certain circumstances. In cases of robbery and burglary, victims who didn't try to stop the crime lost property nearly 85 percent of the time. Victims who attacked the intruders or threatened them with a gun had a better outcome, losing property 39 percent of the time. But those are slightly worse odds than for victims who fought back with other weapons -- this latter group lost property 35 percent of the time.
There are a few big things we know about gun violence in America: The US has way more guns per capita than any other country. It has far more gun homicides per capita than other wealthy countries. States with more guns have more gun deaths. And people with guns in their homes are more likely to be killed or to kill themselves with guns.
But just as importantly, there’s a lot that researchers still don't know. There’s frustratingly little evidence on what policies work best to reduce gun violence. (Australia saw a drop in homicides and suicides after confiscating everyone’s guns in the 1990s, but that would likely never happen here.) Experts still don’t have a great sense of what impact stricter background checks have, or how the "informal" gun trade operates, or even how people use guns in crimes.
Vox explains This is the gun bill Senate Democrats spent 15 hours filibustering to bring to a vote. The Dems was a federal veto over purchases by anyone on the terrorist watch list (now or in the past 5 years). That seems a bit broad, I'd only like that if the watch list itself was more transparent (which it should be anyway). Republicans came up with a completely unworkable proposal, "To stop someone from buying a gun, the government has to prove in court that there’s "probable cause" the gun buyer will commit an act of terrorism, according to Sarah Trumble of Third Way. Under Cornyn’s proposal, the government would also only have 72 hours to file the paperwork to do so." As if that could ever happen. Sen Toomey (R-PA) has a third proposal, the FISA court has to approve a list of names from the government to block gun sales too. That does add judicial oversight, but is the FISA court going to investigate a list of hundreds of thousands of names to check each one?
I've seen a few friends post on Facebook about this and then the comments begin. Pro-gun people point out all the flaws in the arguments and never suggest any better solutions. Or they say a particular proposal won't solve the problem and a holistic approach is needed but don't offer ideas or even find fault with the party that blocks any research to gather data or evaluate possible ideas. So here's mine. We should roll out some sensible restrictions, nation wide and see where it gets us.
Allow the CDC or some government agency to gather statistics on gun sales, use, and crime and to fund research about that data.
Ban magazines larger than 10 rounds in long guns and hand guns, it's something
Close the gun show loophole; require background checks for all non-family purchases
Fund better investigations into so called Bad Apple Gun Dealers. Based on 1998 data about 90% of guns used in crimes can be traced to about 5% of dealers. Because the ATF can't share gun trace info it's impossible to get more recent data.
Repeal the Tiahrt Amendment to allow ATF gun trace data to be shared for research
Crack down on dealers that allow obvious straw purchases
Make the various terrorist watch lists more consistent and add some due process so non-terrorists can get themselves off it.
Figure out something to do to people on terrorist watch lists who try to buy a gun. That might be delay them, watch them, ban them, I'm not sure but something should happen in this circumstance and law enforcement should be able to figure out what.
Require proof of gun safety training before buying a gun. This varies by state today, enforce some federal standards and probably licensing. I haven't looked into details but some states require license to purchase and others to own and others to carry with various renewals required. I'm not sure of the details but I think it should regulated like drivers licenses are.
FYI, current gun laws are a bit confusing but wikipedia describes Gun law in the United States and Title II weapons. As near as I can tell fully-automatic weapons and parts to make a weapon be fully automatic (as well as other things like silencers, short-barreled shotguns and explosives) must be registered with the government, are taxed and can't be sold across state lines except by licensed dealers. Some states (NY and CA) have banned ownership of Title II weapons outright. Apparently the ATF has been known to abuse their power and harass otherwise law abiding gun owners on technicalities. The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 (FOPA) addressed the abuses and also banned the sale of machine guns made after 1986 to civilians. Seems to me angle to explore is adding some definition of "assault rifle" whether that's semi-automatic rifles, or AR-15 style weapons or some other definition to Title II coverage with a similar style of grandfathering.
Update: Legality of the AR-15 in other nations based on Wikipedia and here which has a nice table at the end. In general in the EU you must be over 18, pass a background check, have a valid reason and register all guns with state.
legal, classified as restricted, but only in home and during travel to/from range, background check, magazine limits, I think still registrations but might have been eliminated in 2012
Czech Republic
legal w/ clean criminal record, no history of mental illness, no DUI in past three years, passing exam
legal but tough since 2009, need reason, clean criminal background, psych exam, gun basics course, some magazine limitations, year waiting period, registration, police inspections
Hungary
legal with police permission, psych test, and club membership
Ireland
legal with license which police can deny
Italy
legal with license
Japan
basically illegal
Netherlands
legal with license for hunting or sport except felons, addicts, mentally ill, limit of 5, police inspect annually
New Zealand
Legal, magazine limit to 7 w/o military license
Norway
Legal, with license, course, exam, police can inspect storage, only one gun per calibur allowed
Poland
legal with license, criminal/medical/psych checks, exam
Russia
legal with license, magazine limit to 10, other limitations
South Africa
legal with license
South Korea
illegal, hunting and sport licenses but firearms stored at police station
Spain
legal, magazine limit to 4, calibur limits might mean AR15 is illegal?
Sweden
legal for competitive use, registration, transport limits, no carry
Switzerland
legal since everyone is in militia, ammunition limited, registration, transportation and carry restrictions
United Kingdom
basically illegal
United States
legal with background check, regulated in 6 states
The island experienced the highest temperatures ever recorded on June 9, when air temperature in Nuuk, the capital city, soared to 75 degrees. While that may seem like no sweat, the average high for this time of year between 1961 and 1990 was just 44 degrees, and even Greenland’s hottest month rarely broke 50.
All this hot air caused Greenland’s sea ice, which is the size of Texas, to begin thawing nearly six weeks before normal this year. The rapid melting of over 12 percent of the ice sheet was so unusual in April that Danish Meteorological Institute scientist Peter Langen said they “had to check that our models were still working properly.”
I had a conversation with an old friend, who differs with me politically but it's makes for an interesting conversation. He's equally bothered by both leading candidates. "Ones a clown and the other is an unethical crook". So we agree on the clown part and I asked about his rationale for the other. There were a few other points but one was about huge speaking fees and donations from foreign officials while she was in office. I knew a little about these accusations but not a lot, so I spent a fair amount of time today reading about the Clinton Foundation and Hillary's income. I'm not too bothered by it.
So until recently they didn't make much. He was in public service, $35K for AK governor in 1991 and she was a lawyer on a board or two making under $200K. Nice, but not the super rich. And they didn't make much while he was in the White House (and they racked up legal bills). But then she went into the Senate (an avg professional salary) and he wrote a book. Then he started the foundation and I've heard him talk about the impetus, that he could use his fame to connect the capable (wealthy but also with special skills) with the needy. By most accounts, that's a fairly new idea and it's been impactful. And in spite of the accusations, they seem to spending the money effectively, not on themselves. She's released all her tax returns and information for decades, that's pretty open.
And the thing that this article pointed out for me, sure, they got money from speaking fees and books, and while it seems exorbitant, they are extraordinary people, but they also didn't invest the money in specific companies or even industries. Their wealth is mostly in index funds and insurance policies. Hillary Clinton Net Worth 2016. They seem to have just two homes, one in Chapaqua worth under $2m and one in DC worth about $7m. While that's certainly very nice, it's what I'd expect of ex-presidents and far less than what I'd expect of someone using their reputation to live the high life (compare it to say Trump or even Romney).
To be sure, there are a few cases of donations to the Foundation that suspiciously match up to some policy stuff while she was Sec of State. Great, investigate them fully and see what comes up. But so far, it doesn't feel to me like a pattern of people using their public service roles to enrich their personal lives.
I'm less bothered by her speaking fees than I am by her big-money funded campaign, but given our current election system, that doesn't rise to the level of "unethical crook". Bernie might think so, and i think his stance is clearly more ethical on the matter (and Lessig's too). I am a little bothered by the idea of her taking in large speaking fees after being Sec of State knowing then that she was going to run for president (or at least consider doing so). But I don't think it changed her positions on things, everyone in 2008 already thought she was the candidate of big money.
The falsehoods in his remarks came so often and so quickly, it was enough to push professional fact-checkers into retirement. Trump said the Orlando shooter was ‘born in Afghan,’ for example, which is both untrue – the gunman was born in New York, not far from where Trump was born – and bizarre given that ‘Afghan’ is not a place.
Then again, for a presidential candidate who believes people born in Indiana are ‘Mexican,’ perhaps this wasn’t too surprising.
But this was just the tip of a mendacious iceberg. Trump lied about the number of refugees coming to the United States. He lied about the vetting process for refugees. He lied about NATO’s counter-terrorism efforts. He lied about Clinton’s approach to gun reforms. He lied about the Obama administration’s policy on intelligence gathering."
Apple's developer conference is this week and yesterday was their much anticipated Keynote. Unfortunately they announced no new hardware, so that was frustrating (I'm waiting for a next generation watch and laptop). They did announce lots of updates to all their software platforms. There are plenty of articles online so I don't need to repeat them, but I'll say a few things.
watchOS 3 seems to be a significant change to address many of the issues of a confusing UI and slowness. It's not clear what the battery life implications will be but I suspect the next watch hardware update will improve the battery life. Like with other hardware, they'll probably just make sure the longevity stays the same, power for all day usage and needing to recharge each night.
tvOS got a few updates but the big thing seems to be single signon, because activating each app via an onscreen keyboard seems to be such a pain.
OS X got renamed macOS and the update is about connecting to other apple devices better. You can automatically unlock your mac with your apple watch. There's a universal clipboard so you can cut and paste between devices. Apple Pay is enabled on the web and if you buy something on your mac in safari, you verify it by using TouchID on your iPhone. That's all stuff that's nice to have and will be slick if it all works smoothly. Siri also comes to the mac and got a lot of updates in things it knows about (files). As much as I love Quicksilver, I'm looking forward to trying Siri for many things like controling iTunes or looking things up. There also making some changes to files leveraging iCloud. Your desktop is shared among macs and iOS, that could be nice (and incentive to keep your desktop clean). More concerning is they'll have a way to automatically move unused files to iCloud to save space (and I guess do some cleanup). I assume this can be turned off.
One thing that surprised me was the applause for picture-in-picture video support not the mac, as if it hasn't had windows since the beginning. But the demo was cool, dragging a video out of a browser to it's own undecorated window.
iOS got more changes than the others. The lock screen and control center got updates to make them more useful, from what I understand this is to catchup to Android. Music, News and Maps got a redesign. Messages got a lot of new features, some of which look interesting (rich links) and others will make your conversations look more silly (more emojis, stickers, bubble effects). Siri is getting smarter and is being opened to third party apps (Messaging, VoIP, payments, ride booking, photo search, workouts). Photos is getting some AI smarts to recognize and group photos and apparently it's on the device to avoid privacy concerns.
In news after the keynote it seems macOS is finally getting a new modern file system APFS to replace HFS+.
Apple File System is a new, modern file system for iOS, OS X, tvOS and watchOS. It is optimized for Flash/SSD storage and features strong encryption, copy-on-write metadata, space sharing, cloning for files and directories, snapshots, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives, and improved file system fundamentals.
It will just be a preview in Sierra and probably released in the next version of things. Apparently it will just switch your system over to the new system, magically.
Someone took the screenplays of many sci-fi films and fed them to a neural network and generated a screenplay for a short film. Then they filmed it. Ars Technica writes Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense. I found it incoherent and unengaging. If this is state of the art, I'm not concerned about AIs taking over the world any time soon.
Dylan Matthews points out Thanks to Obama, the rich paid more in taxes in 2013 than they did in 1980 "President Obama has raised taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans so much that they actually paid more in 2013 than they did in 1980, before the Reagan and Bush tax cuts and the huge recent increase in inequality."
So what happened? Two things, mainly. First, Obama used the expiring Bush tax cuts as leverage to force Congress to accept higher tax rates for the rich. Couples with more than $450,000 in taxable income faced a top rate of 39.6 percent, not 35 percent, and the top capital gains rate went up from 15 percent to 20 percent; income taxes were back to where they were for the rich under Clinton.
Second, 2013 was the first year that many of the taxes in the Affordable Care Act took effect, including a 3.8 percent surtax on investment income (including capital gains) and a 0.9 percent increase in the Medicare payroll tax, only applying to income above $200,000 for individuals or $250,000 for couples. The expiration of the Social Security payroll tax holiday, in effect since 2011, also played a role, but a comparatively small one.
Sullivan was right that white conservatives in places like Indiana hate Ivy Leaguers and Black Lives Matter and the gay left and safe-spacers and feminists and all the other mocking, sneering, atheistic know-it-all types from cosmopolitan cities who scoff, as Obama famously did once, at their guns and their religion.
But they also hated all of those people eight years ago, 16 years ago, 30 years ago. What's new about the Year of Trump is that they have now also suddenly turned on their own party. Why?
Sullivan basically ignored this question. The closest he came to an explanation was a passage saying that "global economic forces" hurt blue-collar workers in particular, forcing them to compete with lots of other unskilled and basically fungible human beings around the world. Which made them, he guessed, pissed off.
This avalanche of verbose disgust on the part of conservative intellectuals toward the Trump voter, who until very recently was the Republican voter, tells us everything we need to know about what actually happened in 2016.
There never was any real connection between the George Wills, Andrew Sullivans and David Brookses and the gun-toting, Jesus-loving ex-middle-class voters they claimed to embrace. All those intellectuals ever did for Middle America was cook up a sales pitch designed to get them to vote for politicians who would instantly betray them to business interests eager to ship their jobs off to China and India. The most successful trick was linking the corporate mantra of profit without responsibility to the concept of individual liberty.
Into the heartland were sent wave after wave of politicians, each more strident and freedom-y than the last. They arrived draped in the flag, spewed patriotic bromides about God, guns and small-town values, and pledged to give the liberals hell and bring the pride back.
Then they went off to Washington and year after year did absolutely squat for their constituents. They were excellent at securing corporate tax holidays and tax cuts for the rich, but they almost never returned to voter country with jobs in hand. Instead, they brought an ever-increasing list of villains responsible for the lack of work: communists, bra-burning feminists, black "race hustlers," climate-change activists, Muslims, Hollywood, horned owls...
Starting today, it appears the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. We say ‘appears’ because officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the US Navy’s largest installation in the Mojave Desert. And the Navy won’t tell us much about what’s going on.
The FAA issued an advisory warning pilots on Saturday that global positioning systems (GPS) could be unreliable during six different days this month, primarily in the Southwestern United States. On June 7, 9, 21, 23, 28, and 30th the GPS interference testing will be taking place between 9:30am and 3:30pm Pacific time. But if you’re on the ground, you probably won’t notice interference."
On average (different locations and zooms) Apple labels more cities
On average they show the same number of roads, but Apple shows a few more in some cases and Google labels many more roads than Apple
They label similar numbers of Points of Interest, but prioritize different kinds. Google shows transit while Apple shows more landmarks, restaurants and shops. Both have separate transit maps.
In reality, slashing regulations, particularly regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, would be very counterproductive, as a 2015 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) report to Congress made clear. The OMB found that ten years’ worth of major Federal regulations provided annual benefits to the nation (in 2001 dollars) of between $216 billion and $812 billion, while the estimated annual costs were only between $57 billion and $85 billion.
Of that, EPA regulations delivered the majority of benefits ($132.5 to $652 billion) but only about half the costs ($31 to $37.5 billion).
Of course, lots of those benefits were things like reduced health care costs because the air got cleaner — and those benefits don’t show up in our primary measure of economic growth, GDP. Indeed, reducing sickness and death actually lowers GDP."
John Oliver and Samantha Bee have great shows, but they're only on once a week (which may be why they can do what they do). Seth Meyers might actually be the one continuing Jon Stewart's legacy.
In 2001 I saw the Will Smith movie Ali and liked it. More recently I liked 2013's The Trials of Muhammad Ali which focused more on his activism and legal battles than his boxing which I didn't know much about.
I had no idea he starred in his own biopic, The Greatest (1977) and will have to find it (it's not streamable on Netflix) even though the reviews aren't great. Also there's 2014's I Am Ali, a documentary based on family interviews and audio journals.
I cite Sarah Kliff often for her articles on the health care system. Her latest is: Unpaid, stressed, and confused: patients are the health care system's free labor "I write a lot about health care for my job here at Vox, and have spent the past seven years covering and explaining the American health care system. But there was something I didn't understand about American health care until this experience. It is the considerable burden our fragmented system puts on patients to coordinate their own care."
Her problems of doctors giving her unfillable written prescriptions and telling her to schedule an MRI are not at all my experience. My doctors usually send the prescription directly to my pharmacy and I get a phone call or text message when it's ready to pick up. In fact my problem is I get too many 9am phone calls from my pharmacy, asking me about an out-of-date prescription and do I want to fill it and I can't seem to make them stop. Also, my doctors are good about scheduling tests for me. But coordinating among specialists is problem; you get handed off to another and never know when to go back to the first and then you get conflicting diagnoses. Then there's all the billing, from the insurance company, the doctor and the facility. The numbers often don't match up and the various billing codes are indecipherable. Some I can pay online, some I can't, even for doctors that are down the hall from each other. And of course, when you don't know what's wrong and they ask if you want a test that may help, you don't find out until two months after you have the test that it's $800 out of your pocket. Ugh.
Stumbled across this 2000 Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling and found it interesting. They compare and talk about the state of C, C++ and Java at the time. I found the perspective of reading it 16 years in the future interesting.
The Day the Internet Became “internet”. Apparently today several style guides are switching to not capitalize Internet. I think this is absurd. I fall into this camp:
Most of those reasons come down to this: In the 1970s, the word “internet” was derived from the word “inter-network,” which was defined as a set of smaller networks that exchanged data using one set of rules. So, in the eyes of the general population (or at least of the engineers who used inter-networks) there were multiple internets, and they were always lowercase. When people started using dial-up internet services, however, the need to disambiguate wedged a the before the word and encouraged capitalizing
And I don't get the counter argument:
“There’s a huge generational divide on this issue,” she said. “Making it have a proper name, made sense. It was the Thing, the Internet. Now, for people who are born after 1990, it’s where you live, and where you exist and any notion of it being a proper name seems very strange.”
I live and exist in Massachusetts not massachusetts.
One reason for this passionate response, according to McCulloch, is that the internet has made casual, informal writing more visible and available to the average person. Whereas written material produced by older generations may have been largely formal — a work memo, or a college paper — texting and chatting is an everyday exercise for most these days. And in participating in this way, people quickly attach a sense of identity to the style of writing they use.
“Even if they’re not consciously aware, people might be subconsciously aware of the trajectories for linguistic change, like which forms seem new, which forms seem associated with young people,” McCulloch said. “If you want to indicate you are a young person and you are with it, then you’re going to use the forms that are associated with people who are more technologically savvy. So if you want to show that you’re someone who really gets the internet I think you’re more likely to use lowercase internet.”
I've been writing informally on the Internet for 35 years. As far as I can tell from "young people texting", no words should ever be capitalized and most are spelled differently than in the dictionary (vowels seem optional, like in Hebrew).
There's one Internet, it's a proper noun. It's not like phonograph or electricity (other counter examples I've seen recently of words that were originally capitalized).
And as far as this comment on the article: "Whenever I see people write it as ‘Internet’ or ‘Inter-net’ or the ‘Web’ or the ancient ‘World Wide Web’ it just made me think that person was old and didn’t really understand how the internet worked." Hah! (or should I say LOL, I'm fine with that), the odds are I understand how the Internet works better than you. "For my peers and I the internet is just a part of life, there was never really a time before it. You use it all the time to help you find a restaurant, watch movies or it teaches you how to tie a tie. You’re part of the internet all the time because you have a social media account and everything you post on Instagram or Twitter is from you." The same can be said for the Earth and we capitalize that when we're not referring to dirt.
The first thing that GW150914 can teach us is how closely nature follows Einstein’s prescriptions for colliding black holes. Researchers from the LIGO team and the Virgo team have performed a series of tests to see if any violations of general relativity might be lurking in the data of GW150914 [3]. They first determined the theoretical waveform, or ‘template,’ from general relativity simulations that best fit the measured signal (see Fig. 1). Their main finding is that the residual signal—obtained by subtracting this template from the data—is consistent with noise. This is, in a sense, the ‘everything’ test, as the template folds in all that general relativity predicts about the merger: the decay of the last few orbits of the two black holes, their violent collision and astonishingly rapid relaxation to a quiescent rotating black hole, the propagation of gravitational waves through the cosmos, and finally the transformation of these waves into a chirp in the LIGO detectors. Given the large signal-to-noise ratio of 24, the close agreement between the template and the data puts limits on alternative models. Specifically, the predictions of these models can only disagree with the general relativity prediction for GW150914 by, at most, 4%."
ThinkProgress reports NRA Tells Parents To Keep Guns In Kids’ Rooms For Safety "During a seminar on ‘home defense concepts’ at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Louisville, an instructor encouraged gun owners to store firearms in their children’s bedrooms." The rationale was the fear of violent home invasions.
Researchers have found that only 39 percent of gun-owning families keep their firearms locked, unloaded, and separate from ammunition, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. For those that do not, the consequences can be terrible.
Everytown for Gun Safety reports that the U.S. has one of the highest rates of unintentional child gun deaths in the world. At least 265 people were accidentally shot by kids in 2015, and so far in 2016, there have been at least 96 accidental shootings by children. In one week in April, four toddlers accidentally shot and killed themselves, according to a New York Times report.
During the three days of the NRA convention, a three-year-old girl accidentally shot and killed a seven-year-old girl in Beverly, Illinois, less than 300 miles from where the leaders of the country’s most powerful gun lobby gathered to discuss their opposition to any type of gun safety legislation. And just over 700 miles away in LaPlace, Louisiana, a five-year old girl accidentally killed herself while playing with a gun in her home.
Meanwhile, the threat of a violent home invader is far less likely than Pincus claims. Not only is the national rate of household burglary decreasing steadily, but so is the rate of violent crime during a home invasion. Less than one percent of homicides in the U.S. occur during a home invasion, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report from 2010, the most recent year the issue was studied. The roughly 100 homicides per year that occur during household burglaries is far dwarfed by the number of shootings by kids who accidentally get their hands on firearms (not to mention the staggering number of unintentional shootings committed by adults every year).
“If the NRA is really are a gun safety organization, they should be lobbying for stronger laws that will protect children,” Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told ThinkProgress. “Instead, they are trying to promote and sell guns in a way that actually puts them in danger.”
The article is long, but make it to the end, the last line is a kicker.
SOFTWARE MAKERS LIKE Microsoft put a lot of effort into ensuring that the operating system and application updates they deliver to your system are secure, so that hackers can’t hijack updates to get into your computer.
But it turns out that PC hardware makers are not so careful. An investigation conducted by Duo Security into the software updaters of five of the most popular PC manufacturers—HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, and Asus—found that all had serious security problems that would allow attackers to hijack the update process and install malicious code on victim machines.
Researchers at Duo Security’s Duo Labs found that all five vendors, known as OEMs or Original Equipment Manufacturers, shipped computers with pre-installed updaters that had at least one high-risk vulnerability that would give an attacker remote-code execution abilities—the ability to remotely run whatever malicious code they want on a system—and gain complete control of the system. The skill required to exploit the vulnerabilities was minimal, the researchers said in a report they’re releasing (.pdf) about their findings."
It's amazing to me that vendors are still getting this so wrong when security has been a big issue on PCs for so long and Microsoft is so public about securing Windows. To be sending updates over unencrypted channels shows complete incompetence.
