But I'm still not sure how we make them work at scale.

As a result, Big Tech is big. So big that it can't possibly examine all the communications and transactions on its platforms.

Tech has historically been tilted towards erring on the side of more speech over more censorship, partly out of the ideology that free speech is a good in and of itself, imperfect but better than the alternative, and partly because policing speech at (Big Tech's) scale is a technical and logistical impossibility, and so any system to separate good speech from bad speech (even assuming some clear division between them) will either let a lot of bad stuff through, or stop a lot of good stuff (or, realistically, both).

There's a folk-tale that holds that pornographers are prolific early technology adopters, first to use 8mm film, new printing techniques, polaroids, VCRs, and the internet. The reality is that mastering each of these technologies cost something in terms of time and money, and the people whose communications were easy and cheap based on the old technologies had no reason to expend the effort to master the new ones. But people whose communications were expensive -- whose literature was seized in the mail, whose sales channels were subject to raids and shut-down, whose practitioners could be sued or jailed -- were already paying a high price to communicate.

If Fox News gave the directive to its hosts to suggest that the president had already made the country great again in the ways that matter, and that an appreciative nation would be happy to allow him to return to private life and let Mike Pence take over the duties, most of its audience would nod willingly.

outlets like the Drudge Report, Fox News, Breitbart and Alex Jones kept culturally conservative stewing in a distraction soup of resentments and conspiracies.

Moreover, appeals to “the law of the land,” which Dias made repeatedly, are somewhat undercut by the fact that one country’s residents can engage in digital activities across borders, in lands with different laws; it’s hard not to feel that actors like Dias use the authorities as a shield for impropriety.

Through his companies, Dias rents out server space in Las Vegas, New Jersey, and Luxembourg—the last of which, according to BuyVM’s site, offers especially “strong privacy and freedom of speech laws.” When I contacted Dias to ask him about his involvement with the Daily Stormer, he replied at some length. “I try my very best to take the most neutral stance when it comes to things like this,” he wrote. “I’d prefer they weren’t hosted here, but minus some people trying to sling bad press at me, they’ve broken no laws I’m aware of.”

When I asked the company’s representatives for comment about their genocidal guests, they replied curtly. “While GKG does NOT endorse the beliefs or content on the site, the registrant has not broken any laws or violated our terms of service,” Michael Mahoney, of the company’s abuse team, told me.

The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this episode.

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

As I argued with political scientist Spencer Piston in The Nation last year, the American public dislikes the wealthy and is incredibly supportive of policies to tax the one percent.

Democrats can safely advocate for taxes on the rich without many electoral consequences: less than two percent of Clinton’s voters in 2016 made more than $250,0000 a year, according to my analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Studies.

But Clinton made a major tactical error as president. By leaving the Republican party a budget surplus when he left office in 2000, Clinton set the stage for President George W. Bush’s tax cuts. Republicans chose to spend down that deficit on tax cuts, rather than funding government services. In turn, Clinton gained very little in terms of policy achievements (a recent collection of his biggest accomplishments included a desert protection act — important, sure, but impossible to compare to Obama’s achievements).

This is one of Trump’s most underappreciated political achievements of the year: consolidation of power over a party to which he had scant personal or institutional ties. And all signs are that if Republicans win in 2018, slavish loyalty to Trump will only grow more ingrained, especially because Trump himself makes no secret that loyalty to him is the key to access, and access is the key to policy influence.

Implicit in coverage of Trump is the idea that he’s upended the rules of American politics, succeeding with strategies that would have failed (or disgraced) previous officeholders—that he’s another “Teflon president,” impervious to political opponents. But this doesn’t fit the reality of the situation. Donald Trump was an unpopular figure who won the White House by the skin of his teeth, becoming president despite losing the majority of voters by winning just enough votes in the right places. And in the first year of his presidency, he’s done almost nothing to persuade skeptical Americans that he is worthy of their support. He’s committed himself to divisive rhetoric and action, and seems oblivious to the massive backlash against his administration as a result.

The president’s low standing has exerted a downward pull on the rest of the Republican Party and its legislative agenda.

There’s really no mystery about Trump. He’s exactly what he seems to be. The only reason we keep regurgitating stories like this one is because we can’t collectively believe it.

Today’s proclamations about the end of facts could reflect some wishful thinking, too. They let us off the hook for failing to arrive at common ground and say it’s not our fault when people think there really is a war on Christmas or a plague of voter fraud. In this twisted pipe-dream vision of democracy, we needn’t bother with the hard and heavy work of changing people’s minds, since disagreement is a product of our very nature or an unpleasant but irresolvable feature of our age.

Now the study of the flyer suggested this effect would hold even when the thing you’ve heard before has been explicitly negated. Imagine a debunking like one shown on the CDC flyer: The flu shot doesn’t cause the flu. Over half an hour, Skurnik’s study argued, the word doesn’t fades away, while the rest of the message sounded ever more familiar—and thus more true.

The “Don’t Litter” message seemed to backfire and make the garbage problem worse: Half the people who received that flyer tossed it on the ground, as compared with just one-quarter of the people who’d received the other messages.

The show’s creators aimed to skewer and rebut the attitudes of its central character, the bigot Archie Bunker. But when scientists surveyed high school students in a Midwest town, they found that the most prejudiced teenagers in the group were the ones most likely to be watching Archie every week. “The program is more likely reinforcing prejudice and racism than combating it,” the researchers concluded.

Arriving when it did, in the middle of the post-fact panic, their handbook satisfied a pressing need. Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, called it “a treasure trove for defenders of reason.” The liberal website Daily Kos said it was a “must read and a must keep reference.” Its text would be translated into 11 languages, including Indonesian and Icelandic. .slate-paragraph a, .slate-paragraph a:visited { border-bottom: 2px solid #28b044; } @media screen and (min-width: 1024px) { .slate-paragraph a:active, .slate-paragraph a:hover, .slate-paragraph a:focus { border-color: transparent; color: #28b044; } } .slate-paragraph--drop-cap:first-letter { color: #28b044; } .slate-paragraph--tombstone:after { border-color: #28b044; } “The existence of backfire effects” have “emerged more and more over time,” Lewandowksy told Vox in 2014. “If you tell people one thing, they’ll believe the opposite. That finding seems to be pretty strong.”

For students who were politically conservative, the correction didn’t work the way it should have; instead of making them more suspicious of the idea that Saddam Hussein had been hiding WMDs, it doubled their belief in it.

From the start, the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton by more than 12 points, he couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. He was baffled when the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer whom Trump barely knew, offered him an infusion of $5 million. When Mercer and his daughter Rebekah presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so fucked up.”

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.” Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.

Who knows why Bannon would say those things to a reporter?

To the extent that Trump fits the criteria of someone with NPD, hisTweet storms yesterday could be the kind of lashing out that happens when he feels threatened.

When the history of the end of the republic is written, it may be fairly said that a hostile foreign power helped elect an authoritarian president, and the American people allowed him to stay, only to have the riches of the nation stolen from them.

On Tuesday, the president promised to announce “awards” next week for the news outlets he deems to be the most untruthful, noting that he would not include Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in his assessment. This is an attack by a sitting president on the First Amendment. The people may not like it, but they’re not about to go out into the streets over it.

Publications with original ideas (The Outline, Slate) or that speak to niche audiences (Rookie, The Root) or that aspire to run news stories other outlets won't (The Intercept, Splinter) or news that doesn't come cheaply reported (ProPublica) or news that rarely exists anymore (local news outlets; alt-weeklies). You don't have to subscribe. You don't have to pay money. And you don't even have to love everything these places do. But if you want them to keep existing, let alone keep acting as an independent voice that isn't a machine built just to write things to get you (or your knuckledragging third-cousin) to click on or share on Facebook?  You'll bookmark them. You'll use their URLs. You'll go through the front door. 

Before Facebook came along and screwed everything up for everyone, people entered URLs into browser bars. They used bookmarks. Maybe even RSS readers. 

By going to websites as a deliberate reader,

Instead of reading stories that get to you because they're popular, or just happen to be in your feed at that moment, you'll read stories that get to you because you chose to go to them. Sounds simple, and insignificant, and almost too easy, right?

But that only maintains an inadequate status quo. And observers are warming to the idea of more drastic action. “In my book, I walk up to the line of calling for the breakup of these companies and kind of balked,” says Franklin Foer. “I have come along in my own thinking even since publication.”

But policymakers need to address the challenges of regulatory enforcement. Neutrality depends on seeing and understanding an algorithm that’s often invisible, and it can be difficult to establish a causal connection of bias.

As gatekeepers with the power to highlight or suppress content, Facebook, Google, or Amazon should not have the power to pick and choose what gets attention and what doesn’t. Any lawful information or commerce should be able to reach those who want a look.

In the 2001 AOL-Time Warner merger, the FCC forced AOL’s market-leading Instant Messenger (AIM) to be compatible with chats from rivals.

Portability would break one of the most powerful dynamics cementing Big Tech dominance: the network effect. People want to use the social media site their friends use, forcing startups to swim against a huge tide.

Mark Zuckerberg famously said in 2011 that privacy is no longer a social norm.

Data is the mother’s milk of Big Tech. Nearly all revenue is derived from it, mostly from delivering valuable targeting information to advertisers.

Government can solve this information chasm, but millions in lobbying dollars help shield Big Tech from scrutiny. The Obama administration was captured by Google; his Federal Trade Commission famously declined to sue them in 2013 over favoring properties in search and mobile apps, defying staff recommendations. Part of the staff report got inadvertently leaked to The Wall Street Journal, but the FTC has rejected calls to release the full investigation.

Whenever anyone chooses to dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theorists, accusations fly; the internet screams that you've aided and abetted George Bush. I disagree. To me, the 9/11 Truth movement is, itself, a classic example of the pathology of George Bush's America. Bush has presided over a country that has become hopelessly divided into insoluble, paranoid tribes, one of which happens to be Bush's own government. All of these tribes have things in common; they're insular movements that construct their own reality by cherry-picking the evidence they like from the vast information marketplace, violently disbelieve in the humanity of those outside their ranks, and lavishly praise their own movement mediocrities as great thinkers and achievers. There are as many Thomas Paines in the 9/11 Truth movement as there are Isaac Newtons among the Intelligent Design crowd.

I disagree. I find value in reader comments that can’t be adequately reproduced elsewhere. The argument that the conversation has migrated to Facebook and Twitter is flawed. Those are good places for discussion, but they are no substitute for having discussion take place where the story itself lives. I’m convinced that many smart readers with something to contribute will not follow a story onto social media to talk about it. News organizations should fix online comments rather than ditch them. They need fixing, for sure. Too often, they are a place where trolls congregate, ready to offer their mean-spirited opinions. Too often, comments are racist, misogynistic, abusive and even libelous. They can also hurt newsgathering, sometimes criticizing reporters’ sources and making them more reluctant to talk to reporters next time.

On NPR this morning, “Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep asked Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake if he shares Clinton’s view on immigration. According to Trump, Inskeep said, his opponent favors “open borders” and “amnesty.”This is an example of a statement that’s technically accurate, but entirely misleading. And dangerous. Yes, Trump has said, time and again, that Clinton wants “open borders” and “amnesty.” It’s also true that this claim exists only the realm of fantasy. Indeed, in an interview — just yesterday — NPR’s Mara Liasson told Inskeep those claims were false.Journalists, I believe, are beholden to the truth. If they are unwilling to pay deference to the authority of the truth, even when that deference conflicts with the profession’s other guiding principles, there isn’t much point in being a journalist.Again, I understand why reporters respond to criticisms in partisan fashion. It’s natural. Indeed, I was sympathetic to Business Insider’s Josh Barro when he quipped on Twitter that Clinton supporters are among the whiniest supporters.But in this case, vocal complaints by Clinton supporters are not empty. They are based on something. They are based on demonstrable instances of journalistic malfeasance.

I recently had lunch with a friend and former co-worker who is a child and family therapist for a local HMO. She recounted stories of immigrant children she is currently working with who are American citizens but whose anxiety about the possible deportation of their parents is becoming a mental health issue. She also said that in her 30+ years as a family therapist, she’s never experienced so many people needing to talk about what is going on in this election. It has gotten so pronounced that she and a co-worker have decided that they need to bring it up in their group consultation. As professional therapists, they recognize that talking about politics with clients is usually unethical. But this election is different. People need to talk about how is it affecting them.As the feminists in the 60’s and 70’s so wisely said…the personal is political. That has never been more true than it is right now. The one thing I’d add to what the NYT editorial board wrote is that this is not just about the potential damage a Trump presidency would do. It is also about the damage his candidacy is doing to people right now.Pundits are meant to analyze policy and write about the political horse race. But I need to say that this kind of hate is personal for me. People’s lives are being damaged by our current political dialogue. Perhaps if we notice and say so, they won’t feel so alone.

Beyond incoherent, the ideas underlying Trump’s narrative are racist, full stop. If “plantation” theory is true, then black voters are the mindless drones of American politics. Nefarious Democrats gave them a taste of government, and they never abandoned the hand that fed them. White voters, by contrast, are active citizens—noble republicans in the best tradition of the founders. It’s ironic: For as much as they disdain Democrats as the real racists, it’s the proponents of plantation theory who echo the arguments and propaganda of the pro-Southern, anti-emancipation Democrats of the Civil War era. “The Freedman's Bureau!” sang one poster from the 1866 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election, advocating on behalf of Hiester Clymer and his white-supremacist platform. “An agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the white man.” What’s key is that black voters hear this sentiment in the rhetoric used by Trump and other conservatives. It’s one reason that, despite having been peddled in its current incarnation by black conservatives and their allies for the better part of a decade, the argument has never gotten any traction.

And then there’s this: In discussing the influence of the racist alt-right movement in the Trump campaign, Clinton delivered an address of historical significance. Never before has a presidential candidate been willing to talk about the racist right as a baked-in part of American politics, as something that demands the serious attention of serious people.

To step back: Toyama’s book primarily addresses the folly of assuming technology in isolation can solve social problems. But I’m arguing that this warning also applies to the world of work. As the history of email teaches us, a new technology, no matter how slick, cannot by itself transform a workplace for the better. This remains a deeply human endeavor. We must figure out what it means to work well in the 21st century and then slot in technologies only where and how they fit this plan. Th

This is either extremely clever or bottomlessly stupid. It’s clever if it lulls the Clinton camp into thinking (as it won’t) that they too should just coast into the debate. It will be all the more brilliant if it masks actual preparation on Trump’s side.It is bottomlessly stupid in all other circumstances.

What defies conventional analysis is the clash of grievances. The groups that have played second fiddle to white men for so long are justifiably demanding a rightful place in our democracy and our economy. The multiple complaints of African Americans, of women, of sexual minorities, of immigrants, are just. But, paradoxically, so are the grievances of non-elite white men. And these multiple grievances rub each other raw. Appalachia is the epicenter of declining life spans and living standards for poor and middle class whites. The legitimate demands of the out-groups add to the sense of wounded displacement.

I could give you a hundred of reasons why I keep books – that they are tangible objects representing who I am, they hold my history, they make a house a home, etc.,… but the truth is I just like books. Jacques Bonnet (owner of 40,000+ books) gets this. His descriptions of his own “working library” is inspirational – “the kind where you don’t hesitate to write on your books, or read them in the bath; a library that results from keeping everything you have ever read – including paperbacks and perhaps several editions of the same title – as well as the ones you mean to read one day. A non-specialist library, or rather one specialized in so many areas that it becomes a general one.”  A library that is both loved and used – isn’t that what most book lovers want? If you’re thinking of getting rid of your books, I strongly advise reading his book Phantoms on the Bookshelves before doing anything drastic.

Finally, we get to the boy in The Giving Tree. Even when I was a child I was shocked at the audacity of that ungrateful little shit. He doesn’t even thank the tree. Not once! Not a single goddamned time. And the tree is no innocent either. That kind of enabling and codependency is unhealthy and leaves us in a world with millions of people thinking they’re entitled to our branches and our apples and our attention when they themselves don’t bring a goddamned thing to the table except for a dick pic and a backhanded compliment.

The data from IDC, while being only one reference point, does actually provide some interesting views on the direction of the market.  As an individual category, “External Storage” is becoming increasingly niche, as organisations adopt hyper-converged and SDS solutions.  The traditional array vendors are having to adapt to the changing market and derive more business from other sources because this source of revenue looks flat or declining.  Competition for external arrays has increased significantly, with many more startups fighting for business, especially with all-flash solutions. Total hardware revenue from storage systems does appear to be increasing, but these figures don’t provide any idea of how much the storage software market is growing.  There must be another layer of revenue on top of the Storage Systems figures that accounts for the money made in selling the software, but how big this part of the market is, is anyone’s guess at the moment.  The fascinating part is that tracking by hardware sales will become less relevant a measure for the success of storage companies that diversify into storage and as a measure of the health of the market as a whole.

As part of a plan to help NASA "modernize" its desktop and laptop computers, the space agency signed a $2.5 billion (~£1.9 billion) services contract with HP Enterprise Services in 2011. According to HP (now HPE), part of the Agency Consolidated End-User Service (ACES) program the computing company would "modernize NASA’s entire end-user infrastructure by delivering a full range of personal computing services and devices to more than 60,000 users." HPE also said the program would "allow (NASA) employees to more easily collaborate in a secure computing environment." The services contract, alas, hasn't gone quite as well as one might have hoped. This week Federal News Radio reported that HPE is doing such a poor job that NASA's chief information officer, Renee Wynn, could no longer accept the security risks associated with the contract. Wynn, therefore, did not sign off on the authority to operate (ATO) for systems and tools.

During a 16-month period stretching from late 1989 to early 1991, Trump churned through five different presidents he had hand-picked to run his flagship casino, the Taj Mahal -- a preview of how he's run his presidential campaign.We know how all of this eventually ended in Atlantic City: four corporate bankruptcies, investments soured, jobs destroyed, a town left hollowed out, and Trump still angling for fees, perks, and other corporate table scraps until he finally exited the market in 2014.The Trump Organization itself -- the licensing and development boutique on the 26th floor of Trump Tower -- is a tribal operation, increasingly stewarded by the three eldest Trump children. It is sparsely populated by a tightly knit group of loyalists who have been with the Trump family for many years. But it has never embraced a broader team of professionals, nor has it created a Fortune 500-level corporate bureaucracy, the kind that might serve as a model for, say, a national political machine.

Thinking about universities in this way doesn’t provide obvious answers to student demands for safe spaces, some of which seem to me to be legitimate, some not (I also suspect that the media has an interest in hyping up the most ridiculous seeming claims because the weird social connections between the American elite and a very small number of colleges mean that this stuff gets an audience – but that’s another matter for a different post). What it does though, is to make clear that universities’ and professors’ own notions (myself included) of what makes for legitimate inquiry, academic freedom etc, and what doesn’t are themselves contested, and the products of social processes that don’t always look particularly good when they’re subjected to sustained inquiry. If the university is made up of safe spaces (we call them departments, schools, research programs and academic disciplines), then demands for safe spaces are nothing particularly new (except that they come from students), and should be examined in just the same kinds of ways as the safe spaces that academics have created for themselves, and don’t think about, because they seem part of the natural order of the universe. Sometimes, there will be some broader justifications for them (in terms of diversity or other desiderata), sometimes not, and the justifications will themselves always be arguable.

Pence has said in the past he supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump opposes. More recently, Pence says he would support renegotiating trade agreements with Trump in the White House because he believes Trump could negotiate better deals. Political observers say Pence’s actions as governor raise new questions about the true extent of his support for Trump’s trade policies. “To the extent that there is any daylight between them, one has to wonder what Mike Pence’s true thoughts are,” said Robert Dion, a political scientist at the University of Evansville. “In the event they disagree, you have to wonder, has Mike Pence changed his position or is he simply doing what a VP nominee must do to be part of a national ticket? That’s the million dollar question.”

Turning to Fox News, many of these patterns are reappearing. Like ESPN, Fox News presides over a small monopoly on a certain demographic—not of young male sports viewers, but of older male conservatives. Fox News sometimes seems to lear above the political landscape like an ominous village volcano. But in the larger picture, the channel's presence is best described as a medium-sized hill: The network averages about 2 million viewers each week, and Bill O’Reilly’s show fetches a bit more than 3 million. "Well, that's a lot more than you," a Fox News personality might retort when confronted with such accusation, and indeed, it is a lot more than me. But in an election with more than 120 million projected voters, it’s really not so many.

David Carson, the acclaimed graphic designer who created Ray Gun magazine, is the so-called Godfather of Grunge. His method was simple, his gospel twofold: you don’t have to know the rules before breaking them, and never mistake legibility for communication. Carson’s technique of ripping, shredding, and remaking letters touched a nerve. His covers for Ray Gun were bold and often disorienting. He once disliked a Ray Gun article on Bryan Ferry, and so set the entire spread in Zapf Dingbats.

Put more generally, human existence involves the conflict of values. We are, as Aristotle observed and Hannah Arendt celebrated, political animals. Not because we are all party apparatchiks, but because we cannot escape the basic condition of social plurality. There is no magical space apart from political and ethical strife, and it is foolish to believe that technology can be deployed without co-option by some human end. For the same reason, it is naïve to believe that these problems will be solved in the future. Regardless of how swiftly technology develops, there will never be a time without discord. Even if everyone agreed on our troubles and how to overcome them (a huge ‘if’), nothing would stop interest groups from selfishly doing otherwise. This happened with tobacco, is happening now with fossil fuels, and will continue with other businesses, lobbyists, and parties. Humans are a divided and fractious species. There are also some problems that technology cannot solve. Not because it is too sluggish, fragile, or clumsy, but because not all problems are instrumental. Machines can no more do ethics than they can have existential crises. They can help to change circumstances, but they cannot reflect on their value or morality. For example, a cheap pump can increase water supply in a drought, avoiding brutal resource conflicts. But technology cannot persuade the community to install, operate, and maintain this pump, or aid organisations to support this project instead of a cheap laptop program. This highlights the intimate but asymmetric relationship between humanity and its instruments. We are a tool-making species, but we are not ourselves tools. We have our own ends – in fact, we are ends. Technology can nudge, encourage, invite; it can amplify or diminish, accelerate or slow down. It is no neutral bystander. But its agency is limited, and its consciousness non-existent.

So why in the world did Lowery confess to such a terrible crime, when we now know that he was innocent all along? He explained the mindset of someone who has been broken down by seven hours of relentless interro­gation: “I didn’t know any way out of that, except to tell them what they wanted to hear, and then get a lawyer to prove my innocence…. You’ve never been in a situation so intense, and you’re naive about your rights. You don’t know what [someone] will say to get out of that situation.” One analysis of 44 proven false-confession cases revealed that more than a third of the interrogations lasted six to 12 hours, many lasted between 12 and 24 hours, and the average length was more than 16 hours. The longer you speak to police officers, the more likely it is that you will confess to some crime that you did not commit—isn’t that enough of a reason to avoid speaking to them?

Ziegler said that if there is no price to pay for Trump's most enthusiastic backers in the conservative press, then "it's over." "The conservative establishment that needs to be gotten rid of is the conservative media establishment. Sean Hannity needs to go. Bill O'Reilly needs to go. Sadly, Rush Limbaugh needs to go," he said. The talk show host concluded: "Here's what I'll be very disappointed in: If Trump does lose, as I am very confident that he will, and let's say it's not super close, if he loses by a significant margin and Sean Hannity and people like him have not experienced some significant career pain, if not destruction, because of their role, then it's over. It is over." "Because if there is no price to pay for conservative-media elements having sold out to Donald Trump, then guess what? It's going to happen again and again and again. ... If that doesn't happen, then I think we're done. It's over."

"We are doing what journalists throughout said mainstream media are supposed to do: challenge the conventional wisdom, hold politicians' feet to the fire, ask tough questions, report facts that are in many cases inconvenient truths for career politicians, and give a voice to the millions of people worldwide who have had theirs taken away from them by world elites who consider the ordinary person beneath them," Boyle said, pointing to Breitbart's record July traffic as evidence Americans "hunger for something different."

Years ago, the British retailer Marks and Spencer decided it was spending too much money controlling the movement of stock in its stores. So instead of a clerk filling out an order form to replenish a shelf, which was handed to another clerk behind a counter, who went to fetch the items, etc., the company got rid of the whole procedure and simply let the clerks go in the back and scoop up what they needed. The company was able to function with thousands fewer clerks and 26 million fewer cards and papers. Now that’s truly efficient­­, and a vote of faith in the honesty of the clerks. Health care administrators take note: treated with respect, left to figure out many things for themselves, health care professionals can prove to be at least as trustworthy as store clerks.

Okay, that’s a tall order, and it’s certainly not what Fuller signed up for, but it was this week, for the first time in my life, that I truly, on a deep level, understood why Depression-era audiences flocked to fluffy spectacles full of rich people singing and dancing their way around enormous estates and palatial penthouses in fabulous finery - they wanted to see something that took them out of their own miserable lives for a little while, they wanted to see a fantasy that offered a glimpse into another world, one they could never enter but one they could dream about. And my fantasy world? The one that feels too far away to truly grasp? A world where humanity comes together to be a little less shitty to each other and actually get things done.

And I certainly don’t want to hear some fantastic load of tripe about Gary or Jill because they can’t win either and that’s simply the way it is.

Then the company analyzed how the variations changed user behavior. The most effective variation, Tolia said, involved multiple new things—the tip asking users to reflect on what really counts as suspicious and the form asking for more info about a person if race is mentioned. Introducing friction to make it harder to post about race increased the number of posts that were started but then abandoned by 50%, the assumption being that these people were going post something potentially racially offensive. Tolia says some companies might be unhappy with a result in which their users are less active, but Nextdoor is pleased.

To think of sexual harassment as a problem of one bad man is to fall into the fallacy of seeing sexual assault as a crime of passion. Sexual harassment is much more likely to result in someone losing her job than in sex. Someone is unlikely to fall in love or lust because she’s been forced to undress in front of colleagues (something Tantaros alleges Ailes did to her) but she’s very likely to have her job performance compromised by psychological damage or distraction, or gain a reputation as difficult because she can’t safely or comfortably work with certain colleagues, or simply quit because she can’t bear to come into work.

At this point, I simply cannot recommend using FreeNAS. Although ZFS is simply the best filesystem available today, my experience getting FreeNAS up and running has been frustrating in the extreme. Once it’s working, it seems to be a solid product. But unless you have serious time to devote learning, configuring, and debugging a system, I recommend looking to a commercial product (Synology, QNAP, Drobo) instead of FreeNAS. Hopefully this recommendation will change with the release of FreeNAS 10.

Suddenly, the Web felt accessible to me in a way it had never been before. I had complete control over a slice of it, and I dove into understanding how it worked. I started my own blog (as did all of my colleagues). I began experimenting with open source community building platforms as a way to connect our department since, at the time, we all worked in different buildings. We began building custom learning spaces for courses, based on partnerships with faculty. For me, working in open source made possible all the things I had imagined back in the 90s, and it challenged all of those beliefs and values that the LMS underscored. It was possible to build learning environments that empowered students, and not necessarily to the detriment of the course. I could create learning environments in which the interfaces, tools, and features were customized to the needs of the professor and students. And there was simply no reason to assume that the experience from one course to the next needed to be standardized. Open source was infused with a different set of values and beliefs: co-construction, iteration, fast prototyping, extensibility, and, well, openness. It was probably within three years that we began to ask the question “What if every faculty member and student had this? Their own domain name? Their own Web space to build what they want or need? What would happen and what would change?” It took another six years before Domain of One’s Own was fully realized at UMW. During that six years though, we continued to build and experiment. The first great experiment was UMW Blogs, our institutional blogging system which debuted in fall of 2007. In that nine years, it has had almost 13,000 users and it now contains 11,000 individual WordPress sites.

The most famous tweet may be from user Randall Scott: “I’m down with a black human torch. Down with a black storm trooper. Mary Jane Watson is a fucking redhead. The end.”Scott’s tweet represents one of nerd-dom’s biggest problems: A whole lot of people who, in their heart of hearts, don’t consider themselves to be racist, are nevertheless playing into dangerous campaigns spearheaded by hardcore bigots. Only here, the weapon of choice is “canon.

One other quick note about Trump: he's been waffling back and forth on immigration all week. It's his signature issue, and he's been running on it for over a year now, but he still can't quite seem to make up his mind about some of the most fundamental issues related to immigration policy. This has produced many thumbsuckers about whether Trump is pivoting, or staying the course, or some combination thereof. My advice: don't bother. Trump doesn't have a policy. He couldn't care less about immigration. To him, it's just a handy applause line in his speeches. Trying to follow his peregrinations is like trying to figure out what a five year old really wants to be when she grows up.

In the lead-up to her speech yesterday, the press had been informed that Clinton was going to talk about this. I noticed primers on the alt-right from people like the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dave Weigel and Media Matters. If you want to educate yourself about these folks, those are a good place to start. But here’s a handy guide, what started out as white supremacists, became white nationalists, became identitarians, became alt-right.One name that pops up a lot when describing the alt-right is someone who takes credit for coming up with those last two more “politically correct” labels – Richard Spencer. I wrote a bit about him a year ago when Evan Osnos published a fascinating article about how his travels among white supremacists had introduced him to the idea that they were celebrating the rise of Donald Trump.

Now, this attitude is what we call "privilege", these days: not noticing that things that aren't difficult or a problem for you may be not at all easy for other people. The communities I "grew up in", fannishly speaking, were majority female and heavily queer (LGBTA+ of all stripes). Such people cannot assume that using their legal names and revealing their physical locations is innocuous. This is not just because of the Internet, either. When I got my first phone, back in the 1970s, I had to decide how to have my name listed in the telephone book (unlisted costs more). Being a single woman, I naturally listed myself in the form "Doe J", not "Doe Jane", to reduce the chance I'd get harassing phone calls or active stalking. That was what we all did: the expectation that you could be publicly known by your first name was a "privilege" reserved for men, or for women under cover of men -- "Doe John & Jane". Now I've decided that I really hate calling an expectation of safety and respect "privilege", and I can see why it gets some people's back up. "Privilege" often sounds like the opposite of "right", as in "Having a phone while you're a teenager is a privilege, not a right." Yet the core part of "having privilege" is "being able to count on being treated with basic respect" -- such as not being harassed or stalked in public spaces. These things *should* be rights, given to all people as a matter of course, not "privileges" awarded to a few. Is there another word than "privilege" to use, then, to describe things some people experience as rights and which ought to be rights, but which aren't in practice always easily available to other people? To say to someone, "No, you can't just judge by your own experience, it isn't universal -- but it should be."

That’s how the GOP handles this kind of story. And it works just fine, every time. The mainstream journos can't find a both-sides hook, and they are nervous about this alt-right stuff anyway, so the story dies. Journos fear the brutality of GOP pushback. So it goes. Every. Time.

In other words, the solution isn’t to turn away from public funding for higher education. Rather, taxpayers should take some of the money they’ve been inefficiently sending to the for-profit sector, and channel it toward America’s underfunded public higher education system. There, the emphasis should be on emulating some of the flexibility of the for-profit sector while offering the quality of non-profit schools. That should boost graduation rates and employment prospects, and result in taxpayers getting stiffed a lot less in the future.

Prosecutors are able to apply the law broadly because they do not have to show that the person deleting evidence knew there was an investigation underway. In other words, a person could theoretically be charged under Sarbanes-Oxley for deleting her dealer's number from her phone even if she were unaware that the feds were getting a search warrant to find her marijuana. The application of the law to digital data has been particularly far-reaching because this type of information is so easy to delete. Deleting digital data can inadvertently occur in normal computer use, and often does.

So like the cobbler whose children went without shoes, the maximum tribune of capitalism in American politics cannot get his intended beneficiaries to cough up enough ducats to keep him competitive in this, the most expensive presidential nominating cycle ever.