> Why was this article hidden from the front page? A similar satellite journalism article from the BBC about a killing in west Africa was allowed on the front page a few weeks ago.
Because it's about China, and information about Chinese human rights abuses is apparently considered "nationalistic flamebait."
> Post-war Iraq is not the same as a war zone, so protection of the civil service, bureaucrats, diplomatic corps, etc. I think can be done by some kind of other trained force.
I said conflict zone not war zone, which I meant to encompass lower-intensity dangerous areas. But in any case, aren't American embassies traditionally defended by US Marines? I see no reason to change that.
> In fact, it might be better in some ways - soldiers are trained to have a very aggressive posture, a very 'lean in' kind of assertion. The 'killer instinct'. And it involves a lot of training in heavy weapons, assaults, recons, urban warfare etc. etc.. We don't need that for these missions. Because in any serious engagement they should be calling in the actual Army.
These "contractors" are former soldiers with exactly that same "aggressive...killer instinct" training, so you're not avoiding it by hiring mercenaries for guard duty.
I don't agree with that. Didn't these mercenary companies start out as just "enhanced security guards?" It seems like once you allow them to operate in any capacity, the rot spreads until you have assassination operations like the one in the article.
The only military career path for Americans should be within the ranks of the US military.
Mercenaries may always exist, but American ones don't have to. Participation in them should be made illegal, and all these private military companies should forbidden to operate until they find another line of business or liquidate themselves. If some former soldier or former general wants to become a mercenary, let him renounce his citizenship and go find a new home.
The only military forces in the US should be explicit parts of official US military.
> not a libertarian, but what do the alleged actions of of a theocratic monarchy have to do with the potential excesses of free market capitalism?
Probably because there's profit to be had in making deals with that theocratic monarchy. It's the same thing with China. If you're optimizing for market success as you are in free market capitalism, you're incentivized to overlook things that stand in the way of that success, like the immorality of making deals with foreign authoritarians.
> By obligating handset makers to load the free apps along with the Android operating system, regulators said Google had boxed out competitors.
It sounds like a very good thing to me to prevent companies like Google from having such terms, which allow them to use dominance on one area to fuel dominance in many others. Each product should stand on it's own, and the idea that the entire ecosystem is one big product is frankly BS.
> Look at the comments that already exist - is there any way that you can imagine this not turning into a flamefest?
That's an interesting censorship tactic: if you don't like a topic or an idea, start a fight about it, the ruder and unproductive the better. Your disliked topic is thrown out like a baby with the bathwater, an objections to the censorship can be countered with the misdirection that the topic or idea isn't getting suppressed, just "fights."
That's why I think, in the interest of open, good-faith discussion, the flamers themselves need to be moderated, but not the topics that attract them.
> Months ago, senior Facebook executives briefly debated banning all political ads, which produce less than 5 percent of the company’s revenue, sources said. The company rejected that because product managers were loath to leave advertising dollars on the table...
> Nah, this isn't a legal debt that they can forward to a collection agency, as pointed out in the article.
My understanding is that many collection agencies aren't very scrupulous about they debts they try to collect. Many of them are false, already paid, or lacking necessary documentation.
> I doubt UA would follow through considering it is illegal to submit known false debts.
I wonder if they've snuck in a mandatory binding arbitration clause into their contract, and if that would cover disputes about false debts. Even if the false debts were totally illegal, arbitration could make it impractical to challenge them.
> This is insane on a whole other level, because United profits when you don't get on that 2nd leg.
Not necessarily. If you use use hidden-city ticketing, they lost out on extracting the extra money they wanted to charge you for going to your intended destination AND the extra money they may have been able to charge someone else for the leg you didn't take.
That said, I think it's the airline's fault for using an over-complicated pricing model with odd behaviors that customers can take advantage of like this. There'd be no issue if they just charged the same per leg regardless of your final destination. That'd make everything transparent and totally remove the need for hidden-city ticketing.
The "free market" doesn't make fraud or misrepresentation illegal, the laws and regulations of the dreaded government do.
The worst the free market can do to a fraudster is to stop dealing with her as knowledge of her frauds becomes widely known. That, of course, doesn't work very well to limit fraud.
So you're saying the defaults should be setup for the unusual use cases like you describe, even if that means we get botnets of millions of routers?
You're not going to define one set of secure-by-default rules that's going to work for everyone. Rather, you want to try to define a set of secure-by-default rules that work for most people. Then but the burden of reconfiguration and maintenance on those with unusual needs, rather than the majority.
This story: 19 points, 46 min ago, 2 comments: rank 35 (2nd page)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18405775: 17 points (less votes), 2 hours ago (older), zero comments: rank 11 (1st page)
It appears this story was suppressed off the front page.