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Well, I guess I today get to be the semantic web nazi, but here goes... Hyperlinks should flow nicely along the text and not be words like "here" or "this". This is how I would tweak your message:

actually, it seems like it does from this Amazon review of the printer
The drivers from Epson website are also looking to be fairly compliant and is registered as a SANE backend.

actually, it seems like it does from this review here
The drivers from here are also looking to be fairly compliant and is registered as a SANE backend.

All the defense has to do is enter Steven Levy's book into evidence. That history properly defines the term hackers.
http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-Anniversary/dp/1449388396/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382495568&sr=1-1&keywords=hackers

Now a book on John Carmack,...or even John Romero might actually be interesting and warranted.

Your wish is my command.

http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture/dp/0812972155

Why is it that transit; for both roads as well as public transit always gets hit by people talking about pay per use. As if it is somehow natural and obvious that transit should be pay per use.

Road tolls have a history back over 2,700 years per Wikipedia.

I was surprised in reading Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It that the author suggests tolls as a solution to highway funding, yet the problem seems to lie in state politics where much highway toll money is diverted elsewhere. My own experiences trying to push highway improvements is most people consider traffic a fact of life rather than something that can be fixed. Worse still, some idiots like John Prescott push congestion as government policy to make mass transit more attractive.

That's not what Bruce Schneier says, though.
Schneier's later work has focused on how trust is required for a functioning society, and how we can encourage and enforce trustworthy behaviour.

He focuses on rational consideration of cost-benefit tradeoffs. Trusting no one is somewhere between highly impractical and impossible if you want to function in a society with other people and have access to food, shelter and companionship. It's irrational since most people you'll encounter are benign, and the benefits of cooperation will far outweigh the risk.

I'm not going to get into the argument of whether your claim that the only thing management consultants are doing is providing due diligence. What I want to do is to point out that regardless of what the industry's current situation is, it is not a static position.

The excellent book The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century details the history of management consulting from its birth about 100 years ago to recent times. A common theme in the book is that what gave birth to management consulting as a separate profession was changes in regulation (banks were no longer allowed to act as consultants, as they might be partial to recommend their own financial services), and it is changes in regulation that can very quickly change the whole industry (IBM was barred from entering consulting, but now is a big player in IT stuff), or even destroy it (as a somewhat unrelated point: it is well known that recruitment-wise the biggest competition the MBB face is from investment banks). The book also details how efficiency engineers turned from their operational consulting and clocking workers' speeds to organizational restructuring to advising CEOs in strategy and thus rebranding their profession. In this process many of the bigs went bust and new companies innovated their way from nothing to the top and it is not just new companies doing the same old, but rather the whole concept of what consulting is has changed along the years (the company you mentioned, BCG, is one such innovator that came relatively late into the game and now is one of the letters in MBB, the big three).

Saying that he only made Minecraft is like saying that Bill Gates only made Windows. Part of the fascination is seeing how some guy who just wanted to make a game he'd like to play ends up a multimillionaire and doesn't go insane... although he did challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3 for the use of the Scrolls name.

There was a book about John Carmack and John Romero, but as for the others there isn't currently a book specifically about them. You could always do what Linus Larsson and Daniel Goldberg did and contact one of those guys and perhaps write a biography for them. You'll probably want to spell Sid's last name correctly though.

Case in point; Steve Keen's Debunking Economics contains many examples of economic theories that are either provably false, or run counter to the empirical evidence, or both.

When 20 something year olds are the experts of course you have to wonder. http://www.amazon.com/Delinquent-Teenager-Mistaken-Climate-ebook/dp/B005UEVB8Q

Have you got any good readings you can recommend on the subject =)?

Registration and Purchase required? PDFs from the New Cambridge History of Islam. There's an amazing maritime section here:
http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9781139056137

Blow your mind, with the journal of the travels of 14th Century adventurer, Ibn Batutta. He makes Marco Polo look like a homebody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta

1929 abridged translation of Ibn Batutta's journals:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zKqn_CWTxYEC

More books? Warwick Ball is an accessible archaeologist and historian, who effectively destroys the case for "Clash of Civilizations", and the entire dubious taxonomy of "east and west".
http://www.amazon.com/Rome-East-Transformation-Warwick-Ball/dp/0415243572/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Arabia-Phoenicians-Discovery-Europe/dp/1566568013/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-5
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-One-World-Ancient-Persia/dp/1566568226/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-3

Nice, "pro-Nabatean" writeup on the late-antique origin of Arab maritime trade, after the breakup of Alexandrian east. You will have to go farther back, to the Phoenicians of Tyre and Carthage, 'tho! This author begins with Nabatean emergence. There are many links on this site... Quite fascinating.
http://nabataea.net/who1.html

Oman and maritime history. Nice to overlay this with the Nabateans. These things met and mingled - especially out in the Indian ocean, away from home:
http://www.maritime.om/Oman-Maritime-History

The sections on Ancient Indian and Chinese maritime development is slim, but worthwhile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_maritime_history#Indian_subcontinent

An Indo-centric, but factual and entertaining page:
http://www.aseanindia.com/navy/maritime-history

Summary of "silk-routes":
http://www.silkroutes.net/SilkSpiceIncenseRoutes.htm

Genoa in the Crimea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoese_colonies

Technology of early Islamic ship-building - mostly focused on Mediterranean, not Indo-Persian
http://www.academia.edu/1596791/Early_Islamic_Maritime_Technology

Have you got any good readings you can recommend on the subject =)?

Registration and Purchase required? PDFs from the New Cambridge History of Islam. There's an amazing maritime section here:
http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9781139056137

Blow your mind, with the journal of the travels of 14th Century adventurer, Ibn Batutta. He makes Marco Polo look like a homebody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta

1929 abridged translation of Ibn Batutta's journals:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zKqn_CWTxYEC

More books? Warwick Ball is an accessible archaeologist and historian, who effectively destroys the case for "Clash of Civilizations", and the entire dubious taxonomy of "east and west".
http://www.amazon.com/Rome-East-Transformation-Warwick-Ball/dp/0415243572/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Arabia-Phoenicians-Discovery-Europe/dp/1566568013/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-5
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-One-World-Ancient-Persia/dp/1566568226/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-3

Nice, "pro-Nabatean" writeup on the late-antique origin of Arab maritime trade, after the breakup of Alexandrian east. You will have to go farther back, to the Phoenicians of Tyre and Carthage, 'tho! This author begins with Nabatean emergence. There are many links on this site... Quite fascinating.
http://nabataea.net/who1.html

Oman and maritime history. Nice to overlay this with the Nabateans. These things met and mingled - especially out in the Indian ocean, away from home:
http://www.maritime.om/Oman-Maritime-History

The sections on Ancient Indian and Chinese maritime development is slim, but worthwhile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_maritime_history#Indian_subcontinent

An Indo-centric, but factual and entertaining page:
http://www.aseanindia.com/navy/maritime-history

Summary of "silk-routes":
http://www.silkroutes.net/SilkSpiceIncenseRoutes.htm

Genoa in the Crimea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoese_colonies

Technology of early Islamic ship-building - mostly focused on Mediterranean, not Indo-Persian
http://www.academia.edu/1596791/Early_Islamic_Maritime_Technology

Have you got any good readings you can recommend on the subject =)?

Registration and Purchase required? PDFs from the New Cambridge History of Islam. There's an amazing maritime section here:
http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9781139056137

Blow your mind, with the journal of the travels of 14th Century adventurer, Ibn Batutta. He makes Marco Polo look like a homebody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta

1929 abridged translation of Ibn Batutta's journals:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zKqn_CWTxYEC

More books? Warwick Ball is an accessible archaeologist and historian, who effectively destroys the case for "Clash of Civilizations", and the entire dubious taxonomy of "east and west".
http://www.amazon.com/Rome-East-Transformation-Warwick-Ball/dp/0415243572/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Arabia-Phoenicians-Discovery-Europe/dp/1566568013/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-5
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-One-World-Ancient-Persia/dp/1566568226/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382201303&sr=1-3

Nice, "pro-Nabatean" writeup on the late-antique origin of Arab maritime trade, after the breakup of Alexandrian east. You will have to go farther back, to the Phoenicians of Tyre and Carthage, 'tho! This author begins with Nabatean emergence. There are many links on this site... Quite fascinating.
http://nabataea.net/who1.html

Oman and maritime history. Nice to overlay this with the Nabateans. These things met and mingled - especially out in the Indian ocean, away from home:
http://www.maritime.om/Oman-Maritime-History

The sections on Ancient Indian and Chinese maritime development is slim, but worthwhile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_maritime_history#Indian_subcontinent

An Indo-centric, but factual and entertaining page:
http://www.aseanindia.com/navy/maritime-history

Summary of "silk-routes":
http://www.silkroutes.net/SilkSpiceIncenseRoutes.htm

Genoa in the Crimea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoese_colonies

Technology of early Islamic ship-building - mostly focused on Mediterranean, not Indo-Persian
http://www.academia.edu/1596791/Early_Islamic_Maritime_Technology

has anyone ever read Goralski's book on networking (he's a top engineer there)?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Illustrated-Network-Kaufmann-Networking/dp/0123745411

"Good! Now maybe people will begin to see the others as stupid too!"

The odds are stacked against you - about 47% of the human population lacks a paracingulate sulcus, the brain structure most responsible for differentiating reality from imagined reality (as a consequence of memory processing). Somewhere over 90% of schizophrenics lack this structure, which lends credence to the theory of an evolution of consciousness and a natural origin of religions.

There appears to be a moderate evolutionary advantage to having the sulcus - we'd expect the presence of one to be lower in antiquity, but if we figure a halving in 10,000 years, you're going to be waiting a long time until it's a tiny minority.

I hope for the same but with the oldest one who recently just turned 5 it will be a while. I did see that there is an updated version of "The Way Things Works" out that I will probably be getting at some point. I loved my copy as a child and with how curious both of my kids are they will probably like it as well.

Nietzche was just one example from an interesting book, "The Creative Process", originally published in the 1960s IIRC - apparently it's still in print. It's a collection of 50 essays by well-known thinkers including Nietzche and Einstein, I was just paraphrasing from long-ago memory. Most/all of the essays involve that plateau-leap-plateau-leap cycle of creativity. So it's not just him.

WRT the Nazi collection, another book points out something interesting - another philosopher that was "adopted" by the Nazis was Max Weber, whose work was not at all supportive of the Nazi world view but whose works could be used by them. According to Alan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind"), Weber's work was all the rage, but completely misunderstood, among the European socialists of the 1930s. His work and terminology was turned inside out and most of the original meaning stripped out, and then was brought over to the US and adopted by the folks who taught in American schools of education in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was taught to the budding new teachers who taught them to us Boomers in the 1950s and 1960s. So it turns out that many of the "grand new ideas" of the 1960s were not new, were not grand, and were in fact empty phrases from the socialists of the 1930s whose meanings had been inverted from what Max Weber originally meant. And now here we are.

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Guide-Inner-Space/dp/0440556341/ ?

I've kept every book anyone ever gave to my kids (three of them, age 7, 9 and 12). Their library has over 300 books on it now, everything from the Bob Books and Dr. Seuss to Harry Potter and the Golden Compass. My kids love to read, and we read to them every night.

There's a quote-- "a writer is a reader moved to emulation." I don't know who said it. But one day a few years ago, the two oldest kids asked me if they could write their own book. I said "of course!", so we did. http://www.amazon.com/My-Sister-Makes-Me-Laugh/dp/0977649725 Now they're published authors and famous in their schools.

But, here's the funny part. The book was immediately banned by the school system. Unfortunately, it has the word "pee pee" in it, and a little bit of rule breaking and trouble making. But more importantly, if a book doesn't come from a select set of only three publishers who are known to only print "safe" books, it has to go through a strict review (at the district level) before it can be approved for a school library. I don't know if it's like that everywhere, but that's how it is here in Texas.

So, public libraries are suspicious to me now. Quiet censorship shaping young minds.

To fight this, my kids take a whole box full of their book into each new grade they go into and give them away to their classmates. The "pee pee" word hasn't produced any anarchists yet, but the experiment is still young...

We've followed similar career arcs. When I figured out, like you, that this wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I started studying money. It's essentially a new language, with variable, types, modules, classes etc. Once you understand the basic premises, it's no more difficult to make it than to write a significant application.

The cool thing about working towards a good chunk of cash is that it gives you the ability to take a step back and look around. Maybe software development IS what you want to do for the rest of your life, but you don't want to be tied to the company you're at, or to a paycheck at all. Maybe you want to do like This guy.

I'm not much for the self help genre, but try these two books. Even if they don't solve your problems, at least you'll be happier where you are.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Rich Dad, Poor Dad

We've followed similar career arcs. When I figured out, like you, that this wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I started studying money. It's essentially a new language, with variable, types, modules, classes etc. Once you understand the basic premises, it's no more difficult to make it than to write a significant application.

The cool thing about working towards a good chunk of cash is that it gives you the ability to take a step back and look around. Maybe software development IS what you want to do for the rest of your life, but you don't want to be tied to the company you're at, or to a paycheck at all. Maybe you want to do like This guy.

I'm not much for the self help genre, but try these two books. Even if they don't solve your problems, at least you'll be happier where you are.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I really enjoyed Cryptography Decrypted which takes a similar history-based approach. It's shorter and written in an entertaining way.

Highly recommended for the history part, not so much the math. But it's very well written.

Amazon link

10 years for decent ideas on how to use it practically

http://www.amazon.com/Microwave-Cooking-One-Marie-Smith/dp/1565546660

contrary to reviews, it is not "the saddest book ever written" it is actually useful, although I find the layout annoying.

the really sad thing is the decorated "Happy Birthday" single serving cake on the cover.

Oh, and Charles Murray, Coming Apart.

I agree that there is simply too much "crap" in the Android markets all over. The amount of good, quality, useful stuff is a seemingly small ratio of what's out there.

Really that seems like a simple lie. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_2407748011_nr_p_n_feature_keywords_0?rh=n%3A2335752011%2Cn%3A!2335753011%2Cn%3A7072561011%2Cn%3A2407748011%2Cp_n_feature_keywords_two_browse-bin%3A7107988011&bbn=2407748011&ie=UTF8&qid=1381921202&rnid=7107987011 here are a list of "no contract" best-selling android phones, they all look pretty good to me some are as much as 10x cheaper(larger screens; more cores; more memory; extra storage etc etc) than the latest Apple phones, yet have better specifications than the phone in my pocket which I am still very happy with. Now if these phones required proprietary software and hardware, locked down to one store, Breaking hardware and software standards. Like say the iPhone...I would argue that they would be "crap"(sic)

Perhaps iOS needs more hardware choices.

A more enjoyable set of tips on how to sabotage a project, or recognize that your project has been sabotaged, is http://www.amazon.com/AntiPatterns-Refactoring-Software-Architectures-Projects/dp/0471197130

"Their deadliest hit list begins with the Blob, where one object does most of the work in a project, and Continuous Obsolescence, where technology changes so quickly that developers can't keep up. Some of the more entertaining antipatterns include the Poltergeist (where do-nothing classes add unnecessary overhead), the Boat Anchor (a white elephant piece of hardware or software bought at great cost) and the Golden Hammer (a single technology that is used for every conceivable programming problem)."

On the downside, or upside if you're the stickee instead of the sticker, is that they offer some tips for how to approach unraveling such sabotage.

It was very surprising to find them for that price. The "professional" model, versus the "premium" model, lacks a bunch of the chrome and costs about $100 less. Here's a plain search for DT990 with no referral codes. http://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=dt990

I have heard that the 600-ohm Premium version, which is almost $400, is even better. Is it really $250 better, though?? The distortion is already so low on the 250 ohm Pro version.

It's not for everyone though. You and I have specialized headphone amplifiers in one form or another on our rigs, most people don't... you get disappointing volume levels plugging a 250 ohm set into a cell phone, definitely would be even quieter on the 600 ohm version.

I can certainly ask. Our processors are designed for packet pushing. Here's an inexpensive router using one of our older low-end chips:

http://www.amazon.com/EdgeRouter-ERLite-3-512MB-Ethernet-Router/dp/B00CPRVF5K/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1381865052&sr=8-2&keywords=router+million+packets

It's capable of pushing a million packets per second using Linux and a modified TCP/IP stack. While Ubiquity source releases all the source sadly they're using a rather old SDK (2.0). Once things settle down at work I hope to incorporate support for this into our base bootloader. I'd also love to push all of the bootloader changes I have made to U-Boot upstream though I'm dreading the battle involved due to the huge amount of code and some of the unorthodox things we do.

> Already done [amazon.com]

FYI, this is an Amazon affiliate link, and will set a cookie that gives the poster (dargaud) credit for your future Amazon purchases.

If you prefer, here is a clean link that will not set such an affiliate cookie.

I've lived in Bolivia. An extremely poor country, its inhabitants are part of the bottom billion. They are, as you say, too poor to own computers, but internet cafés are cheap, widespread and popular.

I wouldn't expect to see a poor Bolivian posting here, but that's not because they don't have access.

Remember to throw away all 4 dlinks at the office.

Hey, your life gets easier no matter the rationale.

I've been real happy picking up refurbs of the WNDR3800 and running OpenWRT (latest release) on them.

Gigabit switch and they handle VLAN's really well so for $50 delivered by Prime, it's hard to ask for more.

opkg install luci-ssl
opkg remove wpad-mini
opkg install wpad

and you have secure access and WPA2-Enterprise (freeradius w/ samba works). Just remember that the switch ports are labeled backwards by Netgear...

Speaking of backdoors and untrusted code, I wound up using these to VLAN the home network, so I could put all of the non-open-source systems on their own 'Guest' VLAN, and let them have Internet but not access to the LAN where personal documents are stored. Who the heck knows what's running on the Roku firmware, but now with VLAN's, who the heck cares? (and the kids can still watch their cartoons).

Maybe not Playboy, but I'd say it's a pretty good bet that this stuff isn't going away.

If the summary is true, what we're looking at is an inflation of transaction costs. It's harder for authors to tell their stuff and for readers to buy it, because the large markets that most people participate in have been barred to them. Playboy doesn't solve that problem, for one thing because its not going to be perceived as a friendly place by female customers. What the author wants is for his or her smarmy little masterpiece to be easy to impulse-buy, quietly and nearly anonymously, without the reader being forced to register for a special smut site.

What losing access to Amazon and B&N would mean to authors is that titles which are marginal sellers (including most erotica) won't be worth selling at all. But people don't write because it's a sensible career move; they write because they like to write or have a compulsion to write or have a fantasy of what being a writer means. So nearly all those books that are being banned will still be available, but in non-commercial forums. "50 Shades" started life as *Twilight* fan-fiction and was later re-worked. Even if it could never have been published, it would have been written and distributed anyway.

Already done.

The Dinosaur Erotica is safe. Apparently, Jeff Bezos understands that the love a woman feels for her diplodocus is high art, not smut.

Some advanced technology such as this could be used.

I keep my Nexus 10 tablet next to the bed and the connector is nearly impossible to see in the dark (white paint or not...) I end up basing the orientation of the plug on the way the cable is bending because that's the way it sits on the night stand.

I kind of wish that the connector was more friendly though, it's annoying enough having to find the port let alone get the orientation correct. It's almost so bad I thought about getting a magnetic connector for the bottom connector that Samsung didn't include a cable for.

Customers with purchase histories similar to yours, and those who looked up Joyce Kilmer: also considered this product!

I think I'll take the CDC as authoritative over wikipedia.

What you did is called lying through statistics, their are entire books and website about how to use statistics to lie like you did. I called you out on it, in fact here are some websites exposing the types of tactics you used.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/CSE3/Lie_with_Statistics.pdf
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/bag-of-tricks/chap10.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/stat3.html

Your personal desire to make revisionist history doesn't actually change anything. You've even attempted revisionist history on my posting where I said the US hasn't bombed civilian centers since WW2. Your either deluded or so full of hate that you couldn't see the truth if it smacked you across the face.

It needs one killer game that you can't get elsewhere. Do you think Halo would have done what it did for the XBox if it was also available for the PS2?

Yes, there is no way Halo could have done as well on the Xbox if it had shipped on other platforms too.

It needs one killer game that you can't get elsewhere. Do you think Halo would have done what it did for the XBox if it was also available for the PS2?

Yes, there is no way Halo could have done as well on the Xbox if it had shipped on other platforms too.

This is a real accomplishment in input innovation - even without considering the dynamic haptic feedback portion of the design.

Not really. I had one of these for my Super Nintendo back in the day. Sure, this controller might be more sensitive, but the idea itself isn't new.

Why this is news for nerds:

For tech nerds

This deals with a blog and the legal ramifications of posts in China. This may lead to administrators having to worry about assets in China and other oppressive countries.

Economics Nerds
In the very lengthy book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, the authors mention China and its extractive policies and economics and how its tremendous growth will end unless things change. On of those things is the corruption regarding privatization (things like well connected people getting rich for doing nothing other than knowing the right people). This shows that China is more than likely going to have some really bad times ahead - like the end of Soviet Russia.

And when I see American companies scrambling to get into China and moving operations there, I just shake my head and hope they get burned soon so I can jump into the vacuum they leave behind and make my own money or at the very least, pay my student loans.

Oops sorry, I'll have to retract that post. Looks like someone took care of it already.

Historically movies have been put out to "sell war" and FUD about alleged enemies of the US.

In tinfoil-hat land maybe, in the real world... not so much.

You are going to try and deny reality that is proven over your belief? Really? It is no secret that Hollywood worked for the MIC during WW II, The Korean War, and Vietnam War. This fact is most definitely not a conspiracy, it is reality. This is a reality you may not wish to hear or see, but the reality does exist.

If you knew of a book that showed how advertising uses subliminal messaging would you change your mind and consider that it could also happen in movies, or hide from that reality too? Here, Here, Here, and Here for starters. Those are just the tip of the iceberg mind you, and found in a 5 second Google search.

Denying reality to maintain a delusion is fine because we all do this. When you post in a public forum you are trying to persuade others to live in your delusion, and that is not fine.

For posterity, we all have delusions. It's how we make sense of the world and rationalize what we don't understand. Please don't take that comment as labeling you or insulting you, as that was not the intent.

Please provide a source for that claim because Amazon seems to contradict that:
http://aws.amazon.com/federal/

Being portrayed as a liar...by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

FTFY. Daniel Domscheit-Berg is behind this movie, as he was the book on which it's based. And it's my strong suspicion that Berg was either a CIA or FBI plant at WikiLeaks. He began sabotaging the operation almost from day one, attempted (successfully) to destroy many of its documents, and has actively participated in the concerted effort to discredit Assange ever since he got canned.

I would call him a "traitor," but that would imply that he was ever an actual ally.

Oh for fucks sake please stop engaging in such false equivalencies. I know you appended the smiley in an effort to make a joke of this, and this isn't aimed at you personally. Far too many people really think it isn't that bad, and we shouldn't say anything because we're not perfect either, and your post (meant in jest or not) feeds into that notion.

The United States may have put an inexperienced African-American in office ahead of a vastly more qualified female, but our gender (and other issues) are miniscule compared to how women are treated in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other places.

* Women are routinely murdered for stepping out of line, in despicable, dishonorable acts referred to by their perpetrators as "honor killings."
* Women who offend the sensibilities of the men of their family are often locked up for life in a room with no light, no sound, and no outside contact beyond a tray of food being shoved under a door, a practice that makes solitary confinement in the US and other western states look like a picnic in comparison. The result is almost universal madness on the part of the victim, usually within a relatively short time. This practice is so common and entrenched that there is a term for this facility, the "woman's room" (not to be confused with a restroom or loo)
* victims of rape are routinely charged and convicted of fornication, adultery, etc. for having the audacity of being a victim, and imprisoned or worse (see above). Worse, they are convicted merely on the word of a few men, while female testimony is dismissed (by law) and not considered as a counterweight. In many places, they are stoned to death.
* Even women who manage to escape all of this and are considered "upstanding" by the psychotic standards of the culture can, at best, expect to be buried in the desert with no record of their passing (no marker, no death record, nothing). This after a life in servitude and bondage.
* Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to leave the house without the company of a man, even if the man is a boy-child.
* Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive, on pain of severe punushment.

and the list goes on. Women drowned in front of their entire families in the family swimming pool. Women disfigured by acid for refusing the advances of a suiter, and so on and so on, ad nauseum.

People should read the book "Princess" by Jean Sasson, about the nightmare of being a Saudi Princess, arguably the most privileged and sheltered position a woman can occupy in that society. There are also several excellent, Iranian-made movies that depict, describe, and criticize the epidemic of female-stonings in that society, often with little or no evidence beyond the word of a husband keen to ditch his wife for a prettier woman, e.g. The Stoning of Soraya M.

It's appalling, and we in the west have betrayed everything we purport to stand for, year after year and decade after decade, by cozying up to such regimes and abusive societies.

I have actually argued for $800 toilet seats at my place of work. Once I was unable to hold out past 2pm, so I used the company facilities--and HALF a roll of toilet paper. Half the roll. Not only did I clog the toilet, but that evening when I showered it was quite painful due to a nasty rash I'd developed from improper hygiene.

My bathroom comes equipped with a shower, which I use when hygiene is required. You wouldn't fist your hands into a pile of cow manure and then wipe off with a paper towel before you prepare dinner, now would you? Why public facilities aren't equipped with the correct hygiene products is beyond me and, frankly, disturbing as all hell.

Yes. http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/#hipaa