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And the reason coffee prices were so high previously was Brazil's coffee-producing region experienced a four year drought.

Arguing based on a single data point while ignoring its context is silly. It's like people who've claimed Hurricane Sandy proves (or disproves) global warming.

It's a tad more complicated than that sadly. What they tried to do was replace nuclear with renewable sources. Unfortunately they chose wind and solar. 2 sources that when used on a small scale are not so bad. Unfortunately when you have a huge portion of your power grid running off them they generate a lot of problems. During the day Solar obviously works... and it doesn't at night. Then you have wind, which fluctuates almost at random. So now your grid is spiking and crashing. But your usage is not. Their other sources like Geothermal and Hydro are constant. You can't really get more power out of either. So you're left with Oil and Coal/Lignite to burn when the wind dies down and its night time. The problem there is that we are very good at burning fossil fuels efficiently when we're doing it consistently... unfortunately ramping up a coal plant in the middle of the night is terribly inefficient. Just like your car gets better gas millage when it's warm. So because they are now ramping up and shutting down their coal plants, those very plants are operating at about the worst efficiency they possibly could. Currently Germany has plans to build 16 new coal-fired and 15 new gas-fired power stations by 2020 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9559656/Germanys-wind-power-chaos-should-be-a-warning-to-the-UK.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-19/merkel-s-green-shift-forces-germany-to-burn-more-coal-energy.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/08/31/germany-insane-or-just-plain-stupid/

Well, according to this article, the neighbors don't want that exported electricity and it's causing problems with their grids.

Apparently, neither does the FTC.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-01/ftc-staff-said-to-formally-recommend-google-patent-suit.html

Guess what. FTC thinks Google's been abusing FRAND patents.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-01/ftc-staff-said-to-formally-recommend-google-patent-suit.html

Especially when you see what Motorola was doing to Microsoft. Microsoft licensed 2300 H264 patents for $6mil/year. Motorola wants $4 billion for their 50 H264 patents.

Apparently all these google fandroids cannot see blatant extortion even when you show the the facts.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-20/google-s-motorola-mobility-offers-to-settle-microsoft-cases.html
http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/06/googles-newest-h264-royalty-demand-is.html

It's not surprising that a Microsoft shill wouldn't be aware of the facts. Microsoft has been extorting money from Android OEM's and threatening others with lawsuits if they did not licence their worthless prior art ridden patents.

Especially when you see what Motorola was doing to Microsoft. Microsoft licensed 2300 H264 patents for $6mil/year. Motorola wants $4 billion for their 50 H264 patents.

Apparently all these google fandroids cannot see blatant extortion even when you show the the facts.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-20/google-s-motorola-mobility-offers-to-settle-microsoft-cases.html
http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/06/googles-newest-h264-royalty-demand-is.html

I tell everyone I can that telemarketers are scammers.

No exceptions.

After all, we're on the "Do Not Call List", these people ignore it thereby violating the law making them criminals.

Yes I know that charities and politicians are exempted but consider this, when it comes to charities, most if not ALL the money and then some goes to the telemarketer.

And as far as politicians are concerned, well, we all know they are liars and cheats - no exceptions.

And lastly, STOP GIVING or doing business over the phone!!! It only encourages these assholes!

And the Huffington Post is still down! I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district.

Looks like they sort of tried on Wall Street:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=iB520MWRNVP8

What's your address so I can send you a one way ticket to Vietnam or Cuba? Also say which one you'd prefer.

Are you certain Vietnam counts here? (Does anybody else find the name "Ho Chi Minh Stock Index" amusing?)

To put it simply:

You only get the 30GW when the sun is shining. There isn't enough battery capacity to store what isn't used for later. Therefore some fraction of that 30GW is not used to actually power anything. That fraction may be large or small.

No one is saying that you can't build a big solar plant infrastructure and have it output gigawatts. The problem is, if you have more production than you can use, then you either store it or it goes to "waste". And while there are methods for storing power like molten salt storage, they are not widespread and may have their own issues.

While we wait for these storage methods to be discovered, implemented and brought online, we still need base power generation for 24/7 load. That is currently the realm of fossil fuel, hydroelectric, and nuclear plants. Nuclear plants, if you remove the scare factor, are probably the least dangerous environmental threat, particularly if you keep up with the state of the art on them and allow them to be profitable. That isn't happening right now. It's like chaining someone to a lead weight and wondering why they aren't winning the 100m dash. Even I could beat an Olympic athlete if they have a ball and chain around their ankle.

I'll be honest, if stopping nuclear power in Germany is how things are going there, I'm actually wondering why Germany is getting *behind* environmentally. All of those nuclear plants going down aren't being replaced by solar, they are being replaced by coal plants for base load, because solar can't provide base load without a massive storage infrastructure.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-19/merkel-s-green-shift-forces-germany-to-burn-more-coal-energy.html

Son of BOSS is a real tax shelter, believe it or not. BOSS stands for Bond and Options Sales Strategy. Son of BOSS cost the US treasury billions in taxes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Boss

And Mr. Romney's IRA is something I'd like to know more about, too. Did you know IRA contributions such as his are limited to $30,000 a year? His IRA has at least 20 million and as much as 100 million, but let's be conservative and go with 20 million. It would take over six hundred years for 30k contributions to add up to 20 million. But Romney only worked at Bain for 15 years. This means his contributions cannot exceed $450,000. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-15/the-secret-behind-romney-s-magical-ira.html

That means Mr. Romney got a return of at least 44 times his initial investment. If you don't think that's suspicious, maybe you're the one wearing a tinfoil hat...

[Planned obsolescent products include] cars, especially those from one once big American car company, that recieved millions in bailout cash under this president.

In other words, not Ford. Unlike GM and Chrysler, Ford didn't take a dime of Bush's bridging loans, even though it did benefit a bit from herd immunity.

FYI, we already have solar-powered jet fuel made from algae. Virgin has already had test flights using the stuff.

You are wrong, inflation is what causes hoarding, not of that fiat, but of fiat hedges. But this is not a momentary result of the government printing money, it takes time and in case of USA it took 58 years for the country to default on its monetary obligations (71-13). What happens once the default occurs is obvious - the savings and productive investment capital starts leaving, going somewhere else. Of-course the same forces that destroy the currency allow the government power to grow uncontrollably (until the economy collapses and the government with it). People see inflation and look for hedges. Inflation is what pushed so many people around the world into the stock markets, where most people should never have gone. Others bought more and more government debt, not realizing that the gov't debt is denominated in the same currencies that are being destroyed (well, government propaganda machine knows what it's doing). Of-course today it's the Fed that monetizes all new long term debt of the Treasury, while private investors are moving out of the gov't debt.

Inflation is theft, people know it and they are worried about it.

Inflation eventually destroys the economy, it drives savings and investments out, causes prices to rise and hits those on fixed incomes the most, then those with some modest savings. Those who are working have their hourly wage reduced by inflation (that's how the Fed "controls" unemployment), this allows businesses to hire more because wages fall in real price, but eventually, as businesses leave due to the inflation and government that grows based on inflation, there are fewer and fewer businesses and eventually there are no more people who want to or can hire.

The minority with more wealth than others bid up prices of assets, moving their money out of currencies and into various commodities and of-course monetary metals.

You are wrong, inflation is what causes hoarding, not of that fiat, but of fiat hedges. But this is not a momentary result of the government printing money, it takes time and in case of USA it took 58 years for the country to default on its monetary obligations (71-13). What happens once the default occurs is obvious - the savings and productive investment capital starts leaving, going somewhere else. Of-course the same forces that destroy the currency allow the government power to grow uncontrollably (until the economy collapses and the government with it). People see inflation and look for hedges. Inflation is what pushed so many people around the world into the stock markets, where most people should never have gone. Others bought more and more government debt, not realizing that the gov't debt is denominated in the same currencies that are being destroyed (well, government propaganda machine knows what it's doing). Of-course today it's the Fed that monetizes all new long term debt of the Treasury, while private investors are moving out of the gov't debt.

Inflation is theft, people know it and they are worried about it.

Inflation eventually destroys the economy, it drives savings and investments out, causes prices to rise and hits those on fixed incomes the most, then those with some modest savings. Those who are working have their hourly wage reduced by inflation (that's how the Fed "controls" unemployment), this allows businesses to hire more because wages fall in real price, but eventually, as businesses leave due to the inflation and government that grows based on inflation, there are fewer and fewer businesses and eventually there are no more people who want to or can hire.

The minority with more wealth than others bid up prices of assets, moving their money out of currencies and into various commodities and of-course monetary metals.

Seeing as the US has not signed the treaty it should be declared null and void

Where'd you get that garbage from?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aEgU_TIgfK1U&refer=home

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/the-final-word-on-mitt-romney-s-tax-plan.html

Here is an institutional investor, he runs the largest bond fund in the world.

Quote:

The proportion of U.S. government and Treasury debt in Pacific Investment Management Co.â(TM)s $278 billion Total Return Fund dropped to 20 percent of assets in September from 21 percent the prior month, according to data released on the Newport Beach, California-based companyâ(TM)s website. Mortgages remained his largest holding at 49 percent. Pimco doesnâ(TM)t comment directly on monthly changes in its mutual funds.

Gross wrote in his monthly investment commentary last week that the U.S. will no longer be the first destination of global capital in search of safe returns unless fiscal spending and debt growth slows, saying the nation âoefrequently pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth.â Mortgages have accounted for 50 percent of the fund holdings since January as Gross correctly bet the Federal Reserve would announce a new round of monetary stimulus using the securities.

Why do the world investors accept a lower yield for US government bond that German government bond?

- because 'world investors' are not buying long term US debt. The Federal Reserve is buying long term US debt, the US banks are buying long term US debt, other central banks are holding US debt, but nobody in his right mind buys long term US debt as an investment. Short term paper is trading still, and pension funds are (unfortunately for the pensioners) mandated to be in "least risky assets", and since the government defines 'least risky assets' to be its own debt, the pensioners will bear the consequences of the US debt and dollar crisis.

The rating agency that works for the buyers and not the sellers downgraded US debt a couple of times and now it is under investigation for that. That's what the gov't is worried about - somebody changing the status of its debt to not be least risky, but to actually a very much risky asset, and then the pension funds will finally not have to be in US Treasury bonds.

That's the reason the US gov't is fighting Egan-Jones.

The real interest rates for US Treasury bonds are negative, and you, personally, would give US gov't money for 10, 20, 30 years, you may as well just throw it into a fire.

Let us know when you successfully run the largest software company on the planet.

You'd have to get past Tim and Larry first.

Google Passes Microsoft’s Market Value as PC Loses to Web

Google Inc. (GOOG) has surpassed Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to become the world’s second-largest technology company as computing over the Internet reduces demand for software installed on desktop machines.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-01/google-passes-microsoft-s-market-value-as-pc-loses-to-web.html

The real problem is that there is too much fake money that people do not personally feel attached to, because it's created by the main counterfeiters of the world - the central banks, and because starting a competing exchange is nearly impossible.

How about this for a story:

In April, motivated by what I consider pure maliciousness, the SEC initiated a âoecease and desistâ administrative proceeding it deemed âoenecessary for the protection of investors and in the public interestâ against Egan-Jones Ratings Co., a privately owned, 20-person firm based in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and against its principal owner, Sean Egan.

Do you know what the alleged crimes are?

Here:

Now, incredibly, Egan-Jones is the sole rater that the SEC has decided to attack. The trouble for the firm started on July 16, 2011, when Egan-Jones downgraded the U.S.â(TM)s sovereign debt by one notch, to AA+ from AAA. Egan-Jones cited âoethe relatively high level of debt and the difficulty in significantly cutting spending.â Two days later, the SECâ(TM)s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations contacted the firm seeking information about its rating decision. (The next month, S&P also downgraded the U.S.â(TM)s sovereign debt, but neither Moodyâ(TM)s nor Fitch did.)

Then, on Oct. 12, Egan-Jones received a call from the SEC notifying the firm of a Wells Notice, an indication that it was being investigated. On April 5 of this year, Egan-Jones again downgraded the U.S. sovereign debt, to AA from AA+. On April 19, leaks started emanating from the SEC that it had voted to start an âoeadministrative law proceedingâ against the firm. And on April 24, the SEC filed its complaint.

The crime is that this one agency is not paid by the sellers of the bonds but instead it's paid by the buyers of the bonds, and the buyers have an incentive to have debt rated properly, so that they know their risk.

Of-course AFAIC US bonds are junk.

So you think SEC is interested in really dealing with HFT and whatever you think is market manipulation?

Think again, the only thing it is interested in is protecting the fake rating of the sovereign debt, so that the US gov't can keep piling it on.

Groklaw suggests, rather shockingly, that Apple's lawyers might have been a little selective in how they presented some of this evidence to the court, by picking little parts of it that offered a different shade of nuance."

The primary thing this tells us is that Groklaw is so biased on this matter that they aren't thinking straight. Let's apply just a bit of common sense:

These are Samsung documents. Apple obviously does not have the power to hide the contents of Samsung's own documents. As is commonly the case, some court documents were redacted for the public to protect the proprietary interests of the companies involved (Samsung, in this case). That does not mean that the jury did not get to see them. It appears that Samsung now thinks it is in its interest to make the documents public.

Groklaw is trying to get us to believe that the jury's decision that Samsung intentionally copied Apple was based entirely on an out-of-context quite from this document. There's something a bit fishy there. If Apple quoted something from Samsung's documents out of context, wouldn't Samsung's lawyers have been at pains to quote the correct context? You'd think so, wouldn't you? Unless, of course, this document was not actually as pivotal as Groklaw (and presumably Samsung) now would like us to believe. Could it be that the jury did not base its judgment solely--or even primarily--on this document? Could it be that the jury saw much more compelling evidence that Samsung's copying was intentional?

Say for instance a detailed Samsung report comparing Samsung's product to Apple's feature by feature and recommending that Samsung emulate Apple's design choices?

Or perhaps emails showing that Google warned Samsung that its products were infringing upon Apple's designs?

This is kind of sad. Groklaw did some nice reporting on the SCO lawsuit. But when it comes to Apple and Samsung, they seem to have gone off the rails.

As an aside I was talking to a truck driver as I loaded him up (45 tonnes of bulk) and he said with the new generation of big diesel rigs with scads of horsepower (600 is typical) and lots of torque (pulling along at 1500 rpm is easy) that he gets fantastic fuel economy. On flat roads while crusing, he gets about 6 mpg! That's amazing fuel economy for a big rig!

Daimler (of Daimler-Benz) has been working for years on a 10mpg tractor trailer.
They've finally managed 9+mpg under real world conditions and 10+mpg using a streamlined trailer on a test track.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-30/daimler-unveils-big-rig-50-percent-more-efficient-than-average.html
Part of the magic is extensive aero tweaks and the other part is a fancy diesel engine from Detroit (tm)

The difference between 6mpg and 9mpg is 50%, which is an enormous amount of savings for a trucking company or a driver who owns his own truck.

Meanwhile, we're throwing away $ 40 billion every month "until the economy improves". For me, that puts many things in perspective.
If we're going to flush money down the toilet, this seems like a much more potentially constructive way to do it.

The summary has a different link than the (broken) one I submitted. Try this one

The case may undermine a legal doctrine the Federal Circuit has adopted to extend the rights of patent holders. Under the so-called conditional sale exemption, patent holders can enforce their rights even after making a sale of the covered product. The doctrine has given patent holders the power to enforce restrictions against downstream purchasers...The Obama administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, told the justices that the conditional sale doctrine is inconsistent with the 2008 ruling. Even so, Verrilli said the court should reject the appeal because the Federal Circuit didn’t focus on the conditional sale issue in the Monsanto case.

Actually, Dow Chemical owns UCC since 2001 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Chemical_Company#Bhopal_disaster but thank you for the correction, I misremembered the acquisition of UCC, whose subsidiary UCIL ran the Bhopal plant.

Monsanto, however, is a global company with 21,000 employees in 404 facilities in 66 countries, not a US one; here is a list of worldwide facilities from their web site: http://www.monsanto.com/whoweare/pages/our-locations.aspx

Likewise, Caterpillar does it's manufacturing close to its customers in various countries: http://www.caterpillar.com/company/global-footprint

Case tractors are also manufactured outside the US in many instances: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_IH#Factory_locations ; most of the engines used in the US models are manufactured in Brazil.

General Electric, which manufactures most of the train locomotives used in the US, makes nearly 2/3rds of its money outside the US, and has reduced their US workforce by 1/5 from 2002 to 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?scp=2&sq=ge&st=cse

I'll point out that most steel beams used in large construction are manufactured in China and shipped over for use in the US, since the US no longer has the facilities to manufacture them; for example, most of the recent San Francisco Bay Bridge superstructure is from China: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-11/sf-bay-bridge-gets-5-300-ton-delivery-from-china.html

The other stuff is transient local infrastructure (why bring in concrete from another country, unless you are talking pre-stressed concrete girders, which, again, tend to get shipped from China).

So tell me again how the US is doing?

where are you getting this 10 years stuff?

This ten year stuff is a quote the juror gave Bloomberg in an interview

Hogan, in a phone interview yesterday, denied that there was any misconduct, saying the court instructions for potential jurors required disclosure of any litigation they were involved in within the last 10 years -- and that the 1993 bankruptcy and related litigation involving Seagate fell well outside that time range.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-03/samsung-claims-jury-foreman-misconduct-tainted-apple-case.html

It might not be in the transcript, perhaps it was in written instructions - I don't know the procedure

He was asked if he was involved in any lawsuits within the last ten years, which he answered. The lawsuit with Seagate occurred in 1993 which is beyond ten years ago. Thus, he did not disclose it because it wasn't asked of him. But let's pretend he attempted to deceive the system in order to screw over Samsung because that sounds better, right?

(emphasis mine)

Where do you get "within the last ten years", it is not in the summary, the article, or the unredacted filing, which says:

“you or a family member or someone very close to you [has] ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff, a defendant, or as a witness?” (Reporter’s Transcript (“RT”) 148:18-21), he disclosed one such lawsuit but failed to disclose two others, including one in which he was sued by his former employer, Seagate, for breach of contract after he failed to repay a promissory note (RT 148:22-150:12; Seagate Tech., Inc. v. Hogan, Case No. MS-93-0919 (Santa Cruz Mun. Ct. June 30, 1993), Declaration of Susan Estrich (“Estrich Decl.”) Ex. A), and filed for personal bankruptcy six months later (In re Velvin R. Hogan and Carol K. Hogan, Case No. 93-58291-MM (Bankr. N.D. Cal. Dec. 27, 1993); Estrich Decl., Ex. B).

It's in several other articles since:

Hogan, in a phone interview yesterday, denied that there was any misconduct, saying the court instructions for potential jurors required disclosure of any litigation they were involved in within the last 10 years -- and that the 1993 bankruptcy and related litigation involving Seagate fell well outside that time range.

“Had I been asked an open-ended question with no time constraint, of course I would’ve disclosed that,” Hogan said, referring to the bankruptcy and related litigation. “I’m willing to go in front of the judge to tell her that I had no intention of being on this jury, let alone withholding anything that would’ve allowed me to be excused.”

Note: I'm not saying he's right and the Samsung brief is wrong - just that that's where the 10 year claim comes from.
If you have a PACER account, you should be able to pull up the Court Reporter's transcript from voir dire, and see what question was asked.

"I hate it," Wozniak said when asked about the patent fights between Apple and Samsung. "I don't think the decision of California will hold. And I don't agree with it -- very small things I don't really call that innovative."

The problem was not the aircraft and was not the oxygen flow. The solution was found to be overinflation of the pilots upper G-suit ("Combat Edge") that had been occuring for years and in aircraft such as the F-16 and F-15 but no on noticed it then.

Here is a link to the USAF describing the problem and fix:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-24/oxygen-problem-with-f-22-now-solved-pentagon-s-little-says.html

As a secondary precaution the F-22 is also having a particle filter removed from the air supply (the topic of this Slashdot article) but this is not the primary fix.

The "Raptor cough" which (nugget?) pilots got spooked about is actually common for pilots flying all high-performance jets after performing high-G manuevers. It just happens that the performance of the F-22 is good enough that a lot of these maneuvers can be performed before energy bleeds off enough you can pull them (that is, the Raptor can use them to end nearly all Within Visual Range training encounters - although lesser aircraft occasionally beat less experienced Raptor pilots from time-to-time, which opponents of the Raptor love to crow about). The medical name of this acceleration-induced coughing is.
acceleration atelectasis
Please refer to: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/combat-edge-anti-g-ensemble-might-be-causing-raptors-oxygen-woes-372642/

So please could everyone stop with the media-included scaremongering and stop blaming the F-22 or invoke spooky and mysterious illnessed that pilots of that aircraft are afflicted with (ignoring that fact that the G-suit issue and acceleration atelectatis occurs on other aircraft, just less often because the F-15 and F-16 are relatively lower performance [lol, never thought I'd say that] compared to the F-22).

Now you whippersnappers get off my flight deck!

He already is. (imprisoned indefinitely without trial)

There is a difference, an important one - any day Assange wants, he can surrender to the police from whom he fled after losing his court appeals, return to Sweden, answer the formal questions from prosecutors before charges are filed (as is the way in the Swedish legal system), and then face trail over the accusations of serial sex crimes. At present Assange is in a cell of his own choosing - he imprisons himself.

65% http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-10/google-s-u-s-search-market-share-rises-to-65-3-yahoo-declines.html

"If the effects are as big as purported, and if the work really is relevant to humans, why aren't the North Americans dropping like flies? GM has been in the food chain for over a decade over there - and longevity continues to increase inexorably," he said in an emailed comment.

Actually, life expectancy is decreasing in North America.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-09/life-expectancy-in-the-u-s-drops-for-first-time-since-1993-report-says.html

Where are the lawyers from Samsung when you need them?
Probably enjoying a few drinks with the lawyers from HTC before preparing for courtroom battle.

Sure can would you like more? This one also references Samsung suing Fujitsu as well in 2003. Samsung is just as much complicit in patent madness as anyone else. They are hardly innocent bystanders. There are more that can be found with additional searching.

Apple's definition of FRAND is (in typical Apple fasion) vastly distorted.

Apple's claim: Samsung wanted more for their patents than any other company has asked Apple in licensing fees. Note: This is NOT a violation of FRAND. Licensing fees for patents are proportional to the value of those patents. Apple said the fees were too much and chose not to pay.

Samsung's claim: Samsung asked Apple for the same amount of money they have asked from other licensees. This is the very definition of the "Non-Discriminatory" part of FRAND.

"In his cross-examination, Teece was presented with a letter from Samsung dated July 25, 2011 where the company proposed Apple pay a 2.4% royalty rate to license technology from any of 86 patents. Since the patents in question are deemed standards-essential, they should be licensed under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, but the 2.4% rate was never before levied to a licensee."

And: The lawyer showed Teece a July 2011 letter from Samsung to Apple proposing the iPhone maker pay the 2.4 percent rate to license any of 86 patents. Samsung had never published the rate, and “you have no evidence that Samsung has ever asked any other company for such a rate,” Mueller said.

So, do you have a citation for your claim that "Samsung asked Apple for the same amount of money they have asked from other licensees"?

Well, here you go.
44% of Tea Partiers reported to be "born again Christians" as opposed to the 33% of non-Tea Partiers.

Also, your own link can be used for my citation. It states that 34% of Tea Partiers are white evangelical. The US average is 26% evangelical (which I believe includes all those non-white churches, shrug). Notice the trend there. So, you know, thanks for helping me out there.

Manufacturing in general is losing jobs. Not only in the US but in third world countries like China and Mexico because of efficiency increases.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRI4bAft7Xw4

It's a reprise of what happened 50 years earlier when farms became mechanized. It is an inexorable inevitable trend that machines will replace humans in routine tasks.

The fact is that manufacturing as an economic sector in the US is doing fine. To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of demise are much exaggerated.

The US is easily the world's most productive manufacturing nation in terms of output value per hour, and also has the largest manufacturing economy in the world.

http://www.nam.org/Statistics-And-Data/Facts-About-Manufacturing/Landing.aspx
http://www.seeitmarket.com/u-s-still-in-the-business-of-making-things/
http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

The United States of America achieved the highest Output Value Per Hour of all countries in the world by doing one thing - making super high valued items - like Stealth Fighter planes, Nuclear Submarines, Super-computers, and CPUs.

Except for the last item, which is produced by the millions, the rest of those super-high-valued items are not mass-produced - at least not mass produced to achieve the economy of scale.

That lies the problem.

The USA may be the biggest exporters of the world because there is still a great demand for those super-high-valued items - especially the weapons

And others are catching up.

Take the CPUs - Intel has been raking in truckloads of $$$ by producing CPUs that are worth much more than their weight in gold, since the 1980's.

Nowadays, however, Intel is increasing feeling the heat - competition is heating up. No, not from AMD, but from other companies which made ARM chips, and there are a lot of them - From TI of USA to Samsung of Korea to Nvidia of Taiwan to Allwinner of China

There _are_ competitors to other super-high-value items produced by USA, but fortunately, for the time being, the competitors aren't very well financed or don't have the required technology yet.

But that doesn't mean the competitors don't play catch up. They do, and they are catching up, fast.

Nowadays USA is not the only one capable of producing stealth fighters. Russia, Japan, Europe and China all have their own versions of stealth fighters.

What does that leave USA, then?

To innovate? Or to destroy their competitors, before they can play catch up?

If USA were to be run by those who is running Apple, Inc., no doubt the choice would be the latter.

Fortunately, the USA government hasn't yet completely relinquished its sovereignty to Cupertino.
 

Manufacturing in general is losing jobs. Not only in the US but in third world countries like China and Mexico because of efficiency increases.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRI4bAft7Xw4

It's a reprise of what happened 50 years earlier when farms became mechanized. It is an inexorable inevitable trend that machines will replace humans in routine tasks.

The fact is that manufacturing as an economic sector in the US is doing fine. To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of demise are much exaggerated.

The US is easily the world's most productive manufacturing nation in terms of output value per hour, and also has the largest manufacturing economy in the world.

http://www.nam.org/Statistics-And-Data/Facts-About-Manufacturing/Landing.aspx
http://www.seeitmarket.com/u-s-still-in-the-business-of-making-things/
http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

Yes, but Samsung just dropped $4B more into the US economy... Asians who outsource here!

Meanwhile, Apple, a US company, chooses to take all of the business they can away from Samsung, and over to others in China. At the same time, many of their Chinese vendors have openly complained that Apple uses it's bargaining power to force lower margins, to the point of short term losses at times, than they would otherwise negotiate. Apple has so few people employed in R&D that one of their more recent job postings was for an engineer to design dock connectors. How can they not have several in house engineers waiting for work??? Besides marketing, the only "real" jobs they keep in the US are R&D... Apple store clerk and phone support counts about as much as saying McDonald's is a major employer of college grads.

So yeah, Samsung does their production globally including lots in China, but they make sure they stimulate the economies everywhere they go, playing to each locality's strengths. Frankly, they are acting very responsibly within the context of a global economy.

Yep - those number seems about right

A range of $12-$30 has been suggested for labour costs at $1.78/hr. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57382995-1/iphone-manufacturing-costs-revealed/

Other have suggested as little as $6-$7 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-11/iphone-assembly-suggests-yuan-gain-wouldn-t-narrow-trade-gaps.html

Your example of $42k per year is around $21/hr (assuming 40-hr weeks with and 50 weeks per year), so about $12x higher than $1.78/hr and would add $140-$360 per phone.

$42k per year seems high for basic assembly line work so probably more like $100-$250 per phone. And if the lower labour range is more accurate then something like $50-$150 per phone - certainly not the stupid numbers some other people have been throwing around.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-14/nokia-apple-payments-to-nokia-settle-all-litigation.html

The government already has methods of taking over some phones. Them having a list of phones just seems logical..
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-29/spyware-matching-finfisher-can-take-over-iphone-and-blackberry.html

However, he owns a patent. This is an obvious conflict of interest.

No it's not.

Clearly you have never read the 6th amendment. Impartiality is required.

This would be something like a person who owns and profits from copyright sitting on the jury in a case where someone was being sued for copyright infringement.

No it's not. But only a really really really [insert infinite more reallys] bad lawyer would let that person remain on the jury. Do you know how jury selection works? Sure doesn't sound like it.

Did you know that lawyers can't do background checks and ask anything they want to potential jurors during selection? You also state "remain" implying a person is already on a jury, implying jury selection has already occurred. Nice.

he clearly states he was trying to expedite the whole process to avoid being hung up on actually looking at evidence.

No he doesn't. You clearly have reading comprehension problems.

Have you watched the interview? He clearly talks about skipping over anything that wasn't unanimous. So instead of having debates and discussing evidence, he would sidebar it and move on. He claims this made it "easier" to do the hard things, but that makes no sense and he doesn't elaborate. This is consistent with what I said: he tried to hurry along the process. Moving all discussion in a case into one big lump sum at the end when 95% of the questions have been answered? That sounds an awful lot like trying to give people a reason to rush the process, and I don't see any reason aside from rushing that one would skip over a question just because they actually needed to deliberate on it. That's what juries are supposed to do. Why avoid deliberation? Feel free to watch yourself.

This makes me curious if being a negligent juror is actually a federal crime. If it's not, it should be.

Fuck your sig, I'm modding you troll. I'm so sick and tired of seeing you post shit that's blatantly incorrect. Almost every post I've see of yours has two things in common -- they try to ruffle feathers and they contain fallacies. At this point, I'm pretty sure you know you're wrong all the time and you're just a clever troll. If you want to stop being downmodded stop being a douche bag, don't whine about it in your sig.

Because ad-hominem comments are the best way to indicate to someone any issue in their argument. Presenting facts is hard, isn't it? Why are you so angry?

Groklaw is an obviously anti-patent site. Don't quote them as authority on mainstream patent law.

The whole point of this article is that the average juror isn't smart enough for these cases (forgetting the 7th Amendment).

Now we have a foreman with a patent, and he's too smart? Catch-22 much? I guess we need these ivory tower philosopher kings to administer your "software and hardware should be free, fuck Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution" ethos.

"The foreman told a court representative that the jurors had reached a decision without needing the instructions."

Fucking lie. Stop relying on Groklaw and listen to the actual foreman's interview:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/apple-vs-samsung-foreman-we-focused-on-evidence-eRnU07ChTjeV8MuvEiBSxw.html

America is doing evil things. Those who do evil things deserve to die.

America as a whole deserves to die? I'm curious, when did you acquire a taste for genocide?

Those who do evil things deserve to die.

By the way, does that include Assange?

The treachery of Julian Assange

Julian Assange and Europe's Last Dictator

In December 2010, Israel Shamir, a WikiLeaks associate and an intimate friend of Julian Assange -- so close, in fact, that he outed the Swedish women who claim to be victims of rape and sexual assault by Assange -- allegedly travelled to Belarus with a cache of unredacted American diplomatic cables concerning the country. He reportedly met Lukashenko's chief of staff, Vladimir Makei, handed over the documents to the government, and stayed in the country to "observe" the presidential elections.

When Lukashenko pronounced himself the winner on 19 December 2010 with nearly 80 per cent of the vote, Belarusians reacted by staging a mass protest. Lukashenko dispatched the state militia. As their truncheons bloodied the squares and streets of the capital, Minsk, Shamir wrote a story in the American left-wing journal Counterpunch extolling Lukashenko ("The president of Belarus ... walks freely among his people"), deriding the dictator's opponents ("The pro-western 'Gucci' crowd", Shamir called them), and crediting WikiLeaks with exposing America's "agents" in Belarus ("WikiLeaks has now revealed how... undeclared cash flows from the U.S. coffers to the Belarus 'opposition' ").

The following month, Soviet Belarus, a state-run newspaper, began serializing what it claimed to be extracts from the cables gifted to Lukashenko by WikiLeaks. Among the figures "exposed" as recipients of foreign cash were Andrei Sannikov, a defeated opposition presidential candidate presently serving a five-year prison sentence; Oleg Bebenin, Sannikov's press secretary, who was found dead in suspicious circumstances months before the elections; and Vladimir Neklyayev, the writer and former president of Belarus PEN, who also ran against Lukashenko and is now under house arrest.

Did Assange at this point repudiate Shamir or speak up against Lukashenko? No. Instead he upbraided Ian Hislop for publishing an article in the Private Eye that exposed Shamir as a Holocaust denier and white supremacist. There was, he claimed, a "conspiracy" against him by "Jewish" journalists at the Guardian. Addicted to obedience from others and submerged in a swamp of conspiracy theories, Assange's reflexive reaction to the first hint of disagreement by his erstwhile friends was to hold malign Jews responsible.

Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange in Rape Investigation

I don't know why I bother... but let us continue anyway.

Truthiness? No, when it's been tested in court, it's actually true. It's isn't "truthiness" just because you don't want to believe it.

It has been tested in a court. Appeals will surely follow. However, US != world, there have been different verdicts around the world. How's this for an example.

Do you have any links to back this up? It's obvious that Equador is independent of the US's control, but this is the first time I've heard of long term exclusivity contracts on Equador's oil contracts.

Maybe not exclusivity... but consider:

Petroecuador was to hold a 60 percent stake in the joint venture, and Sinopec the remaining 40 percent

China hands over $1bn for Ecuador oil

China's CNPC in talks with Ecuador over $12.5 bln refinery

Ecuador’s Rating Raised By S&P On China Loans, Oil Proceeds