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Even the National Highway Traffic Administration says measured active THC levels can't be correlated with impairment:

"It is difficult to establish a relationship between a person's THC blood or plasma concentration and performance impairing effects ... It is inadvisable to try and predict effects based on blood THC concentrations alone." - http://www.businessinsider.com...

Also, given the difference in absorption rates between edibles and smoking, it's possible for someone who ate it to be more impaired but give a lower reading than someone who smoked it. - http://www.theverge.com/2012/1...

Oddly though, the Medical Examiner, who normally takes photos of the deceased, did not take photos of Brown. His/her reason? The battery was flat on his/her camera.

Sometimes these things happen, but it strikes me as a little strange that he/she didn't have a spare battery, spare camera, or even a camera phone... and presumably didn't ask if anyone else at the scene had one either. Thus leaving a _slight_ evidence gap... which someone far more suspicious than myself might suggest is the kind of gap you need if you want to [ahem] massage the facts after the event.

First off, the camera phone almost certainly would not be acceptable for the ME's use here--do you really want to imagine the results of any leaks of autopsy photos? This is also why borrowed cameras of any type are a no-go.

Secondly, the lack of a spare battery? On the whole, outside of big cities ME's offices are so poorly funded it ought to be notorious. Because of the security and privacy issues, it's got to be an office camera. Because of this, odds are depressingly good that many Medical Examiners' officers have only got one camera, which was probably either donated by somebody or bought cheap, and unless it either uses a standard sized battery or came one then there are no spare batteries.

The gap isn't desirable in the least, but neither is the risk of leaks. Funding MEs better, and taking steps to ensure this can't easily be a problem, is the ideal course here.

Someone did manage to find a working camera to get photos of Darren Wilson's injuries though. Wilson has said that he had been hit twice by Brown and was of the opinion that a third punch "could be fatal if he hit me right". IMHO his injuries don't look... well, they're practically invisible, let's be honest! That's not to say he wasn't in a compromised position and felt in fear of his life, but I'm not completely convinced he was in any danger of being punched to death.

Punching somebody to death is actually disturbingly easy to do by accident, and one of the reasons trained fighters can be wary of untrained people in the ring--part of the training is actually to ensure you know how to use appropriate force. Blunt force, it turns out, is a blunt force solution with all that implies.

Injuries caused by blunt force, meanwhile, tend to take a while to 'blossom'--and I've known people who showed absolutely no sign externally for over a day, even when it was a rather significant injury. This is why it's actually not that weird for somebody to have what looks like it ought to have been a painful bruise to get, without a clue how they got it--and why you should never take the lack of external bruising or swelling as proof against if somebody thinks they may have a broken bone. (My aunt ended up walking on a broken leg for a day precisely because my grandmother made that mistake.)

Oddly though, the Medical Examiner, who normally takes photos of the deceased, did not take photos of Brown. His/her reason? The battery was flat on his/her camera.

Sometimes these things happen, but it strikes me as a little strange that he/she didn't have a spare battery, spare camera, or even a camera phone... and presumably didn't ask if anyone else at the scene had one either. Thus leaving a _slight_ evidence gap... which someone far more suspicious than myself might suggest is the kind of gap you need if you want to [ahem] massage the facts after the event.

Someone did manage to find a working camera to get photos of Darren Wilson's injuries though. Wilson has said that he had been hit twice by Brown and was of the opinion that a third punch "could be fatal if he hit me right". IMHO his injuries don't look... well, they're practically invisible, let's be honest! That's not to say he wasn't in a compromised position and felt in fear of his life, but I'm not completely convinced he was in any danger of being punched to death.

Interestingly, immediately after the Browns death, a photo was circulating on the intertubes purporting to be of Wilson's injured face, apparently worded to discredit the idea that Brown was a "Gentle Giant". This picture has itself since been discredited... but I only just found out today, so I thought it was worth mentioning!

For what it's worth, I am really really not taking sides here. I'm perfectly happy to believe that Brown wasn't exactly a pillar of society... his apparent intimidation of a local shop owner and, I believe taking of goods without paying, immediately prior to his encounter with Wilson, do kind of suggest that. But I am very firmly of the opinion that officers of the law must be held to higher standards than the general public.

Also the idea that the french are lazy or unproductive is also false

Ok, I'll bite. m:tier, a two-person company worth about 100,000 Pounds Sterling, that has been around for 6 years is your poster child? A company that has a single reference on its web site for a, and I quote:

We have been using the M:Tier CompliantBSD complete Desktop and Office solution since 2008 to provide an extremely secure and stable environment for up to 350 users across diverse geographical locations.

And somehow you want us to believe this is evidence that BSD is competitive on the desktop with over a billion Windows installations, or 66 million Macs in use?

I think you just proved my point. When everyone else has thought about what to run and made their decision, a billion chose Windows, 66 million chose a Mac, and a few hundred chose OpenBSD. OpenBSD has so few users, it has trouble keeping the lights on, literally.

There is a fleetingly small number of companies with BSD on the desktop, virtually all are involved with supporting BSD in the data center (including m:tier), and they all involve a very small number of folks.

Actually, a lot of companies have a moral compass, even "evil" ones. I mean, do you consider Apple evil because they sue over patents?

Um, if it makes Apple "evil" to protect their IP from being directly ripped off by well-heeled competitors (cough, Samsung, cough), then I think you need to adjust your definition of "evil".

I mean, if you were the CEO of Apple, what would you have done in that instance? I mean, look at the Techcrunch article with the "Before iPhone" and "After iPhone" Samsung pictures. Tell me you wouldn't have been incensed, probably moved to litigation.

In Seattle the average work day for a man is also 13% longer, much fewer men take maternity leave and many more men actually do work long hours at the day's end.

A woman with the same dedication to work as a man in the same exact position with the same experience will make same or more money, since apparently women have more education then men do.

Yahoo! CEOs:
Scott Thompson

Compensation for 2012
Salary $377,240
Bonus $1,500,000
Restricted stock awards $14,047,995
All other compensation $21,164
Option awards $8,333,084
Total Compensation $24,279,483
Stock Ownership for 2012
Number of shares owned 757,788

Marissa Mayers

Mayer's pay from Yahoo has totaled an estimated $214 million.

As a result of the rise in the stock price, Equilar calculates, Ms. Mayerâ(TM)s $56 million package had grown to be worth about $186 million as of the end of last year, after Ms. Mayer forfeited some of the stock for failure to meet some performance requirements. In addition, Ms. Mayer was awarded $12.47 million worth of restricted stock in early 2013 that had grown to $23.7 million by year-end. Add in $4.3 million in cash paid to Ms. Mayer, and the figure rises to about $214 million for 15 months of work.

That would be because the problem was by and large resolved.

Metal prices can fluctuate by several orders of magnitude in the short term. They can fluctuate to a moderate degree in the mid-term. But the long-term trend of metals as a whole is almost always downward (excepting "investment metals", which are inherently distorted by investors). There's no shortage of anything in the crust. The crust is unimaginably massive. It's always a question of what you've found, what extraction processes you've gotten mature enough to compete, and what infrastructure you've actually built. As a general rule, most resource "reserves" rise over time, not drop, because each tech advancement tends to put exponentially more resource into play.

Ten-thousand hours (~3.4 years if a regular job)

Where did that come from? 10000/3.4 = 2941 hours per year. Nobody works that. The average full time *American* works less than 1800 year, and has since the 70s. Other countries full time work even less.

A 2000+ hr work year is a fiction

If you are working 2000+ hrs for someone else your probably being exploited. Take a good hard look at what you are doing and whether its worth it. Most people do NOT have to work that much. And they probably get paid just as well as you. The average full time employee works 1700 hours. (They get PAID for another 200-300 though for holidays, vacation, sick/personal days etc. So the work year might still add up to around 2000... but you shouldn't actually be working that. (This is just one reason, (along with medical and other benefits) why contractors need to charge more... they're not being paid for those 200-300 hours.)

If you are working 2000+ hours for yourself, and just making ends meet, (ie its not a choice) then you need to take a hard look at your business.

If you are working 2000+ hours for yourself, and making out like a bandit, well... good on you... you can afford to life a more balanced life, and you probably should, but the choice is yours.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

I had to google "shirtstorm" to see what you're talking about... holy shit there is no hope left for society.

Business Insider posted compare-and-contrast photographs of the live-streaming Matt Taylor in his lingerie tee-shirt and tattoos and his female counterparts in the control room for India's Mars landing.

The only thing needed to complete the picture was Google Glass.

Rosetta Scientist Pisses Off Twitter With A Shirt Covered In Half-Naked Women

It's quite clear in this video that Taylor knows he screwed up badly here. Rosetta mission scientist Dr. Matt Taylor cries during apology over 'offensive' shirt

I mean, getting removed from iMessage is not really something that Apple planned.

Even if you deregister from iMessage, it might take 45(!!!) days till your phone number gets removed from all databases.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Yes, the most important racism out there is affirmative action.

If my wife hears about this, she's liable to want us to go out and get cable again.

HBO is going to have a standalone service in the near future.

So, look at this through the eyes of the defender, in the context of breaches of other sites. Put aside ethics, right/wrong, law, etc.; what this comes down to is a security breach when viewed from the defender's perspective, right?

Okay, so when you look at past breaches, what do you find...breakdowns in basic security. Sony wasn't patching, Home Depot wasn't watching their security monitoring, etc. While many vendors and researchers are trying to come up with novel security products and solutions to solve exotic problems in unique ways, what's actually happening is entities aren't following Security 101.

There are signs that this has happened with Tor as well. Silk Road 2.0, for example, was registered using "Blake@Benthall.net," which is about as NON-anonymous as you can possibly get. It's not only giving up the name, it's the name as it's tied to a very specific "Blake Benthall," so that law enforcement wouldn't even have to set about figuring out which Blake Benthall it was. A quick warrant request, a fax to the hosting provider behind "Benthall.net," and the guy is toast. This is not very fucking good security, at a fundamental level. And even worse, it was what got Ulbricht, the original operator of Silk Road, caught.

The argument could be made that only some domains were hit because others were out of reach due to where they were hosted; I don't buy this. In the past, it's been possible to get significant disruption of even the most unreachable systems through a number of means. This is why the RBL "broke up" and went to ground; even being out of the reach of law enforcement didn't mean their IP space couldn't get blackholed by ICANN, for example, or domains ignored by upstream TLD resolvers in the DNS hierarchy. I do believe that this "out of reach" potential was why hundreds of domains were shut down, but only 17 people were arrested. But if there were a fundamental issue with TOR itself, I don't see why they couldn't (and wouldn't) take down all of the sites they would want to hit at one blow. But now three of the top six drug-sale sites are still up, including the one that was second-largest, Agora.

So this looks more to me like the variability of operational security among the operators of the different domains, and poor security by those that got hit.

Seems Ted Cruz is not wasting any time in opposing Obama on Net Neutrality by calling it "ObamaCare for the Internet", a laughably stupid hyperbolic statement only a complete moron would make -- unfortunately, he's got a support base of tens of millions even bigger morons who will think this idiotic statement is actually accurate.

Citation provided as requested: Business Insider, Feb 18, 2011: The REAL Death of Music Industry.

I had a quick search to fact check your post, and it doesn't really seem accurate. It seems 12.9% of oil comes from Persian Gulf countries (i.e. the Middle Eastern nations where war is a problem), whilst 14% of European oil comes from the same place, so there's little in it:

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/...

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/art...

The gulf is bigger for Africa (US 5%, EU 21%) but apart from a temporary foray into Libya for a few months the nations in question aren't nations where there has been any Western intervention for a long time.

Which isn't to say EU's energy purchases aren't a problem, as the whole Ukraine crisis has shown the EU needs to cut dependence on Russian gas and oil.

But ultimately your claim that the EU should be stabilising the middle east because it uses more oil is basically false, given there's a mere 1.1% gap in purchases between the EU and US from the major problem areas in middle east where American blood keeps getting spilled.

Your argument is irrelevant however, it's a distraction, an attempted play on technicalities to avoid the real reason it's always the Americas that end up the middle east- it's not about oil consumption, it's about oil control. America doesn't keep meddling in the middle east because it consumes their oil, it meddles in the middle east because it wants it's companies to profit from production of that oil, and to control who gets to consume that oil.

The EU isn't engaging in the middle east as much as the US is because EU foreign policy hasn't been so focussed on controlling the flow of oil and building it's economy on the basis of taking control as much of the global oil and gas market as possible.

You mention China also, which is a similar case, you talk of lack of power projection, but that's not true- China's power projection just isn't military, it's economic. But whilst the US spent the last decade bombing Iraq and Afghanistan China spent the same decade courting under-developed African nations to build up their infrastructure and to exploit their resources- whilst America went to war to control the oil already being pumped, China invested in just pumping new oil in as yet untapped markets by funding production of wells, road, telecomms infrastructure and so on and so forth. It's been pretty busy:

http://www.businessinsider.com...

It's also interesting if you look at some of the widely available pre-2010 maps- you'll see there's barely a section of Africa that hasn't been touched to the tune of billions of dollars by the Chinese in the last 10 - 15 years.

So your misdirection was a nice try at excusing America from the problem, but it misses the very reason America isn't excused from the problem - America isn't there because it's the good guy doing the EU, China and Japan a favour. It's there out of choice because it has created and intertwined itself in the problem because it views that as a key part of it's global power projection priorities. It realises that messy military agreements and dealings with the Saudis may not net it much oil because it doesn't need it from them, but it does mean that US companies can rake in billions from helping exploit those resources whilst also providing it's military companies with lucrative defence contracts to defend those investments.

It's the very nature of the fact that America's power projection is military that's the reason it's always engaged in wars unlike China with it's economic power.

This is also in part why Saudi Arabia is more than happy to help keep oil prices low at a time when fellow OPEC members like Venezuela could be pushed to the brink of collapse by low oil prices- partly because Saudi gains in seeing a competing major oil producer crippled for a

That is the cool thing about Google.. they are not forced to eat their own dog food ...(with the exception of Vic Gundotra that dropped Twitter once he became Google+ leader....I wonder where is he now?)

The "U3" unemployment rate is downright deceitful; it excludes people who are no longer applying for jobs because they've become discouraged by endless rejections (regardless of whether they became discouraged 2 weeks ago, or 5 years ago). Naturally, U3 is the measure most commonly reported in the mainstream media. As the U3 rate regularly ticks downward because more and more workers become discouraged, it has become rote for the media to release celebratory articles. But more people seem to be waking up to the fact that movements of this number are meaningless outside of the context that explains why it moved.

A true measure of economic health -- which genuinely reflects whether the demand for labor is vigorous or soft -- is the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR). It has just fallen to a the lowest value in 36 years. You specifically asked about current prosperity as compared to 10 years ago. You can go here to see a chart showing it's taken a nose dive since 10 years ago: http://static3.businessinsider...

Note that the current LFPR is even worse than it was when the so-called "Misery Index" was at its all-time high (June 1980). And the LFPR is nothing like it was during the boom years of the Clinton Administration.

Our current "booming stock market" is solely a function of the Fed artificially holding interest rates near zero. I.e., the places where "sensible" people traditionally invested money, such as a bank certificate of deposit, are currently not an option unless you're willing to settle for a return that's near zero. (Actually, those near-zero returns are negative, when adjusted for inflation.) That certainly explains why people are pouring a large portion of their savings into the stock market, does it not?

And since you're interested in genuine numbers, I trust you will stop saying that "tens of thousands" died in recent wars. The genuine numbers of combat deaths are: Afghanistan, 1,742; Iraq, 3,527. You have to go back to Vietnam to find a figure in the tens of thousands (47,424).

Has this helped?

Volume-based billing absolutely makes sense. It makes no sense to the ISP to charge the same amount to a customer that uses 1000GB/month as one that uses 1GB/month.

Volume-based billing doesn't make sense. The operating costs are incredibly low whether it's 1 GB or 1000 GB (if you look at figure 20, you can clearly see high speed data is $2 -- and this is for google fiber's gigabit service -- http://www.businessinsider.com...). The true cost for bandwidth is in the infrastructure.

Voters worry about irrelevant issues like abortion, gay marriage, inequality, and racism, while not worrying enough about the stuff that matters, like banking regulation, tax policy, nepotism, and crony capitalism.

And, in my opinion, that's largely because of the Centrally Controlled Media in the United States. And if you think "Main Stream Media" doesn't include Faux[sp?] News, you're also a victim of this control.

To paraphrase the late George Carlin, If the answer to "..was the last person to get a job in my major my professor.." ..a "yes", then perhaps you should rethink your career track.

Mike Rowe may be right. Thirty years ago they shuttered all the vocational training shops in High Schools across the U.S. and rejiggered the curriculum to entirely "College Prep." Apparently someone thought the new millennia would see floating cities, personal jetpacks and genetically engineered mental telepathy as the new societal construct, and the only way to fulfill this prophecy was to produce eager young archons -disciples of the critical thinking required to operate the flying cars and mind operated workbots. Except it didn't happen, and you have to write a check for nearly $200 to the guy running the power snake in your basement floor drain on a Sunday night emergency call.

When everyone has an MBA, does anyone have an MBA?
Where does a Gender Studies degree take you when the corporatization of universities is closing the door on living wages or career advancement in higher education?

With a large number of Associate or certification programs producing comfortable middle-income career tracks in the skilled medical, production or transportation sectors, is a 4-year degree and $50,000-$100,000 of student loan debt that secures a $39,000/yr salary moving papers around inside a cubicle somewhere in the Midwest ... worth it, or right for everyone?

http://www.businessinsider.com...

But you don't understand! CurrentC was designed with your best interests in mind!

If you can't trust a statement from Walmart, who can you trust?

And a million consumers in 3 days
http://www.businessinsider.com...

Seems they do have qualms. Sweden takes its international reputation on Human Rights seriously.

... compiling dossiers on everyone. Since in order to use the internet you need to use a search engine, a good idea is to look at you chrome browser history and note the title, time, where you visited, is there, then combine this with analytics and cookies (machine identification) remember this is the kind of shit and more they got behind closed doors. This will be used to pro-actively deny employment to people and 'screen' people for their political views/sites/news they visit/any health problems/etc. i.e. it allows corporations unprecedented insight into the flaws of our evolved nervous system and minds. We are not "free" in any way or form our minds were shaped by evolution and they have a lot of problems reasoning or perceiving reality, if in doubt see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

They are trying to map political dissident to pre-emptively strike against political change using science and big data they are fervently trying to figure out how to regain their control, since they know media's days are numbered with newer generations. So they are learning techniques in controlling populations and manipulating public opinion on social media, to socially engineer how people think, etc. The reality is america has been the greatest success in propaganda in human history, most americans were hyper capitalist, virulently anti-communist for the last few decades and the upper class would like the working classes to keep voting against their own interests to keep their ill gotten wealth. So if you vote for D&R you are one of the illusioned and the elites aren't worried about you at all because you are politically illiterate just like they want. They want you all to vote democrats and republicans so as not to rock the boat. They don't want political change to manifest outside the political system (aka threat to corporate power).

This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Look at the following graphs:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Chr

Ultimately what counts is economic output.

Is it? If the economy were to grow by 5%, but all of that extra money then went to a tiny slice of the population (less that 0.1%), does that growth really matter?

If the vast majority of a society gets poorer, while a tiny, tiny slice of the population gets vastly richer, has that society improved?

Indeed. Figure 1 in this article says it all. The 1947-1979 era saw relatively uniform growth in incomes across the whole range. Since 1979, the distribution is very heavily biased towards the top 0.5%, and by some estimates the share going to the bottom 90% hardly changed at all. Figure 2 in the same article indicates the successful rent-seeking of CEOs. Actually, the whole article argues that the increase in income share for the top 1% has resulted from rent-seeking rather than from well-functioning markets rewarding competitive behavior.

Or, if you want a different reference, try this one. So 95% of income gains since 2009 went to the top 1%. That leaves just 5% of income gains to be shared among the other 99%. Oh, and accoding to this article, almost half of that went to the top 10%, so only about 2½% of income gains would be left for the bottom 90%.

Egalitarianism

Wage gap myth:

http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf

Majors by Gender: Is It Bias or the Major that Determines Future Pay?

There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap

The Gender Pay Gap is a Complete Myth

Gender pay gap is not what activists claim

Equal pay statistics are bogus because they don’t compare like with like

Fair Pay Isn’t Always Equal Pay

Wage Gap Myth Exposed -- By Feminists

5 Feminist Myths That Will Not Die

The Wage Gap Myth

Don’t Blame Discrimination for Gender Wage Gap

The pay inequality myth: Women are more equal than you think

Women Now a Majority in American Workplaces

Labor force participation rate for men has never been lower.

Share of Men in Labor Force at All-Time Low

Women In Tech Make More Money And Land Better Jobs Than Men

Female U.S. corporate directors out-earn men: study

Female CEOs outearned men in 2009.

Women between ages 21 and 30 working full-time made 117% of men’s wages.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, single women between 22 and 30 years old earn an average of $27,000 a year. That’s 8% more than comparable men.

Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top

Young Women’s Pay Exceeds Male Peers

The 15 Jobs Where Women Earn More Than Men

Women aged between 22 and 29 earn over £10 per hour on average, compared to men their same age who earn just under this amount.

Young women now earn more than men in UK

"Much as I despise the current UK government, and am deeply concerned about surveillance and censorship and erosion of privacy and free speech generally"

This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Look at the following graphs:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

Samsung and others have been making lots of money off bigger phones.

You might want to review that statement, Apple appears to be cleaning house on the money side, taking 87% of the profit in the market.

Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates handed the reigns to Steve Ballmer in January 2000. Today, the company announced Ballmer will retire within 12 months, and Microsoft stock has surged on the news. That can't feel good if you're Ballmer. Under his 13-year leadership, Microsoft stock has fallen over 40%.

And this article gets it right

Amid a dynamic and ever changing marketplace, Microsoft—which declined to comment for this article—became a high-tech equivalent of a Detroit car-maker, bringing flashier models of the same old thing off of the assembly line even as its competitors upended the world. Most of its innovations have been financial debacles or of little consequence to the bottom line. And the performance showed on Wall Street; despite booming sales and profits from its flagship products, in the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago. In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion.

... and ..

“I see Microsoft as technology’s answer to Sears,” said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. “In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it’s just a barren wasteland. And that’s Microsoft. The company just isn’t cool anymore.”

Cool is what tech consumers want. Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.

No, really.

One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion.

There are a few websites/apps that have allow the user to opt out of being tracked.

Have ANY of these sites/apps actually respected the request of the user? Google certainly did not care, and neither do many others in Internet advertising.

So using an encrypted service advertised as secure is the same as leaving something in plain sight?

Nope, smells like blaming the victim.

This obviously does not imply that the person with the stolen property stole their own property as you are attempting to do.

Huh? Where did I imply that some "stole their own property"?

What it does state is that "if the celebrities had not taken deliberate actions, no crime would have been possible".

Yes, if you hadn't bought a TV, nobody would have stolen it. If you hadn't bought that car, nobody would have stolen it. If you hadn't taken that picture, nobody would have stolen it.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Apparently everyone in the US who buys a Honda Acord is committing entrapment.

There are only 3,572 known comets, but there are many millions of asteroids.

Thus you are orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by an asteroid than a comet.

Does this mean you should go about cowering and worrying and fulminating about the possibility of your own "death by asteroid"?

Guns... same thing. If you're at high risk for a firearms injury, you probably not only know that, but you probably know why, and you probably know what you could do to reduce that risk. While "probably" is the modifier at hand, I'll tell you what's probably going to actually kill you:

Deaths per 100,000 by disease/accident (total is about 600 a year right now)

Note no comets, no asteroids, and no ebola.

Deaths per 100,000 by firearms (total averages out to well under 20. Location where the odds are worst? Alaska. Yes, Alaska. :)

So... 600 out of 100,000 die by disease or accident (and more than 50% of them from heart disease or cancer), and I bet it wouldn't take me more than a few seconds to find some smoker and/or over-eater in a crowd who spends a goodly amount of their time online pearl-clutching about firearms, when that's ~3.2% likely as compared to the other 96.8%, and where that 98.6% is LARGELY UP TO YOU, as is a GOOD BIT of your odds of dying by firearm.

Ah, but you just can't fix stupidity. Such is life. :)

Perhaps Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy can blame the lack of security on Reggie Brown. Too bad they weren't given an opportunity in their depositions

I know the popular narrative: It's somebody else's fault: greedy executives! greedy politicians! greedy everybody else but me!

you are not listening.
http://www.businessinsider.com...

the reporters' salary is but an anecdotical tiny fraction of any news suscription you pay. this renders your entire argument pointless because your measures are meaningless.

Do
http://www.ibtimes.com/icloud-...
you
http://securitywatch.pcmag.com...
think
http://www.thehothits.com/news...!
iCloud
http://www.businessinsider.com...
is
http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/0...
secure?
http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/...

Three major hacks in the last few months, one by a preteen.

I'm not predicting Microsoft's demise, rather just saying that they'll step out of the limelight. Even during its worst years of slowest growth, Apple was still a multi-billion dollar company.

At any rate, Microsoft already are no longer the dominant consumer OS vendor; that crown now belongs to Google as Android alone (not even counting chrome OS) already runs on more devices than Windows, iOS, and OSX combined.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

"Why exactly do the NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6, GCHQ, DGSE, FSB, BND, etc... etc... have to trace everything we do or say online?"

This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Look at the following graphs:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

Just because most women that play video games are ugly

[citation required]

Way to go, insulting your natural allies (women who play games).

58% of minecraft players are women. Are they mostly ugly? Somehow I doubt it.

As I originally wrote, the definition of "gamers" has to be changed. The old view that all gamers are fat nerdy males needs to be abandoned. Either update the definition to match today's reality, or come up with a new word to describe people who play video games that is more inclusive.

It's that YOU women are invading our hobby

All I'm saying is make things more realistic. We already have a world where girls have poor body images because they see photoshopped images of women on magazine covers that are literally impossibly thin unless you're anorexic. Even Barbie is getting some more realistic competition because the old one had a ridiculously impossible physique, so bad she wouldn't have been able to stand.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

According to the NPR report I just heard it was 4 or 5 days after the person arrived in the US before they fell ill so they probably weren't contagious on the plane ride over.

I just saw a report that said he went to the hospital four days after starting to feel bad, but was sent home by doctors there, he then came back 2 days later after feeling even worse, so you are talking about 6+ days after onset and everyone in the hospital waiting room and the doctors who screened him the first time around, plus family members who were probably treating him at home. I'd feel better if it was the plane full of people, at least we have a list of their names.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Listening to NPR they just reported that the person had traveled from Liberia to visit family. It was 4 or 5 days after the person arrived in the US before they started feeling sick so it's not likely the folks on the airplane are at risk.

Sure, passengers on the plane are probably ok. How about all the patients in the ER the first time he went to the hospital in Dallas, four days after initial onset of symptomatic EVD, was checked out by doctors there and was sent home? He then came *back* two days later and was admitted and tested postive. So you have people in the ER the first time around, the doctors who conducted exam (I hope to hell they were wearing basic PPE) and then any family members who were around while he was 6+days after becoming symptomatic. Check out the currently known timeline, it's not like he walked off the plane and headed to the hospital, he's been walking around with symptomatic EVD for almost a week before being isolated:

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Apple CEOs recently sold off a lot of their stock at the height of the iPhone 6 release: http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com] My guess is that they knew this was coming and cashed out at the highest possible value. It might be time to short AAPL.

You are welcome to short AAPL, but you should be careful, since apparently you have not a clue how the stock market works. When insiders like Apple's CEO trade shares, they can't use the insider information which they obviously have, because that would mean jail time if the SEC finds out. Instead, they have to enter these trades a long time (around a year) before the trade is executed, and there is no way to back out of this. So Tim Cook could today set up a trade to sell 10,000 AAPL shares on the 23rd of September 2015, and if he does that, the sale will go through on that day - even if AAPL is at a low on that day and Tim Cook has news that will double the share price on the next day.

Apple CEOs recently sold off a lot of their stock at the height of the iPhone 6 release: http://www.businessinsider.com... My guess is that they knew this was coming and cashed out at the highest possible value. It might be time to short AAPL.

Great yeah http://www.businessinsider.com...

There were two sentences out of dozens in that post that I actually wrote.

They are a direct quote from you. If you disagree with them then you should not have posted them.

Who said I disagreed with them?

The distance from the Earth to Mars is about 200 million kilometers.

Your example ship would be closer than Mars is. A lot closer.

Not that readers need it pointed out, but Mars has mysteriously entered the discussion.

There is a reflector on the Moon. People aim lasers at that reflector. Those lasers diffuse over distance. "At the Moon's surface, the beam is about 6.5 kilometers (four miles) wide ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment
That's from the Earth to the Moon. So even if you could focus the reaction mass a tightly as a laser it would spread out over a lot more than "a several kilometer wide umbrella" would cover even if you were only as far away as Mars.

Argh. You're comparing an exhaust, which rapidly cools off in space and generally acts very differently to a laser, to a laser. I don't even know where to start with that one.

Yes it can. It does that all the time. You are confusing spotting them with projecting their course over time.

Right, yeah: http://www.businessinsider.com...

It is physics. Unless you want to argue that the laws of physics do not apply ...

You keep using that word. It does not mean what you think it means.

Unless you're talking about being closer than Mars ... how did it get closer to Mars without being detected?

jackiechanwtf.jpg

Saying that the answer is somewhere else is not addressing my point. Quote it. Like I quoted the Wikipedia article on how much the lasers diffuse between the Earth and the Moon.

I did. It's up there, in italics, marked 5, Informative, with a link to the full article, my first response to your post.

You are now talking about a distance less than the distance between the Earth and Mars. So something blocking out part of Mars would be very noticeable. Not to mention the Sun would be reflecting off of it. And that's not even addressing the interplanetary material that you had previously discounted.

Interplanetary != interstellar.

kilometers 350,000 is about Earth to the Moon
kilometers 200,000,000 is about Earth to Mars
kilometers 39,900,000,000,000 is about Earth to Alpha Centauri

I seriously have no idea where you're getting this stuff. At 1 million kilometers a ship with a 6km wide umbrella around its midriff would occupy about one eighth of the sky that Venus does when it's at its furthest from earth. That's the size of the dot you're saying is occluding everything behind it. That's the size of the dot with negligible differences from the background you're trying to differentiate.

There is no stealth in space.

Oh yes, there is.

Okay, I've worked as a valet. I've worked around other valets. Valets are like the police today. "Most of them are doing a good job and a few give them all a bad reputation." With me so far? What car can go anywhere? Your car! When it's being driven by a valet! If you're driving a sports car and parking is a few blocks away those guys are fighting to get to park your car instead of Grandpa's Cadillac next in line. Frankly, it's just too much fun. I'm not saying it's right or anything, but that IS reality.

Now the bigger problem here is that I don't for one second believe that the key is the only place in your car this can be activated from. It's a computer system. The computer checks the keys for instructions. The key does not control the car, the computer does. Tin foil hat time I suppose, but every technology that NSA/police get their hands on seems to end up being used to excess.

Car companies are already monitoring users remember?

Police proposal: We can protect the public by ending high speed chases!

I think I'll pass on in car audio video recording. At least from the factory.

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-new-iphone-screen-2012-1

When Steve Jobs was around, he actually used the iphone day-to-day before it shipped to make sure it would meet user needs. When carrying it in a pocket left its screen annoyingly scratched, he bitched out the product development team and made them find an entirely new material for the screen just scant weeks before the product launch.

Bet the new CEO didn't carry an iphone 6 day in and day out for weeks during its development to see how well the design would face the real world. And if he had, there's no way a supply-chain guru would call for a major redesign to the product just weeks before planned launch day.

Given that Android allegedly makes up 78% of the smartphone market, I can see why you feel soooo unique.