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Microsoft or Google for the rise in ocean temperatures

or will claim that it was George Bush that caused the problem

Or worse still will look for some lame excuse for why the West Coast of North America is on fire and is going to experience El Nino from hell this year with floods and no snow in the mountians.

I was surprised that the right wing morons didn't jump all over Obama for this statement here on Slashdot, after all what does he know about climate science. Thank heavens he does not get his advice from some of the posters on /. especially about climate change issues or IT tech!

How do you clean up the environmental problems caused by the central government?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/13/...

The IATA doesn't actually have such a rule. Uzbekistan Airlines is being dishonest. http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/12/travel/airline-weighing-passengers/

It's true that the weight and center of mass on the plane contributed to the crash of Air Midwest 5481. However, the plane was also improperly serviced at a facility that had poor training and wasn't making an effort to correct those issues. The weight, improper maintenance, and skipping an important testing step after the maintenance were responsible for the crash.

The weight of an aircraft is also an issue during its landing, not just during takeoff as with the prior example. This can be rectified to some extent by not putting too much fuel in a plane, which will also make it heavier. It's necessary to have some extra fuel if there is a need to divert to another airport or stay in a holding pattern longer than expected upon arrival. But there isn't a good reason for having excess fuel beyond what's necessary for that. Older aircraft had systems available to dump fuel in case of the need to make an emergency landing right after takeoff. While they would be under the maximum takeoff weight, they wouldn't be under the maximum structural landing weight. More recent aircraft don't have the ability to dump fuel and will, instead, circle to burn off enough fuel or simply land overweight expecting that an incident isn't likely and inspections will be done after landing. Interestingly enough, this was a big issue on 9/11 when many international fights weren't allowed into American airspace. They were sent to Canada or their point of origin and many had to dump fuel in order to land safely because they weren't permitted to continue to their intended destination.

For those hoping to have extra fees for heavier passengers, that's not likely to happen anytime soon. Samoa Air has already tried this and it hasn't caught on elsewhere. Uzbekistan Airlines indicates that individual weights aren't being recorded and it's simply tabulating men, women, and children by category. They won't single out passengers for extra fees or anything like that.

Chaotic Architecture, brought to you by NASA. The organization where one team uses metric and the other English units of measure.

Your logical fallacy is strawman.

No one ever said anything about tracking you at home, or while away from the office. Meanwhile, study after study after study continually show that sitting all day, per the office drone norms, is terrible for you.

Wearing a little watch-sized gizmo that tells you to get up and stretch your legs every few hours is hardly the most Orwellian oversight I can imagine. And really, the company has entirely pragmatic reasons for the idea, beyond BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING. Simply put: healthier employees are cost effective. You'll take less surprise sick days; even if your total days off work remain constant, you'll have more vacation time which is planned in advance. You'll also be in a generally better mood, less bitching about how much your back is killing you

Oh, and we already do have a shady organization tracking the air you breathe. It's called the fucking EPA.

none of these emails was classified at the time she sent/received it. These are documents that later were marked as top secret.

That's not what the Office of Inspector General spokesperson says: the emails were "were classified when they were sent and are classified now."

no, they weren't.
It appears you've just made a different selection of the 'news' to pay attention to.

Really? What selection of the news am I paying attention to that you aren't (or vice versa)?

CNN (not exactly a right wing outlet) quotes the Office of Inspector General spokesperson who said: the emails were “were classified when they were sent and are classified now.”

Did you know that when you send an email to your lawyer, you don't actually have to put "ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVLEGE" in the subject or body? The privilege exists regardless of markings on the communication.

Just because a document which was not treated as classified by someone does not mean that it is in fact no longer classified or be treated as such. Flags help identify such things, but it is ultimately up to the sender & receiver to use their judgement as to how to handle it.

The fact of the matter is Hillary repeatedly exhibited poor judgement with regards to her private email server, and in a just world will see her with a criminal conviction. Alas we do not live in that world.

First she claimed she did no official business on that server, then claimed it was only for convenience, then claimed there was no classified emails on it, then claimed it had all been erased. Turns out none of that was true. Massively lying, she had to know she was going to get caught.
 

She is just assuming that her buddy Barack will pardon her prior to leaving office...

First she claimed she did no official business on that server, then claimed it was only for convenience, then claimed there was no classified emails on it, then claimed it had all been erased. Turns out none of that was true. Massively lying, she had to know she was going to get caught.

This implies there is something there she is desparate to hide. If she is not hiding something, why all the lies?

Even if there is nothing there except highly classified material, then she has broken the law and lied about it repeatedly. Does that make her a qualified Presidential candidate, or a criminal?

A interesting (and terrifying) article on this subject: http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/0... It points out that in the 90's when the system was designed it wasn't a issue as it was a closed system. The CAN based system was never intended to be connected to anything. The ramifications of a wireless connected car with zero security should make everyone very concerned. It's just a matter of time before someone locks up your right front brake when you're doing 80 MPH. That the government is mandating this (RTA) is even worse.

What you eat is at least equally important to how many calories you take in.

Tell that to the nutritionist who lost weight on the Twinkie diet.

What he did is not healthy, and not recommended - but he did it to prove a point: it really is almost entirely about calories.

"... it's not the disaster that people are making it out to be."

One of the issues is this: "people" are saying negative things. Apple has become a gay-supporting, headphone-selling, watch-making corporation that announces products before they are ready.

Apple's Tim Cook profiled as "most powerful gay man in Silicon Valley"

5 Reasons Apple Headphones Are The Actual Worst. We are all victims.

Exclusive: Corrupt Apple Store Employees Come Forward Across America (12/20/12)

Apple CEO Tim Cook is apparently not someone who can handle being a CEO. A capable CEO would not run a company in a way that gets so much negative or distracting publicity.

Does Tim Cook deserve to be paid so much? "Cook's pay package was valued at $378 million when he became Apple's CEO."

That bastard PopeRatzo never posts citations for his ridiculous assertions.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/2...

I'm not going to pretend T-Mobile is an angel, but I think they've truly changed the industry.

I don't know about changing the industry, but other carriers have made moves to match T-Mobile, which has resulted in more consumer-friendly options across the board. So kudos to T-Mo for that. But the whole "Un-Carrier" schtick wasn't done from altruism, it was a strategic play decided on when T-Mobile didn't have many options except to be disruptive.

Flash back four years ago and T-Mobile is recognizing the decreasing distance between its rock and its hard place. It was the fourth largest carrier in the US, in a business where scale is EVERYTHING. (Think of it this way: you need 40,000 towers or so to cover the country whether you have 10 million subscribers or 100 million subscribers, so divide up their support costs per customer and...) T-Mo is owned by Deutsche Telekom, which had enjoyed being in the growing US market (compared to Europe) but basically said at this point, "your network is mediocre but making it genuinely good would cost billions and billions of dollars, which we don't want to spend. We will be trying to sell you as soon as we can. Barring that, figure a way out of this and send us a postcard once in a while on how it's going."

Deutsche did in fact shortly agree to sell T-Mobile to AT&T, which ultimately fell through due to FCC/antitrust objections. T-Mo couldn't compete based on economies of scale, and they couldn't compete based on network; their strategy had always been to have good coverage in urban/suburban areas but skip the more rural areas that you need to have really good reach but are not very cost-efficient. T-Mobile basically had to do something creative or die. Given that choice, to their credit, the opted for the former.

With that being said - and even though they have passed Sprint to become the #3 carrier in the US by customers - the fact that they are offering consumer-friendly deals and adding subscribers doesn't mean they are actually in a position to be profitable in the long run. Hint: there's a reason that T-Mobile was engaged in talks to be acquired by Sprint last year, and then again with DISH Network this year... companies with sound long-term economic prospects don't go around seeking to be bought by larger companies.

Since you didn't provide the information to back up your statement, I will provide it for you. Minimum wage has been above $10 in today's dollars for about 3 years in the late 1960s. And a resulting decade of runaway inflation was the result, with home mortgage interest rates of 15% and Credit card interest rates in the 30s. At least credit card interest was tax deductible back then.
As for the wages in other countries, in Switzerland, they pay $18.82 per hour, a Big mac costs $6.82. Wage is over 125% higher, and a Big Mac is 42% higher.
In Norway, the wage is $15.40 and the cost of a Big Mac is 20% higher.
In Sweden, the wage is $12.32 and the cost of a Big Mac is 7% higher.
In Denmark, the wage is $14.00 and the cost of a Big Mac is 6% higher.
Some places, the wage is less than in the U.S.
In Israel, the wage is $6.05 and the cost of a Big Mac is 4% less.
The data is pretty consistent. The higher the minimum wage, the higher the cost of goods and services.

Naa, the unions can't organize because the buildings they used to work in "mysteriously" need 6-12 months of repair work and they close, putting everyone out of a job. But don't worry, corporations are people... very, very bad people that should be locked up to protect society.

This chart was made before Obama was elected, but it does show 40 years of trying dem policies and trying republican policies:

Your chart is nonsense because it doesn't indicate the unit of measure. It could be growth in bunny rabbits for all we know. Furthermore there are plenty of actually reputable sources of data that say you are wrong. See below.

You'll notice that economic growth has ALWAYS gotten worse under the EVERY democrat administration's budgets

The actual facts show you have that backwards. GDP growth has been higher when a democrat is in the white house. That said, you have missed the point. Arguing about which president was responsible for improving the economy is idiotic. The president has very limited control of the direction of the economy. Blaming or applauding the president for the state of the economy is basically and admission you have no idea how economics actually works.

I woke up today to hear on the news how Germany has effectively outlawed Keynesian economics in those countries that were suckered into the Euro currency union (the Right in the UK were absolutely right to avoid joining the monetary union. It's a shame they get so much else wrong).

On the elevator I saw a news blurb on how Hedge funds are demanding that Puerto Rico close their schools to pay back debts (rather than take a haircut on their risky investments that earned them well over market interest rates for years. Hint: you get that interest rate because your return is risky, not guaranteed).

And of course there's the endless snowden leaks that make Security Systems look benign, and the ridiculously skewed anti-abortion propaganda that may bring down one of the most important institutions for women's health, and so on and so on.

It really does feel like the world of Channel 23, and wondering how soon they will ban the off switch (rhetorical shots across the bow are already being made, with talk of ad blockers "violating copyright". How soon until turning off your TV is the same?)

Finally, after years of giving corporations and the rich unfettered leeway to buy elections, exploit the poor and middle class (and now, more and more, the upper-middle class), we get a judicial ruling in favor of people over corporations. Of course, our downward death spiral will no doubt resume shortly, but in the meantime it is a breath of fresh air to see sanity in our courts for once.

Women in tech have a 4:1 advantage over men, and men are much more likely to experience harassment and more severe harassment than women.

And of course there's nothing that harasses and abuses women in this world nearly as much as feminism.

I googled the sentence the poster above you wrote

http://www.marketplace.org/top...

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/2...
"In the first quarter, Tesla sold nearly $68 million of the zero-emission credits to other automakers. That represented 12% of its overall revenue. "

So really, Telsa is not helping the climate - they are just outsourcing (selling) their percentage of climate damage to the competition. If they really cared, they would not sell or use these credits and actually help save the environment.

The scam artists of the world would de-fund ISIS in about a year

You forgot who is financing ISIS.
According to the vice-president (and a lot of other more credible places), it's the US allies, that their funds from the US.
The clip with Joe Biden
News about him apologizing for telling them out
Old Wikileaks leak about them financing anyone available to fight against Assad, and being interested in a big humanitarian disaster. Quotes from the e-mail:

One Air Force intel guy (US) said very carefully that there isn't much of a Free Syrian Army to train right now anyway

the idea 'hypothetically' is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within

They dont believe air intervention would happen unless there was enough media attention on a massacre, like the Ghadafi move against Benghazi. They think the US would have a high tolerance for killings as long as it doesn't reach that very public stage.

The fact that "corporate profits" are a higher percentage of GDP, a prioriy, only means that more private businesses are organized as corporations, hardly a big problem.

More than forty percent of all workers in the US are making less than $15/hr.

The claim that "the statutory top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent" is a half-truth, because the effective corporate tax rate in the US is actually closer to 50%, one of the highest in the world.

That is some happy American Enterprise Institute horseshit. The real, effective corporate tax rate in the US is less than 13%:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/0...

There are many uses for drones and some of them are to save a life. See http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/01/...

Scroll through the videos and you'll see:
- Drone assists in river rescue
- Firefighters hope drones will save lives
- This drone could save your life

The last one is a drone that delivers a cardiac defibrillator to a heart attack victim, during the first few crucial minutes. That is, a person has a heart attack, someone calls it in to 911, they dispatch the drone, and the helper uses the defibrillator to keep the person alive, until the medical team arrives.

They're going to send the drone along the fastest possible path. They aren't going to check whether it flies over your property or not [just like they wouldn't for a medical helicopter].

Okay, so you shoot it down. I'd be willing to bet that you'd have more legal liability than a fine. More like criminal liability, just as if you tried to interfere with paramedics at the scene of an accident. Not to mention causing a person's death in a case where they would otherwise have been saved.

And that was after it was discovered that China had stolen nuclear warhead designs from the USA.

Citation needed...

Even CNN knows, google could have told you, WTF is wrong with you?

Africa can feed itself. It could feed the entire world if it wasn't full of thousands of waring gangs (tribes) with over 60% of the arable land on the planet.

They have the best labeling anywhere.

What do you mean by "best"? Their weight on their labels don't match the actual weight, factual things like that I would consider a basic part of labeling.

And you can be damned sure that the use of CPR in its modern form has saved a tremendous amount of lives.

No, you can't be sure about that. In movies and fictional TV shows, CPR is depicted positively, with 75% of CPR recipients getting up and going about their lives with no ill effects, often within minutes. In real life, most CPR recipients die, and those that survive the procedure often have severe brain damage or debilitating injuries to other organs. Many are confined to bed or a wheelchair for the rest of their life. Less than 5% have a good quality of life outcome.

About 80% of the public say they would want to be aggressively resuscitated. For emergency room doctors, about 10% say the same.

How reliable are they in winter driving conditions? How is the battery efficiency affected by temperature? What about cabin heating? I'm having a hard time seeing any of the current crop being adopted for year-round use in areas that get more than a smattering of snow, or a few days below freezing per year.

Does Norway count as an area that has a few days below freezing per year?.

Right. I guess that's why the largest bank in France and the largest mutual fund operator in the US are testing out bitcoin/cryptocoins:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/frenc...

http://i.imgur.com/yfKkhRu.png

Oh, and the NASDAQ is already using blockchain technology for their private market:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/1...

This is hilarious, it was quite obvious that you only read the first paragraph article you cited... and now you didn't even read the first paragraph of what I last cited, allow me to demonstrate. You claim:

State may have them. Nobody knows except the State Department.

Except that's not what the State Department has said, to quote the last article I cited (and the first paragraph no less):

The State Department said Thursday that it could not locate “all or part” of 15 e-mails provided last week to the House Select Committee on Benghazi by Sidney Blumenthal from his exchanges with then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Still not convinced? Why not consult a whole number of articles from various sources which report the same thing?

http://news.yahoo.com/state-de...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/15...
http://www.nbcnews.com/politic...
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/25/...
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/26...
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/sta...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes...

Noticing a trend yet?

Thus, your claim that we know she didn't turn over all of the emails is false. The State Department might have them, they might not.

So you are calling the professionals at the State Department and national archives incompetent because they cannot adequately locate these documents they may or may not have? Riiight. Occam's Razor would seem to apply.

You're misunderstanding the quote. According to them the information should have been deemed confidential.

On the contrary, I understand it quite well (as unlike you I've spent some time reading on this subject. Failing to set the 'classified' flag on an email doesn't change whether it is actually classified or not, it simply flags it for filtering & handling... not unlike putting "ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGED" in a subject line of an email. It's the content that matters, not the subject of flags.

It wasn't, though. That means there is no proof that she sent material that was, at the time it was sent, deemed classified.

Again... that's not what the IGs (two of them) have said. Though even your use of the term 'proof' is laughable. The intelligence agencies do not deal in proof the way the rest of us do, but in terms of probability. And the IGs have determined it is very probable that classified information that Hillary had access to is not in the control of the government due to her. That's the first step to opening a criminal investigation which will hopefully lead to a trial and proof that even you would accept.

Say hi to President Sanders for me.

'I am troubled by the allegations that such dangerous and illicit activity went undetected at a federal research facility'

Seriously? After reports of government lawyers watching porn on their office computers, nothing really surprises me about Federal government. Especially given the nincompoop we've twice elected to run it.

Because even among the above mentioned work-place masturbators none got fired.

I'll ask the same of you.

Report: Iran developing nuclear bombs

An article on CNN has a few more details.

Their next generation, out in four years, will offer "Maximum Plaid." No, really.

Astounding as it may seem, but the Democrats are clearly positioning former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro (that's right - Mayor) as their VP pick. http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/04/...

Of course, that's not as astounding as the fact that the Democrats are hell-bent on nominating Hillary, in the first place.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/2...

Perhaps you weren't alive during that time period, but Iraq invaded Iran at the behest of their sponsor.... uncle Ronnie... who then made mint selling weapons to both side, AND supplying Iraq with the chemical weapons it would use against Iran.

The CIA ousted the pro-western, democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, and put in place a sadistic dictator who used secret police squads to round up and jail/murder opposition. The Iranian Revolution finally through out that sociopath, and the US's response to that was.... install another sadistic murderous dictator in Iraq, and have him start a war with Iran. Then while trying to save their own cities from capture, his military used chemical weapons repeatedly to kill tens's of thousands. Of course, given the USA supplied them with the weapons, the USA was then nice enough to block any condemnation from the UN about their use.

After all that crap, do you actually not understand why the Iranian government generally has a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to the US?

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/19/...

http://www.history.com/topics/...

do you truly not know any women in software or gaming who've experienced the kind of awful "boy's only club" attitudes and sometimes downright literal sexual harassment

I do not. I'm willing to believe, the attitudes exist — as do women-only clubs, but I don't see anything particularly wrong (as in "this must be illegal!") with them. Nor do I know a person with a claim of having been persecuted over being a woman supported better, than something I can claim on the basis of being a Ukrainian expatriate.

Such claims are bogus and the laws they are based on — tyrannical. I do not believe, we've become a better country by adopting such laws — they target the symptoms (and do so poorly), while allowing various scammers (both private and governmental) to blackmail innocent employees into various "settlements".

You're Australian. You people find specifically invent vaguely insulting ethnic terms and then use then to refers to yourselves (are you a Pom, a Wop, or other, Mr Harlequin80?). You also don't have a large West Indian minority, so the Jamaican accent angle not occur to you.

OTOH, in the states:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
http://articles.baltimoresun.c...
http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Mov...

You'll note that even over here it was not uncontroversial to call Jar-Jar racist, but if you were paying attention to pop culture in the US in '99 you would have had a position on this.

We've had plenty of significant events happen in the past couple decades. One and only one - 9/11 - changed how the government does anything.

Yeah, and it only changed how the government did anything by making things worse. Now we're subjected to illegal searches, detainment, etc. by an incompetent bureaucracy that has stopped exactly 0 terrorist plots and misses over 95% of banned items in its screenings. Hopefully these aren't the kinds of changes you'd like to see with the oil industry as well.

A couple of kids have, here is one

Admittedly not a nuclear bomb, just a reactor but none the less. I will agree to a certain extent acquiring knowledge does not in itself justify breaking the law. However, sometimes the pursuit of knowledge requires it. Ask Galileo. (Admittedly that is a false equivalency, but so was petty larceny to building a nuclear bomb).

Oracle does much more than databases. They make software businesses use, and when a competitor gets too strong, they buy them, hostilely if necessary. Oracle is good at making sure there are no alternatives too their software.

One of the more positive things that has happened recently is that they got starved for victims so they started attacking their own political camps. They were basically doing purity tests. Once everyone is a liberal how do they justify their existence? well... they then ask "how liberal are you"... and they just start goal posting moving to make sure they have enough people to be outraged with at any given time.

So anyway, they were doing that and eventually they hit a segment of their own political contingent that fought back. And now they're a little baffled because a lot of the wind has gone out of their sails. They're getting attacked from all sides now and they're losing credibility rapidly.

Its funny because they're such dogmatic robots that they don't really understand what happened.

We'll see... they'll either be suppressed to the general good of society or they'll osterize most of their political base which will lead to a structural schism in the faction which will weaken them collectively.

Hit. Nail. Head. I wish I had mod points today. What's happening with liberalism today is a case study in self destruction. All we need to do is sit back and watch it play out.

Like those ideological purity tests...if we started measuring conservatives on the basis of how conservative are you, it would surely mark the beginning of the end. Liberal purity tests have pushed their kind so far to the extreme, they're now attacking themselves. And their tactic of keeping one constituency or another outraged at any given time has totally backfired.

I don't really blame liberals for being baffled. They've spent so much time in an echo chamber, they've lost touch. When reality finally slaps them in the face, it is only natural for them to try to figure out what happened. The question is, do they have the capability to make the necessary changes in order to correct their course?

Somehow I doubt it. Liberals are so

Just something to beware of with security freezes. A few months ago I did freeze my accounts at the credit reporting agencies because my tax preparer recommended it as a proactive move to prevent identity theft.

I have a credit card that reports my current FICO score monthly. The month after I froze my accounts my FICO score dropped by 57 points. Looking back over the last year, my rating had moved up 11 points before this unexpected drop, so I think it's likely that the change was caused by initiating the credit freeze.

It doesn't matter as my credit history is frozen, but if I do need to give someone access to my credit ratings for any reason (buying a new car, getting a new job, whatever) then I presume the much lower score will be shown.

The formula that is used to calculate FICO scores varies depending upon the age of your credit history and other things such as factors associated with your socio group. In other words, your score can change for reasons that are unrelated to your finances or to anything you have done. However 57 points sounds like a big jump.

http://www.myfico.com/credited...

Also, the score that you bought is not the ones that the banks see.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/2...
http://www.consumerreports.org...

If you'd been watching the attack maps, you'd know that:

(1) It's China
(2) It's likely at the government level

If you'd been watching current events, you know that:

(3) China's economy has been crashing, going on three weeks now
(4) They're really unhappy about people taking money out of, and shorting, Chinese stocks, adding to the crash
(5) They've lost $3.25T in market cap since June 12th
(6) That's just over 20% of their Gross National Product

So it's likely they are attacking our financial markets over that.

See also:

"Key things to know about China's market meltdown"
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/08/...

There's a world of difference between an adobe flash exploit and the availability of a gun that can mow down a large number of people in a matter of seconds.

There is not. Shutting down NYSE [slashdot.org], for example, cost billions of dollars. At $10 mln per life [wikipedia.org], that's hundreds of lives right there...

Are you making a serious argument in comparing people getting shot and the NYSE shutdown? This is the hill that you're going to make your stand on?

It's a very poor example but a valid point. A much better example would be fraud [identity theft], ransomware, spam, etc. With computers you can easily steal time from people on an unimaginable scale.

Suppose someone hacks me, and I get off relatively "easy". I may spend 1 hour of my time canceling a credit card, activating the new card when it comes, and changing all the passwords of all the accounts that the credit card number is associated with. That's probably on the very low end of what a hack can cost an individual.

The hacker doesn't stop there. They repeat their act 1,000,000 times. That's a fairly successful and prolific hacker, but not unheard of, espeicially if the attack vector is a business. At just an hour apiece per victim, 1 million victims is 114 total man-years spent cleaning up. Nobody died, but an entire lifetime has been stolen.

The Target hack(s) affected "up to 110 million people". If we take that figure at face value, and each victim spent only an hour dealing with it, that's 12,557 years or roughly 148 lifetimes. Even if I count injured people, I can't find a mass shooting that comes anywhere near 148 lifetimes.

There are whole sections of stores dedicated to girls and seperate ones to boys.

That'll be changing soon enough. It's unfortunate too, now my boys will have to shop around to find the elven princess set for their orc set to come pillage. Time to move on though, girls/women are allowed to have their gender-only stores/gyms/events and boys/men are not.

In the US we love big machines. The Queen Mary, the Spruce Goose, the continuous asphalt pavers, the Liebherr T 282 B giant dump truck (although Liebherr is a Swiss company), the Boeing 747-400 and Lockheed L-1011 wide-body passenger jets, the massive Abrams tank, the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the 280mm towed howitzer M65 "Atomic Annie", and such are examples.

See how I slipped a Swiss-built monster in there? Well, the US and Japan aren't the only ones. Germany has a 31 million pound excavator. The largest plane is made in Russia by Antonov. South Korea builds some of the biggest cargo ships.

So while, yes, giant robots are a big thing in Japanese art the urge to build huge machines is all over the industrialized world. The US and Germany have never been afraid of large engineering feats. The US has a whole industry of using remotely piloted craft for actual combat.

I don't think Japan needs to focus so much pride on this one little competition as a cultural identity issue. It's not like a US firm is going to enter a contest designing and building a robot with the intent of a face-saving loss or an honorable tie.

And aliens love big projects as well. Don't forget the giant pyramids at Giza.

Hell, a while back slashdot's own Rob Malda made CNN's list of 10 people who don't matter.

You know you matter when you get mentioned in a list of people who don't matter. People who don't matter don't even make THAT list ( in other words, the other 7 billion people in the world).

And after Linus was Mark Zuckerberg at #10; seems like CNN might not be the best arbiter of relevance in the world of tech.

Eh, who cares. Does anybody actually still look at that web site? Honestly I barely knew it was still around.

Funny, that is what people are usually saying about this website. Hell, a while back slashdot's own Rob Malda made CNN's list of 10 people who don't matter.