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Was this really the last resort?

Yes.

J. Kirk Wiebe is retired from the National Security Agency, where he worked for more than 32 years. He received the NSA's second highest award, the Meritorious Civilian Service Award; the Director of CIA's Meritorious Unit Award; and a Letter of Commendation from the secretary of the Air Force, among other awards. He was an NSA whistleblower on matters of privacy involving massive electronic surveillance.

The linked article that Weibe wrote answers your question in depressing detail.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...

Those articles reference water vapor, not liquid water.

Where does water vapor come from, if not liquid water?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...

Those articles reference water vapor, not liquid water.

Asteroids, gas giants and --- say --- the moon don't have liquids.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...

Screwed that up. Somehow the first part of my post was eaten.

For those that haven't researched the case, besides it being the State of Kansas suing, not the lesbians, they won't even see any money from the man even if the state wins, as the money will go to the state to repay the benefits given to the child.

Also, the couple was fine until they seperated(divorce anyone?) and one lost her job due to illness.

Liar liar well on fire:

http://features.blogs.fortune.... http://crooksandliars.com/susi... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... https://www.utexas.edu/news/20...

Creating draconian laws to supress the right to peaceful assemble and protest is an increasing (and worrying) trend.

It happens all across the globe and it is mostly as a reactive mechanism from the governments against the number of massive popular protests facilitated (but not created or organized) by the social media.

Some examples of these protests (there are others, these are from the top of my head):

February 15, 2003 anti-war protest: The February 15, 2003 anti-war protest was a coordinated day of protests across the world in which people in more than 600 cities expressing opposition to the imminent Iraq War. (...) According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of the 15th and 16th; other estimates range from eight million to thirty million.

The 2011 Egyptian protests (better known by the "Tahrir Square" protests): In February 1st alone "[t]he BBC reported the number of protesters in Tahrir Square ranged from "more than 100,000 to some 250,000-the square's maximum capacity." Egyptian security forces stated that 500,000 people participated in the protests in Cairo alone."

2011-12 Spanish protests (The "indignados"): According to statistics published by RTVE, the Spanish public broadcasting company, between 6.5 and 8 million Spaniards have participated in these protests:

2013 protests in Brazil: In June 20 alone "Protests in over 100 cities around the country rallied over 2 million people."

2013 protests in Turkey: 3.5 million of Turkey's 80 million people are estimated to have taken part in almost 5000 demonstrations across Turkey connected with the original Gezi Park protest.

Some governments like the Syrian, the Bahraini and the new (same as old) Egyptian did not tolerate and supressed with enormous amount of brutality in the very beggining their (then) peaceful protests that were organized in a similar fashion than the ones mentioned above.

The rest of the world governments watched and understood that they cannot afford the risk to let some small local matter (like increasing the bus fare in some cities in Brasil, or cutting down some trees in Turkey) to become the catalyst to mass protests.

Measures like these in Ukraine will happen more and more and won't be limited to countries with nascent democracies (like Ukraine) or repressive dictactorships (like Syria). In Spain proposals were already made to criminalize and regulate forms of protest. Thailand invoked "security laws" to curb theirs.

And without a doubt most other countries, eastern and western alike, will change their legislations, enact new laws and enforce old ones to ensure one thing: that the massive indignation and lack of confidence in the democratic process won't become a full blown revolution.

Saw this article just after reading this one:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/...

I'm pretty sure that "it shouldn't work and should be easily hackable" were not in the spec. This is just another example of the quality of work you get when governments contract out to private companies.

Spec? What spec? They were making changes two weeks before launch. From the congressional testimony, http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/24/...:

"In the first detailed account of what happened, officials of four contractors involved in the website creation described a convoluted system of multiple companies operating separately under the oversight of CMS, a part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Each said their individual components generally performed as planned after internal testing, but all conceded that CMS failed to conduct sufficient "end-to-end" testing of the entire system before the launch ... an end-to-end test conducted within two weeks of the launch caused the system to crash. She said it was up to CMS to decide on proceeding with the rollout."

"... blamed a decision by CMS within two weeks of the launch to require users to fully register in order to browse for health insurance products, instead of being able to get information anonymously, as originally planned."

The preceding should not be interpreted to mean that the contractor did good work. They may have been a problem as well. My point is that government officials were basically sabotaging their project through mismanagement. Inadequate integration testing, last minute changes, launching despite testing showing they were not ready ... It appears that politicians were in control.

many middle eastern countries import a lot of workers form the Philippines and India. They take their passports once they arrive, pop them in a housing facility and bus them to work and back. They never make enough to get ahead of the debt they incurred for this wonderful opportunity, and cannot leave without their passport- which they will not get back until their debt is paid.

communication to places like Amnesty International or women's help groups is prevented to help keep the slaves from revolting.

http://globalpublicsquare.blog...

Pretty soon people will correlate creditworthiness etc to the distribution of known friends and their credit scores.That algo will mark you as loner, possibly a loser.

Too late. That ship has sailed.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/2...
http://www.pcworld.com/article...

I posted about this on my G+ feed a while back; at some point, we went from being told about Global Warming to being warned about Climate Change.

The reason for that is that people equate "Global Warming" with "hot summers". That's bogus. The greenhouse effect isn't about direct sunlight; it prevents heat from escaping; therefore it affects low temperatures more than it affects high temperatures, and it affects winter more than it affects summer. The Arctic and Antarctic are the places that are changing the most drastically, and that's far removed from your average Joe's day to day "ermigahrd its sooo hot" experience.

But warming the poles more than the temperate latitudes evens out the temperature difference between them, and that has huge consequences from a weather standpoint. Temperature differences drive the jet streams; a polar jet stream is a 100mph~200mph river of air that circles the planet 5 miles up, and if you live in a temperate latitude (e.g. the US, Europe, China, south Australia) then a polar jet streams is responsible for everything nice about your weather. A polar jet stream blocks cold dry air from plunging equatorward (and warm moist air from surging poleward), and it also shepherds weather systems from west to east, forcing them to keep moving. Without a jet stream, weather would just sit in place for weeks or months at a time, causing droughts or flooding depending on whether a high pressure system or a low pressure system decided to set up shop over your head. (Either possibility is a disaster for agriculture and local ecology.) But thanks to CO2-induced polar warming, the jet streams have been creeping equatorward a little bit each year and they've been weakening. With weaker jet streams, we can expect things like polar vortex plunges and balmy temperatures in Alaska and 15%-of-normal-rainfall droughts in California and 115 F heat waves in Australia to become regular occurrences. (These things are all happening right now, if you haven't been paying attention, and they're all a consequence of polar jet stream shenanigans, which are getting more common and more extreme as of late.)

Like the jet streams, ocean currents are also driven by temperature differences, so ocean currents will eventually start to shift if polar warming continues. That will have far-reaching consequences, because ocean currents determine evaporation rates and thus where precipitation falls, but ocean current changes are very hard to predict because we have so little data to work from. This hasn't really affected us yet, but the El Niño vs La Niña dichotomy (drought vs flooding; where you live determines which one brings which) gives a small taste of how much power the ocean has over the weather (and how big the effect will be once we do get our first permanent ocean current shifts). That awful The Day After Tomorrow film was mostly made of bogus-science-from-hell, but it was very loosely based on a real-world hypothesis that freshwater glacial melt could disrupt the thermohaline circulation that powers the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that keeps the UK and northern Europe warm. (The UK is at the same latitude as the Gulf of Alaska, suggesting it would be as cold as Alaska if the Gulf Stream were disrupted. The Gulf Stream

If people who disagreed with the NSA were arrested, or lost their jobs, or were audited, or were deported, or disappeared in the middle of the night, we would know about it. Those things can't be kept secret.

Sure they can be kept secret. And we don't know how many people fall into this category. But any such losses would be simply lost in the local mystery that every town has, namely the huge number of missing persons.

Take a look at these numbers reported by CNN using data from the FBI NCIC.

There a a vast forest of people missing in which you could hide a lot of "disappeared" people. Someone quietly working in a field without a huge public exposure (whether white hat or black hat) could go missing from his basement lair, get reported, and forgotten by all but his mom and the world would never take notice.

All of EBTC's 80 VisionNet customers stream IPTV from Shellsburg, IA. Those people are using at least 3 Mbps of bandwidth constantly while watching TV. If all 80 people are watching TV during primetime they are likely using more bandwidth than all of EBTC'S internet customers combined. EBTC's DSL and line of sight broadband customers are subsidizing the cost of EBTC'S IPTV service. An argument can be made that is it anticompetitive that EBTC gives preferential treatment to their IPTV steam over competitors like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Google. EBTC confirms that up until three days ago that they were giving their IPTV service a higher priority on their network. According to Neilson the average person watched 151 hours a tv per month in late 2008. A person watching 151 hours of tv per month is using 226.5 GB of data (1.5 GB per hour). Using EBTC's current internet rates that TV user is using $931.50 worth of data per month. http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/24/us.video.nielsen/

Yes I drive a lot less than I used to 10 years ago, but it less to do with the Internet and more to do with the price of gas....

http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/23/news/economy/gas_aaa/

Don't kid yourself, belief in God doesn't make you stupid, not even close.

You're reading is FAIL --- has Gitmo ended(1)? Is Afghanistan over(2)? Did Iraq linger and linger(3)? A passing familiarity with recent events makes it sarcasm as obvious as a cement truck barreling down the freeway.

(1) Obama did have a plan to close the Gitmo facility, and transfer its practices to the Thomson SuperMax in Illinois, aka Gitmo North. Anyone who can't see the how Obama used the word "close" there in a deceptive manner needs to take some reading comprehension courses. http://www.salon.com/2009/12/15/gitmo_3/

(2) Obama at one point tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan over GWB's numbers. That's the opposite of ending it. http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/22/chart-u-s-troop-levels-over-the-years/

(3) Obama quit Iraq only when the Iraqi government wouldn't extend SOFA. SOFA prevents US soldiers from being tried for crimes committed in Iraq, in Iraqi courts. When Iraq wouldn't extend it and thereby extend the official troop presence, Obama pulled out and everyone gave him credit for peace, when really, he merely failed to make more war.
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/10/23/obamas-revisionist-history-on-ending-the-iraq-war-a-lesson-from-the-3rd-presidential-debate/

They'll also innovate their way out of problems if there's a strong economic case for doing so.

Yes, they do. A typical innovation is to move head office to a foreign country so if they get in too much legal trouble in one place, they can continue to operate elsewhere.

If at all possible, the first recourse in the private sector is to innovate your way out of bearing the downside. Contrary to your ideological end cap, this happens a great deal more often than just the companies who've gained some form of monopoly power. It would be tedious just to list the corporate inventiveness on this front (some of which is criminal, not that this makes much difference when prosecutors are left holding an empty cage.)

Here's one they actually caught. Enron convict Jeffrey Skilling has reached a deal to be released early from prison

Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison for his role in the Enron debacle. Under the deal, he could shave nearly a decade off the 15 years remaining on his prison term.

He must have given a lot of blow jobs during his years in the can to collect enough cigarettes to make whole his many victims, justifying his early release for good behaviour.

Actually solving the problem is the private-sector recourse of last resort, unless it leads to a future business model where there's a substantial likelihood of being able to innovate your way out of bearing the downside. Now there's an incentive to get the saliva flowing in the profit motive.

The government isn't better or worse, just different. The worst outcomes occurs as a collaboration between the government and the private sector. Regulatory capture is a transaction between hookers and johns to bugger the public purse.

Here's the concluding paragraphs of Michael I. Norton taking the piss out of Hayekian overreach in his Edge.org essay Markets Are Bad; Markets Are Good:

When we think of groups, we think of the conditions under which groups are likely to behave well or behave poorly. We don't often think of them as self-correcting, as always performing well over time, or most importantly, as either inherently good or inherently bad.

Applying the same logic to markets—think of them in this context as "groups writ large"—will assist with the development of a richer and more accurate theory of when and why markets are likely to have terrible or uplifting consequences.

Mainly they behave well when something firmly bars the gate to behaving badly. Greenspan believed that Wall Street corporations could successfully police each other, if the government stayed out of the way.

Greenspan admits 'mistake' that helped crisis

Greenspan, 82, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a "mistake" in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. Greenspan called that "a flaw in the model ... that defines how the world works."

Oops. By the downside-mitigating innovations of Goldman Sachs, who picked up the cheque for that mess? "Too big to fail" was cleverly crafted.

Unfortunately, markets are not some automatic panacea for all that ails the human condition. They are just one little piece of the puzzle that sometimes weave extraordinary magic. America's founding fathers weren't a market. They were just a bunch of extremely astute men well aware of how easily it all goes wrong, who sat down and tried to do the right thing, acting on moral sentiments rather than market incentives. What tangle of corporate i

Hey, did you hear a judge threw out the ticket that some cop in CA gave to the lady for driving while wearing her Google Glass? Apparently he said there was no proof that the thing was actually on. For once, the good guys win. Next thing you'll hear about is some dude blowing away someone in a movie theater for wearing their Google Glass.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/16/tech/innovation/google-glass-ticket-dismissed/

Actually there is very little doubt that it was and is legal since every time the NSA actions have been tested in court in which a final judgment has been issued the NSA has won. People dispute the relevance to national security, but that doesn't really apply to the question of legality. It has been known for some time that most of the disrupted plots have been overseas. This Belgian plot may have been one of them.

You're also mistaken about the question of Wyden and Clapper. If you bothered to actually read the whole thing you know that Wyden almost certainly knew the truth as disclosed in closed door sessions and confidential reports. What he did was try to improperly trick or maneuver Clapper into disclosing classified information publicly. Can it really be said to be lying if Congress and the Congressman in question knew the actual truth from that same organization as it was disclosed in closed session? I don't think so.

Wyden, who was already well briefed on PRISM and other intelligence operations, already knew the answer to the question when he asked it. But he also knew that it would have been inappropriate, if not illegal, for Clapper to answer the question honestly since doing so would have required him to publicly reveal highly classified information that ought not to be made available to America’s enemies. Wyden’s purpose wasn’t to shed light but to merely embarrass Clapper and the administration. -- Wyden’s Stunt Was Congress at its Worst

You aren't really answering the real questions there, but are embracing Wyden's shabby behavior.

Google has the desire. The only way they make money is by tracking everything about you and selling that info.

I'm pretty sure they have other revenue streams. They can make money from advertising because they have so many users seeing them, so it stands to reason that their number one priority must be retaining those users by not pissing them off. Of course they are incompetent sometimes, but they certainly don't sell all your private info to advertisers.

MS has some capability too.

You missed the fact that they have the number one OS in the world, on 90% of computers. Obviously any large company is going to be schizophrenic, but aside from the XBOX division they generally seem to be the least privacy invading of the three.

Windows is on 90% of traditional Intel PCs, but computers and internet using devices is a very different picture. This says Windows have 15% share of devices (PCs+Tablets+Phones). I think another report with a stricter definition of included devices arrived at around 30% Windows share across "computer devices".

And I could not buy a computer at all.
But there are places I want video. http://www.cnn.com/help/video.html#20
Listen, I want it my way. My computer, my way.

The article doesn't say the victim threw anything, so kudos on reading comprehension.

That's because it's a crappy article (following the great Slahdot tradition of posting the worst possible link...)

This one is better: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/14/justice/florida-movie-theater-shooting/

Also, how THE FUCK can you reference Heinlein's "polite society" quote in this case?

Maybe because I've actually read that book and don't have it all ass-backwards like you.

Of course it isn't "polite" to shoot people. The point is that the overall politeness of society goes up every time you shoot somebody who acts like an asshole in public and attacks anybody who dares to tell them to stop.

"The two men began to argue and Reeves walked out of the theater. Police said Reeves was going to complain to a theater employee, according to the police report. When Reeves returned, witnesses and authorities said that Oulson asked him if he had gone to tell on him for texting. Oulson reportedly said, in effect: I was just sending a message to my young daughter. Charles Cumming and his adult son were two seats away. Cummings said that when Reeves returned to the theater, he didn't return with a manager. "He came back very irritated," Cummings recalled. Voices were raised. Oulson threw a bag of popcorn at Reeves, according to a police report, and then the former Tampa Police Department officer took out a .380 semi-automatic handgun and shot Oulson."

-- CNN

The shooter was able to leave, come back, engage in another argument, and shot a man for throwing popcorn.

The local reports state that the movie hadn't even started yet when this happened.

They also say that it was in the middle of the previews, and that the shooter was a 71 year old man who was physically assaulted by the texter after the 71 year old had reported the texter to the theater management. If something were escalating to a physical altercation with someone 30 years younger than you, and you were a little old guy with a gun, would you take the beating, or would you shoot?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/14/justice/florida-movie-theater-shooting/

Interesting, that does not tally with the following, which I presume is from the same witness : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yLeDpfQDVI

In that he states he did not see who through the popcorn.

The local reports state that the movie hadn't even started yet when this happened.

They also say that it was in the middle of the previews, and that the shooter was a 71 year old man who was physically assaulted by the texter after the 71 year old had reported the texter to the theater management. If something were escalating to a physical altercation with someone 30 years younger than you, and you were a little old guy with a gun, would you take the beating, or would you shoot?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/14/justice/florida-movie-theater-shooting/

clever toilet

Are you serious? Have you not read about the numerous lawsuits brought against torrent users. I worked for a university where we received requests weekly to find who downloaded a file and delete it. Seriously that is just one link, a simple google search will show you just how much the government enforces what lobbying media companies tell them to.

Other space entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork here

Link to emails:

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/01/politics/christie-emails/index.html

Note they are all to/from Wildstein. Texts to others have their phone number not Wildstein's.

Wildstein probably leaked the emails to the news orgs himself.

1. Fast and Furious was made up. The entire thing was based on one right wing ATF source, who was discovered to be lying. It has been debunked so often that even the actual GOP doesn't mention it, only ultra-far right idiots in the Tea Party talk about it nowadays.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/irs-scandal-democratic-acorn_n_3785717.html

That link is to a completely unrelated story about the IRS. I was hoping you had some proof, because that was the first time I've heard that Fast and Furious was all bullshit. So I searched the same website for more info and didn't find anything to support your claim. What I did find was an article from july 2013 talking about two more deaths in mexico linked to those guns - not something I'd expect to see from "huffpo" if the scandal had been debunked.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/fast-and-furious-gun_n_3554854.html

Sorry, too many links. Have some more appropriate links, and thank you for catching that:
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/not-so-fast-on-fast-and-furious/

My impression is that the most expensive part of the car are the batteries (probably costing more alone than a low end Honda)

As I understand it, yeah, the most expensive part is the battery. Electric motors are not that expensive.

I'm pretty confident that battery costs will come down significantly. Even if no significant technology advances come along to help, battery costs should come down as demand picks up and production scales up.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/04/electric-car-batteries/

An electric car has a major up-front cost, but then low cost of operation (electricity is cheaper than gasoline) and low cost of maintenance (electric cars are simpler than conventional cars: no transmission, no radiator, etc.). If fracking hadn't driven the cost of gasoline down, electric cars might be in higher demand right now. Especially where I live, because we have cheap hydro electric power.

From the congressional testimony, http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/24/politics/congress-obamacare-website/:

"In the first detailed account of what happened, officials of four contractors involved in the website creation described a convoluted system of multiple companies operating separately under the oversight of CMS, a part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Each said their individual components generally performed as planned after internal testing, but all conceded that CMS failed to conduct sufficient "end-to-end" testing of the entire system before the launch ... an end-to-end test conducted within two weeks of the launch caused the system to crash. She said it was up to CMS to decide on proceeding with the rollout."

"... blamed a decision by CMS within two weeks of the launch to require users to fully register in order to browse for health insurance products, instead of being able to get information anonymously, as originally planned."

The preceding should not be interpreted to mean that the contractor did good work. That may have been a problem as well. My point is that government officials were basically sabotaging their project through mismanagement. It appears that politicians were in control.

Jane Q. Public writes "Christ Turney, a climate researcher at University of New South Wales, and some other researchers chartered a ship to go to Antarctica to further their Anthropogenic Global Warming ("climate change") research. The expedition, consisting of 74 researchers and crew, radioed for help on Christmas day, stating that they are trapped in the ice. A chinese ice breaker called "Snow Dragon" came within a few miles of the stuck ship but had to turn back. The researchers and crew are now hoping that the ice breaker Aurora Australis, out of Australia, will be able to reach them." [Jane Q. Public, 2013-12-28]

As Tom Curtis noted:

"There is an irony about the various sailors, scientist, reporters and tourists currently being trapped in sea ice. They are not trapped because of the growth of Antarctic Sea Ice. Although the current Antarctic SI is 1.5 million square kilometers greater than 1979-2008 mean for this time of year, it is nonetheless melting rapidly, including just north of Commonwealth Bay where the Shokalskey is trapped. Rather, it is trapped as a consequence of portions of ice shelves breaking of the Antarctic coast line. Specifically, in 2010, Iceberg B-9B, a remnant of a calving event on the Ross Ice Shelf in 1987, collided with the tongue of the Metz Glacier, breaking it of. The debris from that collision, it appears, has remained more or less in situe for the last three years, until b winds shifted out from the terminus of the Metz Glacier towards Commonwealth Bay, trapping the Shokalskey. This is described in more detail on the mission blog."

Tom also noted that the mission's 2nd goal was to "explore changes in ocean circulation caused by the growth of extensive fast ice and its impact on life in Commonwealth Bay."

For some strange reason, the CFACT link Jane provided tells a different story.

Usually it is marked as attorney's eyes only under a protective order. The attorneys are not allowed to disclose it to their client, but can compare the client information with the attorney's eyes only information.
If the information goes beyond the attorneys, then the attorneys get in trouble. See the Apple v. Samsung case for example.
See, e.g., CNN at http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/10/03/apple-samsung-sanctions-grewal/

they have diplomats collect him and bring him in on a plain covered by immunity

You mean, like that Bolivian presidential plane that was forced to land in Austria?

Mining is the act of removing very small amounts of valuable minerals from large chunks of rock.

Bringing them HERE means the tailings all end up in earth orbit.

We've got enough crap orbiting the earth and taking out Satellites without adding to this mess.

Processing them on the mood might make more sense, but if you have the ability to do that, why not just mine the moon?

My guess is they are going to start classifying various crimes as terrorist acts.

Well, they're already classifying peaceful protests as such so I'm thinking were just a little way past that.

I don't really believe we can or should tax our way out of the problem. Taxes can do many things but they are not the be all and end all solution to systemic problems. At some point is it not the case that adding more sumps is not the real answer to the boat taking on water.

The thing is, corporations are government chartered. They recieve limited liability in exchange for meeting certain regulations, without which, they would have trouble existing and operating as they do today.

Corperate structures account for far more of the economy than the government. Simply shuttling money up through them isn't the answer, you need to fix the corperate structures to not require as much central redistribution.

...

The most obvious fix for corporate structures is simply to require them to pay their workers more: raise the minimum wage. This doesn't require any new mechanisms, is already widely supported by the public*, and will improve the distribution of wealth to most Americans as the floor is raised (a rising minimum wage raises most everyone's wages). Even Wal-mart is in favor of it.

*71% of adults, even a majority of Republicans support it: http://www.gallup.com/poll/160913/back-raising-minimum-wage.aspx

I presume you support the current system since you admit to participating in it. Absentee ballots already provide an avenue for forced voting and over a third of the eligible votes were cast this way in the last presidential election. I think it is safe to say electronic voting, done properly, could be just as effective as absentee ballots.

From what the summary says, these people saw someone using the name for a US service and claimed the trademark in Europe before the US company could. This seems to me to be an exceptional example of abuse of the system.

This seems to be a perfectly ordinary example of how the system works. Especially in countries other than the United States (excepting select other Anglo/common law countries).

In most countries, trademark rights are protected through registration and awarded to the first to file to use the mark in that country. Trademark 'squatting' is as unexceptional as the sun rising in the east. Take China, for example.

The solution has been in existence for more than a century. The Madrid System allows someone who files for a trademark in their home country to also file an international application that creates, at a minimum, priority rights to the mark in each contracting country. The international application can serve as a common application for each designated member state, or can be transformed into individual trademark filings in each member state.

The Paris Convention also allows someone to file for the same trademark in almost any other country in the world within 6 months of when they first applied for the trademark elsewhere. If they do, that application will be treated as if filed on the first filing date. The downside is that you have to file individual trademark applications rather than a single international application.

Pinterest took neither route. Not only that, Pinterest didn't file an application to register its trademark anywhere before these people did. See here:.

The company Premium Interest filed the trademark PINTEREST in the European Union, 2 months before Pinterest filed its US trademark.

Whether out of desperation or sheer gall, Pinterest essentially argued that its business in the US somehow gave it prior trademark rights in Europe. See the same article:

Since the OHIM systematically rejected all the evidence as the evidence concerned the use of the mark in the US and not in the UK, Pinterest lost the opposition.

Summary for the TL;DR crowd: Disruptive internet startup presumed that it could claim worldwide trademark rights by registering a domain name and sorting out compliance with the law later. Startup was very wrong.

Hope their space ship works better than their ice breaker ship.. Did we not already learn that chineese laborors don't particularly care about quality? *sigh* I sure hope the astronauts are not volentold as well..

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2003/06/01/343371/

But the company that sold GM those robots--Japan's Fanuc Ltd.--is worth another look. Fanuc (for factory automation, numerical control) has spent the intervening years turning its own assembly line into the lights-out model Smith dreamed about. At this moment, in one of Fanuc's 40,000-square-foot factories near Mt. Fuji, robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time.

Actually they sort of do. All major airports have industrial grinders to destroy confiscated items, though it's primarily for foodstuffs. For wood they probably hauled it away to a bigger (and proper) chipper.

CNN (Unfortunately they don't have a picture of the grinder).

Ginep. Mangosteen. Guava. Eggplant. Nance fruit. Ginger. Jocote. Grapefruit. Watermelon.

These aren't the offerings of some international supermarket. They're seized produce, destined for Customs and Border Protection's grinding machine.

Some items that need more inspection get sidelined to a nearby U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory. Bigger items - beef, sugar cane or bags of food banned from coming into the United States - are hauled away. Everything else goes through an industrial kitchen grinder in a back room in the International Terminal.

Tonight, agriculture specialist Lauren Lewis does the honors. It's 6:40 p.m., just past suppertime.

Slipping on black gloves, she takes each piece - garlic, onions, rambutans, carrots and more - and feeds it into the whirring machine.

With that, what might have been someone's post-flight snack is reduced to mush.

All in the name of safety.

As per CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/01/us/north-dakota-train-fire/, the people have been given an all clear and returned home... this happened a long time ago.. why is it being posted now?

The next attack will happen with or without illegal, unconstitutional domestic spying. I don't want you magic tiger protection rocks sir.

I can't imagine how (some? many?) Americans take a face value any comment that says NSA spying will prevent attacks on Americans when it was not needed in 2001. There was plenty of clear intelligence information leading up to the events of 9/11. No vast spying on Americans was needed to warn the Bush administration that something big was about to happen.

"Here is a representative sampling of the CIA threat reporting that was distributed to Bush administration officials during the spring and summer of 2001:

-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations," April 20 -- CIA, "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent," June 23 -- CIA, "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays," July 2 -- CIA, "Threat of Impending al Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely," August 3

The failure to respond adequately to these warnings was a policy failure by the Bush administration, not an intelligence failure by the U.S. intelligence community..."

It makes me wonder why the NSA is pushing so hard to keep unconstitutional spying programs in place. What are they really doing? What are they needing to justify? What snake-oil are they trying to sell the American people? What are they really afraid of? Who are they attempting to control?

Well said. There have been a number of people who have come forward to say that the intelligence agencies knew something big was going to happen before 9/11/01. Yet that is not covered much by the Media. Condi Rice got a lot more exposure than Susan Lindauer ever will.

So it's no wonder to me that so many people still buy the bullshit. The Media generally can be counted on to keep a lid on uncomfortable information. The more uncomfortable it is, the less likely they are to actually tell their readers and viewers about it. They don't want to bring heat on themselves, or jeopardize their reputation or access. So we get bad or incomplete information by which to make decisions about our republic. This dynamic is not lost on those in power.

The next attack will happen with or without illegal, unconstitutional domestic spying. I don't want you magic tiger protection rocks sir.

I can't imagine how (some? many?) Americans take a face value any comment that says NSA spying will prevent attacks on Americans when it was not needed in 2001. There was plenty of clear intelligence information leading up to the events of 9/11. No vast spying on Americans was needed to warn the Bush administration that something big was about to happen.

"Here is a representative sampling of the CIA threat reporting that was distributed to Bush administration officials during the spring and summer of 2001:

-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations," April 20
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent," June 23
-- CIA, "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays," July 2
-- CIA, "Threat of Impending al Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely," August 3

The failure to respond adequately to these warnings was a policy failure by the Bush administration, not an intelligence failure by the U.S. intelligence community..."

It makes me wonder why the NSA is pushing so hard to keep unconstitutional spying programs in place. What are they really doing? What are they needing to justify? What snake-oil are they trying to sell the American people? What are they really afraid of? Who are they attempting to control?

This is what I responded to.

Well, in fact they did claim they stopped terrorist attacks, but that was later determined to be a complete fabrication.

That is false. Next, what was the title of the article I linked to? " NSA helped foil terror plot in Belgium, documents, officials say"

The roles and cooperation between the NSA and FBI are documented in previous news stories. What you believe is irrelevant, and it makes very little difference in terms of the news, or the law. The police of a foreign nation received the contents of an email sent by a Jihadi in their country from US intelligence agencies working with a multinational corporation in the US, and headed off a suicide attack in the process. As far as I see your only real interest is to prevent that sort of cooperation despite the obvious outcome. The courts have repeatedly found their actions lawful in decided cases.

NSA helped foil terror plot in Belgium, documents, officials say

An intercepted e-mail from one of the cell members to his ex-girlfriend indicated he was about to launch a suicide attack. A defense lawyer in the case told CNN that prosecutors at trial acknowledged that the United States intercepted the communication and passed it to the Belgians.