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http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/investing/bitcoin-bar-new-york-city/

They do have warnings on the boxes. And on the instructions. And on the packaging. I've bought several packages of Buckyball brand magnets when they were on sale.

Here is a CNN Article with an image that shows the warning I'm referring to.

Apparently, that site is jacked with all kinds of javascript... here's a link directly to the image.

As you can see, the warning is clearly printed on the packaging and clearly printed on the container. They are not showing the insert that also contains the warning, but I assure you it is there.

According to CNN they lowered the missile again not much later. What can I say? Some folks just can't keep it up.

Seriously, though. The missiles they're tinkering with are using a less volitile fuel that doesn't have to be used right after fueling, so they could be messing around with this thing for days before the oxidizer they're using ruins their new toy.

See? There's a nerdy side to every news story.

The fact that a video game company was voted worst company in America is ridiculous and would be laughable if it was not so frightening. Come on! Is there nothing more serious on the planet than botching a game release? Aren't companies that fight like crazy to deprive cancer patients from inexpensive treatments a little worse? Or companies who lie to be free to play with your health in the name of profit? Or companies using child labor to lower the price of smartphones? Or simply profitable companies planning massive layoffs? Or media associations with an agenda built on layers of lies?

Apparently, for the majority of Slashdot readers, getting a perspective chip would be a good idea.

As many people have noted, his ocean research non profit is selling some boats that look an awful lot like the sort of workhorse boats that such a non profit would be expected to have. That's not Eric Schmidt's yacht. This is Eric Schmidt's yacht. It's got a night club.

> That's the beauty of democracy.

The current system has nothing to do with democracy. The US is experiencing a symptom of an economic problem (translated into a legal climate of money for power). Democracy has other unique problems that the US has wiped away and replaced.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/07/opinion/lessig-washington-corruption/

Nice, you insensitive clod.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/08/showbiz/annette-funicello-obit/index.html

North Korea has always felt it's had to make provocative statements. It's what they do. It's more about internal politics and making sure that the country comes across as powerful. There needs to be an external threat so that the populace stays in line.

The major difference here is that the United States media is just moronic enough to go along with it. Sometime last month CNN was airing reports on how the media failed the nation in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the road to the Iraq war, including being complicit in the misinformation campaign. What's happening now? Kim Jong Un is trying to talk tough to placate his military, and now it's impending war 24/7 on the Western news networks. They're being smarter about the misinformation campaigns -- Betteridge's Law violations like this one being somewhat less duplicitous than outright fabrications -- but it's still irresponsible media.

As for some of the saber-rattlers here on Slashdot, and those modding them up, Jesus Christ, go study some fucking history. Not even ancient history, but recent history. Go look up lies about forces on the Iraq border, about babies being pulled from their incubators, Colin Powell lying to the United Nations. Iraq was not a threat to the US, but you went ahead, drank the Kool-Aid, and allowed morons to lead you into the stupidest conflicts of the past few decades. Just because a guy has a weapon it does not mean he's a credible threat. CHILL the FUCK OUT.

North Korea is a bully? Please. They're awful to their own people, sure, but unfortunately that's on their own people to do something about it. What's the cost of NOT doing something about North Korea? Shut the fuck up. The cost of doing something about it is the instant death of hundreds of thousands of South Koreans.

North Korea will do nothing, because the moment they decide to do something they'll be bombed into the stone age. South Korea will do nothing, because the moment they decide to do something Seoul will be leveled. It's mutually-assured destruction, and it's worked for the last few decades.

The only risk is if the United States elects another PNAC figurehead who thinks that it's ok for hundreds of thousands of Asians to die for no reason just so that some juicy contracts can go towards military contractors. There's little risk of that happening so long as you STOP BEING MORONS.

What was the point of seizing them at security?

Aside from the obvious security theater, they also sell the items.

For an example of what I'm talking about, look at the Southern Poverty Law Center's pronouncements - including especially their advice to law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security that displaying bumper stickers supporting Ron Paul during the presidential primary, or any of a number of other pro-Constitution or Tea Party political position messages, was a sign that the driver was a terrorist.

Let's see, upset at SPLC? Wonder why that is...

As far as designating drivers with Ron Paul stickers as terrorists, you are most likely confusing that (deliberately or not) with their investigations into and reporting on right wing hate groups that planned or carried out attacks. Like this one. I mean, if we are talking about militia groups, patriot movement groups, and sovereign citizens, we are talking about groups that have attacked or planned to attack police officers.

The worst part of this will be that since Windows will be outsold by Apple, Microsoft will just say "make it even more like Apple, and Facebook! More Facebook! Wouldn't want Mr. Vader Fader Kid to beat us at phones too!"

Especially at HP, where there is a huge amount of infighting among the board.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/08/500-hp-apotheker/

And a number of those were caused by what I've been told by officials is a federal crime (having checked baggage travel without the owner on the plane).

Of course, compaines ship other people's packages on commercial flights all the time w/o the owner on board, and many of those packages undergo less-rigorous screening than passengers and their checked luggage. From: How safe is the cargo on passenger flights?

While much airport security is concentrated on screening passengers and their checked bags, about half the hold on a typical passenger flight is filled with cargo. In fact, over a third of cargo by volume that entered the United States in 2010 was shipped on passenger jets, according to the Department of Transportation. That is 3.7 billion tons. Another 7.2 billion tons of air cargo came in on all-cargo aircraft, according to the DOT.

And the screening requirements for such cargo are not as strict as they are for passengers and their checked bags.

Most of the cases described in the article involve in-bound international flights, and there is a US law requiring 100% screening of all cargo, even US officials admit that the screenings would have caught some of the items discussed in the article.

Under TSA guidelines, cargo screening can involve a variety of methods including physical inspection, dogs, a variety of single-view or multiview X-ray machines, and "explosive trace detection" ... (but) Physical inspection of every package is impractical given the volume of cargo...

No offence, but this is why you aren't in the entertainment selling industry.

  Well, maybe I should be.

Total revenue from U.S. music sales and licensing plunged to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research. In 1999, that revenue figure topped $14.6 billion. Probably not adjusted for inflation, too. And this is an older article - http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/

Check out that chart.

The things you listed all cost money to make. Then you have to distribute it to all the folks selling it. If you offer the products online, you have almost pure profit. Sure, you have to have a website, and you have to pay for bandwidth, but in reality, you have a pure profit business. You have infinite stock. You don't worry about refunds, stock control, your inventory is zero.

  The way you put it, profits should be up! But they're not. They've been dropping fast and hard since the 'digital revolution'.

  I will argue that piracy has absolutely affected sales. Want a song or album? It's easy and costs nothing. If you're moral and want to get the song legally? You buy the song from iTunes or Amazon, who have to compete with piracy, and sell songs for very fucking cheap, really - a dollar or so per track. Your local bar's jukebox will cost you a dollar just to play the song once.

  What you fail to understand when you state that profits in digital distribution are 100% is the fact that sales are DOWN, and dramatically so. Once upon a time, in order to hear a song I liked on demand, I needed to own it. I would either buy the album, or a single, or have a taped/ripped copy from a friend. Now I can just fire up YouTube and play it any time I want. Why would I buy an album when I can listen to it anytime, anywhere, from any device that can access Youtube?

  What I am suggested is that, to maintain sales, labels/bands/whatever sell added services - extra shit you get for buying an album. Aside from posters and stickers and the like, what about concert ticket discounts with a purchase of an album? What about autographed copies?

  The alternative to this - bands will only be funded by Kickstarter and ticket sales, or otherwise have to resort to some sort of NPR pledge drive funding scheme. Or a national endowment of the arts. Enjoy your government-sponsored music.

The real question is should our government buy counterfeit military replacement parts from China?

Until we as a people decide that our national security depends on our manufacturing base and manufacturing capability then what difference does it make? It's all coming from China no matter how you look at it. The subcontractor of my subcontractor of my subcontractor is Chairman Mao. And when you play in a commodity market, the lowest bidding supplier with a stolen formula for capacitors wins as in the case of Dell.

That's a bit like saying no one should not use "NoScript" because they know someone who had trouble using Facebook with it installed.

If someone has a localized cancer that is easily treatable completely by surgery, then surgery can make a lot of sense of course. Steve Job's cancer apparently was one rare such situation. In that sense, he did regret not having surgery sooner. But many cancers, by the time they are detected, can't be easily removed surgically. Procedures to remove cancers can also let cancerous cells loose in the bloodstream. Removing one cancer may allow others that cancer suppressed to grow. Even when cancers can be removed 100% surgically, the conditions (diet and lifestyle) that contributed to the cancer growing would likely just support more cancers or other health issues. There are also quite a few cases of a person's immune system rallying and the cancer going into remission.

Consider:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/opinion/weil-steve-jobs
"Steve Jobs had a long run with a rare form of cancer (a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor) that is sometimes curable by early surgery. While I was not his physician and don't have access to the details of his illness or its treatment, assertions that his use of alternative medicine shortened his life strike me as uninformed. No one knows how long he would have survived or what his quality of life would have been had he opted for immediate surgery and used only conventional treatment."

And:
http://www.livescience.com/16551-steve-jobs-alternative-medicine-pancreatic-cancer-treatment.html
" "I don't think waiting nine months for surgery was a bad decision," Dr. Maged Rizk, a gastroenterologist at Cleveland Clinic, told WebMD in an interview last week. "Especially if it is limited disease, especially if it is an islet-cell tumor and the cells are [typical of early cancer], and as long as you don't have symptoms, you can sit on it a bit," Rizk said. (Neuroendocrine tumors are also known as islet-cell tumors.)
But what about Jobs' use of alternative medicine? Could that have had an impact on his cancer?
Some experts say that, if anything, use of alternative medicine approaches may have helped Jobs' overall health. Jobs lived 8 years after his diagnosis.
The average life expectancy for someone with a metastatic neuroendocrine tumor is about two years, according to PCAN. (It remains unclear whether Jobs' cancer was metastatic when he was diagnosed.)
"I believe that he must have really refocused his heath practices," through changes in diet and exercise, said Dr. Ashwin Mehta, an assistant professor and medical director of integrative medicine at the University of Miami's Sylvester Cancer Center. "To do as well as he did, he must have done a lot of things right," Mehta said."

So yes, eating better may have helped Steve Jobs live a lot longer, whatever one can say about his decision about surgery. Iain Banks says parts of his cancer are inoperable, so it is a very different situation. He says he is considering chemotherapy; I pointed to potential ways as to how to make it more effective,

People are always getting pre-cancerous and cancerous cells. They usually don't get "cancer" because their body's immune system kills the cells. So, anything you can do to strengthen your immune system can help you do better. So can anything you do to remove additional toxins and also to remove things that may promote cancer growth (including apparently some substances in dairy).

The worst thing about making cancer treatment decisions (beyond all the personal trauma) may be that most oncologists get paid by the treatment. So there is no financial incentive for oncologists to suggest anything other that treatments they can supply. This sort of conflict-of-interest between patient and specialist physici

http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/09/news/economy/nuclear_reactors/index.htm

This wasn't mentioned in the article or the summary, but Washington State has apparently already completed the selection process. The contract was awarded to BOTEC Analysis, a consulting firm run by drug policy analyst and blogger Mark Kleiman. You can watch a CNN interview with Kleiman here. Kleiman's blog posts on drug policy are archived here.

Yes... CNN Article in 1997: http://money.cnn.com/1997/05/14/technology/intv_tauzin/ CNN Article in 2013: http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/01/pf/princeton-mom-women/index.html

Yes... CNN Article in 1997: http://money.cnn.com/1997/05/14/technology/intv_tauzin/ CNN Article in 2013: http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/01/pf/princeton-mom-women/index.html

The TSA says they are all about the war on terror.
But their actions prove they are only interested in conducting a War on Diginity.

Groping children
soaking a man in his own urine
Arresting people for wearing watches with exposed gears
Arbitrary strip-searches
Detaining people armed with flash cards
Forcing mothers to drink their own breast milk
Forcing a woman to remove her nipple ring with pliers
Requiring women to remove their bras
Requiring a woman to remove the brace on her sprained ankle and then making her walk on it to prove it was sprained

The list of abuses is into the thousands. Every once in a while they get a taste of their stupidity. But it isn't anywhere near enough.

Who's "Provocative Action"?

March 29 2013 - Hagel says U.S. has to take North Korean threats seriously

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said on Thursday that North Koreas provocative actions and belligerent tone had "ratcheted up the danger" on the Korean peninsula, ...

March 28 2013 - US sends nuclear-capable B-2 bombers to SKorea

The U.S military says two nuclear-capable B-2 bombers have completed a training mission in South Korea ...
...
The U.S. says the B-2 stealth bombers flew from a U.S. air base and dropped munitions on a South Korean island range before returning home.

March 26 2013 - U.S. Army learns hard lessons in N. Korea-like war game

The Unified Quest war game conducted this year by Army planners posited the collapse of a nuclear-armed, xenophobic, criminal family regime that had lorded over a closed society and inconveniently lost control over its nukes as it fell. Army leaders stayed mum about the model for the game, but all indications -- and maps seen during the game at the Army War College -- point to North Korea.

March 20 2013 - U.S. flies B-52s over South Korea

The U.S. Air Force is breaking out some of its heaviest hardware to send a message to North Korea.

A Pentagon spokesman said Monday that B-52 bombers are making flights over South Korea as part of military exercises this month.

March 19 2013 - S. Korea, U.S. carry out naval drills with nuclear attack submarine

South Korean and U.S. forces have been carrying out naval drills in seas around the peninsula with a nuclear attack submarine as part of their annual exercise, military sources said Wednesday, in a show of power against North Korea's threat of nuclear attack.

The two-month field training, called Foal Eagle, has been in full swing to test the combat readiness of the allies, amid high tension on the Korean Peninsula in light of a torrent of bellicose rhetoric by North Korea. It kicked off on March 1 and runs through April 30.

March 17 2013 - Troops remember sacrifices of Cheonan sailors

Halfway through the around-the-clock Key Resolve drills Friday, 8th U.S. Army Commander Lt. Gen. John D. Johnson remained full of energy as he underscored that the allied forces were ready to cope with North Korean threats.

...
Despite their hectic schedule, the troops gathered early in the day to pay respects to the 46 deceased crewmembers of South Korean corvette Cheonan, which was sunk by North Korea's torpedo attack on March 26, 2010.

March 12 2013 - First day of SK-US military exercises passes without provocation

Around 10,000 ROK troops and 3,000 US soldiers, including 2,500 reinforcements from US Pacific command in Hawaii, are taking part in the military exercise, which will continue through Mar. 21. Another 10,000 US soldiers will be deployed by the end of this month for the Foal Eagle exercises. Also flown in to participate in the exercises were B-52 bombers and F-22 stealth fighters, which boast the world's highest levels of performance. These two kinds of aircraft can maneuver throughout Korean airspace without landin

Several of the first links on a google search for "average starting salary out of college": CNN was the particular one I clicked, but the same number was at a several major news websites. If you're in an area where teachers make the best starting salary out of college, I think you should expand your job search to other regions...

Excellent point on the portfolio though, if you're able to point at several existing projects you've done or contributed to in a major way, then to hell with college and the degree. Of course, your employers seem to be after competent people with years of experience and can't break $35k per year...

Financial products are logical constructs. Virtual products. Like objects in an online game which people buy and sell.

The financial world depends on logical constructs. Currency, the base of the financial world, is a logical construct. Slips of paper to which people ascribe value. Gold is the same way. One cannot eat gold, wear it, drink it, shelter under it, use it to bind wounds or cure ailments. But to many (most) it has "value." Currency is a durable construct because it makes people's lives easier, and improves their standard of living.

Stocks ("shares of ownership") are an older financial product. So are bonds. Futures are bets. Then you get into the myriad financial products/bets and their derivatives on which today's global financial system is based.

1) "A financial product is about as conceptual as you can get,” says Wilson Ervin, a senior adviser at Credit Suisse. “You just need paper and ink.”-- The Economist magazine

2) "In an even more blunt description, Tourre calls the CDOs he produced "intellectual masturbation" and likens himself to Dr. Frankenstein. "When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: 'well, what if we created a 'thing', which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?")" -- CNN / Money

"Financial Innovation" consists of two things:

1) Creation of new virtual products / logical constructs.

2) Methods by which one can entice others to take on more debt.

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said the only beneficial financial innovation of the last 30 years was the ATM. However, the ATM is not a financial innovation, but a technological one. So that leaves a dim legacy of recent financial innovation.

I'm all for financial innovation just as long as it doesn't lead to "financial pollution" - public costs. Like a tannery which dumps effluent into a river. The tannery keeps the profit and the public bears the costs. The concept is known in the financial sector as "privatize the profits, socialize the losses." In recent years, the financial sector has been able to successfully privatize its profits, yet push the costs onto the public. This is done by government insurance of private debt, and outright rescues and bailouts.

In any regulation of the financial sector, the key I think is to make sure that losses are limited to the participants in the transaction.

This fellow - well if he is able to make money, bravo. If he and his shareholders lose money, the laws regulating the financial sector should make sure that the losses are limited to participants in the transaction, and not imposed on the public.

There is a long series of case law in America that it's not enough to put a label on the product to absolve the manufacturer of responsibility for the damage that the product does. Juries don't accept it.

There's a reason why bleach bottles have childproof caps.

With Buckyballs, the warning labels just didn't work. http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/23/doctors-warning-labels-on-magnetic-toys-arent-enough/

I don't know why you place all the responsibility on the user and none of the responsibility on the company that knows their product is injuring and killing children.

People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.

Oh really now?

Google has already been testing the cars on the road in Nevada, which passed a law last year authorizing driverless vehicles. Both Nevada and California require the cars to have a human behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle at any time. So far, the cars have have racked up more than 300,000 driving miles, and 50,000 of those miles were without any intervention from the human drivers, Google says.

Source dated Tue October 30, 2012

Someone's a touch behind...

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/industries/182/index.html
You lie.

Of course not. (Almost) no technology will ever solve the built-in greed and scandal problem. (Aside from Zero-Point Energy, but that is a discussion for another day...)

However, technology can make it easier to track the "paper-trail" (utilizing BitCoin then could make it easier to hold those accountable who mismanage their responsiblity / fraud others). The key issue though is as long as the governed holds those in power responsible for their actions then any technology is largely irrelevant -- technology has the advantage that those wiling to make excuses "We don't know where the money is/went." harder to lie about. Sadly, the general populace doesn't really care about accountability even WITH with the current tech; I don't see this changing anytime in the foreseeable future.

One of the positive things about BitCoin I see is that people are starting to ask "Why isn't the money trail more traceable? Why do you we continue to let the Army go extremely over-budget?" etc.

i.e.
* http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-to-blow-6-billion-on-a-tech-project/

"cost growth and execution problems were based on the fact that no GMR radios were ever even tested by potential users until 2010. After 13 years in the pipeline, what those users saw was a radio that weighed as much as a drill sergeant, took too long to set up, failed frequently, and didnâ(TM)t have enough range."

and

* http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/09/army-to-congress-thanks-but-no-tanks/?hpt=hp_c1

If the Pentagon holds off repairing, refurbishing or making new tanks for three years until new technologies are developed, the Army says it can save taxpayers as much as $3 billion.

But guess which group of civilians isn't inclined to agree with the generals on this point?

Congress.

To be exact, 173 House members - Democrats and Republicans - sent a letter April 20 to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, urging him to continue supporting their decision to produce more tanks.

That's right. Lawmakers who frequently and loudly proclaim that presidents should listen to generals when it comes to battlefield decisions are refusing to take its own advice.

If BitCoin were to ever become popular guess who will be the first to "discredit" it ?

The bank used public IP addresses (existing, used elsewhere) for their internal network? The one that designed that should be considered a bigger security threat that any current cyberattack.

BTW, the CNN editorial "Why cyber attacks threaten our freedom" is another piece of art of more or less the same magnitude. I'd say that is on a par with this one

As someone outside of america looking in, but seeing all of these stations from time to time... CNN is the only halfway decent major news network in the U.S.

CNN international is some what decent, but that is not the CNN the U.S. sees. US CNN is 24hr TMZ. They can avoid the "left" vs. "right" by focusing on Michael Jackson stories and other "celebrity" "news". Occasionally they get lucky with a natural disaster and they dispatch their crack team of raincoat wearers, but for the most part it's 24hr TMZ.

In case your local news doesn't keep you up-to-date on the latest Michael Jackson News just switch on CNN or go to CNN.com. Today front page story

Funny that you mentioned Mexico:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mexico-s-drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html

Wachovia admitted it didn't do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That's the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/10/news/companies/hsbc-money-laundering/index.html

In Mexico, HSBC became the preferred bank for drug cartels and money launderers, according to the Justice Department. The government said the bank didn't raise red flags even when billions of dollars in transactions took place in cash, the typical mode of operation for drug dealers.

They're not fighting crime that well are they?

Mexico might be a far better place than it is now if those criminals in Mexico couldn't get their hands on all those billions of dollars from the USA. The banks helping them launder all that money have blood on their hands.

And all they have to do is pay fines and often it's just the banks money not their own money. I don't see anyone in the banks going to jail for their part in it. All these laws aren't going to work till the people involved in such crimes also risk jail time.

even PAT ROBERTSON thinks the whole 6000 years thing is a bunch of crap... youd think the militant anti-theism folks would give it a break.

Look, I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop Ussher wasn't inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years. It just didn't. You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas.
They're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible. If you fight science you're going to lose your children, and I believe in telling it the way it was.-Pat Robertson

http://www.examiner.com/article/evangelist-pat-robertson-no-longer-preaching-creationism

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/29/pat-robertson-challenges-creationism/

I Googled up this fairly recent article - an interesting read: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/19/us/manual-car-question-comeback

When inspectors would show up unannounced, Iraq wouldn't let them inspect...

Except that according to the presentations to the UN, he DID run no-notice inspections.

Yes he did... and he frequently ran into problems. Go watch the other presentations in which he complained about them on live TV. Saddam made the calculated decision early on to fuck around with the inspectors a bit, to give himself strategic ambiguity. He figured Bush wasn't crazy enough to start a second war while giving a huge tax cut. He underestimated the insanity of a man who told the Nashua Chamber of commerce "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family" and paid for it with his life. Go figure.

Okay, say the average cost of a security incident is a million bucks.

And I'm not sure where you're getting an average hourly wage of $44 from, but even with your $44/hour average is

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/best-companies/2012/pay/hourly.html.

Median for the top 88 companies with the best pay is $54,300 a year.

For the mathematically challenged, that's $26.11 an hour.

And HR costs are NOWHERE near 70% of salary (try 40%, though it's actually inversely proportional to a higher salary).

$36.55 * 25K = 913,850

And that's assuming all employees are primarily trained in a single year, and an entire hour for training upkeep is required of each employee every year after that or that ongoing forms of employee awareness training will cost a similar amount.

AND it also assumes that the company is kept to a single incident in a year.

If number of incidents is anything exceeding 1...

Simply investing in a technological solution and hoping it'll magically solve all your security issues is lazy and stupid. Worse, it means you've started believing the line of bullshit your vendors are feeding you.

Security is not a "product". It's a process. And the stronger each link in that process chain is, the harder it'll be to breach it.
Security hardware isn't the be all and end all.
Security software isn't the be all and end all.
Security personnel aren't the be all and end all.
Security testing isn't the be all and end all.
Security policies aren't the be all and end all.
Security processes aren't the be all and end all.
Employee education (and ongoing awareness raising) is not the be all and end all.

All of them should be working together in lock-step or you have a vulnerable point someplace. And someone WILL figure out how to exploit it.

They only submit it to production once they are sure it works reasonably well, and they can make a decent margin on it without killing existing product lines.

You're an idiot. iPod sales are down since the launch of the iPhone. Apple doesn't care.

When inspectors would show up unannounced, Iraq wouldn't let them inspect. They were allowed to inspect certain areas on certain days if Iraq approved it ahead of time. The inspection process was a joke, but Hans Blix defended it because he didn't want to see war again.

The irony is that if Hans was harsher and enforced real surprise inspections, perhaps we would have had real answers on WMD sooner and prevented war. By not really running proper inspections, Blix may have enabled the war to happen.

Except that according to the presentations to the UN, he DID run no-notice inspections.

This is not to say that the operation of inspections is free from frictions, but at this juncture we are able to perform professional, no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase aerial surveillance.

The real problem is that the UN team were repeatedly fed 'dead-cert' tips from the CIA and MI6, and when they followed up on them they found chicken farms or sheds that had clearly been empty for years. They didn't want to admit that their intelligence was of practically no use (also consider the dossier released by MI6 that claimed Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger where they hadn't even checked whether the minister signing the documents was in office on the signing date). So instead, there was an intensive briefing campaign that suggested Blix was incompetent, or that he was deliberately ruining the inspections because he was a hippy pacifist. It was another aspect of the 'the French/'Old Europe' are surrender-monkeys' propaganda bullcrap.

but having to swap forbidden books using flash drives dwarfs whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior and made you feel like you could ever possibly understand what it is like to live in a mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted country like Cuba.

forbidden books, mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted...

whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior

I rest my case, your honor.

Two high school kids just got 1 year each for raping a drunk 16 year old at a party (where people actually filmed and took pictures of it happening)..

It is not a determinate sentence.

Ohio Youth Services can keep them locked up until they are 21, if they think it is appropriate. They will then become registered sex offenders ranked by a judge according to the threat they appear to present at that time. Two teens found guilty in Steubenville rape case

http://articles.cnn.com/2002-12-04/tech/coolsc.coolsc.mousegenome_1_human-genome-new-human-genes-genes-that-cause-disease?_s=PM:TECH

Many of the companies went bankrupt quickly after getting the federal money

How many? You named three. And how many "green energy" companies got federal funding?

There were 27,226 federal awards listed in the stimulus bill for energy/environment. You've named three that failed. The three companies you mentioned were part of a specific group of those awards under the control of the Department of Energy that were meant just for new technologies. There were 28 such funding deals. Of those, four went under. Others in the successful group include a very successful battery company that's not far from where I live, which now supplies batteries automakers, including Japanese and Korean companies that build cars in the US. Batteries that are also exported. Other successes include companies that are building the smart grid and even a company whose technology is being used in the natural gas industry (you know, the fracking folks you love so much).

Though the stimulus bill authorized $90 billion for green projects, about $80 billion was spent, and most of that on infrastructure. The group of 28 Dept of Energy awards totaled $34billion. It might be worth noting here that a study published this week estimates the cost of the Iraq War at $6trillion.

You gotta look beyond just the right-wing talking points.

[Source for the stimulus energy figures: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/04/politics/fact-check-green-energy

Source for the cost of the Iraq War: "Costs of War" project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/5584/20130315/cost-iraq-war-6-trillion-dollar-costofwar.htm ]

There is at least as much fudging there.

Fudging is hard, but not impossible (see Kia). The EPA spot-checks 15% of all vehicles sold in the US in its own lab, each year. 2/3 of those are randomly selected. So you, as cheating Joe Automaker, have a 1/10 chance that your model will get selected at random. Even if you only have one model that you cheat on, this can't be a long-term strategy or you will get caught, on average, once every 10 years.

And to complicate things, the MPG figure you see on the window sticker is not the same figure used to calculate aggregate fuel efficiency for CAFE requirements.

That was sort-of true until this year. It is true that automakers could use the older methods to calculate fuel economy. But they then had to run the results through a set of equations that estimated the results if the more modern tesst were used instead. Starting this year, everyone has to use the more modern tests.

The cars are tested with pure gas

That isn't true, though I'm not sure what you mean by "pure gas", which itself is a cocktail. They have a standard fuel that they test with, which is 93-octane. For CA-rated cars, they use 91-octane. To get to 93-octane, you need to have ethanol, or some other anti-knock agent "watering" down the gas. The differences you get tank-to-tank are going to account for far more than the variation you'll see between a bit more ethanol added here or there compared to the EPA test.

Anyway, there will never be a "paragon" for predicting how consumers will drive a yet-to-be-sold car - all we can do is try to guess. The EPA test does a fair job, though I think people see the highway number as a bit optimistic unless you really restrain yourself. The city number is pretty realistic.

You must have missed the follow up
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/26/once-thought-lost-and-now-found-6-billion/

But the inspector general's new report says almost all the $6.6 billion was properly handed over to Iraq and its Central Bank. "[Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction] was able to account for the unexpended [Development Fund for Iraq] funds remaining in DFI accounts when the CPA (Coalitional Provisional Authority) dissolved in June 2004," the new report says. "Sufficient evidence exists showing that almost all of the remaining $6.6 billion remaining was transferred to actual and legal CBI (Central Bank of Iraq) control."

There was also a great story about how a random guy ended up being solely responsible for handling every pallet of cash destined for the Central Bank of Iraq.
It's actually a bit disturbing that the US didn't set up any procedures and this one guy was more or less on his own, handling billions of dollars with zero oversight.

Yeah, we should remember that terrible Bush Ecomonic Growth which even in the post internet-bubble-burst and post 9-11 period managed to hit the 7% mark (Obama hit 0.1% growth last quarter)

Things are soooooo much better now with record numbers of Americans on food stamps, and cashing-out their retirement funds just to make ends meet. And now with fewer people working full-time than were working when he took office in 2008, I guess we can say he has provided millions of Americans with "time-off"....

It turns-out that when you take a guy who has never done anything productive in his life, who has never run a business, or a city or a state, who has never had to earn a living working a real job, and whose college education you take "on faith" (nobody has seen any records or any diploma) and you put him in charge of the world's most-important nation (military and economic superpower) the results are.... sub-optimal

At first I was surprised that they even cared about public opinion at all. Then I remembered that this is SE Asia, where the importance of "saving face" is taught along with potty training. Remember the 1996 rocket crash in China? A small village was razed, they detained journalists for hours, and days later Xinhua only admitted to six deaths, blaming failure on a "sudden gust of wind". Then you have the tragically comical DPRK.

Citation please? Doctors are closing their practices in droves due to financial hardship. Many people on medicare can't even find a doctor to take them. As for what's fair for physicians to earn, remember that it's a ridiculously competitive field to enter, so these are the brightest of the bright, they incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and they sacrificed their twenties studying.

Citation please? Doctors are closing their practices in droves due to financial hardship. Many people on medicare can't even find a doctor to take them. As for what's fair for physicians to earn, remember that it's a ridiculously competitive field to enter, so these are the brightest of the bright, they incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and they sacrificed their twenties studying.

This is all bullshit.

On Feb 10th, ArsTechnia released the following story: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/at-facebook-zero-day-exploits-backdoor-code-bring-war-games-drill-to-life/

On Feb 19th, The Register released this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/19/apple_hacked/

On Feb 20th, CNN released this: http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/20/tech/web/hacked-apple-facebook-twitter

On the 10th I said they got pwned for real in #misec on freenode, and 9 days later I was proven right. This is nothing more than a publically traded company trying to save face.... or something. But the "wargame" and actual hacking are NOT coincidences.

- ShadowHatesYou

Or at least the Chrome OS developers could give the Android developers a few pointers...

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/07/apple-android-malware/

http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/14/pf/health-insurance-premiums/index.html

Nice troll, there AC.