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Even private corporations that outsource key components of their business frequently have problems.

Absolutely — in fact, you read carefully, I acknowledge just that in my post. However, those, who have such troubles too often get eclipsed by competitors. Government, however, has no competition — more or less by definition.

So, instead of switching the service-provider with the same ease Verizon can be changed for AT&T, we are forced to foot the bill for the repairs and upgrades to something, that has not worked right since inception.

So what the heck makes you think that outsourcing should be the default for governments?

Nothing, really — I never said such a thing... My point is, the government should only be allowed to do the things, which can not be done by non-government entities (like courts and military). Just as you should not be running Seti@Home inside your kernel, you should not be managing private citizens' healthcare inside federal government, for example. And, note, I said "can not" — a so-called "market failure" to do, what somebody thinks is worth doing (like, most recently, the "municipal WiFi"), is not a justification for making the government do it instead. No, sir.

No, the idea that government should outsource everything doesn't make any sense.

Luckily for all present, this was not my idea...

http://www.economist.com/

I second this. The journalists at The Economist are mostly British, although most subscribers are American. It is very entertaining to read news about America from an outsider's perspective, especially about typical American issues, like our dysfunctional health care system, guns, abortion, etc.

As for American news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, I wouldn't even use them to line my parakeet's cage, for fear that I would end up with a retarded parakeet.

http://www.economist.com/

It depends. What impact will publishing a paper have on your career? If âoepublishingâ 10 papers is the difference between a associate professorship and a full professorship, $15,000 is cheap.

One might ask how valuable fake papers are â" and it turns out they can be worth quite a bit.

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21586845-flawed-system-judging-research-leading-academic-fraud-looks-good-paper

Thriving may not be the best word. The situation is a bit more nuanced than that. IIRC the benefit to wildlife of abandoning a large chunk of land was uneven – in particular to those animals at the top of the food chain.

Cataracts are up in animals – something that you almost never see in the wild. It is being cause directly by the radiation – not by ingestion – which surprised me.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21584963-birds-live-cataracts-chernobyl-not-so-blindingly-obvious?zid=318&ah=ac379c09c1c3fb67e0e8fd1964d5247f

You know that even with the rate increase you are getting a huge barging? Florida’s state insurance scheme deficit keeps on getting bigger and bigger each year. Private insurance companies are fleeing as fast as they can because of caps set up by the state insurance regulator- which is why there is no competition.

Either build cheap houses that are cheap to rebuild after they are blown down or build them so that can take a hurricane. Stick built houses just is not the answer..

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21579470-americans-are-building-beachfront-homes-even-oceans-rise-youre-going-get-wet

http://www.economist.com/node/4085798

You know that even with the rate increase you are getting a huge barging? Florida’s state insurance scheme deficit keeps on getting bigger and bigger each year. Private insurance companies are fleeing as fast as they can because of caps set up by the state insurance regulator- which is why there is no competition.

Either build cheap houses that are cheap to rebuild after they are blown down or build them so that can take a hurricane. Stick built houses just is not the answer..

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21579470-americans-are-building-beachfront-homes-even-oceans-rise-youre-going-get-wet

http://www.economist.com/node/4085798

On a side note, BMW is increasing its use of 3d printers to print out parts due to complexity or ticks that can be done with 3d printers. In the 3d market manufactures is one of the fastest growing categories.

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21584447-digital-manufacturing-there-lot-hype-around-3d-printing-it-fast

If you want to know results, try Venezuela. A year ago, they removed the guns from private citizen's hands because of escalating violence. Their crime rate is now 1/1000 (yes, ten cubed) what it was before the gun ban.

Assuming the official statistics can be trusted, that is. The article I'm quoting is a few years old, but it points out some problems that were already occurring, regarding the country's response to the exploding homicide rate:

http://www.economist.com/node/21009630

The government, however, seems less concerned with reducing the crime rate than with preventing press coverage of it. The main detective corps, known as the CICPC, closed its press office years ago, forcing crime reporters to meet under a nearby tree. In response to El Nacional's morgue photo, it announced that it would request that the paper be prosecuted for violating children's right not to be exposed to violent images. Police officers were stationed at the morgue to prevent any repetition.

JP Morgan Chase lost about $7.2 billion dollars trading bonds (with its own private money, mind you, not depositors' money or anything). Then the feds decided this was bad and that they should fine them an extra $800 million. Even the Brits are dubious, suspecting that it's really because Chase has been publicly complaining about the feds and wondering when exactly it became a crime to lose money...

So if you want a laugh, sure, you can choose the popular-screed opinion du jour where banks are the bad guys. But I'd say, why limit your targets like that? We can be cynical about banks and regulators!! :P

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21568433-early-evidence-french-tax-skimming-froth

So you're saying "They do it too". OK. I agree with that. But that doesn't invalidate what I said.

(OTOH, it is possible that this incident is why I remembered Airbus and Boeing in this context. Perhaps it was a different pair of companies.)

I'm having a bit of trouble tracking down the origina incident that I was remembering, but I did find:
http://www.economist.com/node/304958
containing:

The second accusation, that the Echelon surveillance system is now used for commercial gain, is particularly controversial and harder to prove. A report compiled last October for the European Parliament (which preceded the Campbell report) concluded that "there is wide-ranging evidence" that governments "utilise communications intelligence to provide commercial advantages to companies". It suggested that satellites used by telephone companies are monitored by sites in Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, while cables under sea and on land, as well as microwave tower networks, are also tapped. Such monitoring is increasingly useful, because of the growing use of e-mail, faxes and the Internet by businesses to communicate. The Campbell report agreed that there is âoewide-ranging evidenceâ suggesting governments use spies to benefit companies.

which suggests that my memory was not incorrect.

The link missing from my post is here.

if something is not profitable, then the net benefit to society is negative.

Counterexample: Wikipedia. It's a non-profit, based entirely on user contributed material and user curating of said material. Even in opinion at , Wikipedia was considered to be generating a consumer surplus. But the very notion of consumer surplus is missing from your analysis.

As another example, having accessible works in the public domain is a net benefit to society, even if there is no profit to be made from them. No doubt, having any works in the public domain is an economic catastrophe in such a narrow view as the one you presented.

There's nothing to support your prediction that Chinese characters will be used in English. China is a great economic and political power, but it hasn't established any kind of cultural hegemony. There are almost no loanwords from Chinese now. Also the Chinese themselves are forgetting how to write many words. Consequently they don't use stroke order for text input, they use Pinyin. It seems to be much easier. If you prefer strokes, isn't it much easier to just draw the character? My guess is, once handwriting recognition has improved, Wubi will be a thing of the past or a fringe phenomenon like stenotypy is here.

The reality is that stroke-based input is REALLY the only way somebody who doesn't know how to speak Chinese CAN enter characters on a keyboard

But why would they WANT to enter characters they don't understand, except for cutesy emoticons? Anyway, I can enter any Unicode character by its code, no need to memorize stroke-key mappings.

I realize you're probably trolling, but on the off chance you're simply ignorant, here are some articles that you might find interesting/informative.

This article shows the point of view of a westerner living in Japan and debunks some of the most common misconceptions people have.

This article details some of the cultural issues that continue to hinder their society.

These are some examples of the 'civilized' behaviours they've demonstrated in the past, and this is the attitude that they have towards said behaviours and those who committed them.

If you're going to idolize a country, at least do some research. It's like someone praising Josef Mengele for advancing medical science without looking at the bigger picture. Oh well, at least the Japanese weren't Mengele-level bad, right? Oh wait.

It reminds me of this:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583974-top-musicians-are-judged-much-their-movements-their-melodies

In short, people were bad at guessing who won the competition when they could only hear the music and not see the performers. Professional judges were just as bad as novices (worse when they could see the performance but just as bad when they could only hear it).

Interesting stuff.

England wants nothing to do with us on it as well as most of Europe.

Huh? England *very* much wants this as does all of NATO. Oh, are you talking about English citizens? They don't matter in this decision.

But maybe Parliament does matter, eh? And what other NATO nation has expressed official gung-ho endorsement of the US regime in this matter, let alone military involvment? Perhaps by "all of NATO" you mean "France". I am not up to date on France's position of the hour. I do know Hollande shot his mouth off some days ago, but the French population is not crazy about his enthusiasm for unprovoked military action against a sovereign power not belligerent to France.

I suspect, having watched both the US and British loose cannons in chief come up so far short of support, Hollande may well waver.

Parliament does matter but they're just an obstacle. Still, I was happy to hear of the labor party's defiance.

Hollande will go along with the U.S. regardless of public support. U.S. must act first, and they will. Turkey has also been drumming up for war and directly funding the destabilization of Syria since 2010. Turkey, more or less, is just a pawn.

England wants nothing to do with us on it as well as most of Europe.

Huh? England *very* much wants this as does all of NATO. Oh, are you talking about English citizens? They don't matter in this decision.

But maybe Parliament does matter, eh? And what other NATO nation has expressed official gung-ho endorsement of the US regime in this matter, let alone military involvment? Perhaps by "all of NATO" you mean "France". I am not up to date on France's position of the hour. I do know Hollande shot his mouth off some days ago, but the French population is not crazy about his enthusiasm for unprovoked military action against a sovereign power not belligerent to France.

I suspect, having watched both the US and British loose cannons in chief come up so far short of support, Hollande may well waver.

Actually, do you know which country in Africa has the cheapest cell phone providers?

Somalia.

(ref: http://www.economist.com/node/5328015)

Somalia fascinates me from a free-society perspective. Usually Somalia is the punchline of some attempt to troll a libertarian, but if you actually look at what's happening there, it's quite fascinating.

This paper is one of my favorites. Take a look, you may be surprised:

http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf

There are 2 approaches.
Top down would be the carbon tax. If you are concerned about exporting pollution to the 3rd world there are ways of handling that – like via a tariff (and still not be a protectionist).
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21572180-can-trade-restrictions-be-justified-environmental-grounds-air-trade/print

Or you can go bottom up, implementing various subsides and plans, figuring out the loopholes, then adding another layer, see the loop holes, etc.

You want the plan that gives the most bang for the buck which is the Carbon Tax.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/28/196355493/economists-have-a-one-page-solution-to-climate-change

Ban Ki Moon's spokesperson explicitly said the UN inspectors would not be doing that. So whether the rebels have faked any attacks or have attacked themselves -- we may never know. At least not for a long time and certainly not before western forces attack. I think at this point even finding evidence of use doesn't really matter. Western politicians have been talking too tough for too long and the perception if we back down would be disastrous for them. They'd be seen as abetting Assad's war crimes through inaction. We're locked in to a course of attack by politics and public perception. Truth be damned. Well. The egg will be on all our faces once the rebels we put in power start committing genocide.

It's a choice between Assad's war crimes or the "rebels" committing genocide. Some of the more vocal rebel factions have made it quite clear that Alawites and Shiites are kuffar (infidel) apostates from Islam and will be killed should they ever gain power. That's to say nothing of the Christians and other minorities. Even, as is pointed out by the rebel interviewed, secular Sunnis are kuffar as far as they are concerned. Assad, as bad as he may be, is the lesser of two evils. Or do you think we can occupy the place indefinitely keeping each side from killing each other, because that worked so well in Iraq.

There was a much better article about this in the Economist a few months back. The banks don't ask you for a list of your Facebook friends. It doesn't work like that. They get the information as part of your score from credit agencies. You will never even know it is happening. But I don't see why this is worse than other things they consider, like your zipcode or marital status. You are judged by the company you keep. Deal with it.

The big question is, when you have your privacy settings turned up do credit agencies still have a way to get your data? And less importantly, if they do turn up empty handed, do they use that against you with equal weight as being "friends" with deadbeats? In other words, is having a well-manicured facebook page now akin to having a cheap car loan (in good standing) on your credit record, to ensure you get a good rate?

There was a much better article about this in the Economist a few months back. The banks don't ask you for a list of your Facebook friends. It doesn't work like that. They get the information as part of your score from credit agencies. You will never even know it is happening. But I don't see why this is worse than other things they consider, like your zipcode or marital status. You are judged by the company you keep. Deal with it.

With the way national governments keep piling up debt, it's unreasonable to assume any of those governments will be funding space exploration in 2030.

Oh, I'm sorry, is the flavor of the shit sandwich any different with 2013 flavored dollars? Like most budgets are justified today...yet we keep spending. It's more unreasonable to believe that behavior would change. We ran out trillions ago.

With the way national governments keep piling up debt, it's unreasonable to assume any of those governments will be funding space exploration in 2030.

Reality is that cars are far heavier now than a few decades ago due to improved safety standards: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/08/daily-chart

Sure, race cars are both lighter and more survivable. They also cost far more. When you care about improving safety, but cost is also a constraint, weight is pretty easy to sacrifice. After all, you can always stuff a bigger engine in there so the car won't be slower than last year's model.

That's not the correct quote. At least, that's not quite what he said at the keynote I went to, and that's what the article's about. So I'll call it a misquote.

The nutbag theory is that Muslims want convert countries like the US to Sharia law.

What "those guys" want, as Gen. Alexander explained, is to create a caliphate in the Middle East that is based on strict Sharia law. Our actions in the Middle East stymie that.

Note that this is actually the stated goal of Al-Qaeda.

I'll give it 10 years before some group of liberals manages to force a rule through congress that all new cars must be capable of autonomous navigation.

I think insurance companies will be in the driver's seat (*) in making this happen. Contrast the rates they will offer to a 17-year-old in (a) a traditional car, (b) a car with instrumentation reporting home, or (c) automated car. Aviva's Drive Like a Girl campaign is just the beginning of this shift.

(*) A phrase that will be less connected to daily life 50 years from now.

...the trend is toward co-mingled or “single stream” collection... But the switch can make people suspicious: if there is no longer any need to separate different materials, people may conclude that the waste is simply being buried or burned. In fact, the switch towards single-stream collection is being driven by new technologies that can identify and sort the various materials with little or no human intervention.

I think you may be basing your beliefs about single stream recycling on outdated information.

The 900 lb gorilla in the room is the shutdown of nuclear generation. This is causing a much faster increase in coal consumption and construction of more coal burning plants in Europe.

A lot of what is being mined and burned is nasty brown stuff too.

The idea is that it's going to be replaced by renewables. Someday maybe, but I bet not in my lifetime. The upshot is that despite all this solar etc. the EU is spewing more CO2 than ever.

The Economist has a great article about it. They call it the 'Golden Age of Coal'.

Please try again.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/04/economist-explains-why-iceland-ban-pornography

Iceland, the land that has outlawed stripping and is trying to outlaw online porn? Yes, a bastion of personal liberty.

But they were given meaning by our beloved economists. In 2008, the definition of GDP was changed to include things like patents and other types of intellectual property. Article here:

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21582498-america-has-changed-way-it-measures-gdp-boundary-problems

So, instead of waiting to see how a corporation (or national economy) actually executes their IP rights and measure the revenue, the GDP calculations attempt to impute a future income stream from them. And then this becomes part of our GDP statistics. IP has become a Potemkin village of value behind which companies (and entire nations) hide the true dire straights of their economy. They are pretty, shiny objects meant to impress investors, who should bee asking whether anyone has the ability to actually produce value with them.

So we aren't going to see a change in the status of patents any time soon. Because now, the economists have a number (fictional though it may be) that pins an amount of GDP to them. And woe to those who attack that and drive us into another recession.

Piracy has killed things off. You don't think it has because it's so difficult to measure what would have been created but now wasn't. But take a look at the rise and fall of the music industry in terms of sales. They plummet right around the time broadband internet and MP3 became widespread after rising for many years. The rise in digital sales did not nearly offset the fall in other kinds of sales. You think that's a giant co-incidence?

It isn't and that's so obvious that even the Economist has said "the internet sank the music business". See the article for a graph of sales broken down by physical/digital. Digital sales rose but overall sales are still just over half what they were in 1999. Did people somehow lose interest in music and halve their consumption? No, of course not. People still listen to just as much music as they did back then, probably much more. The difference now is they don't pay for it.

a lot of freight is already transported by rail. HSR is for people,

More importantly, the US has an incredibly efficient "normal speed" freight rail system, and you can't add passenger HSR into the mix because the two systems are at odds.

First, a bit of background on the "father of spin"

THE FATHER OF SPIN: EDWARD L. BERNAYS & THE BIRTH OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

One of Bernays's skills was sensing where public opinion was moving, and using it in his favour. His first success was a campaign for the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to smoke. Slimness was becoming fashionable for women, so he flogged cigarettes as a healthy alternative to sweets, enlisting the help of “experts” to claim in the press that cigarettes also disinfected the mouth.

Women were still resistant, though; which was when Bernays had the brilliant idea of using cigarettes as a symbol of emancipation. He put it about in the papers that the taboo against women smoking in public was symptomatic of male oppression, and organised a march down Fifth Avenue of fashionable young women with their “torches of freedom”. He orchestrated massive press coverage (which omitted to mention that the march was led by his secretary). Afterwards, newspapers carried reports of women being seen smoking in the street; and within a few weeks, the Broadway theatres changed their rules to allow women into their smoking rooms.

Bernays also invented a tool much-used since: the front organisation. When, for instance, a new government in Guatemala threatened to take over some of the vast plantations of the United Fruit Company, and distribute it among the peasants, Bernays set up the Middle America Information Bureau. United Fruit financed the Bureau, which provided information to the newspapers about communist penetration in Guatemala. The newspapers printed the information, the American public was inflamed, there was a CIA-backed insurgency and the elected government was toppled and replaced by a right-wing totalitarian regime.

In other words, advertising/publicity is simply a means to brainwash the masses into doing what the advertisers want. The word 'Machiavellian' comes to mind.

This is what I was going to say. I'd pay for well researched news on major events instead of the speculation and opinion sites put out in the first 30 seconds of hearing about something.

If you're looking for well researched articles etc. try The Economist.
Or if you want a daily newspaper, try The Wall Street Journal.
*shrug* I find them worth paying for.

otoh, if this thread is just a rant-fest about how most news sources are lame...
*shrug* while I don't disagree, that observation isn't newsworthy.

Yeah, that's what I thought on reading the summary too. 30 years for wire fraud?

I read an interesting article in the Economist the other week. It suggested that countries where children are spanked tend to have populations that support harsher prison sentences.

People who as children experienced the “powerlessness” of frequent spankings report a disproportionately greater interest later in life to own guns, Mr Pfeiffer says. They also demand more draconian prison sentences, including the death penalty, for convicted criminals. And they seem more prone to violence themselves. In a study of 45,000 ninth-graders Mr Pfeiffer conducted in 2007-08, those kids who had been beaten by their parents were five times as likely to commit repeated crimes or to use cannabis, and missed school four times more frequently for ten days a year or more.

Scandinavian countries, in part inspired by the children’s books of Astrid Lindgren, the author of the popular Pippi Longstocking (pictured) series, were the first to make spanking illegal for teachers in the 1950s and 60s. Between 1979 und 1983, they also outlawed spanking by parents. Crime rates, gun ownership and prison populations have been falling since.

By contrast, spanking is still common in large parts of America, especially in the Evangelical milieus of Southern states. This is also where crime remains relatively high, gun ownership common, and incarceration excessive. (America’s incarceration rate is between eight to ten times that of northern European countries.)

Correlation does not imply causation and all that, but it's still an interesting theory as to why the US is so far out of step with the rest of the world on crime and punishment.

So why don't we do that instead of electing them to public office or making them executives in the banking industry?

Because there is evidence that psychopaths actually make better leaders. There was an article about this a couple months ago in the Economist. By ignoring the suffering of individuals, psychopaths are able to focus on bold action for the greater good. This is especially apparent in war time, where compassionate leaders are often dithering and indecisive, leading to a prolonged war and many more deaths and wounds than needed.

This week's The Economist discussed that same question as its cover story. You should read it.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21582004-crime-plunging-rich-world-keep-it-down-governments-should-focus-prevention-not

And so I searched united states broadband subsidy in DDG, and this is the second link. My casual review notes somewhere between $7.2B and $11.7B in stimulus funding, paid since 2006, mentioned in the first three paragraphs, $4.5B of that announced in Nov. 2011. That would be one budget ago. Exactly how much more recently are you looking for? I'm sure if I look, I could find some slated for distribution in 2013, but I think the point is made. That particular trough is still open.

It seems the US government has a very loose definition of "polluted".
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/06/fracking

> There is something to this. If you have an approved mechanism for intuitively detecting bombs they
> you have probable cause to terminate a prospective bomber, and if your intuition is right more than
> half the time on average, you're a hero. Since some few are more accurate with intuition and some
> less, and the metrics are classified, you are free to open fire indiscriminately anywhere anywhen.

Half the time? Nah, I think you are overestimating how accurate you need to be, because, even if you find nothing, you can, like the scammer of these did, claim that it hit on some residue and you just got them at the wrong time.

In fact, this is very much the way drug dogs are used. Dogs, it turns out, have great snouts and can detect all manner of things, and do great in really blind trials. However, they are even better at playing "Clever Hans" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans ), that is, if the handler is given any clues as to where their might be hits, the animals false positive rate goes through the roof...in exactly the places where the handler expects to find something.

So.... dogs are great at finding bombs or drugs in random packages... but in one of their most common use cases, sniffing a suspects car, they are just about guaranteed a hit, because their handler is expecting one. A hit, that can be explained away and dismissed when nothing is found, so their real hit rate can be far lower than chance without bringing them into question.

One study used no drugs or explosives at all, but flagged several points with information for the handler indicating the type of hit expected to set his expectations. If the dogs were 100% effective, there would have been not a single hit amongst any of the trials...the results?

from http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/02/animal_behaviour

The findings, which Dr Lit reports in Animal Cognition, reveal that of 144 searches, only 21 were clean (no alerts). All the others raised one alert or more. In total, the teams raised 225 alerts, all of them false. While the sheer number of false alerts struck Dr Lit as fascinating, it was where they took place that was of greatest interest.

that may be, but Napolitano didn't save any money. She increased costs substantially, caused economic turmoil for the country with the policies she supported, and spent over 200 million bucks on those scanners which have saved us approximately $0. Did I mention the amount of tourism lost because people were like "Fuck this country" over things like claiming we can randomly stop people in 3/4 of the country. You may think it's a TSA thing, but TSA and DHS go hand in hand. Plus DHS harassing the shit out of foreigners, as well.

So does that mean she's working gratis? sadly, no.

[responding to a post near top of thread to prevent the use of "forum sliding" tactics--refer to article in my signature if you are unaware of the tactic]

While the mainstream US media largely ignores NSA/US spying, other news has to take the place of those stories--something bigger and "better", so to speak.

Let's start with the train wreck in Lac Megantic--not a single story in mainstream media regarding SCADA systems used on most trains these days. Why not?

http://www.getransportation.com/rail/rail-products/locomotives/on-board-systems/train-controlscada.html [getransportation.com]

The owner of the rail company involved spews disinformation to distract from a valid concern--that trains can be remotely operated (including brakes!) by a system easily hacked. Who might have such a motivation?

Let's move on to the Asiana crash at SFO.

The following from the Economist has some interesting information about the controls of airliners. The most relevant information is discussed in the last section of the article.

http://www.economist.com/node/787987 [economist.com]

I shouldn't have to remind everyone that Boeing is inextricably involved with government operations--they build the best military aircraft out there, including drones. In both incidents, the operators of these vehicles were blamed before any reasonable amount of investigation could possibly have been completed. Why is that?

zimmerman innocent!! zimmerman guilty!! "Oh my God. Just when I thought this case couldn't get any more bizarre," Saudi Princess out on bail Holmes acquitted Holmes Confesses Stock Market recovers Stock market plunges Sarah Palin Pregnant Student Loans 45% Interest Offer Students Access to Morning-After Pill FREE XBOX SONY ELECTRONIC ARTS VALVE STEAM FREE DOWNLOAD reddit closing facebook shares /. china pork senate finance committee dollar plunges twinkle Twinkie Egypt Christians targeted cook a steak killed kittens gold cellphone UC Berkeley stolen marijuana Texas secedes! LDS LSD SD SC Abortion Fracking Skateboard lost Toronto Red Cross charges of adultery phone number

[responding to a post near top of thread to prevent the use of "forum sliding" tactics--refer to article in my signature if you are unaware of the tactic]

While the mainstream US media largely ignores NSA/US spying, other news has to take the place of those stories--something bigger and "better", so to speak.

Let's start with the train wreck in Lac Megantic--not a single story in mainstream media regarding SCADA systems used on most trains these days. Why not?

http://www.getransportation.com/rail/rail-products/locomotives/on-board-systems/train-controlscada.html

The owner of the rail company involved spews disinformation to distract from a valid concern--that trains can be remotely operated (including brakes!) by a system easily hacked. Who might have such a motivation?

Let's move on to the Asiana crash at SFO.

The following from the Economist has some interesting information about the controls of airliners. The most relevant information is discussed in the last section of the article.

http://www.economist.com/node/787987

I shouldn't have to remind everyone that Boeing is inextricably involved with government operations--they build the best military aircraft out there, including drones. In both incidents, the operators of these vehicles were blamed before any reasonable amount of investigation could possibly have been completed. Why is that?

And, just to keep the sheep happy, why the hell is Zimmerman being tried by a jury of only six of his "peers"? Every state-level criminal court I've heard of had thirteen, plus alternates.

For those of you who do not know--IKEA is the biggest charity scam in the world. Its money is all tied up in mysterious offshore accounts. They have hundreds of millions of dollars and give away maybe a million or two per year. It is all a big tax avoidance scheme by the reclusive founder (and X-Nazi recruiter) of Ikea. So anything they claim to do is suspect. http://www.economist.com/node/6919139 http://mentalfloss.com/article/18575/ikea-worlds-largest-charity

If you already have legal obligations, the disclaimer is superfluous. I am not sure what you mean by risk management, but if your management scheme consists of using a boilerplate disclaimer then you are doing it wrong. Remember we are talking about emails going to unintended recipients. Not email going between business partners.

Relevant links from page one of the google search. In all email disclaimers are useless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_disclaimer
http://www.economist.com/node/18529895
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-08-26/business/ct-biz-0826-chicago-law-20110826_1_disclaimers-legal-obligations-binding
http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2012/03/that-disclaimer-at-bottom-of-your-email-is-unenforceable-lawyers-say.html