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> This is why I hate going to Slashdot. Not the factually incorrect articles, not the summaries needing proofreading, not the occasional "advertising". It's the asshole users.

As opposed to the asshole MS that force upgrades your Windows 7 / 8 and admits they can't disable tracking.

Methinks your priorities are out of whack.

See http://www.forbes.com/sites/sa... for example. It's endemic. They'll probably derail civilisation as we know it eventually, bridges falling, weapons launched. Then, when we're back to the caves/trees and eating nuts and berries (not a bad life outside the cubicles, really), we will curse the evil god Ex-cel and provide blood sacrifices on altars (inscribed with A1, C2 etc.) to keep him away?

> Windows 10 works just fine if you don't care about being spied on.

FTFY. When even MS admits they Are unable to stop Windows 10 tracking then you've just admitting to being MS's bitch. But I guess you have no respect for yourself since MS sure doesn't have any for you.

Only a complete idiot blindly trusts Microsoft.

The rest of us actually have a pair and don't allow MS to pretend they own our computers, nor our network connections.

> I used Windows 7 the other day, it felt old all of a sudden,

/sarcasm I used the wheel the other day. It felt a few thousand years old. It is now out of date and is just not reasonable anymore -- oh wait, it works.

Ah, that explains it -- just another dumb hipster who thinks "Ooh, shiny!" is somehow more magically stable then something that has been around for a while. Windows 10 == more lines of code == more bugs, but keep on being a shill because Windows 7 works just fine for those of us using it.

But I don't expect an apologist to understand why Microsoft's forced upgrades on Windows 7 and Window 8 users leaves a bad taste with customers and users start looking for alternatives.

Ok, lets NOT talk about a power grid that would be completely overwhelmed and collapse without billions in investment..

I'm skipping the various examples of where it would not work to look at this. Sure if everyone went to an electric, well we would have problems, but that is unlikely. According to forbes the average car is ten plus years old, so at most 10% of cars are replaced a year. I'd hazard a guess that we are no where near the breakeven point where as many electrics are purchased as gas, so maybe we will be at 5% replaced by electric per year in a few years. (I looked, but didn't find a gas versus electric sales comparison.)

Of course at some point there will be a pseudo tipping point, where the electric sales will accelerate. I'm guessing that will mainly be if/when the battery cost drops enough to really make them competitive. Either way, I think we can build out our infrastructure fast enough to match the actual changeover rate.

Now, that does not mean we will actually do it. I wouldn't at all be surprised to have a few big blackouts occur before utilities really get moving. Rural areas would have the extra hit since they might be relying on electric for heat, but urban areas might be worse since you would suddenly be massively increasing energy usage in a much smaller area.

If you think that's confined to Silicon Valley, you must not get around much.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/su...

Management at Microsoft seems wildly incompetent. It wasn't only Slashdot comment posters who called former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Monkey Boy.

Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today."

As an audiophile I'm quite aware of adjusting the center channel independently, but thanks though. :-)

The problem is two-fold:

1. I also watch movies at a friends house and they only have 2 speakers -- the dialog is "blown out" more often then not. :-/ Since they aren't interested in a sound bar there are little options. There is only so much futzing around with the downmixing / sound modes one can do. :-(

2. Even on my own system I'm come across the occasional movies where someone screwed up the dialog channel. Tends to be action / foreign films the most for some reason. Go figure.

> at least not as well as my plasma.

Man after my own heart. =)

Digressing ... I honestly don't know what I'm going to do when my Panny TC-P60VT60 goes out. Hopefully OLED will come down from the stratosphere by then.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...

Back on topic, yup, for black levels Plasma kicks projectors.
* http://www.avsforum.com/forum/...

--
"When I die I hope my wife sells my speakers for what they're worth rather than what I told her I paid for them."

A "confirmation" from an internal corporate investigation is worth about as much as my toilet.

On the other hand, for a company/organisation to come out in public with a statement like this is very risky indeed, unless they are able to back it up with substantial evidence.

No, it's not risky. It's not risky at all.

Microsoft purchased the Gears of War IP from Epic in 2014. The game is being developed by an in-house Microsoft studio, now called The Coalition. So yeah, super surprising that Microsoft are only releasing it on platforms they control.

Some of the natives have really lifted themselves up, even with the communal ownership thing. Take the Osoyoos band. To quote from their web site, http://oibdc.ca/

Both of your examples rely on a mix of capitalism and outside investment to improve their lifestyle. You aren't making a good case here at all. Also, read this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...

Russia and the Soviet Union. It's hard to claim that a country that went from wealth being considered how many serfs you owned to a space fairing nation in 50 years, while winning WWII through the sacrifice of millions of lives, and suffering under Stalin, didn't increase their GDP.

Because they didn't. All of that mainly came about as a result of the old fashioned way of doing things prior to the industrial revolution: Conquest. I've spoken to people who lived in Warsaw pact nations before the fall of the Iron Curtain who have said that the Russians were essentially dirt poor and got most of what they had by plundering it from their satellite states, primarily relying upon them for sustenance. This includes rocket technology used in the space race, by the way. (The US did a similar thing with Werner Von Braun et al, but not until after they saw the long-term strategic need for it.) This is why Russia also maintained a strong expansionist policy well after the age of imperialism as a means of economic growth had ended. (And capitalism is the reason that age ended; notice the non-capitalist states were still relying upon it.)

And by the way, not one person I spoke to who lived in that has ever said that they liked it. One of them (my current coworker) tells me that the only reason it took so long for communism to end was because the leadership loves having power and doesn't want to let it go. A couple I met from Romania said the same thing, and they described how it ended in violence because the dictator essentially had people loyal to him (nobody even knew who they were other than just some random guys with guns) just randomly fire upon people in the street who had even the slightest appearance of favoring an end to communism.

Sadly socialist revolutions, while easy to sell to a poor population, usually end up with corrupt leadership that fuck it right up.

Because communism just flat out doesn't work without central leadership. It just doesn't. Look at the Icarians as a case study. They had no legal requirement to follow their leaders who were democratically elected, but even then the GDP slowly tanked until the leadership had no choice but to take a harder line stance to make the workers productive, and eventually people just got sick of it and left, so the whole thing fell apart. The Icarians, by the way, had an entire town already built just handed to them (Nauvoo, Illinois, which was built by Mormons who were essentially forced to leave because the state government hated their religious views.) Even Karl Marx knew (and stated such) that dictatorship is required for a conversion.

In the mobile space customers who use IAP (In-App-Purchases) are known as whales.

* Who Are the 'Whales' Driving Free-to-Play Gaming? You'd Be Surprised

* Forbes: Why It's Scary When 0.15% Mobile Gamers Bring In 50% Of The Revenue

This exploitation is nothing more then a legalized form of gambling. In other news gambling is for those that suck at math.

But go ahead and keep hijacking the term "free" and making headlines about how gambling makes money.

--
redditard, noun, some one who down votes simply because they disagree instead of content.

Out here in rural America (I'm near Lake Tahoe), we hear nothing but Big Business Buzz. I've got the best there is in the County Seat: 12 Mb/s, barely enough for my small business...but nothing near what it would take to attract significant business growth, because we're not "visible" enough, and the Republican congress has made sure there's been no money (even though most rural areas are as Red as Hell) for broadband through the Rural Utilities Service, or other federal medium.

Google could create a massive economic boom in rural America...but "shareholder return" is more important to them than trying to help solve economic problems outside big cities. But, even Jack Welch, the original progenitor of "shareholder value" has now called it "the dumbest idea in the world."
(See http://www.forbes.com/sites/st...)

Even the Tennessee Valley Authority spawned the USDA's Rural Electrification Service to bring electricity to rural areas...back when politicians still gave a damn about their constituents' needs.

So, Google, why won't you return my phone calls about serving rural markets? Are citizens in rural areas less VALUABLE to our Country, in your eyes? Where does YOUR food come from?

Sociopaths make better CEOs. I believe that has been proven by research. Actually, Forbes thinks psychopaths make better CEOs: http://www.forbes.com/sites/je... I would have just said sociopaths, myself.

Yeah, it sucks that radiation leads to increased cancer rates. My biggest problem is I can never find numbers in these studies of how many more people are getting cancer, and if a "significant" increase is hundreds, thousands or doubling a 0.1% chance to 0.2%.

Alternatively, coal and oil power is believed to have contributed to the death of hundreds of thousands. Even renewables such as wind and solar are believed to have killed more than nuclear power: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Yes, why not? You want to police people to see if they're spending it "right"? That's why we have so many problems with welfare programs now, and why welfare has high administration costs.

We already have that in effect, with the EITC. What improvements does UBI or NIT bring compared to EITC?

If we really had the political will to reform our social safety net, we could do it like Germany did, which is to consolidate our entire welfare system into a simple means-tested cash program, together with case worker supervision and a requirement to take jobs that the government finds for you. That system was introduced by the moderate left in Germany, and it has worked well.

Of course, why would we even bother? When you count government assistance, there is very little poverty in the US. While welfare is a big chunk of money and an ugly-as-sin behemoth, social security, Medicare/Medicaid, and ACA are far bigger problems.

Of course, there, too, we could learn a lesson from Europe, where governments have figured out long ago that the only way to finance a social safety net is to impose high taxes on the middle class. It's only snake oil salesmen like Clinton and Sanders that pretend we can finance this stuff by only taxing the rich.

I think it's safe to say that Peter Thiel will be fine.

But just for the record, I don't hate the man, I am just disappointed. Not only for this, but also for using his money to destroy Gawker, while trying to keep this out of the public eye.

He is not the man I thought he was.

According to Forbes, "though speaking engagements, book deals, and consulting gigs".

1. You didn't pay more than $1.6 billion in taxes. I guarantee you didn't.
2. Corporations must make a profit or they cease to exist (and thus also your job ceases to exist). Taxes cut into the profits.
3. If you want a dog to come to you when you call you don't beat him when he shows up. You offer him a reason to come. It's the same with corporations: you can't tax the hell out of them and expect them to stick around. You'll get more tax revenue from having more corporations with bigger profits than you will by driving all the corporations away and taxing the life out of the few that are foolish or small enough to remain.
4. It's not tax evasion if they're abiding by the law.

What, are you saying we do NOT owe that money, it's not committed expenditures? I know if we used a GAAP approach we'd be over $120 trillion, but assuming we slough off future SS payments to those not currently collecting, we still need about $19.4 trillion today.

Of the $19.4 trillion, what do you claim we do not owe?

How Obamacare was passed into law

It had mostly to do with the unions killing them in the first place. Labor became far too expensive, and it ultimately lost for everyone, including the union workers. Here is an old Forbes article: Click

Sue Amazon. Well, get a patent on your product first, then sell it on Amazon, -then- sue Amazon for selling items that infringe on your patent. Wouldn't be the first time.

A related anecdote...Back in 2014, I received a solicited free iPad case to try that was a Griffin case knockoff. Looked exactly the same, just missing the logo, and $40 cheaper. I was interested, but curious why it was the exact same case w/o the cost. Long story short, the guy went right to Griffin's suppliers in China and paid them to make the exact same case for his company. His mistake was that he setup an office in the United States, and Griffin sued him into oblivion.

This isn't just a "racist killers" problem, though (I used those words only to reflect the AC's terminology). Merely managing to have a department that isn't so egregiously out of control that the officers are murdering people is not good enough! I have zero doubt whatsoever that I could find all sorts of other police corruption in Dallas or any other jurisdiction, from petty stuff like failing to write up a DUI for the drunk officer that got pulled over all the way up to racial profiling and civil forfeiture.

Some liberals lie and say they want "reasonable" gun restrictions when their goal is a total ban (except for the elites). It's all about getting the thin edge of the wedge under the door.

Upon seeing her Clinton gun ban enacted in 1994, she said: “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in,’ I would have done it.”

Gun Control Misses Mark: Sen. Feinstein Shoots-off Mouth, Hits Foot

The Second Amendment must go: We ban lawn darts. It’s time to ban guns

we spend less of our GDP on defense than many other countries...

I thought I would do a quick search to test this, and found this which shows Saudi Arabia, Israel and Russia are the only countries which spend more of their GDP on defense (in 2014 anyway). I would imagine a fair bit of Israel's spending comes from the $3 billion or so in aid the US sends over each year, and Saudi buys their gear from the US. There's a lot of money in war.

Bernie can actually run against Trump; if the Superdelegates believe in earnest that Hillary can't beat Trump and Bernie can, they'll side with Bernie.

I don't think any of them have it all on-target. Trump is a disaster; Hillary is at least stable (she's been Secretary of State for a decade), but won't take important forward action; and Bernie *will* take forward action, but has no idea how, and has a lot of breaking ideas.

We're facing a Technical Renaissance-Revolution problem at this point. Our technology paradigm is about to shift dramatically. We always have constant job reduction by technical progress (fewer employees to make the same thing), and this reduces the cost (and price) of goods and moves buying power to consumer hands, resulting in more purchasing and new, replacement employment, thus stabilizing the unemployment level. If we suddenly move the pace of advancement up (e.g. "automation"), one of two things happens: the pace of new job creation stays close to the pace of job elimination (technical renaissance: the entire country, from poor to rich, all get *extremely* wealthy); or the pace of new job creation falls sharply behind, creating high unemployment and a collapsed economy (technical revolution, e.g. the Industrial Revolution).

Bernie is correct on implementing a universal basic income, and not all there on *how* to do it. He doesn't have the reasoning for it (he's crying out against the rich and rallying for the poor, rather than looking at the economic threats on the horizon). Because of this, he's misinterpreting the problem space and installing damage (pushing toward a Technical Revolution).

In essence, to lean a TRR to a Technical Renaissance, you need to slow transitional unemployment and speed up replacement employment. Replacement employment is a natural process: while some 50,000 jobs are created each month, several million people leave the labor force (retirement, etc.) and enter the labor force (graduate college) in that same time span. That means the upper end of current employment falls off, reducing the pressure on a shrinking job market in a given profession; new skilled labor enters the market, and is adapted (with lag) to the changes. Thus speeding up replacement employment only requires keeping the consumer market healthy enough to buy jobs, which is in part accomplished *by* slowing transitional unemployment.

Well-designed UBI plans such as a Citizen's Dividend (universal social security) provide both of these. The non-wage income increases the buying power of the consumer base by increasing their effective take-home per dollar: rather than your employer spending $1 to employ you and you take home $0.60, your employer spends $1 and you take home $0.85 (at the lowest end, this can be greater than unity). This helps reduce wage-labor costs. For example, an employee paid $80,000 and married in a two-adult household would take home approximately $63,000 today; and, under my plan, you could pay that same employee around $64,000 and he'd *still* take home more. This effect is highly-pronounced at the lowest wage levels, where minimum-wage workers enjoy ~50% take-home increases without a wage raise.

Bernie's plans include minimum wage raises, among other things. In a stable economy, a minimum-wage increase concentrates wealth into a small subset of low-wage workers: you lose some minimum-wage jobs as the middle- and lower-class become poorer, and roll the difference into fewer hands in the lower class, thus those who didn't lose their jobs come out financially better off. In a TRR situation, a minimum-wage raise increases the cost of human labor relative to the cost of low-labor alternatives: we replace these people with machines.

In today

Now that average consumers are buying wireless routers, we have meaningless speed fixation and corresponding price inflation. Take a look at some of the absolutely horrible advice offered on consumer-grade router reviews, by doing a google search for "wireless router ratings."

Exhibit 1: Forbes: Choosing the best wireless router
The page is one big chart showing theoretical speeds, and recommending getting 802.11ac. 802.11a is the 5Ghz standard that was discarded for dead since it doesn't penetrate through walls. Whoops! That's why for 10 years, hardly any router or NIC supported it. It's kinda useless in most homes. For a while, 5Ghz was billed as a way to do high-speed over short distances. Since people may have multiple network devices in one room or cubicle, you could put a 5Ghz router in each one. The range is so short they won't interfere with each other. But that was too expensive, and the moderate speed boost wasn't worth it.

But it's faster, so "oooooh shiny" now it is back!

Exhibit 2: Wireless routers at Newegg
An observant shopper soon learns that routers are speed rated: N150, N300, AC1750, AC1900, AC2600, AC5300, etc. By this system, a G54 router is ancient. They make it look like buying a 100Mhz CPU in 2.6Ghz era. But if you ask "Why would I need a 5300Mbps router when my internet is 50Mbps?" The only reason to buy a router with such a high rating is that you will probably get a fraction of that actual speed. But even that number doesn't correlate because the number in AC5300 refers to the "A" speed that most devices don't even support. So the number is doubly meaningless.

This stupid system is so prevalent that people sometimes think that AC1750 is the model number. They get confused and buy the wrong router, or can't figure out why there are 5 routers all called the BrandName AC1750.

Exhibit 3: PC magazine recommends the most expensive consumer routers ever
PC Magazine's recommended routers: $300, $250, $174, and $17. Wow, that's quite a price difference. Unless you have lots and lots of people using the wireless network, and some kind of crazy university-sized internet pipe, and devices that support the 5Ghz band, that $17 router will do just as well as the $300 router.

What these review sites need to do is actually measure wireless performance at various ranges and in different rooms. Unless they do that, the speed ratings are meaningless.

Really? Do you have any idea of what you are talking about? 802.11a and 802.11ac are two different standards. 802.11ac is the latest WiFi standard and supports 2.4ghz and 5ghz operations. The AC#### can be a bit misleading though as it combines the maximum link speeds of all the streams on 2.4ghz and 5ghz channels (AC1300 can be 400mbit on 2.4ghz and 867mbit on 5ghz or it can be 1,300mbit on the 5ghz band only). 802.11ac routers support beam forming - using multiple antenna to create a strong signal in a single axis to improve range and signal integrity.
My ASUS 802.11ac router is advertised as a AC1900, it supports up to 600mbit on 2.4ghz (ac or n) and 1,300mbit on 5ghz (ac only). I get a weak 5ghz signal at my carport (~25m from the router) but it has to pass through 3 exterior brick walls and a shed (really bad angle, I could move the router to reduce that to 1 exterior wall but I don't care enough for that) and I get a 2.4ghz ac connection at my daughter's playgroup hall which is about 100m away through a shared exterior wall and a brick exterior wall.
The 802.11n router that my ISP gave me doesn't give enough of a signal on even the 2.4ghz band to make the router detectable at my carport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac

My hopes of a rational discussion were dashed by your admission that you're advocating for full-blown socialism -- as the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. But a few points:

Because we're letting a sizable portion of humanity starve for no reason. We're already making enough food in raw calories to feed everyone, but we still have mass starvation. Think about why.

My question was why you know Monsanto et al are making more profit than they would need to in order to continue to develop the products they do. Your answer was completely orthogonal to my question. Care to try again?

They don't. 90% of the _hard_ R&D is paid for by your tax dollars and mine.

A laughable proposition that might not even be true even under whatever twisted definition of "_hard_" you have in mind. Feel free to send any actual data you have on the subject.

Fun Fact: The US Housing market currently has a housing shortage. Is it because of evil gummint bureaucrats? Nope, it's because they ran out land developed by the American Taxpayer.

Again, feel free to send any support you might have for this. It seems clear enough that cities that have not opted to artificially restrict new development are experiencing a great deal of it in response both to the need and to the increase in prices -- free markets have a pesky tendency of working that way, whether or not that agrees with your worldview. See, for example, here.

Now that average consumers are buying wireless routers, we have meaningless speed fixation and corresponding price inflation. Take a look at some of the absolutely horrible advice offered on consumer-grade router reviews, by doing a google search for "wireless router ratings."

Exhibit 1: Forbes: Choosing the best wireless router
The page is one big chart showing theoretical speeds, and recommending getting 802.11ac. 802.11a is the 5Ghz standard that was discarded for dead since it doesn't penetrate through walls. Whoops! That's why for 10 years, hardly any router or NIC supported it. It's kinda useless in most homes. For a while, 5Ghz was billed as a way to do high-speed over short distances. Since people may have multiple network devices in one room or cubicle, you could put a 5Ghz router in each one. The range is so short they won't interfere with each other. But that was too expensive, and the moderate speed boost wasn't worth it.

But it's faster, so "oooooh shiny" now it is back!

Exhibit 2: Wireless routers at Newegg
An observant shopper soon learns that routers are speed rated: N150, N300, AC1750, AC1900, AC2600, AC5300, etc. By this system, a G54 router is ancient. They make it look like buying a 100Mhz CPU in 2.6Ghz era. But if you ask "Why would I need a 5300Mbps router when my internet is 50Mbps?" The only reason to buy a router with such a high rating is that you will probably get a fraction of that actual speed. But even that number doesn't correlate because the number in AC5300 refers to the "A" speed that most devices don't even support. So the number is doubly meaningless.

This stupid system is so prevalent that people sometimes think that AC1750 is the model number. They get confused and buy the wrong router, or can't figure out why there are 5 routers all called the BrandName AC1750.

Exhibit 3: PC magazine recommends the most expensive consumer routers ever
PC Magazine's recommended routers: $300, $250, $174, and $17. Wow, that's quite a price difference. Unless you have lots and lots of people using the wireless network, and some kind of crazy university-sized internet pipe, and devices that support the 5Ghz band, that $17 router will do just as well as the $300 router.

What these review sites need to do is actually measure wireless performance at various ranges and in different rooms. Unless they do that, the speed ratings are meaningless.

Indeed, there's no disputing the fact that the company, in injecting a bit of Silicon Valley ingenuity into the tried and true auto design process, has completely turned the auto industry on its head.

If that's true then why isn't Tesla among the world's largest automakers? There's no disputing the claim that Tesla has "completely turned the auto industry on its head" only if you mean that it hasn't.

I would not bet against that.
Also it already is extended with a loophole.

No, but repeating your false pro-Linux propaganda over and over won't make it true, either.

Which part is false: the part about the spyware (which even Microsoft admits is true, albeit in an indirect way, because they've documented that you cannot turn off any of the surveillance without the Enterprise edition), the part that Windows has malware and Linux does not, or the part that it is my advocacy that people should boycott Windows and use Linux instead?

I might be missing something but I was able to turn off all the spyware in the privacy settings and I am running the home version. ??

No, you pressed some buttons that gave the appearance of turning off the spyware. In effect, they do nothing unless you're on the "Enterprise" edition: http://www.forbes.com/sites/go...

How To Avoid The Internet's Hottest Scam: Fake Vacation Rentals

No citation for some reason... Maybe, because it is simply not true?

You're an idiot.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke...

Cratering the resale value of a few million vehicles, along with the stock value of the company, doesn't constitute harm?

That was caused by the response of the American authorities, not by anything VW did.

A corporate citizen deliberately cheating on tests, then covering it up, does not constitute harm?

The GM case is indeed different. GM, unlike VW, clearly made a corporate decision to cheat on tests and tried to cover it up after VW got in trouble. However, it seems GM will get away with it and VW is paying billions and has suffered some reputation damage.

I agree that VW should fix the affected cars and that the people responsible should be prosecuted and VW should cooperate with the legal investigations, but I do not think it is fair to punish VW over what a few employees did without the rest of the company knowing. Moreover, I do not think the way the authorities (mainly in the US) and the media have handled this is proportionate. After all, VW group cars with a defeat device emit less NOx than the average Euro 5 diesel car.

The way this case is handled has very little to do with the environment and a lot with politics.

The "American Dream" only works for a select few...oblivious to what conditions are elsewhere, like in Europe.

The upper middle class in the US has expanded from about 12% of the population in 1979 to a new record of nearly 30% as of 2014.

Also the US has an unemployment rate half that of most European countries (Germany is the only exception with equivalent unemployment rates to the US due to labor law reform there in the early 2000's).

-we have more allies than just Israel. and most of them were alienated by bush the lesser, and those relationships repaired by Obama.

W put together a coalition of 48 countries for the Iraq war. Most of those contributed little but they were signed on.

I'm really interested to hear which countries were alienated by W and when the alienation occurred. I Googled for "George W Bush alienated" and found this, which is an article saying that President Obama's administration is doing such a horrible job that it makes the W administration look good.

-our military is in NO WAY in shambles

http://www.ibtimes.com/us-navy-doesnt-have-enough-ships-send-marines-crisis-zones-may-borrow-foreign-vessels-1990659

https://news.usni.org/2015/11/04/navy-half-the-carrier-fleet-tied-up-in-maintenance-other-5-strained-to-meet-demands

https://news.usni.org/2015/11/19/report-navy-and-marine-corps-strained-to-breaking-point-second-forward-carrier-in-the-pacific-could-help

https://military.id.me/aircraft/marines-forced-raid-military-museum-aircraft-parts/

"The U.S. Air Force is now short 4,000 airmen to maintain its fleet, short 700 pilots to fly them and short vital spare parts necessary to keep their jets in the air. The shortage is so dire that some have even been forced to scrounge for parts in a remote desert scrapheap known as 'The Boneyard.'"

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/14/wiped-out-air-force-losing-pilots-and-planes-to-cuts-scrounging-for-spare-parts.html

http://dailysignal.com/2015/12/04/is-the-obama-administration-trying-to-wreck-the-military/

-labor participation is dropping regardless of anything any one does. it has to do with the boomers retiring, not the economy.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louisefron/2014/08/20/tackling-the-real-unemployment-rate-12-6/

http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-but-the-real-unemployment-rate-is-9-8-not-5/

-inequality is horrible, but its not thanks to the current occupant, but rather the past several decades of structural issues in the economy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/income-inequality-obama-bush_n_1419008.html

-maybe you forgot, but the economy crashed a few years ago. of course stamps are up, and will remain up until people get back to where they were. that's what they are for

As a candidate, and then as President, Mr. Obama was quite willing to blame W for the economy. Mr. Obama didn't cut W any slack on the economy; why should I be more forgiving toward Mr. Obama than he was toward his predecessor?

And a robust economy helps people... "a rising tide lifts all boats." The Obama recovery is the worst economy recorded in modern times. It's nearly flatline.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/06/05/apple-to-abandon-headphone-jack-suddenly-beats-deal-makes-sense/#66bb3a3e6433 - and even back then they at first claimed this was a done deal.

Apple need Samsung and LG to create new components before "design" corporations can use said parts in the next iteration of products. Apple do not invent, they use off the shelve components made by the Japanese and Korean R&D electronic companies you xenophobic types love to hate.

Of course.

That's why there are benchmarks for Apple's A[x] SoCs vs. Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Samsung's Exygenous (or whatever) SoCs. That's because Apple just re-branded other people's SoCs rather than designing their own from the ground-up (rolls eyes).

CONgress and the Administration need to pull their heads out of their assess (which will be hard given how far up there they are) and realize that if they insist on stupid export controls and technology that legally has to be broken by design; they will accomplish none of their security goals and only harm our economy in the process.

Basically they are trying to limit access to technologies that can be used for weapons, or at least delay it. The goal is not really a bad one.

The scarier bit is things like Boeing builds plant in china. Sure that is only an assembly plant, but it offers more avenues to ship our IP oversees. The interesting bit is Boeing threatened to cut jobs if the ex-im bank wasn't renewed, and then cut jobs right after it was.

Either way, if your stuff is getting built in China, then sooner or later they will be able to build it without you....

So, what you're saying is that you have evidence that a drug manufacturer's advertisement is criminally fraudulent, and therefore we should not allow anyone in that line of work to spend money promoting their businesses, and instead they should put all of their money into research on new drugs until they run out of money, at which some other person who knows you won't allow them to advertise will of course invest billions of dollars in the same area because even though they're smart enough to come up with new drugs that you personally can't produce, they're too dumb to realize you want them to fail, financially. Do you even listen to yourself?

Oh, you want to see documented instances of misconduct in by pharmaceutical companies?? Try here for all sorts of legal settlements, you can review their specific conduct in the settlement agreements. What, did you think nobody's ever caught them misbehaving before? Hardly. And even aside from legal settlements, other investigations exist that do bring up a share of worries. And no, their questionable conduct isn't just limited to questionable marketing, there have been other problems.

As I said, you don't want to examine their conduct in its full scope, you want to avoid even considering the questions. Unfortunately for you, others have already.

That you present this hysterical idea of an absolutist sentiment as an objection just makes you sound silly, and what causes you to say such a silly thing, I don't know, but I'm guessing it's something in your own psyche. Of course, there are other options, for example, Europe does forbid DTC marketing of drugs, and the various companies don't seem to be suffering unduly there. So your idea? Yours, not mine. You made it up, not me, thus you are the one who should look in the mirror and ask yourself why you said it. Why did you say it? How did you think I'd react? Well, my reaction is that I hold you responsible for your own words. You said it, not me.

You may want to try to inform yourself better. You need to correct a lot of insufficient awareness of actual circumstances and improve your ability to recognize what others are saying. After you do that, then you can really work on your presentation.

In addition to having one of the highest nominal corporate tax rates in the world, the US also has one of the highest median corporate tax rates as well (i.e., after "loopholes"). If it didn't, US corporations wouldn't be trying to hard to get taxed overseas, and that is on top of high capital gains taxes. Sweden, incidentally, has one of the lowest median corporate tax rates.

http://www.forbes.com/pictures...

http://taxfoundation.org/artic...

When you make an allegation of corruption you need to back it up. Link to some source.

I'm not the OP (an AC), but for starters:
The Tampa Bay Times.
Forbes.

For those just tuning in, Rick Scott, Governor of the State of Florida, was previously the CEO of Columbia/HCA when it was found to have committed the largest Medicare fraud ever, up to that time ($1.7 Billion in 1997), leading to his resignation.

The copyright term approximates the life of the author's grandchildren

Tolkien's grandkids don't have the money to buy off Congress every time The Hobbit inches towards public domain. Disney and Time Warner, do.

Starting in the 1990s, it was extended in many countries from 50 years after the death of the author to 70 on grounds of drastic improvement in health care over the twentieth century, which allows authors and their children to reproduce later.

Which makes a mockery of copyrights, at least as to how they came about in the U.S. The whole point is to have an exclusive, but time limited control over the reproduction of works to encourage creation. Locking up ideas for a century or more is the antithesis of that.

A good example here is Disney itself - FIFTY of their movies have been based on public domain works. Many of which, like the Jungle Book and Alice in Wonderland, they couldn't have made if current copyright laws were in place at the time.

Appeal to authority. I maintain that said authority is wrong.

We can try an appeal to history: raising minimum wage has always caused a decrease in available minimum-wage jobs.

We can try *many* appeals to reason.

One appeal to reason is that the amount of jobs is affected by technical progress and population growth, and so simple statistical measures are confounded (this suggests a reason *why* such assertions *can be* wrong). If you don't adjust for the increase in population, your measured data shows confounding: a minimum-wage increase that loses 0.2% of jobs over a 0.3% population growth will register as a 0.0994% job increase. For these same reasons, blunt graphs showing sharp loss of jobs when minimum wage increases are also not concrete proof of minimum wage loss.

Another appeal to reason is the simple logical analysis. I like this one because it dispels the "low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth" myth.

Income is, essentially, all money spent over a given term. If you sell $2,000 of goods and you pay your employees $1,500, your business profits $500; the total spending is $2,000, and the total income is $2,000. Raising wages doesn't change income, because the consumer base still has to spend out of their income.

When you raise some wages--e.g. minimum wage--the cost of production of those products increases. That comes with a corresponding price increase. Say the increase is 0.14 cents for an $8 fast-food meal, and we move 127 billion fast-food meals per year. That's $17.780 billion.

Take note: that's $17.780 billion that were previously spent on other goods. Those goods had to be produced by people--labor time, wages. Those goods are no longer being bought; the production is *completely lost*, and the money is instead diverted to the hands of a set of minimum-wage workers.

At a minimum wage of $7.25/hr, that's 1.23 million jobs as an upper cap of jobs lost. At a wage of $15/hr, that's 0.593 million.

"But wait!", you say. "Now those workers have additional money, and they can spend it to buy things, thus creating jobs!"

Those workers have money--the workers who weren't displaced. They also face slightly higher prices nibbling away at that money. In total, the amount nibbled away at in the entire economy is the $17.780 billion I mentioned before. As well, those workers are drawing their additional money as an annual wage: it doesn't magically fold "back into the economy"; it's *spent*, like all other income. That means it's spent no faster than it was when wages were lower, just that the money is directed away from other jobs.

There is no reason to believe these minimum wage workers have a spending profile which now avoids paying for services which involve minimum-wage labor. Further, if they *did* somehow avoid spending their money back into the minimum-wage economy, the basis of spending for maintaining those very minimum-wage jobs would collapse. Somebody's job has to go away.

The analysis above is based on *demand* economics. The ideal that a raise in wages causes an increase in jobs is based on *trickle-down* economics, whereby someone assumes that businesses just pay out higher wages because prosperity starts at the top and trickles down through the worker via the mechanism of wages. Trickle-down economics is universally mocked by economists because it's not a real theory and has been shown invalid.

In summary: I have provided a basis on which rough analysis of the impact of minimum-wage raises can be wrong due to statistical confounding (i.e. "we have seen X evidence..." is largely reliant on how you analyzed that evidence); I have shown the unresolvable logical flaw in the thinking that minimum-wage increases lead to more job-creating spending in the economy (the money comes from *other* *consumers* who are not spending that particular money on

Why do they pay you so much for such easy work?

LOL! "Easy work". Good one.

Consider that CCIE typically is only needed in major metro areas so there is a cost of living adjustment to consider as well. $200k in New York City is equivalent to just over $100k where I live. A surgeon in the US, depending on specialty, can easily make 4-5x as much as a CCIE, if not considerably more. The average salary for an ortho surgeon in the US is around $500k/year.

Forbes has a slightly more informative write-up: http://www.forbes.com/sites/in...

I'm trying to determine the balance on a prepaid debit card but the response I receive from the ERAD-Prepaid Terminal says "Invalid Amount" or "Declined". ERAD-Intel and ERAD-Recovery will only retrieve balances from open loop prepaid debit cards. Debit cards attached to a valid checking account or valid credit cards cannot be processed using the ERAD-Intel or ERAD-Recovery system.

Forbes has a slightly more informative write-up: http://www.forbes.com/sites/in...

IBM is the biggest patent troll. Ever. Who else do you think get $2 billion a year from patent trolling alone? Why do you think IBM has so many patents? Many of the patents are really silly, obvious and has broad coverage. IBM was always considered the big bad company, until Microsoft took over the crown, but IBM has never ceased to being bad. Have you followed IBMs ugly maneuvours in the Mainframe market? Horrendous stories. Every competitor is sued, or bought. Why is IBM called the "Big Blue"? Because they have so many lawyers in blue suits. More lawyers than engineers at one point in time. What do IBM use all those lawyers for? At IBM, a lawyer is more profitable than an engineer, that is why. It was really dumb by SCO to attack IBM for Linux patent trolling, IBM is the king of patent trolling. Really really stupid by SCO, they should know that no one can extract patent profit from IBM. IBM is the big extractor. IBM needed that Linux case, to polish the bad IBM reputation. Sun Microsystems never cared about patents, until IBM nearly bankrupted Sun. After that, Sun started to patent everything and the engineers had a contest to get the goofiest patent. As told by James Gosling, father of Java: http://nighthacks.com/roller/j... "...In Sun's early history, we didn't think much of patents. While there's a kernel of good sense in the reasoning for patents, the system itself has gotten goofy. Sun didn't file many patents initially. But then we got sued by IBM for violating the "RISC patent" - a patent that essentially said "if you make something simpler, it'll go faster". Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn't have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost. The penalty was huge. Nearly put us out of business. We survived, but to help protect us from future suits we went on a patenting binge. Even though we had a basic distaste for patents, the game is what it is, and patents are essential in modern corporations, if only as a defensive measure. There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system...." Another patent trolling story where IBM attorneys black mail Sun: "Pay us $20 million or we will find some IBM patents you do violate and sue you" http://www.forbes.com/asap/200... "...My own introduction to the realities of the patent system came in the 1980s, when my client, Sun Microsystems--then a small company--was accused by IBM of patent infringement. Threatening a massive lawsuit, IBM demanded a meeting to present its claims. Fourteen IBM lawyers and their assistants, all clad in the requisite dark blue suits, crowded into the largest conference room Sun had. The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process. After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one. An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themse

It's a bloody long article, but here's what caught my eye.

Referring to a slide from the training program that seemed to indicate federal statutes and presidential Executive Orders (EOs) carry equal legal weight, Snowden wrote, "this does not seem correct, as it seems to imply Executive Orders have the same precedence as law. My understanding is that EOs may be superseded by federal statute, but EOs may not override statute."

About 20 minutes after Snowden sent the email, an OGC office manager forwarded it to the Signals Intelligence Oversight and Compliance training group — the people who had designed the test.

If the OGC lawyer had added "I'm not sure within the context of the training program whether the training slide attests to such a serious misrepresentation, but if it does, you need to suspend teaching this slide immediately" we might all now be in a different place.

The NSA culture in effect seemed to regard providing timely and correct training materials concerning the chain of agency authority as a "best effort" (warranting an administrative follow up) rather than "mission critical" (warranting an internal bow-shot cease and desist).

Hayden's book Playing to the Edge contains tedious chapter upon chapter about endless compliance politics played at the top level, all lawyered up six ways from Sunday, but did the organization deeply communicate the resulting values internally, as forcefully as described by John Kotter in his book Leading Change?

Think You're Communicating Enough? Think Again

Most companies under communicate their visions for change by at least a factor of 10. A single memo announcing a big new change is never enough, nor is even a series of speeches by the CEO and the executive team.

If the OGC lawyer had the required ten reminders from on high spilling out of her inbox, she might have gone down the cease and desist track instead, giving Snowden immediate reason to believe that someone on the other side actually gave a shit.

Robert Litt, general counsel of the ODNI:

"To the extent Snowden was saying he raised his concerns internally within NSA, no rational person could read this as being anything other than a question about an unclear single page of training."

I would argue here that the other side of "playing close to the edge" is that a single page of unclear training material, if it's the wrong page, is no laughing matter.

"To the extent Snowden was saying he raised his concerns internally within NSA, no rational person could read this as being anything other than a question about an unclear single page of training which, given the content of the page in question, should have been flagged as a matter of immediate and utmost concern."

Narrow sidelines poorly communicated. What could possibly go wrong?