Slashdot Mirror

For comparison, here is a chart of deaths per kwh of electricity generated.

Coal – U.S. 15,000
Hydro 1,400
Solar (rooftop) 440
Nuclear – global average 90

I honestly don't know about Johnson, but I've often seen guys of his age involved in science such as him to be quite pro-nuclear: quite enough for most to not be particularly thorough when it comes to researching positive outlooks. That brings me to the IAEA which is the source cited and has been criticised a lot for its very positive stance about nuclear power.

Last of all, when talking about Fukushima workers, let's not dig too deep, it could lead to taking a look at the sub-sub-contracting (often through the yakuza) of people and the way their eventual issues may get handled afterward :

http://www.rt.com/news/fukushi...

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

http://www.reuters.com/article...

Those are a few among all the various scandals surrounding the Fukushima disaster (still ongoing, by the way). But please, do keep downplaying what the risks are in using nuclear power. In any case, most of the vocal crowd on ./ will cheer on.

Except for the $5.9 BILLION DOLLARS it borrowed in 2009!

Until adulthood. Children can't be held to the same standards of behaviour that adults can be. Once they become adults, if they made women feel unwelcome then they will be expected to correct the behaviour. Of course it's not a binary thing that flips at age 18, it happens gradually over the teenage years, I'm just stating the principal.

If only there was a place to learn how to deal with these social interactions. With authority figures to guide and discipline bad behavior that is not conducive to learning/working... Like a school! If the boys made the girls feel uncomfortable, then discipline accordingly. Just like the real world. The difference you won't lose your job or face a law suit.

Wrong metric. What is important is the number of scholarships going to each gender, and the effect that has on the number of students of each gender. Until men are getting less than 50% of all available scholarships and are achieving less than 50% of the academic success (number of graduates, grade averages or whatever it is you use in the US) then women-only scholarships are just reducing men's privilege, not disadvantaging them compared to women.

Congrats, we have beyond FTM ratio in colleges. Those scholarships have done their job. Lets reverse it as you say. Males don't have the privileged in the university because they are no longer > 50%... They also make up more of the grads too!!! Academic success

See how you made that comment about girls

No, you made this about girls. when you said: "Segregation is the answer." and the segregation was for the sexes and how you feel girls need a safe space to learn CS from those icky boys because privilege... Context is king.

Hey Marillyn, welcome to /.

So kinda like how Al Gore is pushing for positions he is set to make a killing in or how his buddies at Goldman Sachs hired the woman who came up with credit default swaps, aka "economy killers", to write the cap and trade rules so that their friends get carbon indulgences while only the peasants have to pay?

I hate to tell ya but there is scammers on BOTH sides, and all it takes is to look at a fat fucking hypocrite like rev Al living in a McMansion, driving in a fleet of stretch SUVs, and flying in a personal Lear jet while he says YOU need to tighten your belt you filthy fucking peasant you, after all he is "carbon neutral" because he pays himself carbon credits from his own company which is like moving your money from your left pocket to your right, to see some serious scamming going on.

Cap & Trade might as well be called "give these rich fucks your money tax" since the BRIC have ALREADY said "we ain't playing that game" and thanks to the same rich fat fucks pushing "globalism" AKA 'pay peasants peanuts while poisoning their land and water" its not like we can do jack shit about it, without Cheapo Chinese Crap our stores wouldn't have shit to sell. Without BRIC on board its not gonna do shit except give the corps an excuse to send what little work is left here over there (which they will probably get a tax break for doing) because news flash America, those countries are bigger than you and China especially is putting out a hell of a lot more smog and crap than America has for awhile.

If faster-than-light travel truly is impossible, the galaxies that we can reach before dark energy makes them recede faster than the speed of light is a smaller subset of all the visible universe. The slower the travel speed, the less of the visible universe is open to you. This article breaks it down:

It means that, at a particular, key distance from us, the expansion of the fabric of space itself makes it so that a photon either leaving our galaxy towards a distant one or leaving a distant galaxy headed towards ours will never reach us. The expansion rate of the Universe is so great that distant galaxies become unreachable to our own, even if we were to move at the speed of light!

At present, that distance is “only” about 15 billion light years away. If you consider that our observable Universe is some 46 billion light years in radius, and that all regions of space contain (on average and on the largest scales) the same number of galaxies as one another, it means that only about 3% of the total number of galaxies in our Universe are presently reachable to us, even if we left today, and at the speed of light.

It also means that, on average, twenty thousand stars transition every second from being reachable to being unreachable.

Jobs was no idiot, and if avoiding things that didn't work in his case while a bit of peaceful woowoo kept him from losing his mind while he was losing his body, I wouldn't hold it against him.

Except that when he chose this course of action, he wasn't seeking a peaceful end to his life, and he later reversed that choice and regretted not doing so sooner.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/al...

The EU is already lagging in the developed world in productivity

http://images.forbes.com/media...

Why not put a few businesses out of business and raise the cost for those remaining.

An amusing graph certainly. I think people in the US work more than 6% more in terms of hours, and and in many places in Europe it's actually illegal to work overtime without compensation (aka, multiplier to pay or extra time off). That on top of generally having more than 6% more time off due to government mandated vacation requirements.

I think a more significant measure is productivity / hours worked, because especially in the non-manufacturing societies (or specialist manufacturing) the west works in, killing/firing/replacing your skilled work force is a bad idea in the long term.

The EU is already lagging in the developed world in productivity

http://images.forbes.com/media...

Why not put a few businesses out of business and raise the cost for those remaining.

Srsly! Sarah Palin for Secretary of the Department of Energy.

Trump/Palin 2016!!!

you don't need to cite commonly known facts of a topic. if you are unaware of how common extreme punishment for minor drug crimes is, you're only announcing how out of touch you are on the subject

google "years in jail marijuana possession"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/2...

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

http://www.rense.com/general61...

https://www.aclu.org/marijuana...

american drug laws are stupid, pointless, and insane, and have achieved zero effect. it's easy as ever to get pot

a society that prescribes brutal punishment for various minor crimes does nothing but announce its brutality. it has no effect on the crime in question

http://www.drugpolicy.org/drug...

it is important to cite interesting and novel facts. it is not important to cite commonly understood and well-established facts. the stupidity and insanity of american drug laws is well-established. we're just waiting for enough nancy reagan era morons to die the fuck off so we can build a sensible drug policy: legalization of non-addictive drugs, treatment for addicts, inducements for dealers of addictive drugs to come clean. destroy the mafias by draining their income. drain their income by incentivizing healthcare for addicts and legalizing nonaddictive substances

look to portugal

When Apple Pay came out, CVS stopped accepting Google Wallet transactions, and enabled Apple Pay, which always bothered me, as both are NFC, so it was only a power play.

I don't think you have that quite right.

But, yet, this...

Viewing posts such as the "burning biomass is carbon neutral" and then reading about how the EPA has banned use of woodburning fireplaces and stoves because of emissions leads me to believe that either the EPA is overreaching, or the "burning biomass is carbon neutral" bunch is wrong.

Who to believe???

No wonder there's so much confusion and distrust over GW (or GCC, or whatever it's called now...)

I RTFA, then looked up its author, George Anders.

Wikipedia says he has a bachelor's degree in economics from Sanford and his articles all seem to be about describing the accomplishments of others.

From the Forbes article, there were many problems, with running the webservers as 'root' just one of them. Another was a pair of zip email attachments could trigger the FireEye software to "open the files for analysis and in doing so open a backdoor on its appliance". It sounds like the researcher heavily redacted his presentation, then presented, which is why we know what we do. It also means a lot of other juicy bits were probably removed and not presented, so the bad we know about (which is bad) is just part of their problems. My guess is they considered what the guy discovered in the process to be revealing of their software's architecture and therefore would be revealing IP.

Here's an article for you: http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/...

Like any setup you can lock your data in to a particular provider if you store it in a proprietary format or restricted location from which you can't extract it. This is hardly a new thing with SaaS and is certainly not broadly applicable to SaaS in general, in fact it's really only applicable to a small niche.

You keep pointing at consumer stuff; that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about business software like ERP.

Of course, because you said "SaaS" - which is a LOT more than just business ERP software.

Google for "SaaS lock-in"; there's countless IT industry articles talking about this.

It's a very limited subset of SaaS though, and hardly that it's all designed to lock you in and extract monthly payments from you.. Particularly when you consider that the recommendation is that you "make sure your ERP vendor lets you have access to your raw data and download it at any time", if you can do that then it clearly isn't "designed to lock you in" at all.

Here's an article for you:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/...

You keep pointing at consumer stuff; that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about business software like ERP.

Here's another (somewhat old though):
http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

Google for "SaaS lock-in"; there's countless IT industry articles talking about this. Many seem to think it's not a big problem though acknowledging there's a lot of concern about it, and the general advice is to warn people to make sure your ERP vendor lets you have access to your raw data and download it at any time, preferably with direct DB access or at least CSV downloads.

There's some circumstantial evidence from a recent patent filing that the Nintendo NX may ditch the disk drive (and possibly all physical media). A patent-filing is by no means indicative of final intent. After all, Sony filed quite a few "always-online" type patents during the PS4's development but ended up not going down that direction. But it's a sign that Nintendo is at least considering it.

This is an area where there's a huge disadvantage to being the first mover. As MS learned in the run up to the Xbox One's launch, having an always-online download-focussed/only console when your competitor is advancing a more traditional offering can look fairly suicidal. But once one of the major parties has made the move, don't be surprised if the others follow.

Microsoft bought Nokia for their patents. Any other money is just chump change.

The patents were not included in the deal. Microsoft didn't actually buy Nokia, they bought Nokia's handset business. The patents remained with Nokia.

I know more about nonhuman studies than clinical, but according to the US HHS (who runs FDA), the breakdown of costs are these:

- $15k/patient for phase I
- $20k/patient for phase 2
- $25k/patient for phases 3 and 4

The cost of the average trial:

- phase 1: $4 million
- phase 2: $13 million
- phase 3: $20 million
- phase 4: $20 million

Some phase 3 trials can be larger and last longer than average, like 20,000 patients over 5 years. Obviously at the average cost of $25k/patient, such a trial would cost $500 million, well over the average. In fact, a long study can greatly increase the per patient cost as well.

Because multiple trials are run in each phase for each drug, these trial costs are multiplied.

The principal cost in any trial are the medical procedures (~25%): drug administration, tests (lab, imaging, biopsy, etc), exams, etc. These are repeated multiple times on each patient during each trial to monitor changes in both efficacy and safety.

Here's a thorough accounting from US HHS:

http://aspe.hhs.gov/report/exa...

These costs are set by FDA regulatory standards and the medical laws of each country where the trial is performed. Of course if you want approval for your drug in another country, you must comply with all their rules as well, often repeating studies using their residents (e.g. Japan).

This 2012 Forbes article by Avik Roy offers further insight on why clinical trial costs are rising:

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

Pharmas must play by these rules, but they don't write them. Lawmakers do that.

11 Things You Never Thought Of When You Decided Not To Get Married

In the spirit of compromise, I would consider amending my idea to allow a 3 year exemption on married couples, meaning they could get the full $1000/month total for them. Likely, if this plan were implemented, doing a survey/poll on how whether people would get divorced would be best.

Reasons for government to do all drug research: #1-drug companies do research for profit only, unprofitable drugs don't get developed no matter how many lives it would save. #2-high cost and risk of developing new drugs. #3-developing a cure is less profitable than a treatment, so corporations would only make the treatment. The drug companies should only do production and distribution.

Ok I'll need you to take off your rose tinted government issue glasses for a minute. Consider the fact that the US has a smaller GDP than the combined EU, and the EU governments take in more taxes than the US government.

Now ask yourself, why is it that the world's most advanced medications always come from for profit corporations in the US, and nowhere else? Why is it that the US is by far the most popular destination for medical tourism, even though in the US, hospitals are owned by private, for profit corporations?

Clearly because government run medicine is so much better, right?

Well considering how many people are sticking to or buying Galaxy S5 phones and S6 sales are horrible, I'd say that maybe these features are more valued than you and Samsung would like to believe.

Samsung Silent on Disastrous S6 Sales
  - "Has the reduced battery life and removal of expandable storage in the new models proved a bigger negative in customer eyes than was expected?"

Why Samsung Galaxy S6 sales suck
  - "Samsung took things that S5 owners liked - features such as a removable battery and microSD card slot - and dumped them from the S6 design in order to make a smartphone that looked and felt more like the iPhone."

This reminds me of a reported conversation between Clayton Christensen (Innovator's Dilemma) and Morris Chang (of TSMC):

“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”

So, Samsung's 15% of worldwide profits is still around $6 billion, and Xiaomi's 1% is still $500 million. This is only a problem for MBAs and shareholders but not for the longevity of the a company's operations.

If it works for aviation, it certainly might work for business software.

It didn't work for the 787, did it?

Nobody said it is a way to make sure you have a steady upward gain. But that in itself is no reason to not participate in stock market - or if it is, you don't show how in your longish replies to my short posts.

Let's try this:

That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments, a fairly reliable income.

A "diversified portfolio of long-term investments" is nothing. It's not a reliable income, it's not a reliable strategy, it's not even really a *strategy* in the stock market (diversification is a risk strategy, not an investment strategy; an investment strategy has to have some planning for how to select in such a way as to produce gain).

In other words: that sentence is just a bunch of gibberish and jargon, the kind oft-repeated to people who have *no* investment strategy, frequently *by* people who have no investment strategy, and otherwise by people who stand to profit by getting you into the market (e.g. funds managers who can skim a fee off the top). Buy and hold is crap and professional investors--the big capital investors stealing money hand-over-fist, and particularly the people employed to invest and make gains in investment banking houses--are buying and selling based on sentiment (buy low, sell high). The buy-and-hold strategy--the strategy of "keeping long-term investments"--imposes a timing restriction ("don't sell before X time") or a timing strategy ("buy things you won't have to sell for X time") blindly and bluntly, as a cudgel, with no actual investment strategy related to growth and gains-taking (i.e. actually increasing the value of your portfolio).

Nobody said it is a place where money is generated, instead of stolen.

The suggestion that you *should* be investing if you're not a skilled, well-versed, highly-competent investor implies that money is generated in the market.

There are exactly two kinds of people in the market: Con-artists and marks. If you're just leisurely walking through the stock market buying what looks good, you're a mark; if you're studying the market to determine when idiots are holding out their money to be happily taken away, you're a con-artist. Marks are marks because they believe money comes out of the market magically: they'll "invest" and they'll get a return.

You don't have to outright say a thing to *say* a thing. Smoking improves your mood, gives you more confidence, and puts you among peers of great smokers like John Wayne. A great mass of marketing is built around this--it's all true, of course--and historically has lead people to believe smoking would make them healthy, happy, relaxed, and virile because the marketing statements create an association between smoking and all of those things *without* ever stating as much. They greatly *imply* such things. That's the same as when you tell the fish they can easily make income by putting their money in a diversified, long-term investment portfolio; without a huge pile of additional information, it sure sounds like money just pours out of the stock market as long as you're "diversified"...

This sort of marketing by heavily implying untrue situations, by deliberately misleading the audience, is well-known. It's so well-known that most modern advertisement is based heavily in legal research to stick to common knowledge (which is often faulty--Vitamin C doesn't cure or prevent colds, but look at the orange juice ads...) or shaky research (there *is* research, with poor controls and bad experimental design... and we cite the one study that supports us out of 100 that don't) and avoid criminal false advertisement by deliberately misleading consumers.

But like vegetables are not grown in vegetable market but yet it might make sense to buy them in vegetable market, just because money isn't generated in the stock market doesn't mean

Forget about the deer, I hope they've got refrigerator trucks out there collecting all that free hamburger meat.

Well here is Forbes article criticizing Metal Gear Solid. Seems very reasonable to me.

I think it is only gaming journalism that couldn't be trusted to be objective, mainstream media doing just fine.

Previous to 1800, the only monopolies were state sponsored, supported, and sometimes enforced monopolies

And that is still the case today. You postulate the existence of mythical stable "free market capitalism based monopolies", but those simply don't exist. ... Large, stable monopolies are the result of, and require, government action.

While I may not have stated it clearly, I don't consider state sponsored monopolies as a valid point. They're propped up by other than economic forces.

Regarding pure free market monopolies: Standard Oil, Microsoft (virtual monopoly), Intel (virtual monopoly), The current ISP situation in the US, which occurred via local government deals, so that one is arguable. For business networks, it's Cisco to a smaller extent (80% or so from the last time I looked). If you step back 1 level where the choice is extremely limited by cabals, there's plenty there. If the government would let them merge, they would be monopolies.

More than 50% of the world's population lives of less than an equivalent $3 US a day. That's not wealthy by anyone's standards.

Well, no, that's not true. Median family incomes is about $9300, and median per capita income is about $2900, worldwide, nearly three times what you claim.

That is self reported, by people with jobs. Is it accurate? Not that the World Bank and others recently changed the poverty measure, reducing the group considered to be in poverty. And there's a considerable number of people without jobs.

"Wealth" is a subjective measure, it can be created, destroyed, and altered just by comparison.

You're playing meaningless semantic games. If you don't understand what the word "wealthier" means in this context, then we can simply put it this way: the world is much better off today than it used to be, across countries and income groups. There is less hunger, less violence, less homelessness, greater literacy, higher life expectancy, etc.

I think the people in Syria for one, might disagree.

A bald assertion

No, not a "bald assertion". The idea that free trade "drains jobs and money" flies in the face of both established economic theory and long term data. The economic theory isn't even hard to understand: if you erect trade barriers, goods get more expensive so the money people have available is worth less. And, in fact, the cost that the trade barrier imposes on Americans is always higher (often a lot higher) than any increased demand in the US. In addition, politically, if the US erects trade barriers against imports, other nations will erect trade barriers against US imports in retaliation, and our export trade will also suffer. Historically, trade barriers have caused everything from recessions and depressions to outright war.

It's still a bald assertion. There have been many documented cases of jobs leaving the country post free trade agreements. So until you provide some facts, you're still making an unsupported assertion that sounds more like a policy plan than anything based in reality. Thanks to numerous studies and facts, I can conclude that free trade has moved jobs out of the country, lowered wages, and has had a relatively pronounced and severe negative impact on our trade imbalances as wealth flows out of the country.

There is also a difference between a trade barrier and shifting costs. If you can't understand that, perhaps tha

Hmm, from a few pixels on the last graph.

Yet other data sources simply don't support this.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nB6y... http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...

Ok, here's a story from Forbes in 2012 about VC success. It says: "Over both 10- and 30-year periods, share of dollars invested that go to losing deals has been roughly 55%.".

Data Insight: Venture Capital returns and loss rates

I didn't say "the government gives itself an A+". In any large organization waste is inevitable. I see it where I work which is a subsidiary of a large company. All you can do is try to minimize it.

I dislike calling a pressure cooker bomb a 'WMD'.

With the USA changing the meaning of 'WMD' in 2012, some American-made munitions now qualify has WMDs. Here's a summary.

I think the big difference is that there was a big rush to get on the web during the dot-com boom, and the established players actually didn't care AT ALL about revenue (as the old joke went). They just wanted presence of some sort. The problem was, no one really knew what you could actually do with the internet. Everyone just knew that it was important to get on board fast, and a gazillion e-prospectors showed up with all sorts of pie-in-the-cloud ideas that simply weren't sustainable.

Nowadays, the market and investors have a bit more experience. We still saw some seriously overvaluing (IMO), and now we've seen a correction, likely induced by a slump in the Chinese economy. That's actually a good thing, because long-term periods without the occasional correction tends to lead up to much larger corrections, even over-corrections or outright crashes.

I don't see this as any sort of a crash at all, just a more realistic outlook of where we probably should have been all along. We might even see a few additional corrections in the near future. How long have people been talking about the "tech bubble"? This really shouldn't have surprised anyone in the know. It was just a question of *when* it was going to happen.

As far as I see most e-cars consume about 30KWh give or take to drive 100km.
With 19KW charger, you need 1.5 hour of charging, for 1 hour of driving.
Yikes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Would be a bit better in most of Europe, with 220-240V normal, 380V+ three phase current, but still, yikes, yikes...

PS
And there comes fuel cell Mirai (Toyota):
http://www.forbes.com/sites/br...

Note that that type of fuel cell is both quite efficient (70% of energy is turned into electricity) and should be cheap to make too.
I wonder, why Musk is so against it. Invested in Li too much?

'Voodoo' Hackers: Stealing Secrets From Snowden's Favorite OS Is Easier Than You'd Think

http://www.forbes.com/sites/th...
https://archive.is/XNQ3x

##

Government Hacking Us - @botherder calls security firms out

##

@botherder calls security firms out for not publishing info on hacking they discover when done by their own govs

"In a talk at #cccamp2015, @botherder calls security firms out for not publishing info on hacking they discover when done by their own govs[1]."

- https://twitter.com/csoghoian/...
- https://twitter.com/csoghoian/
- https://twitter.com/botherder
- https://twitter.com/hashtag/cc...
- [1] governments

This isn't particularly surprising. When the A380 went into service, it was assumed that hub-and-spoke traveling was the way to go: http://www.forbes.com/2006/05/...

Boeing on the other hand bet on convenience. How many flyers prefer direct flights over having to make a connection?

According to Forbes, most wealthy people earned their money. We're talking 6% versus 69%. I'm not a statistician, but that seems to be well out of the margin of error.

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

It is, of course, well understood that water vapor is a greenhouse gas-- this accounted for in all the models. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere depends on the temperature. This is a feedback cycle. One of several feedback cycles.

Well it seems the the humidity:

Relative humidity has substantially declined in recent decades, defying global warming computer models predicting higher amounts of atmospheric water vapor that will exacerbate global warming. The decline in relative humidity indicates global warming will be much more moderate than claimed by global warming activists. Declining Humidity Is Defying Global Warming Models

The IPCC's CAGW hypothesis necessitates that troposphere humidity increases as levels of atmospheric CO2 increase. Simply stated (this is not rocket science):

          *First CO2 levels increase, thus
              *Atmospheric warming increases, thus
              *Earth's surface warms, thus
              *Earth surface water evaporates, thus
              *Atmosphere humidity increases, thus
              *Atmosphere water vapor increases (i.e. greenhouse gas), thus
              *Atmosphere warms further, thus
              *Earth's surface warms even more, thus
              *More Earth's water evaporates into atmosphere, thus
              *A positive feedback loop established, and continues

For the above climate "tipping point" to initiate, the atmosphere humidity has to absolutely increase, which the above chart of empirical evidence reveals it has not.

In fact, as seen, the atmospheric (relative) humidity is decreasing over time while CO2 levels increase - the exact opposite of all climate model and "consensus" expert predictions. http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-c... Atmosphere Humidity: NOAA Scientists Determine Reality Is Opposite Of Climate Models' Prediction

just isn't cooperating with the GCM's; of course we all know when reality diverges from the model predictions, reality will be adjusted as necessary.

This was also a 'good' one:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.0737...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/br...

Maybe because I'm so aware of what is possible I've kind of given up ?

Anyway, the most likely use case for the DNS-lookup/TCP-connect and tracking would be webmail, a lot of webmail I know doesn't even have real links. They use redirects.

So you think he committed perjury? Perhaps you should submit the proof you have, after all, lying to the election commission is a pretty serious offence.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
Minimum value is $1.35 b, up to $10 b
http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...
Forbes calls it at $4.1 b

I wish I could be so poor.

Uber rates are of course cheaper because the drivers don't carry commercial insurance, paying regular insurance rates, and thus raising the rates for everyone else as consequence.

Citation, preferably recent? Because there's plenty of news articles that say the opposite. I'm not saying that all drivers are properly covered, but you can find gypsy cabs out there that aren't as well, as well as pizza drivers and such.

I won't dispute that there was some 'shaking out' on who's responsible when on the insurance front.

The unemployment rate in Seattle is about 3%

Not according to the BLS; they say it's 50% higher than that (Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA Metropolitan Statistical Area: 4.5%):
http://www.bls.gov/web/metro/l...

Of course, those numbers are also deflate, due to people falling off the eligibility rolls:
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welc...

Even more fell off the roles altogether. Over 1,000,000 more dropped off the roles than found employment. It sounds like planning for long-term unemployment of more than 3 years is the right thing to do...

The battle is not lost.

They don't know me. They have no means of verifying what I tell them. And I do know them, and I know that they'll try and try and try to find a way to make my usage profitable. The only question is, "How can I use their greedy nature to benefit me?"

First, I need to know what benefit I want. If it's privacy I want, then nothing works better against a myopic panopticon than a disguise of misinformation. We already know they can "see" my usage and other statistics. But they can't verify. And if they can't verify, they can't trust. And if they can't trust, they can't use that information. But we also know they will use it and trust it, but they still won't verify it. It's a broken link in the chain. A weakness. Exploit it, and suddenly, you're both everyone and no one.

Next, I need to know how they attempt to identify me. What physical methods (servers they upload data to, etc.) and also what psychological methods they use (see also: Target's data mining is faster and more accurate than peeing on a stick).

Next, to re-use a favorite spin-doctor phrase, just "alter the narrative". Block the physical methods outright, but know that there will be new ones to make up for the ones you block. You can't block everything. Poison the data in any others. And by "poison the data", I don't mean to feed them random junk. Oh, no. That will be too easily identified, or too easily filtered out. You will gain privacy, but no other benefits. And you'll train their systems to work around your efforts. This is war. Don't get mowed down by the first volley like that. Feed them "good" data, but data that isn't you, even if it isn't necessarily consistent from moment-to-moment. If they're pushing advertisements at you, find a way to get them to try to push the "right" ads to you. If you want them to die in a fire and go bankrupt, get them to push unprofitable ads. If you want them to think of you as a cash cow (that goes MOO), get them to push profitable ones. Your motivations may change from day to day, and that's your prerogative.

Next, hold the line on anything that intrudes. If they're pushing ads or coupons or services or whatever, cut those things off at the knees (and by "knees", I mean "router"). Don't watch the ads, just farm them. This is trivial. A headless server in a rack in some nameless data center can be your advertisement playback bitch, and can forward the proof-of-impression keys back to your actual user session for reply back to the ad server. This gives the ad network what it wants (proof that you "watched" the ad), while also giving you what you want (not watching the ad for real). Companies paying for advertisements will slowly learn that "proof" isn't good enough, and the ad networks will die slowly.

And then the war is won.

That is because Gore and pals are set to become carbon billionaires by selling indulgences, which of course means that things that might actually make a difference, like recycling tech, building a "people's car/truck" that gets 50 MPG+ for under $20K and then using a "cash for clunkers" style program to get all the poor folks out of older gas guzzlers? Well that is off the table because Gore and his friends at Goldman Sachs couldn't print money at the barrel of a gun while giving their rich pals free passes....err..."carbon offsets" and we can't have THAT now, can we?

What I can't believe is how many on the left is willing to buy his bullshit, can you name ONE THING, just one, that he is proposing that he hasn't already set himself up to become insanely rich if it comes to pass, just one? Well if everybody in the west gives me just 1 dollar a year why I'll cure climate change within a century using my magical AGW wands! Of course it won't work, but neither will Gore's plans but it'll make me rich and that IS the real goal of this, to make a few a lot richer with a reverse robin hood...right?

If you guys want to listen to somebody about AGW? Ed Begley Jr, and wadda ya know, nearly all his ideas are sensible. But then again he drives an electric car, lives in a modest home and takes coach instead of a personal fleet of SUVs to a personal Lear Jet to his McMansion with an indoor basketball court that uses more AC in a month than a half a dozen families of five do in a year like Gore...but its all good, right? After all Gore pays himself carbon indulgences from his own shell corp thus getting credit for moving money from his left to right pocket...that saves the world too,right?

This is one of those cases where the logical conclusion could possibly actually be way off base. The obese and chainsmokers may end up with lower medical costs over their lifetime. Why? They die earlier. I was all in with you until I learned this unusual bit of information. Now, this article doesn't delve into average age of death, so it could be that they're dieing way earlier on average and the lower costs aren't offset because of shorter insurance premium pay-in duration at lower life expectancy, but it does debunk charging employees in some cases double for insurance if they are smokers.

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

Disclaimer: I don't smoke and find it absolutely disgusting. Still doesn't mean I have to like the insurance 'smoker fee'

Smoking Guns: Russian Separatists Shot Down Malaysian Flight MH17

Unfortunately there are no "take backs" on this.

Granted, he doesn't say the family size that decent living would support, but lacking statements to the contrary I assume at least a three-person household

The minimum wage was rooted in racism. The argument was something like that blacks were so inferior that they were willing to live in squalor, and that whites needed to be protected from that. That's roughly the same argument that progressives today use to advance tariffs and immigration restrictions.

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

Don't leave out that the business is booming, doing much more business than before, and getting tons of applications from high quality candidates attracted by the higher wages.

So yes, the transition might be bumpy. But nobody's salary went down, so they're all making at least what they agreed to for their job. It seems weird to me that people are angry that while they got a raise, but so did lower paid workers, so they aren't making as much more than the other guy as they used to.

A good writeup is at http://www.forbes.com/sites/mi... .