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The fourth amendment has been dead since civil forfeiture became common.

Not dead, but badly bruised and put on the cart.

That really needs to be fixed, now.

Federal Case Could Make It Easier For Victims To Defend Themselves Against Civil Forfeiture
Pennsylvania judge calls civil asset forfeiture “state-sanctioned theft”
IJ Scores Major Federal Court Victory In Massachusetts Civil Forfeiture Case
The Rise of Asset Forfeiture Abuse
Bill Would Prohibit Asset Forfeiture In Michigan Without Criminal Conviction - State has been ground zero for money and property seizures

Unless it is addressed the problem will only get worse as local and state governments face funding squeezes due to tax shortfalls and growing pension funding problems.

The F-150 is the best selling vehicle (car, truck, or suv) in North America,and has been for almost 20 years. This isn't some niche manufacturer that is going to sell 50,000 units and be happy with it. Ford is expecting to sell millions of these before then can do another redesign, so if it isn't successful it's a serious problem, and therefore it's a huge risk.

Furthermore, losing 700 lbs on every one of the millions of these that are going to be sold over the next few years will do more to reduce dependency on foreign oil and co2 emissions than all of the zero emission vehicles put together. So as cool as the technology behind electric and hybrid cars is, if you want to burn less gas, you have to root for advances in truck technology such as this.

what it does prove is the complete intellecutual bankruptcy of the deniers

You AGW cultists are a real trip. When you say there will be less sea ice before you say there will be more, it means that the scientists arguing against your beliefs are the ones in intellectual bankruptcy?

Have the stones to admit you don't actually understand what you thought you did. But then, a real cultist will die before undergoing change to deeply held beliefs...

Just google "Motorola Sues" all the links won the first few pages is google suing people. Several of these are in the past few months. Google is suing people all over the place.

Here is Google suing Apple in August: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/21/and-now-google-sues-apple/
Here is Motorola Suing Apple in September: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/googles-motorola-mobility-sues-to-reopen-apple-mobile-patent-lawsuit-417692

Google has filed at least as many patent lawsuits as Apple and a lot more than Rockstar.

link

You are then a denier. The 97% figure is a lie, it creates positions for scientists that don't exist. The link shows how when scientists who are part of that 97% agreed, they said they did not.

Don't repeat lies that EVERYONE else knows is a lie.

...won't fix. Time-Warner and T-Mobil just need to pony up, and then the crony capitalist decision-making will kick in ala Solyndra, GM, CGI and Serco...

a businessman with a very clear understanding of how to loot destabilizing businesses

FTFY.

And that businessman lost not because of "pity" for Obama, but because he went too far right to try to win a completely dysfunctional Republican primary, and then was stuck with either staying where he was and getting crushed or explaining how he wasn't stating his real opinions before, losing all credibility - and getting crushed. He lost the race before it even started.

And it's a lot easier to destroy an economy than fix it. But looking at the current economic indicators we're finally starting to undo the Bush disaster...

Unemployment 4 year low: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=LN_cpsbref3
GDP up over 4% in Q3: http://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2013/12/20/us-gdp-grew-4-1-in-third-quarter-more-than-previously-estimated/
Stock market record high: http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/investing/stocks-markets/

You Republican middle class sheeple are so amazing in your loyalties. Your upper class overlords who have been making hand over fist in the market for the last 4 years must be feeding you an extra scoop of gruel in your dinner along with their usual lies about "the awful state of the economy"...

From what I can see, even very barebones plans can be grandfathered so long as they don't change much, which is the basic definition of grandfathering.
So while I still think it was not a very bright strategy to for Obama to sell the "keep your plan" so strongly, the decisions to cancel them falls squarely on the insurers.

Not really.. There are two ways an existing plan can remain, one is if it does not change at all and the other is if there is some hardship.

There is a hardship exception that allows insurance providers to keep or even create the barebones plans and the plans that do not meet the requirements under the ACA, but in order to qualify, the insurance provider has to show how changing the plan will create an economic hardship for them or a class of people defined by the actuaries. Now class is defined by an actuary group and not what we would think like with working class, poor middle and so on.

It should be noteworthy that the DHHS just recently (within the last week or so) released new guidelines on the hardship exceptions that they claim "clarified the law" that expanded the ability to use the hardship exceptions. If it was squarely on the insurance providers, we wouldn't have seen that.

The true grandfather clause meant that if no changes were made, the policy could remain until any change is made, then it would have to follow all the new rules. A subsidy given by the government would qualify as a change and so would changes in the risk pools made by the actuary (which would by default have to be made with people moving to subsidized plans and medicare/medicaid roles).

So yes, you can blame the insurance providers if you ignore the fact that they would be penalized for not updating their policies to meet the new guidelines despite the class pools changing and the penalties they would face. But all this is sort of like arguing if the room is painted white or eggshell. This stuff was being brought up before Obama made any of the statements and the statements were specifically to address those situations. You act as if it is not Obama's fault for making the claims when the claims were specifically made to counter the reality that materialized. Add to that that Obama knew before he said it once that it wasn't true but kept on saying it in order to sell the product. In fact, the delay he put for the employer coverage mandates was specifically to address the fact that "66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013," and "156 million Americansâ"more than half the populationâ"was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013."

Please stop repeating party line BS and either look into the facts or be quiet about it. There is no real reason why we are even having this conversation right now. The bottom line is that Obama knew before he ever mumbled those words that they were not true and he said them specifically to counter punch the people who claimed it was going to happen only for the American people to be deceived and then shocked when it is happening. I don't trust what most other politicians say either, but rarely do we have such obvious examples as to why we should be skeptical of them.

If you're utterly unwilling to consider anything but a giant government public works project... then this makes more sense then the stupid high speed rail:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/08/12/hyperloop-the-high-cost-and-long-journey-of-californias-rail-project/

Cheaper, faster, innovative, and worthy of california's ambitions and self image.

The high speed rail crap is last century garbage to distract twits that think THAT is how you get out recessions.

Doesn't work. Never did.

But if you are going to build something... please try to make it less useless and pathetic.

6 Legal Requirements For Unpaid Internship Programs

One of every four Bridges in the US is broken: http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/08/07/one-of-every-four-u-s-bridges-is-broken/

The US government has a website specifically addressing problems with closed roads: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/trafficinfo/

Millions in the US drink dirty water http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/business/energy-environment/08water.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Energy poverty. Budget cuts in the US are causing people to freeze to death http://www.politicususa.com/2013/12/20/republican-budget-cuts-literally-causing-people-freeze-death-streets.html

Wal-Mart has the highest revenue in the US - 469.2 billion according to the Fortune 500.

Oh, and P.S., you have no clue what revenue actually means The largest company on the planet only pulls in $134.77 billion a year. Wal-mark did $469.2 in sales last year.

I'm well aware of what revenue is (I work in sales for a fortune 100, surprise!)

I assumed (naively, I must admit) that CNN would also know what revenue is. However, you just made my original point even more. Nobody has "trillions in revenue."

Wal-Mart has the highest revenue in the US - 469.2 billion according to the Fortune 500.

Oh, and P.S., you have no clue what revenue actually means The largest company on the planet only pulls in $134.77 billion a year. Wal-mark did $469.2 in sales last year.

I'm well aware of what revenue is (I work in sales for a fortune 100, surprise!)

I assumed (naively, I must admit) that CNN would also know what revenue is. However, you just made my original point even more. Nobody has "trillions in revenue."

Wal-Mart has the highest revenue in the US - 469.2 billion according to the Fortune 500.

Oh, and P.S., you have no clue what revenue actually means The largest company on the planet only pulls in $134.77 billion a year. Wal-mark did $469.2 in sales last year.

Wal-Mart has the highest revenue in the US - 469.2 billion according to the Fortune 500.

Oh, and P.S., you have no clue what revenue actually means The largest company on the planet only pulls in $134.77 billion a year. Wal-mark did $469.2 in sales last year.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/10/04/fbi-silk-road-bitcoin-seizure/ The feds plan to eventually sell them back into circulation -- if that's what they mean by liquidate. Though I think they should just throw/burn the private key away, and let those coins join the mass of other coins that were lost by early adopters.

the average per download revenue on iOS is 5x what it is on Android.

Source please? I'm interested in the precise methodology used to arrive at that figure. Does it count only priced apps, only priced apps and IAPs, or also advertisements?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/10/how-much-do-average-apps-make/

I seem to remember one well-known video game developer making more revenue from ads on Android than from priced app sales on iOS.

Then they should have made money from ads on iOS as well.

It's not necessarily a question of social hierarchy, but of organizational hierarchy and role. Government, universities, corporations, pretty much any organization is going to have at least a hand full of positions that have a particular set of legal responsibilities and powers if they exist as a legally organized corporate entity. For example the president and secretary of an organization have such a legally responsible role. Organizational hierarchies are a fact in government and the military. It is also true that those institutions, especially government, have powers that you don't as a private individual. Some of those powers have a direct effect on your life and ability to navigate society.

Acknowledging that isn't a "profoundly authoritarian world view" but a simple accommodation of fact, of reality. If you are unable to do that, the problem is going to be one on your part, not that of others. It doesn't make you any more free, powerful, independent, wise, or intelligent to refuse acknowledging that fact. If anything is may mean that you have adopting fringe thinking that could lead to significant problems in dealing with society, and may lead to criminal prosecution if taken far enough.

Example: What is a Sovereign Citizen?

“ Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. ”
— G.K. Chesterton

and it is possible we are simply out of time, with regards to the funding for this sort of research.

That seems unlikely. The future is never as bleak as some would have you believe.
There have been a number of developments of late that suggest real progress is being made:

http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/cellulosic-ethanol-heads-for-cost-competitiveness-by-2016/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/09/04/same-moonshine-different-name-welcome-to-the-age-of-cellulosic-ethanol/

Somewhat dated:
http://www.nrel.gov/continuum/sustainable_transportation/cellulosic_ethanol.cfm

However, its still ethanol.
It may be wiser to take a look at other fuel stretchers as well.
Butanol is being looked at because it is less corrosive and also higher energy density than ethanol, almost approaching that of gasoline. (Exhaust smells like bananas).

Butanol trumps ethanol in several ways: Adding ethanol to gasoline reduces fuel mileage, but butanol packs almost as much energy as gas, meaning fewer fill-ups. Butanol also doesn't damage car engines like ethanol, so more of it can be blended into gas. And because butanol doesn't separate from gasoline in the presence of water, it can be blended right at the refinery, while ethanol has to be shipped separately from gas and blended closer to the filling station.

Even Zebra poop is helping, it yields a particular strain of Clostridium bacteria that can convert nearly any form of cellulose into butanol very efficiently.

Burned by itself, (B100) you might have a 10% mileage penalty. Mixed with gas it might not even impose any significant mileage penalty.
Its been found that the mileage penalty does not exactly vary in lock-step with energy density. (Theoretically ethanol should only see a 2 to 3% mileage penalty, but some claim 10%, especially on older vehicles). But to date, no one has done significant real world testing on Butanol + Gas blends.

Some links to Butanol stories:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/12/the-fuel-that-could-be-the-end-of-ethanol/
http://farmindustrynews.com/blog/bio-butanol-can-be-produced-about-same-cost-ethanol-optinol-reports
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2013/april/cost-saving-measure-to-upgrade-ethanol-to-butanol-a-better-alternative-to-gasoline.html

NG engines are easy to do and well understood, but the infrastructure issue means it's a fleet-use only item.

Folks who work with NG generators report very long life and low wear. If I had a convenient source of CNG I'd convert at least one of my trucks to bi-fuel as "gas and gasoline" systems can co-exist. Ford is going to offer a CNG option on the extremely successful F-150. (That would make a great option for a work truck since CNG can be used to run cutting torches, generators, and so forth. Standard hardware could easily connect them.)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2013/07/31/ford-f-150-to-get-natural-gas-engine-option/

ok, so these guys took the idea from Aerovironment, gear mechanism from Festo, and the latest openCV optimization to create something that avoids static objects in a still wind environment. And of course made it into a PhD project.

And I like the "crowd over a concert".... Yeah... I'm sure the stereo will work well among all those lights air currents, and people.

Nah think bigger picture. NASA needs to start filming and selling zero-g porn. They'll have a virtual monopoly on the stuff and the adult industry is worth $10+ billion a year. That's twice what NASA spent on space operations in 2011.

And in case you think it's a joke, and not a commentary on how sad it is people would rather invest in seeing money shots than real science, I haz links :

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/659660main_NASA_FY13_Budget_Estimates-508-rev.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html

(although it is cheering to know that the entire NASA budget is bigger than the porn industry, although I must admit I was a little surprised by the 3 billion spent on "cross agency support" -- what's that about?)

Nah. Russian zero-g porn!

Nah think bigger picture. NASA needs to start filming and selling zero-g porn. They'll have a virtual monopoly on the stuff and the adult industry is worth $10+ billion a year. That's twice what NASA spent on space operations in 2011.

And in case you think it's a joke, and not a commentary on how sad it is people would rather invest in seeing money shots than real science, I haz links :

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/659660main_NASA_FY13_Budget_Estimates-508-rev.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html

(although it is cheering to know that the entire NASA budget is bigger than the porn industry, although I must admit I was a little surprised by the 3 billion spent on "cross agency support" -- what's that about?)

Forbes just put out a counter balancing piece that refutes that narrative.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/16/an-nsa-coworker-remembers-the-real-edward-snowden-a-genius-among-geniuses/

MISINFORMATION

Forbes just put out a counter balancing piece that refutes that narrative.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/16/an-nsa-coworker-remembers-the-real-edward-snowden-a-genius-among-geniuses/

I remember when 60 minutes weren't lying media whores. You really think "forbes" would like about this?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/16/an-nsa-coworker-remembers-the-real-edward-snowden-a-genius-among-geniuses/

The only reason I can think why we have the sharing button is as a misguided response to tablet and phone games. We keep hearing how casual gamers are sucked into those and diverted away from consoles (this, etc: http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/05/16/google-play-alone-about-to-overtake-entire-portable-console-game-market-wake-up-nintendo/. A lot of these iOS and Android titles have sharing features and offer to upload your performance to Facebook. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, it seems that Sony and MS have decided to try to integrate their consoles into the phone experience as much as possible. So now we have a sharing button and a PS4 app (http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/ps4-playstation-app-launches-for-ios-and-android). Doesn't change the fact that tablet and phone games are almost all shit, or that people will continue to play them because they're there and they're mindless.

Well, considering that a significant factor in the increased income inequality under our current President is a result of laws passed during his first two years

Well, if you accept as axioms things which have no support in fact or evidence, then sure, you can prove whatever you want. But why even bother with the pretense of proof if you take that route?

Or, for a starting point, try here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2013/03/28/the-mystery-of-income-inequality-broken-down-to-one-simple-chart/

"But it shouldn’t require another Sandy Hook to make us realize something has to change. The school shooters are committing a grandiose form of suicide. Media, traditionally, doesn’t cover suicides, and is very careful when it does. It’s a long-standing custom, borne out of numerous studies from groups like the Suicide Prevention Resource Center and the National Institute of Mental Health.

“More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals,” the NIMH concluded. “The magnitude of the increase is related to the amount, duration and prominence of coverage.”

what has Wikileaks released recently?

The GI files just finished being published. They, for example, tell us that around 2011 there was "not much of a free Syria army", but that they were financing, arming and training people to "commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within". Even worst, it also tells us that "They dont believe air intervention would happen unless there was enough media attention on a massacre, like the Ghadafi move against Benghazi".

So basically, while it makes no sense for Assad to use chemical weapons against his people, it shows that since 2011 the USA consider this a necessity for their attacks. Here is the full leaked email

There were many other revelations from the Global Intelligence files, but I think this is the most important one since over 100,000 people already died from the "civil war" the USA is creating in Syria.

The other recent leak was the TPP IP, this is Forbes report on it: US Fails To Close TPP Deal As Wikileaks Exposes Discord

And FYI, many of the "Manning Papers" (Cablegate) were published around the world and of course not on the land of the free, not just because American journalists are being persecuted, but also because they matter more for those countries.

No, you haven't been paying attention ... the beta boxes are NVIDIA and eventually they want reference designs with all the major graphics architectures.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2013/10/09/valve-confirms-official-amd-powered-steam-machines-for-2014/

Right here.

And dropping 1080p MP4s from HTTP and requiring the laggy DASH crap or separate audio/video downloading remuxing. And dropping 256kpbs audio (even on DASH) for 128kbps.

I hate to reply to an AC, but I hate wrong information more.

Multiple stories corroborate that the actual number potentially losing healthcare is one million, not the five million the AC suggested. These are policies that don't meet the ACA's minimum coverage levels, and thus are no longer allowed to be offered.

This has been a point pounded hard by those on the right ("If you like your plan you can keep it" was a lie!), wanting to point to people losing insurance. The left's typical response is that the plans are junk plans, and folks are better off being forced to get a real plan. Since those arguments are all over the web, I'm going to skip past them. Visit Google News to find them if you have missed out.

As is often the case, reality isn't simple enough to be captured in a sound byte. The law had a provision to grandfather old plans:

So what happens to the plans that don't meet the new minimum standards? They will likely disappear. A handful of existing plans will be grandfathered in, but the qualifying criteria for that is hard to meet: Members have to have been enrolled in the plan before the ACA passed in 2010, and the plan has to have maintained fairly steady co-pay, deductible and coverage rates until now.

What insurers have done is made sure no pre-2010 plan stayed in effect (yes, they cancel millions of plans every year), and for the few that have they have made sure the co-pays, deductibles, and coverage have changed significantly. Why would they do that? Well there are a about 4 million people on junk plans. How bad are these plans?

One example: the "Go Blue Health Services Card'' for which cancer survivor Donnamarie Palin of New Port Richey has paid $79 a month. For that, she gets $50 toward each primary care doctor visit, $15 toward each drug — but zero coverage for big-ticket items like hospital stays.

Get in a car wreck, no coverage. Get cancer, no coverage. Need a wart removed, no coverage. Break your arm, no coverage. Yeah. That bad. But they have one thing going for them, they are cheap. $79/month if you don't understand what you're (not) getting seems pretty cheap compared to hundreds of dollars for real insurance. In plain, simple terms these people were going to get a price hike. Now, you're an executive at a health insurance provider faced with the prospect that 4 million people are going to get letters saying "Your $79/month policy is going away, we'd like to offer you a $450/month policy, but it covers a lot more!" Yeah, that's going to lead to lots of bad press on the evening news.

But the way ACA was written had a convenient out. Make sure the law forced the cancellation of the plans, and then flip the narrative to say the government is canceling your plan. It should be no surprise that it took insurance executives about a nanosecond to figure this out and set the wheels in motion. Just make sure no plan qualified or could be grandfathered in.

Now that the Scooby Doo "how did they do it" moment is over, there is one bit left to tidy up. The savvy reader will notice 1 million Californians had their policy cancelled, but o

Right here.

Forbes calculates the price of a Nissan Leaf battery to be between $7,700 and $3,888. So the cost is, at most, $7,700 x 6 = $46,200.

Honestly, creativity is overrated in our age because with scientific research over the last century a lot of good ideas have been already been flushed out. They simply are not practiced. The problem is not that people avoid creativity, it's they want their own creativity to manifest, not yours. This is true even in the face of peer reviewed, expertly written material.

Geniuses do not create new things, they copy things that already exist (I got this from Edward Tufte). Basically, they observe and then they apply intelligent design to what already exists to improve the status quo, in a way then does not rock the boat, but improves things gradually. Gradual improvement is all we are really capable of anyways, because you cannot observe and improve things without seeing the problems first.

However, this is what is seen as "creativity" by those who do not understand it, because understanding usually requires in depth abstract thought and an extremely good memory to put together the pieces of the puzzle together.

What is really easy is these people who are trying to be "creative" in their own right and ignoring the status quo making things horrible for those around them and creating very detrimental products of their creativity.

i.e. "Let's take advantage of people's superstitious nature." (forced spread and manipulation of religion, just glance at the inquisition...), "Let's issue to much currency and not protect the people, we'll make a huge profit in the end either way." (Several banks throughout history, perhaps bit coin will be the same, we'll see.), "Let's guess how much we are going to make based on business plans that have not come to fruition, and budget that way." (Enron) "Let's time our employees and pay them less, so they need more government assistance and assistance from family members. It's the job that is worthwhile to them." (Good Will) "Let's pay our employees so little and squeeze as much money out of them as possible instead of paying them what we can afford and investing into their futures. This way they go on welfare." (Walmart) "Let's do massive scale Agriculture" (Humanity)

I suppose I could throw in experts being told what to do by their bosses despite plenty of push back. If you have not experienced this, you should try getting a degree or specializing in something. Everyone is an expert except the practitioner and student of their discipline.

As far as I know, ALL of these things go against conventional wisdom, or did at some point in time. These things were never observed to be good, they were just done, they were created by creative people. Created against the tried and true wisdom established before hand.

• -Religion as a Form of Control (who needs real leadership and organic social structure, we have no control then.)
• -Banks (Specie Circular crisis)
• -Speculative Budgeting (Enron did this, and I remember in the documentary, they even coined a term for it, maybe I even got it right. Bull markets come to mind too, i.e. Taking out loans for investing, because how can you lose, right?)
• -Not Investing into People (If you have not watched the Good Will clip that demonstrates this, you should. However, this is how employers are treating people across the board in my experience so far. Walmart is another "great" company.)
• -Mass Scale Agri

The demonization has been going on for a while. Here's an article from almost a year ago: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/18/meet-steve-israel-the-congressman-who-wants-to-ban-3d-printable-guns-qa/

Steve Israel wants to ban your access to 3d printers, and he's using guns as a way to get the camel's nose under the tent. Here are some particularly telling quotes from the interview in the story linked above:

What we’re trying to do is make it clear that if you choose to construct a weapon or weapon component using a 3D printer, and it’s homemade, you’ll be subject to penalties.

Catch that? If you're a business, doing it for commercial gain, then he thinks it's okay. If you're the little guy, doing it as a hobby, then simply doing it even if no one ever gets hurt will get you sent to jail.

Steve Israel: But if you’re going to download a blueprint for a plastic weapon that can be brought onto an airplane, there’s a penalty to be paid.

Interviewer: Just for downloading it?

Steve Israel: No, no, for actually manufacturing it. And we’re not even going after manufacturers, either, but lone wolves, individuals.

Again there, if you're a business he's fine. If you're an individual, it's banned. He even slips and admits he want to criminalize the sharing of the information.

So we’re talking to stakeholders, and working to create a distinction between that lone wolf and legitimate manufacturers of plastic clips.

Make no mistake: the forces working to ban private ownership of 3d printers are already moving against you. The bogey man of undetectable guns is simply a convenient way to get people on board with the first step of restriction. Once that's in place another big-business congressman will come back and say, "Poor GM is losing money because it can't sell overpriced factory parts because people are just printing them. Ban all private 3d printer ownership!"

The only thing in question is how many people will be fooled and take up the torch and pitchfork against 3d printed guns, not realizing that they're working against their own desire to have privately owned 3d printing technology. As is commonly the case, the fight for gun rights is only a microcosm in the larger fight for natural and civil rights. You want 3d printers? You're going to have to fight to protect 3d printed guns. You want marijuana legalized? You're going to have to fight for private ownership of machine guns. You want to continue to be free from poll taxes? You're going to have to support repealing the NFA.

Issues of law and politics don't each exist in separate vacuums.

Zuckerberg is worth 19 billion. Assuming facebook saves 50k$ per year with every H1B hire...assuming zero costs for the hire...and assuming all of this is going straight into Zuckerberg's pocket, that's still chump change...

Really? They're not importing a significant part from it's neighbors?

And prices are pretty close to what I said.

Just try to buy your groceries with it.

If you live in a city like San Francisco it's at the point where you can almost live off BitCoin if you are determined to, including groceries. It's far from easy, but it's coming slowly.

Johannes Gutenberg gave us the periscope, history later developing to the cleptoscope. The "Office of Naval Intelligence" has already gone way above this recently, with the launch of NROL-39 http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/05/u-s-spy-rocket-launching-today-has-octopus-themed-nothing-is-beyond-our-reach-logo-seriously/ The drone is aka "middle management".

there is no more distrust of Bitcoin as currency than there is of Tide as currency in the drug trade. http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2013/01/08/all-money-is-fiat-money/#comment_reply

You still don't understand that money can't be majicked out of thin air and be worth something?

The only thing keeping it afloat is other people believing the same fairy story.

And you still don't understand that money being pulled from thin air has been montary policy since the start of the 20th century.

Wikipedia: Fiat money has been defined variously as: any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[1] state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[2] money without intrinsic value.[3][4] The term derives from the Latin fiat ("let it be done", "it shall be").[5] While gold- or silver-backed representative money entails the legal requirement that the bank of issue redeem it in fixed weights of gold or silver, fiat money's value is unrelated to the value of any physical quantity. Even a coin containing valuable metal may be considered fiat currency if its face value is higher than its market value as metal. The Nixon Shock of 1971 ended the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold. Since then, all reserve currencies have been fiat currencies, including the U.S. dollar and the Euro.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.asp

Definition of 'Fiat Money': Currency that a government has declared to be legal tender, but is not backed by a physical commodity. The value of fiat money is derived from the relationship between supply and demand rather than the value of the material that the money is made of. Historically, most currencies were based on physical commodities such as gold or silver, but fiat money is based solely on faith. Fiat is the Latin word for "it shall be".

And so you aren't thinking my post is redundant, here is a an article from Forbes explaining how fiat currencies work, and why money is fiat and the only different is if its backed by something or not. http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2013/01/08/all-money-is-fiat-mone So yes, you CAN pull money from nothing.

let's see.. According to Forbes... In order of sales here's the largest 11 in the world.

VW
Toyota
Daimler
Ford
BMW
GM
Nissan
Honda
Hyndai
SAIC (Chinese)

The top 10 up there represent the major manufacturers that sell cars in the US other than Tesla and Fisker is about dead anyway.. SAIC doesn't sell anything in the US, so really what's the other 8 on his list? Some guy in a garage building kit cars?

Can anybody give me a reason not to have stability control where that reasons does not contain “fun” or “because”? (which might be sufficient – just looking for any other reasons.)

'Cause, uh, it's a sports car designed for racing?

Mid-engined cars are designed solely to get around corners fast, and they're extremely unstable compared to your average Ford or Honda. The problem is that many are bought by people who have no clue, and end up in a ditch the first time they take their foot off the gas in a corner.

I have had several mid-engine sports cars, both with and without stability control, and you're wrong, mid-engine is the most stable engine configuration a vehicle can have, otherwise why would F1 cars all be mid-engine?

Mid-engine is so stable that the mid-engine Porsche Cayman is commonly known to be the best handling vehicle money can buy:
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/the-mid-vs-rear-engine-debate-porsche-cayman-r-vs-911-gt3-feature
http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2014-porsche-cayman-cayman-s-first-drive-review
http://www.caranddriver.com/comparisons/the-best-handling-car-in-america-for-less-than-100k-feature
http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Porsche_Cayman/Performance/
http://jalopnik.com/is-the-new-porsche-cayman-still-the-worlds-best-sports-333874537
http://www.whatcar.com/car-reviews/porsche/cayman-coupe/summary/26174-4

http://www.examiner.com/article/porsche-cayman-world-s-best-sports-car


For a good example of why mid-engine is better imagine a shopping cart with a 30 pack of beer in it and pushing the cart from the back. Front engine is equivalent to putting the beer in the very front of the cart and mid-engine is equivalent to putting the beer at the back of the cart. Try both and tell me which is easier to push around a corner.

So what do I think happened? Fluke 1-in-a-million accident that couldn't be repeated if you tried.

Why are you (and TFA) both assuming that the market is wrong and that finding new antibotics is more important than the value placed upon it by companies in a position to do it? You have this intuition that it is important, and some rationale that cannot be tested because it involves some speculation about the future need for new antibiotics.

The situation has basically been taken out of the "market" model.

Risk-averse bureaucrats make the safety requirements without any cost burden of implementing the requirements. As a result, the drugs must be "safe at any cost", rather then "do more harm than good".

The consumers are captive, forced to use the system: no one can choose a "risky, less-well tested, but cheaper" treatment. While this may seem reasonable on the surface, it means that companies don't have to compete for consumers based on the value of their services.

Nothing about this system even remotely resembles a market.

To address your point directly, let's assume that one human life is worth $5 million. That's a reasonable estimate, and it doesn't much matter where you put the estimates, you can still do the analysis. Also assume that it costs $5 billion to develop a new antibiotic.

The trade-off appears to be 1,000 lives lost. If no company develops a new antibiotic and 2,000 lives are lost, then the regulations have hurt society more than they have helped. The problem is that the cost of 2,000 human lives is not borne by the regulatory agency or the drug companies. They can safely claim "it isn't our fault" if anything bad happens.

As you say, the need for future antibiotics can't be tested - but the break-even point is small and we have abundant historical evidence from before the discovery of antibiotics about the effect on our population health.

"Speculation" and untested rationale aren't the appropriate words to use here. "Impending disaster" is much closer than you would have us believe.

Surprised NO ONE is mentioning this....

Sheep Marketplace went down yesterday after weeks of suspicious behavior such as disabling withdrawals of money, a countdown to when withdrawals would be available but running at a slower speed, still no withdrawal when it expired, minimum of 1BTC withdrawal so people would deposit money, and more.

So far it appears some $47 million worth of bitcoins was stolen.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/01/silk-road-competitor-shuts-down-and-another-plans-to-go-offline-after-6-million-theft/

Cash prices have started to get much better.

Some related info here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/05/27/why-do-hospitals-charge-4423-for-250-ct-scans-blame-arizona-republicans/

You utterly fucking fail at understanding security. [...] The only known threats on iOS devices have come to jailbroken phones and the jailbreaks themselves.

It ain't just a river in Egypt.

And that's not even considering threats that come from Apple itself, without any need to install apps or change settings. Something magical happens and things just work.

So what you've got is malware requiring physical access to the device, a dodgy app that slipped through the accreditation process but was subsequently pulled and a theoretical vulnerability that Apple have patched.

If you thing that compares to the privacy sham or security shambles that is Android then you really must be a Google or Samsung shill. (It was obvious from the links you included in your post.)

You utterly fucking fail at understanding security. [...] The only known threats on iOS devices have come to jailbroken phones and the jailbreaks themselves.

It ain't just a river in Egypt.

And that's not even considering threats that come from Apple itself, without any need to install apps or change settings. Something magical happens and things just work.

So what you've got is malware requiring physical access to the device, a dodgy app that slipped through the accreditation process but was subsequently pulled and a theoretical vulnerability that Apple have patched.

If you thing that compares to the privacy sham or security shambles that is Android then you really must be a Google or Samsung shill. (It was obvious from the links you included in your post.)