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No, we have corporatism, not unregulated free market capitalism.
The government allowed, and encouraged, monopolies to form: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0612/6514236a.html
Systems from best to worst:
Unregulated market
Regulated market with some competition
Regulated monopolies
Unregulated monopolies propped up by the government
What the US has now is somewhere between the bottom two (worst) options. You are correct in that we could improve our system by further regulating the monopolies. We could fix, and dramatically improve, our system by breaking up the monopolies and deregulating further.

Microsoft (more likely Bill Gates personally) saved Apple from dying.

Not so much.

Avoiding taxes is nothing new for General Electric. In 2008 its effective tax rate was 5.3%; in 2007 it was 15%. The marginal U.S. corporate rate is 35%.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/01/ge-exxon-walmart-business-washington-corporate-taxes.html

And just what do you think the original article is about? is it payroll and local taxes or is it corporate taxes?
I think you will find it is a the latter and not the former.

There is an unfortunate additional quirk in this case: Since, naturally, the 'cyberwarriors' don't want to be stuck purely in the tedious and thankless job of playing defense, there is a demand for 'offensive capabilities'. This creates a perverse incentive: If a flaw is disclosed and patched or mitigated, it is no longer of offensive utility, so now the market for zero-days and exploit payloads isn't just black hats, scammers, and criminals; but 'respectable' defense industry types.

This is not a merely theoretical problem.

VUPEN is the crass, attention-whoring, bad-boy of the industry; but practically the entire who's-who of staid, tight-lipped, defense contractors has a division peddling bugs somewhere in the business.

Even if we were 100% warm and fuzzy about the use these exploits are being put to by these firms customers(Only the good guys, pinkie swear!), this situation is insane from the perspective of actual 'security'. Whose economies, financial systems, and infrastructure depend most heavily on complex IT systems? Ummm, mostly wealthy developed countries. Whose citizens are most vulnerable to electronic compromise of financial information and such? Countries with high rates of internet penetration and lots of computers. Who has the capability to deploy electronic attacks against unpatched vulnerabilities? Virtually everyone.

In addition to the usual grab for rights and money, this 'cybersecurity' industry begets insecurity, because of the demand for 'offensive capabilities', despite the fact that we are the ones with the most to lose in an insecure environment. At least classic corporate welfare military R&D is merely expensive, and once you hand over the money, Raytheon or whoever goes off to build some impractical toy that is largely useless; but at least largely harmless....

I live in the Seattle area as well. Certain local governments seem to be quite capable. Others are less so. As far as the state government goes, they appear to have an interesting approach. That being, whenever budgets get tight, cut education spending. I believe they have done so largely because they know the following: 1) Most people don't like to see the education of their own children gutted and 2) People can keep this from happening by voting for the funding of local education levies.

This has resulted in some interesting (and not altogether unexpected) things. For a very long time, education levies were passed routinely in affluent areas that placed a high value on education. Education levies were not passed in many of the poorer communities. I can't say what came of this (whether the results of education in different areas were different or even if there was a causal link), but it would be an interesting study. Over time, constant bombardment with levy funding requests appears to have left people resistant to passing more. After all, they passed several levies in the past. Where did that money go? They didn't see class size decreases, betterment of test scores, or better school programs. What they didn't realize was that all those levies were largely keeping funding at the status quo. So, now state funding has decreased and levies are less likely to get passed. This has led to a pretty dramatic decrease in the availability of funds for education.

In short, it appears that the state's primary operating procedure of 'cut education 'cause people will find a way to pay for it locally' has had unintended negative consequences. After all, according to this article http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/30/highest-state-taxes-lifestyle-real-estate-state-taxes_slide_4.html?thisSpeed=undefined Washington ranks 8 on the list of 'most taxed' states. There's no reason funding for education should be as low as it is (according to this site, 44th in state education funding per student: http://www.fundingwaschools.org/index_files/FundingStats_Funding_WA_K12_Schools.htm).

Hate to spoil a few things for you but:

- Colonel's original recipe:chicken grease salt.
- Coca Cola recipe: right here, most likely genuine.

Now as to the USPTO, the problem is that they are no longer paid to DENY patents. In the late 1970s/early 1980s, republicans in key positions began playing games with the system, setting up metrics for the patent examiners that judged their performance not by the number of processed patents, but by the number of APPROVED patents. Examine several patents a week, deny most of them, and your "job performance" was not as good as the moron who just rubber-stamped stuff a few cubicles down.

To top that, corporations came up with the idea of "patent slamming." The idea was to overload the patent system; every time the tiniest change to a system was made, it was filed as a new patent by the giant companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, GM, GE, etc. Particularly nauseating about it have been certain software houses, where it seems every new line of code ends up farted out by some shyster in the legal department as a new patent application.

The result has been that for about the last 30 years, the USPTO has been pointless. Not to say that meaningful patents are denied, but so many meaningless patents are granted that any patent in the past 30 years is suspect.

Patents like making a rectangle. Or turning a playing card sideways, a patent so fucking stupidly absurd it should have been laughed out of the office and shipped back to the fucking morons at WOTC/Hasborg along with a copy of Hoyle's Rules for Card Games as century-old prior art.

More likely a Planet of the Apes reference: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/toddessig/files/2011/08/planetoftheapesending.jpg

Is that you?

This was covered by the guardian a whole two months back. Link Partly debunked here

There are a couple of groups working on commercial bionic eyes, one implant with 1,500 electrodes (that's actually high enough resolution to be useful for recognizing objects) did allow some previously blind people to read text, in a human study between 2005-2010:

Link to the original paper with PDF download: HTML, PDF

Published in the journal Proc Royal Soc B: http://royalsociety.org/news/retinal-implant/

In the media: forbes.com February 2012

You mean like moving from sprawling, single family ranch-style homes, which are expensive to cool, into the city?

Seems someone already suggested a means to hurry that part of it up, starting with the skeptics. To wit:

"We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued."

(...mind you, this is originally posted in jest, but it points to some pretty scary shit that some folks are willing to suggest, just to whip up the crowds.)

My goodness. A suggestion that people who lie to detriment of all humanity face consequences? What would happen to our society if that maniacal idea were adopted. We could breed politicians out of the species. I'd explain why that is a horrifying possibility, but, I don't have time.

You mean like moving from sprawling, single family ranch-style homes, which are expensive to cool, into the city?

Seems someone already suggested a means to hurry that part of it up, starting with the skeptics. To wit:

"We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued."

(...mind you, this is originally posted in jest, but it points to some pretty scary shit that some folks are willing to suggest, just to whip up the crowds.)

What they're offering is still well below the $100,000 that a digital arms dealer like Vupen charges for a year's subscription plan for exploits it discovers. And according to the Forbes article I linked to, some vulnerabilities individually cost several times more than that. It's so fucked up that NATO counties pay these security firms like Vupen, HB Gary Federal, etc. for exploits in the products of legitimate software companies for their use in cyberwarfare, espionage, and other nefarious shit. They'd rather leave everyone vulnerable, not even using the info they purchase to shore up their own government's systems lest the vulnerability become public and they lose the value of their purchase. If I were Google I'd save the bounty money and give it to their lawyers to create a tsunami of FOIA requests with every government they can to get the info about whatever exploits they have. Start a PR campaign letting the public know that their own government have knowledge that could help software companies make their products more secure for the computing public at large. Maybe if some influential people in the security field and tech firms complain loudly enough, something will change. I doubt it, but what hell else is there to do?

At it's height it was never as bad as some of the windows viruses have been

Mac Malware Outbreak Is Bigger than 'Conficker'. Remember that OS X only has about 5% of global desktop market, 0.6 million desktops may not sound like much in comparison to Windows, but as a share of the Mac total it is significant: "Mac OS X is the number two desktop OS with 6.54 percent market share. Windows, on the other hand, accounts for 92.48 percent of the market. Based on market share, the Flashback Trojan botnet is equivalent to a Windows botnet of nearly 8.5 million PCs. That makes it an even larger threat than Conficker--just on a much smaller platform."

It's not true. It climbed to 600.000 infections, according to Kaspersky (anti-virus developper) and dropped to 30.000.

They got it wrong; Symantec and Kaspersky both said the number had fallen, but Symantec have admitted they were wrong, and Kaspersky are now "looking into the matter". Flashback botnet not shrinking, huge numbers of Macs still infected:

"We've been talking with them about the discrepancies in our numbers and theirs," said O Murchu in an interview Friday. "We now believe that their analysis is accurate, and that it explains the discrepancies."

"This server communicates with bots but doesn't close a TCP connection," wrote Dr. Web. "As [a] result, bots switch to the stand-by mode and wait for the server's reply and no longer respond to further commands. As a consequence, they do not communicate with other command centers, many of which have been registered by information security specialists [including Kaspersky and Symantec]. "This is the cause of controversial statistics," said Dr. Web.

Also see Antivirus Researchers Confirm: Flashback Still Infects More Than 500,000 Macs.

The financial system in the U.S. is corrupt, in my opinion. There are many arrangements that help those in control steal from the average person.

Sooner or later, people will realize that Facebook promotes fake relationships. Unfortunately, that realization will apparently come after investors have lost billions in Facebook's IPO.

Facebook's reputation with the mainstream media is rapidly getting worse. Facebook is getting a bad reputation partly because of articles in the mainstream media like these:

Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the competition to be voted the worst company in the United States.

Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story, Selling You on Facebook, says:

"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."

There's more like that in the article.

Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the Oregonian Newspaper web site, Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using Firefox with the NoScript add-on), but most people don't know about them.

Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.

On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.

Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like Firestone Complete Auto Care, or did the company offer something to be "liked"?

A few problems with Facebook: Richard Stallman wrote a short list of things wrong with Facebook.

How much information does Facebook keep? Read the December 13, 2011 article, Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages.

What do people in other countries think? The May 14, 2010 article, Facebook is not your friend gives one idea.

The June 15, 2011 article, The End of Facebook, and the June 14, 2011 article, Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? give others.

Most people don't understand the problems that may occur. For example, consider the March 28, 2012 article, Teacher's aide says 'no access' to her Facebook; now legal battle with school.

This April 4, 2012 article would be funny if it weren't so sad: Woman arrested for assault based on Facebook photo. Quotes:

"Aston ... was charged ... based solely on a Facebook

Some links to help you understand the idea here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/not-an-april-fool-1.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

"Virtually every car that has an air bag has some kind of recording ability," says James Casassa, of Wolf Forensics which specializes in downloading crash information from vehicles made by GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Honda. The recorders capture information about how fast you were going and whether you slammed on the brakes in the seconds before and after a crash. They capture just a snapshot before and after a crash, not a continual record of your driving activity -- which would be far more concerning for privacy. (But don't worry! You can get a far more invasive event recorder from your insurance company if you're looking to lower your car insurance rates.)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/04/19/hate-to-break-it-to-you-but-your-car-likely-has-a-black-box-spying-on-you-already/

You do know that R01 grants aren't exactly done on a secret handshake agreement, right? There are so many hoops academic researchers have to jump through to get federal funding. And I say that as someone who almost lost his job the day after landing a big grant, because I accidentally kept someone out of the loop. Your grant proposal gets reviewed by your department people, by the IRB committee, by the university's office of research, and by internal counsel (if needed) BEFORE it ever leaves campus. And then it gets reviewed by program officers, and many impartial and often vicious grant reviewers. And let's not forget that NIH grant success rates in many institutes are approaching 10%, so likely it won't matter at all because you won't get funded.

And, shockingly, the grant description has been available at NIH.gov since at least 2009: "An important innovation of this phase of the longitudinal study will be careful assessment of social aggression in online communication by providing adolescents with handheld devices and recording and coding the content of their text messaging, Instant Messaging, and email communication."

You personally may disagree with the decision that the project is ethical, but you can't argue that they weren't honest with everyone about what they set out to do.

Wrong. They won't cost 6800.

China's slice of the iPad is only 3%: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/which-countries-make-money-off-the-ipad/251654/
Similar for the iPhone: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/24/china-makes-almost-nothing-out-of-apples-ipads-and-i/

Multiply that by 10x and and the iProducts would be at most 30% more expensive. Most of the people buying them now would probably still be buying them at that higher price.

Of course, from what I see the US workers are not worth paying 10x more for. Judging from the many Slashdot posts by US people the average worker is unlikely to be even worth 3x more (the best on the other hand are a different story). Compare your pay here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17543356

In some countries there is a better hope since they are educating a higher percentage of their population to higher levels, that way they can stay ahead of the cheap labour (Vietnam etc) and upcoming more sophisticated and efficient robots. In contrast the USA is on the track where a minority rule over a mostly mediocre poorly educated majority. Your rulers don't care of course - it works well for them. Well educated voters will just make their lives more difficult. But you and the rest of the voters should care.

The recently enacted JOBS Act:

1) "Once again, the Puppets on Capitol Hill are about to slam the Muppets on Main Street. The country still hasn’t recovered from the Wall Street-induced financial cataclysm of 2008, yet Congress is preparing to enact the Orwellian ”JOBS Act”—a bill that should in fact be called the “Return Fraud to Wall Street in One Easy Step Act.” The bill will undo some of the most important reforms placed on Wall Street in a generation."
Slate link

2) "In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets."
Rolling Stone (Taibbi) link

3) “Simply, the JOBS Act will make funding more accessible for startups by allowing non-accredited investors to participate in the funding rounds, and this alone, I believe will be the main factor driving the increase in new companies being founded. And with new companies comes the need to hire staff. Without a doubt, this will help the current unemployment rate,” said Tanya Prive, founder of Rock The Post, a social networking platform for entrepreneurs to fund and swap resources."
Forbes link

4) "It is self-defeating for us to say this because as criminologists and anti-fraud specialists we would have job security for life if this bill was adopted. It is literally composed of the wish list in regard to fraud-friendly provisions that those intent on cheating have been dreaming about and salivating to achieve for decades. This bill will kill millions of jobs because financial frauds are weapons of mass financial destruction. It will start an international fraud-friendly deregulation race to the bottom and will become the basis for further criminogenic U.S. Congressional actions."
Huffington Post Link

5) "Amy Borrus, a spokeswoman for the Council of Institutional Investors, an investor watchdog group, said small companies — the focus of the new bill’s relaxed regulations — are particularly prone to fraud and accounting scandals. Senators did add some investor protections, but not enough, she said."
New York Times link

So... we might be looking at a jump (bubble?) in the stock market. I don't quite know what to make of it yet, but the initial reviews seem to be pointing to such a thing. Investigate and plan accordingly (and try not to lose your shirts).

5 Horrifying Facts You Didn't Know About the Space Shuttle and this one, which is linked in the above story.... For Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on eBay

First off, the Costco case applied to goods made inside the US -- not goods made outside the US like this case.

The Costco case was about goods made outside the USA (i.e. Switzerland in the Costco case). It is the reason why the SCOTUS ruled not to overturn the lower courts ruling.

From the Forbes article linked to in the /. summary of the Costco case.

The Supreme Court, in a 4:4 decision, refused to overturn a Ninth Circuit decision limiting the first-sale doctrine to U.S.-produced goods. The decision upholds the right of manufacturers — in this case, Swiss watchmaker Omega — to use copyright laws to prevent U.S. retailers from selling goods they obtained overseas.

Unless the Forbes summary is wrong, I think your comment needs to be reworked in light of these facts.

It seems that this student has quite a legal obstacle to clear in this case. I hope some group takes over his representation to challenge the previous SCOTUS split ruling (assuming the case has merit), as the Costco Wholesale Corp. v. Omega S.A. Ninth Circuit decision was deleterious to the USA (and possibly world) economy. USA copyright law is a dead weight loss to the USA economy in general; the Costco case extended USA copyright law's application to our detriment.

Well, the fact is, people buy imports from places like China because the manufacturing is cheap. Cheaper than domestic production. Sure, the Chinese manufacturers could build to the standards of (say) American manufacturing, but at that point, once you factor in overseas training, import costs, etc, you lose the advantage of having your products made in China.

The Chinese government knows this and artificially depresses the value of Chinese currency in order to keep exports up. It's hard to say what Chinese imports would really cost if they did not do this, but it would certainly shift against importing from China (though my gut tells me that we would simply look to other developing nations like India, Mexico, or a half-dozen other South American nations for our goods - Apple has been looking to Brazil for manufacturing lately).

In short, if you really want quality, you don't go to the opposite end of the Earth to find someone to make your product, unless you're willing to physically go there and oversee the standards (which is what Apple is doing - don't tell me they don't have representatives at FoxConn supervising the shit out of that place).

In any case, I have a feeling that 'American manufacturing' (as it stands) may never recover. By outsourcing our manufacturing, we're also selling off our intellectual property and infrastructure - in short, we've all but sold off entire industries. I'd argue that the US still has the best 'idea men' in the world, and arguably the best scientists and researchers (for now); but what do we do with our amazing new processor core designs (or whatever)? Give it to another country to have them build it so we can buy it back from them. I suppose that's a good thing for anyone who wants information to be free (because at this point it certainly is), but look what it did for companies like Dell -

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/

Yeah, Dell more or less created the modern giant incarnation of Asus when they outsourced their tech.

Of course, what's really happening is that people now know the closely guarded secret, that Global Warming is caused by the lack of Pirates in modern times: Link to Forbes article

No, the US government is rightly concerned with the Australian government making spurious claims of security problems that harm legitimate competition for money from Australian companies, and is bringing up the issue with he Australian government, which is its job.

Sorry, but under the US Patriot Act, the US government has granted themselves unlimited, and secret access to any and all data stored on a US server.

I've done some contract work for the Canadian Government, and it is illegal to store certain kinds of information on US based servers because it would potentially violate Canadian law. There are companies who have arms-length subsidiaries whose job it is to handle government data that could not be allowed to be stored in the US. This is no different than similar issues with US owned companies accessing EU data because of the Patriot Act.

The US can claim their companies are being hurt by this, but the fact of the matter is, the US is not a trustworthy place to store your data unless you are also going to accept them potentially spying on your citizens.

This isn't a trade issue. It's a trust issue.

So if America wants to keep their Patriot Act which tries to violate the laws of other countries, their businesses are going to lose out in those markets if it would mean those companies can't comply with local laws and the US law at the same time.

Sorry, but these aren't spurious claims -- they're well established issues which have been covered before.

Before this week's layoffs, Forbes did an analysis http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/02/why-best-buy-is-going-out-of-business-gradually/ back in January on why Best Buy was in a slow, horrible death spiral. This panic over demanding a driver's license is just part of the apocalyptic horror. And it's a demonstration of the short-sighted, reactive, anti-consumer leadership that painted them into this corner. Clearly, they've decided morons are their target demographics because who else will now buy more than one big ticket item at Best Buy more than once every 90 days? Guess it takes one to know one.

Except that this was well enough done to nail 600,000 Apple users:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/04/06/researchers-confirm-flashback-trojan-infects-600000-macs-being-used-for-clickfraud/

Facebook may never make $1b

ftfy

Facebook made $1b profit in 2011, on revenue of $3.7b

Corn subsidies are only half the story. There's also the DoA's policies on sugar.

If you're pretty don't attach a photo that makes you look too attractive if the HR bunch involved are females:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/04/04/girl-on-girl-crime-too-pretty-costs-you-the-job/

Caveat: it's just one study. But since way more girls go "I hate her" about someone they hardly know (some singer/celebrity) without being able to give a good reason, I won't be surprised if the results are reproducible. If there are straight unmarried guys involved, you can use the pretty photo.

That said, maybe your goal should not be merely to increase your chances of employment. Instead your goal should be to increase your chances of employment in places where you'd really like to work. If a company rejects/accepts you for stupid reasons, you might be better off not working there.

This has nothing to do with things like offets for favored industries. Large companies now move the various parts of their business to whatever location gives the best net tax situation. Multinationals construct structures like the Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich to place sub-companies for minimal tax. Techniques like Transfer pricing are aggressively used to move the profit to the right place to tax it minimally. Games are played with repatriation too.

If none of the options are good, they lobby for the specific incentives they need. US companies operate in Delaware because the state legislature there passes whatever the companies ask for in return for the business. Been that way since the 80's. The Cayman Islands and the Bailiwick of Jersey are popular offshore locations because they bend laws to whatever companies ask them to. Even a low rate on a lot of money is still a lot of money relative to a small country or state.

Yes, this is all legal, but it's only legal because the companies have gotten the laws they lobbied and or bullied for. The result is that we're in a race to the bottom on taxation, where business flows to whoever is running the lowest margin government--which unsurprisingly is usually with the most favorable legislative kickbacks too.

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole The World takes 350 pages to outline just how that happened over the last hundred years, it's a great read for those interested what I'd call "financial tech". The minute you allow companies to influence lawmakers by things like lobbyists and campaign contributions, the inevitable result is making what those companies want legal. The corporate side is unsurprising given that corporations are by definition immoral. The fact that voters are ignorant to how they are being conned is really the problem here. The lawmakers who are complicit and benefitting in all of these schemes shouldn't just be voted out, they should be prosecuted as traitors for hire.

Really, who cares? Here is what happens with credit card number fraud. It is used once or twice, the bank catches it early because they watch for unusual spending patterns, sometimes even the vendor does (at places like jewelry or electronics merchants where fraud is more common, and insurance against theft becomes expensive), they expire the number and reissue you a card. The vendor gets reimbursed from insurance against theft. Sometimes you get a phone call, asking if it's really you, based on contact information at the bank, not given at the POS. I don't know a card issuer in the world that would hold you liable for "forensic recovery and fraudulent use of a number recovered from a discarded electronic device." It gets added to the premiums of the vendor's theft insurance, if they don't catch it, and they often do.

You all should be more worried about all those bank people and vendors tracking and monitoring all your purchases, and perhaps sending your daughter expectant mother mailers.

As for the "stolen" number, they can have it for as far as it will get them. If you're deeply concerned about this "problem," you should consider waiters and cashiers with eidetic memories to be a more clear-and-present danger than forensic analysis of discarded hard disks.

There's several for MacOS Classic.

Several Trojans, Worms, etc for OSX. Virus in the classic form? Some proof-of-concepts here and there.

For a blast from the past:
http://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/tools/mac/mac-virus-list.txt (speaking about Mac viruses from the 1980's)

Interesting read on creation of malicious software targeting OSX:
https://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204791948/Mac_OS_X

A list of baddies for MacOS Classic and OSX:
http://www.iantivirus.com/threats/

Also interesting:
http://lscr.berkeley.edu/archive/mail/magnet/2004/0418.html

And then there's this:
http://www.forbes.com/2006/02/16/apple-osx-virus-cx_po_0216autofacescan09.html

This was amusing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf6_sPkMupA

I'm sure there's lots more if I care to dig.

Dysfunctional Console Industry Struggles For New Profit Centers

Here's an idea for a new profit center: console industry executive salaries. The CEO of Electronic Arts, Larry Probst, is overpaid by at least $12 million dollars annually. And that's just one executive. There's easily hundreds of millions of dollars in the untapped profit source of console industry executive salaries.

In Pennsylvania, a judge received a life sentence for taking kickbacks from a corporation of for-profit prisons for juveniles.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2011/08/12/pennsylvania-judge-gets-life-sentence-for-prison-kickback-scheme/

"Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, sent kids to juvenile detention for crimes such as possession of drug paraphernalia, stealing a jar of nutmeg and posting web page spoofs about an assistant principal (3 months of hard time). Some of those sentenced were as young as 10 years old. A mother of one of those sentenced by judge Caivarella lashed out at him after the guilty verdict. Sandy Fonzo’s son, Edward, was a promising young athlete in high school when at the age of 17 he found himself in front of judge Caivarella for possession of drug paraphernalia. With no prior convictions, the judge sentenced Edward to months in private prisons and a wilderness camphe missed his entire senior year in high school. Edward never recovered from the experience according to his mother and in June 2010 he took his own life at the age of 23."

Stealing a fucking jar of nutmeg. Kids as young as 10 years old.

How's THAT for evidence?

It couldn't be how every time I go into a Best Buy it is a horrible experience. It couldn't be how any time you ask one of the minimum wage sales people a question about a product, the answer is, "I don't know, but would you like an extended warranty?" It couldn't be that to make up for the loss leaders they price other things through the roof. Just Google "Why best buy deserves to fail" and you will see I am not alone. My two favourites are http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/02/why-best-buy-is-going-out-of-business-gradually/ and http://www.jrdeputyaccountant.com/2012/02/why-best-buy-deserves-to-die-horrible.html personally.

Forbes had a really good article explaining why this was inevitable a few months ago. The author was absolutely dead right about his central point contrasting best buy and amazon.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/02/why-best-buy-is-going-out-of-business-gradually/

He makes the point that it isn't about money, it's about the customer experience and he is absolutely right. Amazon goes to extremes to make the customer have a better experience. Best Buy goes to extremes to make the customer more profitable. Best Buy needs to drop their customer as the enemy mentality and learned to embrace the customer instead of alienating them on a routine basis.

"...its just that compared to all other options, the government is the best option"

You might want to rethink this.

http://www.businessinsider.com/oecd-better-life-index-2011-5#1-australia-11
http://www.forbes.com/2011/01/19/norway-denmark-finland-business-washington-world-happiest-countries_slide_11.html
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mef45ejmi/the-worlds-happiest-and-saddest-countries-2/#content

"...its just that compared to all other options, the government is the best option"

You might want to rethink this.

http://www.businessinsider.com/oecd-better-life-index-2011-5#1-australia-11
http://www.forbes.com/2011/01/19/norway-denmark-finland-business-washington-world-happiest-countries_slide_11.html
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mef45ejmi/the-worlds-happiest-and-saddest-countries-2/#content

They may be cutting off federal highway funding... it's a good thing the TSA is funded separately, otherwise who would randomly patrol our highways?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/29/the-tsa-is-coming-to-a-highway-near-you/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/south-carolina-teacher-suspended-for-reading-students-enders-game-will-not-face-criminal-charges/

In short, a parent's overreaction caused the school's overreaction. The teacher will get a "slap on the wrist" for including materials without following proper procedure. There will be no criminal charges.

Oh, and the reading of internet stories about prostitutes was a complete fabrication.

I'm not looking to replace my entire library of DVD with Blu Ray, since I have literally hundreds of DVDs. But some movies which I really like I've re-invested in them because seeing them in full HD is worth it if I can find the disk on sale.

Doesn't matter, lowering the price is a stop-gap to what's inevitable. The consumers will get what they want whether the movie industry likes it or not.

Music industry fought mp3, suing everyone, until Apple came in and cleaned their clock. Now instead of $15 CDs we buy songs for $1 and the music industry does whatever Apple says because Apple sells more music than Walmart. Had the music industry stopped suing their customers and start selling to their customers they would be the ones with $100 billion instead of Apple.

Fast forward, and the movie industry is on the exact same path of destruction as the music industry. Doesn't anyone learn? Look, you can try and sell blu-ray discs for $20+ a pop, but that's just going to drive more people to streaming. Give us $5 BD and start a universal streaming service and make money again or someone else will and they'll take your money. It's your choice, but in the end we will have a streaming movie service and we won't be paying $20+ for discs just like no one buys $15 CDs anymore.

Resistance is futile. We are your consumers.

Spook BackDoors In Cisco Routers
- Older news, but still relevant!!
Please save this story and repost it everywhere
Especially in Security Discussion Forum Sites
- You should use OpenBSD or a hardened Linux distro
For a router, NOT these blackboxes offered with
proprietary hardware & firmware!

http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/03/hackers-networking-equipment-technology-security-cisco.html

"Special Report
Cisco's Backdoor For Hackers
Andy Greenberg, 02.03.10, 01:45 PM EST
The methods networking companies use to let the Feds watch suspects also expose the rest of us.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Activists have long grumbled about the privacy implications of the legal "backdoors" that networking companies like Cisco build into their equipment--functions that let law enforcement quietly track the Internet activities of criminal suspects. Now an IBM researcher has revealed a more serious problem with those backdoors: They don't have particularly strong locks, and consumers are at risk.

In a presentation at the Black Hat security conference Wednesday, IBM ( IBM - news - people ) Internet Security Systems researcher Tom Cross unveiled research on how easily the "lawful intercept" function in Cisco's ( CSCO - news - people ) IOS operating system can be exploited by cybercriminals or cyberspies to pull data out of the routers belonging to an Internet service provider (ISP) and watch innocent victims' online behavior.

But the result, Cross says, is that any credentialed employee can implement the intercept to watch users, and the ISP has no method of tracking those privacy violations. "An insider who knows the password can use it without an audit trail and send the data to anywhere on the Internet," Cross says.

Cross told Cisco about his findings in December 2008, but with the exception of the patch Cisco released following the revelation of its router bug in 2008, the security flaws he discussed haven't been fixed. In an interview following Cross' talk, Cisco spokeswoman Jennifer Greeson said that the company is "confident in its framework." "We recognize that security is complicated," she said. "We're looking at [Cross'] findings and we'll take them into account."

Cisco isn't actually the primary target of Cross' critique. He points out that all networking companies are legally required to build lawful intercepts into their equipment.

Special Report
Cisco's Backdoor For Hackers
Andy Greenberg, 02.03.10, 01:45 PM EST
The methods networking companies use to let the Feds watch suspects also expose the rest of us.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Cisco, in fact, is the only networking company that follows the recommendations of the Internet Engineering Task Force standards body and makes its lawful intercept architecture public, exposing it to peer review and security scrutiny. The other companies keep theirs in the dark, and they likely suffer from the same security flaws or worse. "Cisco did the right thing by publishing this," says Cross. "Although I found some weaknesses, at least we know what they are and how to mitigate them."

The exploitation of lawful intercept is more than theoretical. Security and privacy guru Bruce Schneier wrote last month that the Google ( GOOG - news - people ) hackings in China were enabled by Google's procedures for sharing information with U.S. law enforcement officials. And in 2004 and 2005, a group of hackers used intercept vulnerabilities in Ericsson ( ERIC - news - people ) network switches to spy on a wide range of political targets including the cellphone of Greece's prime minister.

All of that, argues IBM's Cross, means that Internet-related companies need to be more transparent about their lawful intercept procedures or risk exposing all of their users. "There are a lot of other technology companies out there that haven't published their architecture

Don't make this about conservatism or Christianity.

Why not, where do you think this is coming from? Read this:

The Daily Caller flags a little-discussed position paper on Rick Santorum's campaign websiteâ"his pledge to aggressively prosecute those who produce and distribute pornography. Santorum avers that "America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography." He pledges to use the resources of the Department of Justice to fight that "pandemic," by bringing obscenity prosecutions against pornographers... His statement references going after pornography that is distributed not just on the Internet, but also "on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV."

Mind you, I have nothing against abstaining from pornography or preaching against it, but this is something else. And don't say Santorum speaks only for himself, the point here is how many votes he is getting.

Most profitable company
Record iPad sales.
Record iPhone sales.

Apple takes 52% of all smartphone profits
Apple takes 66% of all smartphone profits
Apple takes 75% of all smartphone profits

How long before they are at 100%?

LG Posts net loss
Motorola Mobility net loss
Sony Ericsson net loss

What do you think will happen to android market share when every company stops making them because they went out of business?

No doubt. If there were any genuine psychics to be found in the world, here's where I'd start looking:

http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

I still wouldn't bet on it though. And, you'll note, not a single declared psychic is anywhere near this list.

Changed like in previous election? Jumping from the frying pan to the fire? The bad trends on Bush administration continued and improved under Obama, from the other party. Checked how similar are the backers of both parties candidates? You are electing the same boss, just with a different public face.

And if well you can argue that Iran people could deserve the government they elected, what about the rest of the world regarding the government US elected? Because a lot of their latest laws are meant more for the rest of the world than for US (heck, the NDAA enables to kill or kidnap kidnap and send to guantanamo or similars those that put in danger "national security" with not even a trial, like the childrens tortured there for years, and the most that Obama did was a statement regarding rights of some us citizens). And a lot other of the other countries are straight pushes from US (i.e. Sinde law in Spain)

...Not to mention dealing with the enraged fanboids that raise hell about bugs in the app they pirated to begin with...

Get real, those are the best testers you never paid. On the other hand, if you regard all your most avid fans as thieves I guess you can stop worrying about development issues because you will not be in business long.

By the way, while you are bleating on about how hard Android development is, perhaps you can explain why Android apps crash less than Apple apps

Wow, I wonder why Apple astroturfing shills hate the idea that Android apps crash less than Apple apps?

Using humans as high-tech signboards makes perfect sense to those who prize wealth above all else. But why stop there? Let's chain them to garbage cans and charge pedestrians a dime apiece to throw away their hamburger wrappers. Or, better still, have an auction for the rights to run and maintain the concrete under sidewalk.

Wifi should cost the same as a library card. But Verizon pay its CEO $37.5 million a year to make sure that it doesn't.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-compensation-11_Ivan-G-Seidenberg_NBWH.html

.

...Not to mention dealing with the enraged fanboids that raise hell about bugs in the app they pirated to begin with...

Get real, those are the best testers you never paid. On the other hand, if you regard all your most avid fans as thieves I guess you can stop worrying about development issues because you will not be in business long.

By the way, while you are bleating on about how hard Android development is, perhaps you can explain why Android apps crash less than Apple apps