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The PRC is not quite to the stage where the concept 'rule of law' has supplanted 'rule of men', and PATRIOT Act-related BS that the likes of AT&T get into in the US is par for the course. Sina is listed on NASDAQ, but home plate and most of their action is back in Shanghai, as are the major shareholders. http://finapps.forbes.com/finapps/jsp/finance/compinfo/insider/InsiderRoster.jsp?tkr=SINA

I think you picked up an an article that was subsequently corrected:

http://blogs.forbes.com/energysource/2010/04/07/exxon-says-it-does-pay-u-s-income-taxes/

Oh and by the way, they employed over 100,000 people that paid taxes as well.

You might also want to look at this about GE:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/did-ge-really-pay-no-us-taxes-in-2010/73178/

They had huge losses in the GE Capitol division and the losses washed out their profits of the other divisions. What is so hard to understand about this?

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/28/hackers-iphone-apple-technology-security-hackers.html

My point remains however. This isn't news. This is a non-google sanctioned market and they're responsible for what they post. Not google. Not android.

I'd much rather carefully pick my apps....and actually be able to carefully pick my apps, instead of being limited to only doing a small subset of the features my device would otherwise be capable of.

As you said, people in glass houses....

Fitbit blocked it; they've forced all the profiles to private then requested the search engines to do a fast rescan of their site.

Nothing to see, move along.

You are absolutely correct, at least according to a PhD in Economics who wrote for the Wall Street Journal
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/18/china-growth-debt-currency-yuan-climate-markets-economy-myths.html

How about Jobs deliberately misquoting Samsung even after Samsung had publicly corrected it? http://blogs.forbes.com/elizabethwoyke/2011/03/02/oops-steve-jobs-misquotes-samsung-at-ipad-2-event/ How about Jobs laughing at their competitors and calling them copy cats? http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/steve-jobs-slams-android-samsung-and-ipad-2-rivals-as-copycats-50003016/ AND then going ahead and blatantly copying Android notification system. Yep, year of the copy cat it is. Except this time it's Apple doing the copying.

"Microsoft's ethical vacuity in this area is no surprise. A year and a half ago, in "Microsoft's Ballmer to China: Forget Google -- If You Want Censorship, Come to Bing!" link

"The U.S. is the most extreme when it comes to free speech .. If the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice, we’ll take that piece of information out of the Bing search engine" link

Didn't stop them from losing tens of billions of dollars in the financial meltdown, but GE is a big fan of Forced Ranking: "Jack Welch, General Electric's former CEO, is often associated with a 20-70-10 distribution: the top 20 percent is rewarded for best performance, the middle 70 percent is rated 'average' and the bottom 10 percent is coached for improvement. The 'rank-and-yank' system, also associated with Jack Welch, automatically terminates employees in the bottom category, allowing organizations to purge the worst performers."

I'd say somewhere like Iceland's Thor Data Centre is looking attractive. http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/curtains-operas-iceland-data-center I know Icelandic policy is to establish itself as a place where people can do things like publish anonymous leaks free from intrusion and censorship. This blog has some background. http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/02/01/icelands-data-haven-plan-finds-an-american-friend-internet-archives-brewster-kahle/

Are we talking normal size the world over, or "normal-sized" by American standards?

Well, it was in Cambridge and that's in the UK; I think it'd be a fair compromise if it was average-sized by UK standards.

Granted, according to Forbes the percentage of "overweight" (BMI > 25) adults in the UK is ~10% lower than in the US, but it's still very high.

I recall first browsing the web while mobile around 1998, sitting in a McDonalds in London with a Psion Series 5.

Funnily enough I was a software engineer working on EPOC32 at the time, and I was dating the head of the Web App team. She'd be first to admit that the Web browser was very primitive compared to today's mobile web browsers. And as that was well before McDonalds had WiFi, you must have been connecting via IrDA to a mobile phone at, what, 9600 baud? And paying for GSM data rates.

Now you'd have the full web, in colour, delivered at 10s or 100s of megabit rates via free wifi.

The past really isn't as rosy as you remember.

Are you slow? Concentrate on inflation of essentials, which is what all those desperate people that capitalism has saved with slavery will be wanting to buy.

Slow, no. Just fair. You want to take a particular slice of inflation that suits your argument, and compare it with a particular slice of wage rises that suit your argument. Pushing inflation up and wage rises down.
Oh, and by the way I'm not much of a fan of capitalism. But there's enough real things to attack without accepting people like you distorting the facts.

You're the one touting the rise.

Google is your friend. (Back in 1998 not so much. Google hadn't hit he big time, and most search engines were being gamed by metadata spammers. And there wasn't nearly so much financial data and news published on the web anyway.)

http://blogs.forbes.com/russellflannery/2011/03/18/china-faces-years-of-double-digit-wage-increases-currency-appreciation/
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/06/chinas_wage_inf.html

Hell the Federal Reserve is printing money so fast that the US dollar is going to go flat almost as fast..

Disputed, to say the least:

The Myth That The Fed Is Printing Money

In fact, I wonder if there is any tie from that guy back to L-Mart? These days L-Mart is working hard on hit jobs on SpaceX. They have done loads of lobbying jobs on SpaceX, trying to prevent them from even getting a CHANCE at a job, and now has started an astroturfing 'journalists' similar to MS's use of Rob Enderle against Linux and Android. Sadly, it means that SpaceX has had to waste time and money fighting not just Valador, but L-Mart's lobbyists and hitmen.

There are now many companies that are fighting against all that Musk attempts to do. He really is shaking up the Global industries as he decides to go into them.

In fact, I wonder if there is any tie from that guy back to L-Mart? These days L-Mart is working hard on hit jobs on SpaceX. They have done loads of lobbying jobs on SpaceX, trying to prevent them from even getting a CHANCE at a job, and now has started an astroturfing 'journalists' similar to MS's use of Rob Enderle against Linux and Android. Sadly, it means that SpaceX has had to waste time and money fighting not just Valador, but L-Mart's lobbyists and hitmen.

There are now many companies that are fighting against all that Musk attempts to do. He really is shaking up the Global industries as he decides to go into them.

In fact, I wonder if there is any tie from that guy back to L-Mart? These days L-Mart is working hard on hit jobs on SpaceX. They have done loads of lobbying jobs on SpaceX, trying to prevent them from even getting a CHANCE at a job, and now has started an astroturfing 'journalists' similar to MS's use of Rob Enderle against Linux and Android. Sadly, it means that SpaceX has had to waste time and money fighting not just Valador, but L-Mart's lobbyists and hitmen.

There are now many companies that are fighting against all that Musk attempts to do. He really is shaking up the Global industries as he decides to go into them.

This is a cleverly concealed tax for people who are bad at math.

According to the Feds, online gambling is the crème de la crème of money laundering methods. Does this law mean that the US government is prepared to tolerate money laundering so long as they get a cut?

Companies that did a 360 on their products and did OK:
Motorola

1. I think you meant 180
2. Motorola is far from doing "okay"

http://www.forbes.com/2011/04/29/mobile-earnings-after-the-bell-motorola-mobility-holdings-research-in-motion-marketnewsvideo.html

Indeed. Call me when we have a similar facility for people on this list.

What you said was:

When graduates can look forward to $250k/year salaries instead of $100/year salaries

Graduates are considered entry level people and get entry level jobs, especially those who have spent the last 10 years going to school full time to earn a PhD and have no real world experience.

Doctors go through what is basically a period of apprenticeship during which someone else checks off on all their work. This gives them experience before they are allowed to practice on their own

Lawyers often start off making modest salaries but their salaries increase rapidly with success. The successful lawyers will work for, under, and with more successful lawyers to get experience. Lawyers without experience are often the cheapest because they are inexperienced and have no track record.

Financial advisers are regulated by the SEC and "requires most advisers to provide clients and prospective clients with information about the adviser's business practices and educational and business background". Maybe you should read up on how one becomes a financial adviser and how much they make starting out.

One of the central points made by the research professor in his analysis was not all or none on austerity measures - but that the taxpayers were very correct in not agreeing to foot the total losses of the private banking sector - to the extent that Iceland would never be able to repay the private sector losses+interest, and so avoid entering national level "debt slavery" that they can never escape from. Besides the overwhelming evidence presented to support his analysis (including the "Brady bonds that resolved Latin American and Third World debts in the 1980s" and the resulting social and unfortunate economic impact those "austerity" measures have had on the region) - this particular professor of economics is not alone in his analysis. Increasingly economists who are worth their salt and not mere shills for the financial industry (a short list) are coming the the same or similar conclusions - including a nobel prize in economics winner or two.

When I discuss this kind of analysis with some well educated Economist colleagues of mine, the knee-jerk reaction appears to be similar to "rolfwind" above "full of shit" - however once we begin to dig into the issue a little it becomes apparent that the intellectual dishonesty/deception (as discussed in the first linked article) has worked way to persuade people who really should know better and be capable of much better critical thinking about this most important issue that affects us all.

Iceland has set a shining example to the rest of the world on how NOT to be subjected to never-ending corporate control. An example that other countries citizens are fighting in the streets (literally) to try and follow.

Sort of a reverse miracle.
I'm guessing THAT is the case since you are able to see that video, and yet you are blind to what is happening there.

Zimbabwe is the case of a catastrophic failure of government AND the economic system that has no access to a strong economic system (no foreign currency available to its citizens), no infrastructure to speak of, basically 0 accumulated personal wealth owned by its citizens - BUT with rather easy access to exploitable natural resources.
Like gold and people.

They are trading gold for bread cause that is the only valuable thing they can get their hands on - and there are no readily available banks or exchange offices for them to get their hands on dollars or Euros.
And the price is "what the market can bear" - i.e. or what one man can dig up in a day. Wanna know why?

Because their economic system got replaced by an exploitation system.
It's not even a barter system. Gold traders are just using them as basically free workforce in order to get to the natural resources of the land which are basically no longer under anyone's care.
You know what would happen if they were able to dig up gold for two breads? Price of the bread would go up.
They are simply slave labor, only without any visible chains or any particular "master" to claim them as his property.

THAT is the image of the "golden standard". Sifting earth the whole day long in order to buy a loaf of bread.
Cause gold ain't worth squat if you can't trade it to a fair trader for a fair price.

And I'm making a guess here, but I assume that you are not one of those people I mentioned in the post above - the ones who've actually seen an economic system collapse.
Cause I am one of those people. Seen it, lived it, made it to the other side.
Bosnia. '92, winter of '93 in particular, '94- '95 it was already looking up as trade and aid roads opened up.

First your money becomes worthless, but most people are not aware of it yet.
You can still buy locally produced food - like milk and other perishable items that must be sold anyway.
If you are living in an urban setting you might also get some stamps which you have to have along with your money in order to buy that milk.
That's if your local government has some level of social responsibility instead of just letting the "invisible hand of the market" fix everything.
Meanwhile, those with money, who are aware where things are going are bringing out bags full of old money and buying up foreign currency.

Pretty soon though, everyone catches on to the fact that your old money is worthless for anything with actual value - like clothing, home appliances, spare parts, luxury items, high-calorie food, medicines...
You must have strong currency to buy those. Like Dollars or Deutsche Marks - later being the preferred foreign currency even before the war.
But hold on... There can't be enough foreign currency going around, right? What do you use for change and stuff?
Simple. Take the biggest banknote you got in the bank vaults (the only one with any value left in it), take a large rubber stamp - and turn the former currency into scrip with new value, adjusted according to the current value of foreign currency.
You could print your own new currency too, but that makes sense only once trade routes between cities and with the "outside" are functional again.
Until then, scrip will do fine - and it's easily exchangeable for old "non-scripped" money.

Sure, you can sell your jewelery and buy things, but guess what? Price of gold goes down the drain.
Hear those gold traders in that video of yours asking for 0.1 gram of gold for a tin of grain? HA!

You could get a whole gold wedding ring for that much corn in '93.
Plus a "One can't eat gold. THIS... corn... is what one lives from".
That piece of wisdom from a peasant with maybe 4 years of elementary education but with plent

Actually, yeah. The original complaint was that she said that Paul Revere warned the British, which was fact. Here are some links:
http://politicalhumor.about.com/b/2011/06/03/sarah-palin-paul-revere-gaffe.htm

As any elementary school student can probably tell you, Paul Revere was not attempting to warn the British when he rode around crying, "The British are coming." Nor was he ringing bells and trying to protect gun rights.

Apparently Palin learned nothing at any of the five colleges she attended.

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/06/03/sarah-palin-paul-revere-warned-the-british/

This certainly gives us an entirely new point of view to consider when examining our nation’s founding.

While I had been led to believe that Revere’s historic ride was actually for the purpose of warning our forefathers that the British were coming, it turns out that his midnight ride, complete with ringing bells and warning shots, was really all about letting the English know that we were armed.

http://www.huliq.com/3257/sarah-palin-paul-reveres-midnight-ride-warned-brits

Former vice-presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin has never been accused of being a brain surgeon, but her latest gaffe is another cautionary example of why she is, many say, unqualified to be a Presidential candidate: Paul Revere's ride was not to warn U.S. Revolutionary War patriots, but instead to warn the British.

I'm faily libertarian yet even I can see they've got you hook line and sinker.

A lot of "charities" are barely worthy of the name and are nothing more than PR firms for their main donor.

http://blogs.forbes.com/erikkain/2011/04/06/non-profit-pays-bristol-palin-262500-donates-only-35000-to-charity/

In reality the figures for what the rich donate are massively overinflated.
Run a software company? well grant liscences to all your software to the charity and call it a "donation" at the retail price.
give some unused office space to your "charity" then call not collecting rent a "donation" (at an insane rental rate of course).
etc
etc
etc
Hell people even claim that america sends far more private aid overseas than it ever really does then try to paint it as americas wealthy donating a lot while in reality they massively distort and inflate the figures by counting money sent home by poor imigrant workers to their families which accounts for the lions share.

taxing people even if they don't particularly want to be taxed is how just about all governments everywhere do it and it's not theft.
Yes most people want someone else to pay for everything.

Personally I'm perfectly happy to pay my taxes as long as I get valuable services in return.
Which I do.
I get (good ,ie non american)healthcare, transport, protection and a fairly stable environment in which to work or run a buisness.

The real question is "Does the D-Wave 'quantum computer' do anything useful at all?"

See Scott Aaronson's opinions on the topic: http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-prof-scott-aaronson-on-d-waves-quantum-computer/

Aaronson is a brilliant quantum algorithm complexity professor for MIT. You can read his blog at http://www.scottaaronson.com/

Doctors on average lose about 10% of the money they COLLECT to pay for malpractice. That can range anywhere from $20,000 up to $200,000 per year .

Most doctors also work about 70 hours a week too, So if they cut their hours back to what a regular person works, then the cost would be about 20% of their patients bill.

Your statement logically makes no sense, comparing apple to oranges, or doctors costs to all spending. You mistakenly assume that total spending all goes back to the MD. There are many other costs included in spending, such as paying for the nurse, lab fees, hospital fees, medicine, therapy - most of which does NOT go to the doctor.

Defensive medicine - approximately 35% of all x-rays are ordered for defensive purposes.
http://blogs.forbes.com/aroy/2011/02/25/penna-study-35-of-all-health-imaging-costs-are-driven-by-malpractice-litigation/

I don't think you know what you're talking about, or have logically made a grievous mistake.

http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffmcmahon/2011/04/22/safer-nuclear-reactors-impeded-by-marketplace-expert-says/

“There is a tremendous incentive to develop new reactors that have more inherent, intrinsic safety features, and we’ve been doing this for some time at ANR and at other research organizations,” said Hussein Khalil, director of Argonne’s Nuclear Energy Division.

“They’ve been developed to a fairly high degree of technical maturity, but none of them have been successfully commercialized yet because it appears they can’t yet compete on an economic basis with the existing technology.”

So we know how to build safer plants, but the nuclear industry can't afford or refuses to make the investment in protecting the public.

The other part of the economic equation is insurance. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h6m6Z-A7ZI8TAPBRy35Dlp_z8oiA?docId=6274d45186a24d978d43b1dff293cea4

The bottom line is that it's a gamble: Governments are hoping to dodge a one-time disaster while they accumulate small gains over the long-term. Yet in financial terms, nuclear incidents can be so devastating that the cost of full insurance would be so high as to make nuclear energy more expensive than fossil fuels.

One estimate by a German think tank shows that coverage for every euro1 trillion ($1.5 trillion) in estimated damages would theoretically cost annual insurance of euro47 billion ($68.5 billion).

In Switzerland, the obligatory insurance for nuclear plants is being raised from 1 to 1.8 billion Swiss francs ($2 billion), but a government agency estimates that a Chernobyl-style disaster might cost more than 4 trillion francs — about eight times the country's annual economic output.

"Capping the insurance was a clear decision to provide a non-negligible subsidy to the technology," said Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister and longtime head of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), said.

So the lack of meaningful insurance shifts the economic risk on to the public and is effectively a huge direct subsidy for the nuclear power industry. It seems very likely that if the same level of support were put into renewable energy that it would be very competitive with fossil fuel. As well as being much less risky. But guess who has the bigger lobby and more entrenched businesses?

And BTW this is not new. MS did something similar with Corel more than a decade ago:
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/microsoft-buys-into-corel-2000103/
http://www.forbes.com/2000/10/03/1003corel.html
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/news2/details-of-corel-microsoft-deal-revealed

You're wrong : "In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers." [ http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/01/20/danger-america-is-losing-its-edge-in-innovation/comment-page-2/ ]

Osama bin Laden's share of this fortune is estimated at almost $300 million.

from Forbes. Yeah, $300 million is virtually chump change. Not much you can do with that.

forget about it hurting NASA, what does "also extends to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy" mean for everything else under the executive branch? or is it just one particular executive branch office?

a bit of googling:
from Forbes.com:
"Although the ban will expire at the end of the current fiscal year in October, Wolf will seek to make the prohibition on any scientific collaboration between U.S. research agencies and China permanent.... the Obama Administration has taken the position that the ban does not apply to any U.S. scientific interactions with China conducted as part of foreign policy"

So how do I parse these "liberal guys" from CATO, published in Forbes, saying that oil and gas firms get special tax breaks?

"Another significant tax break allows companies to accelerate the deductions of the costs of labor and various other inputs associated with drilling oil or gas wells. Now, there's nothing wrong with deducting the cost of doing business from one's tax bill. In other industries these expenses would be capitalized and deducted over time as income is earned. But in the oil and gas sector, the tax code allows oil and gas firms to deduct 70% of these expenses in the very first year of a well's operation and the remainder over the next five years."

Or this guy over at The Volokh Conspiracy claiming that:

"The best example is the percentage depletion allowance which, as applied in some cases, enables oil companies greater depreciation than the value of the initial investment."

Because, I wouldn't want to look dumb and uneducated, thereby hurting my claim.

sorry... you aren't on the list

They said the same about Motorola. They are still around.

http://www.forbes.com/2011/04/29/mobile-earnings-after-the-bell-motorola-mobility-holdings-research-in-motion-marketnewsvideo.html

Motorola Mobility posted first-quarter results after the close of trading late Thursday, with a net loss of $81 million, or 27 cents per share, compared to a wider loss of $212 million, or 72 cents per share, last year.

http://www.revolutionaryviews.com/chris/Eclectablog/JoeHarrisOrders.pdf
http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/04/16/gov-scott-walker-reportedly-planning-financial-martial-law-in-wisconsin/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/15/967374/-UPDATEDx2And-so-it-begins-Emergency-Financial-Mgr-fires-entire-government-of-Benton-Harbor,-MI

When you post [Citation needed], do you actually bother to look? Or is it just a knee-jerk reaction to something you don't agree with?

You claim to own Apple stock, and have no intention of selling it any time soon. Why not?

Because Apple is still profitable, and the stock http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=>price is still rising. See that hole back there in 07? That's where I bought. It can bobble up and down daily and still not hurt me.

Lots of analysts think this is the Time to Buy Apple.

You seem to be of the opinion that just because Apple will not be in first place in handset sales that the company isn't a good investment. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Apple has made a career out of being in second or third or fourth place. They thrive on it.

They will sell every tablet and every iphone they make. They won't be the sales leader. They don't have to be. They are profitable.

If I bake a cake and package it in a golden, diamond encrusted box designed by some guy that changed his first and last name into a single, unpronouncable word, the cake hasn't increased in value at all. Sure, it looks much nicer with all the shiny bits, but it can't compensate for the fact that I can't bake a decent cake.

You obviously are unfamiliar with how luxury items actually perform in the real world.

http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/28/luxury-cars-breakdowns_cx_dl_0731reliable.html

It's not the same kind of information at all. The android file (only available if you have root) is a temporary cache. That is totally difference then the Apple file which holds the data about your location since you bought the phone.

The fact that he considers them the same, and the rest of his article, make it clear that he is merely some obscure, inaccurate, apologist.

With this story being reported all over the Internet, by media and blogs both respectable and ridiculous, why did /. choose to use this ridiculous one. /. seems to have turned into a sort-of FOX news of tech discussion - without even a pretense of objectivity.

Speaking of which, here's one of my favorites pieces so far. A Forces columnist asks whether this discovery (of the Apple location history file) is cool or creepy and concludes that it is cool. She decides that it is actually a great feature and pushes Google to get to it and see if they can come up with a similar feature:
http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2011/04/20/cool-or-creepy-your-iphone-and-ipad-are-keeping-track-of-everywhere-you-go-and-you-can-see-it/

So maybe the blog post that /. choose for this whole saga is not actually the worst piece written on the topic.

http://blogs.forbes.com/davidewalt/2011/04/06/the-forbes-fictional-15/

Check the user comments from peterm below the article.

DC 1rst place for online gambling! April 12th

This seems to be a many pronged approach. 1) The government loves to interfere with your life to give you the idea that you're being controlled, not them.
2) The government is going to make online gambling taxable, and wants no competition.
3) The government will seize all the cashouts for the next few months like they did in 2009 for extra money.

(The following is a joke, don't get upset), Obama must be tired of making spending cuts so he needs to take poker player's money :P

From what I can tell the law in 2009 said,"You can't deposit money", but I had my money on the site before 2009, I'm a winning poker player and as such I never have to deposit. I turned $1.20 into $1,300. If the US was smart, they'd let profitable poker players still play because we can bring in more money and buy more goods which helps the state's sales taxes.

Forbes profiles Gabe a few months ago. He's apparently a billionaire now. I believe he's the first game developer to achieve that level of income.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe-newell-videogames-valve-online-mayhem.html

His work with Apple(which obviously gooses the value of his stock holdings; but for which he doesn't get paid nearly what he easy could demand)

Yeah, about that famous "$1" salary that Jobs gets from Apple (a headliner news item he shares with other tech moguls). The purpose of drawing a low salary is to avoid paying the highest rate of 35% income tax and instead pay 15% capital gains on stock grants and qualified dividends. Steve Jobs is the 34th richest person in the U.S. and tied for 110th in the world with an estimated net worth at $5.5 billion (a respectable chunk of which comes from a 10 million stock grant from Apple in 2003 worth $3,350,600,000 today).

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/18/fictional-15-richest-characters-oped-fictional1508_cx_mn_de_1218fict15_land.html has the previous years.

I wanna see the Model T vs 2011 Kia Rio offroad challenge!!

How about the Model T vs 2003 Hummer offiroad challenge?

Exactly where do you get your information about the tea party movement? Because just about everything you say is wrong.

First, Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Second, the single greatest expansion of federal government spending has been entitlements - namely, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Social spending eclipsed military spending in 1971 and has been skyrocketing since, but just stick to your talking point (oh, I know, now you'll fall back on "discretionary spending" while ignoring that Congress still has to approve social spending and can change it any time they wish). Oh, and nevermind all of the state and local social spending on to of that, ignoring that state military budgets are essentially nonexistant so military spending doesn't increase with it.

Third, you can take 100% of the WEALTH of the Forbes 400, at $1.54 trillion, and pay off last year's deficit spending. The tea party isn't just about cutting taxes, in fact, it's more about cutting spending than it is cutting taxes. Our spending levels are completely unsustainable and going into the future, we've got annual trillion dollar deficits are far as the eye can see before you even take into account the ENRON level fraud of the cost estimates of ObamaCare.

As for your Jefferson quote, most of the tea partiers would love an end to the Fed. It's the big government types that like it since it allows them to keep spending without actually being accountable for what they're doing, just like the decision to raid the Social Security Trust Fund in 1967 because the costs of the Great Society programs massively exceeded its estimates and Congress/LBJ wanted to pretend they didn't bankrupt us.

BULLSHIT!

the report points out that a growing volume of research publications does not necessarily mean in increase in quality

No kidding. China (and Asia South-Pacific in general) has a rampant plagiarism problem. E.g.,:

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-04-11/news/20844688_1_yuan-papers-professor

This practice has permeated many of the country's scientific journals, where it is commonplace to copy-and-paste large sections of others' work. International journals are typically able to shield this using "similarity detectors" and peer review, but the occasional hack-job still gets through occasionally.

25% of MIT grads in 2006!

But the industry had crashed by 2008

So how is that 2006 figure relevant today? What are the current figures, and where is there even a link to an article that this behavior has returned?

But wait! Apparently it was 8% in 2009 (page 6), so why omit this relevant information?

My own take : globalization has pushed pure technical work offshore, now finance is backfilling. Why don't they offshore? Because Goldman Sachs probably thinks they would have a better chance pursuing legal options here if need be, rather than 'over there', wherever that may be

Linus didn't upgrade the Linux kernel to GPLv3. If you want to know why, see here.

In the Tivo case, it was a DRM issue, and possible an issue here with Samba and Apple. If Apple wants to take their OS X software toward iOS and start locking down the computer, they're going to need to

1.) Change the definition of computer or call their computers something else, like they did successfully with the iPad not being a tablet PC or Macs not being called PCs, even though the definition of PC is simply "personal computer" (side note: why aren't business computers called BCs?)

and

2.) Lock it up so people can't tamper with it.

They can't do number 2 as most developers that choose GPLv3 specifically, do it to keep DRM away, which is what signed binaries are. Why go iOS route is understandable too. Most computer users in the US and other developed countries can't use a computer beyond the applications they use every day. Installing software is too complicated, even on Macs where it's literally drag and drop (for most apps, not all). Drivers? Don't bother. Software: Why is it soft? Those that peruse Slashdot aren't part of this crowd, but computers have always been made to fit us because we've been the consistent buyers. Now, computers are so cheap that anyone can afford them, even if they don't know how to use them. Our software will have to change to fit those people whom technology is a black art, especially since processor speeds have really stagnated in the past couple of years.

Side note. Read these post of what processors should have been now, discussed back in early 2006. It's sad that their expectations have been crushed by today's standards of PCs.

http://www.knowledgesutra.com/forums/topic/34141-cpus-with-5-ghz-clock-speeds-on-their-way/

The data is old, but according to forbes charities

American Red Cross operates at 91% efficiency.
And this site: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3277
Puts it at almost 92%.

Of course that doesn't mean they don't pay their CEO a lot. It says he makes $446k a year.