Slashdot Mirror

the percentage of Blu-Ray that is PS3 is high. I don't know how high, but it's high, dropping a bit now though.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080118-new-nlu-ray-2-0-spec-makes-ps3-the-most-future-proof-player.html

At CES, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced that 3.5 million Blu-ray players had been sold to date. Of those, 3 million were PlayStation 3s, the most future-proof Blu-ray player on the market.

As for quality, the PS3 is one of the top blu-ray players, It may not have the highest picture quality, that award usually goes to samsung in the writeups, but with all the other features BD-Live,gaming etc.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/147209/the_best_bluray_players.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9874808-7.html

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/03/blu-ray-sony-tech-personal-cx_mji_0403blu.html

http://buy.blorge.com/2008/07/15/buyers-guide-to-blu-ray-players-help-clear-up-the-confusion/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10005897-1.html

a quote:

If you've been following CNET's Blu-ray coverage, it shouldn't be shocking that standalones are struggling. The PS3 holds the top spot on our best Blu-ray players list, and every time we review a new Blu-ray player we use the PS3 as our reference. It's the best Blu-ray player we've tested so far, plus you get a high-def gaming console and a well-featured media streamer for $400. Yes, there are a few reasons why you may not want to use a PS3 as your Blu-ray player, but for the vast majority of people the PS3 is just a better value. And with standalone players at current price levels, it seems like consumers agree with us.

They're even saying forgo the dedicated video streamers like the AppleTV for PS3's and Xboxes, because you can rent and download HD content on them via PSN and XBoxLive

And even this article on six reasons NOT to use a PS3 as your blu-ray player still says it's the best one out there:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9941740-1.html

And a recent firmware update fixed some of the issues listed in that article.

And here's another thing. I'm responding to your post with Firefox 3.0.1 running on a PS3 with a Yellow Dog Linux install.

Like the PS2 Linux kit was the best $200 gaming related purchase I made all those years ago, because it increased the functionality of my PS2 even further beyond PS1 games, PS2 games and DVD's The PS3 trumps it.

And at the same time, the factory owners are moving to the inner provinces as wages demands keep increasing, thus increasing the demand for transportation.

Riot at McDonalds toy making factory

Sadly, as another poster mentioned, "rights", once lost, are restored very slowly, if ever. Likewise, taxes rarely disappear once they are put in place. Choose your poison.

I'll take higher taxes over infringement of liberties any day. Render on to Caesar what is Caesar's: money is a government creation, and while there are practical matters and while current tax schemes are rather invasive in terms of data gathering, I don't have a problem with the fundamental idea that if you want to play the game of state capitalism with the state's counters you've got to ante up.

We can get rid of taxes as soon as we can get rid of government, and we can get rid of government just as soon as the prerequisite of "universal enlightenment" is fulfilled. In the meantime, we Americans ought to stop our famous tax whining - compared to other industrialized nations we as a whole are under-taxed.

Would I rather pay an extra thirty bucks a month in taxes, versus warrantless wiretapping? Versus illegal invasions of sovreign nations? A consistent attempt to force religion into biology classes? Attempts to criminalize medical procedures, to even re-outlaw birth control? Continual anti-gay bigotry shrouded in religious language? Ruinous borrow-and-spend policies that merely shift the tax burden on to future generations? I'd pay the extra thirty bucks and be happy.

But I wouldn't have to, since the current Democratic plan is to shift taxes off of the middle class and back on to the wealthy who have benefited from years of rule by the investment class that owns the GOP, and off of the middle class. Under Obama's proposals, a family making $66,000/year would get a tax reduction of $1,042, while a family making $604,000 a year would see a tax increase of $116,000.

Compared to the great economic boom of the 1950s, the rich are far, far, far undertaxed - under that radical leftist Eisenhower, top marginal rates were over 90%. And during the go-go early 80s it was 50%. So don't even try to play that raising the top rate back to the modest 39.6% it was during the Clinton years would ruin the economy.

So, to you, stacking the Supreme Court with anti-abortion zealots

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/14/AR2005111400720.html

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/2008/05/sekulow_recalls.html

and going after porn with a vengeance by increasing Justice Department prosecutions and devoting FBI resources to porn DURING A TIME OF TERRORISM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/bushs-war-on-porn-perve_b_7704.html

and viciously pushing to remove porn's sources of funding

http://www.forbes.com/2003/05/01/cz_sl_0501porn.html

and levying huge fines on outspoken media opponents for talking about innocuous things

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0408043fcc1.html

or for showing a tit

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/01/entertainment/main626925.shtml

or using swear words

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article390108.ece

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080616/epps

isn't doing much to push the religious agenda?

How much more does it take to convince you that Bush, especially during the time he had no Congressional opposition, was actively doing things to help the religious zealots? Are you sure that YOU haven't been living on Mars the last seven years?

So on $400 an $11 markup is gouging? I want to shop where YOU shop.

I wanted to point out that those numbers are $11 billion per quarter and $400 billion per year. The correct numbers are $11.68b profit this quarter, on $138b revenue this quarter.

AND, do you want to know who's #2 in the 'record profits' field? Is it Shell, Conoco, etc? Nope, it's Walmart. Look it up.

I looked it up and you are incorrect. As of April 2008, the number two spot, sorted by profits, is indeed Royal Dutch Shell. Walmart is way down there at #19 (you'll have to count). See http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/18/biz_2000global08_The-Global-2000_Prof.html .

And you think it's decreased since then?

The article the man was referencing is here: http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/17/senate-politics-washington-biz-wash_cx_jh_1120senate.html

Furthermore, your quote of the quote:

The wealth of the incoming class will hardly raise eyebrows in the Senate, where about half of the current 100 members are also millionaires and the average net worth is $8.9 million...

Emphasis added so that the grammar is a little more obvious.

here the print one without pub http://www.forbes.com/2008/07/24/doom-iphone-morris-tech-personal-cx_cm_0725doom_print.html

Here's the actual Forbes article rather than a link to a website that links to the article.

For reference, the vast majority of digital projectors in existence are 2K. There are a few 4K ones in the wild, but the most popular tech for electronic projection (namely DLP) currently maxes out at 2K. Sony has some 4K SXRD projectors available, but very few theaters have installed them.

The IMAX company is currently still running most of their theaters on the 15-perf 70mm film systems, so you can still see the full 8K image to day if you want to. The problem is, they are planning to install DLP-based systems that will reduce the resolution to 2K x 2K (although the article doesn't mention that). Once those are installed, you will not be able to see images like we're seeing today. The resolution will be far lower.

Even if Nolan and his team go for these kinds of high resolution images again for the next movie, there might not be any place to see it that can do it justice.

Now I know someone is going to chime in and say that film is analog, so anything digital is automatically better, but ask yourself: Would you replace a high quality analog sound system with 4-bit digital sound? That's approximately what we're talking about here. If the IMAX company were planning to tile a bunch of 2K x 2K images on the screen to produce an 8K image, or maybe use some other technology to achieve the kind of resolution they have today, then it would be a different story. But they aren't.

See it now, before they take it away.

Maximum Security is expensive-- if the inmate is convicted of a nonviolent offense, is not a escape risk, and the sentence is relatively short, minimum security is reasonable. But, by escaping, Davidson has all but guaranteed that if he is ever recaptured, he will serve out as his sentence in a more secure facility.

Florence doesn't even appear on Forbes list of the best places to go to prison.

I'm not sure why prison rape is looked on as a correctional tool by so many posters here (even if it is just a film reference) Most prisoners eventually return to society, and it's better for all of us if they can be rehabilitated.

Yeah, it really is garbage

I mean, why would a greater propensity to roll, a larger passenger cage more prone to buckling, a higher, more exposed profile, and a larger mass which carries more energy (which is then transferred into the passenger and provides more challenge to the structural integrity on impact) be less safe!

(1) Switch to e-billing
(2) Change your billing address to anywhere in Portland, OR 97202
(2b) You might need to switch your area-code to 503 -- some carriers will let it slide though
(3) Get charged the lowest cell-phone taxes in the country

I saved about $4/month switching from Taxachussets to Oregon. My parents saved $7 because our town (yes, the town) levies a $2/month tax on cell phones on top of the country and state taxes. Plus, as an added bonus, you can reward a low-tax jurisdiction with more revenue while depriving a high-tax one.

http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/06/cz_sw_0606cellphone.html

http://www.forbes.com/digitalentertainment/2005/06/20/batman-movies-superheroes-cx_de_0620batman.html

http://xrl.us/batman

Being Batman
David M. Ewalt, 06.20.05, 7:28 PM ET

Dark clouds have gathered over Gotham. Crime is rampant, despair is
widespread and no one is safe. Who will rescue the metropolis from
itself, fight the forces of evil and save the good people of the city?

Why don't you do it?

Plenty of us would love to fight for truth and justice--if only we had
magic powers or mutant genes. We all love superheroes. Last weekend,
Batman Begins was the No. 1 film in the U.S., pulling in $71.1 million
over its first five days. The Batman movie franchise is also one of
the most lucrative of all time, with five movies (not counting Batman
Begins) grossing nearly $1 billion.

OK, so he also has a couple billion dollars. Batman's alter ego, Bruce
Wayne, is an old-money heir and the owner of Wayne Enterprises, a
massive international-technology conglomerate. In our Forbes Fictional
Fifteen, we estimated his net worth at $6.3 billion. If he were a real
guy, he'd be the 28th richest person in America, right behind News
Corp.'s (nyse: NWS - news - people ) Rupert Murdoch.

Wayne uses his riches and corporate connections to equip himself with
the latest and greatest in military hardware, and uses those tools to
help him fight villains like the Joker, the Riddler, and Ra's Al Ghul.

But you don't have to be a billionaire to become a caped crusader.
Using commercially available training, technology and domestic help,
the average guy could conceivably equip himself to become a real-world
superhero, provided he's got at least a couple million to spare.

What would it cost to become a real-world Dark Knight? Click here.

The Training
Cost: $30,000

You'd better be ready to defend yourself if you plan to take on all
the thugs and super-villains that call Gotham home.

In the new movie, young Bruce Wayne goes to Tibet on the mother of all
study-abroad trips and ends up learning the martial arts from a group
of vigilante ninjas called the League of Shadows. But similar training
is available to those not lucky enough to get plucked out of obscurity
by Liam Neeson.

A good place to start would be an internship at the birthplace of kung
fu, the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China. One month of training at the
prestigious Tagou school costs about $740, including a private room
and training with a personal coach. It'll take a while to get good
enough to stop the Joker's worst thugs, though, so count on spending
at least three years and about 30 grand for the trip.

The Suit
Cost: $1,585

They say the suit makes the man, and Batman's no exception. Without
his outfit, it'd just be Bruce Wayne running around out there, and
there's nothing particularly scary about a billionaire playboy in his
underpants.

Batman's suit is a modified piece of infantry armor built by the
applied sciences division of Wayne Enterprises. It's waterproof,
bulletproof, knife-proof and temperature-regulating. Paired with an
impact-resistant, graphite-composite cowl and spiked ninja-style
gauntlets, it allows Batman to protect himself against everything from
swords to machine guns. Wayne Enterprises also supplies Batman with
his cape, a specially designed nylon-derivative fabric that stiffens
when hit with an electric charge, allowing Batman to use it as a
glider. All this doesn't come cheap. In the new movie, Wayne's told
that the armor alone costs $300,000.

Real-world superhero wanna-bes will have to go with a much more
prosaic solution. We recommend a lightweight ProMAX OTV bulletproof
jacket, which will cover your ar

http://www.forbes.com/digitalentertainment/2005/06/20/batman-movies-superheroes-cx_de_0620batman.html

http://xrl.us/batman

Being Batman
David M. Ewalt, 06.20.05, 7:28 PM ET

Dark clouds have gathered over Gotham. Crime is rampant, despair is
widespread and no one is safe. Who will rescue the metropolis from
itself, fight the forces of evil and save the good people of the city?

Why don't you do it?

Plenty of us would love to fight for truth and justice--if only we had
magic powers or mutant genes. We all love superheroes. Last weekend,
Batman Begins was the No. 1 film in the U.S., pulling in $71.1 million
over its first five days. The Batman movie franchise is also one of
the most lucrative of all time, with five movies (not counting Batman
Begins) grossing nearly $1 billion.

OK, so he also has a couple billion dollars. Batman's alter ego, Bruce
Wayne, is an old-money heir and the owner of Wayne Enterprises, a
massive international-technology conglomerate. In our Forbes Fictional
Fifteen, we estimated his net worth at $6.3 billion. If he were a real
guy, he'd be the 28th richest person in America, right behind News
Corp.'s (nyse: NWS - news - people ) Rupert Murdoch.

Wayne uses his riches and corporate connections to equip himself with
the latest and greatest in military hardware, and uses those tools to
help him fight villains like the Joker, the Riddler, and Ra's Al Ghul.

But you don't have to be a billionaire to become a caped crusader.
Using commercially available training, technology and domestic help,
the average guy could conceivably equip himself to become a real-world
superhero, provided he's got at least a couple million to spare.

What would it cost to become a real-world Dark Knight? Click here.

The Training
Cost: $30,000

You'd better be ready to defend yourself if you plan to take on all
the thugs and super-villains that call Gotham home.

In the new movie, young Bruce Wayne goes to Tibet on the mother of all
study-abroad trips and ends up learning the martial arts from a group
of vigilante ninjas called the League of Shadows. But similar training
is available to those not lucky enough to get plucked out of obscurity
by Liam Neeson.

A good place to start would be an internship at the birthplace of kung
fu, the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China. One month of training at the
prestigious Tagou school costs about $740, including a private room
and training with a personal coach. It'll take a while to get good
enough to stop the Joker's worst thugs, though, so count on spending
at least three years and about 30 grand for the trip.

The Suit
Cost: $1,585

They say the suit makes the man, and Batman's no exception. Without
his outfit, it'd just be Bruce Wayne running around out there, and
there's nothing particularly scary about a billionaire playboy in his
underpants.

Batman's suit is a modified piece of infantry armor built by the
applied sciences division of Wayne Enterprises. It's waterproof,
bulletproof, knife-proof and temperature-regulating. Paired with an
impact-resistant, graphite-composite cowl and spiked ninja-style
gauntlets, it allows Batman to protect himself against everything from
swords to machine guns. Wayne Enterprises also supplies Batman with
his cape, a specially designed nylon-derivative fabric that stiffens
when hit with an electric charge, allowing Batman to use it as a
glider. All this doesn't come cheap. In the new movie, Wayne's told
that the armor alone costs $300,000.

Real-world superhero wanna-bes will have to go with a much more
prosaic solution. We recommend a lightweight ProMAX OTV bulletproof
jacket, which will cover your ar

Yeah, at least Fake Steve himself, Dan Lyons, admitted that he was conned. I don't recall reading a similar mea culpa from DiDo.

I really appreciated Lyons' article. I still think it was stupid to buy into SCO's claims in the first place: there was a little matter of an absence of evidence, and the company's excuses for not releasing clear proof of code pilfering were sadly flawed (The Linux people will just destroy the evidence by removing it!). But Lyons' admission of error made it possible for me to read Fake Steve again after he was outed, and enjoy it. Namaste, Forbes Man.

Funny. I was exchanging emails with Cuban students and internet pioneers more then 10 years ago. I assure you this connection wasn't provided by satellite internet, it was provided by Sprint, the American company. Some clever university folks even had gopher, ftp & web sites.

More info: http://www.cubatrade.org/eyeon2000g.html

It's better than the American health care system, so that would be a plus compared to going to the USA.

Then why did these guys get raided?

Look at the laundry list of charges: "money laundering, mail fraud, wire fraud, counterfeiting, and conspiracy". With the exception of counterfeiting all of these are applied to many other things the government considers crimes and really have nothing to do with local currencies. I'm not sure but I think the Liberty Dollars were made to look like US issued money, which would be counterfeiting. When asked "So are these things legal?" "Lewis Solomon, a law professor at George Washington University and author of a book about local currencies, says local currencies are legal with some stipulations, including that they have to be printed (not coined) and that local money cannot resemble dollars."

Falcon

Don't you mean average Australians?

I guess the Magic Lantern article wasn't enough for you then?

How to legally spy on your employees and Spy cover up

Major employers such as Delta Air Lines and Google have fired employees for what they put on their own blogs. Ellen Simonetti, a Delta flight attendant, says she was fired in October 2004 after she posted pictures of herself in her uniform in suggestive poses on her blog.

"Employees should know that your employer is looking over your shoulder. If they catch you, they're canning you," says Nancy Flynn, executive director of The ePolicy Institute and author of Blog Rules. "You can be fired for anything, even for blogging right at home in your jammies."

Spy software can be used at work or at home to spy on employees and is marketed as so and Boeing used it like that.

I know, it's not like there's anything particularly useful they could be discussing, so at least they'll get rid of those pesky leeches on society.

I agree with a lot of what you said up there, but I feel I must quibble with your touting Chinese efficiency of coal mining. One of the reasons they move so much rock is because labor is a seemingly disposable resource for them. Last year China had 3,786 coal mining fatalities in 2007 (down 20% link). In the US there were 66 total mining fatalities in the US (34 in Coal mining link). Otherwise, good post.

More specifically, 80% of marketers said their organizations share e-mail addresses with third parties, compared with 47% of security and privacy officers. Other examples: 65% of marketers said they would distribute a customer's cellphone number, while only 47% of privacy execs said their companies allowed the data to be shared. Forty-five percent of marketers believe their companies shared credit card data, compared with 32% of privacy officers, and 29% of marketers believe their firms distribute social security numbers, compared with 7% of privacy professionals.

Those numbers just back up what we all believed anyway, right? I mean, is this really news? Or just news with different numbers?

The CEO's spot is reserved for MBAs, not people who rose through technical merit.

The stats don't back you up. This is an older article, but it shows only 38% of fortune 500 CEOs have an MBA.

Sorry, welcome to America. The Supreme Court has ruled that campaign contributions are "Free Speech" protected by the First Amendment. Limits on individual contributions are still constitutional, but you'll still find plenty of Republicans and Libertarians who advocate no contribution limits under the guise of Free Speech, Steve Forbes for one.

Forbes rated it (Pittsburgh) in the top ten cleanest cities:

http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/16/worlds-cleanest-cities-biz-logistics-cx_rm_0416cleanest_slide_16.html?thisSpeed=30000
I hope this link works for you guys :/

Sorry to be replying myself. I made a mistake in the link above.

Correct one: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1661031_1661028_1661016,00.html

Also, here's a very different list,
http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/24/pollution-baku-oil-biz-logistics-cx_tl_0226dirtycities_slide_26.html?thisSpeed=30000
using the Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score as the ranking value.

The first five are:
- Baku, Azerbaijan
- Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Antananarivo, Madagascar
- Port au Prince, Haiti
- Mexico City, Mexico

By comparison, the average waistline in America in 2005 was 39 inches for men, 37 inches for women.

Depending on who you want to believe, it seems the Aussies have beat the US in the obesity rate:

http://www.forbes.com/markets/2008/06/20/australian-obesity-survey-markets-equity-cx_jc_0620markets06.html

How did Novell and IBM manage it on Blue Gene ..

"Linux has dominated the marketplace for high-performance computing,"

Mark Seager, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Calif

It is owned at 51% by a French company. The buyout of the remaining stock was accepted recently.

So often these posts are quite timely. The law goes open source at Forbes.com saves me the trouble. Apparently I'm not the only one that noticed this. Oddly the story is future dated for some reason.

Next up: claw that geographic information database back from ESRI....

"A process network is the network the SCADA/DCS system and it's physical controllers sit on, usually segregated from corporate LAN"

You do seem to have implimented a solution, which begs the question as to why the rest of the power industry haven't also done it. See here where their still using the Internet to relay SCADA data. They obviously don't use your methodology. Just who do you work for again?

"the vendor usually checks out stuff like windows updates, and assesses the impact in the system"

How do you checkput a service pack without installing it on a live system, when a service pack breaks something, the usual solution is ti reinstall, reinstall, reinstall. Again you do seem to have thought of a solution that would be of use to the rest of the IT industry.

"Updates are usually installed to fix/improve system operation"

My understanding is that service packs are provided by the software vendor in response to general issues, and not specifically to correct problems in a specific installation. In nix land, if there's a bug then you can directly contact the programmers and get specific solutions to your problem. I guess it's a different mind set.

Some people don't think we're in a recession *shrug* YMMV

You ALSO have to keep in mind that American oil companies have to compete with other oil companies on the world market. Unfortunately, for the American oil companies, the vast majority of the other world oil companies are nationalized and have a lock on most of their oil. The market is so restricted that a mere 7% of the total world oil production is available on the open market to compete for.

Total world production of crude oil (including lease condensate, but excluding natural gas plant liquids) in 2006 was 73.54 [million barrels per day] (preliminary). The US imports roughly 10.1 million barrels per day of crude oil.

That's right, SEVEN PERCENT. ALL the rest of it is locked up by nationalized oil companies and totalitarian governments. So the US can't even TOUCH 93% of the world's oil supply. It's just not available to buy!

So how are we buying it then? Maybe you meant extraction rights, in which case your desire to compel access to the resource rights of sovereign nations bears little difference to that of the hip-hop street thug cliché.

Now compound that with the fact that America has to import over 80% of her oil

Closer to 60%

to supply daily whims, wants and waste

Fixed that for you.

and every day the weak dollar and increased market pressure from China and other countries drives the cost for crude higher and our ability to buy lower and lower.

Well maybe we should have kept our manufacturing infrastructure at home then, no?

Oh yeah, and add to all that the fact that the vast majority of American oil reserves are locked up in areas where drilling is BANNED (ANWR, both East and West coasts, the west coast of Florida, and the High Plains fields.), AND the fact that we haven't built a new refinery in America in nearly 30 years (if not longer)

There's still plenty of headroom on refinery capacity. You do raise an interesting question, though: if people in Florida are willing to pay extra for their gasoline to forgo the environmental degradation, risk of catastrophe, and (the only one you're likely to understand) decline in property values, well, isn't that a rational economic choice?

and you will BEGIN to get a picture of the real reasons why gas costs are currently so high, and why they are historically so volatile.

Historically volatile? Except for a period around 1980, gasoline prices have remained relatively stable. Given a good such as gasoline with low demand elasticity (we can call this a "lifestyle choice" if you like), volatility in price is mainly due to either speculation or tight supply. I imagine the powers that be are hoping that talking up the former will draw attention away from the latter.

I should highlight the difference between reserves and flows. ANWR at its peak (about 15-20 years in the future) would contribute about 10% at best of today's daily consumption of crude oil. But hey, you just go ahead and keep blaming those Eeeevil Big Oil Execs and their OBSCENE 4% profits! Ignorance like yours must be fucking bliss. Over the last 12 months, BP plc boasted a 20.4% gross profit margin. ExxonMobil's gross profit margin was 40.1%. It's worth noting that ExxonMobil is chiefly a refiner and does little R&D relative to producers like Shell.

With all due respect, if you're actually interested in arguing a position, you may wish to refer to primary or at least reputable sources of information and get your facts straight rather than taking as gos

You ALSO have to keep in mind that American oil companies have to compete with other oil companies on the world market. Unfortunately, for the American oil companies, the vast majority of the other world oil companies are nationalized and have a lock on most of their oil. The market is so restricted that a mere 7% of the total world oil production is available on the open market to compete for.

Total world production of crude oil (including lease condensate, but excluding natural gas plant liquids) in 2006 was 73.54 [million barrels per day] (preliminary). The US imports roughly 10.1 million barrels per day of crude oil.

That's right, SEVEN PERCENT. ALL the rest of it is locked up by nationalized oil companies and totalitarian governments. So the US can't even TOUCH 93% of the world's oil supply. It's just not available to buy!

So how are we buying it then? Maybe you meant extraction rights, in which case your desire to compel access to the resource rights of sovereign nations bears little difference to that of the hip-hop street thug cliché.

Now compound that with the fact that America has to import over 80% of her oil

Closer to 60%

to supply daily whims, wants and waste

Fixed that for you.

and every day the weak dollar and increased market pressure from China and other countries drives the cost for crude higher and our ability to buy lower and lower.

Well maybe we should have kept our manufacturing infrastructure at home then, no?

Oh yeah, and add to all that the fact that the vast majority of American oil reserves are locked up in areas where drilling is BANNED (ANWR, both East and West coasts, the west coast of Florida, and the High Plains fields.), AND the fact that we haven't built a new refinery in America in nearly 30 years (if not longer)

There's still plenty of headroom on refinery capacity. You do raise an interesting question, though: if people in Florida are willing to pay extra for their gasoline to forgo the environmental degradation, risk of catastrophe, and (the only one you're likely to understand) decline in property values, well, isn't that a rational economic choice?

and you will BEGIN to get a picture of the real reasons why gas costs are currently so high, and why they are historically so volatile.

Historically volatile? Except for a period around 1980, gasoline prices have remained relatively stable. Given a good such as gasoline with low demand elasticity (we can call this a "lifestyle choice" if you like), volatility in price is mainly due to either speculation or tight supply. I imagine the powers that be are hoping that talking up the former will draw attention away from the latter.

I should highlight the difference between reserves and flows. ANWR at its peak (about 15-20 years in the future) would contribute about 10% at best of today's daily consumption of crude oil. But hey, you just go ahead and keep blaming those Eeeevil Big Oil Execs and their OBSCENE 4% profits! Ignorance like yours must be fucking bliss. Over the last 12 months, BP plc boasted a 20.4% gross profit margin. ExxonMobil's gross profit margin was 40.1%. It's worth noting that ExxonMobil is chiefly a refiner and does little R&D relative to producers like Shell.

With all due respect, if you're actually interested in arguing a position, you may wish to refer to primary or at least reputable sources of information and get your facts straight rather than taking as gos

I really wish people would quit saying that we have an economy that needs fixing. Really, we've just been through a major mortgage crisis, and the most anyone can say the economy is going sideways. I'd say that bodes pretty damn good for our economy, just wait a few more months until the banks get their crap together and the economy will be humming along again. Also here's a few links just to prove a point:

U.S. manufacturing activity rose unexpectedly in May...
http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/06/02/afx5070060.html

Gross domestic product expanded at an annual pace of 0.9 percent from January through March, up from the 0.6 percent projected last month...
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aERpSgHrPI_Y&refer=home

What do you call a recession where the economy keeps going up and up, even if a bit sluggishly? Well, my friends, you call that an expansion.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2008/5/29/the-strangest-recession-in-economic-history.html

Fewer Americans than forecast applied for unemployment benefits last week...
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aDeTc4KzXjhs&refer=home

Recession? Where? Looking back months from now, we may find that the economy grew 0.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, 1.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, and 2.5 percent (according to a model from Macroeconomic Advisers) in the second quarter....
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2008/5/9/the-recession-that-wasnt.html#

The unemployment rate edged down in April and employers cut far fewer jobs than expected...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050200489.html?nav=rss_email/components

The American Medical Association restricts the supply of MDs, and by law you can't get most medical care from anyone who isn't an MD.

AC is correct: you cannot be a "realtor." You can be a "REALTOR" (Registered trademark) if the National Association of Realtors permits it.

Both restrict capacity of the labor in their industries. This is known to create at best Cournot competition. Meanwhile, a market that is not capacity constrained has Betrand competition - where the mere threat of entry can keep prices near their minimum. Cournot competition reduces economic efficiency (id est, screws you out of money).

I'd estimate the average working American is getting "screwed" (how much he pays less what a competitive market would cost) by about $6,000 per year (of the approximately $16,000/yr of medical expense he and his company pay). Your paycheck is probably light by $500 per month due to the AMA tax.

It is also worth noting that a supply shortage of saved lives is equivalent to preventable deaths. This artificial shortage raises prices of having your life saved while simultaneously reducing your odds of having your life saved.

The AMA and NAR are de facto monopsonists, restricting the ease of health care and real estate purchase respectively, and using your medical bills and need for housing to make their members artificially richer.

Don't believe that doctors are getting paid "too much"? See if you can find the trend in the Forbes best paying jobs in America:
1. Anesthesiologist
2. Surgeon
3. Obstetrician
4. Orthodontist
5. Oral Surgeon
6. Internist
7. Prosthodontist
8. Psychiatrist
9. General Practitioner
10. Chief Executive Officer
11. Physician and Surgeon, Other
12. Pediatrician
13. Dentist
14. Airline Pilot
15. Podiatrist
16. Lawyer

Productivity in the US has been going up steadily over the last decade, but real median income has gone down. Where does all that extra money go that you're not getting paid? Your company spends it on health insurance, most of which ends up in the hands of MDs.

OPEC dominates the trillion dollar global petroleum industry. The AMA dominates the two trillion dollar national medical industry. Politicians blame OPEC for our economy because doctors write big checks.

And the majority of the worlds billionaires created their wealth from scratch. http://www.forbes.com/2007/03/06/billionaires-new-richest_07billionaires_cz_lk_af_0308billieintro.html Apparently there is some sort of link between merit and wealth. Wouldn't you agree?

India and China have seriously better prospects than say Sierra Leone or Ethiopia. By contrast to many Sub-Saharan African countries where there is no wealth to be had, China gained 50 new billionaires in 2007 and India has three of the world's ten richest people. While they aren't yet at the EU's standard of living, to call modern day China or India impoverished is laughable.

India and China have seriously better prospects than say Sierra Leone or Ethiopia. By contrast to many Sub-Saharan African countries where there is no wealth to be had, China gained 50 new billionaires in 2007 and India has three of the world's ten richest people. While they aren't yet at the EU's standard of living, to call modern day China or India impoverished is laughable.

Look, I'm all for helping Africa get great colleges and postgrad institutions. It's a good thing, and certainly can't hurt. But if these people think that a postgrad center for math and physics is going to help pump great wealth into Africa, I'm afraid they'll be dissapointed. They'd be better off building business and engineering institutes. People like Patrice Motsepe will do far more to bring wealth to Africa than someone like Hawking.

The Chinese government has done a lot more good for the environment than the US government has...

Your credibility is null. Funny how you accuse others of nationalist cheer leading while you ignore that 16 of 20 of the world's most polluted cities are in China. Site: http://en.epochtimes.com/news/6-6-10/42510.html

Forbes

the theory- http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
the goal http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html
a practical consequence -http://davisfreeberg.com/2008/01/03/bad-copp-no-netflix/

And:
broken sound API's (change for change sake)
Lack of drivers for older hardware
Useless on older machines with just 512 MB of RAM
too many versions
SP1 released just last month
Did I mention the DRM? http://practical-tech.com/entertainment/vistas-multimedia-mess/

As someone already mentioned, MS has 2 OS's in competition, and the newer one is losing. Why is it surprising that they would provide a "fix" to XP that makes it less desirable? Let's face it- they could have put out SP3 at any time in the last three years, and should have. They took the time to pull SP3 last week when it was conflicting with some MS Point of Sale software, but they don't have the resources to test it on any HP systems with AMD cpus's?

Looks like someone finally clued these geniuses of national security in on the obvious Archilles' heel in their web of protection.

I just hope our clueless protectors have at least had the common sense to slip in some spys at that new big "Fab 68" Intel plant they're building in China.

"Sadly, if you get the whole Chinese populace riled up into thinking that everyone is picking on them, they have no strong basis for comparison. Heck, it's not like most of them know about what actually happened in Tianamen Square. They certainly don't really understand the oppression that has happened in Tibet over the last 50 years"
this is an extremely ignorant thing to say. Everyone of us who left China and stayed in China knows what happened in TAM square. A lot of the expatriats and their parents even participated in it. I can tell you stories about students tying themseles up on bridges to stop train traffic. I can tell you stories about the human walls they formed against the soldiers. Most of oversea Chinese know more about what happened in Tibet than anyone else does. We read the Western articles and the Chinese articles. I'm not blind to the mistakes of either side.

As someone who has lived in the country, away from it and visited there on frequent occasions, let's get some basic fact straight here:
1. Chinese gov't does not randomly go arrest people in the middle of the night as some people think.
2. Chinese gov't has far higher approval ratings than the American gov't.
3. Chinese people are now more free and well off than they have ever been in the history of China.
4. There are definitely a lot of human rights issues that China needs to work on. Very few Chinese people will dispute that.
5. The great democracy that is know as Taiwan took 45 years to go from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As recent as the 2004 election, we had a fake assassination attempt, underaged voting and 10+% discard votes. It takes time to go from a situation not accustomed to having democracy to one that does.
6. China will only become a democratic country + have human rights from the efforts of the growing middle class through this economic growth. Shoving Western doctrines down Chinese people will only annoy them.

"It is often hard to tell when the Chinese nationals are shouting down dissenting points of view if they actually believe that crap, or if they're just doing what they're told. I have a suspicion that a lot of them (even the ones here in Canada who were protesting against Western media bias last week) honestly don't know any different version of events. Therefore, they assume that we really are trying to hurt their national pride. They don't want to be told that their government is and has been lying to them."

Let's see the facts and see which of this you actually know:
1. Tibet before 1959 was a feudal state with slaves. If it continued that way till today, it would be one of the most backward society in the world. Dalai Lama will just be another religiou zealot with many worshipping slaves.
2. Dalai Lama's so called autonomy sounds more like independence than autonomy. if you check this page where it stated what's the Tibet in exile's demand. http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/04/10/tibet-china-macbain-oped-cx_lbm_0411tibet.html
You would see that their demand consists of having no Chinese troop in Tibet, a separate gov't + judicial system just for Tibet, Chinese people not being able to move into Tibet. Does that sound like autonomy or true sovereignty to you?
3. The requested area by Tibet in Exile includes not just the Tibet region itself, but also includes most of Qinghai, a large part of Sichuan, parts of Yunnan and Gansu. That's part of the reason that the discussions haven't moved forward if you read the forbes article. In this area, Han Chinese actually far outnumbers Tibetans. So in any kind of real referendum, Tibet would never be able to leave. Kind of funny huh? Real democracy would actually work against Tibet? Of course, chicom will never allow such a referendum to happen, because it would set dangerous precedence for Taiwan.
4. There were clear videos and interviews conducted by CNN and a number of Western media that sh

That's a pretty serious mischaracterization. Though Dirk Meyer worked at Intel for 3 years early in his career, he spent the next 9 years at DEC working on the early Alpha CPUs (see here). Many of AMD's other current & former top engineers on the CPU side are ex-DEC people as well (Mike Uhler, Rich Witek, Jim Keller in the past, etc.). IBM is the other main source of top AMD engineers (Rich Oehler, Chuck Moore, until recently Phil Hester, etc.).

There are some top folks from Intel too but they're definitely in the minority.

Notice that there are no Intel people mentioned here.

They tried this already...

http://www.forbes.com/2000/07/20/mu4.html

and we all know how well THAT worked out.

Nope, IBM is guilty of abusing their patents, they aren't purely defensive. See this story from the 1980s.