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According to FT (sorry pay walled link http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1a199004-a8d5-11e0-b877-00144feabdc0.html) Murdoch was planning to convert his other newspapers (The Sun) into a 7 day newspaper by sharing content/news with TNotW anyway. As it is, his 4 newspapers share the same printing press and he often moves around editors/writers.
From the FT story
The second obstacle is that Mr Murdoch and Ms Wade had made known their plan to cut costs and overlap by bringing the News of the World close into line with The Sun as a seven-day operation. It seems likely that News International will resurrect the Sunday title as The Sun on Sunday.

It's better than the 1990s and it's HTML 1.0 and animated GIFs. It''s better than the 2000s as we get ever more sophisticated web apps and usability by devices other than PCs...

I recall first browsing the web while mobile around 1998, sitting in a McDonalds in London with a Psion Series 5. It was perfectly usable on a handheld device in the late '90s before the bloat of nascent Web 2.0 and reliance on Javascript made sites too heavy and complex. We're only now creeping back to where we once were in terms of usability on less powerful devices.

Also, cloudy web apps are a horrible idea, both technologically and in terms of all the freedom arguments RMS has already made about them. But if you don't already agree with this then you're hardly likely to change your mind right now.

Inflation may have been 5.5% last year, but wages rose by 16%.

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. Next consider whether the wage rises have been across the board, whether they've been engineered, etc.

In fact where wages are rising rapidly there is bound to be significant inflation of prices.

You're the one touting the rise.

Legislating physics doesn't work. California was supposed to have a 100% emissions free new vehicle fleet eleven years ago. Maybe obviating ~20% of all US base load power generation is possible without getting voted out of office for a generation. Good luck with that.

Nuclear power isn't dead. It isn't even dying. China made obligatory noises about 'reviewing' nuclear projects after Fukushima Construction has not actually halted and nothing has been canceled. Ultimately it will amount to a couple siting changes and little else. Sweden is pushing back at German nuclear energy policy changes and has no intention of abandoning its own nuclear energy. Neither will France.

Germany is the victim of a large amount Chernobyl fallout, so nuclear is a bad word in German politics. Germany's neighbors, on the other hand, are not uniformly following Germany's lead. It is rather likely that Germany will find itself replacing some of its lost generation capacity with foreign nuclear power.

As for the US? Investors are not going to put up billions of dollars for pressure groups to play with in court for twenty years; that money is going to China. Nothing is going to happen one why or the other until after the currency collapse and breakup. We're a debtor nation balkanized around our welfare state, so we don't get to build, replace or otherwise change much of anything until long after the public debt bubble pops.

The power generation system you have now will be what you have in 2026. If you're lucky.

Worrying that legal euthanasia may lead to trouble with insurance companies is only a problem in the very few, terribly uncivilized, western countries that do not have universal medical care paid for by taxes.

Yes, we keep hearing reports of how those government run plans turn out.

British healthcare in crisis despite massive investment
Cruel and neglectful' care of one million NHS patients exposed
Hospitals must make deep cuts to survive

For $41-billion, Canadians deserve a straight answer

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks. . . .

Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on. ...

In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.

Also note that the United States actually has tax payer funded medical care, Medicare, for example. Medicare refuses more treatment than private insurers:

Don't you EVER learn tomhudson? We all KNOW that you stalk & troll me by AC replies, and who said that??

Why, YOU DID, here, quoted verbatim (and instigating others to do so as well? Please... lol, you FOOL, no one!):

"Wait until he starts on another kick, then reply to him as an AC. It's the new meme". - by tomhudson (43916) on Sunday May 09 2010, @08:29PM (#32150544) Homepage Journal

QUOTED, LITERALLY VERBATIM, FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1646272&cid=32150544

(So, if the "best you've got" is AC trolling & stalking replies to me tomhudson? Well... lmao @ U!)

APK

P.S.=> Now, on this "tidbit" from you? Who the F do you think you're fooling tomhudson??

"Nobody ever claimed that Linux was immune" - by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31, @01:26PM (#36299196)

I've been around here long enough (since 2004, maybe a bit earlier) to KNOW "how it is" around here, a very "Pro-*NIX slant" to things, & Penguins are NIGH CONSTANTLY implying that "Windows is a malware ridden horror, Linuxes are not"!

Well, to THAT, specifically (& on topic about ANDROID Linux)?

Heh... see these additional "problems" ANDROID Linux has shown over time then recently:

---

A RECENT HISTORY LIST OF ANDROID LINUX EXPLOITS BY MALWARE ETC. et al:

http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=1718

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/10/android_malware_attacks/

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/jacks-blog-10017212/android-and-facebook-attract-more-malware-attacks-10022271/

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/12/30/1856242/Android-Trojan-Found-Spreading-From-Chinese-App-Stores

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bf3d6002-452e-11e0-80e7-00144feab49a.html#axzz1FdlXHJmB

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/29/android_data_disclosure_bug/

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/03/01/0041203/Infected-Androids-Run-Up-Big-Texting-Bills

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/1946202/New-Android-Exploit-Discovered-To-Steal-Data

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/213219/Security-Expert-Warns-of-Android-Browser-Flaw

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/11/21/1321200.shtml

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/11/02/2238205/Serious-Security-Bugs-Found-In-Android-Kernel

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/2011243/Major-Security-Holes-Found-In-Mobile-Bank-Apps

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/18/1910224/A-Tidal-Wave-of-Java-Flaw-Exploitation

http://news.slashdot.org/story/

1st, let me "open" with 3.5++ times as many unpatched security vulnerabilities in Linux 2.6x KERNEL ALONE (not the entirety of a Linux distro, nor the other parts needed for business development), vs. NEARLY ALL OF THE TOOLS MICROSOFT PUTS OUT FOR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, for starters:

http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2200490&cid=36300084

OR, do you care to deny that much, vs. SECUNIA's statistics for that much (they're quite respected on that note, mind you).

Secondly?

Well - My point here was that ANDROID, which yes, IS A LINUX VARIANT, is showing itself, it's TRUE SELF (& thus, Linux as well) to be no better @ being secure than Windows is...

Hell, it's WORSE!

Now - Would you like me to post an entire LIST of problems I know ANDROID has had on the security front too? I can, roughly 50 of them, & from RECENT HISTORY no less? Ok, here goes:

---

RECENT HISTORY LIST OF ANDROID LINUX EXPLOITS BY MALWARE ETC.:

http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=1718

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/10/android_malware_attacks/

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/jacks-blog-10017212/android-and-facebook-attract-more-malware-attacks-10022271/

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/12/30/1856242/Android-Trojan-Found-Spreading-From-Chinese-App-Stores

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bf3d6002-452e-11e0-80e7-00144feab49a.html#axzz1FdlXHJmB

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/29/android_data_disclosure_bug/

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/03/01/0041203/Infected-Androids-Run-Up-Big-Texting-Bills

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/1946202/New-Android-Exploit-Discovered-To-Steal-Data

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/213219/Security-Expert-Warns-of-Android-Browser-Flaw

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/11/21/1321200.shtml

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/11/02/2238205/Serious-Security-Bugs-Found-In-Android-Kernel

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/2011243/Major-Security-Holes-Found-In-Mobile-Bank-Apps

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/18/1910224/A-Tidal-Wave-of-Java-Flaw-Exploitation

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/31/167255/Silent-Easily-Made-%20%20Android-Rootkit-Released-At-DefCon

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/30/1640223/Many-More-Android-Apps-Leaking-User-Data

http

Here's what the IPCC has to say about it in the Fourth Assessment Report:

"Since 1950, the number of heat waves has increased and widespread increases have occurred in the numbers of warm nights. The extent of regions affected by droughts has also increased as precipitation over land has marginally decreased while evaporation has increased due to warmer conditions. Generally, numbers of heavy daily precipitation events that lead to flooding have increased, but not everywhere. Tropical storm and hurricane frequencies vary considerably from year to year, but evidence suggests substantial increases in intensity and duration since the 1970s. In the extratropics, variations in tracks and intensity of storms reflect variations in major features of the atmospheric circulation, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation."

This article discusses a report from the Global Humanitarian Fund that estimates that 40% of 2010's severe weather events are attributable to global warming, which is in line with Peter Baines estimate that 37% of Australia's drought severity can be attributed to Global warming.

So to put it plainly, there has been a significant increase in both flooding and droughts. I don't think there's been much research into the effects of climate change on hailstorms and blizzards.

Per my subject-line above, some "examples thereof":

http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=1718

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/10/android_malware_attacks/

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/jacks-blog-10017212/android-and-facebook-attract-more-malware-attacks-10022271/

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/12/30/1856242/Android-Trojan-Found-Spreading-From-Chinese-App-Stores

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bf3d6002-452e-11e0-80e7-00144feab49a.html#axzz1FdlXHJmB

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/29/android_data_disclosure_bug/

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/03/01/0041203/Infected-Androids-Run-Up-Big-Texting-Bills

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/1946202/New-Android-Exploit-Discovered-To-Steal-Data

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/213219/Security-Expert-Warns-of-Android-Browser-Flaw

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/11/21/1321200.shtml

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/11/02/2238205/Serious-Security-Bugs-Found-In-Android-Kernel

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/2011243/Major-Security-Holes-Found-In-Mobile-Bank-Apps

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/18/1910224/A-Tidal-Wave-of-Java-Flaw-Exploitation

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/31/167255/Silent-Easily-Made-%20%20Android-Rootkit-Released-At-DefCon

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/30/1640223/Many-More-Android-Apps-Leaking-User-Data

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/12/21/1849243/The-Smartphone-That-Spies-and-Other-Surprises

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/20/1422239/Cybercriminals-Shifting-Focus-To-Non-Windows-OSes

Want more? I've got 'em... MANY more in fact!

So, please - my "bottom-line" here, is this & quite simple:

Don't go telling folks that "Windows is 'bad'" etc., because ANDROID's not exactly "looking good" and on MANY grounds (see those links above).

APK

P.S.=> So, do I "hate google"? No, in fact, FAR from it... but, what I do NOT like is when someone in a position to make changes, good changes, starts acting like a "PR Machine" to attempt to "mess up the competition" - especially when his own platform has issues... MANY issues! apk

Bullies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)#No_Cussing_Club
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)#Epilepsy_Foundation_forum_invasion
  Identity thieves
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d0a21040-7800-11e0-b90e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1LbiGgDhc

Anyone can claim to be a member of Anonymous, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are. Even though Anonymous doesn't have a defined leader, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have specific membership. If someone is not in contact with the preexisting members of Anonymous and claims to be acting on their behalf, then the person claiming to be Anon is just appropriating the name.

That is a different situation than if an existing member does something that runs contrary to the will of the group. That seems to be what is happening with the current AnonOps situation. If I had to guess at which category the Sony breach falls into, I'd guess the first. Anonymous' activities are consistently more on the "hacktivism" side of the computer crimes spectrum than the "for-profit crime" side. If Anon had been the ones to break into Sony (even if it was a subfaction of the larger group), I'm sure we would have seen PSN user lists and/or credit card numbers (maybe sanitized, maybe not) released. They were very vocal about their actions when they went after HBGary and they promptly released the data they acquired. The Sony breach far more closely matches the Eastern European or Chinese organized crime MO than the Anonymous MO.

Well I'm not sure that the Financial Times is generally classified as a tinfoil hat site. Here is my source
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/67dc062c-fe45-11df-abac-00144feab49a.html#axzz1JnZELfGr
or google '"China gold boom sparks wave of counterfeits" site:ft.com' to get past the paywall.

Aaaaand... the second result from a google search. By far? Look at more than the first google result and try again.

Couple that with a culture that tends to frown on whistle blowing and reporting your superiors and you have a real problem on your hands. While this is the first major nuke incident in Japan, there is a long record of serious safety violations and technicians and engineers not willing to go behind their bosses back to report them. In 2003 TEPCO was caught forging documents at ALL 17 of it's reactors. This is far from an isolated incident.

Even with the radioactive clouds released, background radiation levels at Fukushima, just outside the reactor building are lower than the natural level of radiation in Ramsar, in Iran (which has a particularly high natural level, it has nothing to do with whatever is currently happening there, it's probably been that way for longer than humans exist). Spending a year close to Fukushima itself will have ZERO observable health effects.

Get some perspective (see left upper corner for the increase in background radiation)

I guess we're seeing populist politicians implement their usual strategy : lie. Sorry, ... "Fake but accurate" is the term, right ?

I'm honestly not sure what's worse: that you are absolutely, completely, factually incorrect in your entire post or that you posted a diagram that doesn't agree with your argument. Let me show you what I mean.

This article [ft.com] claims that workers outside the Fukushima plant have received doses of 170 millisieverts. Stay with me here, I'm about to do math! The diagram you posted shows "All the doses in the blue chart combined ( ~ 60 uSv)". "Blue Chart" meaning background radiation. So if you were exposed to every single source of background radiation you would be exposed to 60 microsieverts (claimed by the "put things in perspective chart"). Sixty microsieverts is equivalent to .060 millisieverts. Of course we have to remember that Sieverts are a measure of radiation dosage over time, and the chart is completely worthless because it has some measurements based on a day, some on a night, and some on a year, but then it still adds them all up into one number. Regardless, the point that I'm about to make is still valid. The workers in the Fukushima plant have, at worst, received radiation doses 2,833 times greater than the combined "blue chart total" of 60 uSv. How's that for some perspective?

Now, the chart doesn't show an accurate yearly dosage of background Radiation, but the wikipedia article on the Sievert does. You wanted to talk about radiation levels in Iran, so I'll do that. From Wikipedia - "Background radiation in parts of Iran, India and Europe: 50 mSv/year". So the workers at Fukushima have received a dosage just over 3 times the yearly Iranian dose in a few weeks. So how do you justify calling the radiation levels at the reactor buildings lower than the natural level of radiation in Iran? Larger numbers are...well, larger. Do we really need to discuss the number line on Slashdot?

Here is the bottom line. I'm all for Nuclear Energy. I think Fission is fine for now, Fusion is the goal for the future. But you aren't doing the Nuclear Energy movement any favors by being factually wrong. That only gives the "green scientists" you mention more firepower. As someone else pointed out, it's not about green scientists vs nuclear energy proponents, it's about truth. Fukushima is a complete and utter disaster, failure, and setback for the nuclear industry. However, the real failure here would be to make it appear less of an issue so that the Nuclear industry doesn't learn from it's mistakes.

This gratuitous insult leads me to believe that you can't make a case based on facts and logic, so you're using personal attacks instead. Case closed.

You lose your case when you whined that that NYT and WSJ wasn't spoonfeeding you what you wanted to know. I frankly don't believe you. They aren't sloppy news sources. A few minutes of googling could have found news stories, opinion blogs, etc all talking about who the rebels are. I don't have respect for someone who can't do basic research.

News Corp has a quarterly revenue of around 8 billion dollars [google.com] but their net income has been steadily declining (duh).

Has it?

From the article titled "News Corp profit doubles despite MySpace charge"

The charge on News Corp’s digital media group came after MySpace cut half its staff and marred otherwise strong results in which rising cable and broadcast television profits more than offset declines in film and digital media.

Net income for the fiscal second quarter more than doubled to $642m, or 24 cents per share, from $254m, or 10 cents, a year earlier, when results included a $500m litigation settlement. Excluding one-offs, adjusted earnings per share rose 16 per cent from 25 cents to 29 cents.

Although I think the rest of your comment is spot on.

Audi's factory in Germany uses lift to transport cars to the next factory.

Humans really hate personification. We definitely don't do it constantly to pretty much any plant, animal or object.

Programmed for Love
The art of good writing

I don't think in the second article that Adam Haslett brought much to the party. He seems to forget that one must first weed the flower bed before cultivating bonsai plants.

Many people have this view of human language akin to believing that your statement grammar is your entire language, which might border on the truth in Forth, Lisp, or APL. Hideously far from the truth if the language contains strong types, OOP, templates, exceptions, closures, or introspection.

OOP verges on personification. Bank accounts ingest and regurgitate, etc.

What was the topic again? Oh yes, muonium kicks ass.

Goldman never needed a bailout. The treasury just had to give all the banks money so it wouldn't be obvious which banks *cough* BoA *cough* citi *cough* really needed the money.

Goldman had meetings about how much money they were going to make off the subprime crash as early as 2007. Bright guys, they were. Apparently they made a net $50m profit off the subprime crash.

I don't think you're going to find a citation on this one. If you're really interested you can do the same research that I did.

Grab the last list put out by the Financial Times at the end of last year.
http://media.ft.com/cms/253867ca-1a60-11e0-b003-00144feab49a.pdf

Note that the first few lines are:
1) ExxonMobile
2) PetroChina
3) Apple
4) BHP Billiton
5) Microsoft ... Feel free to go farther down the list if you're curious, but I don't expect a huge swing in 14 days.

Punch those companies into a source of near-real-time stock information. I used Google. Make sure to adjust for currency exchange rates if you use more then one Exchange.

Find out that the Market Cap for those companies is now approximitly:
1) ExxonMobile - $393B
2) PetroChina - $253B
3) Apple - $320B
4) BHP Billiton - $252B
5) Microsoft - $242B

Reorder to get
1) ExxonMobile - $393B
2) Apple - $320B
3) PetroChina - $253B
4) BHP Billiton - $252B
5) Microsoft - $242B

And observe who #2 is.

Assuming the socio-economic driving factors behind loss-generating events to be the same for all causes, the difference is likely to be due to climate change

That assumption is awfully wrong. For example, in the US, there has been a vast build up on coastal lands subject to tropical storms. And I imagine globally that disasters are better reported than they were in the 80s. Further, one would expect, with increasing population, more stuff to be built on flood plains, deltas, and other areas prone to flooding. That's where the food and flat land is. Earthquake faults are far less considerate of humanities need for good land, so they'd be less likely to be near high population centers. In other words, there are several huge examples of observer bias here. Bottom line is that loss events from disasters do not correlate with an increase in frequency or severity of a disaster.

The time frame of 25 years is embarrassingly paltry and the extrapolations should have in themselves thrown up warning signs. If you're predicting 40% of loss events are currently caused by global warming, you should have some support in the form of obviously stronger weather patterns. We don't. This is not a serious study at all.

You should really give the people you choose to disagree with more credit. I hardly think it's a stretch to say flooding at unprecedented levels in Pakistan is extremely likely to be related to climate change. It's not like this was just some normal flood, at one point one-fifth of Pakistan's total land area was underwater.

At the very least we should be able to see that without climate change the flooding wouldn't have been as severe as it was. One of the most basic effects of a warming climate is to increase the amount of precipitation that wet areas get (and decrease the amount that dry areas get). More heat means more evaporation and that eventually means more precipitation.

Of course, not all weather incidents are related to climate change, but if climate change is occurring then we should be able to establish a baseline for what is a normal rate of weather disasters and then we can identify the number of events which lie outside of the expected range of events and we can therefore estimate the number of weather related disasters caused by climate change.

Which is what the Global Humanitarian Forum did when they estimated that 300,000 deaths in 2009 were attributable to climate change.

It isn't time to panic, but it is time to start taking the reasonable and logical steps to mitigate the effects of climate change. Many of those steps are still pretty good ideas even if you don't believe that climate change presents a danger.

Benigni asked if the Mafia were now using pretty young girls instead of guns and bombs, and imagined the premier returning home one night to find three girls in his bed, and shrieking: “The Mafia are after me!”.

Now it appears that Begnini's joke is the truth if you substitute the CIA for the Mafia. It's starting to look like at least one of the girls in Julian Assange's bed had CIA ties, a history of politically motivated lies, and is very likely part of a CIA plot to discredit him. Well, I suppose it's more pleasant than a bullet from a sniper rifle.

Nuclear? China has already started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China#Future_projects

They've even started preparing their uranium supplies and stock piles: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35c2d7ca-f8c7-11df-b550-00144feab49a.html

They're already building nuclear reactors for 40% cheaper than the French (using French designs).

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-24/china-builds-french-designed-nuclear-reactor-for-40-less-areva-ceo-says.html

Wonder if they're of similar quality, but if I were in charge of stuff in China's nuclear power program, I'd definitely be making sure there are no major screw ups.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/11/18/ex-china-nuclear-power-boss-given-life-sentence/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Rixin

You can't count on your screw ups being rewarded with a bail-out or golden parachute there. High stakes.

I don't even think there's a "golden bullet" option in executions, even if your family is willing to pay extra for it ;).

Here's what actually happened: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35d6244c-d9fa-11df-bdd7-00144feabdc0.html

Also [allegedly] stole IP from Motorola: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/motorola-stings-huawei-lawsuit-alleges-theft-trade-secrets/2010-07-21 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/616d2b34-953d-11df-b2e1-00144feab49a.html

So that we can still get valuable information from people who really don't care about that particular aspect of their privacy but are too lazy to check the box. It's the same logic as opt-out organ donation, which seems to be very successful.

If they were really against they would have kicked up a row well before this.

Um, they did: For example there was this letter letter to the Financial Times on March 9th 2010 criticising the Digital Economy Bill, which says:

Put simply, blocking access as envisaged by this clause would both widely disrupt the internet in the UK and elsewhere and threaten freedom of speech and the open internet, without reducing copyright infringement as intended.

Oh, the signatories include the chairman of Talk Talk and the CEO of BT. A handy tip: if you're going to talk rubbish on the internet, make sure there isn't a public letter retrievable in about 2 seconds of googling which unambiguously demonstrates you have no idea what you're talking about.

The problem on our side is that as a member of the WTO, we can't impose tariffs on imports - including importing work that takes place overseas.

I've heard here and there that the WTO will allow for certain tariffs to exist (such as Value Added Taxes) for certain externalities. I'm running around Google looking for examples... Here's a short example. Here's another.

Well, the Financial times also has quoted an unnamed senior law enforcement officer as saying "Every bad guy known to man [is on] ICQ". The ft.com article (requires free registration): Link. And at least for me, if you click on the link from Google, it doesn't seem to need any registration (it's the first listed link): Link.

Article 1 Article 2

Wow that's a lot of paranoia.

Boeing was allegedly given massively unfair advantage in the next generation tanker deal

Fixed that for you.

BAE was fined by the US over a bribery scandal in the Saudi Eurofighter deal, yet US companies do this exact same thing all the time

I'm unfamiliar with that case, but I'm getting an apples-and-oranges vibe. Can you verify that the fine wasn't related to national security issues rather than "just" corruption?

BP is being held to higher standards than the US companies that are responsible for Exxon Valdez sized leaks every single year in Nigeria,

Nigeria? Why the hell should the US government be responsible for overseeing environmental protection elsewhere in the world? It'd be *nice* of us, perhaps, but that's up to the Nigerian government to request. Again, apples and oranges.

It's a bit rich for an American company to complain about an overseas company bending the law

(1) It's the Chinese government blocking foreign companies from doing business, not just encouraging local ones. Yet again, apples and oranges.
(2) But Google hasn't complained.

Hate the US government as much as you like and it certainly does its share of questionable and bad things, but comparing it to China is way overboard and reeks of bias or ignorance.

I was quite amazed to see the Financial Times refer to separate McKinsey and PWC studies that show that the cost of reducing European CO2 by 80% would not cost more than ``business as usual'' replacement of coal fired plants and even that going 100% renewable by 2050 would cost only about 2.5 times what Germany has already spent on solar power.

FT, McKinsey and PWC are not known as granola eating treehuggers, which makes this all the more exciting.

I was quite amazed to see the Financial Times refer to separate McKinsey and PWC studies that show that the cost of reducing European CO2 by 80% would not cost more than ``business as usual'' replacement of coal fired plants and even that going 100% renewable by 2050 would cost only about 2.5 times what Germany has already spent on solar power.

FT, McKinsey and PWC are not known as granola eating treehuggers, which makes this all the more exciting.

I was quite amazed to see the Financial Times refer to separate McKinsey and PWC studies that show that the cost of reducing European CO2 by 80% would not cost more than ``business as usual'' replacement of coal fired plants and even that going 100% renewable by 2050 would cost only about 2.5 times what Germany has already spent on solar power.

FT, McKinsey and PWC are not known as granola eating treehuggers, which makes this all the more exciting.

It still takes about 5 years to recoup the cost of a residential solar system-- even with huge government subsidies!

But energy is free after that whereas you have to keep paying for distributed power, even with huge government subsidies to coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuels. Solar panels are warrantied 20, 25, even 30 years. I think the shortest warranty for hardware are on batteries, yet Surrette/Rolls has a 10 year warranty. On the other hand Enersys Batteries only have a 5 year warranty. Even if you have to replace the batteries every 5 years, you still save money.

Some, like you?, complain about subsidies for alternative energy but you say nothing about subsidies for "conventional" energy. Coal? It gets billions of dollars in subsidies, here's, Chevron's CEO agreeing with the Sierra Club to lobby to end coal subsidies. Rep Edward Markey practically brags that My Climate Bill 'Has Huge Subsidies For Clean Coal! Huge!'. He details some of the subsidies nuclear power and other's get. How about this: Global Dirty Energy Subsidies Top $550 Billion Per Year. A blog entry on the Financial Times website says The cost of fossil fuel subsidies: $557bn. How about the US? The Policy Archive says that between 2002 and 2008 "Fossil fuels benefited from approximately $72 billion over the seven-year period, while subsidies for renewable fuels totaled only $29 billion."

If you want to complain about subsidies complain about the subsidies conventional energy, and agricultural businesses, get. A Reason blog entry says Agricultural Subsidies: Corporate Welfare for Farmers.

Falcon

"Apple’s latest rules for developers who create apps for its devices limit the situations in which they can send approved information about their apps’ audiences to advertising services. The information cannot be sent to advertising networks that are affiliated with companies developing or distributing mobile devices or operating systems – a definition that effectively excludes Apple rivals like Google and Microsoft."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e7ae5066-7408-11df-87f5-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss (Put it into google if it gives you the paywall.)

"US antitrust regulators plan to investigate whether Apple is unfairly restricting rivals such as Google and Microsoft in the market for advertisements carried on the iPhone, iPad and iPod, people familiar with the move said on Wednesday."

I would encourage you to look at Japan to see where the degree slippery slope leads. Japan has a great focus on technical skills, from high schools that focus on trade schools to technical colleges and yet it's all but impossible to get a job in Japan unless you have a college degree. College has entirely replaced high school as the minimum acceptable level of education in society. Once one could get a job having only completed elementary school. Then one needed to be a high school graduate. Now one needs a two to four year degree. And this is for a job as a waiter or dish washer.

The reason is simple: colleges are absorbing the unemployed and underemployed. And it is a system that can successfully absorb as many as can borrow money. Individuals who can't get work go back to school in hopes that a degree will help them. This takes them out of the work force for that time.

I would argue that if there is any hope for the current economic paradigm this is a good thing. Here's what I mean: Either technological unemployment (i.e. the jobless recoveries of the 90s and today) cannot be resolved at all or it will be resolved by having almost every person in society being educated enough to innovate their company's way out a la Google.

"A year ago or so there were students who wanted to hold a speech on how easily they hacked some transportation company's bus/subway tickets."

It was MIT students and the MA Transit Authority. They weren't exactly "buried" in legal threats. A judge just issued a court order telling them not to discuss the vulnerabilities they had discovered. Not sure what ultimately happened.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/72ed83e0-58ac-11df-a0c9-00144feab49a.html

Turns out that the government already has a rainy day fund to deal with industry disasters. At present it holds $1.5 billion, it is not adequate but I think this is the way to go. The impact of this accident is going to be felt by the entire industry, it is only logical for funds to be collected from all oil companies to help with recovery efforts.

Tax on Oil May Help Pay for Cleanup

Curiously BP is not carrying insurance, it is having self-insurance -- they apportion an amount of almost a billion a year into a fund on the island of Gernesey (the offshore UK tax haven).

Insurance rates will go up

Which delusion?

Mossad as weapon?

Mossad has big budget?

Israel encourages settlers by giving them confiscated land?

I don't think you'll find anything delusional about my post. Maybe you need to consider your own biases.

Tabloid rags? WSJ? Geez, I'm as non-Republican as they come but you sound like an idiot saying that.

He does sound like an idiot, until you read some of what the WSJ has become under Murdoch. Once you have the context, his comments don't sound stupid at all. Sure, the WSJ still has plenty of decent business news, but now it is laced with editorials and "business" news stories that are laced with Murdoch's political agenda ... the days of an unbiased, factual WSJ are long gone, more's the pity.

Unfortunately, our perception of the rag lags well behind the change, and will probably do so for quite some time.

Thankfully, for those of us still investing and engaged with the markets, there are better alternatives:

http://www.ft.com/

with various localizations, and without the Murdoch poison:

http://www.ft.com/home/us
http://www.ft.com/home/uk

So let them ringfence Murdoch's tripe (even the formerly great WSJ he is wrecking). Please.

Or don't wait for Rupert to take both barrels to his own feet and do it for him: filter his tripe out of Google News yourself (I use both approaches: "take off, nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"):

1) Bespoke AdBlock Rules

Open FireFox, go here and install AdblockPlus:
http://adblockplus.org/en/installation

You should have a ABP stop sign looking thing to the right of your FireFox search box. Click the little arrow to the right of it. Click preferences. Click Add Filter. Paste in:

news.google.com##*[href*=".foxnews.com"]

Murdoch ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation ) also owns The Wall Street Journal. Add Filter again, and paste in:

news.google.com##*[href*=".wsj.com"]

2) Greasemoneky Script

Get Greasemonkey:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Get Sterc's script:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/61397

"Laugh it up" :-)

[ Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=10c7469adda1fdac&hl=en ]

Tabloid rags? WSJ? Geez, I'm as non-Republican as they come but you sound like an idiot saying that.

He does sound like an idiot, until you read some of what the WSJ has become under Murdoch. Once you have the context, his comments don't sound stupid at all. Sure, the WSJ still has plenty of decent business news, but now it is laced with editorials and "business" news stories that are laced with Murdoch's political agenda ... the days of an unbiased, factual WSJ are long gone, more's the pity.

Unfortunately, our perception of the rag lags well behind the change, and will probably do so for quite some time.

Thankfully, for those of us still investing and engaged with the markets, there are better alternatives:

http://www.ft.com/

with various localizations, and without the Murdoch poison:

http://www.ft.com/home/us
http://www.ft.com/home/uk

So let them ringfence Murdoch's tripe (even the formerly great WSJ he is wrecking). Please.

Or don't wait for Rupert to take both barrels to his own feet and do it for him: filter his tripe out of Google News yourself (I use both approaches: "take off, nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"):

1) Bespoke AdBlock Rules

Open FireFox, go here and install AdblockPlus:
http://adblockplus.org/en/installation

You should have a ABP stop sign looking thing to the right of your FireFox search box. Click the little arrow to the right of it. Click preferences. Click Add Filter. Paste in:

news.google.com##*[href*=".foxnews.com"]

Murdoch ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation ) also owns The Wall Street Journal. Add Filter again, and paste in:

news.google.com##*[href*=".wsj.com"]

2) Greasemoneky Script

Get Greasemonkey:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Get Sterc's script:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/61397

"Laugh it up" :-)

[ Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=10c7469adda1fdac&hl=en ]

Tabloid rags? WSJ? Geez, I'm as non-Republican as they come but you sound like an idiot saying that.

He does sound like an idiot, until you read some of what the WSJ has become under Murdoch. Once you have the context, his comments don't sound stupid at all. Sure, the WSJ still has plenty of decent business news, but now it is laced with editorials and "business" news stories that are laced with Murdoch's political agenda ... the days of an unbiased, factual WSJ are long gone, more's the pity.

Unfortunately, our perception of the rag lags well behind the change, and will probably do so for quite some time.

Thankfully, for those of us still investing and engaged with the markets, there are better alternatives:

http://www.ft.com/

with various localizations, and without the Murdoch poison:

http://www.ft.com/home/us
http://www.ft.com/home/uk

So let them ringfence Murdoch's tripe (even the formerly great WSJ he is wrecking). Please.

Or don't wait for Rupert to take both barrels to his own feet and do it for him: filter his tripe out of Google News yourself (I use both approaches: "take off, nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"):

1) Bespoke AdBlock Rules

Open FireFox, go here and install AdblockPlus:
http://adblockplus.org/en/installation

You should have a ABP stop sign looking thing to the right of your FireFox search box. Click the little arrow to the right of it. Click preferences. Click Add Filter. Paste in:

news.google.com##*[href*=".foxnews.com"]

Murdoch ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation ) also owns The Wall Street Journal. Add Filter again, and paste in:

news.google.com##*[href*=".wsj.com"]

2) Greasemoneky Script

Get Greasemonkey:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Get Sterc's script:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/61397

"Laugh it up" :-)

[ Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=10c7469adda1fdac&hl=en ]

Why would anyone not remember this when reading the summary?

> Just wait, in ten years, Chinese firms will be outsourcing there.

They already are planning to do so (warning: the FT restricts how many pages you can view, even if you register)

But it's not surprising. After all, pretty much all the Japanese auto manufacturers now actually produce in the US.

Actually, Nokia had been slipping for awhile, but seems to have bounced back a bit in 4Q09. They were managing about 35% of the global smart phone market in 2009, but in the last quarter, they boosted their share to 40%. Great, but not the 50% so many often claim. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5af7cd20-0c05-11df-96b9-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

Keep in mind that the smartphone market itself is actually growing pretty fast, too.

Willem Buiter suggested some ideas to deal with the problem of "too big to fail". The tax ideas is quite interesting, but as always the problem is enforcing it without just driving the company oversees. There's also the concept of "too big to save", where the company exceeds too big to fail by becoming so expensive to bail out that it can't be saved (see what happened to the defaulting Icelandic banks, for instance), I wonder how long it would take Google to reach this point, and who would bail it out - the US or every country that has an interest in it not failing?

I'm not sure "too big to fail" is such an issue in Google's case anyway. At the moment they have money to burn and they seem to be acting like a TBTF company on a mad spending spree, but if revenues fall it's easy enough to reign that in, it's similarly easy to reign in spending on data centres. it's not like advertising will suddenly drop off a cliff one day. If it goes away (and I find this unlikely, even today I was reading a report that traditional offline advertising boosts online conversions by up to 40%, so the idea that old forms of advertising are losing their relevance doesn't seem right), it's likely to be a gradual decline and Google and everyone else will have time to prepare/scale down/find a new model.

I wonder if this is partially why Google is trying to get into the phone market and infrastructure, to mitigate "peak advertising".

keep voting for the big bucks ...

In Soviet Amerika, big bucks vote for us.

This article claims the opposite: that Macmillan isn't willing to sell at hardcover wholesale anymore, but is demanding a switch to the fixed-split model that lets Macmillan set the prices. Amazon wanted to stay with the hardcover-wholesale pricing model.