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The manufacturers probably already make them do this, though perhaps less to reduce future harm and more to keep secrets.

Or "Too big to jail."

ABC News from March 2013.

There was a live broadcast of the Olympic torch reaching the summit in 2008. But it doesn't count if it's not a westerner, I guess.

Texas, and at some point soon, Nevada. Also apparently there's 80 in at least Utah.

While your ideas are interesting, the point I was making is that wealth need not be THE defining criteria for success. Other elements such as dominance in a market and ability to deliver what your customers want every time can be a measure of success as well. In some cases, this can actually be seen in the current marketplace. The point you quote is well visualized in a news article by ABC concerning companies that do NOT treat their employees like slaves, yet still somehow turn out successful.

However, just because there are some examples of companies that do right by their employees, there are many more examples of those that do not. In those cases, there tends to be a huge disparity between the pay at the top and the pay of the workers earning that money. Among the employees of those companies, only those at the top, those that have money or skill or power, really get to set the levels of compensation and define who gets to be greedy, which is kind of the point I was making. If someone at the bottom attempted that, they'd be kicked out in a heartbeat for someone else willing to slave away for a pittance.

No. Companies are allowed to keep reasonable financial reserves, but the billions that Apple and other companies keep are anything but reasonable reserves, and are unprecedented. This was worked out decades ago, but they stopped enforcing it.

Amen to this. Apple is currently engaged in the largest stock buy-back in history, $60 billion so far.

In essence, with its immense cash reserves, which instead of tangibly building the business in some way, or increasing the compensation of its foreign workforce, or making its product more affordable, it is benefiting those holding tons of stock options (the execs), who will only pay low, low capital gains taxes on the wealth being transferred to them risk free.

Apple has been progressively building its business for over a decade. They don't do massive acquisitions because they understand that the company's culture remaining undiluted is the key to its success.

Since Apple has been using Foxconn for assembly, Foxconn has increased line worker pay considerably, sometimes at Apple's specific request.

Apple's products are by definition very affordable by dint of their massive sales. If people are buying their devices numbering in the hundreds of millions, they're by definition affordable in a general sense. Apple isn't a charity. They aren't bound to give away shit at a level that you, in particular, deem adequate.

Stock options are not a risk free compensation. That you think so is laughable. They also can't cash out on those options immediately or they'll have to pay the full US income tax rate on them. They're used to make sure that executives have a vested interest in the fortunes of the company they work for in the longer term.

Thank goodness that only exists in jokes... or does it?

8 Arrested For Smuggling Radioactive Substances
Report Reveals Rampant Smuggling of Radioactive Materials

Give a hundred old ladies guns, and another hundred old ladies pepper spray, and have rapists go after all of them (ethics review board might have an issue with the experimental design). I wouldn't be surprised in the pepper spray ladies did better.

"Your wrong," as it is customary to say here. Police trainers always tell their students that even a mortally wounded attacker may have enough strength left to cross the few yards separating him and the shooter and to kill the shooter with his bare hands (or a knife, or a gun.) This has happened before, more than once. Why? Because that attacker has nothing to lose, and he certainly has a solid revenge motive.

There is another expression: "Don't attack an old man. If he is not strong enough to fight you, he will kill you." There is not much that the state can threaten a 80 y/o man with. Besides, every jury will be on his side, and against some 19 y/o attacker(s) who wanted his cell phone or his c/c.

I'm a guy but I have a lot of trouble thinking of a scenario where I'd actually shoot someone who hadn't already taken the first shot, ie at best my gun would be a bluff.

You wouldn't shoot a guy who broke into your house, tied up your wife and is now doing the same to your two teenage daughters?

Also, don't think that women are somehow more pacifist than men. They may be less likely to attack unprovoked, but they have an instinct to defend their family - and that instinct is often stronger than among men. Just this week a woman stabbed an intruder to death with a kitchen knife, while her husband was experimenting with non-lethal methods of persuasion.

a few of the bolder ones will realize she isn't willing to shoot, and they'll probably be right. With pepper spray fewer will run, but almost all of those who continue will end up with a face full of pepper spray.

Most of those "bold" ones will quickly become dead ones, and the homicide will be written off as justified. With pepper spray many of the attackers will end up with a face full of it ... but the victim will be raped and then probably killed. At very least, the victim will be pepper-sprayed by the attacker to teach her to not do that ever again.

>> Even better, the IRS official that was in charge of the office targeting individuals and groups for IRS harassment that politically/ideologically oppose this administration has just been put in charge of the IRS's Obamacare office. Better hope your health remains good if you speak out against the government.

Do you have sources for this please?

Ask and you shall receive.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/irs-official-in-charge-during-tea-party-targeting-now-runs-health-care-office/

Strat

It's good to see then taking the Muzzy threat seriously. And they needto:

Florida Man Charged With Plotting Terror Campaign in Name of Islam
Florida Terrorism Suspect Planned New York Attack, Feds Say
Hafiz Khan, Florida Imam, Convicted In Terror Case Of Aiding Pakistani Taliban
Witness Is Silent in Terror Probe

Oh, let's see:

IRS Apologizes For Singling Out Conservative Groups
Justice Department Seized AP Phone Records to Track Government Leaks
Women shot by cops were just delivering papers
Man Dies in Police Raid on Wrong House
Student Photojournalist Beaten and Arrested While Taking Photos of Police in Public

> I don't think Florida has figured out that one yet.

Whoops: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/09/drunken-man-on-horseback-leads-police-on-chase-across-florida-town/

Florida courts have even upheld DUI convictions for people riding a BIKE: http://www.jacksonvillecriminallawyerblog.com/2008/11/in_florida_you_can_get_a_dui_f.html

I believe that in California or New York, if the driver of a car is arrested for DUI, the police can actually force PASSENGERS who are under 18 (but not 18-20) to submit to blood alcohol testing too, arrest them for alcohol possession if they exceed some threshold, and suspend THEIR licenses if they refuse -- even though they themselves weren't the ones behind the wheel driving.

Turnabout is fair play.

How the FBI Busted Anna Chapman and the Russian Spy Ring

No surprise - Putin has been trying to drag the US - Russian relationship back to Cold War times. He has become much more provocative with military probes around US territory, and has been dismissive of US diplomats. Apparently it plays well in Russia.

It looks like he is getting his wish. So much for the "reset" in relations.

This time it will be confusing. Our local policies are reading too much like Russia's local cold war policies.

You seem confused, so I'll help you sort it out.

the US with its imprisoning of more people (by absolute numbers and percentage of population) than any other country

They are imprisoned for what are recognizable as ordinary criminal offenses, such as drug offenses. People in the United States are not imprisoned for things like singing songs that insult the president, such as this.

Indefinite detention

You are referring to Prisoners of War. Completely legitimate and a recognized standard. You can keep POWs in detention until the end of the conflict. Unfortunate that they made a bad choice of fighting for Al Qaida.

torture

The US waterboarded a total of three people, the most recent of which was 10 years ago. The US has waterboarded at least thousands, or tens of thousands, of military pilots and special forces personnel both before and since in the same way. It is certainly a form of coercion. But torture has a legal definition, and waterboarding under those circumstances didn't meet that at the time. Or would you claim that the US actually tortured its service members?

summary execution

Killing people on the battlefield or in the theater of war isn't summary execution, but simply killing, and in no way illegitimate. The people killed were in the same status as these people shot dead by the US Government without trial or warrant.

Yeah. The US has credibility when it comes to human rights.

Yes, it does.

Turnabout is fair play.

How the FBI Busted Anna Chapman and the Russian Spy Ring

No surprise - Putin has been trying to drag the US - Russian relationship back to Cold War times. He has become much more provocative with military probes around US territory, and has been dismissive of US diplomats. Apparently it plays well in Russia.

It looks like he is getting his wish. So much for the "reset" in relations.

How many mass-murders by knife do you hear about?

Interesting you should mention that.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/12/22-kids-slashed-in-china-elementary-school-knife-attack/

They don't prosecute a lot of folks who violate gun laws.

GIYF.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/fbi/fbi-informant-infiltrated-occupy-movement-758348
http://www.verumserum.com/?p=33490

I'm sure team democrat still supports them, maybe.

Well then, when you decide to look at the news you'll see that the benghazi talking points underwent 12 revisions including scrubbing all terrorist references. And that democrats have been leaning heavily on the press to try and get them to discredit the whistleblowers.

Yeah, all coming down to "it's a scandal, and a bad enough one that they're in CYA mode."

Wonder if Demand Media is regretting that purchase now?

Why would they? They can just "Due to the unfortunate circumstances of a continuing bad economy, we have had to shutdown name.com. Sorry for the inconvenience, lol." and done. Their hands are wiped clean, the low-level IT workers are Romney'd in one fell swoop, the fat cats still get cash from their bulk-writing SEO scheme, and they can just buy up whoever else decides to take over whatever domain( name)?s they managed.

But he really meant that Israel had nothing to do with it.

Israel on the other hand is responsible for cutting their Internet, and training birds to spy on arab countries.

And I didn't see any tanks, unless you were watching something I wasn't. What the hell good would they be? You gonna shoot a guy with a tank cannon?

Well, maybe 'tanks' is a bit strong of a word for some, but just because they didn't have cannons doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of armor on hand.

If there were no legal purchasers, the number of guns in the hands of criminals would drop sharply.

So no more guns in the hands of police, military, national guard, etc.?

Example link: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=8992181

If you think it is "individuals" launching rockets you have a seriously flawed understanding of the situation.

If you're outraged about the use of chemicals against "civilians," do you have any to spare?

Suicide Bombs Spread Rat Poison, Disease

Is a Palestinian Arab launching a rocket aimed at an Israeli town innocent?

Cole Withrow was expelled and arrested for accidentally leaving his unloaded shotgun in his truck and being stupid/honorable enough to attempt to correct the issue. An assistant principal of the school did the exact same thing and was forced to take three days of paid leave when someone else reported her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_High_School_(North_Carolina)#Controversy
http://www.wral.com/classmates-rally-around-princeton-student-expelled-for-gun-in-car/12401713/
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=9087003

From North Carolina:

http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=9087003

"David "Cole" Withrow is a Princeton High School honors student who was arrested Monday and charged with a felony for having a shotgun in his truck in the school parking lot."

The reporter didn't bother to dig up any past incidents involving a black teenager. She did discover that school administrators have committed the same "crime" and were never charged.

The idiocy isn't unique to Florida.

2013-04-21
_KGO San Francisco CA_/_AP_
executives oppose privacy
Steven Harmon: San Jose CA Mercury News

I'm just gonna leave this here: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/top-20-airports-tsa-theft/story?id=17537887#.UXhog4KUuHk

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2008/11/mushrooms-in-sp/
(accidental mushrooms)

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/2139421
(deliberately grown mushrooms)

Sorry for my poor google-fu, but the information is somewhat scant on the topic. The original PDF appears to be gone (someone with better skills than me might find it) but they did grow Mushrooms on the SpaceLab D2, and they grew fine.

I dunno, I ran Picasa on my pr0n dir, and it gets all the Czech models mixed up all the time.

But I guess that just means the face recognition software is American...
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/04/czech-republic-ambassador-dont-confuse-us-with-chechnya/

So instead of being on first, he should have gotten second then I guess by reading that. Thanks for the clarification.

Based on the latest update, this is very accurate. http://espn.go.com/mlb/blog/_/name/stark_jayson/id/9196879/new-twist-milwaukee-brewers-shortstop-jean-segura-baserunning-madness Rule 7.01 (see above for link) states that

Rule 7.01 Comment: If a runner legally acquires title to a base, and the pitcher assumes his pitching position, the runner may not return to a previously occupied base.

Which the update article states should be interpreted as: Segura shouldn't have been allowed to go back to first, specifically because Segura was on second when the play started. Therefore, at the end of the play, Segura isn't entitled to first base.

One could also argue that the comments about Segura being out of the baseline are accurate, given that he shouldn't have been allowed to go back to first.

This all assumes that the new article has the correct rules interpretation. MLB hasn't stated their official position yet.

THIS! Two guys with pressure cookers shut down a major american city, innocent American's were deprived of their 4th Amendment rights (just as one example, stripped naked guy) Endless pictures of paramilitary police and armored personell carriers roaming the streets of Boston Door to door searches by police that essentially are indistinguishable from military without search warrants brandishing firearms ... You tell me who won? It certainly isn't the American citizen.

THIS! Two guys with pressure cookers shut down a major american city, innocent American's were deprived of their 4th Amendment rights (just as one example, stripped naked guy) Endless pictures of paramilitary police and armored personell carriers roaming the streets of Boston Door to door searches by police that essentially are indistinguishable from military without search warrants brandishing firearms ... You tell me who won? It certainly isn't the American citizen.

The rest being done by the other side of the same collectivist coin, the radical leftists, such as this guy: http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/images/wpvi/cms_exf_2007/news/local/032913_image_Sunil_Tripathi_FB_1.jpg

Yup. Check out this guy who is the guy in blue in many of the photos on 4chan.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/teen-boston-marathon-bomber/story?id=18990057#.UXCjJ0qyJmF

...and bam! bank holiday, for months, and you are f*****. That's right even though it's yours, it's the banks property now. Too big to fail you know. So quickly we forget, although you are too young to forget, you never learned. That's right you are paying rent on the box. Can't pay the rent(e.g. they can change the terms of the rent, which they can do legally do at any time), you are f*****. You suddenly, magically owe them money which is more than the contents of the box worth. Read about it story after story, from the 30s on...

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4832471&page=1

A bank considers your assets theirs first and foremost.

Nope it was bombs as they found two that didn't blow at the scene so the question now is who, because knowing every whacko with a cause is gonna claim it.

intellectual president? really? you think choom is an intellectual?

There's a big difference between 'whistleblowing on a crime' and 'leaking every single thing you have

Unless "everything you have" is so illegally outrageous that the story needs to be told.

Furthermore, If Manning is going to be held accountable for information Al-Queda obtained, then the Pentagon and CIA should be held accountable in the same fashion when an unencrypted laptop with sensitive dat is lost, or a website database is compromised* due to gross negiligence. Right now, the only consequences are "whooops, lol sorry bro. have a free 6-month credit inquiry"

* http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/nasa-inspector-gen-says-stolen-laptop-contained-space-station-control-codes.php
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/02/8821/
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2007/02/hundreds_of_fbi/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/01/malware_pentagon_usb_ban/

And the keyword is "before". As we all know, 9/11 changed everything.

Before, a hijacking meant an unplanned trip to Cuba or an inconvenient delay on the tarmac while the hijacker negotiates for ransom money. (And the hijacking situation was probably more convenient than some flight delays) . So sit back, relax, and do what they tell you.

I think you just proved his point. You are doing exactly that, you are using this as fodder for political infighting. You don't like it so you label it as hate speech. Does that mean we treat it the same way Europe treats it? Somebody makes an anti-Semitic comment on twitter, so France wants to put them in jail?

Anyways, yes they both do it. 10 seconds of google and I found something that tops yours: Obama makes fun of disabled people:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/03/president-ob-15-3/

You're one of those people who I commonly rail against when I say we need to stop treating the election like we're rival football teams. Quite possibly one of the ones I rail against for blind voting.

Besides violating over a dozen international treaties...

Untrue. There are exceptions to WTO treaty obligations, one of which includes national security.

...an unsubstantiated claim that there may be espionage/surveillance capability built into some devices.And let me be clear: No government or private agency has come forward with conclusive proof that any product made in China for commercial resale has these capabilities built into it at the direction of the Government.

There were many claims from many different parties that the Chinese government engaged in active spying/covert intelligence gathering on New York Times, Google, RSA. And those are just the ones we know. Lets also not forget the Mandiant Report that caused such a reaction online not too long ago. None of this is conclusive proof but it sure is a great cause for concern.

The economic and political rammifications of this are being glossed over -- this action doesn't just affect our relationship with China, but with any country we do business with, because they signed the same treaties, and now they're looking at our unilateral action and thinking: What makes us think the US won't renege on their deal with us?

The consequences you paint may well be overblown. There is evidence that the US is not the only country worried about China's activities. Australia, for example, has blocked Huawei from bidding for work on its $38 billion national broadband network, for the same security fears. Germany has sent representatives to the Chinese Government to ask them to stop, unofficially. Even the UK is so worried about the China spying problem that Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5 publicly warned that the West now faces an "astonishing" cyber espionage threat on an "industrial scale" from specific nation states.

Given that China itself uses national security as a reason for imposing restrictions on foreign commercial activities on its shores, I really don't think there is any basis to complain about the present measures introduced by the US.

We have vast amounts of technology now, and we should use that technology to create material abundance for all. We do that through five interwoven types of economic operations involving subsistence production, gift giving locally and globally, exchange in the market, planning at various levels of government, and theft/extraction/conquest (see my site). Bitcoins fall mostly into the area of exchange (as an artificially scarce token). However, there is a seeming subsistence aspect in Bitcoins because you can in theory produce them yourself. That is similar to how people can create virtual objects in some online games which they can exchange for national currencies. But, in the case of Bitcoins, they are produced more as a form of almost online gambling (since you may not find one even having put in the electricity).

In general, it is a waste of CPU cycles and electrical energy to engage in this form of creating artificially scarce tokens to be used for exchange. Society woudl be better off if peopel with spare CPU cycles from always on computers donated them to other causes like protein folding or NASA or SETI or whatever. It is better to create locally useful products for subsistence, or to create inherently worthwhile things for exchange or gift-giving. We should be planning how to create more shared abundance not more artificial scarcity.

For those interested in a virtual currencies, a better model is "LETS" (Local Exchange Trading System) systems where currency production is regulated by democratic involvement in a LETS system, which anyone can set up for their local community (subject to any local laws and gathering community support).
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system

Anything that has some value due to rarity can be used as a currency as a medium of representing demand. That can include artificially created things like fiat dollars, Bitcoins, Kanban tokens, or LETS credits. But a currency not based on one-for-on exchange with a useful item (like electricity currently or food or CPU cycles) only has value if the community gives it value as a medium of exchange and signaling demand. Thus stable currencies need to be regulated by a community or a trusted organization the community delegates the responsibility to -- because a currency represents a social contract. Otherwise, we will see some pattern of valuation as a bubble as the community eventually figures out the dynamics of the thing (which may take some time for the learning to propagate). Example of a community slowly becoming aware it is being collectively scammed in another financial context:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/600m-ponzi-scheme-incubated-small-nc-town-18845335#.UVhOeLAq3D0

The bottom line: it is wasteful of electricity to compute otherwise worthless mathematical functions for arbitrary social reasons. Of course, the same can be said of much gold mining, too -- although at least gold looks pretty and has some inherent usefulness. If people want a fiat currency, there are many ways to create one like via LETS that don't entail that level of waste.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Bitcoin conceptually if it is successful may just be that anyone can make a slight variant of it with a somewhat different mathematical function (Bitcoin1, Bitcoin2 ... Bitcoin100000) -- and then what is the value of Bitcoin0, the first one? The only value is in the social sentiments about it. And feelings can change about the social worth of a pattern of bits in some computer somewhere.

Will some people make a lot of money from Bitcoin0? No doubt, as people have told about on Slashdot already. But people will likely lose a lot in the bubble, too. And the waste of electricity is a surety. LETS its a better idea which promotes a re

(Reverse no true scotsman? That's all you've got?)

According to Wahabists, indeed they are not proper Muslims, which is why often when fundamentalist families think they're losing their kids to the evils of ... being moderate, they murder them (a lot).

Why did public pensions invest in venture capital firms in the first place? Years of ever-escalating pension benefits plus years of severe underfunding those same pensions means that they needed unrealistic growth rates to even come close to meeting their targets.

Take California for example. Not only did they keep increasing pensions promises while underfunding them, they used a variety of accounting tricks to cover it up. On top of that, they assumed unrealistic returns (7.5% or higher in many cases).

How could they get away with? California has essentially become a one-party state where public employee unions are the most powerful interest group. So the process is:

1. Public employee unions use mandatory union dues to contribute to Democratic candidates.
2. Once elected, Democrats vote for ever escalating pension benefits.
3. Democrats appoint pension board officials who ignore underfunded pensions. And the CEO of CalPERS, California's largest pension fund, was just indicted for fraud. "The indictment charges that the falsified documents allowed Villalobos to reap $14 million in fees for serving as a middleman between CalPERS and a prominent investment firm handling $3 billion in CalPERS' money."

Combine this with ever-higher taxes, and a faltering economy, and you have a recipe for the governing class looting the treasury at the expense of the middle class (and future generations that will have to deal with the consequences of bankruptcy and crushing debt loads). Several California cities have already declared bankruptcy, and newer, more transparent accounting rules will probably force more into bankruptcy.

VC funds are probably the least of their worries.

I am a private driver, and you should be aware that without the threat of birds pooping on your windscreen, 99% of fatal car accidents happen when the car is out of the garage (where it's possible for birds to poop in your windscreen). This (US average of 87 minutes per day) represents approximately 6% of the total time of an average day. Let me repeat: 99% of fatal accidents happen during the same 6% of a car's runtime.

Given that these are already the most stressful parts of the drive for the driver, adding stress like not being able to see is insanely bad news. If this had happened at night, it could have temporarily blinded the driver, long enough to lose control of the car. If it had happened on the final approach or landing, especially on a windy day, the pilot would have missed the runway and likely cratered.

Picking nits about whether the driver was permanently blinded or not won't matter so much once everyone aboard (and likely some on the ground) are dead because of the incident.

Reference: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Traffic/story?id=485098&page=1#.UVH7RFuDTxg

Thus we should kill all birds, or preferably something even more drastic.

And yet who is going to lose thier job over this "spending mistake"?

Oh if only the bar for complaining and job loss about Government mis-spending was this low.

But what we really need is a study about how much researching the video cost and that will address waste and abuse.

No, not so much. You could go to jail for that, too, as one guy who recently did the right thing learned after an ATM spit money out at him.

No, not so much. You could go to jail for that, too, as one guy who recently did the right thing learned after an ATM spit money out at him.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93364&page=1
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18144319
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Differences_among_countries_and_regions