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The only time many of the politicians, lobbyists and contractors seem to work together is to make as much money off China as they can while pretending to be concerned about security. Who can be surprised about all the Chinese spys when mysterious money men with Chinese connections always seem to turn up in campaigns? I just got done reading about China having penetrated US and Australian (UK too I think) databases:

"China has penetrated U.S. databases: 'They are already in and we have to find them'

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2008/ea_china_02_08.asp

There was also the Chinese purchase of 3Com (maintains firewalls to the Pentagon) to a Chinese concern

"Congress members cite 'growing apprehension,' security risks in 3Com sale to Bain, China firm"
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/01/business/NA-FIN-US-3Com-Congressional-Review.php

It all seems sort of psychotic to spend to have national security and then let the the lobbyists, politicians and contractors sell them off out the backdoor to anyone ready to pay. So many things are broken (FDA, borders, transportation, US cities declaring "independence" from the government etc) but these issues hardly even get into the media when it focuses on the election.

I'll let you take a guess as to how seriously Wikipedia is taking that one - probably about as seriously as anyone would take this one. But boy, no one ever lost any ad revenue by reporting the alleged plight of people who "sign" online petitions.

All you have to do is look at what has actually happened with WalMart.

Ok let's look at what's happening with Walmart. Walmart is the world's biggest retailer, and is one of China's biggest. The Chinese seem able to afford to shop there. Or take Brazil and Mexico. Walmart has been a success in both countries. In Brazil Walmart is closing in on Brazil's largest retailer, the French company Carrefour.

they're raking in billions of $ while Medicaide or other programs pay their workers health care costs

As in other areas I'd prefer a free market in health care. I don't believe in employer provided health insurance. In the US this is a vestige from World War II. Then the US had wage control laws that prevented employers from paying employees more, instead to allow businesses to attract employees employers were allowed to offer health insurance to employees. This alone distorted the market for health care and insurance. Even today laws and regulations favor employers who provide health insurance instead of paying them more so they can buy the type of insurance they want. However as you point out with Walmart some employers don't offer insurance for employees. Because health costs are skyrocketing employers are either requiring employees to pay more or are dropping coverage. That has been a sticking point with US auto manufacturers and United Auto Workers. The companies want workers to pay more but the union won't go along. What needs to be done is to let employers pay employees more without either having to pay more taxes then allow employees to buy insurance.

In any case you sound like you've swallowed the whole 'there is an evil liberal agenda to have all powerful government'.

On whether or not there's any agenda or not doesn't matter to me, but if there is one it's not liberal. Liberals, real ones not fakes, want liberty and small government.

It is crap. It is Corporatist propaganda.

Looks like you've missed where I've railed against corporation. A number of tymes I've stated corporations should have their Corporate Charter revoked if t hey no longer served to public good. The very first corporation, the Dutch East India Company, was granted a corporate charter for this very reason in 1602. Two years later the Honourable East India Company was granted a charter for the same reason, to serve the public good. If corporations today were treated the same it wouldn't be a problem. Thomas Jefferson said "I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country."

while the Republicans have given loads of lip service to shrinking government, they've failed utterly to live up to their word.

Republicans have never done anything to shrink government. Two of past 3 Republican presidents increased the size of government. What's ironic is that the republican president that warned of the military industrial complex, Dwight D. Eisenhower, actually made it stronger. Many Americans believe it was Kennedy who first sent US troops to Viet Nam, but it was actually Ike who sent Colonel Edward Lansdale to undermine a vote on whether North and South Viet Nam would re

Yes, DHS thinks you need combat squads on trains everyday. story story. Keep pushing for regime change and democracy in the USA and we might see better spending of tax money.

By my count, we are probably dealing with as many as eight, maybe even nine, unexplained cut or damaged undersea cables within the last week, and not the mere three or four that most mainstream news media outlets in the United States are presently reporting. Given all this cable-cutting mayhem in the last several days, who knows but what there may possibly be other cut and/or damaged cables that have not made it into the news cycle, because they are lost in the general cable-cutting noise by this point. Nevertheless, let me enumerate what I can, and keep in mind, I am not pulling these out of a hat; all of the sources are referenced at the conclusion of the article; you can click through and look at all the evidence that I have. It's there if you care to read through it all 1) one off of Marseille, France 2) two off of Alexandria, Egypt 3) one off of Dubai, in the Persian Gulf 4) one off of Bandar Abbas, Iran in the Persian Gulf 5) one between Qatar and the UAE, in the Persian Gulf 6) one in the Suez, Egypt 7) one near Penang, Malaysia 8) initially unreported cable cut on 23 January 2008 (Persian Gulf?)

The article includes the following links as references to document the above list of believed cuts:

1) http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1202064573279&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
2) http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/business/?id=24186
3) http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theuae/2008/February/theuae_February121.xml&section=theuae
4) http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080202132053.iohfg5ob&show_article=1
5) http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153455.htm
6) http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i03tUdyj8wf2Xa9P4trWEjqAJdyQ
7) http://www.arabianbusiness.com/510132-internet-problems-continue-with-fourth-cable-break?ln=en
8) http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=7980
9) https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Effects+of+Fibre+Outage+through+Mediterranean
10) http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/01/internet.outage/?iref=hpmostpop
11) http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/04/technology/cables.php
12) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/business/worldbusiness/31cable.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
13) http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/31/Cut-cable-disrupts-Internet-in-Middle-East_1.html
14)

this author actually dug a bit deeper and found a trail that leads from the owners of most of these internet cables all the way back to some very, very large companies in the U.S. and in the U.K. Which companies you ask? Who is behind this?

Well, that's the topic for my next post. You'll have to subscribe to my RSS feed and stay tuned for my findings. Don't worry, the wait will be short.

Well, no. "Official data show that wind energy production amounted to a preliminary 2,742 gigawatt hours last year and contributed 2.37 percent of the Netherlands' total electricity consumption, up slightly from 1.81 percent in 2005." Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/18/business/wind.php

I can't believe this guy is coming out now to tell us that we should stop "embryonic stem cell research" because it "shattered" human dignity. If you want to bring back some form of dignity how about letting those suffering a glimmer of hope based on sound science rather than false promise? Also I'd really like it if someone would send him the memo. We don't need to hurt embryos anymore so the pope's latest message comes too late proving how irrelevant the church is to this discussion.

That's not true. Yes, patents should not be issued for things that occur naturally. But how about genes? It's ludicrous to think that someone could patent a DNA sequence, and force others to pay licensing fees when screening for that gene. Here's an op-ed by Michael Crichton that discusses patents on genes. Here's another article from Wired. That's just to give you an idea, though I'm sure there are many more informative articles.

Pharmaceutical companies? They care nothing except for their profit. Who said they were worried about staying in business? One company has never made a profit or marketed a drug of its own. And it's been in existence since 1981. Another company has lost $1.3 billion, yet is still up and running.

Under-the-tongue (flu) immunization or over-the-tongue immunity (phallic)?

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/01/28/america/NA-MED-US-Flu-Vaccine.php

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/01/29/flu-drops.html?ref=rss

Will it be better to just provide Viapren strips to evil-doers? (LOL)

The link references the opening statements of a trial in which three people are accused of violating election laws (the story is dated 6 days earlier than your post).

That's a year and six days.

They were in fact convicted, and that's the link I should have given.

However, I see on further review that they made a plea deal and got probation. Which shows how important protecting election integrity is - mandatory minimums for possession of illegal medicines, a slap on the wrist for subverting democracy. Res ipsa loquitur, as HST used to say.

I have friends that live in Scandinavia, and they have to pay an assload of taxes. 180% on a new car, up to 63% income tax - that starts at about $70,000, and 25% VAT tax.

In Denmark young people are moving to escape the tax system:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/05/business/labor.php

Oh if you do go and look you'll see all those people riding backs...not because they want to stay in shape, because they can't afford a car. Would you really want to live in a country where you had to pay 300,000 dollars for a BMW 3 series? I guess you could pay 30,000 grand for a new Kia....

The unemployment rate in Sweden is supposed to be as high as 20%
http://truckandbarter.com/mt/archives/000589.html

Because everything is so heavily taxed - forget the fact that college is free - everything is so expensive students have to take out loans anyway.

Oh then there is the gas tax. They pay 9 - 10 dollars a gallon. Yep 7 dollars a gallon in taxes for gas. Not for any environmental reasons .... just to pay for all the 'free' stuff:
http://americanindk.blogspot.com/2007/08/gas-prices.html

Then there is health care....the wonderful system where you have to wait. Yep you really do. It's not a myth. Oh and you don't get a choice of doctor either. You pretty much get whoever the government decides. Unless of course you one of the few rich people and can afford extra insurance - and then you get better care.

Vets suck there too. My friend has had too dogs killed by vet ineptness. She is lucky because she can go to the police vet sometimes, but most of the time she is stuck with idiots. She can't always go the him though because he travels around the country and to Germany to help people .... because there vets suck too.

Yep its great there. No choice, high taxes, dead pets, everything is really expensive...

I want to see a moonbase.

The US government makes quite extensive use of open source software. In the Intelligence Community alone, some of the examples of open source software in use on Intelink, the IC's three networks that run at UNCLASSIFIED, SECRET, and TOP SECRET/SCI levels:

- LAMP (Linux, apache, PHP, MySQL) stacks to support a wide variety of applications, such as some below
- MediaWiki powers Intellipedia, the highly successful wikis that run on the three iterations of Intelink
- phpBB powers Intelink Forums
- WordPress MU enables the current generation of Intelink Blogs
- Jabber provides the IC-wide Intelink Instant Messaging
- tag|Connect is a social bookmarking tool based on del.icio.us
- Zimbra powers the uGov Collaboration Suite
- RSS, XML, and other open standards are used extensively
- ...and much more

These services are run in robust, highly available environments, and have gotten great support within various IC components. In fact, much of the social software movement within the IC is reliant on open source software and open standards, and they have been embraced. For a great overview of what the IC is doing with social software, see:

- 'The Intellipedians' The social software movement within the U.S. Intelligence Community, Federal Computer Week, 16 August 2007

And if you don't want to sit through the presentation (it is a bit long, though quite good), see:

- Open-Source Spying, New York Times Magazine, 3 December 2006
- A Wikipedia of Secrets, Washington Post, 5 November 2006

And on the newest initiative, A-Space:

- Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence, New York Times, 2 September 2007
- Classified social-networking system promises to help U.S. spies talk, collaborate, Associated Press, 5 September 2007

Some of the articles are a little over-simplified, but the reality is that social software running on open source platforms and environments is taking off in the Intelligence Community.

Roovskaeg.....My friend live their any it sucks. NOTHING IS FREE!!!!
Up to 63% tax - if you earn 100k you would pay 63,000 in taxes!!!!!
180% tax on new car
25% VAT tax

Article about labor shortage because of income tax:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/05/business/labor.php

In WWII the Danes got over run in a day by the Germans because they had no guns!!! The Japanese didn't attack the American man land because we were armored....Guns are the teeth of liberty!

Three broken stereo systems (the last sony product I bought failed at my wedding, big last straw), rootkits, and proprietary formats for portable audio players (mini-disc, some digital audio format which it dropped, etc).

Of course, I do still buy Sony movies and music. But the rest is enough for me to boycott any hardware purchases.

Yeah, right: Greece leads the EU on privacy, in a year that saw the board of the independent Privacy Authority resigning over rampant and unconstitutional CCTV use by the Justice Department. Incidentally, that happened just before the Greek PA was to investigate the 2005 wiretapping scandal that made international headlines. What kind of kool-aid are they taking over there in Privacy Int'l? The sad truth is that privacy took a nose dive this year across the whole of the EU, with the Prum, VIS, PNR and Swift data accords being ratified and there weren't any silver linings.

Ok...then how abut the IHT quoting Peugeot? [1991] A Peugeot spokesman said the withdrawal had been prompted by the failure of the company's 405 model sedan to gain a significant share of the U.S. market. Peugeot, which turns out both the Peugeot and the Citroën, joins such other European car companies as Renault and Ford's German operation in admitting defeat in the highly competitive midsize segment of the American market. Peugeot produced 1.4 million cars last year, and both the 405 and 605 have sold well in Europe. Last year [1990] Peugeot sold 4,261 cars in the United States.

Great for them if they can continue selling and doing very well without the US market. If they were selling in Europe alone they would have a larger population to sell to, so one would hope they could still sell cars there. I don't see how this supports any of your radical conclusions.

Here's one from the International Herald Tribune.

Somebody please stomp out myminicity. It's seriously polluting /.

The FBI keeps arresting and convicting people in this country for ties to terrorist organizations. Now, how do you suppose domestic surveillance contributes to that? Did the idea cross your mind that those arrests and convictions, not to mention the other disrupted plots, are the reason we haven't had something like the Bali bombing, or the London tube bombing, or the Madrid bombing? Of course I'm sure that you also know that the Canadian bomb plotters had connections in the US, that the US helped the Germans foil a dangerous bomb plot, and British and American surveillance helped foil a major attack? There are plenty of other cases as well.... for anyone that cares to know.

On the Legality of the NSA Electronic Intercept Program

But you see ... wikipedia is against absolute truth. After all ... everybody's truth is equal, right ? Except Christian, kapitalist or anything "white" truths obviously. But maths is different. You see maths is proof that there are absolute truths, valid everywhere, demonstrating that the scientific view of the universe/God (one that is bound by laws, predictable and inherently good) is one of these fundamental truths, and one that you can learn from. That the earth is our to make as we choose (instead of the "don't touch it !" climate alarmism we hear today, we can, and will, change the earth, and we'll change it for the better. The only thing climate alarmism will cause is change for the worse, a lot worse. Can you believe that these days the left's arrived again at it's 1930 eugenics "we must prevent bad people from having babies" state ? *1)

So no absolute truths please ... we're a multicultural "reality-based" society. No maths allowed, or allah (represented for the occasion by some middle eastern nutcase, who just beat his daughter into the hospital, so she could join her wife and at least now she is covered *2)

*1 http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/10/asia/AS-GEN-Australia-Climate-Baby-Tax.php

*2 covered in blood, of course, that how the prophet likes his girls, and his cities

They're talking about new sanctions, not engaging in warmongering.

Dude, it was France that refused to rule out a first strike in Iran. In addition...

In France, where the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, acting in coordination with Washington, has made vast efforts to enact separate European Union sanctions going beyond those of the UN Security Council, the report was characterized by an expert on nuclear proliferation as occasionally brushing close to the "hallucinatory."

As far as fear of their neighbors, Iran has publicly stated for years that their purpose was to export their Islamic Revolution and create a United Islamic Republic. This is a direct threat to the regimes of all of their neighbors. None of them want the Imams in charge.

Yes, they don't like and fear the U.S. However they fear a nuclear Iran even more.

IMO, the discover that may end up having the most impact will end up being the guys who discovered what atmospheric conditions are most condusive to the transmission of Influenza.

Don't want to get sick?, crank up the heat, and plug in that humidifier.

- How are we 'maxxed out' on hydro?? I guess I'm thinking in terms of Canada too.

Transporting electricity long distances isn't cheap, so more hydro in parts of Canada isn't an ideal solution. Also, much of the US is in a drought stage (which may be status-quo and we mis-interpreted good years as typical) so it's looking like we've over-maxxed out hydro. Also, hydro can have some pretty harmful side effects too.

- Why did she skip from hydro to fossil fuels and nuclear? What happened to wind, solar hot water heat, energy conservation - increased energy efficiency, etc? I know that in my Canadian home town... they are close to approving the largest wind project in Canada for my county- the first one in the county. Proof that we are far from 'maxxed out' on wind for example.

Similar to hydro, wind power has a significant problem of being geographically sensitive, as you have to use in a high wind area. It also has consistency issues (as does solar) and isn't cheap initially, particularly in land area cost. Obviously most of Canada has an advantage here compared to more densely populated areas.

- If the sudden popularity of compact fluorescent lightbulbs has just recently taken off and can make such a difference, as well as Walmart's push for concentrated laundry detergent, etc, etc, isn't this a sign that we have many, many more areas where efficiency improvements can be made. Lets look at trimming the waste.

Certainly, and I don't think most advocates for nuclear power would disagree, but that misses the point. Currently the majority of our power (power grid + transportation) comes from burning coal, oil and gas, with millions of tons of harmful emissions. If we reduce our fossil fuel use (which we need to do) then something has to take it's place, and currently nuclear power is the only thing that can generate the power needed 24/7 and at most geographic locations.

- What REALLY is the solution to nuclear waste? Isn't it kind of a joke to assume that any human government or corporation will be around and responsible enough to babysit these waste storage locations for 50 or a hundred thousand years? That's THOUSANDS of generations of humans!!! Puh-lease!

Integral Fast Reactors. As been stated elsewhere in this thread, allow the reprocessing of fuel (typical reactors used in the US use ~1% of available energy, IFR 99%+) and the volume of waste would be greatly diminished. (There are other reactor types that solve this problem, IFR looks to me, as an interested non-professional, like the best solution.) What makes nuclear waste dangerous is what makes it still usable as a power source, so if we get most of the energy out then we have ~200 year waste in a smaller quantity (small enough to even store on-site), not the many tons 100k year waste.

- It seems to me that it's kind of a give-up to say nuclear is the 'only' solution.

I definitely agree. Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, bio(waste|diesel), ethanol, clean coal, etc., all have their place (and a more significant one than they do currently), and intelligent reduction of resource usage is very much needed. However, nuclear power alone is usable most everywhere (no need for highly specific geographies like wind paths, coastlines, geothermal vents, etc.,) is highly available (24/7 power,) has manageable emissions, and is doable now with today's technology. The safety issue is largely settled, as TMI would illustrate from the fact that there were no deaths as a result and the long history of successful safe operations elsewhere (France, US navy,

http://www.iht.com/bin/3-col.php?id=8630144

No, there really is a problem with voting rights vs. short selling. See "One Share, One Vote - Short Selling Short-Circuits System", in the International Herald Tribune: When brokerages lend out a customer's stock to short sellers and those traders sell the stock to someone else, both investors are often able to vote in corporate elections. ... "It is an abomination," said Thomas Montrone, chief executive officer of Registrar & Transfer, which oversees shareholder elections. "A lot of the time we have no idea who's entitled to vote and who isn't. It's nothing short of criminal." And: ""It appears to be the case where there are opportunities to game the system" (Cary Klafter, VP Legal and Government Affairs, Intel.)

There are other references, but that's enough for now.

AT&T plans to help find alternative payphone operators for people who need them. The AT&T decision only applies to 13 states serviced by AT&T (SBC) payphones. AT&T only operates about 65,000 of the 1 million payphones in the US, while Verizon operates about 225,000. AT&T plans to sell as many of the phones and lines to independent operators as they can. They expect the majority of the phones to be bought by someone. They even expect to continue selling wholesale payphone service to payphone owners.

It sounds to me they just decided to let someone else field the equipment. There's a lot of exaggeration around this story, but the facts are all over the web. Death of the payphone, indeed. This reaction is kind of like saying IBM getting out of the consumer laptop and desktop PC market was the end of the Windows computer.

Difference between Vdd and ground means nothing in terms of efficiency. Modern switch-mode DC voltage converters work with efficiencies exceeding 98%. In fact, in modern power supplies, virtually all of the various voltage levels your system needs are generated by stepping up or down a different DC voltage.

The reason that you see a trend to lower and lower voltages is not because lower voltage = lower power. It's because in order to make transistors faster, you generally want to make them smaller (less area = lower capacitance) and you want to run them at a lower voltage (= less total charge to move to switch between a 1 to a 0). The problem with smaller, lower-voltage transistors is that they are more fragile (they have thinner gates, which higher voltages would fry), and higher leakage current (which makes them more inefficient - sometimes much more so). We've seen a lot of companies trying to reduce the power usage of the current generation of devices. That is not because they're running at lower power. It's because transistor companies have been spending tons of money doing materials and device physics research trying to find new ways to make transistors in order to overcome the problems caused by trying to make them smaller and faster. There have been some major recent advances.

They had shipped 5.9 million in total by march Not sure if they are aiming for a cumulative 11 mil or 11 mil in a single year. but cumulative it's not a hard target.

You may be joking, but there appears to have been a considerable amount of concern about this when SUP first got involved with LJ -- Alexander Mamut, one of SUP's main investors (or possibly its owner -- I've seen both descriptions in articles), apparently has some ties to Putin. Brad had tried to assuage fears about it at the time, but I unfortunately don't really know how the situation stands on the Russian side after those initial reactions.

As a longtime LJ user, I'm encouraged that Brad's still optimistic about SUP today, and I don't think Six Apart ever really knew exactly what to make of LJ, but I'm still having a hard time getting over a vaguely uneasy feeling about the whole thing.

Airlines operate at a profit about as often as George Bush breaks 45% approval rating in the polls.
While some airlines are notoriously unprofitable, others make a tidy sum. As a whole the airline industry is expected to make about $4 billion in profits this year.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/03/business/airlines.php

Otherwise it's just sensationalist nonsense. Google is a company with an aim to generate income. However much of it's business deals are driven by the knowledge that google works in "good faith" with it's partners. (Many companies won't partner with Microsoft on new technologies because they don't want to be the next SGI/Fahrenheit sucker.)

Companies, universities and investors would not embrace google if it's practices were unfair on it's users. From reading the article we can see that Google actually made a decent decision and gave the anonymous user options before eventually releasing the details.

Google needs to appear as a reasonable entity to the courts. If google fights the courts to the last frontier in every case it is presented, it would not only be costly to the company, but give google a damaging litigious image. Instead google chooses it's battles wisely for the betterment of it's users allowing it to defend more important legal issues with success..

According to a report recently issued by Reuters, the leading political candidate representing the liberal anti-Kremlin Yabloko party has been shot by an unknown assailant. The candidate is now in serious condition in a hospital. This attempted assassination caps a year-long effort, by the Kremlin, to rig the parliamentary election on December 2. Under orders from the Kremlin, banks have refused to accept donations from supporters for deposit in the accounts of opposition parties. Owners of assembly halls have canceled contracts allowing opposition politicians to stage rallies. The police have seized the newspapers of opposition parties in a draconian attempt to prevent them from spreading their message.

In early November, the election-monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) declined to send election observers to Russia to monitor the 2007 parliamentary election. This OSCE decision resulted from (1) the Kremlin's refusing to allow more than 70 OSCE observers to enter Russia and (2) the Kremlin's delaying the granting of visas to them. In 2003, the Kremlin had accepted 400 OSCE observers, but after the OSCE condemned the 2003 election for being unfair, many folks in the Kremlin vowed to stymie OSCE's efforts in future elections.

According to a report recently issued by Reuters, the leading political candidate representing the liberal anti-Kremlin Yabloko party has been shot by an unknown assailant. The candidate is now in serious condition in a hospital. This attempted assassination caps a year-long effort, by the Kremlin, to rig the parliamentary election on December 2. Under orders from the Kremlin, banks have refused to accept donations from supporters for deposit in the accounts of opposition parties. Owners of assembly halls have canceled contracts allowing opposition politicians to stage rallies. The police have seized the newspapers of opposition parties in a draconian attempt to prevent them from spreading their message.

In early November, the election-monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) declined to send election observers to Russia to monitor the 2007 parliamentary election. This OSCE decision resulted from (1) the Kremlin's refusing to allow more than 70 OSCE observers to enter Russia and (2) the Kremlin's delaying the granting of visas to them. In 2003, the Kremlin had accepted 400 OSCE observers, but after the OSCE condemned the 2003 election for being unfair, many folks in the Kremlin vowed to stymie OSCE's efforts in future elections.

Methinks that's a bit of Indian understatement at work there. :-)

Why do I say this? Consider the About Us page:

InstaColl is a Bangalore-based start-up founded with a singular vision - establish the first "Made by India" product brand that is globally recognized and appreciated. Please note that is "Made by India" and not just "Made in India" - half the software products in the world are probably already developed to some extent in India but can you name even one product brand made by India...no? We thought so - this is therefore our raison d[']être...

Confusing run-ons notwithstanding (and in fact, I would disagree, unless they specifically meant Web2.0-isque products), there's a bit of a ra-ra-India chest-beating going on out here. You then have that sentiment followed by this gem of a sentence:

InstaColl was founded by a bunch of average-Joe technologists aided and abetted by the favorite poster boy of Indian IT .

Note three points here:-
a) "Favorite" not 'favourite' : These guys are thinking "global", which apparently, is en-US.
b) AND YET, you have that very superfluous, Indian construct, "of the". In a different place and dialect, that sentence would have, probably, read as "Indian IT's favourite poster-boy" or something; it is a very very Indian habit to convert adjectives into nouns with an "of the" construct.
c) You usually aid and abet someone in crime, not to fund a start-up. While, of course, they might have used the phrase tongues firmly in cheek, long experience in editting such documents tells me that they, perhaps, didn't think about it too much. The idiom hits the general spot they were aiming for; so they didn't quite think about, well, not using it. Again, this is usually a result of reading English more than you speak; truth be told, I'm also occassionally guilty of doing that. [As also use more c's and s's than necessary at times ;-)]

In addition to using quaint phrases, and wrong idiomatic usage, (traditional) written Indian-English is also quite understated; for the line you quoted, you could easily imagine the copy-writer thinking about writing, "More Powerful than Office!" but then telling herself that she's probably better off saying, it matches Office 2007. This is a common pattern in Indian-English; here's an article where the author hints at that understatement ("self-important colonials ... decreed that when an exalted civil servant says "may," trembling lesser breeds should hear "shall."")

Another article making a similar point:

[A] recent book, "Indlish", ... notes that: "Indian English suffers from flatulent orotundity, a form of high-flown language that tries to impress but instead obscures." This style of speaking and writing, the book argues, is a hangover from the Raj and the bureaucratic officialese that it bequeathed to India.

Favorites or not, you get this distinct impression of a previous generation's "good-name" Ind-glish is struggling to come out into a globalized world here.

In any industry other than consumer software, Microsoft would have been shut down years ago for negligently exposing consumers to grossly defective products. Vista is the Aqua Beads of software. You wouldn't tolerate this level of nonsense in your automobile, your television, or your kids' breakfast cereal; why tolerate it in a commercial product that has huge economic and public-policy exposure?

It makes quite a difference whether it's $500 in electricity or $500 of coal in an iron smelter.

What if the electricity is generated at a coal burning facility?

The price of raw coal is a minute fraction of the price of electricity. Coal combustion is about 30 MJ/kg = 8 kWh, or 3 kWh if you count the efficiency of a plant. Coal costs about US$ 50 per tonne [ref], so about US$ 0.017 per kWh electricity out of the $0.10--$0.20 you pay for your electricity. To put it differently, $500 in electricity produces as much CO2 as $50 in raw coal.

I thinnk you may be on to something....
November 13, 2006

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/14/asia/AS_GEN_Malaysia_US_Carrier_Incident.php

More like a YEAR!

This link from TFA http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/07/business/toys.php seems to indicate the GHB precursor was an unapproved last-minute substitution in the bead formula. It's not necessary, it's not beneficial, and it was probably done to cut costs.

I'm in a quandry. I see policemen beating lawyers on the streets in Pakistan. How should I be feeling?

That's a tough call. You should already be depressed, worried, upset, mad, and overall just frickin' pissed off at the terrible rape in the Congo (or even the U.S.), the starvation in Somalia (or North Korea, mothers dying around the world from a condition that can be treated simply and cheaply, incredible pollution in China and everywhere else, intense economic inequality in Latin America and how it's driving the obesity epidemic elsewhere in the world, the war in Iraq that will never end, and the spread of MRSA thanks to decades of using antibiotics too liberally.

This stuff in Pakistan is just more of the same. Please feel sad, perplexed, and angry.

The real question (which you missed) is this: what can you DO about it? Other than make snarky comments on Slashdot, of course.

ah wikipedia links, because nobody astroturfs wikipedia, especially not pro-corporate IP lobbyists

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=73011&in_page_id=34

"Gordon Brown announced a review of the present 30-year rule on the release of confidential documents. It could be cut to just 20 years.

The Prime Minister said: 'I want to explore how together we can write a new chapter in our country's story of liberty.'

Slashing the 30-year rule would lay bare the most explosive events of the Thatcher years, including the 1982 Falklands War and the 1984 miners' strike."

"In a major shake-up of Britain's secrecy laws, other proposals included a Bill of Rights and the extension of the custody time limit for terror suspects from 28 days to a possible 56.

The Freedom of Information Act could be extended to private firms working in the public sector. "

That articles dated Thursday, October 25, 2007

So what parent said was pretty much wrong, however it's all sugar round a rather nasty tasting pill namely to increase the length of time someone can be held without charge to 8 weeks. Long enough to seriously mess up most peoples lives, should you be innocent.

This Prat just got 8 years http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/23/europe/EU-GEN-Britain-Terrorism.php
Ok he said he intended to become a suicide bomber and he posted stuff on the web about how to make bombs and guns (probably the anarchists cookbook). At what point did it become more than words?

Reality comes in different flavors.

You might want to take a look at Microsoft's Q1 returns:

Microsoft's client unit, which includes the Vista operating system released to consumers in January, posted $4.1 billion (Euro 2.8 billion) in revenue for the quarter. That's a 24 percent increase from the same period a year earlier.

Demand for Vista was especially encouraging in "emerging markets" such as Russia and China, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said during a conference call with analysts. In addition, demand for premium, and more expensive versions of Vista was better than expected. Microsoft shares hit six-year high on earnings report

Each of the company's five business divisions showed double-digit revenue growth. That was particularly important in the Client Div., the group where Microsoft counts Windows sales. There, revenue jumped 25%, to $4.1 billion, an astonishing gain for a mature market. Microsoft estimates that PC sales grew 14% to 16% in the quarter. The larger revenue gains came as consumers went for the pricier, premium version of Windows Vista. Microsoft Results Turn Heads

Someone out there - or 88 million someones - bought a copy of Vista, 28 million of them in the last two months. This brought $4.14 billion in revenue in the quarter, making the Vista doom mongers look a tad silly. Sales of high-end Vista SKUs were the most popular.

Office 2K7 sales were up 20 percent to $4.11 billion, while Halo 3 and the Xbox 360 generated a profit of $165 million in the quarter with 1.8 million Xbox 360 consoles sold. Vista helps Microsoft's quarterly profits rise 23 per cent

For an extra $15, our baggage handlers won't rummage through your bags and steal your stuff. Take advantage of our $5 rider covering pervert protection. For $20, we won't let them use your baggage to smuggle drugs into the country.

In other iPhone news, the International Herald Tribune writes that Apple will sell official unlocked iPhones in France, to comply with local laws:

So thanks to European laws, Americans will soon be able to import updatable unlocked iPhones, As I predicted.

This leaves us with only one question: What will we complain about now? :-)