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You only seem capable of thinking in extremes.

- in limited space and time this is the only way to demonstrate a point.

You can own property, just not if you retaining it would cause someone else to die of starvation.

- nonsense. "just not"? You can't be a touch pregnant and you can't believe in 'touch' of rights.

Either you have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness or you do not. You cannot have that right unless..... somebody can define a reason why you shouldn't have that right and bring up any argument.

Your individual rights are sovereign, which means the collective cannot abuse them (if that's the government that you set up, where government must protect your individual rights, and where that's the only real function of the government).

, but if somehow it did and by sharing you yourself would not die of starvation then yes, they have a right to your stuff

- nonsense. At the point where this is an accepted ideology you lose your rights. You don't have any rights if the government turns the argument this way, because it means that a good lawyer on the government's side, working with government assigned judges will use this to argue anything - that you must do this and that or other, because that's necessary for somebody to survive, etc. This is the actual reason why in USA there is such a huge loss of liberties and freedoms right now. This very argument, and soon there will be a choice - either to accept that individual rights cannot be violated in any such case, or there will be another USSR created, but probably worse, once US dollar and bond collapse and Western and USD economies go to hell.

No, you do not have a right to survive by robbing me of my rights.

But when it's between 2 individuals, this has nothing to do with rights. Again and again, between any 2 private parties there is only the criminal and contract law.

Rights only are a meaningful expression of relationship between an individual and a collective - the government system. I have explained time and again that your personal individual rights that government must not violate (well, in case of USA it must not violate, your country and the way it set up the government is your business), that these rights have nothing to do when 2 private parties are dealing with each other. There is no such thing as a 'right to free speech' when 2 individual parties are dealing. This is about government not establishing roadblocks for you to speak your mind. This is because the power of government is the ultimate power, which needs to be kept in check.

The only reason even to have such a concept, as a 'right', is to establish the relationship between individual and the collective. When 2 individuals are dealing with each other - this is covered by contract and criminal law, however that's maintained.

2 people come to kill you, they are not denying you a 'right' to live, they are just there to kill you. When they are CHARGED and TRIED for your murder, there is NO ARGUMENT about your right in court.

There is no argument. Nobody will be able to make an argument that you DID NOT HAVE A RIGHT TO LIVE.

However when GOVERNMENT takes you to court (or when the president just kills you with his order, which obviously goes against the Constitution), they are making that exact argument.

The huge difference is that government is a SYSTEM and private individuals are PEOPLE. There needs to be a way to deal with the SYSTEM that does not involve SPECIFIC PEOPLE.

So you are not suing or trying a specific person when you argue that you have a RIGHT to SPEECH or to LIFE. You are arguing against the SYSTEM.

So that's the main purpose of defining what a 'right' is, it's to establish a way for you to deal with the system that has all of these various powers that you do not have.

From what I've read, Zynga's revenues rose 115%, but profits dropped 90%+.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/09/zyngas-90-drop-in-second-quarter-profits-unlikely-to-derail-ipo.html

According to that article, their costs went up a ton due to development of two new games that have yet to make them money. I have a hard time swallowing the article's claim that a 90% drop in profits isn't something to be alarmed about.

âoeOzone is a difficult gas to pin down,â said Cooper, who works at the Earth System Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. âoeThe study of intercontinental air pollution has been going on for a decade, but whether it was increasing overall was uncertain. And in places where it had spiked, along coasts and in national parks, we didnâ(TM)t know how much was from local sources and how much was from Asia.â

Cooper said they have not yet determined exactly how much of the ozone increase comes from Asia, but they found that the increase was about twice as much when prevailing winds came from South and East Asia.

[...]

Ozone is not the only substance that crosses borders. Last year, a study by the National Research Council found that âoesignificant concentrationsâ of three other types of air pollutants are also transported across the Northern Hemisphere: particulate matter such as dust, sulfates or soot; mercury; and persistent organic pollutants such as DDT. Emissions of nitrogen oxides, a key ingredient for ozone formation, have increased by more than 50% in China over the last decade while decreasing in the U.S. and Europe.

These are pollutants with known direct harm to human health. Sure, I probably have some ideological bias, but I think it reasonable that the concern over CO2 emissions is exaggerated compared to a serious pollution threat from Asia.

Debt that Obama inherited.

Debt that increased in the ratio of debt to GDP from 70% of GDP in September, 2008 to over 100% of GDP this year. Similar increases in public debt occurred. The last president who experienced this level of debt increase was FDR during the Second World War. If Obama were truly controlling the debt, he could have nixed the second half of TARP, never come out with ARRA and other bogus pseudo-Keynesian activities, destructive legislation such as health care "reform", bizarre hostility to business, and never run deficits well over a trillion dollars during his three budget years so far.

You can speak of Republicans or whatever "poisoning" the US. But when are you going to deal with the venom from your side?

But they made up for it in volume.

So did they. Obviously Obama will now recommend them to all investors and insist all Groupon jobs are permanent, creating the very fabric of the US' strategic economy, bringing us into tomorrow.

I just know that 3 months from now, there is going to be a lot less credit in the world.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fiw-markets-20110922,0,6254504.story

The central banks cannot prop it up any longer. The correction is pretty much imminent. De-leveraging has to happen. The credit bubble is going to burst. Either there needs to be serious debt forgiveness (yeah right, like that will ever happen) or the economy needs to deal with the reality that consumers are tapped out and cannot take on any more debt.

There is some discussion about trying to tap emerging markets, or trying to increase consumer demand in China, but that will not go anywhere. China is way overheated at this point. The emerging markets rely on America to buy their exports. How are they going to take on debt if they cannot sell anything?

The stock market and the DJIA are American centric. Americans are tapped out. The party is over. The only way the economy can go is down. It needs to crash so fully, and our currency needs to be devalued so significantly that it will finally become cost competitive to manufacture here in America again. We cannot have real growth unless we make things.

OP is correct. You only have to read recent news.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-solar-20110920,0,2015603.story

http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/32974

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

This sounds eerily similar to the British monitoring twitter for riots... block the method of communication for the protestors and the problem will fix itself!
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/08/cameron-considers-blocking-facebook-twitter-after-riots.html
http://technology-corner.com/british-police-will-use-twitter-to-monitor-protests.html

I'm not sure if Yahoo did it intentionally (would be quite the coincidence), but if that is the case, a Yahoo account might not be the best thing to have for anybody with views of the government.

You want to see how far this can go? In California you now have to give health insurance companies direct access to your bank account or they will cancel your policy. No credit card payments allowed.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20110920,0,2211923.column

It wasn't doomsday. It was just an example of a major corporation turning the screws on a customer to get what it wanted.

In this case, what it wanted was access to Kreuzhage's checking account, rather than her credit card account.

Anthem announced a few months ago that it planned to stop allowing members to automatically pay their bills by credit card. For those still wanting to use plastic, they could call a service rep each month and give their card number over the phone, although this would entail a $15 "convenience fee."

...

Sure, you can still pay by credit card. But you have to remember to call in every month to do so. If you forget, your coverage can disappear.

Kreuzhage, for one, has learned her lesson. She's forked over the checking account number that Anthem wanted all along and now approaches her health insurance with a renewed sense of humility.

"If this is how they treat me when things are perfect, when I file no claims, how are they going to treat me if I ever have a serious medical problem?" Kreuzhage asked.

And big companies never make billing mistakes. Even in those rare occasions when they do, it's always fixed right away. So, for example, if due to a billing error they clean out your account and you miss insurance payments or mortgage payments they'll fix everything like it never happened. And I have some major bridges in New York and San Francisco that I can sell you real cheap.

Bollocks. You are implying that the same dollar that the corporation made in profit is taxed twice. It is not. The corporation's dollar in profit stays in the corporation. The individual's capital gains dollar comes from whoever paid a dollar more for the stock once it is sold.

There is only an indirect relationship between corporate profits and individual capital gains. I can for example own stock in a corporation that made billions in profit yet paid $0 in corporate taxes, that stock may have gone up several hundred percent.

Some companies pay dividends, which are taxed as capital gains. But that is only a portion of the market. And there is actually no requirement that a dividend be paid on profits; a company could lose money and yet choose to pay a dividend in order to prop up its stock price.

Not to denigrate the pilot or even you, but you are incorrect and just making stuff up. The images in this link show that the pilot was not visible in the cockpit so he couldn't have seen the crowd at all. http://framework.latimes.com/2011/09/17/reno-air-races-crash/

Netflix is not saying that they will be losing 1M of their existing customers. Rather, they're altering their guidance for the next quarter by 1M subscribers, which is an important distinction, since it more or less halves the impact from what most people here seem to be thinking. Previously, they had been expecting a decent growth of 400K in the upcoming quarter, but now they are projecting a net loss of 600K in the quarter, hence the 1M number. Yes, it's bad, but it's not as bad as losing 1M of your current customers in addition to however many potential customers you'd lose as well.

The article and most of the other blogs are glossing over this detail, but numbers are always important.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-netflix-20110916,0,5009354.story

Good for you. Not for everyone else. 2. Unless the reporting was lying. Wherein "do more research" should be directed at the news media, not me.

I wonder if Broadcom is issuing any stock warrants to NetLogic's customers.

The article you are linking is from 2001. Did you just peek out from your Y2K shelter? Go back in.

The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.

Why remember that X is caused by Y when you can just input Y into a computer and it gives X?

I wonder if Broadcom is issuing any stock warrants to NetLogic's customers.

So basically the critic was trying to put into a negative light the fact that the Apple Campus will have lots of trees, be embrace nature, foster a healthy work ethic, and all without contributing to urban sprawl of larger cities. You just can't win can you?

Before wasting your time criticizing someone else's work, you should at least try to understand what has been said. After all, odds are that those you are trying to criticize, which happen to have taught architecture at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley may actually know a bit more about architecture than you do.

Regarding your claim, the Christopher Hawthorne's criticism isn't a simplistic and naive tirade on "lots of trees" and other nonsense, which you may only interpret as such if you hadn't read the article (and therefore made your comment to be baseless and knee-jerk gibberish). What Christopher Hawthorne stated is that, contrary to what Jobs' and his minions said, the design for Apple's new campus isn't cutting-edge and "is practically bursting with contradictions". Among the contradictions, Christopher Hawthorne pointed out the following:

"in many ways it is a doggedly old-fashioned proposal, recalling the 1943 Pentagon building as well as much of the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and '70s. And though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car make a different argument.

He goes further by stating the following obvious but insightful point:

The more interesting question is whether a place like Cupertino can maintain its low-density sprawl in future decades, as the Bay Area's population continues to grow, and whether the council's enthusiasm for the new Apple headquarters can be read as an endorsement of a car-dependent approach to city and regional planning that might have made sense in the 1970s but will seem irresponsible or worse by 2050.

For those with a basic understanding the deep impact that urban planning has on our lives, including social and economical, this is rather obvious. If the city accepts this sort of architecture then it will be forced to invest time and money aggravating their urban mobility problem and making their lives harder by making it impossible to provide basic logistic networks that are cheap to maintain and to use. Moreover, if a city is designed so that their inhabitants' lives are limited to a small bubble of reality which contains nothing more than their suburban homes, their cars and their workspaces then this sort of urban plan will end generating generations of sociopaths who are detached from their community and it's affairs. This will force segregation based on where you are employed. This problem and it's negative impact on society is widely known for decades, with the inception of social housing and the problems that it ended up generating in pretty much every country which invested in it, including France, Germany, and even the US.

So, no. This isn't, as you put it, a petty criticism targetted at Apple, an organization which, by the victimizing comments some people make, is always perfect and is always right. This is a very reasonable and realistic comment on the negative impact that this shiny piece of architecture has and will have on a community, economically and socially. And if you tried to step away from Apple's reality distortion field you would realize that.

...and we're paying less per unit of energy because demand is lower.

I'm positive the exact opposite will occur. Again using California as an example, examine their water conservation efforts. First, water utilities actually raised their rates in order to promote "conservation" (making water unaffordable is not the same as conservation). Then, as the economy tanked AND usage dropped, water utilities raised rates in order to offset decreased revenues.

I'm all for conservation, but with union strangleholds on these industries, the government in bed with the unions, all on top of campaigns by reckless anti-progress environmentalists and NIMBYs, things are only going to go from bad to worse. Every time a new round of environmental regulations gets handed down by a government (who despises electricity generation but wants to keep all the lights on), generation stations must be retooled or closed, both meaning higher costs for consumers.

The reality is drops in power demand aren't primarily from conservation efforts: they're from the high cost of energy and the steady decay of American manufacturing, particularly on the west coast.

The same Texas where a quarter of the population doesn't have health insurance? And where health insurance costs more compared to income than every state except Mississippi? And where health insurance costs are rising faster than the national average (same link)?

Oh yeah, great place.

It would be much cheaper and more effective to find better ways of evaluating teachers, weeding out the dead wood and attracting better talent. Value-added analysis achieves this in a way that corrects for factors outside the teacher's control (broken household, poor section of town, etc.).

Consider two teachers. The first teacher's class tests at the 30th percentile at the beginning of the year and at the 40th percentile at the end of the year. The second teacher's class tests at the 70th percentile at the beginning of the year and at the 60th percentile at the end of the year. Although the second teacher's students tested better, they fell behind. Shouldn't the first teacher be commended and the second teacher be put on probation?

Sure, why don't I just do ALL your fucking googling for you. Sit tight.

Dismissive, condescending, and frankly wasteful. Initiating your response with this tone is probably beneath you.

You must really use sources other than Limbaugh and Trump.

A silly attempt at pigeonholing my opinion. Again, you should think more of yourself than this. How am I supposed to take you seriously when the first three sentences you wrote in reply are this shallow?

If you think the list below is the mark of someone very, very average, you must keep company with some very,very accomplished people - how many of them are in Congress?

I'm not American. I know many, exceedingly accomplished people. Being a member of the U.S. Congress is not much of an intellectual or executive accomplishment, really. Nor, may I add, is being a Junior Senator. There are many very bright politicians, and just as many catastrophically stupid ones. Not a consistent marker of exceptionalism.

But we're talking about Barack Obama here, right? So enough with the subtle ad hominems, ok?

1.) President of the Harvard Law Review - that's not easy to come by. And don't try to claim "affirmative action" for that one - there's no way the rich whites who got passed over would have taken that lying down.
2.) Graduates from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude ( top 10% )
2.) Community organizer - this gets mentioned a lot by the RadicalRightWingNuts, as if it's a bad thing. Isn't that supposedly how the Tea Party got started (aside from the clear evidence it was actually funded by billionaires)?
3.) Author - wrote "Dreams from My Father" shortly after graduating from Harvard. How many politicians have published a book at the start of their careers?
4.) 4 years as a civil rights attorney at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard. Some details at http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/06/nation/na-obamalegal6
5.) Twelve years of teaching at UofChicago Law School ( info below is currently posted at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media )
Statement Regarding Barack Obama
The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as "Senior Lecturer."

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.

Yes, I was fully aware of the preceding before I posted, thank you. Yes, that is his resume, in short.

The question here isn't what, but why. There is nothing in the accomplishments listed above that should rationally lead one to anoint somebody a savior.

His articles are average. His books are rudimentary. He is certainly not a compelling orator when off-script. It's the minutia of the man that should give one pause. Again, Barack Obama is utterly average. The question you still need to answer is how someone of such obviously modest gifts has achieved so much?

I'm certainly not arguing his accomplishments as listed, as relatively pedestrian as they are. My point remains; how did such an ordinary man become known as an i

...everything he has, including the Presidency, he earned.

I would really like to see you prove that.

Sure, why don't I just do ALL your fucking googling for you. Sit tight.

It was utterly obvious from his initial coronation at the Democratic convention in '04 that he was a talking head and nothing more.

He's not dumb. But he's very, very average. The thing about his pre-presidential resume, was that he didn't really have one.

You must really use sources other than Limbaugh and Trump. If you think the list below is the mark of someone very, very average, you must keep company with some very,very accomplished people - how many of them are in Congress?

1.) President of the Harvard Law Review - that's not easy to come by. And don't try to claim "affirmative action" for that one - there's no way the rich whites who got passed over would have taken that lying down.
2.) Graduates from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude ( top 10% )
2.) Community organizer - this gets mentioned a lot by the RadicalRightWingNuts, as if it's a bad thing. Isn't that supposedly how the Tea Party got started (aside from the clear evidence it was actually funded by billionaires)?
3.) Author - wrote "Dreams from My Father" shortly after graduating from Harvard. How many politicians have published a book at the start of their careers?
4.) 4 years as a civil rights attorney at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard. Some details at http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/06/nation/na-obamalegal6
5.) Twelve years of teaching at UofChicago Law School ( info below is currently posted at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media )
Statement Regarding Barack Obama
The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as "Senior Lecturer."

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.

The average restaurant manager or small-business owner with couple of years under their belt, has more executive experience than Obama had prior to running his campaign.

It's not just that he's a product of the advantages gained by Affirmative Action; it's that he is the ultimate product of said advantages.

Watching the mythos be manufactured and marketed, and most distressingly seeing tens of millions of people just like me fall for it completely, with a religious fervor... it was an informative first-hand lesson in how the whole mess of religion must have started in the first place.

A part of us is willing to suspend disbelief at a moments notice, as long as the reward is somebody telling us everything will be ok. Don't you find that terrifying?

Obama is far more of a product than any previous U.S. president, and that's saying something.

2c

I don't agree about Obama and affirmative action but do you know who the ultimate product of AA is ( yes, there's a double-entendre here ) - former 2-time POTUS George Walker "Fucknuts" Bush. How did he get into Yale? Was it his grades, his SAT scores? Hmm, I wonder.

They already do. It is, however, a bit hard to get to.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/04/local/la-me-climate-berkeley-20110404

Allow me to have 6 hours of your time. From January 20, 2009 to August 23, 2011 (945 days), we've increased our national debt by $4.247 Trillion. So every six hours in that time period the US went into debt another $1.12 Billion. Note... not "spent"... went into debt $1.12 Billion. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/08/obama-national-debt.html

They just don't want people to know all their medical information got compromised as well. Just kidding (for now) but only a matter of time before some major RHIO/HIE/NHIN to be breached.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2011/03/health-net-inc-security-lapse-leads-to-loss-of-personal-information-for-nearly-2-million-current-and.html
http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/breachnotificationrule/breachtool.html

And it's worth noting that Texas is not a "failing Texas sized state economy," but is doing well relatively with significant economic growth compared to other large states.

Oh, really?

I would like to see some stats for the statement "its rulings are also upheld more than any other circuit"

That in and of itself shows a significant problem that should concern everyone. While it happens, a court should have very few rulings upheld.

But what you are trying to do with your insistence on pushing the excuses for the ninth, is missing the point that if a district hears 100 cases, 20 of them are reverses, that's a 20% average. If another district hears 5 cases and 1 of them is reverses, that's still a 20% average. So what are the difference in the odds that this ruling would be reverses if it's heard in the ninth with 20 out of 100 cases being reverses compared to another with 1 out of 5 being reversed?

More cases reversed give a greater chance of this being that one case that is lumped in with those reversals. More cases being heard means more chances at something going wrong. But go ahead and pretend that 20 is no different then 1 if you can construe the right context. Just don't pretend to be smarter then me in the process.

BTW, have a look at this.
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/11/opinion/oe-fitzpatrick11

Let's just stick with the facts and stall the name calling until you actually know them. Then I won't have to pretend you're standing in front of a mirror saying things like you stupid fuck.

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/11/opinion/oe-fitzpatrick11
Now I know it's from the right wing Los Angeles times. But please read it, ask you mom to help if it's a little hard for you, and then think about it before replying.

That would be stupid and here's why. The moment a specific example is cited, it becomes "an attack on a single person" and not an example of how the system gives free passes to a group that would generally be considered unacceptable for anyone else. But let's prove this point.

It is known that Michael King Jr. (alias Martin Luther King Jr) plagiarized his "dream" speech. He also plagiarized his doctoral dissertation and while it was impossible to deny by people who make decisions on such matters, it was decided that it served no purpose to remove "Doctor" from the rest of his title.

If I were to offer examples of people who were not famous, it would be meaningless, of course, so by citing examples, I'm a "hater" attacking a dead iconic figure. It's a trap, in this case, to request citations. But the fact is there for all to see. People need to get over excusing behavior based on the group member ship of an individual. But we see it all the time. Cops get away with crap civilians would never get a pass on. Corporations (corporate persons?) definitely get away with crap that would land individuals in prison. And many famous double standards for the behavior of men versus women (goes both ways) are frequently accepted. (You know, like "women are entitled to change their minds" such as changing their testimony or other official accounts without being prosecuted or their reputation as witnesses diminished)

But since I have provided examples, observe my being modded down. It would be surprising not to be. When people care more about WHO is being talked about instead of WHAT is being talked about, the problem is obvious.

Getting back on topic, I tend to believe that when people actually do try to keep things "on merit" and it doesn't fare well for a particular group (black people in this case) it becomes "racism." I don't believe that black people are less capable of doing ANYTHING. There is too much evidence to the contrary. But the numbers indicate a lower rate of high achievement and a higher rate of low achievement across the board. Are we to believe that the whole wide world is just stacking the deck against black people or is it something else?

My military experience was a great awakening experience where racism is concerned. In the U.S. military, there just isn't racism as we claim it to exist in the civilian world. In the US military system, it is truly merit based (at least for enlisted... officers play by different rules entirely). If a black man achieves rank, it is because he earned it and for no other reason and it is accepted and respected across the board. There is no affirmative action in the US military. There is no quota system in the US military. And there are a GREAT many successful and productive black people in the US military -- real heroes even.

I believe if things are to be turned around for black people n the US, the US military experience has indicated that it can be done by making no special exceptions based on the numbers and by basing everything on merit.

If it makes you feel any better, there's an investigation pending for Darpa surrounding this (and presumably other) contracts. I guess the woman that heads up the agency is in bed with one of their major outside contractors, RedX. Better details here... http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/16/nation/la-na-defense-contracts-20110817

Didn't you get the memo? Cyber-loafing boosts worker productivity.

The GP I posted to, did not say 'non-hispanic whites are a minority', he plainly said whites. Even if he had said that, his statement would still have been bullshit. The 2011 census disagrees with him... About 43% non-hispanic white, about 38% hispanic. And I dont trust the source for 2006 43%.

Besides the GP's statement was alluding that blacks are the majority (the rant that blacks are evils followed by something that states whites are a minority)

See if you can find a video called "India - Who Killed The Sikhs" ~35 mins.
Its strange what "data" human rights groups can turn up.
Your right, why any state actor, supporter would let any "group" ever use any IT is strange.
Italy was able to put together the trail of a rendition operation in court http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/29/world/fg-rendition29 using telco logs.

Here's an LA Times article on Serkis and his role as Caesar.

You will care when interest rates rise for everyone from the local bonds building your schools to state bonds building roads and bridges because those levels of gov't are dependent on federal funds, that is taxes paid by state residents and laundered through the federal government and returned at varying ratios with strings attached. It may even effect the interest rate on your home mortgage if it's not fixed.

The ratings agencies have warned the feds for months. They wanted to see $4 trillion in cuts and only one plan offered that. It was the one called "Cut, Cap & Balance" and passed by the Republican-led House first with some Democrats joining in. The Democrat-controlled Senate voted immediately to table the bill. It never even got a debate.

The White House belittled the plan as "Duck, Dodge & Dismantle" when all the cuts talked about are reductions in automatic increases. Since the Budget Act of 1974, the federal government depends on "baseline budgeting" and today that means a guarantee that budgets will rise 7.5% over the prior year every year. We should be using "zero-based budgeting" where departments must justify every budget dollar.

We know from debt commissions and other studies, there are billions--maybe $100-200 billion according to the non-partisan GAO--in overlapping and duplicative spending but we have Democrats screaming nothing should be touched and anyone who wants spending reform is a "terrorist" (Vice Pres. Biden) or wants to "destroy" government (Minority Leader Pelosi). This is NOT helpful.

Republicans offered their long term reform ideas months ago in the form of the so-called "Ryan plan." Democrats offered criticism all year but no formal counter proposal. There was nothing in writing that could be "scored" by the CBO and Obama's budget received ZERO votes in the Senate. Senator Majority Leader Reid said it would be foolish for his congressional Democrats to offer a budget. That body hasn't passed a budget period in 829 days. Way to avoid responsibility and accountability!

Instead the president's party and its allies used the GOP proposal in divisive, misleading campaign ads. One even showed a doppelgänger of Congressman Ryan pushing an wheelchair-bound elderly woman over a cliff when the plan itself doesn't effect existing benefits for anyone 55 or older. Again, NOT helpful. (Hey, what happened to the "new tone" of "civility" after the Tuscan shooting?)

The president talks about "millionaires and billionaires" when the actual tax changes would effect, not those super rich alone, but persons making $200,000 or couples at $250,000. Small business people filing as S-corps or a cops and teachers in some high cost of living areas like NYC. Taxation needs fundamental reform not just higher rates on easy political targets who are also the most able to avoid taxation. Just as Ireland about Bono.

For anyone reading here who doesn't know and feels guilty a

Perhaps it would have been more accurate for me to say instead "victim flavor of the month". My point is that with broad enough rationalizations and definitions, ANYONE is a "victim" - which seems to suit both sides of the political fence.
Certainly they have been victims. But to suggest that 'white males' somehow float through life on a cushion of privilege, power, and ease is farcical.
As far as the last time a straight white mail was harmed by his skin color? How about 20 recent examples sustained by the USSC? http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-new-haven-firefighters-20110729,0,7391797.story
To suggest that white males aren't harmed by minority/gender hiring quotas - primarily the domain of government/education - is prima facie absurd.
Of course, the rebuttal is that it's 'compensatory' which is a pretty damn slippery slope. As far as less-formal matters, I'd challenge any white guy to walk through Compton at night. As a black man I *might* make it. Whitey? No chance.

The point is that ANYONE can be a victim, if you're enough of a narcissist. Find me an American-born black today that's actually 'suffered' from Slavery - that doesn't stop it broadly being used for crass politics and the culture of victimhood useful to the black political leadership (on the left - there is none on the right, AFAIK). For what it's worth, whites were bought and sold as chattel slaves in the North African markets into the 19th century. http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Slaves-Muslim-Masters-Mediterranean/dp/1403945519

I couldn't care less about his skin color, frankly. The PC pandering I see here is the suggestion that they might make him gay - from the Archie comic, to metrosexuals, to Hollywood, to Dumbledore, there's a clear trend toward 'gaying up'
everything pop culture. Whether this is simply a sort of race among the superficial to be au courant, or indicative of a directed effort at 'mainstreaming' homosexuality is unclear.

Your facts and timelines are inaccurate - the spill happened April 20th 2010, on Apr 30th, Obama announced that BP would be held responsible including cleanup and restoration ( http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/04/30/4426189-obama-again-addresses-oil-spill ).
Tony Hayward announced BP acceptance of the cost and ultimate responsibility on May 3rd ( http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/05/gulf-oil-spill-bp-accepts-responsibility-for-oil-cleanup.html).

Sarah Palin was criticizing Obama and blaming environmetalists for the spill in late May; the National Republican Council had an attack ad against Obama airing by May 27th ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVehAAwh0gY ) and Bobby Jindal was calling for an overturn of the moratorium on offshore drilling by mid-June.

Also, BP USA is really an amalgam of several major companies, most home grown, including Amoco, Arco, Veco, Castrol and has tight relations with Halliburton, Kellogg_Brown_&_Root, etc. One other factor that probably made BP look bad was MSNBC ( Rachel Maddow ), in late May ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo ) reviving a story from June 1979, showing that techniques hadn't changed in 30 years, drawing several unfortunate but accurate links to both stories, including that one company that was involved wad Sedco, which later became TransOcean.

Interestingly enough, California is a right to work state, and yet we have one of the most pernicious and overpaid prison guards' unions in the entire country. It's to the point now where there are over 100,000 applicants every year for new prison guards, for less than 300 openings each year, because the job pays better than most graduate degrees after only a few years on the job and requires only a 3 month training course with no higher prerequisite qualification than a high school diploma. For example, the highest paid employee in the State of California is a prison surgeon who earns over $700,000 per year. There's just one problem; he's so incompetent that he lost his license to actually perform surgeries due to malpractice. But that's not even the best part. They cannot fire this guy because the employment review board (ever heard of one of those in the private sector?) says that while his medical skills are poor, he wasn't negligent so they have to keep him on so that he can shuffle papers (he doesn't even see patients anymore). It's insane, but hey that's California for you.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hollywood-rave-riot-20110729,0,1592465.story

"Its not. It costs $6 just to rent a single movie and their free movies are lame. "

VUDU is the same. You can only rent movies to stream, unlike netflix where you pay once a month for all-you-can-eat. And VUDU has been around for 4 years. Yes, FOUR, and it hasn't gone mainstream yet, while Netflix is everywhere.

And VUDU wants 99 cents to $5.99. Come on, $5.99 is about what I pay Netflix for the month, and you want me to give you that for just one movie? No thanks, not when I have redbox down the street with $1 DVDs and $2 games.

if you can't figure out that the iPhones are pretty high-quality pieces of engineering.

The success of the iPhone had absolutely nothing to do with quality. Hell, the first one couldn't even manage picture messaging (MMS). How long did it take to get copy and paste on that so-called smartphone?

This is to say nothing of the astonishingly poor battery life that plagued the thing at least until the iPhone 4.

The iPhones success is a complete mystery to me. How did the crumbiest phone on the market gain such impressive market share?

No they would be the first company to reach a trillion dollar valuation. That title goes to PetroChina which did it in 2007. When doing a Google search it it looks like lots of people think apple may reach a trillion dollar valuation, but how much of that would be speculation (like it was for PetroChina) and how much would be blind faith (the apple fanboi).

"Operation Fast and Furious"

(Reuters) - U.S. firearms agents told lawmakers on Wednesday they were instructed to only watch as hundreds of guns were bought, illegally resold and sent to Mexico where drug-related violence has raged for years.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/15/us-usa-mexico-guns-idUSTRE75E49N20110615

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been accused of allowing guns to slip across the border and fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

The allegations made by senior agent John Dodson came after it was discovered that the gun used to kill a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Mexico was first bought in a Dallas, Texas store.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1363293/U-S-Justice-Department-ordered-ATF-allow-guns-cross-border-Mexico-used-kill-American-agents.html

The investigation into a federal operation that allowed Mexican drug cartels to acquire U.S. weapons escalated Thursday with new revelations that an Arizona gun dealer repeatedly expressed fears that his guns were falling into the "hands of the bad guys" but was encouraged by federal agents to continue the sales.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/15/nation/la-na-guns-20110415

The US has a special class of victim, called a 'citizen'.

Yeah. This was more a case of "You idiot prosecutor, the law you charged them under has nothing to do with this case and is completely inapplicable. Oh, and by the way, we don't agree with the trumped-up 'resisting arrest' bullshit you tried to tag on either."

From comparison of experiences of numerous acquiantances, friends, co-workers, and family who have ever dealt with police, "resisting arrest" is a bullshit charge they throw in just to punish people for bothering to assert their right to trial instead of plea-bargaining guilty.

The plea bargain system is about forcing the innocent to plead guilty, nothing else.

We know from other data that music sales (http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2) and DVD/BlueRay sales (*see below) are down. When adjusted for inflation and population growth, Box office revenues are down around 15% compared to 10 years ago.

It's also worth pointing out that saying, "pirates buy more than the average consumer" is not actually an argument for piracy, since pirates tend to be disproportionately from a class of people who were originally big fans. Thus, it's possible that "big fans" who start using piracy end up buying 1/2 as much as they used to, but still out-buy the "average consumer" who was never all that interested. (For example, I don't pirate and I own zero DVDs or BluRay disks, which makes it easy for pirates to buy more than me.)

* "Total revenue from DVD, Blu-ray and digital sales and rentals of movies and television shows in the U.S. declined 3% to $18.8 billion in 2010, according to new data from industry trade organization Digital Entertainment Group. Although the drops, particularly of DVD sales, are worrisome for the entertainment industry, studio executives can at least take some comfort in the fact that the picture isn't worsening as quickly as it did in 2009, when total home entertainment revenue plunged 7.6%."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/01/home-entertainment-market-shrinking-slower-as-blu-ray-and-digital-make-up-for-more-of-dvd-decline.html

So 9 should be awesome and an entirely new recording medium will have its size determined by its ability to hold one copy.
CD ~700 MB ~74 minutes @44.1 kHz 16bit =The Choral Symphony (see http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fiw-sony-ohga-20110423,0,590843.story)
___ ~ X GB = Windows 9

You think people do this on purpose?

Why, yes, I do.
http://californiabicycleracing.blogspot.com/2008/07/this-is-what-doctor-christopher.html (warning, NSFW).

And the verdict:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/cyclist-sentenced.html

You know, I've heard that story many times. It comes up every time the Gates Foundation is mentioned on /. But I have yet to see an actual reputable citation supporting the claim that this supposed requirement actually exists. The Gates Foundation Wikipedia article doesn't mention it under its "Criticism" section. I looked at the Economist articles on the Gates Foundation and don't see the article you describe. The closest thing I could find was this article in the L.A. times, which criticizes some of the Gates Foundation's investments.

The only stuff I can find on the Gates Foundation and IP at all seems to indicate that their only concern with IP is with the rights of the local researchers that they give grants (they generally are required to publicly publish their results). And nowhere have I seen any mention of a requirement that a country that gets a grant has to sign the WIPO treaty (or any other treaty).

I just saw an article pointing out an effort in Texas to go around this light bulb efficiency mandate by producing and selling the bulbs within the state.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-adv-texas-light-bulbs-20110710,0,4858840.story

I believe this has merit. This is the same argument to allow medicinal marijuana in California, and avoid firearm controls and taxes in Montana. The federal government is only empowered to regulate commerce among the states, not within them. If the lamps never enter or leave the state then the federal government has no jurisdiction.

Anything that moves backwards happens in Texas.

I just saw an article pointing out an effort in Texas to go around this light bulb efficiency mandate by producing and selling the bulbs within the state.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-adv-texas-light-bulbs-20110710,0,4858840.story

I believe this has merit. This is the same argument to allow medicinal marijuana in California, and avoid firearm controls and taxes in Montana. The federal government is only empowered to regulate commerce among the states, not within them. If the lamps never enter or leave the state then the federal government has no jurisdiction.