Slashdot Mirror

Dman.. I thought it was a joke
http://www.freep.com/article/20090625/ENT07/90625070/L.A.+Times++Superstar+Michael+Jackson+dead

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31552029/ns/entertainment-music/

I've never been impressed by the argument that 'I can't think why we need this (standard) security measure, so let's drop it.' It usually indicates a lack of imagination of the speaker. But in this case, does usability outweigh security?"

In counterpoint, I've never been impressed by the argument that "It's a standard security measure that everyone does." It usually indicates a lack of critical thinking of the speaker.

For a specific example, passwords that expire after a certain time period. Especially those that expire after, say, the windows standard period of 42 days, and start reminding you that it's going to expire fourteen days prior to the actual expiration. This means you only get 28 days of nag-free logins. After which, you have to dismiss an additional modal dialog before you can log in and begin working. Not to mention that for the first few days to a week after you've been forced to increment the number on the end of your password as you do every 42 days, you invariably enter it wrong the first few times, often locking yourself out, and necessitate additional work from the IT guys and lost time by the users.

Another example is those absurd legal disclaimers at the end of emails that apparently carry little legal weight, if any.

Microsoft Vista buyers to get free Windows 7

SEATTLE - Microsoft said Thursday that prices for the Windows 7 computer operating system are largely in line with those for Vista, and that people who buy PCs before the new system goes on sale in October will get free upgrades.

To drum up demand among people who aren't in the market for a new PC, Microsoft also said it is taking limited pre-orders for Windows 7, selling some for as little as $50.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

People who buy Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate computers starting Friday can contact their manufacturer for a free upgrade when Windows 7 becomes available on Oct. 22.

Are these similar to the methane geysers which were found recently to shoot out of Uranus ?

That would explain the rings.

For specific kinds of applications, yes, there is demand. DARPA is interested in this, because electronics use, and there fore electricity use, by the military has expanded tremendously, even in remote locations. A diesel generator has to receive a constant supply of fuel. This is very expensive and inconvenient on the top of a mountain in Afghanistan. A solar power receiving station doesn't. The power supply is invulnerable to attack. The receiving station doesn't make constant noise. In such contexts, power delivered at rates an order of magnitude higher than commercial generation is very competitive.

Invulnerable, huh?

1. If this story is true, he apparently received a liver instead of somebody else who was a better candidate (in the sense of a better prognosis). That is, in expectation (actuarially), his actions took years from somebody's life.
2. Most of us with health coverage and some money will, at some point, receive some expensive treatment where the money could have instead been used to provide more basic, life-saving treatment to several poor people. Especially if you re-consider this analysis on a global basis, given that people in Africa die every day die from want of a few dollars in health care, or even clean water.
3. Due to Jobs ingenuity and force of will, the economy is probably larger than it would otherwise be by a few billion dollars, with some fraction of that (i.e. hundreds of millions of dollars) providing thousands of hard-working nerds and their families with money for life-saving health care services.
4. Distrust in the equity of organ distribution may decrease the number of donors. Some people won't like the thought that their organs are most likely to live on in rich old white guys with short life expectancies who clawed their way to the front of the line like aristocrats boarding lifeboats at the sinking of the Titanic (whether or not that is a myth).

The asshole "moved" to Tennessee to jump into a different organ transplant queue: 295 vs 1,615 people, and a wait of 48 days vs 306. Not only that, but there are no rules against entering multiple programs- so basically, you could enter every transplant program that would take you (and that you could afford), and virtually guarantee yourself an organ.

MSNBC did a nice job of putting all the facts together. In short: he had a complicating illness that normally would have ruled him out, he had the money to guarantee admittance into transplant program (whereas normal mere mortals are often denied coverage by their insurance companies, and cannot afford the 200K cost).

Oh yeah, and Apple lied to investors and the world: the man had cancer and a failing organ, and they claimed it was a "hormone imbalance." I hope the SEC is already working on this...

Don't you just love kneejerk investors?

I bet some people with inside knowledge made some decent cash on this.

But then, like Macgrrl, I wouldn't trust a guy that he was on 'the pill' either unless I was living with him and thus knew for sure that he 1) had a prescription and 2) was taking it appropriately (or, y'know, was getting shots every few months to stay nice and sterile). A friend of mine found herself in the stereotypical situation where her boyfriend got her pregnant shortly after she started college, and then the guy suddenly skipped town. Quite a winner.

My fiance hasn't voiced any complaints about condoms since we started using a specialty brand. If you're not just grabbing a box of Trojan Magnums to impress the hot girl at the checkout, or quickly throwing some random box into the shopping cart and covering it with a pair of boxers so people don't see you hanging around in the pharmacy department reading the backs of condom boxes, you might actually have better luck finding condoms that you can deal with. Hell, try buying online. Places like condomdepot.com also have sampler packs.

Kodak quits Better Business Bureau council

...Kodak has long refused to accept or respond to consumer complaints submitted by the Upstate New York Better Business Bureau, prompting expulsion proceedings in December [2006] by the council's board...

"Every member of the BBB system is required to make a good-faith effort to resolve consumer complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau,"...

Kodak was advised it could contest the termination but chose instead to resign its national membership in early March. ...

"We've had companies kind of come and go," said the council's spokesman, Stephen Cox. "But in terms of those founding members, Kodak is the first to have expulsion proceedings initiated."

They were accredited, they were reviewed because of the number of complaints the BBB received, and their BBB rating was dropped to "unsatisfactory" before Kodak left the BBB in March 2007. Regarding "Lots of companies are guilty of that crap these days": yes, lots, but few to the degree required to get out of good graces with the BBB, and most companies would at least attempt to clean up their act when the BBB reviews them.

They were:

Kodak quits Better Business Bureau council

Eastman Kodak resigned its membership in the Council of Better Business Bureaus after a prolonged dispute over its handling of customer complaints about defective digital cameras, product warranties and other issues

[...]

It said Kodak has long refused to accept or respond to consumer complaints submitted by the Upstate New York Better Business Bureau, prompting expulsion proceedings in December [2006] by the council's board.

"Every member of the BBB system is required to make a good-faith effort to resolve consumer complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau,"

[...]

Kodak was advised it could contest the termination but chose instead to resign its national membership in early March [2007].

The average aids patient in the US will spend $600k on treatment throughout their lifetime. Assuming the aids infection rate in the US is 50k people per year, that's $30 billion dollars per year being lost to HIV related medical expenses. If this study comes up with some general guidelines that encourage a mere tenth of a percent more people to wear condoms, that's still preventing 50 cases of aids in the US each year. That's a potential savings of 30 million dollars per year on a one-time fixed cost one mid-sized mining truck. That's a 75x ROI in the first year alone.

Heck, if ONE PERSON avoids getting aids due to wearing a condom after reading this slashdot article, the program has recouped. And that's just in raw drugs cost alone, let alone lost work hours / family troubles, giving it to other people, etc. HIV is so hugely expensive that anything we can do to reduce infection rate is basically worth it against our bottom line.

Not to mention the fairly recently demonstrated satellite killing ability on the part of the Chinese.. seems that keeping the location of new satellites secret for as long as possible would be a nice idea.

and I don't think I've seen any statistic that showed Obama getting a lot more media coverage than McCain

Time and Newsweek, for example. (Speaking of 2008)
"Obama's face or name has somehow made it onto the cover of Time just about half of the time this year (25 out of 52 issues -- 48%)
Newsweek has had 49 issues this year so far (through Dec. 22), so Obama has been featured on about a quarter of its covers as well."

"...the Republican nominee, John McCain, made the cover of Newsweek just four times the entire year, and twice he shared it -- once with Obama and once with Sarah Palin"

The iPhone is definitely -not- reasonably priced. Last year's was $600 or $700 ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25478296/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/ ) and this years is $800 ( http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/06/15/rogers-fido-no-contract-iphone-3g-s-pricing-revealed-eh/ ). That's not -reasonable- at all.

The G1 is about $450 outright, which is still too high to be called 'reasonable', but it's a lot closer.

These new toys are expensive. Period.

Well, clearly not getting second place in a state's presidential primary, as when that happened (Nevada) all of the news reports read "Romney first, McCain third", not mentioning the "Paul second" part anywhere. I agree Ron Paul had no chance of winning, but he got even less coverage than the others who had even less chance of winning.

Maybe because your story isn't true?

I just Googled Nevada GOP Primary. Clicked the first news story http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22739349/

Headline is:
Clinton, Romney win in Nevada
Texas' Paul to finish second in state's GOP caucuses

They don't talk much about Ron Paul in the story. Probably because he got the same number of caucus seats as McCain. So although McCain got third he actually in effect tied for second. And since Ron Paul was currently polling in the low single digits there was no reason to believe it was anything other than a fluke in an unimportant caucus won by the guy who came in third place in the end anyway. And take one look at Rudy Giuliani. If the media was to be believed then he was a shoe in. So if Huckabee could go from obscure to competitive second then there is no reason Ron Paul couldn't have as well despite minimal media coverage. The simple fact of the matter is most people think Ron Paul is a nut job because he advocates things they don't believe in nor want to vote for.

California is seriously considering shutting down the vast majority of its state parks to reconcile its budget surplus.

I think you mean budget deficit But if they're having trouble dealing with a surplus then I'd be happy to do my part and take some of that extra cash off their hands. :)

California is seriously considering shutting down the vast majority of its state parks to reconcile its budget surplus.

(To give an idea of how bad things are, it's been proven in unambiguous terms that the parks make money for the state and surrounding businesses)

Personally I am checking The Guardian and BBC News, CNN.com (which I agree is pretty horrible),MSNBC, The Independent, Wikinews, The Daily Beast (and Slashdot of course) and some random ones. I'd be interested to know which sources people are using to get news about the situation in Iran, or for that matter other international events of interest. Also I find it helpful to try to read around to get news and articles from different perspectives and not rely too heavily on one single source.

This has been done before. During the Cold War, in order to disrupt the Soviet economy and serve them some comeuppance for their industrial espionage activities, the CIA, in partnership with American Technology companies ensured that hardware and software with carefully arranged "flaws" found its way into Soviet hands. In one particular instance a "flawed" natural gas pipeline software and associated hardware went "haywire" (i.e. it ran the ultra-high pressure test) after a planned period of normal operation. The result was the largest non-nuclear man-made explosion ever seen from space (the satellites designed to detect plumes from ICBM launches detected a tremendous flash from the area near Vladivostok where the pipeline in question was located). This article covers some of the details excerpted from the book At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War as recalled by Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time.

Perhaps, but this activity is the kind of thing Apple used as reason to not allow users their software freedom with their own phone. Around the time of the iPhone's introduction Steve Jobs told Newsweek:

"You don't want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

Leaving one to wonder about that other network called the Internet. Even when viewed only from a security standpoint, this was a tall order to fill. It appears that Apple has failed to fill it.

I've heard they overheat and cause solder joints to fail.

http://video.msn.com/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18924679/
Dunno why facts are rated troll, I guess if inciting someone to react by delivering unwelcome news counts as trolling.

    Let me rephrase my previous response.

    Hurricanes happen a lot. Category 5 hurricanes happen enough to make it a concern.

    Volcano's erupt ... umm ... Well, the last major eruption in the US was Mt. St. Helens in 1980, and there haven't been any major eruptions in the last decade.

      Compare that to 8 Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic in the last decade.

    Or we could look at a longer time span. 14 major volcanic eruptions world wide in the last century. There were at least 32 Category 5 North Atlantic hurricanes and 12 Category 5 Pacific Cyclones in the last century, but there may have been more that were not detected since our technology wasn't good enough to detect them.

    The list of total hurricanes is really long. Long enough where I couldn't find a straight list of them. Just looking at hurricanes that hit Florida there have been 327 in the last century.

    We kind of joke about some of them though. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between a regular afternoon thunderstorm, tropical depression, tropical storm, or category 1 or 2 hurricane, without a proper weather forecast. We can have storms that knock down trees that are just thunderstorms. There was a thunderstorm not too long ago that induced tornados that destroyed several homes. Here's an example from 2007, where a building collapsed, and several vehicles were overturned. Here's another example from 2006 of approx 100 homes damaged, 15 condemned after the storm. Both of these are NOT tropical weather formation related.

    They broadcast warnings on all stations on the radio and TV (that pesky EAS thing) to let people know to seek shelter. I used to have a neat add-on on my old work cell phone that would beep at me and show me the text and map of dangerous weather. We were out shopping a few years ago, and as it turned out a tornado was headed directly towards us. We got went inside a safe building, and they advised all customers to get to the back of the store, just in case. No panic. No "oh my god, it's the end of the world", just get back where it's safe, away from the windows. The tornado dissipated before it reached us, but there were power lines down, and trees thrown across roads.

    Let me rephrase my previous response.

    Hurricanes happen a lot. Category 5 hurricanes happen enough to make it a concern.

    Volcano's erupt ... umm ... Well, the last major eruption in the US was Mt. St. Helens in 1980, and there haven't been any major eruptions in the last decade.

      Compare that to 8 Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic in the last decade.

    Or we could look at a longer time span. 14 major volcanic eruptions world wide in the last century. There were at least 32 Category 5 North Atlantic hurricanes and 12 Category 5 Pacific Cyclones in the last century, but there may have been more that were not detected since our technology wasn't good enough to detect them.

    The list of total hurricanes is really long. Long enough where I couldn't find a straight list of them. Just looking at hurricanes that hit Florida there have been 327 in the last century.

    We kind of joke about some of them though. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between a regular afternoon thunderstorm, tropical depression, tropical storm, or category 1 or 2 hurricane, without a proper weather forecast. We can have storms that knock down trees that are just thunderstorms. There was a thunderstorm not too long ago that induced tornados that destroyed several homes. Here's an example from 2007, where a building collapsed, and several vehicles were overturned. Here's another example from 2006 of approx 100 homes damaged, 15 condemned after the storm. Both of these are NOT tropical weather formation related.

    They broadcast warnings on all stations on the radio and TV (that pesky EAS thing) to let people know to seek shelter. I used to have a neat add-on on my old work cell phone that would beep at me and show me the text and map of dangerous weather. We were out shopping a few years ago, and as it turned out a tornado was headed directly towards us. We got went inside a safe building, and they advised all customers to get to the back of the store, just in case. No panic. No "oh my god, it's the end of the world", just get back where it's safe, away from the windows. The tornado dissipated before it reached us, but there were power lines down, and trees thrown across roads.

My friend's mother got cancer. They tried all sorts of "natural" treatments. By the time they were willing to give up and try real medicine it was too late and she died.

This, and what you wrote, are known as anecdotes. They are known to be very poor for generating actual knowledge that is likely to be correct. Something called data is known to do this convincingly, and to provable confidence levels.

Data indicates that doctors are not worse than useless, but osteopaths may very likely be.

Better to be on that list than this one.

Yea, that's why we called it "swine flu" even through it wasn't present in swine at the time (or, from what I read, transmittable by ingestion). After all, it's not like it could possibly cause a baseless backlash against the pork industry.

Most online gambling might be an outright lie. But in the case of online poker, the house took a rake, just like in the real casino. In fact, I managed to even cash out a few winnings before I lost interest, and then it became illegal. It was *possible* for the online casino to have a ringer that got stacked decks... But I seriously doubt that any of the mainstream sites would use that tactic especially since there was...

You mean something like this?

There's a difference between what they're "allowed to access" and what's admissible in court once they've seen it. The techs aren't the government--things they've seen don't automatically get excluded because they shouldn't have seen them.

Guess what? No more Fourth Amendment. No, really.

If a private citizen breaks into my house and sees something illegal, they can usually alert the cops and have knowledge of that thing be admitted in court, even though they themselves can still be prosecuted for trespassing and breaking and entering.

If a private citizen breaks into my house and sees something illegal, they can place you under citizen's arrest which for you is legally equivalent to being arrested by a police officer, even though they themselves can still be prosecuted for trespassing and breaking and entering. There, fixed that for you.

The difference in an arrest between a cop and an citizen is that a) the citizen is usually assumed to be a jackass in court, because the system hates competition and b) a cop can arrest you on the suspicion of a misdemeanor whereas a citizen has to see you commit it but may still arrest you on the suspicion of a felony. (This is how it works in California; I would guess that it would be similar most places, but I certainly wouldn't take it as legal advice in any state. I learned when I was becoming a security guard, something I'm glad I don't do any more. And the most dangerous things I ever had to patrol were the Santa Cruz bus station, and mental health offices.)

No, extragalactic is a specific term that means outside of OUR galaxy, not outside of any galaxy.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extragalactic
http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/extragalactic.html
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/extragalactic
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/extragalactic
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/extragalactic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extragalactic_astronomy

And why cats?

Quite. The Chinese eat cats.

It's fragile, underpowered and heavy, with crap axle articulation

Consumer Reports and Edmunds both seem to think you are full of crap in your analysis of its offroad abilities. Furthermore how you can call a vehicle with nearly 400HP underpowered strikes me as bizarre, even as heavy as it is. I've ridden in one myself on an offroad test track and it was impressive - though I'd never buy one in a million years. Perhaps you are referring to the H3 which was supposedly designed primarily for urban use and might actually be underpowered?

There is plenty to complain about with Hummers but please criticize the right things.

...in China. Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co doesn't really care about the lowering demand for SUV's in the United States. They have an emerging middle class that just loves American cars. Remember, a national market does not get any bigger than the Chinese market.

Goodness...how did we EVER survive as a species before cell phones and GPS trackers??!?!

When I was a kid, I roamed all over the neighborhood, and ones near us.

You're certainly not the first to notice this. Where the great-grandfather traveled MILES as a kid, the grandfather traveled no more than a mile, the father never went off his street, and now his son isn't allowed off the lawn.

This article's a year old, but it's still really relevant. Would this have been newsworthy a few generations ago? Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone.

" I would like input on a way to be able to keep track of my child."

no one uses google now days....

First, your child doesn't need GPS, she needs a cellphone. Why? Because even if you had this magical GPS tracking/locating system you want, there would still be some kind of data communication needed between the child and the laptop. That requires data usage or cellphone usage, so either way you're paying a monthly fee.

Google child cellphone and the very first result is Best cell phone for kids. In it, it says:
"Migo is made to use Verizon's optional Chaperon service that lets parents track the phone in real time on their handset or PC. For an additional charge, parents can set up boundaries for where the child can go. If the phone leaves the designated area, a text message alert will be sent to the parent's phone. (Only certain adult handsets are capable of using this service.)"

So you have the GPS tracking you wanted, plus your child has a cellphone so you can reach them if they're indoors and GPS isn't working so hot, AND you have the added feature you didn't even know you wanted: a text message the instant your child leaves a designated area. Not only that but it all works through your cellphone, so anytime you can't find your kid forget about going "Gee, I forgot to bring the GPS locator handheld with me". It's already setup on your cellphone.

Oh and sure, all this will cost you a few bucks, but I'm sure it won't cost more than a custom handheld locater and a small unobtrusive device to attach to your daughter and and creating a secure website on your own.

Tiananmen Square is very much ongoing for China. Zhao Ziyang - who was effectively the Chinese Gorbachev - was planning to liberalise Chinese society substantially. Students were demonstrating peacefully. A handful of hardliners used the army to crush the students, illegally deposed Zhao and have turned China into a vicious police state where old ladies get sent for reeducation camps for requesting permission to complain that developers have kicked them out of their houses. Before Tiananmen most people thought that China would liberalise just like Eastern Europe. After there was no chance of that. All the tensions with Taiwan and Japan greatly intensified following Tiananmen. It was a coup, plain and simple and a noticably fascist regime took over from a much more liberal one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15zhao-transcript.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

Based on this, we can say that if a country wishes to modernize, not only should it implement a market economy, it must also adopt a parliamentary democracy as its political system. Otherwise, this nation will not be able to have a market economy that is healthy and modern, nor can it become a modern society with a rule of law. Instead it will run into the situations that have occurred in so many developing countries, including China: commercialization of power, rampant corruption, a society polarized between rich and poor.

Zhao Ziyang, RIP.

More to the point one year after Tiananmen similar demonstrations broke out in Taiwan, which was at that point a one party state and effectively a mirror image on China where the KMT was the ruling party instead of the CCP. President Lee Teng Hui met the students and agreed to their demands for free elections, which he proceeded to win until he run into newly reintroduced term limits. Now Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and China isn't.

If it hadn't been for Tiananmen I'm quite sure China would have gone the same way. I also think Lee Teng Hui and Zhao Ziyang would have been able to negotiate some sort of way for Taiwan and China to coexist. Reading Zhao's book, the similarities with LTH seem quite striking. I think they would have got on pretty well.

You should read his book
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_the_State:_The_Secret_Journal_of_Premier_Zhao_Ziyang

I bought the English edition in Taiwan. I had to reserve a copy because it had sold out in both Chinese and English. I'm told the Chinese edition has sold out in Hong Kong. Inevitably it's been scanned as a pdf and is circulating on the internet inside China where equally inevitably it has been banned. A great injustice happened to the Chinese people at Tiananmen and has continued in the years since. While most people are scared to talk about it, it most certainly has not been forgotten.

The French oil company Total racked up 13 billions of profit last year. That is an interesting comparison.

However, I think that ITER (that is not btw a French effort but a real international cooperation including EU, US, Japan and others) suffers from very poor management : it took them almost 5 years to decide where they would build the prototype. I wouldn't be surprised if most of their time was wasted in bikeshed discussions.

My bets are safer put on the Chinese fusion reactor project

Praiseworthy? You been watchin' too much Oprah, Willis!

Look, his "philanthropy" is just more oligarchal, social and economic control for an elite agenda.

"They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming."

Why all the secrecy? "They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece

He's also a Bilderberger. He wants to turn mosquitoes into flying syringes - to inject folks with agents that serve the "Overpopulation" agenda.

Overpopulation? That's your children, mate. The world can sustain 10,000 ordinary mortals for the same resources that support Gate's own two children.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=7628545&page=1

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30851839/

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05202009/news/regionalnews/worlds_richest_hold_secret_meeting_170193.htm

Watch Goodman on the agenda of the BMGF
http://www.snapbuzz.com/view/video/6051/

My cynicism knows no bounds, which gives me to think what the Democratic response to this might have been if a Bush Administration official had proposed it. I'm betting something to the tune of, "Oh those damned Republicans they want to use band-aid technological fixes so they can go on driving their SUVs over baby polar bears for another ten years!"

To be fair, Bush did create the world's largest oceanic preserve and was universally lauded for it. Personally, I think Bush is a war criminal, but at least he did something right.

This would still seem unlikely, no site that I'm aware of will send opps' hole cards to your client until the hand is over. And in the case of Pstars, they use ssh for client comms so hopefully that's pretty unbreakable...

You're likely right. Here's an example of what I was referring to. The story is sketchy on specifics (it's MSNBC), but it appears he had or was inside help.

Anyway, my overall point was that cheating by technical means is another dimension, though it occurs to me now that it's a dimension in face-to-face play, too ;-)

Except for apparently about the only way the steel is worth more than the cost of disassembly is when you send it to India. And then you get stuff like this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13443629/

Where they pay a bunch of workers the bare minimum to wade through the asbestos and other chemicals, risking fire and falling, and leave the leftovers on the beach. I'm not sure the environmental and human cost of these operations makes the energy savings for the steel really pay off.

Of course, I'm all for finding better ways to scrap ships, but the cost of steel right now is low enough there isn't a ton of a market.

Anecdotal evidence time: My family's panasonic microwave that we bought around 1986 or so has only just recently been replaced, and not because it broke down, it just wasn't heating quite as quickly as my mother liked so she decided to replace it. The cheap piece of crap she replaced it with will probably last five years and need to be trashed. Planned obsolescense is, sadly, very real and part of the same Wall Street culture that gave you the current financial crisis, the real estate boom, the S&L scandal, and the dot com crash. There is a good article here that I highly recommend about the practice and how it is being pushed not just by the manufacturers but also by the retailers. You can get another piece of the puzzle here, in an article about how the CEO of CostCo resists pressure from Wal Street (you know, that was a typo but I decided to leave it... shit, now I'm going to have to fire up the gimp when I'm done posting this comment) to drive "growth" at the expense of his employees or the quality of the store (not that CostCo is perfect by any means, still a good article and worth a read though).

Michael Chertoff as The Necromancer would be great...

>and 'justice' moves at a snail's pace.

To put this in perspective, the court backlog in India may exceed 450 years. There are dozens of cases that have been in the court system for 20 years or more, and one that has been running since the 1870's.

Since the average court case in India is dealt with in under 5 minutes, I suspect their courts are a lot more crowded than ours, as well.

Why do people still think knives are instruments of beauty? Can you show me anyone who looked better one year after their surgery than they did before?

Yes:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30586321/

That's beyond beauty, though. I bet she also can breathe better now and otherwise physically function better. I think what most people are talking about with reconstructive surgery are the people who do it that are obsessed with having the D-cup boobs or whatever.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14723718/

Would you pay attention to MSNBC?

HEADLINE: Armitage leak admission creates new questions

By the way you should be asking yourself if you were incorrect on this issue just how many other issues are you relying on your feelings about the issue rather than the facts.

I'll pick a few here:

Teh GAYS are coming to steal yer marriages!!!!11

Never heard this from a Republican

You are a liar. Bush's "re-election" (his first actual election) was won primarily because they snuck so many anti-equality laws on the ballots. The bigoted wingnuts came out of the woodwork and voted for Bush while they were there.

We're the party of fiscal responsibility!

I would have agreed with this last year. But since the current party has tripled the deficit, it turns out that it's true!

Yes, I am absolutely certain that Obama, in 100 days, managed to triple the deficit, compared to 8 years of Bush spending like a drunken frat boy.

I totally believe that, because, apparently, I am an idiot.

They're not prisoners of war, so the Geneva Convention doesn't apply!

Were any of these guys wearing a uniform? No? then the Geneva Convention does not apply. Why is this so hard to understand?

Because I have a soul, and the idea of shoving flashlights up little kid's asses in front of the kid's mother is abhorrent to me.

Oh, and here's a POW being waterboarded:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-13/cheneys-role-deepens/

Iraq had something, anything to do with 9/11!

I have never heard a Republican say this, yet it keeps getting repeated over and over as if it's true. And what do you know, many of the exceedingly ignorant and borderline retarded believe it.

Liar.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3119676.stm

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/21/bush-on-911/
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/bush-team-peddles-911-iraq-link-torture
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/lieberman-peddles-the-old_b_77198.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10164478
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00247.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0321-02.htm

Not only that, it turns out we were torturing people to death and shoving flashlights up children's bums specifically to try and GET a fake link between Iraq and 9/11. Whoops!

Why do people still think knives are instruments of beauty? Can you show me anyone who looked better one year after their surgery than they did before?

Yes:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30586321/