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There's an interesting piece on the rise of cesarian section delivery written by New Yorker staff writer and active surgeon Atul Gawande, where he claims and shows evidence that c-section replaced forceps delivery because forceps delivery required experience, skill, and physical dexterity, while c-section could be taught by rote, essentially. His underlying thesis is that a mass-production system of doctoring means everyone will get basically the same level of quality of care, rather than having some superstars and some real duds. But in the meantime, it's become so routine, and so highly practiced, that it's rapidly approaching parity with natural childbirth, as regards complications to mother and child, and he thinks at some point it'll be considered the default method for childbirth.

I'm betting you're an American.
You should read about Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia some time.
Here's an interesting article detailing what's happening throughout those areas: women are hired in country A, by agents from country B, who tell the women that they're going to country C to be housekeepers, maids, or work in manufacturing jobs. Once they leave their country -- and often, pay for the ticket -- their passports are taken and they've become illegal aliens who are enslaved, for all practical purposes. The local police are involved, so that doesn't do them any good, and they're physically prevented from going to their embassies, who don't seem to have any interest in helping poor women, anyway.

The current estimates range between half a million and four million women being held this way. I have no idea how accurate that is, but as such, I don't think it's anything like a gross exaggeration to make the claim that involuntary prostitution is real.

In January 2009, a Sri Lankan newspaper editor and journalist, Lasantha Wickramatunga, had an essay posthumously published in his paper. It accused the government and prime minister (a friend of 25 years) of being involved in his assassination.
Context and original essay included in this New Yorker article.

Yet another falsehood from the right. The Ford Ranger was hugely profitable, despite labor costs. The smaller cars that were produced by Honda and Toyota faced labor costs very close to that of American car companies. Yet they were very profitable -- and the difference in profit was greater than the difference in labor costs.

No, you're just simplifying it to union = labor = wages. The main damage of the unions, and the complicit management, was the extensive health care, retirement and unemployment benefits. Those are "labor" costs where there is no more labor involved.

In 1962, G.M. had four hundred and sixty-four thousand U.S. employees and was paying benefits to forty thousand retirees and their spouses, for a dependency ratio of one pensioner to 11.6 employees. In 2005, it had a hundred and forty-one thousand workers and paid benefits to four hundred and fifty-three thousand retirees, for a dependency ratio of 3.2 to 1. Toyota America, however, had a mere 258 retirees to support in 2005.

In 2005, the average cost of health insurance for an employee between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine is $3,759 a year, and for someone between the ages of sixty and sixty-four it is $7,622. This goes a long way toward explaining why G.M. has an estimated sixty-two billion dollars in health-care liabilities.

Read The Risk Pool by Malcom Gladwell, published in The New Yorker in 2006 for an excellent explanation of the dependency ratio and how it was/is/will be one of the major factors in world economics.

actually, europeans outpaced america there some time ago, sorry.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact

Your halfwitted social structure is to blame, basically. Unfortunately this very article is about partially-successful attempts to impose your corporate idiocy on europe in an attempt to drag us down to your level.

Fuck copyright law, fuck patent law.

There's an interesting book review in the New Yorker which discusses journalistic integrity/objectivity in the US (specifically in the newspaper business) and how it is a relatively recent thing (ie. the post-war decades).

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/04/13/090413crbo_books_lemann

The jist of things is that for most of the history of newspapers in the US, journalistic integrity was a laugh. Starting post-WW2 and arguably hitting it's peak in the 60s and 70s journalism was held to a higher standard, but prior to that in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer back to very beginnings of journalism in the US, newspapers were purely the tools of politicians (or political movements) and there was no such thing as unbiased sources of news. The rise of Murdoch and those like him is in a way a return to the kind of smarmy opinionated journalism that was the norm before Bernard Kilgore, Edward R Murrow, Walter Cronkite, etal.

I think the advent of televised news gave those that were initially involved in it a sense of the nobility of their work that was by and large lacking from previous eras of journalism, but those ideas didn't last more than a decade or two before the networks started to demand more profit generation from their news divisions. In the movie *Network (1976) televised news divisions are seen to be in decline already in the 70s.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/
*(this film is awesome BTW, and predicts in hillarious fashion "reality TV" decades beforehand)

It's kind of sad that things are sliding back towards what are apparently the old/normal ways of journalism, but sensationalist journalism is certainly nothing new.

Much like your post. We're "soft" "cream puffs". Get over yourself. There's a lot we don't understand about human psychology, but I'm sure there's an unpleasant reason why they use non-stop loud music. I'm willing to believe that the long-term consequences of months of non-stop noise can be worse than those from twenty minutes of simulated drowning.

consider this new yorker piece:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

basically, this poor woman's condition has bolstered neurologists rethinking of the itch sensation as something completely unrelated to pain. she had an incredibly rare "phantom itch". how disabling was it? she scratched THROUGH HER SKULL, until she was scratching brain matter

she survived, in a debilitated condition, but she did better than her roommate, who, with a similar phantom itch, scratched through to his carotid, and killed himself

read, for an especially horrifying insight into what its like to live with a phantom itch:

"But I was desperate," M. told me. She let them operate on her, slicing the supraorbital nerve above the right eye. When she woke up, a whole section of her forehead was numb--and the itching was gone. A few weeks later, however, it came back, in an even wider expanse than before. The doctors tried pain medications, more psychiatric medications, more local anesthetic. But the only thing that kept M. from tearing her skin and skull open again, the doctors found, was to put a foam football helmet on her head and bind her wrists to the bedrails at night.

She spent the next two years committed to a locked medical ward in a rehabilitation hospital--because, although she was not mentally ill, she was considered a danger to herself. Eventually, the staff worked out a solution that did not require binding her to the bedrails. Along with the football helmet, she had to wear white mitts that were secured around her wrists by surgical tape. "Every bedtime, it looked like they were dressing me up for Halloween--me and the guy next to me," she told me.

"The guy next to you?" I asked. He had had shingles on his neck, she explained, and also developed a persistent itch. "Every night, they would wrap up his hands and wrap up mine." She spoke more softly now. "But I heard he ended up dying from it, because he scratched into his carotid artery."

I met M. seven years after she'd been discharged from the rehabilitation hospital. She is forty-eight now. She lives in a three-room apartment, with a crucifix and a bust of Jesus on the wall and the low yellow light of table lamps strung with beads over their shades. Stacked in a wicker basket next to her coffee table were Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life," People, and the latest issue of Neurology Now, a magazine for patients. Together, they summed up her struggles, for she is still fighting the meaninglessness, the isolation, and the physiology of her predicament.

She met me at the door in a wheelchair; the injury to her brain had left her partially paralyzed on the left side of her body. She remains estranged from her children. She has not, however, relapsed into drinking or drugs. Her H.I.V. remains under control. Although the itch on her scalp and forehead persists, she has gradually learned to protect herself. She trims her nails short. She finds ways to distract herself. If she must scratch, she tries to rub gently instead. And, if that isn't enough, she uses a soft toothbrush or a rolled-up terry cloth. "I don't use anything sharp," she said. The two years that she spent bound up in the hospital seemed to have broken the nighttime scratching. At home, she found that she didn't need to wear the helmet and gloves anymore.

DHS runs ICE, which operates a number of detention facilities, not to mention the numerous "black sites" that exist around the world. (This would be the CIA in most cases, if you want to get technical, though I don't know if they were in charge of Maher Arar's case.)

Seems as though Riddick Geo III hasn't had the greatest luck in court. Despite his voriferous abilities to bully, harass and cajole, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia replied in it's March 21, 2003 decision of Xoom v. Imageline that, "The district court found that Imageline had no basis for litigating claims of infringement with respect to the individual images because, as registered, the copyright claims were only in the works as a whole and not in the individual images".

This being a referential case, there's no reason the websites under attack by him shouldn't just take him to task and toss this little gem in his face; he'd be hard put to claim "thousands of copyrights" on every digital image in his collection - and most likely provenance could be shown otherwise under closer examination. Additionally, he's only adding fuel to the flames brewing over the copyright bruhahau (of course, we're all anti-private-property-lovin'-commies here at /.)

"We mean business. We hate digital pirates. We hate hypocrites even more. We never walk away from a case until a resolution in agreed to, or forced through curt order, in writing. We never will." Curt Order, indeed: clean your own house, Georgie, before you decide to bitchslap someone else in their own.

"The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we've failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It's viewed as the art of medicine. That's a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer's perspective it's outrageous." We have a thirty-billion-dollar-a-year National Institutes of Health, he pointed out, which has been a remarkable powerhouse of discovery. But we have no billion-dollar National Institute of Health Care Delivery studying how best to incorporate those discoveries into daily practice.

I guess we do, now.

The quote is from a very interesting article on the use of checklists in emergency rooms, how effective they are, and how much the medical culture resists them.

Public education and some reforms to the election system have definitely made things better.

Voter fraud and intimidation was a lot worse when a large portion of the electorate was illiterate.

Here is an awesome, if lengthy (4400 words), article on the history of voting in the United States.

We actually owe more to the Australian government for our current system of voting than we do to the framers of our constitution, although their methods were originally adopted largely to disenfranchise blacks, it worked out in the long run. The electoral college is about the only thing we have left of our founders vision for elections.

We need something that can see big things too, so we don't miss some Cthulhu looking thing just beneath the ice while we scrape around for little stuff.

Sasha Frere of The New Yorker wrote an article on this several months ago. It's here and talks about the place that autotune has in modern music and how it's being used and misused.
Among other things discussed in the article is the zero-time adjustment setting, which is often referred to as the Cher setting, based on her use of it in her 1998 hit "Believe". It's a better read, in MY opinion, than TFA.

Truth is an absolute defense to libel.

Interestingly, truth was not always a defense against libel. That defense was first used by John Peter Zenger in 1735. (Well, technically, by his lawyer Andrew Hamilton). It worked. No clue how old libel laws actually are.

The New Yorker answers that, as I discuss in a blog post on Why are so many movies awful?. The New Yorker story isn't easily excerpted, but it is very much worth reading.

To back up this philosophy, I can link you to a New York Times article talking about the same phenomenon with scientific discovery instead of art.

This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call "multiples"—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians "invented" decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.

"There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England," Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:

The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the "exclusive" discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.

Last year, the New Yorker printed a great article on the subject of (lack of) dark skies to watch stars in.

Anyone interested in proper darkness, or even just improved outdoor lighting, should check out the IDA - International Dark-Sky Association.

The image in WormholeFiend's above post is an awesome example -- but we needn't a power outage to achieve this; it's really not very difficult to plan much better lighting solutions (curiously, the problem is often too much spotty light, and the solution is often simply to use less light, but in the right places).

Seems to work just about all the time -- unless it's Jack being tortured. And the creators of the show exhibit no such agenda.

See this Slate article, for example:

Jack Bauer--played by Kiefer Sutherland--was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief, once gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show "reflects real life."

Amnd teh New Yorker:

This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind 24. Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming.... Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show's central political premise--that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country's securitywas having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. "I'd like them to stop," Finnegan said of the show's producers. "They should do a show where torture backfires."

Bullshit.

I find this stuff fascinating. Oliver Sacks, who has researched this condition, wrote a lengthy article about Clive Wearing, who is another person with the same condition as H.M.

According to the New Yorker article on this, she was getting help.

Well, since you mentioned, here are, imho, the problems with each of your alternatives:

1) Pass on the money while they still live, giving gifts to family/friends under the tax limits each year for many years.

This alternative invalidates your alternative #4. In fact, it is exactly what my grandfather did before he passed away in order to avoid inheritance tax: he transfered what he had to the name of his children. Of course then the children would have to register that income and pay taxes over that. But their tax bracket would be much lower than your proposed 90% tax. What, you think you could place limits on how much he could transfer? Watch Mickey Blue Eyes.

2) Pass on the money while they still live, giving it to charity with no limits.

Well, this point is really number (3) below. Except it happens before you die.

3) Allow the money to go to charity when they die, with no limits.

How fair or efficient is that? You could be perpetuating a rich person's eccentricity. In fact, just recently there was a very interesting debate around a rich woman who donated millions of her money to a charity to support... her dog! (see Rich Bitch). Her white maltese (called "Trouble") will get her own, tax-free, trust fund.

4) Have the government take most of it.

Would be a good idea, if the government were such a perfect agent for our society's welfare. Do you really trust the government to spend that money well? Think US$700bn, think US$25bn, think of the cost of the Iraq War. Then think about how much ($20k, $100k?) you parents will be leaving for you.

If you think your parents would leave a larger sum, you may have less to worry. As Warren Buffet, the 3rd richest man in the world, told us about, the tax system tends to be lighter on the rich.... The rich often pay less taxes, have good lawyers, creative accountants, resourceful private bankers...

A favorite Murphy Law states: Hard Problems have solutions that are simple, elegant, and wrong. But I am with you: it should be discussed...

I was pleased to read a really well written article in the new yorker where they interview the lead designer Cliff Bleszinski (CliffyB). Being a PC gamer I had never tried gears of war (yes I am now aware that there is a PC version) but found the article brought me up to speed on the franchise and also gave a good behind the scene look at Epic games and their garage to riches history.

Well worth checking out. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_bissell

I was pleased to read a really well written article in the new yorker where they interview the lead designer Cliff Bleszinski (CliffyB). Being a PC gamer I had never tried gears of war (yes I am now aware that there is a PC version) but found the article brought me up to speed on the franchise and also gave a good behind the scene look at Epic games and their garage to riches history.

Well worth checking out. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_bissell

In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.

If that's the case, Mr. Gladwell, then why do we need a patent system to incent inventors at all? It sounds like we would see just as much innovation without the much vaunted protection that is the foundation of a company like IV.

In fact, one of the IV ideas for a blood filter to prevent cancer was already in progress by another company. Well, why should that slow IV down for a millisecond? If good ideas are "in the air" as the article seems to propose, then the only thing we might need to protect is the direct manifestation of such ideas. If scarcity of genius is a myth then genius is not in need of protection.

Gladwell's article basically says "we don't need to patent system."

Who says big ideas are rare?

Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point fame) write a glowing article about this venture.
Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft, is one of the major investors in Intellectual Ventures, says, "I can give you fifty examples of ideas they've had where, if you take just one of them, you'd have a startup company right there."

The New Yorker had an article about this six months ago.

A good example of this was Ayers coming out after the election and saying he was involved with the Obama campaign "until the maelstrom hit"

Would you please cite this? Because the quote I heard after election day was "I barely knew Obama".

Perhaps he's referring to this article from the New Yorker from November 4, 2008.

"It's all guilt by association," Ayers said. "They made me into a cartoon character--they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life." Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. "That's not my world," he said. (emphasis added)

Taking that statement out of context can make it sound as if he had some (or lots of) contact before the "maelstrom" happened. For example, check out this article doing just that.

But the New Yorker notes something the Post glossed over: Ayers says his contacts with "the Obama circle" continued until "his name became part of the campaign maelstrom."

But, that's not quite what New Yorker article actually says. It says there was no contact after the "maelstrom" and says nothing--zero, zip, zilch, nada--about what contact, if any, there was before the maelstrom. Certainly not that it "continued" up to that point and certainly not that he was "involved with the campaign" up to that point. But, still, that's the sort of thing the GP is probably thinking of.

Of course, that same New Yorker article had this to say about Ayers relationship with Obama:

In fact, Ayers said that he knew Obama only slightly: "I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better."

Obama's tax cuts are aimed at people who actually work, so lazy people who are sitting around and not contributing aren't going to get anything back.

Now, let's talk about Alaska. They don't pay income tax up there. In fact, every single man, woman, and child (even infants) get paid by the government to live there. Alaskans all receive an "equitable share of the state's non-renewable resources." That certainly doesn't happen in Texas!

Now, let's talk about Palin.

Palin said: "Alaska-we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs"

Palin passed a windfall profits tax , literally taking profits away from oil companies, and redistributed it amongst every man, woman, and child in America, to the tune of an extra $1200 on top of what Alaskans got that year from the Permanent Fund Dividend.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/13/081013fa_fact_lepore?printable=true

The most recent New Yorker magazine had a really good article about that, specifically talking about Bob Barr. (It made me less scared of him, which isn't saying much.) But the thrust of the article was that third parties aren't running for president, they're running to get their ideas discussed, and as such, they tend towards the extreme, to make the most news, rather than towards the center as far as possible, the way the Republicrats do.
You'll notice that the Greens are running a black woman as their presidential candidate.

The New Yorker had an interesting article a few weeks back about young vs old geniuses, that your post made me think of. Let me see if I can find it....

Ah, here it is

From reading various things, I've come to the conclusion that brains are hard to generalize. Even assuming one of the million things that can go wrong with them doesn't, in fact, happen, they still develop differently from individual to individual, and that what we presume to be the normal way that people's brains "age" isn't necessarily so.

Looks like MS is back to it's old tricks again—namely: stealing someone else's idea (his own ex-employee, no less). The idea is to found a venture to create new ideas...savor the irony.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_lehrer

The idea that creativity is linked to a time of day smacks of numerology. This recent article from the New Yorker gives a much more sensible explanation to the phenomenon of insight.

Basically when the mind is relaxed it brings together information from across the entire brain. But when we concentrate singularly the mind is incapable of reaching that insightful state. The article seems to suggest the ideal circumstances for insight are to immerse oneself in the facts so they are in the mind, then relax and allow the brain to do its thing and coalesce everything.

The real irony in many ways is that Niccolò Macchiavelli was actually very much a republican (as in, one who favors the republic as a form of governance :), but one who understood that the republic can falter. The New Yorker posted an interesting (and long) look at his life last month, which is worth the read for anyone interested. Machiavelli's possibly most well-known work, Il Principe , can indeed come across as archetypically "machiavellian" (as we use the term today), but reading it more closely brings to light advice to would-be rulers that they cannot be callous, ruthless bastards and expect to hold onto their jobs for very long. Some choice quotes, courtesy the linked article:

A prince must have the people on his side, otherwise he will not have support in adverse times.

A prince need not worry unduly about conspiracies when the people are well disposed toward him. But if they are his enemies and hate him, he must fear everything and everybody.

The best fortress for the prince is to be loved by his people.

Ultimately, the current strategy in the US of criminalizing broad swaths of otherwise harmless behaviour and locking up everyone who disagrees with the movers and shakers is pretty far from Machiavelli's advice to would-be rulers, given the mounting discontent this generates. Machiavelli actually comes across a bit as an old-school Taoist (in terms of Lao-zi, not Zhuang-zi) -- keep the people fat, happy, and dumb, and they will be easy to rule. Pissing them off and depriving them of common liberties left and right just isn't a smart move.

Cheers,

Of course they [had to explictly enter into an agreement that led to legacy costs]. I never suggested otherwise.

You didn't say anything literally wrong there -- just, your casual framing of it implied less avoidability than there was.

Any chance you have something to support your claims?

Sure: pretty much every historical account of GM. But I think we're talking about different things here: you're talking about the governmental pensions, I'm talking about the corporate pensions, and yes Japan did have problems with her national pension plans as you say, but no the corporate ones did not for the reasons I mention, and yes in a national system one advantage is that you have broader base of workers to dump the costs on when you mess up, but no that's not a different problem *in kind* from what GM is going through. If a pension plan (corporate or governmental) wants to make up for poor planning by dumping more costs on the workers, it faces limits in that the workers can decide they're getting screwed, and go work where they don't get gored to pay old people and the mistakes of planners.

There is a difference though, in that it's harder for people to abandon their country outright because of excessive taxation, than it is go work for a (relatively) competent corporation. So, what you see at GM is it finally dawning on them that no one has to buy their cars, and when customers can buy from unburdened companies and workers can work for unburdened companies, all you have left is an undercapitalized, un-trusted company. (If you thought GM was going to have a bankruptcy in 3 years -- as traders quietly do in their low bids for GM bonds -- would you believe their ability to support a 10-year drive train warranty? I hope not, for your sake -- no one wants to get in line, either in front of or behind, a grandmother who needs her money for medical care so that you can get your tranny fixed.)

I believe that to combat future problems, they began cutting back from promised levels and increasing employee costs.

So then, couldn't we solve all the problems *today* by cutting all benefits to zero? ;-)

How do you propose the large companies should fully fund the benefits in advance? On the day they hire an employee the company must deposit a check for the full cost of their pension assuming they work there until retirement age?

Don't be ridiculous. They should only have to fund the benefits the employee has already earned, at their present *discounted* value. After working there a year, he's owed an annuity in e.g. 29 years for $20/month, so they need to have bought a third-party annuity covering that, which will cost something like $100.

. Most companies with pension problems simply suffer from too many retirees compared to the current profit

Actually, that's exactly the perspective I claim is wrong. (Though it seems to find an advocate in the hateable Malcom Gladwell. There needn't (and *shouldn't*) be any relationship between the current profitability of a company and its ability to pay deferred compensation to workers for work already performed. If the funds are set aside in advance, the retirees are accounted for, irrespective of the ability of the company to earn a profit. This holds true regardless of how many retirees the company has.

In fact, to couple retirees' payments to current profitability (via the risk of nonpayment) is equivalent to stuffing a pension fund with the own company's stock and bonds -- which is now illegal for that very reason.

I will grant you that, based upon my understanding of Japanese pension law, Toyota does seem to benefit compared to US companies because the Japanese government holds most pension responsibilities. I don't know enough to say how their national pension compa

There is only one answer: TrueCrypt. Note that version 6.0a is much more powerful than earlier versions.

Commercial software cannot be trusted with something so important, for two reasons:

U.S. government surveillance: All of the U.S. government's many secret departments believe that they can order executives of companies that do business in the U.S. to a) provide any help they want so that they can accomplish surveillance, and b) put the executives in prison if they reveal the corruption. So, any software that has ever been under U.S. control, or has been corrupted by the U.S. government, cannot be trusted.

Often employees of U.S. government secret departments take jobs in commercial companies, and pretend to be normal employees, while serving illegal purposes of the secret departments. So even companies in other countries cannot be trusted.

Please check this carefully if you doubt it. The U.S. government uses what is called signing statements, which at present basically mean that a U.S. president can authorize breaking any law, merely by signing his name. That corrupt system has been used to challenge hundreds of laws.

Closed source software cannot be trusted until the secret employees of the U.S. government are tried for treason, and an open government is established. It does not seem that will happen soon.

The Bush and Cheney families and friends and associates are oil and weapons investors, and they use secret surveillance as a way getting what they want, no matter how illegal. For example, the U.S. government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to limit awareness of what the corrupters are doing. There are three groups of people who want war with Iran: weapons investors, oil investors, and Jews. The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said, so they acted in a hysterical fashion.

The purpose of invading Iran seems to be the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further. Weapons investors want continuous war, and an invasion of Iran would almost certainly cause that.

Changes in company management: A trustworthy company may be sold to another, less well-managed company. The less well-managed company may outsource some changes, or hire an employee that is not trustworthy. One of the changes can be the inclusion of a back door, or some other corruption. That's only one example. There are many other ways that there can be such problems with closed-source software.

The purpose of the biometric testing is to restrict the movements of non-Jews in Israel. Jewish businessmen want Arabs to do their less desirable work, but Arabs may not support Jewish policies, so all of their movements must be tracked.

The U.S. government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to limit awareness of what the corrupters are doing. There are three groups of people who want war with Iran: weapons investors, oil investors, and Jews. The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said, so they acted in a hysterical fashion.

The purpose of invading Iran seems to be the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

Jews want U.S. citizens to pay for a war with Iran because Jews supported a war with Iraq, and that made other people in the region feel even more threatened, and there is talk of war with Israel. Jews supported a war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein did not like the way they were treating Arabs.

Israel is a country formed of immigrants. The Jews in Europe were not wanted there, because they were seen to be destructive of the common good, such as involvement in manipulating the currency. Jews were restricted in Russia. The idea of forming Israel was that Jews weren't welcome anywhere, so forming a new country would give them somewhere to go. But they have made themselves unwelcome in the region around Israel, also.

The U.S. government is rapidly becoming a police state.

For example, the government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to limit awareness of what the corrupters are doing.

The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said, so they acted in a hysterical fashion.

The purpose of invading Iran seems to be the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

The corruption is not just at the borders.

For example, the government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to limit awareness of what the corrupters are doing.

The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said, so they acted in a hysterical fashion.

The purpose of invading Iran seems to be the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

As Schneier suggests, the U.S. is becoming a police state. The corruption is not just at the borders.

For example, the government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to limit awareness of what the corrupters are doing.

The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said, so they acted in a hysterical fashion.

The purpose of invading Iran seems to be the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

Several people have recommended TrueCrypt. Open source, free, Windows and Linux, encrypts the boot partition, provides hidden operating systems and hidden partitions.

More and more, the U.S. is becoming a police state. The corruption is not just at the borders.

For example, the government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to limit awareness of what the corrupters are doing.

The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said, so they acted in a hysterical fashion.

The purpose of invading Iran seems to be the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

You should do something, besides just complain, because the U.S. government has become extremely corrupt. For example, the government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to limit awareness of what the corrupters are doing. The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said. The purpose of invading Iran seems to be the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

Interesting, related article in the current New Yorker about California's medical marijuana law, and just how "legal" it is. Clicky:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_samuels?printable=true

On June 30 of this year, The New Yorker magazine published a fascinating, if at moments disturbing article entitled The Itch. The article discusses, among other things, the human mind's perception of the reality of its environment based on the various nervous inputs it has, vision included. Apparently this is an oft debated topic among the scientific community, but it was new information to me.

One of the things I found intriguing was the note that the bulk (80%) of the neural interconnections going into the visual cortex of the human brain come not from the optic nerves themselves, but from other areas of the brain including "functions like memory." The suggestion is that the eyes provide visible light input, but that the brain's processing of what it is looking at is primarily an act of abstract object/pattern reconstruction.

If you couple this notion with the limitations of the human eye itself -- such as the fact that the finest resolution/detail comes from an incredibly narrow region directly in the center of the FOV with rapidly decreasing information towards the extremities that ranges from soft profiles to mere suggestions of color, brightness and movement -- it strikes me that if researchers at MIT wish to replicate the model of human vision on any level close to reality, their input and processing systems should actually be modeled a bit like the real deal.

I believe that without a solid neural net with strong pattern recognition, instant recall, massive parallel processing - the finer things of the visual cortex - that human vision will not be possible with semiconductors. Is 16, 32 or 100 GPU's substantial enough to pull it off? Probably not, I think - too much overhead, not enough interconnects... to coin a pun: "too RISCy". I must admit though that the research discussed in the technologyreview link is very interesting.

Time to become a weapons or oil investor.

It's not just the RIAA. The corruption is everywhere.

The U.S. government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to stop complaints. The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said.

The purpose of invading Iran is the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

The U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt. Passing bills for those who paid the most is only a small part of it. The U.S. government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", but that is only to stop complaints. The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said.

The purpose of invading Iran is the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: to restrict the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

Quote from the parent comment: "How does this happen?"

It happens because the voters and Congress no longer control the U.S. government. Voters are not even allowed to know who controls the government.

Example: The U.S. government is already fighting a war with Iran. There is talk of "diplomacy", of course, but that is only to stop complaints. The situation is the same as before invading Iraq. There was talk of diplomacy, but the leaders in Iraq knew that the U.S. government would invade, no matter what was said.

The purpose of invading Iran is the same as the purpose of invading Iraq: To suppress the supply of oil even further, so that oil prices will rise even further.

Note that Nancy Pelosi, head of the Democrat party, has Jewish heritage. Many Jews want the U.S. taxpayers to provide security for Israel. That's apparently why she supports the Bush administration, rather than the citizens of the U.S. who vote for Democrats.