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This is the result of Microsoft employees not seeing any action in years:

1 stabbed, 1 arrested in Microsoft co-workers' fight over a woman

A CNBC report out today appears to put to rest continued rumors of significant Microsoft layoffs coming this month.
In recent weeks, two blogs -- Mini-Microsoft and Fudzilla -- have both reported that Microsoft is preparing to lay off large numbers of employees before the company announces its second quarter earnings on Jan. 22.
Neither blogger quoted inside sources and both later backtracked on their reports.

I feel bad for the employees at the company that were effectively jobless days after christmas, with no warning of their impending 'layoff'. I find their letter justifying why the couldn't give 60 days notice unsettling. They're admitting they screwed up, and i'm sure their former employees are comforted by this fact, right? I hope they ban together and demand those 60 days paid, as is required by law.

Indeed, and now there is even a template now on how to do just that:

A day after dozens of protesting workers walked out of the Republic Windows & Doors plant with their demands met, they said they hope their triumph will inspire others nationwide to take similar stands against employers if need be.

"Sometimes people are scared to say something to big companies," said Ricardo Caceres, who spent his first night in his own bed after sleeping on a flatbed truck in the plant during the six day sit-in. "But we stood up - opened everyone's eyes." ...

About 200 of the 240 laid-off workers occupied the doors and windows manufacturer last week, demanding severance and accrued vacation pay after Republic gave them just three days notice before closing the plant down...

Wednesday's agreement means the laid-off workers will each get about $7,000 in accrued vacation pay and eight weeks of salary. Each will also get two months paid health care.

When your company has an 80% margin and you donate stuff that costs you nothing, like "the right to use your software" and record the gift at retail price, you net a greater tax benefit than it costs you to make the gift. That's net profit for giving, which is not generous -- it's just good accounting. If, from your profits for giving stuff that costs you nothing, you also give "medicine" that's generous because it's not required. Still, if you net a profit from giving, your giving can't be considered anything more than an accounting trick because some good no matter how unlikely, might have been served by paying the tax - some tax money is spent generously or well and wisely after all.

It's not really philanthropy unless you give more than you got. This is charity. Here's my money. Give it away in the best way you can. That's also trust. They say trust is earned. Let's hope BillG deserved Warren Buffet's trust because the ill that can be done with that much gelt is serious.

Nearly all of the African continent is inflamed with horrors beyond imagining. Terror rules more of the modern world than it has for a very long time. The fate of South America is uncertain. Maybe the best use of the Gates Foundation would be to husband their resources well until such a time as they might have some hope to turn the tide. Now is not it. This groundbreaking of the $500M Gates Foundation Campus is definitely not it. You can do a lot of philanthropy for half a billion dollars.

People keep forgetting, Bill isn't exactly at the helm anymore. Steve Ballmer has replaced him.

As for Compuserve and AOL, well, metered billing made sense back then because, well, phone lines aren't free and can be a shared resource.

Metered billing for software doesn't make much sense unless you're running it on the company's hardware; today that better be a cluster, or at least a $5k server, with you having the whole thing.

Given people's known preference for flat rates and predictable bills; I don't think this is going to fly.

I mean, people already complain about unexpected cell phone bills from exceeding minutes or text messages. What happens when the kid forgets and leaves an office app open for a week?

Maybe we need more greenhouse gasses, to stave off the next ice age. Seem like I keep seeing more and more about global cooling... as recently as today for example

I know it's novel, but here: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/156941.asp

Notice the second paragraph, which clears states WHILE YOU RE-ORIENT THE CONSOLE. Now, can you PROVE that the people with scratched disks didn't move the console?

You're missing a pretty interesting one: Project Helium. It's a pretty well-guarded secret outside the walls of Redmond, but for a while Microsoft seriously considered releasing the 360 chipset. as an "add-on" for PCs. That is, your desktop tower would hold two full chipsets: the standard x86 motherboard and CPU, and a second chipset, which consists of everything you need to run 360 games. In the end, the project was scrapped, but not before Microsoft managed to pour a good chunk of change into researching it.

Oh, and if you do ever get the chance to meet someone high in the Xbox development food chain at Redmond, make sure to ask about it. The look on their face is always priceless.

Actually, Microsoft did release a suite of tools very similar (Albeit lacking the 'magic' aspect of this man's request) a while ago called 'Cofee'. Excerpt from the Seattle Times: "The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer. It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.Full Article

Actually, I don't think I've heard of Gates screwing employees out of stock.

Not sure how much of a personal involvement Gates had with the Microsoft permatemp fiasco but at the very least you can say that HR tried their darndest to keep deserving people from getting stock.

Hurray for old news: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/317737_msftdevice30.html

Who _gave_ your local telco a monopoly?

My company has been on the receiving end of all kinds of arbitrary government action. We have had to produce thousands and thousands of pages of documentation at the request of various governments. There are all kinds of Americans asking for very specific documents that the government refuses to release and has refused to release for years and years.

For example, you may be familiar with the notion of a "congressional earmark". Here's a nice article about how, even after the earmark attribution rules changed, it is still very difficult to figure out who wrote what earmark spending into a bill because the congresspeople are being intentionally coy about it.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008257178_favorfactory12.html

Here's the salient quote:

When a reporter for the Congressional Quarterly pointed out how difficult it remains to pull all the information together, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the committee that drafts the defense bill, had a quick answer: "Tough shit."

Do you still feel that your government is accountable to you? That the "discourse" and transparency is there? These guys are stealing your money, and when we try and enact rules that force them to at least tell us what they're wasting it on, they circumvent the rules and do so arrogantly and belligerantly.

This is not a tech industry lawsuit, it's a customer lawsuit. It's true that Intel, HP and Dell were pissed off, but they did not launch this thing. See the fine PDF for more. Industry lawsuits will come later as shareholders for CompUSA, Circuit City, Best Buy and many others sue M$ for the Vista Failure channel stuffing that put them out of business.

It's unclear if the revelations will advance the plaintiffs' central claim in the class-action lawsuit -- that Microsoft artificially increased demand by allowing PCs that could run only the most basic versions of the Windows Vista operating system to be called Vista Capable.

That is where it will all fall apart for them IMHO. I can't see how you can argue that it increased demand. People that were looking for the Vista Capable logo were at least considering getting Vista if not planning on getting it. If you weren't planning on getting Vista than the Vista Logo wasn't a deciding factor in your purchase decision, so again MS can't be blamed.

At best people could argue that they thought that they bought a premium version of Vista and didn't find out until they were trying to install it that they wouldn't get the Aero Interface, and other candy. But they still are able to run a version of Vista so it is still Vista Capable IMHO. Also, I'm not sure if it was the same everywhere, but at least were I'm from there was always a footnote saying that it would run Vista Home Basic on any advertisements that used the Vista Capable logo.

The motion for summary judgement makes it pretty clear that Microsoft was in the wrong, but so was Intel.

Microsoft knew by at least August 2005 that the widely-used Intel "915" chipset "definitely won't qualify for the logo." That same month, Intel published an internet link "positioning 915 GM as optimum for Windows Vista on Mobile PCs," which Microsoft internally viewed as "misleading" and "egregious" at the time. ...

In the aftermath of the publication of the Microsoft and Intel links, Microsfot employees internally viewed Intel as "intentionally" trying to "hide the ball" on the inability of its 915 chipsets to run WDDM.

It's pretty clear that Intel couldn't get it's shit together and kept foisting its shitty 915 graphics on HP, Dell, etc., for use in high-margin notebooks. The OEMs were screwed because Intel was the source for chipsets that made the value proposition of low-end notebooks work.

Microsoft is the one getting sued, but Intel is at least as culpable and incompetent, IMHO.

This story contains links to the PDF's.

A) The vast majority of reputable climatologists agree that human activity is a major cause of the current climate change trends.

B) According to the articles, the residents of the Maldives are trying to relocate to avoid the results of said climate change.

C) The president of the Maldives believes that their culture will disappear as they are absorbed into the cultures of the places they hope to settle. (The best I can do on that at the moment is to cite another slashdot post, but it's really common sense that if a country of only 300,000 is displaced from their native land and distributed geographically and over time into larger and established populations that their culture is going to be greatly diminished, if not lost completely.)

Is A -> B -> C so hard? Meanwhile there are a whole lot of other B's and C's out there as well. Including most biologists believing that we're in the early stages of a human-caused mass extinction (not just as a result of global warming, but it's all pretty related).

So here are three situations for you:

1) If you walk into a hospital and unplug someone's life support to plug in your cell phone charger, is that "wrong" and does it make you a "bad person?" I'd say yes to both.

2) What if you're in the hospital waiting room and the cord you unplug runs through the wall first, so it's not that clear what you're unplugging? That's a bit grayer. You should probably figure out what damage you're doing first, but as it is you don't really know.

3) What if you're just plugging your phone into the socket in your house, but due to the nature of the grid and unbeknownst to you, someone across the planet will lose power to their life support as a result of you charging your phone? If you're unaware of the consequences, I'd say you're pretty innocent.

But what if, in any of those situations, you're explicity made aware of the consequences of your actions? I think that morally that makes the second and third situation equivalent to the first. You might not want to kill the person, you might just want to charge your phone, but that's the decision you're making, and I believe that's where we're at now with regards to climate change and other environmental damage.

And what great advantages are we supposed to be reaping by everyone having an SUV, again? It's like the above situation, but the battery on your phone is already reading full or very near full...

the guy has gotten a big pass

Obama got a pass from the media?

During the 2000 campaign, McCain used a racial slur that would have ended the career of any other politician, a Macaca moment. His fans in the press let it slide.

The media loved McCain: Chris Matthews famously said, "We're his base."

McCain might have room to complain about the fickleness of the media's bias, but that's all.

We get quotes from people around the world like 'There is the feeling that for the first time since Kennedy, America has a different type of leader'

That's what people's attitude is. It's their job to report people's reactions to events.

It's Jim Allchin. Because he fled this train wreck by hopping off as the train left the station and is now enjoying his island paradise. He's so far away you can't hear him chuckle. But giggling he is.

He got his.

McCain is emphatically opposed to torture. He formed this opinion while being subjected to it for several years.

But it turns out he doesn't really stand by that. He started carrying water for the Bush Pro-torture regime in recent years. If it's such an important principle to him, why did he turn around on it when it was politically expedient? One example here. He also voted for a pro-torture bill.

In fact, I'm not sure despite how often that term is thrown around that MS actually hires any astroturfers, or at least I have not seen any direct evidence of this.

Is it that hard to type "Microsoft" and "Astroturf" into Google and click on one of the top links?
LINK
LINK
LINK
LINK
It is pretty clear from a simple ONE MINUTE investigation that MS does hire astroturfers. Why bother to imply the opposite?

I'm probably going to get modded troll or flamebait for this, but everything I am about to say is 100% true to the best of my recollection. And no, I am not an astroturfer for MS. In fact, I'm not sure despite how often that term is thrown around that MS actually hires any astroturfers, or at least I have not seen any direct evidence of this.

It would REALLY help you to be taken seriously if you actually provided enough information for people to be able to check your story.

Phrases like "loaded with Linux" and "magical incantations that were supposed to compile and install the drivers" are EXTREMELY VAGUE.

Also, your expectations seem unrealistic. You put an OS that by itself requires 2 GB on a computer that only has 2 GB disk space. To put it bluntly: What the heck were you thinking? Of course it didn't work. Even if it did install, you would have been out of disk space the first time you created a document or applied a software patch.
Sure it would have been nice to get a warning about it, but when you're within less than one percent of the minimum, does it really take hours to determine that might be the problem?
Was is really out of the question to install an OS that only required 1GB? Wouldn't that have been the reasonable choice from the get-go?

Your comment about being afraid to edit text files seems pretty odd. If you're as tech savvy as you say, you would have experience with the Windows registry. Is that really preferable to just editing a simple text file? (Sure you can pick a specific UI feature the is in a config file in Linux and is a GUI option in windows, but I could turn around and point out a similar feature the requires registry hacking in windows.)
Say, why did you want to edit this anyways?

It's not really even close here... McCain wants to privatize and deregulate. Imagine your social security benefits in the hands of the people McCain trusted so much that he felt that less scrutiny and transparency was necessary. Now imagine your health care benefits managed the same way.

Seriously? You are going to use Social Security benefits as an example? Have you seen how badly the federal government has screwed that up? It's so poorly managed even a 15 year old can see the problems.

Imagine if health care is managed the same way. Imagine if the government becomes insolvent, and we have no healthcare at all - just like we won't have Social Security benefits in a few short years...

Sigh. Nice job conflating Iraq and 9/11. As has been shown time and time again, there was no plausible link between the two.

The invasion of Iraq will no doubt be regarded as the USA's worst foreign policy disaster of the modern era. The Bush administration still has not given a consistent reason for it. In the words of Kevin Tillman:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

My personal belief is that the whole thing stems from Bush trying to settle a family score, gain some political capital as a "wartime president", and (while he was at it) grab a lot of Iraqi oil for his buddies.

True if we were talking ONE acorn employee. Maybe even 2 could happen in different states. 3 convictions in 3 states for voter fraud by the same organisation is starting to become less "it's just the employees". How many does ACORN have ?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003982533_acorn30m.html?syndication=rss one instance, 7 defendants, at least 3 guilty, All ACORN, Seattle
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/missouri-acorn-voter-fraud-scandal.html another, 16 defendants, all guilty, All ACORN, Kansas City
http://www.traditionalvalues.org/modules.php?sid=3433 Ohio, 600.000 fake votes

In the conviction (first article) these people state that ACORN management specifically asked them to do this. But don't worry. Obama is giving them "at least 10%" of the $700 billion bailout package. Surely that'll improve their behavior, right ? But it's possible that he just doesn't know, right ?

possible as in "it's possible you get hit by a meteor right now" that is.

Candidates' tax-cut rhetoric swamps voters

According to that article, the Bush tax cuts don't expire until 2010. And even then, they apply only to incomes over $200K. Are you sure that Obama would tax you more than McCain? Seriously, I'm trying to understand what's reality and what's FUD.

Even if the senate did expel Stevens, his replacement would almost certainly be appointed by Palin.

Nope, there'd be a special election: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/othernationalelectionstories/2008319716_stevens28.html

Acorn fraud is temporary employees attempting to defraud Acorn, i.e. getting paid for not doing the work, though it seems to me filling out fake forms is at least as much work as getting them filled out correctly.

Prosecutors said the defendants committed fraud in order to keep their jobs without actually registering voters.

Do you seriously think someone is going to show up at the voting booth claiming to be Mickey Mouse?

Don't blame the CRA, it only prohibited red-lining (denying a loan based on geographic area rather than individual credit rating), and only applied to banks, not independent mortgage companies.

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) applied to banks, mortgage companies, and other lenders. Read what the Boston Fed was telling lenders about it...stuff like "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor...In reviewing past credit problems, lenders should be willing to consider extenuating circumstances. ". There also was the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Fair Housing Act.

Let's also not forget the FHA zero-downpayment program.

Don't blame Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac either. They weren't the ones making the loans.

But they did buy or guarantee nearly $400 million of Alt-A and subprime mortgage investments. At a conference in spring 2005, Fannie Mae Executive Vice President Thomas Lund warned about the danger to borrowers, asking, "Are we setting them up for failure?"

Besides the desire of the GSEs to get into the >80% LTV loan secondary market on pure profit grounds, they were also pushed by Congress. For example, see Schumer Unveils New Freddie Mac Plan With HSBC That Includes Low-Interest Low-Downpayment Loans.

Ironically, it was the repeal of the section of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed in response to the depression) which strictly separated banks from securities firms (to help assure the stability of banks) which exacerbated this mess and resulted in such massive failures.

No one has explained to me how this has changed the situation - "unified banks" have actually done a better job recently weathering the storm compared to banks with no investment side or pure investment banks. And they did better during the Great Depression as well. Glass-Steagall came from a war between the Morgans and Rockefellers rather than any actual data.

No honest person can say that government entities or regulations were "the cause" of the recent credit crisis, but certainly many regulations, Congress (in a bipartisan fashion), and the GSEs were on the side of "affordable housing" and "creative underwriting" for political profit, just as much as the private sector was in it for the monetary profit.

i probably shouldn't feed trolls, but i'll humor you...

• good Samaritan faces up to 10 years in prison for exposing security flaw in university's computer system.
• Schoolboy hacker faces 38 years in prison for changing his grades.
• an Asperger sufferer faces 60 years for looking for government info on UFOs on military computers.
• and let's not forget Kevin Mitnick who spent 5 years in prison and 8 months of it in solitary confinement.
• while a spam king who committed malicious acts against tens of millions of average computer users only gets 47 months after making millions.

seems like greed-driven malware writers, spammers, and other digital bottom-feeders go free with a slap to the wrist while harmless teenage hackers get the book thrown at them. from a ZDNet article, "US bill would treat all hackers as terrorists":

A major anti-terrorism bill now being considered by the US government has been criticised for disproportionately targeting low-level computer intruders, making small crimes punishable by a penalty of life in prison.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the main civil liberties group in the US focussing on the digital world, condemned parts of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) now in Congress, which would treat all computer trespass as terrorism. "Treating low-level computer crimes as terrorist acts is not an appropriate response to recent events," said EFF executive director Shari Steele in a statement. "A relatively harmless online prankster should not face a potential life sentence in prison." ...
In the US, the EFF criticised the portion of the new bill that adds low-level computer intrusion -- which could be something as innocuous as a teenager having a look around a commercial Web server -- to the list of "federal terrorism offences". Such offences carry penalties of up to life imprisonment, and give investigators broad powers of asset seizure, as well as threatening those who "harbour" offenders.

meanwhile violent offenders face much lighter sentences:

• Staff Sgt. Cardenas J. Alban convicted of killing severely wounded 16-year-old Iraqi during fighting in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. Sentenced to one year's confinement, demoted to private and given bad-conduct discharge.
• Staff Sgt. Johnny Horne Jr. pleaded guilty to unpremeditated murder in same case as Alban. Sentenced to three years in prison, had rank reduced to private and given dishonorable discharge. Horne's prison sentence later reduced to one year.
• Cpl. Dustin Berg convicted and sentenced to 18 months in military prison for shooting death of Iraqi police officer.
• Spc. Rami Dajani convicted of making a false statement following fatal shooting of Iraqi translator. Sentenced to 18 months' confinement and given a reduction in rank and bad conduct discharge.
• Spc. Charley L. Hooser convicted of involuntary manslaughter in same case involving Dajani. Hooser sentenced to three years in prison and given a reduction in rank and bad conduct discharge.
• Capt. Rogelio "Roger" Maynulet convicted of assault with intent to commit voluntary manslaughter in shooting death of wounded Iraqi. Dismissed from armed forces.
• Marine Maj. Clarke Paulus convicted of dereliction of duty and maltreatment in case stemming from death of Iraqi prisoner who was dragged out of holding cell by the

Considering Portal is based on Narbacular Drop which was actually University project, we already got the creativity without going through the standard games industry business model. Narbacular Drop was free and apparently had a decent community creating maps for it (I never tried it myself). Admittedly Portal has shinier graphics and a story, but IMO the current business models pushed by publishers are more likely to stifle innovation than encourage it - which is why Bungie left Microsoft for example. They were fed up churning out sequels to Halo, because they know they are capable of much more.

I don't mind publishers and developers releasing sequels - as long as the original game was good and the sequel is just as good or better, of course - but using recent business models it is difficult for developers with original ideas to get their foot in the door. We still get original games occasionally, but there is pressure from the publishers to produce more of the same recipes rather than try out new concepts - see DeathSpank for another example. Ron Gilbert tried pushing the ideas to publishers for years before he found one that was willing to take the risk on it, even though he's got some great games under his belt. We will always have developers/designers with interesting ideas, it's currently up to the publishers who gets through though.

I have no idea why nobody is still making good ol' point and click adventures. We have plenty of point and click cruft like the Sims and WoW, but for some reason point and click adventures are 'outdated'. I'd choose playing a Ron Gilbert Monkey Island sequel over the Sims any day (though if you said Half-Life 3 I'd have to think about it)! I'm definitely getting DeathSpank when it comes out anyway.

The current generation of consoles are starting to have channels for homebrew type games, and things like Steam on the PC are good ways for developers to be able to release their games without going via the traditional publisher route. I'd never heard of Ico - apparently it was a bit of a flop - but if it was released as a cheap WiiWare game or PS3 store download right now it would do very well. I'd buy it now that I've heard about it. Of course if you threw in every other PS2 game ever, I probably wouldn't notice it at all. It all comes down to marketing and a bit of luck in the end as to which games get noticed - but then that's just life (and damn statistics).

PS - I actually thought Portal would be rather spectacular with online multiplayer. It would be pretty cool playing in a deathmatch arena with traps everywhere, trying to drop objects on people's heads, send them into a spiky pit/whatever. Or perhaps they could have some kind of capture the flag variant. It would be a bit messy and hectic, but could be good fun. As it is, it's "just" a puzzle game to me and I probably will never play it again. I hope they include portals and multiplayer in Episode 3 anyway :)

I don't condone her actions, nor would I excuse them. In fact, I get somewhat irritated by those that try to justify stealing music. I'd actually agree that she needs to be punished to some reasonable degree.

I don't agree, however, that downloading music illegally is a crime that merits the financial destruction of someone's future. That's the issue I have here.

Let me ask you - would you consider illegally downloading music or stealing a car a more serious crime? Doesn't it seem a bit crazy to you that the penalty for downloading music is harsher than grand theft auto?

Google says Sweaty B is full of shit about "flat" growth. Par for the course, he used the wrong metric and then blew it out of proportion. That's not nearly as interesting as his admission of growth in the places M$ cares about most and the reasons he thinks the growth has happened, so they can share. Passing things back and forth in email with brittle formats is not nearly as easy as having it online in an easy and flexible format like ODF. Yes, he's also afraid of Open Office. All of this is well deserved bad news form M$ and their ancient file format monopoly.

(1) Yes, what we have is working better than anything anyone else has.

(2) Make sure not to get VERY sick - and if you do, make sure you do it before you get too old, since you have government bureaucrats deciding if it's worth the state's while to treat you. A Fraser Institute (Canada) survey found that on average a Canadian patient must wait in line 17.7 weeks for hospital treatment.

"Canada spends most on its system while ranking among the lowest in such indicators as access to physicians, quality of medical equipment and key health outcomes."

I got "very sick" two months ago - turned out to be pancreatitis. Since it was on a Sunday when I fell really ill, I went to the emergency room at the local hospital - about ten minutes from my suburban Houston home. Did have to wait five hours (mostly because they had quite a few illegal aliens waiting as well; they tend to clog up the system around here). But got in, got admitted immediately, had tons of tests, IV meds, excellent nursing care, was released on Monday night after ultrasounds, CT scan, HIDA scan, and EGD examination by a fantastic GI doctor. All within 36 hours. Total cost to ME, exclusive of what my private health insurance paid, was about $1,500. And it was IMMEDIATE care. I didn't have to apply to a government bureaucrat and then wait in line for it.

You will never admit it, but you are green with envy right now, because you KNOW that would never happen in the broken-down, nearly bankrupt system in your country.

So it goes.

No, it's paranoid ignoramuses. You don't suppose, for instance, that all the cell towers, radar sites, communications equipment, TV transmitters, and other crap that planes fly over might possibly cause more signals than your sub-watt cell phone, do you? How about a lightning bolt? Those cause all kinds of fun with electronic signals, and yet the average commercial airliner is hit by lightning twice a year. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002844619_boeing05.html/ Understanding how airplane navigation really works wouldn't hurt either, prior to coming up with soccer mom reasoning as to why we should ban anything that might possibly lead to some unspecified harm at an unspecified time for unknown reasons.

Do you have any evidence for this? Goldman Sachs was the most highly regarded of the investment banks well before Paulson. And plenty of financial companies were smart enough to stay relatively clean from this, in that they managed their risks a lot better.

The only financial companies that have been anywhere near okay are deposit banks. There are no investment only banks left. The last 2 standing were MS and GS. Without the fast intervention of the fed they would have also failed. And finally they chose to become deposit banks, signaling the end of investment only banking.

So GS might have been highly regarded, but they were also caught with their hand in the 30x leverage cookie jar. What I find disgusting is I wonder how many companies GS themselves ruined with CDSs and naked short selling before crying to the fed with the cross hairs pointed at them? We'll never know since the current rules don't force companies to show their short positions.

That Buffett was encouraged to invest doesn't mean that he doesn't think it was a good idea. It's not like they can push him around. Sure, he was betting on the bailout, but everybody was betting one way or another on a bailout, which is why you saw the 777 point drop when it failed the first time.

Buffet was on a phone interview on CNBC. He said that if the bailout didn't happen that buying into GE and GS would be the worst investment decision he's ever made. That tells you a lot. One is says that the gov. was on the phone with him explaining how the plan would help GS (and thus him) and that they really wanted him to get onboard. And two, look at the return he is getting on his risk. 10% dividend on the money he invested plus a buyout upside if they want to purchase the shares back from him.

Still, that's exactly what the Treasury and the Fed should be doing about now. A lot of people are scared just because other people are scared, and not because they know much of anything.

No, the fed and treasury need to get out of the way and let the markets correct. It was obvious years ago we had a problem. Some people in gov. noticed it (Ron Paul comes to mind), but were generally ignored or shouted down. Now we have a large class of assets declining in price with numerous derivatives (iirc, GS created some of the most dangerous ones to own right now) based on the said asset. We have to let these trades unwind before things can start to become normal again. Some people will lose 50% of the value of their house and even more people will lose their jobs. This is what happens when you attempt to prop up prices using gov. intervention. Eventually you can't keep printing money fast enough to keep inflation going.

Google alone has hired 10,000 new employees over the past year. Microsoft has added 11,000. I know people who have no CS degrees at all, but who have managed to get some relevant experience on their resumes (usually something web 2.0-ish) being fought over in signing-bonus bidding wars, because everyone who isn't Microsoft or Google is desperate to find some good talent out of the pool that's left.

3. Um I've run vista just fine on computers NOT marked as vista capable. And this is the same as #1 so you're just inflating your numbers.

The fraudulent "Vista Capable" is well documented. It wasn't just about beefy hardware, it was also about poorly supported device drivers:

• Buying a new PC? 'Windows Vista Capable' barely hits the mark
• 'Vista Capable' lawsuit against Microsoft now a class action
• Vista-capable lawsuit paints picture of buggy NVIDIA drivers
• The Vista Capable fiasco: to hell with system recs!

If you had actually followed the link back to the original blog post - unusual for slashdot, I know - you would have found out that the Microsoft employee that came up with this actually is a hardware engineer. If you had decided to indulge your curiosity a little further by googling Christian Belady, you would have found out that he had worked for several years designing servers at HP, with an emphasis on power efficiency. According to this article, he has several patents to his name. So yes, I would say he is qualified to tell hardware manufacturers what their systems are capable of. But don't let the facts stop you from getting in another jab at MS.

I've seen a few instances where he's been caught off guard, and had to actually think. Whole lotta umming and uhhing going on there.

Are you talking about McCain, or Obama? Have you seen the tape of McCain talking - or rather, not talking - about health insurance and birth control?

Not to mention when he says things he'd like to take back (think pigs and lipstick).

Are you talking about McCain, or Obama? You know McCain used the "lipstick on a pig" cliche about a Hillary Clinton proposal, right?

The best thing he's got going for him is that the media loves him and handles him with kidd gloves.

Are you talking about McCain, or Obama? The media's loved McCain since the 2000 campaign. Do you think that if any other candidate had used a racial slur ("I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.") it wouldn't have dominated the news cycle for weeks to the point where the candidate had to retire in shame? When McCain recently made a major gaffe by saying our economy is fundamentally strong, ABC news failed to mention it. As MSNBC's Chris Matthews put it, "The press loves McCain. We're his base."

The "the media loved Obama and gives him special treatment" meme is just another incarnation of the "liberal media" myth that has served the GOP so well since the Atwater days.

I also worry about his simplistic view of raising taxes on the rich as though that would have no cascading effect on those of us who aren't.

Raising taxes on the wealthy back to what they were during the Reagan years is not going to have some "cascading effect" that will ruin the rest of us. Rolling back the Bush II tax cuts doesn't take us into unexplored territory, it returns policy back to what it was in a sounder era. (Of course, generating fiscal policy by rolling polyhedral dice would result in more sound policy than what we have now...)

It came up first on Google, and provided a somewhat biased, but mainly factual overview of what happened. Would you prefer...

Wikipedia
Slate's Leftward view where they paint him as a hero. (I wonder how they treated Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay?)
The New York Times
The Seattle Times
...or just Google him for crying out loud.

Here's a news article of such a sale

Kitimat takes Alcan to court

Industry defends Decision to Resell Electricity for Profit

Kaiser makes a bundle by reselling power

Such stories even made it to a high-school economics 101 course

It's a Matter of Power

... the company discards all user IP addresses almost immediately.

A lot can happen in the time frame of 'almost immediately' when running a computer capable of 11+ terflops.

I'd be interested in hearing how you've come to know that America is a socially inept country beyond your own observation. If that's all you have, my observations differ.

It's based on the observations of many people - including American friends living in or visiting South America, reporters, and journalists with extensive knowledge of other countries. It's also based on my own experiences living in various cities throughout the U.S., as well as the experiences of other people who have similarly moved around the country in various locations.

Obviously experiences vary from place to place and person to person, but that doesn't mean general observations cannot be made or are of little value. For instance, Icelanders are known for being difficult to get to know initially, whereas many South American countries are both social and physically demonstrative even with platonic new acquaintances. America has been around long enough - and with only one in five Americans being first or second generation - that there are general observations to be made about American social interactions and relationships, albeit (again) varying by region, age, individual, etcetera. There is, for instance, the social phenomenon of the Seattle Chill aka Seattle Freeze.

I don't mean to imply that we're completely inept or that people need to always be social, however things aren't so great for us. Americans are becoming increasingly socially isolated:

Americansâ(TM) circle of confidants has shrunk dramatically in the past two decades and the number of people who say they have no one with whom to discuss important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at DukeUniversity and the University of Arizona. ...The percentage of people who talk only to family members about important matters increased from about 57 percent to about 80 percent...

Worse, technology seems only to be exacerbating the problem:

They found a direct correlation between participants? level of Internet use and their reports of social activity and happiness. As their use of the Internet increased, the participants reported a decrease in the amount of social support they felt and in the number of social activities they were involved in. They also reported being more depressed and lonely.

Having an occasional good discussion on slashdot is cool, but it is not an adequate substitute for having a close group of friends or face-to-face interaction. While technology can, and in some cases does, help to bring people together - I have a second date tomorrow with a girl I met online who resembles Ally Sheedy in Wargames, but curvier in a very good way - so far it seems like overall it's hurting us more than it's helping us and we were already having problems.

No really, VISTA was released in BETA.

Brian Valentine, Senior Vice President at Microsoft shoved VISTA out the door so he could get his singing bonus when he quit Microsoft and hired on at Amazon prior to the VISTA release.

Really, I am not pushing FUD on the VISTA release. It was a pretty front end, built on unfinished software. The manager who usually got these projects over the finish line bailed out leaving an unfinished code-base and leadership vacuum. To me this was evident in VISTA. Additionally, all of Microsoft's side deals to cripple.control functionality on media playback and the annoying security pop-ups made VISTA annoying and slow performing.

No, he admitted that UAC was poorly implemented.

Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.

They have no control over the shit quality of apps loaded by OEMs.

...unless Microsoft were to do something stupid like...oh....I don't know...make breaking changes to the audio and video subsystems at the very last minute forcing the companies to redesign and rush their video drivers out for the launch date.

Here (PDF)

Iraq may have been involved with 9/11, though maybe not.

Well, the bipartisan 9/11 commission said, "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." [emphasis mine] And in case you think that was just politicized or the analysis incompetent, the Washington Post reported, "In testimony before the commission, CIA and FBI officials said they agreed with the staff report's assessment of the abortive relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. A CIA counterterrorism analyst who testified using the pseudonym Ted Davis said, 'We're in full agreement with the staff statement,' which he said did 'an excellent job' of representing the agency's current understanding of the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship." Finally, even President Bush has said, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks." So, essentially, the President, Congress, the CIA, and the FBI don't think there was a connection.

They were tied to the '93 WTC attack

Again, the experts disagree. As one article puts it, "In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack."

the '95 OKC attack

Given McVeigh's ideology, this doesn't even make much sense. Also, remember, he fought against the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. Again, the investigation into the attack did not turn up such a link, and the only claims I can find for such a link are right in the run up to the most recent Iraq War (and not particularly credible).

But somehow, Clinton looks like a saint and Bush made it all up.

Saint BJ? Leaving aside irrelevant comparisons to Clinton, the fact is that the Bush administration made many false and misleading statements about Iraq in the run up to war. People who want to deny that try to focus on the question of whether Iraq was a threat, but that is not what they lied about. Many governments believed there was some level of threat from Iraq, but the lies from the Bush administration came in the details and the claimed level of certainty. They presented tenuous or already discredited (within the intelligence community) claims as solid. They had reason to believe some things based upon circumstantial evidence, but in describing them they used phrases like "no doubt," which you can find in the transcripts of interviews with multiple administration officials. Given that few outside the administration had access to classified intelligence, and only the administration had the ability to release (declassify) information, there was very little way for anyone to expose these falsehoods. All the false and misleading statements are way too numerous to list, but thankfully someone has gone to the trouble to catalog them.

When a public servant is in that position of power and trust and something as important as going to war is on the line, we the people must demand honesty and cannot tolerate that sort of deception. You can have a different opinion about th

Your diagram shows half of Europe isn't meeting emissions standards. Trouble for Kyoto

I'll agree that Washington should have offered an alternative but it's safe to say what works for one country won't necessarily work for others in regards to economic impacts. For instance Europeans have a much smaller reliance on cars for transport. There is not a whole lot that can be done in the U.S. at this point about it's main mode of transportation.

California would beg to differ on tougher standards.

So in short, we have some pretty fantastic emissions standards to compensate for the fact that vehicles are less efficient. This was the biggest complaint among auto makers in the 90s as it was hurting performance. They're figuring out how to get that power back now which is why fuel economy has remained flat much to my dismay.

California is not the only state either.

I can speak from experience that most cars sold in Arizona are also compliant with California regs.

Which tier 2 standard are you referring to? 2004? 2007? 2009? They are drastically different removing less fuel efficient classifications as we move forward meaning that the U.S. is actually doing something and without the requirements of Kyoto.

Standards are also not uniform everywhere. California which has more than a few vehicles has very strict regulations which most cars here in Arizona will also meet since California is our neighbor.

California has the strictest standards in the world. For your consideration.

Newer California Emissions expanding to ships as well. The east coast is getting in on it too.

Where do you get that China has stricter standards than the U.S.? I can't control the idiots that buy fuel inefficient vehicles that never use it to its fullest extent. My neighbors for instance though have a truck to pull their boat on weekends and regular passenger cars they drive during the week. This is increasingly common.

I don't see how the Euro 4 is stricter than current Tier 2 regulations, both have the exact same specifications for low sulfur fuels.

There are risks to everything. Being responsible is on the whole less risky, however, as you pointed out, sometimes things don't work out.

If it's "use it or lose it", most everyone would rather use it. Economists think there should always be some inflation. I can't rag on people too hard for spending everything they have, not with all the clever ways society has of devaluing savings and encouraging spending.

May 2008.