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I'm confused. Everything supports 3D printing. There's probably a Linux application for it. You just have the company write a driver, install 3D software that works with it, and hit print. The operating system is irrelevant. All they're doing is putting a big "sue me, I have the most money" sign on them with a picture of a 3D printed gun under it. Now they're just getting desperate. I thought 8.1 was a rush fix like Windows 7 from Vista but nope. Hopefully THIS TIME heads will roll and they'll replace clueless morons with reasonable design leads at MS.

Well, duh, but by sticking their toe into it they enable themselves to come up with their own protocols, languages, interfaces, in short, circumvent all the development in 3D printing up to this point and attempt to make it their own.

As for the re-org, I see it's on.

I wonder what new division label Steve will assign this group - Co-opting Industry Standards And Setting Them Back 10 Years

Anachragnome seems to think that everyone is spying for the NSA. Who is it doing all this mutual spying?

Facebook is building dossiers of everyone, whether they have a Facebook account or not.

The amount of information they can derive is disturbing.

Then Facebook shares the results with the government.

And the nature of the relationship between the two is a little too cozy, to say the least.

It looks like this has hit the press in a large way, which is why nearly every major technology site is covering it:

New York Times

CNN

Reuters

BBC

The end result of this decision should be to allow Amazon to continue selling ebooks at below cost if it wants to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/business/as-competition-wanes-amazon-cuts-back-its-discounts.html?hpw&_r=0

As Competition Wanes, Amazon Cuts Back Discounts
By DAVID STREITFELD, NY Times
Published: July 4, 2013

"Jim Hollock’s first book, a true-crime tale set in Pennsylvania, got strong reviews and decent sales when it appeared in 2011. Now “Born to Lose” is losing momentum — yet Amazon, to the writer’s intense frustration, has increased the price by nearly a third.

Jim Hollock wrote a true-crime story set in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Hollock’s first book had decent sales when it appeared in 2011, but now that it is losing momentum, Amazon raised the price.

“At this point, people need an inducement,” said Mr. Hollock, a retired corrections official. “But instead of lowering the price, Amazon is raising it.”

Other writers and publishers have the same complaint. They say Amazon, which became the biggest force in bookselling by discounting so heavily it often lost money, has been cutting back its deals for scholarly and small-press books. That creates the uneasy prospect of a two-tier system where some books are priced beyond an audience’s reach."

You bring up a good point. NYC is replacing the word "accident" with "collision" because "In the past, the term 'accident' has sometimes given the inaccurate impression or connotation that there is no fault or liability associated with a specific event."

We should all think twice before using the word "accident." Because driver negligence is the number one cause of crashes, more often than not the word "accident" when used in the context of automobile collisions is imprecise at best, and deceptive at worst. And isn't it just easier to say "crash"?

It's unlikely that European countries would interfere with a scheduled flight on an IATA airline; it would violate several Open Skies rules and create a mess at the ICAO. Likewise, overflights of the USA by Aeroflot are unlikely to be forbidden (even briefly) because Russia's closure of Russian/Arctic airspace to U.S. flag carriers would be cripplingly expensive to the latter. Russia has played hardball on that before (and ultimately won each time), as in the Lufthansa/Krasnoyarsk/Astana dispute ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/business/worldbusiness/02iht-air.4.8164855.html?_r=0 ; Lufthansa Cargo and the German government eventually capitulated). There are many U.S.-owned civil freight carriers that overfly Russia that would probably not survive a month of retaliatory airspace closure.

The rules under which military and government flights are cleared are not negotiated in ICAO and are rarely subjects of bilateral and multilateral Open Skies treaties. Closing (or alternatively not opening) airspace to FAB-001 the other day is unlikely to have breached any bilateral or multilateral obligations, although it has obviously caused an international incident affecting the European states, and is causing acute problems in Eurocontrol negotiations on reorganizing clearances for civil flights into geographical blocs for the convenience of (mainly European) civil air carriers and cost savings (for the member-states). An individual Eurocontrol state blocking clearance for any scheduled IATA overflight would make a much bigger mess of that, and also be a serious diplomatic problem if the carrier were, for example, Aeroflot.

Moscow-Cuba-Caracas is still viable and Hong Kong-Moscow-Cuba-Quito made sense too. The USA would not provoke serious direct conflict with Russia over Snowden, and additionally there are semi-regular Aeroflot flights to Cuba which do not overfly the U.S (scheduled as A332/Q).

Flying on FAB 001 or the like was (and remains) plausible, especially as some government transport jets can manage long haul flights. Bolivia's presidential jet could not do Moscow-El Alto without two refuelling stops, but Venezuela's could in principle do a nonstop flight (and Chavez occasionally used an IL-96 from Cubana from time to time which certainly can, and precisely to avoid dependency on "Western" states' good behaviour).

There are other possibilities too which minimize time over states most likely to be helpful to the USDOJ, such as via Ethiopia and then onwards through Togo (Ethiopian Air flies Moscow-Addis Abbaba and Addis Abbaba to Lome then on to Sao Paulo and Rio), or South Africa (for instance). Ethiopia's relationship with the worst parts of the war on terror is murky, however, so there would be some element of a gamble. The Middle East has several possibilities that are likely to mimic the sterile transit arrangement in Sheremetyevo airport (in particular, the government not interfering with him passing through there in transit to elsewhere), and a few of them are not especially likely to be keen on cooperation with USDOJ. The middle east path is a riskier one, though, for lots of reasons, not least of which is that Snowden detouring through an actual enemy of the USA (China and Russia are actually your *allies*, Congresskids, even if the relationships are frictional and sometimes frenemy-like!). Qatar is plausible (Qatar Airways flies Moscow-Doha and Doha-Buenos Aires) and presumably the regime would enjoy some PR via Al Jazeera (Arabic) especially in light of the current controversy over their bias towards Morsi.

There are expensive and awkward paths via the South Pacific that avoid being on U.S. or closely allied carriers' aircraft. There are a few paths to Denpasar for example (if Indonesia is reasonably tolerant of Snowden; it's hard to tell), and then onwards westbound through a series of small island airports en route to one of several South American citi

How many whistleblowers were there before?

Are you seriously arguing that there are more whistleblowers in this adminstration than in all previous administrations combined? It's just a coincidence that all the whistle blowers decided to get together and leak during the Obama administration?

Besides the wikileaks kid and Snowden what whistleblowers has he charged with espionage?

Here is a list from a year ago.

According to the airline, a senior colleague with more experience landing 777s, including at San Francisco, sat beside him as co-pilot.
and "Ultimately, it’s the trainer pilot who is responsible for the flight,” Mr. Yoon, the Asiana president, said, referring to Lee Jeong-min, 49, the more experienced pilot who sat in the co-pilot’s seat when Lee Kang-guk was landing the plane. He had 3,220 hours of flying time with 777s.
These are from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/world/asia/asiana-airlines-san-francisco-plane-crash.html?_r=0

What world do you live in? Police don't just raid a house because of some tag on Google Earth. What nonsense. You think we have a fleet of detectives monitoring Facebook in case someone posts "committin' a crime right naw!" And we announce ourselves so the homeowner would have no doubt it's the police and not some "intruder breaking down their door at 3am."!

What world do you live in sir? Clearly not the same one the rest of us do.

http://www.cato.org/raidmap
http://www.wnd.com/2012/08/cops-kill-dog-handcuff-kids-in-wrong-house-raid/
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55875924-78/lake-salt-landvatter-police.html.csp
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/26/nyregion/raids-and-complaints-rise-as-city-draws-on-drug-tips.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
http://www.wave3.com/story/1495631/false-tip-leads-police-to-raid-house-of-sleeping-family?clienttype=printable

and just because you are wearing a badge and say you are the police doesn't mean that you are

http://www.khou.com/news/local/HPD-Police-impersonators-using-fake-raids-to-rob-illegal-game-rooms-135144963.html

And your suggestion that the police do not read online sources or respond to tips that might come from them is also quite absurd

http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/25/the-saga-of-travis-corcoran

Link

...in 1971 the recently renamed Kelly Services ran a series of ads in The Office, a human resources journal, promoting the “Never-Never Girl,” who, the company claimed: “Never takes a vacation or holiday. Never asks for a raise. Never costs you a dime for slack time. (When the workload drops, you drop her.) Never has a cold, slipped disc or loose tooth. (Not on your time anyway!) Never costs you for unemployment taxes and Social Security payments. (None of the paperwork, either!) Never costs you for fringe benefits. (They add up to 30% of every payroll dollar.) Never fails to please. (If your Kelly Girl employee doesn’t work out, you don’t pay.)”

You're not a person. You're not an employee. You're not even worthy of respect.

If the question is, "are financial institutions doing the end run around public or private regulation for the purpose of screwing people, engaging in fraud, and dodging (necessary) liability?" the answer is always yes.

If Mitt had been elected, this would be cheered on by the Whitehouse as good and normal capitalist activity and the FINRA would be disbanded.

Well, if Obama had been elected, he would have just ignored the law anyway. Just like he did with his own health care reforms.

And then taken the Fifth. Just like his IRS attack dog did.

Then the most transparent administration evah would secretly transfer all records to the CIA so they could avoid FOIA requests.

I guess it's a good damn thing Obama didn't get elected. Imagine those corrupt tyrants reading all your emails.

That could never happen in the US of A. There aren't that many USELESS FUCKING IDIOTS more than willing to be fooled over and over again, now are there?

He's 13 months late with that one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all

Yes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Re:"The local police and FBI go after ordinary criminal activity, and play by the criminal law rules."
The role of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center has changed that dynamic bringing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. military and others together under one roof.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/06/opinion/the-cia-and-the-nypd.html?_r=0
Dont worry embedded CIA with local police was only "irregular personnel practices" more a “perception” issue.

Thank you for so pertinently illustrating GP's point. The gpo.gov document you linked to is a prime example of weasely legal reinterpretation of otherwise clear laws. Genius! Suddenly the US finds itself at *WAR* with an ill-defined(*) group of people not residing on US soil. But wait, it gets better - the POWs in this "war" are suddenly denied their Geneva Convention rights because, oh no, this is not really a war between nation-states.(+) If that is not reminiscent of "animal farm", then I don't know what is.

(*) "those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." Does that include the CIA and the Bush administration, for grossly ignoring all the prior evidence they had lying on their desks?
(+) apart from incredilby hypocrite, this argument is also plain wrong because the Geneva Convention has specific provinsions for "armed conflict not of an international character".

Meet Mark Penn http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/technology/microsoft-battles-google-by-hiring-political-brawler-mark-penn.html?_r=1& This *cough* shitslinger of joys like scroogled is also in charge of include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

Mr. Penn was put in charge of innocently titled “strategic and special projects” its nice that his work bulldozing enemies of the Clintons is now but to work slinging shit at Google.

Ironically this is another article about Bing being shoved down peoples throats in another Duopoly rather than competing on old fashioned things like competition. Perhaps Microsoft Time and Money would be spent serving its hostages.

Already a leader in conservation, Japan consumes about half as much energy per capita as the United States, according to the United Nations Population Fund. But it has been pushed to even greater lengths since the nuclear disaster even as it tries to revive its economy. The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and the resulting backlash against nuclear power have left only 17 out of Japan’s 54 reactors online as the nation steels itself for August, the hottest month of the year.

They're just the only culture that has a term for it.

The interesting thing here is that the article takes its time analyzing some of the social forces that result in the isolationist behavior. In this case Japan is nearly a perfect incubator for isolationist attitudes, whether historically (they closed their borders from 1641 to 1853), financially (they have few social safety nets and the economy was devastated for decades), socially (the article calls it sekentei, the need to impress others), or culturally (the Japanese ignore problems until it is too late to do anything about them--this is as true for hikikomori as it is Fukushima).

I'm interested to see if this phenomenon will be replicated on a large scale in countries with high youth unemployment rates, like the US, Spain, Greece, or Italy. A survey is definitely needed.

And especially the French representatives were shocked, SHOCKED, that the US is conducting spying operations against allies.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/14/news/14iht-spy_.html

Why, it's almost as unbelievable as if Israel was conducting spying operations against the US.

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

To put this in perspective, note that the resolution that was passed is a non-binding one. "Twiddle, diddle and resolve"

I didn't see anything in your articles that addressed how the German companies compete with such highly paid employees. They only talk about how the unions are able to negotiate such high rates.

Is it because German car companies pay less employees who are more highly trained? Is it because executive pay is lower? Is it because of government subsidies? Is it because they are riding on their own coat tails because their car companies were run much better than ours during the 80s and 90s? (and possibly will run into problems in 20 years just like US automakers did)

I also wish that Forbes had cited their sources a bit better, because it does look like they are comparing apples to oranges. UAW workers seem to make closer to $73 per hour from the sources I found. It looks like these statistics are possibly counting different kinds of workers. But there is no way of knowing since Forbes doesn't cite any sources for their numbers (it does cite a larger paper, but that paper doesn't cite any of its sources).

Regardless of any of these figures though, labor only accounts for about 10% of a car's total cost. So higher labor costs wouldn't necessarily make a car company that much less competitive, it would just take more money from car consumer's pockets. Considering Germany seems to make more high end cars than US manufacturers (that is an impression, I have no stats to back that up), I can see how they could pay their employees more.

Europe is being totally hypocritical about this. They spy on the US like crazy and everyone knows it.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/14/news/14iht-spy_.html?pagewanted=1

If you don't think the Israeli model would cost more, then you don't understand the Israeli model.

A number of articles have examined the issue:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aFyfihM1e3G4&refer=politics
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/01/07/would_you_pay_25_for_71_seconds_of_scrutiny_in_an_airport
http://forward.com/articles/122781/israel-s-airport-security-object-of-envy-is-hard/
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/11/20/counterproductive_airport_security_does_tsa_cause_more_deaths_than_it_prevents.html
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/aviation-security-and-the-israeli-model/#more-27215

This book looks at the entire cost-benefit equation:
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0199795762

But you have to remember that a significant "influencer" on the democratic side of the legislation was the trial lawyers guild (hence no tort reform in the bill).

Nice strawman there. Medical malpractice suits only really add about 1-2% to the total costs of healthcare in the economy [1]. Bigger factors that influence the cost of healthcare are: 1) For-profit insurers who have an incentive to take your premiums and stiff you when you're actually sick. 2) Big Pharma charging $1k/dose for their latest life saving drugs and fighting tooth and nail (and winning) against generics after their patents expire 3) Medical equipment manufacturers that charge defense-contract rates for their required equipment ($300 plastic tubing).

[1] http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/would-tort-reform-lower-health-care-costs/

Bill Clinton was let off the hook by the Senate, which apparently viewed it as OK for him to perjure himself, reasoning that the same law shouldn't apply to [a liberal Democratic] President as applies to other people. Remember Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame affair? Bush commuted Libby's prison sentence, but Libby lost his career, paid a huge fine, and remains a felon today. But that doesn't apply to liberal democrats. This unhealthy phenomenon is back in spades today, when nobody wants to rock the boat for the Obama administration. (Probably because they would be called racist for doing so?) So we have things like the Fast and Furious scandal, Obama's war in Libya without Congressional approval (most likely an impeachable offense right there), the Benghazi abandonment of our people and rather absurd subsequent cover-up, the Secretary of HHS doing illegal campaigning, etc.

Probably the Obama administration has been bemused at how much they've gotten away with, and of course each step emboldens them to go even further. At some point they may go too far (maybe they already have), and a lot of people are going to be unhappy with the fallout.

False argument. You're attempting to state that "if you can't achieve perfection, it's not worth trying."

Gasoline engines (and even diesel, bio-diesel, even "greasel",) are even *MORE* inefficient. A "tank to wheel" efficiency ("battery to wheel") of an EV (counting charge inefficiencies, but not electrical grid inefficiencies,) is about 75%. A gasoline engine, at best, is at 25-30% efficiency, and a diesel is at best 40% efficiency. When you add "well to wheel" (power generation to wheel for EVs,) the gap grows, as generating and transmission of electricity is more efficient than the production and distribution of gasoline for fuel use. (Not by a lot, but even if you were to use gasoline to power a power plant, getting the gasoline to the power plant would be more efficient than distributing it to individual cars.)

And an electric car gets better for the environment as the electricity-generation infrastructure becomes better for the environment. A gasoline car will always be just as "dirty" as the day it was bought.

In most areas of the US, a Nissan Leaf powered by "standard" electrical grid (not counting that someone who owns an EV is statistically more likely to opt in to their power utilitiy's "green" energy program,) is still cleaner than a Prius. In the very worst (nearly 100% coal-power) locations, it does become "dirtier", but that will improve as power generation improves.

Although the tide has finally turned more recently since 9/11, check out these surveys and you might change your opinion that "no one" wants to be spied on.

>All measurements show increasing quality and length of life

I wouldn't say 'All'

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/us/life-expectancy-for-less-educated-whites-in-us-is-shrinking.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

That's not quite what Theo said..
https://lwn.net/Articles/420858/ ...
  (g) I believe that NETSEC was probably contracted to write backdoors
                as alleged.
        (h) If those were written, I don't believe they made it into our
                tree. They might have been deployed as their own product.
        (i) If such NETSEC projects exists, I don't know if Jason, Angelos or
                others knew or participated in such NETSEC projects.
        (j) If Jason and Angelos knew NETSEC was in that business, I wish
                they had told me. The project and I might have adjusted ourself
                to the situation in some way; don't know exactly how. With this
                view, I do not find Jason's mail to be fully transparent.

BTW, the guy making the claim is named Gregory Perry. Here's a synopsis he wrote to Cryptome.org about the OpenBSD issue and the FBI's need to weaken crypto standards for the purpose of domestic surveillance.
  http://cryptome.org/2012/01/0032.htm

Obviously there is a lot more to this story than a one page synopsis, but I think what is important to make mention of is the close nexus between supposedly unfriendly governments such as Iran and the US. In 1995 the FBI was adamantly against any relaxation of encryption export regulations, yet they did an abrupt about-face on the issue in 1999 (for example,

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/11/business/technology-easing-on-software-exports-has-limits.html
?scp=1&sq=Gregory%20Perry%20encryption&st=cse).

I personally believe that the FBI, or at least certain officials within the administration at that time, willingly advocated the relaxation of encryption export regulations only due to their discovery of critical vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the RSA encryption algorithm not exhibited by the predominant public key encryption method used at the time which was Diffie-Hellman. Of equal interest was RSA Security's decision to not pursue an extension of the RSA patent after its 20-year expiration, which they could have easily obtained on national security grounds. They simply waived their rights and let RSA become an open and public domain standard despite their significant revenues in licensing of the RSA encryption algorithm in the USA based on U.S. Patent 4,405,829.

If any of this conjecture is the case, then it could reasonably be said that the FBI intentionally - and very seriously - weakened the United States critical infrastructure and our military capabilities by advocating the use of a fundamentally weak encryption algorithm as a tradeoff between US National Security and their need to observe domestic communications in the United States.

Sounded implausible back then, right? Now, not so much.

The following comment applies to the USA. Other countries have different resources, opportunities and challenges.

The only zero greenhouse gas emission technology that can generate the scale of power needed is nuclear,

Flat out false statement. No different from the "EVs don't benefit the environment" nonsense that anyone capable of independent research can trivially debunk. The United States is capable of generating all the energy we need using carbon-neutral sustainable biotechnology that exists today. Do the research and you'll see it's true, don't believe it just because I said it. We could convert to biofuels for less cost than the war in Afghanistan. Only our political masters prevent it.

...and the earth firsters won't go for that.

Another flat-out false statement. Greens are not preventing nuclear fission plants from being built; not only are environmentalists the most politically ineffectual group imaginable but the main opposition to nuclear fission is our economic system itself, which is incapable of safely and economically running terrestrial nuclear fission power plants. Because the public understands this, the vast majority of Americans are smart enough to oppose new nuke plants.

it was largely an accident. Following WWII large parts of the world were destroyed and in need of rebuilding. Also, Eisenhower recognized that without a large scale gov't effort we'd slip back into the policies of wealth inequality that lead to so much unnecessary suffering, so he kicked off the Military Industrial complex (or as I like to call it, Weaponized Keynesianism). Finally the cold war scared companies and prevented the global race to the bottom that Karl Marx predicted (but all you can remember about him is that Mao/Stalin used his books for their dictatorships).

The cheap imports won't last. Already the price of almonds is skyrocketing because they're being exported. You will compete and lose on the global marketplace.

Also, what in God's good name makes you think most Americans own stock? Half of them are below the freakin' poverty line, which we haven't changed since the 50s'.

The conductor actually stopped the performance: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/ringing-finally-stopped-but-concertgoers-alarm-persists.html?_r=0

Sure. Holiday pics fit nicely into a cloud.

Actually even pictures can be a security risk depending on who sees them. If they are recent holiday pics in the snow, while your house is in a location with no snow, it may tell people you are not home and they may decide to rob you.

If there are no tell tale signs of your location in the picture, are you sure you cleaned the metadata? Even a mythbuster can be caught leaving gps information in their pictures.

Even discounting the "Please Rob Me" mentality for a minute... What if you play hooky from work? Is the timestamp on the picture of you at the bar the same day you claimed you were sick? Or was it the night before and you are constantly sick with hangovers? Did you change the timestamp? Are you sure there isn't a daily calendar, clock, or watch in the picture showing the time and date? Even if you do not have any drinking problems and even if you are away on your vacation, some companies cross the boundary into your personal life and may fire you for almost any reason, just ask this teacher from GA. Don't believe this is just aimed at drinking, it may be any illegal activity or even some legal activities that others don't care for. (It could be religious affliations, political rallies, or many other lifestyle choices.)

I can go to an extreme and say you need to watch out for even the most innocent things... How many people are stupid enough to use pet names as passwords than post that pet's picture everywhere. Pictures of cars with your license plate number, calendars with birthdays... A picture of your mom (and captioned as me & mom), who is your facebook friend... And she took back her maiden name after the divorce... oops, there goes my financial identity.

The short answer is nothing in the cloud is safe. Even something innocent can hurt you. Honestly even your posts (and mine) on slashdot can come back to haunt you in the future. You may think I'm a bit paranoid, but how many people still think that after the Snowden NSA leaks?

Now, here we are on slashdot, many of us are tech geeks, and some of us even know better. Even some of us that know better can do stupid things. If we do these stupid things, how bad is the average facebook user?

Let's consolidate this so people aren't confused.

Cool, so when does the President go on trial for authorizing the murder of civilians using WMDs?

Sorry, that is BS. Apparently you didn't read my post carefully. Hellfire missiles are not WMDs in the military context even if they are for US domestic criminal law. So, suggesting that the President is using WMDs is nonsense. It would also be nonsense domestically in the US since government has the legal authority to use lethal force with weapons not available to civilians. Second, the US isn't deliberately attacking innocent civilian populations. The terrorists do, as did the Boston bomber. Launching a Hellfire missile at a SUV of senior al Qaida or Taliban members traveling down a road isn't going to kill many people other than the intended targets. So third, the 50:1 casualty rate is fiction. If it were true, you would need to find 50,000 dead civilians in the drone attack areas of Pakistan - there would be no way to cover that up. That is obviously nonsense as noted by the Pakistani government spokesman below. That doesn't mean that attacks are never made in error, or that innocent people are never killed. But that is a different question from deliberately targeting them.

Pakistan drone strikes: 2012

Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

“Myths and rumours about US predator strikes and the casualty figures are many,” Mehmood said, according to Dawn, “but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners.”

He even brought stats. According to the general, “about 164 drone strikes have occurred since 2007 — the New America Foundation tallies 226 since 2004 — have killed “over 964 terrorists.” Of those, 793 were Pakistanis and 171 were foreigners, “including Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens, Filipinos and Moroccans.” (Filipinos? Huh.) Only “a few civilians” have been killed, he said.

From a wider angle, taking Afghanistan into account, it is the Taliban causing most of the casualties. And you would expect that since one of their key means of attack is bombs and mines placed along roads that kill whomever comes along, as well as bombings in market places, and attacks on institutions like schools. Those are mainly going to kill civilians.

Taliban Causes Most Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan, U.N. Says

Before you respond with any of that , "at war blah blah blah" nonsense, keep in mind that Congress has not declared war on Pakistan.

The SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES. is not limited to geographic area. The US government and Pakistan have had an arrangement.

Ex-Pakistani President Musharraf admits secret deal with U.S. on drone strikes

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- Ex-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf acknowledged his government secretly signed off on U.S. drone strikes, the first time a top past or present Pakistani official has admitted publicly to such a deal.

Pakistani leaders long have openly challenged the drone program and insisted they had no part in it. Musharraf's admission, though, suggests he and others did play some role, even if they didn't oversee the program or approve every attack.

How about the bluest of blue; IBM? IBM has been on a 10 year itch to reduce American and hire Chinese designers and developers.

So, as you said, the traditional protectionist malaise as everywhere (reminds me of the stupid solar industry in Europe which actually managed to convince the EU Commission to introduce tariffs on Chinese solar panels... up to 67% ... now the Chinese are striking back with tariffs on European products *sigh* - will this never end?)

May 18, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-17/u-s-solar-tariffs-on-chinese-cells-may-boost-prices.html

The U.S. Commerce Department ruled that Chinese manufacturers sold cells in the U.S. at prices below the cost of production and announced preliminary antidumping duties ranging from 31 percent to 250 percent, depending on the manufacturer.

October 10, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/business/global/us-sets-tariffs-on-chinese-solar-panels.html

The Commerce Department issued its final ruling Wednesday in a long-simmering trade dispute with China, imposing tariffs ranging from about 24 to nearly 36 percent on most solar panels imported from the country.

ImdatS, did it occur to you that maybe this is happening because China was subsidizing solar cell mfgs so that they could sell their products below cost?

I'm a Meteor developer, using full-stack Javascript 100% of the time... Node.js, MongoDB, and jQuery are my stock in trade. If you're not familiar, Meteor is basically 'Javascript on Rails'. And, in my experience, everything in the article is spot on. As to the jaw-dropping abilities...

- developing in a unified language has increased my productivity 5x to 10x. I get done in a weekend what used to take me a month or more to do in PHP or C#. That's jaw dropping from a business sense, and has allowed me to completely change my business structure and approach. Frameworks like Meteor and Derby are going to win out on productivity gains alone. I can go from an initial client meeting to launching a beta of a multi-user application in a weekend.

- remember that javascript is based on actionscript, based on scheme, based on lisp. When you have your client, server, and database all using a functional language, you can start creating UI elements as monad operations on datastore elements. No objects ever on the heap. Just chained functions from database to server to client to UI. Among other things, this allows for things like reactive templates, demonstrated in the following screencast:

http://meteor.com/screencast

- besides the reactive templates, sharing of libraries between client and server makes every Meteor application theoretically capable of becoming a peer-to-peer distributed application. No PHP or Ruby or C# web application can do that. In theory, you could bundle the node.js libraries themselves into the client, and have each served client become a new peer-to-peer node.

- this allows mesh networking functionality, with monad operations defining computations between and through nodes. Think of it like routing protocols, but with computations. Lots of distributed computing possibilities here, obviously. More importantly is bandwidth usage, offline data synchronization, and the like. Instead of going to a data center to get the latest package updates, applications will be able to query neighbor nodes. Think IPv6 functionality, mesh networking, and being able to query data states from intermediary peers. The people in the Meteor dev community are actively working on things ranging from meters for smart energy grids to real-time bee pollination tracking.

Those technical details aside, the underlying reason why pure javascript can result in jaw-dropping applications is because, at it's core, javascript is a functional language, in the manner of lisp (if you know how to use the lambda calculus). It's lisp for the web (or scheme for the web, if you prefer). And putting it on both the server and client and database allows developers to do crazy monad calculations and method chaining. The monads will update and recalculate themselves in real time, as the underlying data changes. The end result is reactive templates and data-driven animations and UI elements.

If you want a better understanding how this is going to play out, check out the D3 visualization library here:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

Then, imagine all those visualizations used to create applications like in Processing:

http://processing.org/exhibition/

That's the direction this stuff is headed in. If you want to see some real examples in action, consider the interactives on the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/business/dealbook/how-the-facebook-offering-compares.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/2013-budget-proposal-graphic.html

I'm a Meteor developer, using full-stack Javascript 100% of the time... Node.js, MongoDB, and jQuery are my stock in trade. If you're not familiar, Meteor is basically 'Javascript on Rails'. And, in my experience, everything in the article is spot on. As to the jaw-dropping abilities...

- developing in a unified language has increased my productivity 5x to 10x. I get done in a weekend what used to take me a month or more to do in PHP or C#. That's jaw dropping from a business sense, and has allowed me to completely change my business structure and approach. Frameworks like Meteor and Derby are going to win out on productivity gains alone. I can go from an initial client meeting to launching a beta of a multi-user application in a weekend.

- remember that javascript is based on actionscript, based on scheme, based on lisp. When you have your client, server, and database all using a functional language, you can start creating UI elements as monad operations on datastore elements. No objects ever on the heap. Just chained functions from database to server to client to UI. Among other things, this allows for things like reactive templates, demonstrated in the following screencast:

http://meteor.com/screencast

- besides the reactive templates, sharing of libraries between client and server makes every Meteor application theoretically capable of becoming a peer-to-peer distributed application. No PHP or Ruby or C# web application can do that. In theory, you could bundle the node.js libraries themselves into the client, and have each served client become a new peer-to-peer node.

- this allows mesh networking functionality, with monad operations defining computations between and through nodes. Think of it like routing protocols, but with computations. Lots of distributed computing possibilities here, obviously. More importantly is bandwidth usage, offline data synchronization, and the like. Instead of going to a data center to get the latest package updates, applications will be able to query neighbor nodes. Think IPv6 functionality, mesh networking, and being able to query data states from intermediary peers. The people in the Meteor dev community are actively working on things ranging from meters for smart energy grids to real-time bee pollination tracking.

Those technical details aside, the underlying reason why pure javascript can result in jaw-dropping applications is because, at it's core, javascript is a functional language, in the manner of lisp (if you know how to use the lambda calculus). It's lisp for the web (or scheme for the web, if you prefer). And putting it on both the server and client and database allows developers to do crazy monad calculations and method chaining. The monads will update and recalculate themselves in real time, as the underlying data changes. The end result is reactive templates and data-driven animations and UI elements.

If you want a better understanding how this is going to play out, check out the D3 visualization library here:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

Then, imagine all those visualizations used to create applications like in Processing:

http://processing.org/exhibition/

That's the direction this stuff is headed in. If you want to see some real examples in action, consider the interactives on the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/business/dealbook/how-the-facebook-offering-compares.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/2013-budget-proposal-graphic.html

I'd bet a nontrivial amount of money that the Interestate Commerce Clause is 'elastic' enough to handle this one, if Congress felt like it

If a federal judge can strike down Virginia's ban on out-of-state trash processors shipping their trash to Virginia landfills, striking down barriers to Tesla selling direct to consumers across state lines seems like a no brainer to me. And I'm a states rights advocate.

And this post winds a kewpie doll. If I had mod points you'd get a bright and shiny one for understanding this and stating it clearly. A federal court should be able to throw out a law which was cynical enough to be designed to protect dealerships. Smacks of the 'Old Boy Network', doesn't it?

I'd bet a nontrivial amount of money that the Interestate Commerce Clause is 'elastic' enough to handle this one, if Congress felt like it

If a federal judge can strike down Virginia's ban on out-of-state trash processors shipping their trash to Virginia landfills, striking down barriers to Tesla selling direct to consumers across state lines seems like a no brainer to me. And I'm a states rights advocate.

Jimmy, please have some good photos of you taken.

Most photos of you are ugly, for example, the photo in this N.Y. Times article: Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire.

So basically you've admitted to spying on innocent people for years, in who-knows-how-big of a trolling operation, and you finally caught two small fish who so far have done nothing more than "shown an interest" in something that might count as illegal?

Right. Most FBI-reported "terrorist plots" are like that, especially the ones that involve informers. They get a report of some loser mouthing off about blowing up something, and they investigate. They get some informer close to the jerk and encourage the wannabe to push their plan forward, often providing resources to help. Then they arrest the loser and announce they've foiled a "terrorist plot".

The most notable example of this kind of FBI activity was the "terrorist plot to blow up the Sears Tower" in 2006. Even the FBI Director said it was "more aspirational than operational".

When Al-Queda set up the 9/11 attacks, they had good operational security. Nobody talked in public about the plan, and many of the participants didn't know the details until hours before takeoff. What the FBI is doing wouldn't stop a real terrorist organization.

> If it starts to interfere with my use, I simply won't buy the product in question.

This statement as you wrote it doesn't seem to make sense --- how could DRM interfere with your use before you buy the product in question?

So, if I assume that means that you plan ahead, for example, based on historical experience with DRM, I guess that means you don't buy anything with DRM. But then your whole post doesn't make sense...

> These people are the reason DRM exists in the first place.

No their not. The content industry's total inability to undergo the withdrawal symptoms from the powerful drug it became addicted to --- (practically) total control over the advertising, supply, and distribution of its product sector --- is the reason for DRM.

A NY Times Sunday Magazine article was published about you today. I thought it was reasonably balnced telling good and bad things happening in your life recently. Would you like correct any misconceptions in this article?

LOL, man Foxconn sounds like the US Auto Makers in the 1970s. It's because as others have pointed out. Bolted Down robotic workers don't complain and don't jump out of the nearest window. They depreciate, require routine maintenance but day after day they do what they're instructed within extremely precise tolerances. That means a better quality product for their customers without all of those "soft problems" that complicates business.

With China pushing people out of rural areas and into ever larger cities, it will be very interesting over the next few years to see how all of those people will earn a living. While the jobs at Foxconn are drudgery by any modern standard, they do allow people to earn money and contribute to the economy. Turning them ultimately into those nice wage slaves that all companies love that buy products and need services. Workers in China are already pushing for higher wages and better working conditions, something that the beneficent Foxconn would be very reluctant to go along with given their recent labor relations gaffs and breakup with Apple. Unfortunately the stories about labor shortages in China seem a bit disingenuous and reminds me of how there's a presumed "tech shortage" in this country. It seems even in China getting labor for the absolute cheapest price may be pushing this 12 year urbanization plan. These are all problems for China which are magnitudes of order more complex when you're talking about the scale in terms of a population of over one billion. I don't think China can make enough of anything, electronics, knock-off watches, handbags et al to keep up with the population demanding a better quality of life, which means better wages, better working conditions and all those consumer goodies the rest of us take so much for granted.

As a father with three kids in college and another one one just about there already, I wonder where they're going to make their niche in this world economy where your education and your experience can all be cooped out to some fraud ridden outsourcing firm who brings in a person or outsources your position elsewhere. I've told all of my kids not to follow me into Software and Engineering fields because people employed in those fields are now considered a commodity and subject to too much educational push from an ever increasing wave of immigrants from diploma mills overseas. What people don't really realize is that we've shifted out way of thinking from "value and quality" to "good enough at a low price" because the products and services we use have varying degrees based on those expectations. Entire markets the world over have been shifting in that direction and it's eroding the economic and social landscape of countries everywhere with companies seeking the lowest cost labor they can find that has just enough technical competency to get what they need done.

Scalia is in favor of originalist interpretation of the Constitution and he's been pretty consistent about that.

That ship sailed a long time ago.

Scalia isn't an origionalist, he's a hack that makes up his mind before hearings even begin, and then proceeds to find a justification for his pre-made decisions. Over and over again.

This sounds similar to some of the problems that Steve Mann has run into. He has been experimenting with augmented reality headsets since 1980 and has documented quite a few incidents before and been on slashdot before.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html

Yes
Yes
Yes

It is a port town. That means it is next to (both vertically and horizontally) the ocean. It would be a pretty crappy port if it was not next to the ocean. When you live within a couple feet of the normal high tide position and you are looking at a storm surge of a couple feet, the results are pretty predictable.

They then went and dug these handy tunnels all over the city that are... below the city.

Just giving those countries and everyone else the chances to protect themselves do a big service for mankind, not just US citizens.

And a little hint: if Snowden, a worker from a private company, with that access to information, as you said "did wrong" and went public, what about the rest that didn't went public? As far i could say, there is no meaning in international intellectual property by now, anything discussed by foreigners thru internet that could had some value is already traded, patented, and being used to sue the original creators of the idea when comes the chance, to put a just a sample of potential abuse.

It's going to be pretty ugly in a couple decades. It would be nice if people could be rational and let us build newer reactors.

Well it is happening, but the focus these days is on more plentiful smaller reactors.

Westinghouse is beginning fueling tests on the SMR Reactors, which are small enough to be delivered on a couple flatbed trucks. They are engineered for 225 MWe .

The Babcock & Wilcox Company is designing their own model as well as NuScale. Most of these are in the 180 MWe range.

It seems that they are well on track for being available in a couple of decades, maybe in as little as 5 years for the Westinghouse models.
Our ugly problem then will be dealing with half a hundred of these things on the outskirts of major cities, and the waste they produce needing to be stored someplace.