Slashdot Mirror

Oops, fat fingers. I meant this.

How much were you paid to post that comment?

China is incredibly corrupt and corruption is rampant throughout all levels of society.

Freedom? Are you kidding me.

One execution does not make the country less corrupt.

> Unlike in the US, they don't have lobbyists from companies creating the pollution

Are you crazy? Do you really believe what they are paying you to write? Local pollution and greenhouse gases are being pumped out of china at an incredible increasing rate.

> sometime in the next 10 years, they will have the ability to switch over, nearly overnight, to clean energy solutions

Are you just plain stupid? Are you aware how your country generates its power? Let me give you a clue: COAL, DIRTY DIRTY COAL.

> bunch of opposing interest groups like we have in the U.S., it'll literally be like flipping a switch.

You don't need lobbyists to be evil. Your government manages it all by themselves.

Please go to 4chan and post your garage there. Moron.

You clearly have some anger issues that are leading you to make some incorrect assumptions. I am an American just like you. Please read my reply above.

In 12-18 months non distorted images of celebreties and politicians will be on the Internet.

Nope - most politicians are exempt from going through security:

From the New York Times

Only Congressional leaders or members of Congress with armed security details are allowed to go around security. The same privilege is afforded to governors and cabinet members if they are escorted by agents or law enforcement officers.

And does it surprise anyone that they'll give celebrities a pass

as well?

She said, "Well, the airport is very important to all of our incomes and we don't want bad press. It'll hurt everyone, but you have to do what you think is right. But, if you give me your itinerary every time you fly, I'll be at the airport with you and we can make sure it's very pleasant for you."

(No knock against Penn - I think he might be our best hope for getting some sanity out of this: he's passionate enough to want to do something about it, rich enough to afford it, and popular enough that people will listen.) But how amazing is it that for security that's Absolute Necessary, there are so many ways to skip the line?

And we haven't even talked about the lack of security for people and things going through cargo yet...

I do not actually care if anyone sees me naked (been to nude beaches before). So what?

My concern is RADIATION. HOSPITALS can't get their radiation stuff working as it should (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/when-radiation-treatment-turns-deadly/ & http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html), so how am I supposed to trust that TSA will keep the radiation levels in check? No thanks, pat down for me, and hopefully for so many others that the airports will come to a crawl until these scanners are eliminated.

Alas, from the comments I read here and elsewhere, we have a population of big chickens that prefers convenience ("I'd rather go through the scanners than get a pat down"), so probably the scanners are here to stay. They will distort the pictures but still subject millions of people to unneeded radiation for nothing. Well, we evidently have (as a people) the government we deserve.

China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

so the only thing that can be done is for korean volunteers and goverment agencies have to take the initiative in reforestation efforts in Inner Mongolia to at least abate the sand

Seoul launches reforestation of China’s Inner Mongolia region by Joseph Yun Li-sun The city of Seoul signs a US$ 49 million tree-planting agreement to reforest the Kubuqi, the seventh biggest desert in the world. The goal is to block sand blown by spring storms towards the Korean Peninsula.

Seoul (AsiaNews) – The Seoul Metropolitan Government has decided to plant 72,000 trees in the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia, which is the source of severe sandstorms that sweep across Asia. The aim is to prevent the so-called "yellow dust", dense clouds of fine, dry soil particles kicked up by high-speed surface winds in intense storms that block ventilation and irrigation systems on the Korean Peninsula and create health problems for the population. The city signed the deal on Tuesday with Future Forest and the All China Youth Federation to plant 72,000 trees and will invest about W50 million (US$ 49 million) in the tree-planting project.

The plan calls for members of the All China Youth Federation, which is affiliated with the Communist Party of China, to plant trees in Inner Mongolia.

NGOs will provide technical leadership and logistical support to planters, who might have problems in creating small oases to guarantee the survival of the saplings.

The 72,000 trees include poplar and desert willow, the only trees capable of growing with shallow roots.

According to some studies by Seoul University, if the tree-planting project is completed as scheduled, a green ecosystem in the desert will come into being by the end of next year, and will be capable of stopping the sand when winds blow from the West.

The Kubuqi is located some 600 kilometres west of Beijing and is seventh largest desert in the world.

Covered in forests until the late 19th century, it lost its vegetation as a result of early industrial development and overpopulation.

The region is known to be the source of 40 per cent of the yellow dust, which affects the Korean Peninsula every spring.

The South Koreans decided to launch this initiative because dusty thunderstorms have worsened over the past decade.

Sand can provoke serious respiratory problems and affects especially vulnerable groups like children, women and the elderly.

It can also clog air conditioning, an essential service for South Koreans during hot humid summers.

http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=16776

How much were you paid to post that comment?

China is incredibly corrupt and corruption is rampant throughout all levels of society.

Freedom? Are you kidding me.

One execution does not make the country less corrupt.

> Unlike in the US, they don't have lobbyists from companies creating the pollution

Are you crazy? Do you really believe what they are paying you to write? Local pollution and greenhouse gases are being pumped out of china at an incredible increasing rate.

> sometime in the next 10 years, they will have the ability to switch over, nearly overnight, to clean energy solutions

Are you just plain stupid? Are you aware how your country generates its power? Let me give you a clue: COAL, DIRTY DIRTY COAL.

> bunch of opposing interest groups like we have in the U.S., it'll literally be like flipping a switch.

You don't need lobbyists to be evil. Your government manages it all by themselves.

Please go to 4chan and post your garage there. Moron.

On the contrary, outsourcing CEOs has been proposed before.

And all of those cool military gadgets we ooh and ahh over will be deployed against citizens aspiring for freedom.

Like so many others, you're making the same mistake believing the US military will fight against it's own citizens. It didn't work for the Chinese during the Tiananmen Square protests and it won't in the US. See the party bosses in Beijing feared local army units would join with the protesters if ordered to fire on them and fight against other army units. There were even reports of some army units shooting at others. So what did the bosses do? They had to order the PLA's, People's Liberation Army, 27th Army into the city from other provinces or parts of China.

It's my guess you've never served in the US military either. When I was in the US Army I was in the infantry, you know one of those on the front line shooting at and being shot at by the enemy. I and others I served with would have shot or fragged an officer giving a bad order. I bet my nephew who's a Marine, and has served in Iraq, would not hesitate to do the same.

Oh, and let's look at Iraq. The US military hasn't been able to stop the insurgency and fighting there yet. There is less fighting but partially because the Iraqi and US military negotiated with some of the militia factions there.

Falcon

So Wikileaks published the data and.... nothing.

Not true. The Guardian did a weekend special with pages and pages covering the Wikileaks data, and they continued to publish articles based on the Wikileaks data for a week afterwards. They have an online tag for Wikileaks articles: guardian.co.uk/media/wikileaks shows 474 articles, many of them mentioning "war logs" in the title. They also published Afghanistan: the war logs and Iraq: the war logs, with numerous articles based directly on the leaked data. Likewise, the New York Times published the series The War Logs based on the leaked data, as did Der Spiegel.

I know what you are getting at though,and the Guardian also had an editorial talking about this point (Assange is 'force-feeding truth to a world that has no stomach for it'): that the released data has been ignored by much of the mainstream media, whereas in the past in would've been lapped up. Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers was widely examined and discussed in the media, and this hasn't happened so much with the Wikileaks data. They blame general resignation and apathy amongst the population, and a lack of people who are willing to stand up and actually protest against the things that are done in their name. However, I have another hypothesis: the opponents of Wikileaks have done a really great job at getting the media to shoot the messenger, rather than listen to the message.

The anti-Wikileaks organisations have become much, much better at handling the media than they were during the time of the Vietnam war. The Pentagon has a put together a team of 120 people to deal with the Wikileaks problem. They have been amazingly successful in waging a media campaign to discredit Assange, and in turning media attention away from the data that Wikileaks has leaked, and onto unproven allegations of:

• Rape
• Personality issues (abuse of power, sexism, attitute towards women etc.)
• Financial fraud
• Anti-U.S. government bias
• Endangering the lives of troops
• Endangering the lives of collaborators and their families

Assange obviously has issues with U.S. foreign policy, but so do many people, including many Americans. Apart from that, nothing in the list has been proven, and yet - based entirely on these "rumours" - the media has mostly been manipulated into discussing Assange and his personal life and supposed "recklessness", rather than the leaked data.

The assault on Assange has been slow but relentless. He has lost support in several jurisdictions (Iceland, Sweden), and he is about to become an international fugitive from justice - Sweden has requested that Interpol issue a warrant for his arrest. This is for a man who was informed, in writing, by the prosecutor that there was no warrant for his arrest, and that he was free to leave the country. The Australian government has signalled that it would cooperate with a U.S. prosecution of Assange. His British visa expires next year and is unlikely to be renewed. There are certainly clandestine operations against Wikileaks: Assange has had laptops stolen from his checked luggage on international flights, and Wikileaks operatives in other countries have been put under surveillance.

Dealing with Assange was not enough - he had to be discredited, so that people would no longer support him, his organisation, or the principles of leaking data to the world. The opponents of Wiki

What I'm very curious about is the claim that "the Chinese government holds a copy of an encryption master key" that a few of these "old media" made:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8142267/China-hijacks-15-per-cent-of-worlds-internet-traffic.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/world/asia/18intel.html

Sure it can

I thought the government was for the people by the people.

It is a fucking joke, but only the rich are laughing. It is government for the people by the super-rich. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America's private net worth[...] The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent. Yep, that's right : in the U.S. out of a random 100 people on average there will be one person who owns more than ninety of the other people combined.

In America, you can say whatever the hell you want about the government - even if it is slanderous, false, crazy, whatever - and unless you are directly threatening to kill somebody, you can get away with it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/us/02bar.html

You're mostly right, but we are heading down the wrong path.

I don't get it, why does it work that way?

Why? They want Google to get through so their site gets indexed. Then people search for this information, click the search result, and receive the sales pitch for the paywall.

This is the link from news.google.com that does NOT show a paywall:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?_r=1&src=me

This is the link from the Slashdot summary that DOES show a paywall:

http://www10.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?_r=5&ref=technology

So apparently it's all determined by the tail end of the URL.

Opinionated rant: I can understand a paywall for specialized niche publications but for news? That I can obtain from many different sources? Really? This business model is defective and needs to go the way of the dinosaur. The sooner it does that, the better.

I don't get it, why does it work that way?

Why? They want Google to get through so their site gets indexed. Then people search for this information, click the search result, and receive the sales pitch for the paywall.

This is the link from news.google.com that does NOT show a paywall:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?_r=1&src=me

This is the link from the Slashdot summary that DOES show a paywall:

http://www10.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?_r=5&ref=technology

So apparently it's all determined by the tail end of the URL.

Opinionated rant: I can understand a paywall for specialized niche publications but for news? That I can obtain from many different sources? Really? This business model is defective and needs to go the way of the dinosaur. The sooner it does that, the better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?src=tptw Cell service providers are opposed to these because they don't have control over them. Because they are no made by the service providers, cell companies can't make money off of them but are still liable for the security risks they create.

In that vein, I think a good role model is someone who popularizes science. If I were to quote you some scientists who Hirsch-indices were really high, the problem is that most of their stuff is unintelligible to most adults, much less a kid. So I'd pick ones that have written books that popularize science. Along with Tyson, I'd think about guys like:

Steve Jay Gould (paleontologist, unfortunately dead)
Robert Hazen (mineralogist, works on origin of life, not really young though)
David Goodstein (chemist, writes on oil resource depletion.)
Perhaps someone who reports on science, like the scientists at work blog at the NYT or one of the blogs on national geographic. That way the kid could keep up with current events (maybe you could find a blog of someone working someplace inhospitable, like McMurdo station in the Antarctic.

If it takes phone companies as long to eliminate phone books as it takes for Slashdot to get around to the topic of phone book elimination, the phone books should be safe for awhile. (e.g. New York)

Wrong, there is a planetary gear between them. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/automobiles/17VOLT.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Chevy%20Volt&st=cse

At least do a little research for making ridiculous claims.

He's an amateur.

This is what I call a great cyberheist:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=armOzfkwtCA4
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aGvwttDayiiM

Or if fancy computer tricks are required:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html

He's an amateur.

This is what I call a great cyberheist:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=armOzfkwtCA4
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aGvwttDayiiM

Or if fancy computer tricks are required:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html

"BY THE SPRING of 2007, Gonzalez .. was also tired of war driving. He wanted a new challenge. He found one in a promising technique called SQL injection ..

When you log on to the Web site of a clothing store to buy a sweater, for example, the site sends your commands in SQL back to the databases where the images and descriptions of clothing are stored. The requested information is returned in SQL, and then translated into words, so you can find the sweater you want ..

SQL is the lingua franca of online commerce. A hacker who learns to manipulate it can penetrate a company with frightening dependability. And he doesn't need to be anywhere near a store or a company's headquarters to do so. Since SQL injections go through a Web site, they can be done from anywhere" .. link

What makes this one so much more beneficial that it's going to help pull our economy out?

I have no argument against this -- I don't see how any telescope is going to pull our economy out of the state it's in.

But some research has to be state funded or it will never get done -- space exploration in one of those areas. If governments don't fund it, it won't get done because there's not much commercial payback in deep space knowledge.

You apparently think that no large research projects should be state funded because on a project that takes over a decade to plan and execute, it can't be left to the whims of the economy.

Here's a fun exercise... take a look at this chart of the US budget, and see how much of our budget goes to science:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp

You mean like the Russian Gas-Powered boots?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/business/worldbusiness/17gazshoes.html

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: September 30, 1999

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 -- In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases-credit-to-aid-mortgage-lending.html

While I will grant you that ~100 million people without regular access to good drinking water is bad, this is only 10% of the country (see this link for more on that (hopefully I have that configured right for the google link to a pdf).

The elitist attitude over India is unfortunate, particularly since apparently roughly half that number of Americans have issues with local water having unsafe elements in it (and we have only 1/3 the population of India!). See this NY Times article on the US problem. While for the US, it is an issue of bad standards on water treatment, and it is a separate issue in India, a bit of grace might be helpful in relating to other countries.

Full quote: "The first Kinect prototype cost Microsoft $30,000 to build, but 1,000 workers would eventually be involved in the project. And now, hundreds of millions of dollars later, the company has a product it can sell for $150 a pop and still turn a profit, Mr. Mattrick says."

Seems like he's saying they make money off each one sold. That is, it cost so much to make, at first, but now we make money off each one at $150. He isn't saying anything about game or anything else so we must assume he means the device itself.

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/business/24kinect.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2&src=busln

Each piece has a link to an article about it. What more do you want?

For example, "Created more private sector jobs in 2010 than during entire Bush years" links to http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/10/08/its-official-more-private-sector-jobs-created-in-2010-than-during-entire-bush-years/, which has plenty of data and an analysis about the subject (correct or incorrect, I have no idea).

"Signed New START Treaty - nuclear arms reduction pact with Russia" links to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/world/europe/09prexy.html?_r=2, which not only reports about the specific meeting, but gives a insight about the US pass history with Russia in terms of armament.

Regardless of Obama's record - I don't know if he's a good president, and I don't really care anyway - the site seems decent.

increasing irritation with the dichotomy between alcohol and (other) drugs.

Then vote to have the law changed. If marijuana were sold like lettuce there would be no dichotomy.

The problem of illegal drugs is no only the harm done to the user, the problem is that buying them finances crime. You have never seen a brewer gunning down people at the Al-Anon, have you?

There was a recent article in the New York Times that said one of the first things to go with dementia and Alzheimer's is in fact the ability to manage money: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/health/healthspecial/31finances.html

The New York Times has a more in-depth article on this case, and it seems strange indeed.

There's an old saying: "You can't con an honest man." Most cons work because they prey on the victim's own greed or baser emotions. I wonder how much of this was going on in this case?

The Times article contains a few choice tidbits. Apparently, once he got into cahoots with the scammers, Mr. Davidson got involved with some plot of theirs to sue Wachovia Bank for mismanaging Davidson's trust fund, among other things. That sounds suspiciously like the classic con, where you give the con man some of your money in return for the promise that he'll get you lots more money later.

If nothing else, Davidson does sound a little credulous, and possibly mentally ill. The scammers told him his life was supposedly in danger from a group of Polish priests with ties to Opus Dei, whom the scammers told him had a plan to overthrow the United States government. How plausible is that? But then, if you were already rabidly anti-Catholic, it might sound very plausible. Most of us probably wouldn't believe there was an international conspiracy on our lives in the first place, no matter how rich we were; but if you were mentally unstable with delusions of grandeur, you might.

The final paragraph of the NYT article says Davidson's outgoing voicemail message says, “If you leave an ad or any other such message, your telephone wire will be fried automatically.” Who would claim such a thing? You might as well say you're going to report them to the Men in Black.

It seems to me that if Davidson was thinking clearly, none of this would have played out the way it did -- but I guess we knew that already.

So, does the thought go through anyone's mind that -- if the thing really was a missle of some sort -- that it could in some strange way be related to the Carnival cruise ship that had the engine fire in and around the same timeframe. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/world/americas/10briefs-Mexico.html. Some military ships were indeed reportedly pulled AWAY from training exercises to go help respond to the stranded passengers and deliver food and supplies to them. Maybe it was a distress flare from the upset strandees?

For a few billion popular Web pages, Google will store the images of the pages. For others, it will generate the preview on the fly, in less than one-tenth of a second, Mr. Krishnan said.

source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/google-introduces-visual-previews-of-search-results/

I think it's some neocon in Washington trying to sabatage Obamas Indonesia trip .. link

I doubt it. The best Cheney's men in the navy could do right now is sabotage a launch. But I will agree with you that an SLBM test launch in the Pacific while the president is Asia is an attempt to make a statement to our friends, enemies and undecideds in the region. That statement being "please remember what I can do if you make me mad" It would be nice to know the track so we could decide if it was heading to the Aleutians or to somewhere else.

I think it's some neocon in Washington trying to sabatage Obamas Indonesia trip .. link

Also this

Exactly. FC created a summary story of two old articles, but didn't even link them: "Employees Only Think They Control Thermostat" (2003) and "For Exercise in New York Futility, Push Button" (2004).

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100930-716142.html

Looks like only 50 billion.

It also looks like we might actually make money from tarp

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/business/01tarp.html?_r=1

the $700 billion lifeline to banks, insurance and auto companies — will expire after Sunday at a fraction of that cost, and could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit.

Why would Cameron, a deeply conservative aristocrat, care one bit about what the riff-raff can do with his supporter's "intellectual property"? The British have caught the plague that began on my side of the Atlantic: kleptocrats compose a huge part of government, and they've been on a crusade against egalitarianism since the 1980s. Everything done by conservatives in power is aimed at enriching the already rich and reducing everyone else to desperate peasants. They yearn for a return to the Gilded Age or worse. If a conservative creates policy that benefits the people at large, he's done it by accident. Academic rationales and appeals to the public, however erudite or reasonable they might appear, are just meaningless words put together by consultants who specialize in creating talking points that promote a particular narrative among a particular audience. These statements are tools with a particular purpose, not sincere attempts to explain the genesis of an action and demonstrate its worth.

Knowing this, you must consider every action taken by a conservative through the lens of their ultimate goal. If Cameron says he wants to revise copyright law to foster creativity, don't take him at his word. Ask yourself, "In what way will these modifications enrich powerful backers? What loopholes exist? What narrative is the government trying to push? What does it prepare the population to accept? How can the change under consideration be used to hurt the opposition? Where are the lies? Where is the selective truth?"

Finally, consider the most important question of all: "Will the net effect of this action be to enrich the wealthy?" The answer will invariably be "yes".

On a serious note, I remember this article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/business/28trader.html?dbk=&pagewanted=all about day-traders, and if memory serves it addresses the second part of your first question - ie. they explain how day traders often are tricked by the trading algorithms.

That's not what his campaign said when he ran against Hillary Clinton. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/world/americas/19iht-obama.1.6203898.html

It's not a fraud or ponzi scheme. It's a pension plan. Governments and private companies have been funding plans like this for 150 years.

Ronald Reagan did break down the lockbox and mingled Social Security revenue with general revenue, but unless the government defaults on its internal loans, the money is still there.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate economist, explained all this in his New York Times columns. For example http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/about-the-social-security-trust-fund/

When children work to support their parents' Social Security, that's what economists call a generational transfer. There's nothing wrong or deceptive about that; tax systems do it all the time. Another generational transfer is your parents' payments for your education, which goes in the other direction.

Consumption taxes are fair because 1) why should to get to avoid paying taxes just because you don't make much money? (though the proposed FairTax deals with your complaint there) and 2) those "evil rich" everyone wants to complain about avoiding taxes? Yea, they'd have no way around it - if you buy a new house, you pay the taxes, buy a new Ferrari, you pay the taxes, etc. I'm curious as to your reasoning for thinking that some people shouldn't have to pay taxes? Don't you think there's something horribly wrong when 50% of the country pays 3% of the taxes and the other 50% pays 97%? (Those are rounded off numbers from 2008 income tax data that you can look up easily online)

Income tax discourages work because one, you have to work more to get the same amount of money, and two, because we use a progressive income tax system where the more you earn, the less you get to keep from the next dollar you earn. If you read up on economics and taxation, you'll find plenty of information on how income taxes discourage people from working (one personal example is my sister who refuses to work overtime - if she goes into overtime, she only gets about 10% of her overtime pay and the other 90% is taken in taxes, so it's not worth it for her to work).

Here's Mankiw's article (it's simplified due to being in a short newspaper column as well as being something everyone can read and understand) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/economy/10view.html?_r=1 and here's his response to people who had some complaints with it http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/10/response-to-queries.html

Basically it comes down to this - why put out the effort to work more / harder when you're not going to get much in return due to taxes. Oh, and here's a blog post that Mankiw wrote regarding consumption tax vs. income tax a few years ago http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/consumption-vs-income-taxation.html

Basically Intel locked down all I/O on many of their chips to specifically lock out Nvidia and force their lousy GPUs onto you, whether you like it or not. Considering this is the same company that bribed OEMs, rigged their compiler, and paid 1.25 billion to AMD just to keep them from digging all the skeletons in their closet? It really shouldn't be surprising.

I was a life long Intel man, going back to the 486Dx, but after all the dirty underhanded shit they've pulled recently I've gone full AMD for my customers and myself. If you win a market because you are faster/cheaper/better? No problem with me. But rigging the market is a BIG no no in my book, and makes it worse for all of us. Just look at how many power hogging P4s are still in use, thanks partially to the fact that Intel paid off OEMs not to run the better at the time AMD chips. The regulators in the USA may not have any teeth anymore, but I can't wait to see what the EU does to them. Intel has been so nasty lately they make MSFT look like the Care Bears.

Or in 2007 when Switzerland invaded Liechtenstein. Of course, they seem to just have gotten lost instead of following a bad map.

I finally found a reference:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 - The Defense Department said today that at least 12 people were killed when a United States Navy plane bombed a civilian hospital in the early hours of the invasion of Grenada last week. The officials, acknowledging earlier press reports of civilian casualties at a hospital, said the building was not marked as a hospital and was in a milimarked as a hospital and was in a military complex from which gunfire was being directed at American troops. They said they were unable to confirm reports that the hospital was for mental patients. Until today, American military officials had been saying they knew of no civilian casualties anywhere in Grenada. American troops were said to be using ''surgical care'' and ''limited force'' in taking strong points. Destruction to buildings was reported to be minimal.

Unfortunately, this liberal approach leaves them a bit unprepared to deal with "uppity" neighbors.

No problem, really. All Costa Rica needs to do is align itself with Google (maybe just drop XP and Office, pick up Google Docs). Snuggle up to Sergey, maybe give the Google Air Force a special hanger or two (Really Sergey, both a 757 and a 767??). One false move and Nicaragua is just offline....

This is the 21st Century, folks.

Federal debt is around $13x10^12.

There is no "lock box" holding SS funds - they were rolled into the general pool and spent a long time ago.

Please adopt a consistent position. The $13 trillion debt includes trillions held by Social Security.

The inflows were supposed to have exceeded outflows up to around 2017. They didn't - break-even was hit this year.

Obviously the forecasts don't plan for specific recessions. But Social Security is actually still running a surplus, since in addition to the payroll tax, Social Security earns interest on the trust fund.

Yet deficit spending is not contracting, but accelerating.

The deficit has grown greatly in the past couple years, but this is not an issue of spending, but rather of revenue.

As opposed to the union paymasters who donate just as much purely out of feelings of patriotism? The Democrats actually spent $270 million more on this election than the Republicans did:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/44216.html

And of course, the real story is how little campaign spending actually appears to impact the outcomes of elections. The Democrats spent less on the Senate and held it. The Republicans spent less on the house and cleaned up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/us/politics/02donate.html

Brown spent a third of what Whitman did and still won as Governor:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-11-03/brown-beats-whitman-for-california-governor-while-outspent-3-1.html

Fiorina and McMahon spent tens of millions of their own money and lost big for the Senate. etc. etc. etc.

The message you won't be hearing is about the Citizens United ruling which led to unrestrained campaign spending this year. The Dems were outspent 7 to 1. That's right, 7 to 1.

Umm...no.