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Agreed. I'm annoyed about some of these Bushisms, and skeptical that Obama (or anyone) can fix the economic crisis. And I have a lot of complaints about the administration's abuse of the state secrets privledge and support of domestic wiretapping, but ...

Have you seen our foreign policy lately?

The United States is looking like a real global player again. Obama's made kind, respectful statements to the Iranian people (who are a lot nicer than their government). This week he visited Turkey and said that we're not a fundamentalist Christian nation, but a nation of laws and ideals. He even complimented the secular traditions of Turkey since Attaturk, an important thing to emphasize when hard-liners are intent on destroying those traditions. And it was just announced that Cuban Americans are going to be allowed to visit their families more frequently, indicating that we're finally getting over a 40-year-old dispute that's got us nowhere.

As much as we need to be critical of the missteps like that described in TFA, the most important development of the past 60 days is that the chest-beating approach to foreign policy is dying. Welcome back to the world.

Caffeine reduces the absorption of calcium.

Technically true... but not enough to cause problems. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12204390

It's also a diuretic.

Also technically true... but unless you're taking it in pill form, the amount water in which the caffeine is dissolved is more than the amount it will cause you to lose.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/nutrition/04real.html

So your claims that caffeine causes kidney stones are totally unfounded.

From the article "It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement." Exactly why patents don't work in their current form.

Now it seems more appropriate for this story.

It should be interesting to see how MSFT will deal with a preference for a less expensive netbook compatible Win7 on non-netbooks.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/microsofts-netbook-conundrum/

Very simple. They will sell it at a loss, possibly by bundling the licenses in with other products. Perhaps buy a laptop Windows 7 license and get two netbook Windows 7 licenses thrown in as part of the deal.

Smells illegal and probably is, but no worse than any of the other stunts they have pulled with OEMs in the past.

"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)

Clearly, the President is choosing something over our ideals. It's about time that he explained what he's choosing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/arts/design/10fair.html

Very close.

On average, Microsoft charges computer makers $73 for Windows Vista, the version of Windows used in desktop and high-powered laptop PCs. That is triple what it receives for a sale of Windows XP for a netbook.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/technology/02netbooks.htm

But the reason for this current FUD campaign from Microsoft is the very real fear of super cheap ARM based netbooks running Linux. Expect to see many more dirty tricks from Redmond over the next few months...

It should be interesting to see how MSFT will deal with a preference for a less expensive netbook compatible Win7 on non-netbooks. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/microsofts-netbook-conundrum/

As Prostitutes Turn to Craigslist, Law Takes Notice. Given how much of the web is devoted to porn, why is anyone surprised that the best site for marketing prostitution is doing so well?

Note to sarcasm impaired: This is (mostly) a joke.

"Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian"

Where in the text of the settlement is ownership transferred exclusively to Google?

"Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information"

Where in this settlement does it forbid anyone else creating an online archive of orphan works, Project Gutenberg for instance. Would one source of this spontaneous concern be out of Redmond?

'at least one party nudging its way into the settlement is an Internet-issues oriented group from New York Law School .. But what does raise an eyebrow is the source of New York Law's funding on this matter: Microsoft. The chief investigator of the New York Law School project is James Grimmelmann. In an earlier career phase, associate law professor Grimmelmann worked as a programmer for Microsoft'

"Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian"

Where in the text of the settlement is ownership transferred exclusively to Google?

"Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information"

Where in this settlement does it forbid anyone else creating an online archive of orphan works, Project Gutenberg for instance. Would one source of this spontaneous concern be out of Redmond?

'at least one party nudging its way into the settlement is an Internet-issues oriented group from New York Law School .. But what does raise an eyebrow is the source of New York Law's funding on this matter: Microsoft. The chief investigator of the New York Law School project is James Grimmelmann. In an earlier career phase, associate law professor Grimmelmann worked as a programmer for Microsoft'

The way to go is incredibely hard : to encourage nations to abandon their nuclear programs, like Libya did.

I think Libya really is a special case. It's a military dictatorship with a leader who, through some unknown mechanism (loss of soviet sponsorship? meditation? reading Lee Iacocca's biography?) has turned from a saber rattling nut into a reasonable person. Heck, Muammar Qaddafi even had a really good editorial in the NY Times recently about the religious madness that underlies the Israel-Palestine mess.

There were rumors of a similar acquisition but the other way around -- Sun was looking at buying Apple -- a decade ago. This was 'round the time McNealy had said something like "Apple's best hope is to become the world's best Java thin client manufacturer."

How do you like them Apples, Scott? :)

An Apple-Sun merger really doesn't make a lot of sense. They do really different things. Schwartz's time in the NeXTStep development world, though, makes me think it's not completely impossible...

This is the same state where the owners and operators of the New Times were arrested for exposing extreme judicial misconduct by prosecutors;

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/business/media/19cnd-arrest.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=login

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/99912

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13508_3-9800829-19.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376598/

Between "speed tax" photo radar on freeways and "Nickel Bag" Joe Arpaio in Arizona, I would definitely call the state highly prosecutorial against it's citizens.

This is a good explanation of NICE for Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/health/03nice.html

The Evidence Gap
British Balance Benefit vs. Cost of Latest Drugs
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: December 2, 2008

RUISLIP, England -- When Bruce Hardy's kidney cancer spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from Pfizer. But Mr. Hardy is British, and the British health authorities refused to buy the medicine. His wife has been distraught.

"Everybody should be allowed to have as much life as they can," Joy Hardy said in the couple's modest home outside London....

I gather that windmills are safer for birds than they were years ago (I have no firm reason to believe it)

What made wind genies dangerous to birds was that they spun fast. For years now though the blades have been made larger so they don't spin fast. Actually more birds die from flying into buildings.

Falcon

It's already proven that chicks can do math.

Cisco has probably already licensed the patent. They bought Radiata Communications , the company which was set up to commercialise the results of the CSIRO/Macquarie University WLAN project, so licensing issues were probably dealt with then.

From a "douchebag" named Freeman Dyson (you may have heard of him...):

The Civil Heretic

"The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models," Dyson was saying. "They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models."

Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. "The biologists have essentially been pushed aside," he continues. "Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers."

Dyson says it's only principle that leads him to question global warming: "According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I'm paid by the oil industry. Of course I'm not, but that's part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you're a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry." Global warming, he added, "has become a party line."

You and whoever modded you "Insightful" are idiots.

Useful idiots, but idiots nonetheless.

I interviewed Alex Dudley, VP of PR for Time Warner Cable at Network Performance Daily on this. I tried to be impartial, but as I mention in the intro, this would raise my bill 500%, and would be a 1000% markup from Time Warnerâ(TM)s wholesale rate, and as TW is a monopoly in my apartment complex, the net effect is that Iâ(TM)m getting kicked out of my home when the billing goes live, so the interview gets heated at points. FTA:

NPD: I was wondering if you ever considered this⦠tracking the high-end users, and⦠only when the line is congested⦠throttling back their service using QoS priorities. Giving them--

Dudley: Thatâ(TM)s exactly what Comcast did about a year ago, and it caused a complete outrage and the FCC hauled them before the committee and told them they had to stop doing it.

NPD: Actually, I covered that. That's actually the result that Comcast applied after the FCC asked them to choose a different system . You're talking about the Sandvine stuff that was sending forged RST packets and the issue there was that the RST packets looked like they had come from the sender itself, which was essentially kind of a classic " Man In The Middle" attack . A kind of a fraudulent thing.

-------------

Dudley: â¦because of consumers that are using amounts like this, what we're seeing is a need for network expansion. â¦We figure⦠the top 25% of users use 100 times more network bandwidth than the bottom 25%.

NPD: Well that's just standard bell curves.

Dudley: Iâ(TM)m sorry?

NPD: Well, when you put any system on a graph like that⦠because of the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle or whatever it's called, when you put something on the bell curve, of course the top 25 are going to use the most bandwidth because they're the top 25â¦.

Previously, I wrote on how bandwidth caps have a chilling effect on Internet participatory culture.

Yeah it's a good thing the neocons showed that they don't fit your definition of elitism by not deciding which failing banks get on the corporate welfare dole and which ones don't.

Oh, wait.

Stuff like this doesn't do anything to convince me that the "modern environment" isn't involved.

nstead of taking a history 101 course, try reading original source material from the day. You will find a radically different view from your own

Sorry dog, you are just completely wrong.

http://www.civilwarhome.com/csconstitution.htm

here's an editorial on the possibility of southern secession in the NY Times from before the war: at issue: slavery

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9B02E5DD1E31E134BC4151DFB667838B679FDE

From 1853,

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E00E5D7133AE334BC4D51DFB2668388649FDE

It really goes on and on.

The point here is, that, you don't need to be in favor of slavery if you think the south should secede again, but there's no denying that the south originally seceded so that they could keep slaves.

nstead of taking a history 101 course, try reading original source material from the day. You will find a radically different view from your own

Sorry dog, you are just completely wrong.

http://www.civilwarhome.com/csconstitution.htm

here's an editorial on the possibility of southern secession in the NY Times from before the war: at issue: slavery

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9B02E5DD1E31E134BC4151DFB667838B679FDE

From 1853,

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E00E5D7133AE334BC4D51DFB2668388649FDE

It really goes on and on.

The point here is, that, you don't need to be in favor of slavery if you think the south should secede again, but there's no denying that the south originally seceded so that they could keep slaves.

(btw, it happened in PENNSYLVANIA, not new jersey):

http://prisonpost.com/blog/2009/02/20/pennsylvania-judges-plead-guilty-in-juvenile-center-kickback-scheme_227.html

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

"I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare," said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. "All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing."

why was the judge so harsh?

because he was getting kickbacks from the privately run prison

let me repeat that: in the usa, children, who did not deserve to be sent to prison, were being sent to prison for minor offenses. why? because the prisons were being run PRIVATELY, there was a PROFIT MOTIVE. enter: one crooked judge eager to line his pockets, and you have a cash machine

how evil is that? i mean really, how utterly shameful on us as americans that this took place? how shameful on us that we allowed the fiscal and legal environment in which PRIVATE PRISONS even fucking exist!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/us/14judge.html?fta=y

Several hundred families filed a class-action suit Friday against two Pennsylvania judges who pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks for sending juveniles to private detention facilities.

"At the hands of two grossly corrupt judges and several conspirators, hundreds of Pennsylvania children, their families and loved ones, were victimized and their civil rights were violated," said Michael J. Cefalo, one of the lawyers representing the families. "It's our intent to make sure that the system rights this terrible injustice and holds those responsible accountable."

Pennsylvania lawmakers called on Friday for hearings into the state's juvenile justice system. And the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, which blew the whistle on the judges, said it had sworn affidavits from families who said they had sought court-appointed counsel but were told that their children would have to wait weeks, sometimes months, for a lawyer. During that time, the children would have to remain in detention, the families said.

ok, so we have enron, we have this gem, we have the recent stock market crash

dear fiscal conservatives and republitards: why exactly do you want to privatize and deregulate everything?

i await your stunning insight as to how its all the democrats fault, when this private prison debacle and something like enron and the recent stock market meltdown are clear and obvious indications as to why, no, some things in this world you actually do not want to privatize and deregulate, that you actually want to keep utlities and prisons in the hands of the government, and you want to regulate the markets, for their own good. i now await your usual regurgitated kneejerk drivel about tax and spend democrats and socialism. well yes, actually, democrats are tax and spend. as opposed to republicans, who are just spend (all deficits climb sky high under republicans and are reduced under democrats: study past administrations). and as for socialism: yes, democrats actually do care enough to say gee, maybe its wrong middle class hardworking folks have to declare bankruptcy when they get a serious illness

"bloated government bureaucracy... blah blah blah... welfar

The question is "do you have a right to anonymity when making political editorials?" That's a different question than "do you have the right to make anonymous political editorials?" The answer to the latter question is "of course". The answer to the former question is "of course not".

Horseshit. The Bill of Rights exists because of anonymous free speech. Also, the Supreme Court has a long history of protecting anonymous free speech. You are entirely wrong in every point you make.

The right to anonymous speech is enshrined in the highest law of the land. Whether or not the statements are hurtful is irrelevant. Your political example is particularly clueless.

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

The parent poster is correct in framing this as a possible abuse of power. It is probably not illegal to reveal someone's identity. It can be illegal to use political power to discover someone's identity.

Your homework assignment (i.e. if you want to debate this without looking like a total idiot) is to prepare an argument against internet anonymity with reference to libel and slander. The links I provided should give you plenty of ammunition. Also, if you dig back through slashdot, there was a recent case in the maryland supreme court (IIRC) involving a fast food franchise trying to subpoena the identities of some critics on the internet, which may or may not have been covered in one of my links. Do note that such an argument is not relevant to the facts of TFA.

Between this and the Heritage foundation links, it is easy to see why your comments are so laughable.

Um... did you find anything that counters the numbers from the Herritage Foundation graph? No? So you'll ignore facts because you don't like the messenger? You'll only believe what you WANT to be true. Fine, here's a New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/business/13deficit.html?pagewanted=print
others:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104655.html
http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/1411.html

Oh, and the true source from The Heritage Foundation page is actually Rates from Joint Committee on Taxation publication #JCX-6-01; Receipts from FY 2009 Historical Tables, Budget of the United States Government, Table 2.3.

The Heritage Foundation just put in a pretty graph form. As long as you have all the numbers and they are not "adjusted", Numbers don't lie, no matter what the source is.

I never understood the "reality has a liberal bias" line. What is that supposed to mean? That reality thinks that universal health care is good? That taxing is generally the best solution instead of cutting programs? Can someone explain this to me?

I don't have a source, but I always assumed the line "reality has a liberal bias" was a satirical reference to the phrase "reality-based community", which entered the popular lexicon via a Ron Suskind article entitled Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush. The relevant grafs:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Whenever someone tells me that they think the phrase "reality-based community" is an example of the smug and snide attitude of liberals, I direct them to that article.

If the DA fails to bring charges against the girls, would that open him up to a defamation lawsuit for tarnishing their image for so long?

Yes and No. Prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil suit for any activity "intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process", however, "absolute immunity may not apply when a prosecutor is not acting as an officer of the court, but is instead engaged in, say, investigative or administrative tasks." (both cites from [1])

In the years since Imbler, we have held that absolute immunity applies when a prosecutor prepares to initiate a judicial proceeding, Burns, supra, at 492, or appears in court to present evidence in support of a search warrant application, Kalina, supra, at 126. We have held that absolute immunity does not apply when a prosecutor gives advice to police during a criminal investigation, see Burns, supra, at 496, when the prosecutor makes statements to the press, Buckley v. Fitzsimmons, 509 U. S. 259, 277 (1993), or when a prosecutor acts as a complaining witness in support of a warrant application,

The weight of precedent goes in favor of absolute immunity for what he did -- there were credible charges that could have been brought and he had the right to threaten prosecution in an attempt to get a plea bargain. At the very minimum, it would be an uphill battle to find him liable.

Cites:

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=07-854
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=US&vol=424&invol=409&pageno=428

Similar case:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/sports/baseball/13clemens.html

Ah, you mean like this law?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/washington/20scotus.html?ref=us

"The Supreme Court ... upheld ... the Protect Act, applies regardless of whether the material turns out to consist solely of computer-generated images, or digitally altered photographs of adults, or even if the offer is fraudulent and the material does not exist at all. "

Yeah the supreme court sure upheld our rights there!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/us/24savana.html?_r=2

An MBA is the most versatile, especially if you want to go into an industry other than computers (consulting, managing, etc). An MBA from a good school opens more doors than anything else.

That's not as true as in the past. http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/is-it-time-to-retrain-b-schools/

No, just about every affluent country has negative population growth. The total populations of affluent countries are increasing only due to immigration.

Well, yes and no. What your referring to is the natural growth rates. Well, I assume that is because your link which displayed information from Wikipedia wouldn't show anything but the links to Wikipedia for me. Anyways, the natural growth rate is currently around .8 to .9 percent for the US per year. The rest is immigration as you mention. The problem is that the growth rate is not exactly exponential, it is compounded and influenced directly by the immigration. So lets say that a real population increase is 2% but only .8% is natural growth. Lets also assume that we have 100 people. In the first year, we would have a total of 102 people with .8 of them being from live births and 1.2 of them being immigrants. But the next year, if things stay the same, we now have 2% of 102 people making it 104.2 people total with .83 of them natural and 1.25 being imported. So lets say this goes on for 10 years, using a simple compound interest calculation with the values of 100 at the start and 2% increase per year for 10 years, we end up with 121.9 people. That's a real growth of 21.9% over those 10 years. If after the 10 years we find the savings, then in 10 more years with the same numbers, we would have around 148.6 people. That's only another 21.9% or so increase but 10 years into the furter it would be a real 48% increase in population.

This is what makes it so difficult to go backwards like they attempted to do with Kyoto. In was out and offered roughly 8 years after the 1990 numbers were locked in, signing it, ratifying it, and starting to legislate it could reasonably take another 2 years. That would effectivly take the goal to ten years back but instead of starting with 100 people, you are starting with 121 people. Now if it takes ten years to realize the 30% emissions savings, you then have the 148 people using them. You haven't reached your goals yet.

Lets look at the http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFPopulation?_submenuId=population_0&_sse=on >USA's population. Now this is going to get a little sloppy because I had trouble finding population information from the same source and this site stops in 2008 which 2010 would fit better. Anyways, in 1990, the US's population was 248,709,873. In 2000 or 10 years later (symbolic of implementing Kyoto standards) the population was 281,421,906. A difference of 32,712,069 people or about 13% more people. The 2008 population says 304,059,724 or 55,349,851 more people then the 1990 levels. This is roughly 22% more people at the end of ten years (actually only 8 of the ten) working towards a ten year old number. Now here is the effect, if each person used x units of energy and produced 10 units of Carbon emissions a year and it took ten years to get a 20% reduction in emissions, we are only 2% under the 1990 levels. That can be negated in one or two years.

And the hard problem we have is that most all processes are at or near peak efficiency. There isn't much more that we can do outside of sequestering the emissions or removing it from the air directly. But again, I have to ask why are we even worrying about it when we don't care about the emissions of 70% or better of the rest of the world? We know that trees aren't the answer unless we cut the trees down and use them for something, we know that wind and solar are too costly at the moment, but all of that is moot when we don't care if there is an increase in total world emissions as long as it doesn't come from the wealthy nations.

I will go into why the immigration is so important when I answer the other

Euro-ethnic preservationists generally favor metaphors of stone and durability, but the oldest cultural knowledge survives by more fluid formats such as music and storytelling. Witness the Megatherium, a beast that died out tens of thousands of years ago but survives in the stories of Indians of the Brazilian rainforest.

Of course, cultural knowledge tends to be more changeable than scientific data, but it can sometimes tell us things paleontologists can't infer from bones--like how the Megatherium smelled. The Brazilian name for Megatherium means "fetid beast."

Our overconfidence in supposedly durable media has resulted in countless works "archived" on film stock, magnetic tape, and CD-ROM that are now unreadable due to deterioration or format obsolescence. For cultural preservation, I put my money on variable media strategies such as emulation, migration, and reinterpretation.

It doesnt go to a story, it goes to a login page.

If you can't find a URL that actually links to what you are talking about DONT FUCKING POSTING IT.

It took me about ten seconds to find the URL's below. Just imagine, how much time could be saved overall, if either the submitter or the /. ed had taken this ten seconds to find a good URL, for everyone, instead of *every individual reader* having to either wade through the jackass NYT login nonsense, or google around for this themselves.

http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2009/03/co2_freeman_dyson_magic_trees.php

and

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/some-inconvenient-thinkers/?ref=energy-environment

You don't need to be an alchemist to to proclaim the absurdity of turning lead to gold.

But you need to be an expert in the field to show why. It's not at all obvious that you can't do it. It wasn't until the 20th century that scientists began to understand the nature of the atom.

And not too long after that, they DID actually turn lead into gold. In trivial amounts, a few atoms at a time.

The moral being that significant changes to the scientific consensus nearly always come from experts inside the field, rather than from crusading outsiders. Insights are great, but you need to know what you're having an insight into, or you're just guessing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/technology/start-ups/27tesla.html?hpw

From Musk himself, "The worst-case scenario is they would lose their money. They are at risk."

The financing of the Model S comes from deposits from people on the waiting list. It is $40k to reserve one of the first 2k cars or $5k for later cars. But this is old news. Tesla has been using the desposits from the Roadster to fund its operations since the company is running dangerously low on funds. The comapny has applied for two federal loans, $250M and $400M. They need to get either one to survive.

Let them die, I say.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29paper.html

Except instead of the FTC, it's the Minerals Management Service, and it actually happened.

It's pretty close: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2&ref=business

David Swensen and Michael Schmidt proposed that newspapers simply receive endowments and operate off the interest, insulating them from commercial pressures and conflicts of interest. I think that's a fantastic idea, especially in conjunction with legal nonprofit status for newspapers.

If only this guy had this new feature. Then again, maybe not.

he did mention "deep regret", a feeling hard to shake off in 5 seconds. Anger however, is another issue.

If only this guy had this new feature. Then again, maybe not.

The police actively don't hire people that are too smart. Which scares the shit out of me.

Anti-discrimination laws don't cover intelligence. If this guy really were bright, he'd realize that he doesn't want to be part of an organization that screens out high IQ scores.

...they should look at the electronic vote-rigging in the USA?

We know the machines have misreported votes.

I *know* that it has been proven that it is often trivial to get these machines to report false information. Do we know that they have done so during an election?

The president/CEO of Diebold promised to literally do everything in his power to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes to GWB.

Actually, the quote is "[Diebold is] committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." [0][1][2] Not that I don't think that Diebold is despicable, but it's a good thing to have discussions grounded in verifiable fact. :)

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/30/technology/election_diebold/
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/12/politics/campaign/12vote.html
[2] http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm

The police actively don't hire people that are too smart. Which scares the shit out of me.

Intellectual outliers destabilize control structures.

Being predictable to your teammates/backup under all circumstances is an essential part of performing a life and death job - whether performing undersea construction or policing the 'projects.'

Having a tendency to come up with bright ideas under pressure is simply a liability in the world of street level law enforcement.

The police actively don't hire people that are too smart. Which scares the shit out of me.

He won't need to wait that much. In fact, according to Shuttleworth, Canonicalâ(TM)s annual revenue is creeping toward $30 million.

No, the deregulation in the 90s was just so they could make it profitable later. They made it profitable later on, by having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "secure" bad mortgages, in the name of helping poor people buy houses.

Remember folks, "Republican" and "dis-information" are practically synonymous. (Just don't use the "L" word.).

Allow me to quote Paul Krugman (a crazed extremist who's never right about anything, but bear with me):

This is utterly false. Fannie/Freddie did some bad things, and did, it turns out, get to some extent into subprime. But thanks to the accounting scandals, they were actually withdrawing from the market during the height of the housing bubble -- the vast majority of the loans now going bad came from the private sector.

Yet it's now clear that the phony account of the crisis -- that it's all due to Fannie, Freddie, and nasty liberals forcing poor Angelo Mozilo to make loans to Those People -- is setting in as Republican orthodoxy, part of what you have to believe to be a respectable member of the party.

And it never goes away. They spout the bullshit, knowledgeable people cry bullshit, and they just come back with the same line, over-and-over again. If you say it often enough, it must be true.

Mr. Holland will receive a basic salary of $250,000, more than the socially concerned company has ever paid but not an unusually high salary for a food company of its size.

$250k/7=$35.7k, This was in 1995, but I'm guessing Ben and Jerry were using some factor smaller than 7 to determine pay. I consider $250k reasonable for a CEO and $36k reasonable for a factory worker.