Slashdot Mirror

I stumbled across the actual complaint here: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/technology/20080724_Hasbro_complaint.pdf

Don't worry. There are others. Rest assured that regardless of which party is in control of the budget, there will be pork.

Many people, regardless of their "party" or lack thereof, are fiscally conservative

Every time I hear someone say my fellow Americans are fiscally conservative I get a good laugh out of it. You must have missed out on the whole mortgage crisis and the fact that 43% of Americans spend more than they make thus continuing their slide into debt and eventual bankruptcy.

America is such a fiscally conservative country that we bailout banks to the tune of 25 billion dollars , repeatedly bailed out airlines for a couple of dozen billion every couple of decades, bailed out S&L associations costing the American taxpayer another 124 billion, subsidize the agricultural industry at 16 billion dollars a year.

I could make this even worse by mentioning the costs of needlessly invading Iraq in search of WMD or talk about all the wonderful pork projects and "terror funding" that gets wasted but there are people who have written books on the subject and detail this much better than I ever could.

Many people, regardless of their "party" or lack thereof, are fiscally conservative

Every time I hear someone say my fellow Americans are fiscally conservative I get a good laugh out of it. You must have missed out on the whole mortgage crisis and the fact that 43% of Americans spend more than they make thus continuing their slide into debt and eventual bankruptcy.

America is such a fiscally conservative country that we bailout banks to the tune of 25 billion dollars , repeatedly bailed out airlines for a couple of dozen billion every couple of decades, bailed out S&L associations costing the American taxpayer another 124 billion, subsidize the agricultural industry at 16 billion dollars a year.

I could make this even worse by mentioning the costs of needlessly invading Iraq in search of WMD or talk about all the wonderful pork projects and "terror funding" that gets wasted but there are people who have written books on the subject and detail this much better than I ever could.

Many people, regardless of their "party" or lack thereof, are fiscally conservative

Every time I hear someone say my fellow Americans are fiscally conservative I get a good laugh out of it. You must have missed out on the whole mortgage crisis and the fact that 43% of Americans spend more than they make thus continuing their slide into debt and eventual bankruptcy.

America is such a fiscally conservative country that we bailout banks to the tune of 25 billion dollars , repeatedly bailed out airlines for a couple of dozen billion every couple of decades, bailed out S&L associations costing the American taxpayer another 124 billion, subsidize the agricultural industry at 16 billion dollars a year.

I could make this even worse by mentioning the costs of needlessly invading Iraq in search of WMD or talk about all the wonderful pork projects and "terror funding" that gets wasted but there are people who have written books on the subject and detail this much better than I ever could.

It's been updated. Apparently the decision to block US and Canada from Scrabulous was the Scrabulous developers' own decision, presumably a pre-emptive move to prevent themselves being sued under US law (or Canadian law, for some reason). Curious that it has occurred at the same time as Hasbro launch their own version - maybe a deal was struck after all..?

And yet that darn pesky article seems to think otherwise.

Hasbro also asked Facebook to remove the game for violating copyright law under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Which is it? If it is a trademark then the DMCA does not apply. The 'C' doesn't stand for 'Trademark'. And if they are claiming that this is a copyright violation then they are on pretty thin legal ice as there isn't a lot about the game which is copyrightable.

So which is it? Copyright or trademark? Has Hasbro engaged in perjury by issuing a DMCA takedown notice over a trademark dispute, or are they pursuing an unwinnable copyright case?

Sometimes I think people on SlashDot are not necessarily the smartest in the world.

The wealth gap in the US is small enough that the richest quintile only outspend the poorest quintile by about 2.1 to 1. That's not really an obscene difference. Link.

Keep in mind that Kopp is married to the chief recruiter for the Edison Schools. A strange meeting of the minds, that one. My wife went through TFA in rural Mississippi, and I followed for many meetings, retreats, seminars, etc, and there was no lack of Edison Schools presence from TFA alumni actively recruiting current TFA members for when their 2 year commitment was up. Very strange experience, that one.

Every employer wants as much of your life as he can get - for as cheap as possible. My personal willingness to obey that wish relates proportionally to the perception of my compensation. I don't know about you but my perception is indeed influenced not only by my salary but also by the number of pool tables, arcade games, swimming pools and sexy female co-workers in the office. Furthermore I don't mind taking on responsible tasks like doing a massage interview every now and then, or so...

Also consider that pretty much all employers try to make you work long hours. Just normally instead of pool tables they use rigged "bonus programs", 360 peer reviews and other intimidation tactics. Maybe google has those, too? I don't know. But I guess having a pool table in the office (and being allowed to use it!) makes everything more bearable...

I read the NY Times article and thought Steve Jobs calling Joe Nocera a "slime bucket" was not accurate. But then I realized that apparently someone doctored the recent NY Times photograph of Steve Jobs used in the story so that it would have less healthy-looking red color.

This is apparently a normal photograph: Steve Jobs, looking healthy. Here's another: Steve Jobs, plenty of purple in the background, but with red in his skin.

Wiki, Asteroid Deflection

NYT Study suggests mirrors best

NASA has non-nuke plans

Using a 300Kg impactor

Seems the consensus is that nukes would only be used if we discovered the asteroid too late for other methods to be effective.

Yes, the knee-jerk reaction seems to be "license == BadThing(TM)" or maybe "Govt. steals PRIVATE data" but without laws specifiying that certain clauses must be included in the license we would be left with the default copyright laws which I think most people here would agree are unacceptable for trashy romance novels let alone unique raw data sets concerning our home planet. Perhaps private companies in the mold of Disney would decline to take part becuse they have to share data about our planet, but IMHO that's a GoodThing(TM). It also reduces the burden on the taxpayer if private consortiums are forced to share scientific data, the only downside I can think of is the double edged sword of "national security" (control people vs share data).

As far as space exploration goes the worst thing that has happened recently is this obvious attempt to silence the most powerfull tool available for montoring the biosphere. Maybe it's non-obvious that in govt budgets, funding is tied directly to the agency's "mission statement", or maybe I have my tinfoil hat on too tight and NOAA/NASA budgets are not related? Anyway, since I'm not an american taxpayer I can hardly complain about the informative freebies NOAA/NASA already provides, and I admire Hansen as both a scientist and a public servant willing to "speak truth to power".

For every blog that gets read, 100 newspapers (online or printed) get read. So one wonders if this lady will get a call too:

http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080726/BUSINESS/807260323

If not, then Comcast is picking off small low-lying fruit instead of dealing with the larger, more widely seen issues. Silly.

Did you RTFA? Their picking off of the "small low-lying fruit" was featured in The New York Times. I'm pretty sure it's more widely read than "delawareonline.com". For that matter, Slashdot is probably more widely read than delwareonline.com.

Yeah, I guess the old days were better - when there was no consortium, when file and data formats were not at all intercompatible and mostly untranslatable, and when everyone just used Microsoft's file and data formats because "everyone else uses it."

There were no file formats before Microsoft cam along with Office? Then what was ASCII, .txt, .rdf, and Word Perfect's format.

Meanwhile open standards work fine such as for electricity, electricity produced by wind farms in Scandinavia is compatible with the electricity produced via wind farms in Spain or the electricity produced in France's nuclear reactors.

:lol: Um.... :snicker: really? You want to talk about the intercompatibility of electricity? :lol:

Yes, several governments are talking about "Wind-fuelled 'supergrid' offers clean power to Europe" using High Voltage DC to transmit energy from Iceland the northern Africa. You recall those blackouts in the Northeast a few years ago, you know the one that effected the US and Canada? The lines were interconnected, if they hadn't been power would only have been lost in local places not all over.

Seriously, even electricity has had its share of battles and compatibility problems:

I know about the electrical battle between Edison and Tesla, Edison used DC whereas Tesla advocated AC. I even posted a link on /. a little while ago about how Edison tried to electrocute an elephant to show how dangerous AC power was. While AC power is delivered to most places in the US there were places in New York that used DC until last year, 2007. The US uses high voltage DC transmissions today. HVDC is used because there is less of a loss of power when transmitting it long distance than there is transmitting the same amount of power over AC lines the same distance.

Falcon

This article claims that A study of the gender wage gap conducted by economist June O' Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that women earn 98 percent of what men do when controlled for experience, education, and number of years on the job..

Of course, women are now graduating college at higher rates than men. There was a recent study mentioned in the New York Times which claims that in US urban areas, women 21-30 earned more on average than men (as high as 120% in Dallas), although nationwide women in that age range only made 89% of men. The suspicion is that urban areas are attracting more college and higher educated women.

At the same time, I've seen a couple of industries that are notable anti-female, so while things are getting better in general, things still have a long way to go.

And it wants its story back.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0DE1D7113CF931A2575BC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

"Believes he is appointed by God - check"
Cite this ... you know, just give me a Bush quote that supports this in any way ...

http://www.slate.com/id/2106590/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/02/usa.religion

"Believes he is absolute ruler - check"
See above. Also, just what has he ever got done without congress.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0604b.asp

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/bush-commutes-libbys-sentence/

So. How would have Kerry ( or Obama ) handled Iraq...

Really quite irrelevant to the question of Bush, but... Iraq was nothing to do with 9/11, and invading the country has solved nothing and given the US a whole raft of problems in the mideast which are now just going to get worse. It is an attempt to dominate the mideast by force, which the US has neither the patience, the budget, nor the military might to do.

I've usually found ./ to be populated with people who are a step above the median in intellegence. Why don't we see many people taking the long term view,

I don't believe political disagreements have anything to do with intelligence. Osama Bin Laden is intelligent, that doesn't mean you have to agree with him.

Perhaps the world you want to live in is dominated by Christian Fundamentalists, whom Christ would have disowned - I'd rather not live in that world.

The US has helped, and continues to help, to prop up the festering cesspool of little dictators in the mideast - they backed Saddam in the 80s, backed the Iranian coup before that, and currently back Pakistan, Saudi, Israel, and many others with military and monetary assistance. If you want to address those issues, I suggest you look to your own countries current actions in backing undesirable regimes worldwide.

It's only partly about vengeance. It's also largely about profit, and disenfranchising the poor (particularly if they're also black).

The profit part is particularly scummy. Slave labor! Seriously:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05prisoners.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

a copy that doesn't need a NYT login is here:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0705-10.htm

The market has been evolving over the past couple of decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Cite&page=Prison-industrial_complex&id=223976554 [note graphic]

And to think, 28 years ago, comedy films like Airplane! used to joke about the Turkish prison system. Of course, that was before 9/11.

That is why frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the legal system are rarer in England.

Depends on your definition of frivolous. There is a reason there are so many libel cases in the UK - they are easy to win.

Libel suits that would get laughed out of court in Canada, USA, Germany or France are easy to win in the UK.

Even Saudi terrorist financiers are using UK libel courts to shut down their critics.

Online libel is serious even if you are an Average Joe, looking to get a job or maybe just stay out of prison. There has been enough of this kind of stuff discussed here on /. recently that it should be obvious that a carefully made false FaceBook page could be seriously damaging to even an average person. Just a site that degrades you might be enough to create a bad impression if it shows up on the first page when your name is Googled. Now if that site appears to be made by you it's even worse.

Didn't have to, with friends and associates of Bush in charge at Clear Channel:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02E1DD1230F936A15750C0A9659C8B63

I could cite my brother, who is studying medicine and genetic engineering, but this being the web, I'll just grab a few headlines from Google, post them, and get back to work.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/synthetic_genome

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/science/05angi.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/29/news/genome.php

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6733797.stm

Prison rape is a serious problem in the United States, where over 2.1 million people are incarcerated. Depending on the statistics you believe, there are more men raped in prison then women are raped outside of prison. And it is not the "real" criminals who are the victims. For example, a 17-year-old boy was gang-raped in prison after he robbed a guy with a toy gun. Sure, the robbery was a stupid thing to do, but our society punished him by putting him in jail, not to have him gang-raped. Victims of gang-rape risk getting STDs including HIV, which effectively renders a prison sentence for forging a check into a death sentence. Our nation's drug laws have placed many in jail for relatively small crimes. These people are in danger of being raped.

Only people in the United States think it is funny that prisoners are being raped. Prison guards and administrators do not care about this problem, and it is unconstitutionally cruel to allow this to happen. I am not a softie liberal; on the contrary, I believe in the strict letter of the law. We sentence people to jail, or to die. We do not sentence them to get gang-raped for the rest of their lives. (Believe me, I'd be all in favor of getting the real criminals who rape and murder others to be raped themselves for the rest of their lives, but quite expectedly, it is those people who are doing the raping in prison.)

I don't mind ads in yellow pages, because if I pick it up I'm actually wanting to be sold something. It's the rest of the time that bothers me. This recent New York Times article attempts to show how marketing can be a good thing (persuading people to wash their hands more often), but inadvertently proves the point that marketing really does have an effect on our habits.

One wonders what life would be like if advertising was only allowed in certain situations, like when you're actually searching for something. My guess is people would feel less need to buy stuff all the time - a very different but not necessarily unworkable economy.

There ain't much going on there.

Apologies, the Apollo mission did do some great stuff for science but most of it could be done by robot these days. That is progress.

People can't go to Mars, because it would be a one-way trip.

Read this in the NY Times.

It's just too expensive

With $55 billion you could feed, clothe an educate every man women and child in Rwanda for a decade, assuming their GDP is about $3bn.

and there's nothing to do up there that we couldn't do with robots.

Sample return would be much easier and cheaper without bulky, fragile humans.

Much better to spend the billions and billions of dollars on lots of probes, better very-long-range telescopes

Are we alone in the universe? Manned missions won't tell us, bigger telescopes might.

The NY Times converted 4 terabytes / 11 million TIFF based images & articles from their archives in 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances. And continue to do it to this day. Cost? A couple hundred dollars.

There are girl geeks... Few, but some... So you can't assume your % of woman / water, it could have been % of male / water, etc..

Off topic, but...

One GG that I know, and is rather pleasant to view, decided the biological ticking was too loud. Having not found a suitable male after being hurt/rejected a few times, she decided to completely forgo the male part of the equation. A few Dr. visits, lots of $$ for fertility drugs, and some frozen sperm = twin babies on the way, no father needed.

Now, in reality, a male was the initial donor of the frozen sperm, and I told her that she could of saved a lot of money by just going to a bar and drinking a lot of vodka, but she went on spouting about genetic core, family traits, selectability, et al...

I almost wanted to point out the story of Dr. Jacobs who was convicted of fathering children with his own sperm instead of the donor sperm that was selected, but figured that would only cause too much angst.

BTW, I guess this is becoming a trend among some women today, so the available men better figure things out soon, or the next generation will all be wearing "popsicle"(tm) T-shirts... (I'm out of the game, married with 2 kids myself, so don't blame me.)

This is a big problem in many states, particular the Northeast, and especially New York State. NYS limits the selling back of surplus home-generated power to 0.1% of the state's total electrical power supply (note NYT article from 1996, though I heard a few months ago this cap was still in effect.)

This has the effect of keeping alternative power out of the grid, and limits one potential economic incentive for homeowners.

Oh nothing I reckon. After all we didn't see much of an outrage when many nations were dumping toxic and radioactive waste in international waters. "It sinks to the bottom; what could possible go wrong." Who knew that such waste actually move with the current and affect the species in it. Like with tuna and mercury http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/dining/23sushi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin"

Stalin tried his best to be the worst but mainly slaughtered his own people in slave labor camps and massive engineering schemes. He (and his successors) still did leave behind some gems of pollution hell.

As I said, Bosnia still isn't over. And you didn't look very hard.

And now you sidestep Kerry. I'd be willing to place a friendly wager that you, despite your vociferous objections to Iraq, voted for someone who approved it in the last presidential race. How does that not signal them to keep doing what they're doing?

As to plurality voting, we basically agree. The difficulty is that it is self-protecting. The only people that can change it are the ones propped up by it.

But the electorate has abandoned parties before. Have courage! Vote for someone with an idea!

-Peter

Disclaimer: I propose that justice involve some pretty radical actions in this post. I am not a lawyer, but note that I do not advocate any of these actions, nor should anybody else. I worry about the potential of this advocacy to land people in jail, and I don't care enough about justice for Iraqi's for that. I would have gone so far as to proxy this all through TOR too, unfortunately slashdot doesn't allow that(wtf?).

We try to do so much good in so many places that all we manage is a barely mediocre achievement anywhere.

I fully encourage you to make an idiot of yourself by trying to name one such place. I'll actually help you out. There's a single one, Somalia, and we gave up there real fast, a lot faster than Iraq, even when it's now obviously a significantly bigger failure. The only times we've done good was in WWI and WWII, and that wasn't a question of "trying to do good" that was a question of a us balancing against an alliance of aggressive great powers, classic political realism, not a speck of altruism. We've always been a predatory nation, from the Mexican-American war to Iraq.

Iraq was simply a question of our corporate leaders deciding they wanted oil, Iraq had it, so we went and took it and awarded it to those corporate leaders, all on the tax payers payroll. This article builds on this a bit

Allow me to quote two key paragraphs

Some 40 companies from around the world had jockeyed for the contracts, but they were being awarded wihttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/weekinreview/29good.html?fta=ythout competitive bids, the report said. Those about to land the deals â" Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Total â" had held oil rights in Iraq before Mr. Hussein nationalized the fields and kicked them out more than three decades ago. They all came from countries that had either been stalwart allies of the Bush administration or â" in the case of France, which is home to Total â" had lately increased their support for the American-led campaign to isolate Iran.

Just as striking were the companies that failed to capture a foothold: the Russian oil giant Lukoil, which had signed a deal to exploit a huge field in southern Iraq while Mr. Hussein was still in power, only to see it revoked just before he fell, and Chinese firms with their own claims. Before the 2003 invasion, the Russian and Chinese governments had lent muscle on the United Nations Security Council toward fending off American-led sanctions aimed at the Hussein government.

There were those of us who pointed out the problems with the Iraq war from the beginning and the crimes associated with it. Now it's obvious that we were right, so I don't understand this, how can people HONESTLY STILL BELIEVE we went into Iraq to help!? We invaded a neutral country on evidence that was questionable at best (we're cuplable for having accepted it on face, evidence for war should be carefully scrutinized before being acted upon, ours was decidedly not scrutinized) went in there and systematically destroyed Iraq. We killed one in thirty of these Iraqi's and forced many more to flea the country. Those who remain are in almost perpetual fear of both Americans and fellow Iraqi's never knowing who will shot at them next, whether it will be the religious fundamentalists that have (predictably) found a great battle ground for their cause or the American soldiers that don't give a shit about the locals and who's only wish is to make it home before some suicide bomber rushes their humvee, to whom every Iraqi is a potential enemy. What's more, we remain despite prolonged OVERWHELMING opposition from the local population (Don't let the selective quoting from US news sources fool you, take a look at the statistics, I'm guessing you haven't seen

I had always given Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. That they weren't really all that bad, just unusually incompetent and maybe a bit greedy with a touch of power-hungry. Now I'm fully convinced that there is some kind of rotten fucking evil permeating that organization.

I went through this transition, now comes the powerlessness associated with knowing there is little you can do stop them, none of your friends will even understand this - of course, where you can you try to fight the man, the man will eventually bludgeon you into submission.

The sad reality is that the market will slowly be corralled into accepting Vista and all the requisite DRM baggage that it carries. The key here is that the frog is heated very slowly in the pot and the market will accept, like sheep, what is fed to them. Of course the ardent Microsoft supporters will say Vista ain't so bad, and sure their products are nice to work with, but they are also a nightmare of interoperability when you try and work with anything else.

I don't want to encourage purchase of their products because when you dig deeper into the behavior of Microsoft the 'evil' conclusion is consistently reinforced. A corporation has the same legal rights as an individual in society it begs the question "What sort of individual is Microsoft", I found this and made the comparison.

HOW TO SPOT A PSYCHOPATH - 5 WAYS TO AVOID HIRING PSYCHOPATHS COPYRIGHT 2008 MICHAEL MERCER, PH.D.

1. Pre-Employment Tests - especially certain test scores

From my research on pre-employment tests, there are specific test scores that may indicate a job applicant is a psychopath. Specifically, psychopaths may get low or high scores on certain measures/scales in pre-employment tests:

* low scores on two measures - (a) Truthfulness and (b) Following Rules

Check , Check

* high scores on two measures - (a) Aggressiveness and (b) Power Motivation

Check, Check

Lesson: Be cautious with job applicants who get such scores on pre-employment tests.

2. Job Interviews

If you suspect a job applicant may be a psychopath, then you can ask questions to elicit answers revealing if the applicant threatens or intimidates people. Reason: Psychopaths get a huge thrill from intimidating through (a) real or implied threats, (b) verbal hostility, and (c) manipulation.

threats, hostility, manipulation, manipulation, manipulation.

3. Reference Checks

Call the job applicant's ex-bosses at home, and ask for a "personal reference." Obtain specific examples of how the applicant "handled difficulties and friction with other employees." Listen for warning signs of threats, intimidation, anger, or ridicule.

intimidation, anger,

Sure, which is why when the 5th Amendment (or the 4th, 6th, or 8th) is inconvenient, the government can just send you outside the US. Problem solved!

(The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that the President can designate anyone, including US citizens and legal residents, as "enemy combatants" and ship them off to a military base in Cuba, which is technically outside the United States even though we have complete control over it.)

I'm constantly amazed about how people will post private information in a public place (thus making it public information), and then complain about how they are being robbed of their privacy.

Carnegie Mellon behavioral economist George Loewenstein is releasing an interesting study on privacy behavior...

From The Linked Article:

The scientists conducted several surveys of college students, asking them to provide an e-mail address and then indicate whether they had ever engaged in a list of wayward, or in some cases illegal, activities.

In one experiment, one group of students was given a strong assurance that none of the information they divulged on the survey would be revealed. That should make them more forthcoming, right? Actually, the opposite was true. When the issue of confidentiality was raised, participants clammed up. For example, 25 percent of the students who were given a strong assurance of confidentiality admitted to having copied someone else's homework. Among those given no assurance of confidentiality, more than half admitted to it.

it's gotten better, but there are still problems. See the following two links: NY Times article Wikipedia discussion

I'm not trying to endorse either the Cuban lifestyle or Michael Moore here, but that is actually partially true. The Cuban healthcare system runs far more efficiently than the one in the US, at least as far as the numbers are concerned.

Yes, when you pay doctors less it is amazing how efficient medical care can be! US doctors make about twice the OECD average, for example. Or you can look at how Wal-Mart medical clinics are using cheaper nurses to triage patients and treat simple problems without bringing in an expensive doctor, but of course the AMA is opposing these kinds of clinics.

On the other hand, US Medicare just blocked reducing payments to doctors, so you can imagine that "US Socialized Healthcare" will be more expensive than anyone else's with poor results, just like our socialized education system...

The US also isn't willing to engage in malpractice tort reform which could save nearly 50% of costs due to decreases in "defensive medicine"

That human life begins at birth is an ancient myth. It's even codified in the Old Testament. Do you subscribe to ancient myths?

Human life began perhaps 2.5 million years ago, give or take, with the first organisms that were members of genus Homo.

The personhood of a individual human begins sometime after birth, as the brain develops and the organism interacts with its environment (including other humans) to develop an ego structure. It is not an event located at a specific instant of time; it's like asking "when did the Earth form?" - there's not a specific nanosecond when it went from "accretion of dust and rocks" to "planet".

As a practical matter, we can usually take "birth" as our demarkation point in most cases. (But not in all; Peter Singer makes good points about euthanasia of severely crippled infants.)

But honestly, if you are going to control people, the internet would be an excellent tool to have. Think about it, educate people in public schools that you go to *insert government controlled website here* to search for everything. Use that to give people propaganda, and replace popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo with Cuba-controlled ones that look like Google and act like Google but only searches the government sites.

Yeah. That might work. Just because Cubans are clever enough to set up and run samizdat thumb drive networks doesn't mean that they'll find out about the onion net.

And cesnsorship and state control of media worked pretty much flawlessly in the old Soviet bloc. I mean everybody there was pretty well convinced that Soviet communism was the greatest thing ever, Moscow was the center of the universe, and that they had absolutely the highest living standard on earth. That's why it was such a shock to everyone in 1989 when Reagan singlehandedly punched through Berlin Wall and gave everyone a case of Coke and a two-year subscription to Playboy.

We all know how solid China's great firewall is. No way around that puppy, you'd better believe it.

And of course the real goal of the US isn't to prevent companies from doing business in Cuba in contravention of the law (however stupid you think that law may be), but to actually prevent Cubans from getting any information at all. That's probably why there are honking big transmitters in Florida broadcasting news 24-7 towards Cuba.

Castro's done a great job of blocking all that information. Nobody in Cuba has ever heard of El Duque, for example, or Alexei Ramirez. Both of their families still believe the official explanation that they accidentally drowned themselves while shaving.

Indeed we all know that controlling information is much like building a dam: It's very cheap and easy to do, it takes hardly any effort to maintain, and it's virtually indestructible. And the best way to control the flow of water through a dam, much like controlling the flow of information, is to drill a very small hole and use a finger to carefully control how much gets through. Information, like water, tends to stay put and hates to travel.

I cannot possibly see any problems with your plans for CubaNet. Sure, the richest and most ruthless software company on the planet has spent 10 years and billions of dollars trying and utterly failing to come up with something "that look[s] like Google and act[s] like Google". But with a decent project manager Cuba should have the whole thing up and running within about six weeks or so. That'll show those yanqui bastards what's what.

If the Dems piss me off one more time though, all bets are off.

How many times has it been already, uhm?

In the 1990ies Clinton's campaign wore the patience of some supporters with talking about "Change" too much... "Clinton/Gore. For people, for a change." . He took office promising more change, only to strongly disappoint its most vociferous supporters immediately after.

And today's Democratic candidates? One's very motto is "The change we can believe in"... And the other selling herself as "an agent of change". And you keep falling for it...

And, oh, look — the boy-wonder from Chicago, whose first profession was "community organizer" (whatever the heck that means) — is all but nominated by your party. With "change" — the emptiest promise — being his "inspiring" slogan. Eeww...

Even ancient historians describing earlier events have noticed, that plebs leans to change for the sake of change — however useless or outright dangerous the proposed change may be... "One more time," — you said? Yeah, right...

What's replacing radio?

Not sure. But something certainly is:

Radio's Popularity Declining Unevenly

CBS Acquires Last.fm Seeking To Overcome Declining Radio Business

In decline: TV, radio, newspapers, books, mags

Radio Keeps Declining, Wall Street Keeps Getting Surprised

Really? THIS seems to contradict you entirely. For the lazy here's an excerpt: "In these new machines[...] a printer sprays a bar code onto each letter.The bar code includes not just the five-digit ZIP code, but a nine-digit ZIP code detailing the recipient's neighborhood and the letter-carrying route within the ZIP."

This was published in 1995.
Now, I also doubt the parent story: For one thing, it's the sorter that prints the barcodes in the first place.
Now, maybe he worked in an intermediary office that is resorting the pre-sorted mail.
However:
  I worked proof in a bank for some years and the sorter machines we used were pretty much the same ones the post offices uses.
They contain a reject bin, any item that can't be sorted properly gets kicked there, the only thing that halts the machine is a physical jam (or the manual stop).
For example, if the MICr line is fuzzy, double printed, or otherwise unreadable it just rejects and the operator then hand-sorts it to the appropriate bin.

This change-tracking by the McCain campaign is a great service to the public. It will help catch any attempts to shift "beliefs" according to public mood. Hopefully the Obamites will respond in kind and then we, the public, will get the benefit of an overall increase politicians being monitored for duplicity.

Yeah, right. They might catch a duplicated recipe or two but if you think this will lead to anything productive then I want some of what you are smoking.

Prediction: This will lead to some "scandal" that gets Olbermann and/or O'Reilly up into a frenzy of manufactured outrage while disillusioning the rest of us who actually had some hope for our country.

No, he's just another politician, saying things that he thinks will get him elected, even if they don't make any sense. Take, for example, his push to restrict speculation on oil futures to drive down the cost of gasoline. The very large majority of economists, on both sides of the political spectrum agree that futures speculation has no effect on the price of gasoline today, but does provide useful information about where insiders think the price of gas is going. (See, e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ). Here's anther example: opposing NAFTA, while telling the Canadians that he wasn't serious. Here's another example: every politician in DC is saying that the opposition's energy plans won't do anything in the short term. But, both sides are right -- short of a 1970s-style price setting (with resulting shortages), nothing can be done short-term. It's not just Obama -- McCain does it to. (But, you weren't defending McCain.) They are all the same. Also, I don't think Bill Clinton came from a background of family wealth, nor did Reagan or Nixon.

The basic problem is that the Laffer curve remains a theory that leans on a lot of simplification to an "ideal world" (sort of like modelling water as incompressible and non-viscous). Yet devotees of tax-cuts-for-all-situations dogma (like the present leadership of the Republican carry on as thought it's a proven fact about society. This graph from the Wikipedia article you cited does a great job of showing how the Laffer curve has exactly 0 predictive accuracy. Of course current Republican leadership won't accept that because they're ideologically bound to always propose less taxes. And because they're not interested enough in how to reconcile that with people's desire for government services to actually run government in a fiscally sound way (hence the borrow and spend approach justified by letting future debt "starve the beast").

This unwillingness to account for facts that disfavor your preferred theory is characteristic of any group that favors dogma over thoughtfulness when it comes to government policy. I'm young enough not to have been through the period when Democrats were adamant about price controls and mandated full employment, despite the well-understood problems with those policies, but I believe that at that time dogma dominated the Democratic Party as it now dominates the Republican Party. And in fact, one of the best points in favor of Barack Obama is not that he's inspiring or bold (he is the former, his campaign is very evidently not the latter), but that he's genuine thoughtful and well-versed in these issues. There was a tremendous interview with him in the Times about the housing market and economic policy, and it was clear that he's really learned something about the relationship (positive and negative) of government regulation to the functioning of financial markets. The guy's not a professor for nothing, and a sane political environment would value that kind of thoughtfulness and desire to really learn about something.

Actually there is a bias now, against young men. The numbers show young men are doing more poorly in general in grade school than woman. They are trending to go to college less and are more likely to have problems in school. Yet a good chunk of the activism and money goes towards woman now.

If universities are forced to ensure that the gender of athletes is proportional to the rates of enrollment, regardless of actual interest, then I don't see why they shouldn't have Men's Studies programs to mirror Women's Studies, regardless of actual interest.

This is because feminism was never actually about equality, but improving the social status of women. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself - I don't see why the NAACP should take it upon itself to stick up for Latinos, for example. Whereas the goal of feminism is gender equality, but is really only about improving things for women.

Take the suffragist movement, for example. It was started at a convention in 1848, finally succeeding on a national scale with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Know what else happened in that time? The Civil War and World War I. Note that suffragists didn't demand the right to be drafted with the right to vote. Ditto that for WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Hmm.

Today, breast cancer research receives far more money than prostate cancer research, even though prostate cancer kills about as many men as breast cancer kills women. Many states have an Office of Women's Health, but only New Hampshire has an Office of Men's Health - and it had to start without any funding.

Men are far and away the #1 victim of assaults and murders and make up at least 40% of domestic violence victims, yet Congress passes a Violence Against Women Act.

But back to school - yes, the vast majority of PhD's are men - but men also round out the bottom of the scale with the most mental disabilities. And if these people were really concerned about equity, they'd be doing something about the 60/40 female/male disparity in overall enrollment.

Which isn't to say that women haven't gotten a raw deal, the point is that men have too. Feminism needs to go away, and be replaced with straight up egalitarianism.

That or they could just fake this one too!