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Yes, exactly. There is no market without a government first setting the rules. If the rules are rigged for an elite few, then everyone else is guaranteed to lose.

> It's exactly the opposite PRISM used fisa warrants,

Except, I'm afraid, when they didn't bother with warrants or simply ignore the limitations of warrants or subpoenasTake a look at the rebuke by exactly the kind of judge who issues such warrents, at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08....

The ongoing decryption efforts are tied to prism, and constitute hacking or "cracking" of the most basic nature. Examples include: the doucumented spying on embassies of allies, to quote from The Guardian.

            One of the bugging methods mentioned is codenamed Dropmire, which, according to a 2007 document, is "implanted on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy, DC" – an apparent reference to a bug placed in a commercially available encrypted fax machine used at the mission. The NSA documents note the machine is used to send cables back to foreign affairs ministries in European capitals.

As you might expect, Raytheon spends heavily on political contributions and lobbying.

This is why we must elect a young, smart, well-educated politician with multi-cultural background and compelling life-story to Presidency. Someone, who knows, how to use a computer himself. Who is not beholden to KKKorporate interests. Someone loved and respected overseas. Someone, who cares... Someone, who thrills men and whom women can imagine finding in their showers and be excited, rather than frightened. Someone, who is serious about ending Washington's culture of corruption !

Yes we can!

I'm wondering who are the "US companies who actually abide by the emissions law" given that Honda, GM, Toyota and SEVEN makers of diesel engines have been busted for cheating on MILLIONS of vechicles.

So who has NEVER cheated? Or is it that many have simply never been caught?

I am here not to flame you or criticize you, but to try to show you that you have some mistaken ideas.

Bill Clinton was impeached over a minor sex scandal using a superficial and extremely dubious "perjury" hook.

Frankly I don't much care whether Bill Clinton was getting sex from interns or whatever. Hillary obviously has known for many years what kind of man she married, so they have a de-facto open marriage.

I care a bit more when a politician looks right into a camera and lies to the people. "I did not have sex with that woman" His later explanation is that her sucking him off didn't count as "sex", and oh everyone knows that right? Nah bro, you're a lying dog, just admit it.

I care a lot when I find out that the Chief Executive was attempting to obstruct justice. Coaching witnesses on what to say and trying to destroy evidence. Lying is shitty but obstruction of justice is where I draw the line. Of course, lying under oath is also pretty bad, and Bill did that too. (He later claimed to be confused as to what the meaning of "sex" is and argued that his perjury is true if you quibble about what the meaning of the word "is" is. There's a legal definition of "sex" and he knew or should have known it; the judge refered him to the specific legal definition.)

I figured that if Clinton was impeached, Gore would easily win the election (running as an incumbent) and we would have 9 years of President Gore. I did not want to see President Gore, but I very much wanted to see the appropriate punishment for obstruction of justice.

Also, I just plain dislike Bill and Hillary due to their premeditated activities to ruin women who posed any kind of bad publicity threat. Repeatedly a woman would pop up with a tale of having banged Bill or been raped or groped by Bill, and this whole machine started up to demonize and discredit each new woman. If you are a fan of the Clintons, you are implicitly condoning this.

Whitewater was extensively investigated by a special prosecutor hostile to the Clintons (the one that eventually changed the subject to Monica Lewinsky because he couldn't find anything in Whitewater - the weird bit is that this should have been obvious from the beginning, the Clintons were victims, not beneficiaries, of Whitewater.)

I haven't researched Whitewater. It's only memorable to me because of the weird disappearing reappearing evidence. That was weird.

But Ken Starr disappointed me because he was far too nice to Bill Clinton. I wanted Bill Clinton to pay a price for his perjury. Once Ken Starr had physical evidence, with Bill's semen on it, which a DNA test would prove was Bill's, Starr should have kept giving Bill more rope to hang himself. Get Bill to swear under oath three times that there was no way Monica Lewinsky ever even got his trousers off, and then drop the DNA bomb. Instead, Starr told Bill up front about the dress, and immediatly Bill shifted to a different set of lies, and surfed his way through the crisis. (Of course, while Bill fans should have thanked Starr for this, they demonized him as a sex-obsessed partisan hack.)

I'm surprised you didn't throw in a Benghazi for extra credit.

I'm surprised that you and others are so glib about Benghazi. An American ambassador is dead and the whole thing was a disaster. Given the steady deterioration of security in the area, given that the Ambassador kept pleading for more protection, why wasn't more protection sent... or failing that, why wasn't the embassy evacuated? Why was it so surprising that a terrorist attack was carried out on September 11? Why don't you care about the photos of bloody smears on the embassy walls? When did Hillary find out and what did she do? (For that matter, when did Barack Obama find out and what did he do and just where was he? This wasn't the stereotypical 4:00 A.M. wake-up call, this happened in la

"The PC has stopped being the primary computing device of most people meaning that if they don't make it big on the mobile front they'll be irrelevant in the long run."

Agreed. But I think Microsoft will not "make it big" with mobile software.

Products that face low sales because of abuse and foolishness:

Windows: If you have Windows 7, why get a new version? At some point the version you have is enough. Apparently there aren't any new features in Windows 10 that are attractive to customers. Apparently the new features in Windows 10 are all anti-customer.

Google is becoming more and more abusive: F.T.C. Is Said to Investigate Claims That Google Used Android to Promote Its Products.

Apple iPhones: What will the future iPhone 7 have that the iPhone 6 doesn't have? Digital Turnip Twaddling? At some point people will stop rushing to buy new iPhones.

Apple watches? Now that Steve Jobs is dead, Apple no longer releases easy-to-use products. Apple now does the Microsoft thing and releases buggy products that it slowly fixes. Articles:

Verdict: "... there's a learning curve you have to overcome..."

Seven problems facing the Apple Watch

Apple Watch: Issues We Know Of And Possible Fixes.

Opinion: One month later, fixing 15 early Apple Watch problems seems straightforward

These 8 problems with the Apple Watch are 'infuriating'

9 of the biggest complaints about the Apple Watch so far

8 Infuriating Problems With The Apple Watch

The Green movement has none of the power in Japan that it does in the US and Europe

If the Green movement had the power in the U.S. that nuke fans thought it did, all coal and nuclear power in the country would have been replaced with solar panels. In the Carter Administration.

After Fukushima, foreign Greens and their pet journalists swarmed in to fire up a mass movement like the ones in Western countries.

Greens didn't tell the Japanese that TEPCO was a habitual, corner cutting liar that put their employees and surrounding region at risk. TEPCO did that through their corruption and hubris.

But because there is no anti-technology movement in Japan, they will figure out how to do better next time.

Standard nuke fan storyline: if you oppose nuclear power, you're a luddite! Reality: you can be fascinated by the technology, but realize that nuclear power is the most expensive technology ever invented by man.

Let's pretend that the IAEA isn't as incestuous with the industry it's supposed to oversee as Treasury is with Goldman Sachs, and that there will never be a nuclear meltdown again, anywhere. Nuclear power is still completely unjustifiable, as no plant rolls the full cost of it's construction, operation, security, maintenance into the rates it charges much less storing the waste for hundreds of years.

Nuclear power == corporate pork and fluffing Tom Swift fanboys.

How the hell can Fukishima increase nuclear related deaths when nobody died from it???

And if we're counting radiation induced cancer and subsequent deaths (which, from fukishima is basically non-existent) then why do we give coal/oil/etc. a pass on pollution induced deaths?

A good a place as any to throw in this link to a well written piece regarding undue radiation fears. Some people are wising up, but many still just can't accept that radiation risk isn't what its been made out to be all these years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...

Ok, I see what you're saying...

Of course, there is no system in place to do what you're suggesting, and you can't put it into place after the fact (ex post facto).

But if your suggestion is that it should be done for future cases... I'll toss one thought your way...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...

"Yet, Volkswagen is relatively immune to stock market pressure because only 12 percent of its voting shares are traded. Porsche Automobil Holding, controlled by members of the Porsche family, holds a slight majority. The German state of Lower Saxony owns 20 percent, and the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar owns 17 percent."

Consider for a min that they aren't likely to just hand over their shares, and if you fine and sue them into oblivion, they'll spend every last cent the company has fighting you, so that when they finally go bankrupt, there is nothing left to take.

If you make reasonable offers and ask for something less than everything, the shareholders might give it to you. If you demand everything, they may simply spend it before you can get it.

---

Finally, I'm not sure that shares in VW would really make a lot of the owners happy, or whole. To get cash they'd have to sell them running the price into the ground. If you doubled the number of shares, cutting the current owners to 50% of the company (probably the least they would be willing to live with), then you cut the price in half, handing over paper to the owners of cars who would rather have cash.

It is a nice idea, but not a very practical one IMHO...

Speaker John A. Boehner, under intense pressure from conservatives in his party, announced on Friday that he would resign one of the most powerful positions in government and give up his House seat at the end of October, as Congress moved to avert a government shutdown.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/us/john-boehner-to-resign-from-congress.html

http://america.aljazeera.com/a...

It was also ruled legal. So, what now?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07...
http://www.nationaljournal.com...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

The Supreme court will now have to rule, so we will see.

That is completely legal.

However US courts claim that US law is to held up "in Europe!" which makes the teacher lose his job.

We europeans lough our asses off about such stupidity.

I would laugh with you, if that's what actually happened. Except it's not (unless you can provide a contrary link). What actually happens (on multiple occassions, apparently) is that the teacher was fired for violating school rules. Not for violating US law (because in fact a teenager drinking wine in Paris is not a violation of US law.). The teacher was responsible for following the schools rules, the teacher failed to do so, and the teacher was fired/punished for doing so. The only involvement of the courts (AFAICT) is that they agreed the school could fire the teacher.

Now, of course "zero tolerance" rules are incredibly stupid, but that's more of a low-level institutional problem than a US law problem. Note that there actually are a couple of US laws that apply to US citizens even outside the country: for example, laws against pedophilia (to prevent sex tourists from going abroad and having sex with 12-year-olds or younger). Drinking abroad, however, is not against US law.

The problem is that requiring them to buy back every car at full sales price may well bankrupt them.

It won't. The VW group has plenty of money, and they can re-sell those cars in other markets.

Ford faced a similar problem in the 90s with the Explorer. Those who remember and were paying attention will tell you that the tires were only part of it, the vehicle had a design flaw that was not really fixable.

"Most other sport utility vehicles are also built on pickup truck underbodies. Indeed, many have rollover death rates considerably higher than the Explorer's. I'm no Ford-lover, but it wasn't just Ford. It was everyone. All early SUVs were tip-prone if driven by morons who refuse to acknowledge that they are driving something which is not a car. So they remade SUVs to be more like cars, making them worse at being off-road vehicles in the process, instead of making a better driver, which we now know to be impossible.

If there are taxes to be collected, I'm sure governments will find a way to expand their territory. Look at the incidence of Island-building in South China sea: http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

... imagine what the world would be like if elevators were not built so that people could inspect them. “Proprietary software is an unsafe building material,” Mr. Moglen had said. “You can’t inspect it.” On Tuesday, Volkswagen admitted it had rigged the proprietary software on 11 million of its diesel cars around the world so that they would pass emissions tests when they were actually spreading smog. The breadth of the Volkswagen scandal should not obscure the broader question of how vulnerable we are to software code that is out of sight and beyond oversight.

I don't think that Coke is just pushing back against the idea that, say, corn syrup is particularly bad. They seem to be pushing back agains the idea that calorie intake is a big deal at all. Their groundbreaking scientific theory appears to be, "Sure, excess calories make you fat, but that doesn't mean it's your diet. Maybe you should just run a few extra miles a day so you can keep drinking your daily 3 liters of Coke!"

My father had an '85 GT, and it was very cool. My wife now owns it. You can walk up to it, crumple in the door panel with your knee, and it'll pop right back out with no damage at all.

The other feature was their 'mill and drill' setup where all the holes for the body panels were drilled at once in a very accurate jig - that meant that you could easily replace the body panels with factory or aftermarket ones to change the style/color/layout of the body. Since they were not structural, you could do anything, really.

http://www.corbisimages.com/st...

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02...

http://www.hemmings.com/hmn/st...

http://www.calgaryfieros.com/F...

http://www.fierofocus.com/arti...

The price control is called "competition".

Yeah, right.

I am required to buy auto insurance, since I insist on driving on public roads. I can shop by price, and change insurance companies to save money. It works essentially the same way.

Yes, and it's equally ridiculous. In BC, for example, the auto insurance company is run by the state, allowing it to control prices, so mandating it makes sense.

You do realize that the fact that they can't negotiate the prices of pharmaceuticals is due to the republicans and the Bush administration. That occurred before Obama took office with the Medicare part D aspect and now they're cashing in. I just read an article today about how the drug for treating toxoplasmosis went from $13.50/tablet to $750 overnight despite being a 62 year old drug. The drug companies are basically price gouging the US public. In another case they raised the price of Doxycycline, an antibiotic from $20/bottle to $1849/bottle.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12...

That one with Caddy in the '90s? No criminal charges. They programmed the ECU to recognize the test cycle and modify the programming to game the test. Similar to the issue here, but not exactly.

They shipped what was tested. If your daily driving happened to match the test cycle exactly, it was theoretically possible to trigger the hidden code, but in practice, it probably never happened.

Who said that paywalls and (especially) donations were unacceptable? Nobody, that's who, which is why your argument is a strawman.

Aighearach replied to a comment that explicitly said "Then, try offering a paid subscription service" so it was implied that Aighearach had a problem with them.

For the record, my position has always been that paywalls are useful because they let me know a site sucks, or more diplomatically, "that its content and purpose do not match my needs."

Your problem was you didn't understand the ideas I expressed

Correct. I did misunderstand, I'm sorry.

you just responded to the nearest cliche bullshit to what I said, and pretended that is what I meant. It wasn't, and it never would be. You don't need to add in your own extra "implication" that contradicts what I was saying; the words themselves can be literally understood, in which case they will also match my intended meaning. And, I even went into detail. Try reading my comments before deciding what they say. 0% will be the lowest hanging cliche nearby.

Yes I misunderstood, I didn't pretend it's what you meant any more than you pretended the person you were responding to was asking the questions because they wanted to "make money off content, and don't have any content that either has value, or that you care about transmitting to the world."

They just had the same question I had: If having ads is bad, then how to simply cover the costs of hosting which get more expensive as the site gets more popular? It seems that an answer that you have is paywalls, which is fine by me.
Though doesn't solve their scenario of other places copy/pasting the content. The user wouldn't read the same article twice, they'd read it on the free with ads (that they block) version that copied it from the paywall site they don't pay for. Granted I'm not sure how wide spread this scenario is given I don't recall anything happening with The New York Times which has been (kinda) subscription for a while.

So basically we're in agreement.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12...

VW wouldn't be the first. I remember the Caddy because I had a family member with one. Fraud to game the EPA tests is standard, and every US maker has been caught at it. The Caddy issue is the largest I'd heard of before this, but not the only one.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12...

This has happened before. The cars are 100% legal because they are 100% legal. The company that made them may owe penalties, but the cars have nothing wrong with them. At most, a recall would be made that would make them operate under the parameters they used when tested.

According to the previous article about this, the cars are still LEGAL, they are just nowhere near as clean as they claim. It's not a "clean" or "dirty" question, all cars are dirty to a certain extent.

Uh, no.

During normal driving situations, the controls are turned off, allowing the cars to spew as much as 40 times the pollution allowed under the Clean Air Act, the E.P.A. said.

Honda and Ford have already been under investigation for similar emissions manipulation. For 1.6 million affected cars, Honda paid a $12.6 million fine plus $250 million in remedial costs. Ford paid a $2.5 million fine plus $3.8 million in other costs for 60000 vans (Source). The investigation into VW's manipulation is about roughly 500000 cars.

So, while I agree that these manipulations are despicable and beyond stupid, an $18 billion fine is not likely at all, and other automakers probably don't want to rock the boat too much either. This issue reminds me of smartphones that clock higher when a benchmark is running, and of graphics cards which get lower scores when you rename the benchmark executable. If only those were regulated as strictly...

If ice is melting at an exponential rate, how can WWII planes crashed on Greenland be buried under 260 feet deep of ice?

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08...

It's about fraud. Widespread organised fraud. Should that really be legal in your opinion? Or should it be legal if they do it "for the party", since it's fraud for the sake of politics? The entire reason we've got all this shit is because of some donors setting the agenda and turning science denial into a political point of difference between two parties when both used to consider reality previously. Do you deny science for The Party comrade? Papers please.

Assuming the global warming warners are correct, the reason we have this issue is the people doing the warning have made several huge mistakes.

1. They have not lived as though they believed their warnings. The Democrats supposedly believe the world is going to be very messed up, and yet it is way down on their list of priorities. World leaders who presumably have good access to intelligence don't seem very concerned. Al Gore flew around in carbon spewing private planes while living in heavy carbon footprint house.

2. They have discredited themselves by setting themselves up to make a profit from the hysteria. Exhibit A is again Al Gore with his investments: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11...

3. Al Gore becoming the first major spokesperson was a huge mistake because he's clearly a partisan and had just come through a brutal campaign. He was bound to make half the electorate skeptical. If George W. Bush had lost the election and immediately started talking about global warming then it would be the Democrats claiming the whole thing was a host and yet another example of "the politics of fear".

4. Using words like "denier" and saying "the debate is over" as a way to shout down and shut down debate rather than trying to convince people. We need fewer articles that threaten and insult skeptics and more articles that respectfully explain both sides of the debate. Everytime the word "denier" shows up in print it reinforces the idea that the global warming believers know they can't make a case and have to result to poisoning the well attacks.

It was a fucking clock. His engineering teacher could have verified it. Second, if they were really concerned why the fuck was the bomb squad and fire dept not called? They kept that kid for two class periods interrogating him without a lawyer and his parents. The principal trying to force him to write some kind of written confession. Again, without his parents. Do you think that was reasonable? Jeezus.

Also speculating what the kid was up to? Really? Why not just give him the benefit of the doubt?

was the school evacuated? did the bomb squad arrive? did the police wear armor when approaching the "bomb"? was there a bomb-sniffing dog? was the "bomb" deactivated by dunking it in a barrel of water or shooting it or whatever they do?
this is what happens when you suspect something is a bomb http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...
the story here is "we didn't think it was a bomb, but we think you're a bomber"

From what I can see there is nothing special about him or what he did, he is just some cheeky kid who used a very naive way of getting attention and it got out of hand. All this talk of discrimination etc. seems like a beat-up and the poor kid will pay the price in the long run for all the manipulating adults have done to politically capitalise on his prank.

I didn't get the impression that the boy is cheeky or that this was a prank.

It just seems like he's a precocious kid interested in how things work and he wanted to show one of his teachers. Unfortunately, teachers' detectors are up for school violence (remember the child who was penalized for chewing his Pop Tart in the shape of a gun?) and the rise of radical Islam (Islamic gunmen attack the "Draw The Prophet" 40 minutes away in Garland Texas) resulted in this situation.

It's a tricky situation. However, calling the cops seems slightly absurd. They didn't think it was a bomb by the fact they didn't evacuate the premises and bring a bomb robot to blow it up. If the authorities find a credible threat, they bring in a bomb robot and blow up whatever the threat is. That didn't happen.

As far as taking things apart and putting them back together, Henry Ford did that sort of thing. This might have been simpler, but the boy correctly put it together in a different way.

In a previous life I worked on the SIOP and helped evaluate various (mostly counterforce) strategies. I highly recommend the books, Prisoners Dilemma (Poundstone) and Command and Control (Schlosser, don't get sidetracked by the Damascus incident story). If you have not read these sources, even if you worked on strategy and tactics at SAC (like I did), even if you taught Strategic and Tactical Sciences at the Air Force Institute of Technology (like I did), you are probably not as informed as you should be on these topics. I certainly was not then, but with maturation comes some ability to see the past for what it was.

Essentially they fabricated a study to support a use of a drug, and the conclusions in that study were not founded .. because it wasn't a real study.

Sorry, but that's pretty much a criminal activity in my books.

But in the collusive atmosphere that is the relationship between Big Pharma and the FDA, it's known as "Just another workday".

Witness the story of the now-rejected Centocor/Lilly Anti-Septic Shock Drug, HA1A, or "Centoxin". My best friend's father died in September, 1992 after being given Centoxin in lieu of the standard treatments for Septic Shock (steriods, aggressive antibiotics). He was part of the "second" Centoxin study (the one that was HALTED by the FDA, due to an unacceptable death rate...)

The "collusion" comes when the FDA, who discovered that Centocor was "cooking the books" on the FIRST study, didn't simply turn over Centocor (and Lilly) to the DoJ, instead of "giving them another chance to LIE better" with a SECOND study.

Worse yet, when my friend was asked to give "informed consent" to administer Centoxin, it was represented as the ONLY POSSIBLE TREATMENT for Septic Shock (however, they never mentioned that it ONLY worked on gram-negative sepsis, and that it HAD to be given within 120 MINUTES of the onset of symptoms, which they already knew YEARS before that study, and which time had LONG passed in his case); however, a quick cruise through the Physician's Desk Reference (PDR) lists SEVERAL antibiotics (such as Amoxicillin/Clavulinate, Clindamycin and Inipenem, to name a few) which are listed as treatment for Sepsis, and then Steroids and other anti-inflammatory drugs are given to reduce the deadly inflammatory response (primarily from the release of Interuekin-1 (IL1), IIRC) (sometimes your immune system is your worst enemy!), to try to stop your body from killing its own organs.

The problem with the stimulus was that it was too small. It should have been two- to three-times larger to have a significant impact on the economy. Alas, the Republicans forced President Obama to settle for a much smaller number. As for the shovel ready jobs, the states were allowed to pay off other bills with the money that should have went into construction.

As for Export-Import Bank, Boeing is moving 500 U.S. jobs to Europe because it's customers can't get insurance and loan guarantees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/16/business/economy/export-import-bank-general-electric-boeing.html

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

For comparative foolishness, I'll take the Gipper.

Redistricting

Nope! It's leftist. It's just that you are so far to the left yourself that anything to the right of Mao Zedong looks like crazy talk. Take this quick test: is the New York Times a liberal newspaper? The answer is so blatantly obvious as to be, well, blatantly obvious. If you do not answer this question correctly you are a raving nutbag.

Here is the correct answer to this test, as printed in the pages of the Grey Lady herself. If you failed the test, think long and hard about just how far out you are and just how few people share your views, and that you live in an echo chamber where dissent is either not allowed or quickly deleted.

Ronald Reagan believed in astrology and thought aliens were going to attack the world. Even more ridiculous, he believed in the pseudo-science of supply-side economics.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05...

They do tend to bring only cases they think they'll win - there aren't any plea bargains (which is a huge improvement over the current US justice system). That said, they also have a big problem with police/prosecutors relying on (often coerced) confessions to win convictions.

Also, there has been something of a tradition that many judges are inclined to trust the prosecutors/police, that's only more recently been whittled away at with some of the evidence that's come to light in old cases with DNA evidence brought in. Consider Hakamada Iwao, who was found guilty of murder, only to be exonerated 45 years later when DNA testing proved his innocence. One of the original judges reportedly considered committing suicide out of shame over it:

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...

Yeah, I'm sure there were no WMD in Iraq...

http://www.thepoliticalinsider...
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2...

Of course, you could tell the solders exposed to them that they are liars:

http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

The 1988 link was never meant to demonstrate current events, it was prefaced with the line

maybe that Saddam wasn't willing to use them?

I was demonstrating that Saddam had used chemical weapons in the past, during the run up to the war, he was refusing access to the inspectors, and acting like he was about to use weapons on Iran or the Kurds again.

Oh, and please, argue in the talk page of Wikipedia's article, I am sure those people would love to debate the merits of your arguments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

After all, there were no WMD in Iraq, right?

Lee pled down to fairly light charges, with 50 or so completely dismissed. Lee was awarded a $1.6 million settlement from the U.S. federal government and several news organizations for privacy violations. I guess the government just passes out money to suspected Chinese spies?

It wasn't so much the government that settled as it was the four news organizations.

It appears to me that the lawsuit the Wen Ho Lee brought was a revenge suit to try to find out who had ratted him out by giving his name to the press.
The people at LANL closed ranks and refused to tell. After all, they had been filing complaints about his violating security measures long before the FBI was investigating Lee.
So Lee sues the news organizations to make them reveal the sources. Historically, the media would have an easy win on First Amendment rights and centuries of case law. The judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, ignores all this and finds the reporters in contempt and gives them a $500 a day fine.
If you remember the DOJ vs Microsoft case, you'll know why Judge Jackson has a grudge against the media.

The settlement is really bad news for the rest of us.
It's going to make it easy for politicians to shut up the press when something they don't like is reported.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

Also, note that the government's condition was that Wen Ho Lee gets none of the government's money - it goes only to pay lawyer's expenses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06...

Whether or not he was actively spying, I can't say. I find it very difficult to think that a Taiwanese would do anything to help China.
But I'm real sure he was up to no good.

You really need to read this of you want to talk about the Wen Ho Lee case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02...

If nothing else, he should have been imprisoned for this felony:
"They did discover that Dr. Lee had given his password to his children so they could connect to the Internet and play computer games through his Los Alamos computer while they were at college. "

Of course the main reason for dropping the charges was that they had no smoking gun. That is, Lee copied all these documents, but they didn't catch him transferring them. The tapes just disappeared. Part of the settlement was that Lee would reveal the location of the missing tapes, and the big reveal was "I threw them in the trash". That in itself is a felony.

Also the government settled for a plea bargain in the original spy case was to a large extent due to the defense lawyers filing to get security clearance to get access to the 400,000 documents Lee downloaded, and secondly to put them into the court records.

Once again, I maintain that the Wen Ho Lee case is nothing like the Xi Xiaoxing case.

Lee pled down to fairly light charges, with 50 or so completely dismissed. Lee was awarded a $1.6 million settlement from the U.S. federal government and several news organizations for privacy violations. I guess the government just passes out money to suspected Chinese spies?

It wasn't so much the government that settled as it was the four news organizations.

It appears to me that the lawsuit the Wen Ho Lee brought was a revenge suit to try to find out who had ratted him out by giving his name to the press.
The people at LANL closed ranks and refused to tell. After all, they had been filing complaints about his violating security measures long before the FBI was investigating Lee.
So Lee sues the news organizations to make them reveal the sources. Historically, the media would have an easy win on First Amendment rights and centuries of case law. The judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, ignores all this and finds the reporters in contempt and gives them a $500 a day fine.
If you remember the DOJ vs Microsoft case, you'll know why Judge Jackson has a grudge against the media.

The settlement is really bad news for the rest of us.
It's going to make it easy for politicians to shut up the press when something they don't like is reported.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

Also, note that the government's condition was that Wen Ho Lee gets none of the government's money - it goes only to pay lawyer's expenses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06...

Whether or not he was actively spying, I can't say. I find it very difficult to think that a Taiwanese would do anything to help China.
But I'm real sure he was up to no good.

You really need to read this of you want to talk about the Wen Ho Lee case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02...

If nothing else, he should have been imprisoned for this felony:
"They did discover that Dr. Lee had given his password to his children so they could connect to the Internet and play computer games through his Los Alamos computer while they were at college. "

Of course the main reason for dropping the charges was that they had no smoking gun. That is, Lee copied all these documents, but they didn't catch him transferring them. The tapes just disappeared. Part of the settlement was that Lee would reveal the location of the missing tapes, and the big reveal was "I threw them in the trash". That in itself is a felony.

Also the government settled for a plea bargain in the original spy case was to a large extent due to the defense lawyers filing to get security clearance to get access to the 400,000 documents Lee downloaded, and secondly to put them into the court records.

Once again, I maintain that the Wen Ho Lee case is nothing like the Xi Xiaoxing case.

And that sort of shit is really what burns my ass (and I`m not Muslim). Yes, some Muslims did stupid, terrible shit. In more recent ``Christian`` history, we have Kim Davis getting a standing ovation to fucking eye of the tiger after being jailed for multiple instances of contempt because she refused to marry gays like her fucking job says to (apparently it`s against her religion, while her 4 marriages and infidelity weren`t somehow)

And we conveniently forget that in Iran, the major reaction to 9-11 was not celebration but actually this, because they recognize that - regardless or religion - all lives are valuable and a terrible thing had happened. Despite that, some people still want to put Iran in the same camp as ISIS (guess who was fighting ISIS before the rest of us got involved), and major outlets like the New York Times had articles that advocate an unprovoked bombing of Iran as a better alternative than a peaceful settlement.

I`ve met some pretty terrible Muslims in my life. For the most part they were holier-than-thou assholes that thought that praying twice a day made them ``good people`` in spite of their conduct. I see the exact same shit from certain members of Christian churches, as well as Jews, etc. There will always be bad people out there, and there are plenty who would use their so-called religion or beliefs to pretend they are good whilst actually doing evil.

After reading the article on the NYTimes, I went to whitehouse.gov and made a petition to:

"Apologize to Dr. Xi of Temple Univ. for the FBI's wrongful accusation and prosecution of him on charges of spying."

The complete text reads:

After reading this article in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...
I was appalled and upset that another Chinese-American citizen had been wrongly accused and prosecuted for spying when even a basic check could have exonerated him. That this even got to this point not only speaks to the incompetence of the FBI but a pervasive bias and distrust of Chinese American CITIZENS.

President Obama should, at the very least, on behalf of the U.S. Govt. apologize to this distinguished professor who has seen his reputation shattered and loss of various posts and titles. This will be an important symbolic act.

If you believe that he (at least) deserves an apology, follow this link and "sign" the petition:
"https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/apologize-dr-xi-temple-univ-fbis-wrongful-accusation-and-prosecution-him-charges-spying-0".
For those of you unfamiliar with how this works, once it reaches 150 "signatures" then it is publicly viewable. If it then reaches 150,000 within a month then the white house promises to respond.

Please note: when I mentioned "another Chinese American" I did not mean that I am a Chinese American. I am not. Rather I was talking about the other Chinese American CITIZENS (like Wen Ho Lee) who have been charged and prosecuted apparently for no other reason than they are of Chinese origin. They were found innocent.

We already live in a totalitarian state with omnipresent surveillance, searches without cause, seizures without trial, and a government whose budget consists chiefly of taking money from the politically disfavored and giving it to the politically favored. Sure, most places have it worse, no argument there. But "worse" is mostly in the direction we're already heading! A different direction is likely to be better. It almost has to be better than the leading establishment newspaper calling out the troublesome Jews on which to blame our problems (at least they eventually found a sense of embarrassment about that - a sign there's still time to change course).

No matter what anybody likes to think, the US stopped being a free country or a champion of liberty and democracy 14 years ago. And you'll never get it back.

Long before then, I'm afraid. Sadly, all the Patriot act did was say "all the rights you already lose if we call you a drug dealer? Now you also lose all those rights if we call you a terrorist". And lawmakers from both parties had it ready to go, just in case there was a disaster they could take advantage of. Plus the NSA was monitoring all of us regardless, they didn't need a specific excuse.

We're certainly being surveiled as much as the average Chinese citizen, though we used to have the advantage that we still had free speech - you could criticize the government as long as you didn't actually plot to overthrow it. Now that's starting to fade as well, not directly yet, but through groups of citizens harassing anyone who departs from the groupthink. So far that's just on social media, so although it's gotten people fired, it doesn't quite look like Germany in the 30s yet.

This sort of thing is quite worrying, however. I didn't think we were far enough along that a major newspaper would be highlighting where the Jews are causing trouble, so color me shocked. We must find some way to change course, to not fall into the same trap, but we seem too obsessed with "making sure the wrong lizard doesn't win" to vote for anything but more of the same. Still, voting matters, especially in the primaries, and there is still time.

If I'm not mistaken, this may be part of why she's dropping it. I recall reading somewhere that Kleiner Perkins offered to not demand that she pay their attorney fees if she dropped the appeal.

She did offer to drop and they still made her pay anyway..... From New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...

The court determined that Ms. Pao owed Kleiner $276,000 in court fees, and the firm offered to waive those if she did not appeal. But in her statement on Wednesday, Ms. Pao said that she was still ordered to pay those to resolve the lawsuit.

Couldn't read the Washington Post article due to them hating my ad blocker and prompting me to subscribe.....screw 'em...

Microsoft has to do this in order to boost figures which they spread around via marketing. Look how many times Windows 10 has been downloaded by users! Have a look at THIS headline as proof..
The Appeal of Free: 75 Million Users Download Windows 10 in First Month

Obviously the intent here is to inflate their numbers and make the deployment look better than it really is. While I have no doubt that many are taking advantage of the free upgrade option (which apparently expires in a year or so), not all who download are going to install (shoveling the upgrade onto systems) or stick with it.

the diversity funds. $300 million in feel good money. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

Most high tech people limit their kids use of technology, if they know what's good for their kids:

“So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...

"Since then, I’ve met a number of technology chief executives and venture capitalists who say similar things: they strictly limit their children’s screen time, often banning all gadgets on school nights, and allocating ascetic time limits on weekends."

After reading the New York Times article on how Amazon treats it's staff I have made a point to avoid buying anything from Amazon at all. If I could only get it from Amazon, then I no longer need it.

I think it is intrinsic to discourage the kind of workplace that Amazon is creating because it just shows that things really can be a lot worse than they are.

Yeah, like we can do any worse than a former Tech CEO whose product is mostly known for slowing systems that use it to a crawl. I mean, I guess it could be worse - you could have someone who ruined one of the iconic tech companies of Silicon Valley by pushing a buyout of an increasingly unprofitable hardware company against the advice of pretty much everyone and their dog, nevermind laying off tens of thousands of workers, who's now running for president claiming that as part of their qualifying experience.

Oh, wait...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08...