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may have tried to do the exact same thing with Syria, since an apparent chemical weapons attack came shortly after Obama said that the use of chemical weapons would trigger a US military response.

IIRC, Obama made his "red line" comment in August 2012, about a year before the reports came in of them being used.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world/middleeast/obama-threatens-force-against-syria.html

Thanks for the link. By the way, eight of the authors there are from China, including the first author. Four are from Australia, one from the USA.

BTW, to be fair to lawyers, it's true that some US lawyers do good things for the general benefit -- civil rights, environmental defense, open access journal articles, open government, FOSS licensing, etc.. Examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Action
http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/

I guess it comes down to who has the most money to pay the lawyers, and whether some lawyers are willing to make significantly less money to work in the public interest. I guess engineers can also face the same problem -- like working on some destruction-emphasizing defense projects or monopolistic systems like DRM vs. more productive ends or more sharing-oriented approaches.

Another aspect of that:
"Our One-Party Democracy"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=0
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. [Actually, more of a corporatist?] But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions. ..."

The fact is, many public benefit things like FOSS or basic R&D should be funded collectively, and government should be spending money or redistributing it to account for positive and negative externalities. For example, renewables have been cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear since the 1970s if you account for pollution, defense, and risks. But instead of paying more for gas at the pump, we pay a lot of taxes (or incur public debt) for "defense" spending in the middle east, and we have higher medical bills, and people live in fear of Fukushima-style meltdowns, etc..

Still, while I think the climate is changing, but it's not clear the best approach to that is CO2 limits. If I had to choose between CO2 limits versus a global basic income along with free mobility between nations (lawyer-y things), I'd take the latter, given that it is too late to stop lots of climate change and wealth and mobility is a way most people globally could at least deal with it.

And the US Republicans themselves are getting conflicted about things too:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/11/22/1716216/a-war-over-solar-power-is-raging-within-the-gop

Space settlement is another example of a future p

And I'm sure you have something more than anecdotal data to back that assertion up right?

This NYT article contains a long discussion on why CFLs often do not live up to their claims.

In the 2007-8 tests, five of 29 models failed to meet specifications for such categories as lifespan, luminosity and on-off cycling and were removed from Energy Star's list of qualified products. Because of performance concerns, the government is expanding the watchdog program, vowing to test samples of 20 percent of the thousands of certified bulb models each year.

And this only applies to Energy Star certified bulbs – not the countless inexpensive bulbs sold without this certification.

Even the defenders of CFLs admit that they have to be carefully babied in order to work properly: limited on-off cycles, no vibration, no recessed fixtures, dimmers only if both the dimmer and bulb are specially designed. How is this supposed to be a viable product for the ordinary home user?

If you trouble yourself to actually read some on the information you wouldn't make such silly comments.

Many of them, such as those associated with Hezbollah, are generating highly valuable funds for the organization, gather intelligence, and make preparations should they be called upon to act. And they certainly could engage in violence if called up. In the case of Hezbollah, they remain a "trump card" for Iran to play if things get too dicey in some future confrontation, such as an invasion. Activating them now would be a waste, and potentially an act of war that would result in enormous losses for Iran.

The fact that most of them aren't engaged in violence doesn't mean the threat of violence is zero since there are still others willing to act. Case in point:

Wichita Airport Technician Charged With Terrorist Plot

He would have gladly killed you if he could. Now here is a question for you, are you going to remain ignorant by being lazy yourself, or will you inform yourself a little better?

On the scale of things, the thing to realize is that the 7.5 swimming pools isn't actually all that much, and the plant is small enough that you don't need pumps/elaborate cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. As for the contamination - water is actually 'pretty hard' to make radioactive, one of the reasons we like using it in reactors. Plus, what's the most likely cause of a containment failure? The biggest cause I can think of would be a meltdown, which is a lot harder the smaller your power system - it's a surface area vs internal thing, same with animals. Elephants are nearly hairless and have huge ears to help dissipate heat because they're so large, while meerkats have to have fur and huddle at night to stay warm.

After a quick soul search I realize that you're right, I probably went off a bit on that five million gallons (NYT article says ten million gallons). It probably never will get contaminated anyway. It shouldn't. It can't. And even if it does there are some great techniques being deployed at Fukushima right now to clean and filter water. But I do glimpse NuScale Power's intent here. They want to over-build the water pool infrastructure for the first unit, then encourage the purchase of additional drop-in 45MW 'thermos bottles' to ramp up the output. With each additional unit the safety margin becomes smaller, and presumably they have a threshold at which they might refuse to add another. If I was convinced this idea would scale globally I might be concerned.

But I'm not concerned. "All this for 45 megawatts??" and probably thermal megawatts to boot. By the time a steam turbine spins, maybe a couple thousand homes or a few hundred homes and a few factories, and you're done. I am sure there are remote critical use facilities and a few wealthy communities who would love one of these and could actually afford one, but I find it hard to imagine these nuclear Easy Bake Ovens as being superior in approach to stringing a reasonable amount of wire to some more distant plant of ~x20 scale.

People are thinking of small nuclear plants as safer and more do-able, and that is OK. Because they are on the way to imagining something like Robert Heinlein's 'Shipstones' that populate his novel Friday, modular forever-batteries that were available to power a wristwatch or a city. And of course it happened that the Shipstone Corporation controlled everything. Or the actual nuclear P238 Shipstone we have created to power Voyager and other deep space missions.

Part of my personal WTF factor is that I am beginning to see the same scale-down and build more and somehow we'll all survive and be all right so-called innovation for conventional nuclear as I see in other energy proposals, such as the building a couple million of these and hundreds of these. Can anyone fault the dream? No, so long as there is time to think of fun things.

I'm convinced we're running out of time. We are at a crossroads right now, because so many people in this country are enjoying this state of modern comfort and do not realize that with every passing year we approach a dangerous precipice. Not the end of all things but the end of easy choices.

"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Because we're not going to run out of this stuff. We will

There is a difference between the business records containing the metadata and the actual verbal contents of the call. If all they have is the metadata, and they had permission to actually look at it from the court as opposed to simply storing it, they would know that you called Pizza Hut for 5 minutes at 9:30 PM on 01 December 2013. They wouldn't know anything about the content of the call which could be just about anything, such as:

1. Cancel my standing order for tonight.
2. Change my standing order from peperoni to sausage.
3. Tell my daughter to catch a ride home with her friends when she finishes her shift, her mother had to take the car to see grandma.
4. Is my son there? It would be a party of 10 that arrived around 8:00 PM.
5. Hold music ...... Oh, this isn't the pharmacy? I guess I misdialed. Sorry.
6. Is the manager there? ..... Is your refrigerator running? You better catch it.
7. I want to order a nightly special with an extra Coke.
8. The delivery person you sent yesterday was great! Very polite.
9 .... 99999. Other

As we saw yesterday, interest in committing attacks in the US in the name of Jihad continues as noted in the story below.

Wichita Airport Technician Charged With Terrorist Plot

Mr. Loewen, who was employed at the airport, apparently worked alone and had planned to kill himself in the explosion, Mr. Grissom said. “He made statements that he was resolved to commit an act of violent jihad against the government of the United States,” Mr. Grissom said. ....

In a note left for a family member and included in the complaint, Mr. Loewen said the operation was orchestrated to cause “maximum carnage and death.”

“By the time you read this, I will — if everything went as planned — have been martyred in the path of Allah,” the note said.

He was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, attempting to damage property by means of an explosive and attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

I think Wikipedia is whatever the biases of the last editor who edited that section are.

I doubt that such a strong pro US military bias could stand in that Wikipedia page unless there was source material to back it up. However, I'm not going to claim that I looked through the revision history of this article.

But you're still missing the point, even if armed it doesn't matter. There was nothing illegal about being armed, Iraq was full of local militia who were legitimately armed. Merely being armed wasn't a green light to fire at will.

Legitimate militia were uniformed. In fact anyone who is not uniformed is considered, by the Geneva convention, to be an unlawful combatant. In fact, once a person has been determined to be an unlawful combatant, they are not accorded the same rights as a uniformed member of an armed force.

While it was legal for Iraqis to keep weapons in their homes and businesses there was no provision that specifically indicated they were allowed to walk the streets with weapons. And in fact, many of the weapons that were listed in the Wikipedia article are specifically banned by the regulation that allowed Iraqis to keep certain weapons indoors. You can see the list here at the NY Times where it says: "prohibited to most people: machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-fired missiles, antiaircraft guns, mortars, land mines and grenades."

Then there's a case of the van where there was without question absolutely no way to tell if it was full of armed insurgents or not. Even if you do believe that the Apache pilots should be able to fire on people for no other reason than that they are armed you can't argue that they had the same excuse for firing on the van.

The van was not engaged until it interacted with the dead/wounded people on the ground. As I mentioned, such activity marked you as an enemy combatant according to the rules of engagement. It was not an ambulance, and was not carrying any markings that would protect it through the Geneva convention. Who the hell brings their van with children out to a battle with the enemy still orbiting overhead in a helicopter? Where is the sense in that?

"Even if they did not actively engage the troops first, they were not allowed to be armed in the streets of Baghdad. Only military personnel were allowed weaponry."

This is a flat out lie. Stop making shit up.

The US actively supported some armed militias and encouraged them, so you couldn't even be further from the truth. Then there's non-military contractors, security guards and so forth.

As mentioned above the militia wore uniforms. Contractors and security guards wear uniforms. If you'd ever seen a US Civilian Contractor working in Afghanistan or Iraq you'd see that they wear basically the same outfits as the soldiers, but with markings indicating that they are civilians. Even media personnel that were embedded with the troops wore markings indicating who they were and why they were there. The two media personnel with the insurgents chose not to wear the marked clothes for whatever reason.

You can disagree all you want, you'd still be wrong. Civilians and enemy combatants are well defined, civilians can be armed, merely being armed doesn't make them enemy combatants. Similarly, guys getting out of vans as they pass an area and see someone wounded are more than allowed to try and help injured people, that does not make you an enemy combatant by anyone's rules. Go actually read the US rules of engagement I linked instead of continuing to make shit up.

Did you read them? Did you see a date specifying when those rules of engagement were active? You understand that the

The corruption in India is indeed rampant and throughout. One of the most astonishing forms I have seen are the "living dead", where authorities are bribed to declare you dead, so that someone can meanwhile and unbeknownst to you make a claim to your inheritance. For this particular poor fellow, it took mere 19 years of battling against the authorities until a court finally acknowledged him actually being alive.

No, I do not believe it. I believe that you just made it up. Do you have a citation? Because a Google search finds nothing except a law banning "aggressive begging" (blocking traffic, badgering or pursuing people, loitering next to ATMs, etc.).

I wouldn't go so far as to accuse him of just making it up. There are several places he might have picked up the idea. Some, the courts overrule the laws or parts of it. Some are just proposed. Some require a permit to 'gather' (eg more than 5 people). On Thanksgiving, the church should have 1 person with food in the park. 4 at a time, the homeless could come over. Then, walk away and 4 more could come up. I think the homeless should not be able to look at each other either ;) Get a permit right? I believe in the Orlando case, the problem was, you can only get a permit twice a year for each park so you have to move around. Are the activist intentionally getting in trouble making their point? Sure. Does feeding the poor in the same park, week after week, putting wear and tear on the park? Sure.



Orlando, FL
Raleigh, NC
Las Vegas, NV
Los Angeles, CA
Philadelphia, PA
Dallas, TX
Houston, TX
NYC, NY
USA Today
LA Times

I also remember telling people over and over how this was going to be a huge loss since GM would never be able to pay it back and every liberal democrat crawled out from under every rock saying that this was going to be a great profit and win.

Okay, if every liberal democrat said the GM bailout would be profitable for the government, it shouldn't be hard to find one, just one, to quote for me? Looking at articles from that time I don't see anyone saying the plan would be profitable.

Just wait till the 2014 elections ...

For more lies? I can't wait.

You may be wrong yourself. If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian. The USA has a much higher gun death rate than other developed countries, and when you look within the USA itself, you find that Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the U.S., where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide., or put simply more guns, more crime. All of the above citations go to original or academic sources. So what could be going on? Well, firstly, the NRA attempts to stop scientists from studying gun violence. (In a similar vein, the junk-food industry tries to limit the study of the health effects of sugar.) Secondly, the NRA keeps its own datasets to do it's own "research" to reach its own conclusions, which (call me crazy), keeps the donors happy. Those would be the gun manufacturers. Most large industries do this. I'm open minded on the issue, and follow it because I have an academic interest in cognitive bubbles. If you are interested learning a different perspective on the issue, then read this. You don't have to believe a word of it; however, if you *can* read it, and accurately repeat back the arguments made, then that would indicate enough cognitive flexibility to really be informed about the issue, and be an expert. Ideologues do not have this flexibility, but want to maintain the self-concept of being an expert, which explains most of what is wrong with politics.

You are a liar. Here, let me quote:

If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian.

Homicides are not a good measure of defensive actions. Defensive homicides are what happens when the criminal does not back off when warned, is too violent too fast for a threat backed by a gun to work, etc. The vast majority of defensive gun uses are simply displays. Like the guy up thread with the gun on his lap. The criminals were there, and may have been working themselves up to act, but left because of the gun.

Your assertion that a gun has to kill to do it's job is both myopic and factually incorrect. Heck, often a simple display indicating this victim will not go down as easy as they thought is enough to prevent the crime.

Why would you need to LIE to support your position unless your position was wrong? You sir, are a LIAR.

You may be wrong yourself. If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian. The USA has a much higher gun death rate than other developed countries, and when you look within the USA itself, you find that Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the U.S., where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide., or put simply more guns, more crime.

All of the above citations go to original or academic sources. So what could be going on?

Well, firstly, the NRA attempts to stop scientists from studying gun violence. (In a similar vein, the junk-food industry tries to limit the study of the health effects of sugar.)

Secondly, the NRA keeps its own datasets to do it's own "research" to reach its own conclusions, which (call me crazy), keeps the donors happy. Those would be the gun manufacturers. Most large industries do this.

I'm open minded on the issue, and follow it because I have an academic interest in cognitive bubbles. If you are interested learning a different perspective on the issue, then read this. You don't have to believe a word of it; however, if you *can* read it, and accurately repeat back the arguments made, then that would indicate enough cognitive flexibility to really be informed about the issue, and be an expert. Ideologues do not have this flexibility, but want to maintain the self-concept of being an expert, which explains most of what is wrong with politics.

There is weak evidence, but when one researcher tries to confirm another researcher's work, they often don't get the same results.

There was a story in today's New York Times about milk from grass-fed cows. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/health/organic-milk-high-in-helpful-fatty-acids-study-finds.html The reporter was trying to line up the evidence for whether omega-3 fatty acids were really healthier than omega-6 fatty acids, and different researchers got different results and came to different conclusions.

Same with the walnuts study. It looks good, but we've been down this road before. The results seemed too good to be true. They'll have to wait until somebody confirms the study.

The traditional Greek diet looked pretty good. Actually, it wasn't the "traditional" Greek diet. During WWII, and for years afterwards, they didn't have much money, so they couldn't afford things like meat and just bought cheap food. A friend of mine visited that region, and she said it's a very hilly area and a lot of people didn't have cars. They spent all their lives climbing up and down hills. So you can't tell whether it was the Greek diet or the exercise.

When diet does show an effect, it's a relatively small effect. If you could lower heart attacks by 5%, that's nothing to brush off, but it's not as if you'll be healthy if you just eat a good enough diet. Robert Atkins, the diet doctor, had a viral infection of his heart which led to heart failure.

Atkins published a lot of research, including in the Journal of the American Medical Association, so I took him very seriously. But you can read the Wikipedia article about him to see the controversy. Atkins said that a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet reduced heart disease. Is that true? I can't figure it out.

There actually was a study several years ago in which one group of people had a normal diet delivered to them, and another group of people got a low-fat diet delivered to them. There was no difference in their health after several years. Then what do you do? Are you better off eating healthy fats, or just less fats? Are fats better than carbohydrates? Are whole grains and brown rice better than fat? I don't think anybody knows.

I'd like to ask a nutritionist, but I think that if I asked different nutritionists, I'd get different answers.

Don't miss this tidbit from the NY Times version of this story:

The Pentagonâ(TM)s Special Operations Command in 2006 and 2007 worked with several foreign companies â" including an obscure digital media business based in Prague â" to build games that could be downloaded to mobile phones, according to people involved in the effort. They said the games, which were not identified as creations of the Pentagon, were then used as vehicles for intelligence agencies to collect information about the users.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/spies-dragnet-reaches-a-playing-field-of-elves-and-trolls.html

According to the NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/spies-dragnet-reaches-a-playing-field-of-elves-and-trolls.html
  In 2007, as the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies were beginning to explore virtual games, N.S.A. officials met with the chief technology officer for the manufacturer of Second Life, the San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The executive, Cory Ondrejka, was a former Navy officer who had worked at the N.S.A. with a top-secret security clearance.

He visited the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., in May 2007 to speak to staff members over a brown bag lunch, according to an internal agency announcement. “Second Life has proven that virtual worlds of social networking are a reality: come hear Cory tell you why!” said the announcement. It added that virtual worlds gave the government the opportunity “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving U.S. soil.”

Mr. Ondrejka, now the director of mobile engineering at Facebook, said through a representative that the N.S.A. presentation was similar to others he gave in that period, and declined to comment further.

I knew this was familiar, here's a similar article in ny times from 2011. The therapy isn't quite risk free, in the linked article it says that a 39-old woman died when the retrained T-cells targeted a protein in her lungs; just 15 minutes after the injection and she developed breathing problems which I guess goes to show how potent destroyers T-cells can be.

Another factor that often gets overlooked in this debate is the role of sugar in our diet. (Here's a written summary of the video.)

Last spring, the convenience stores in my area started stocking fresh fruit, so I switched my habitual breakfast from coffee and a Snickers bar to coffee and a piece of fruit. Around the same time, I saw the video linked above, and started actively avoiding sugar whenever it's convenient. These are the ONLY changes I've made to my lifestyle, but since then I have lost about four inches off my waistline.

Sugar is toxic. Do yourself a favor and avoid it. (Did you know that a 12oz can of coke does as much liver damage as a 12oz can of beer?) And artificial sweeteners are even worse. They mess up your insulin response profile and impede the signals which tell your brain when you've had enough to eat. (If you have a diet coke with dinner, you'll likely eat more food.)

The BBC did a four-part series on the "weight loss industry" earlier this year. It does a pretty good job of exposing the hype and marketing BS behind our current situation. Worth a look.

Fat mice, when fed fecal matter from thin humans, lose weight. It seems much less expensive to me than pharmaceuticals, and there are no known side effects. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/health/gut-bacteria-from-thin-humans-can-slim-mice-down.html?_r=0

The real problem there is there are a few Congress people that are on the NSA's side

Not just a few . . . a bipartisan majority.

Absolutely. Was he still considered a terrorist by the US, or did he live to see that finally set right?

Mandela was removed from the US terrorist list in 2008. However, he had been able to travel in and out of the US the entire time - and had even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George Bush in 2002 - so this looks more like an oversight than anything else.

Without adjusting for inflation Intel's processors cost about as much as they did 20+ years ago.

http://www.krsaborio.net/intel/research/1991/0422.htm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116492

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116899

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/09/business/company-news-intel-moves-to-cut-price-of-386-chip.html

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116775

Almost every other component (except maybe the GPU) has dropped tremendously in price over the past couple decades, but CPUs have stayed almost flat. Hopefully the newly competitive ARM processors will finally drive prices down (iSuppli estimates a measly $18 for Apple's new A7 CPU+GPU) but I'm not holding my breath.

Picasa acquired by Google - New York Times, 2004. "'They came to the conclusion that it would be easier to buy this business than to build it themselves. It's the type of acquisition you can expect Google to do more of in the future.'' The self-driving car technology was acquired from Stanford, along with Sebastian Thrun. Google did do a lot with language translation in-house; that's probably the most innovative area. Most of Google's big-name products, though, came from elsewhere.

Google is good at scaling, and yes, many of the acquired products had to be rewritten to scale up. Still, Google Earth today looks a lot like the Keyhole Earth Viewer I had in 2003.

Did you know that the average annual growth in GDP under Reagan was less than it was under Jimmy Carter?

30 secs of google found a NY Times article* by Floyd Norris from 2011, using data from the Commerce Department, shows that it avg GDP growth was 3.5% under Reagan, The Gipper and 3.2% under Carter, The Peanut Farmer.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/ranking-the-presidents-by-g-d-p/?_r=0

(*not a right wing, let alone Reagan, trumpeteer)

Did you know that the average annual growth in GDP under Reagan was less than it was under Jimmy Carter?

No, because that's a lie.

http://www.space.com/23801-china-moon-rover-lunar-landing-history.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/world/asia/china-prepares-to-launch-moon-rover-mission.html

You smell like a Young Republican! Go David Duke, right?

Progressives are under no illusion about the Democrats in general and Obama in particular being corporatist sell-outs.

Your use of the word "corporation" and its derivations as a dirty one reveals naiveté at best. There is nothing wrong with corporations — they are merely a way to organize large number of people into doing useful things. There is nothing inherently wrong with them — they certainly are more efficient than collective farms or kibbutzes, for example.

The complete lack of prosecutions of Wall Street by the Obama Administration says all that needs to be said to make that case.

Well, your "case" falls apart, once you learn facts: people, who've committed actual financial crimes (like insider trading or running a Ponzi-scheme) really do get prosecuted. Bush's Justice Department has done it (Bernard Madoff and Martha Stuart being the most publicized cases), and so did Obama's.

What you and yours may be lamenting is absence of prosecution for some vaguely-specified misdeeds, like "the massive Wall Street crime wave that devastated the economy". Huh? We are not a banana republic, where the Dear Leader would organize a show-trial every once in a while to channel popular anger away from his own incompetence. Not yet...

Winning our democracy, our economy, our society back from corporate control

There you go again with the "evil corporations". Corporations want nothing else but maximize shareholder value. This is best achieved in a healthy, well-run country — they are not your enemy. (Except for those corporations, who profit from government spending — which requires higher taxes. But, somehow, I'm afraid, lowering taxes is not on your list of priorities...)

It's so much worse than just Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher calling Mandela a "terrorist".

Not to mention the CIA helped get him imprisoned.

As was revealed in Reagan's diaries after his death he believed sanctions would do far more to hurt South African blacks than help them, Turned out he was right. The best that can be said is that the sanctions somewhat sped up an already inevitable process, but at an incredible price of widespread poverty and violence amongst primarily poor black South Africans. That's not a legacy I would care to be associated with.

How about weapons of mass destruction?.

As others have pointed out, the items are merely 'tools' and the application the tool is where the morality lies.

Could you imagine a world where we routinely use nuclear weapons to relieve stresses in the Earth's crust and prevent large earthquakes and their devastating effects? What about stopping large oil spills quickly?

Using a nuclear weapon on an oil spill.

Unfortunately, many helpful adaptations of large scale explosives are not being utilized due to the political implications, but even a 'weapon of mass destruction' can be a useful tool to save lives (and money).

... a position which is frightfully naive. Of course making things more illegal is a deterrent. It used to be totally legal to drive with your kids in the back of your truck on the open freeway. It's now more illegal (at least in California) and you don't see (very many) people driving on the freeway with kids in the back of their truck.

All officially recognized crimes are punished with the intent of deterring future crime, and you live in a time and place which ranks as among the most peaceful and civilized periods in all of known history. To suggest that this concept does not work betrays a stunning lack of understanding and respect for all the work put in by the millions of people who worked to establish and maintain the system that provides such domestic peace and tranquility.

Did you actually think that spending 10 years in jail actually compensates the parents and loved ones of a murder victim? Sorry, if they're dead, no amount of punishment will ever bring them back, and until you've personally experienced the loss of a close loved one, you cannot really understand just how devastating such a loss can be.

  However, even sociopaths can understand personal injury and suffering even if they lack the ability empathize in any way with their victims.

You call me naive repeatedly, but I'm basing my position on the fact that it's been known for decades that it's measurably untrue that longer sentences do anything.

In day to day free life, the difference between 5 years of captivity and 50 can seem pretty damn abstract. Maybe once you're there, in a cell, it's meaningful, but not to the thought processes of a would-be criminal. Your own naivety and need for petty revenge blinds you to the fact that crime is an objective, measurable problem, and can have objective, measurable analysis of solutions.

The US DID intern Arab-Americans in the week after 9/11, in mass roundups and arrests, and almost all of them were later released without charge nor apology. Then the government began a series of interrogations, fingerprinting, and in many cases deportation proceedings in 2002 for thousands of Arab and Muslim green card holders and immigrant families.

The NY Times is not just a blog.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/us/07watch.html?pagewanted=all

Remember how excited everyone got when they started seeing blurtooth keyboard/cases that turned their $400 tablet into a $500 netbook (when notebooks were running $250-350?

Turning a tablet into a laptop doesn't prove the tablet is replacing the laptop - it proves people like laptops and will adapt their tablets to act like one.

Oh, and I've been working in IT since the mid-80's, and for the last 30-some years the mainframe has been "on the way out"... Hasn't happened yet, they just keep getting cheaper and cheaper...

No, because if it really turns out that what set of genitals you have play a major role in such a huge financial decision as what career you choose, even in the absence of outside coercion, then that instantly invalidates any economic theory that assumes people generally make rational (from purely economic perspective) choices - which would be all of them

No, it isn't. Well-known Keynesian Krugman addressed this on his blog last week, so might as well repeat what he said:

So, for example, what do I say when I read something like this from someone who apparently considers himself a bold rebel against orthodoxy?

        "Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising," he says. "Even if we are actually rational, leaving it to the market may produce collectively irrational outcomes. So when a bubble develops it is rational for individuals to keep inflating the bubble, thinking that they can pull out at the last minute and make a lot of money. But collectively speakingâ.â.â.â"

My answer, to put it in technical terms, is "Well, duh." Maybe grad students at some departments, who are several generations into the law of diminishing disciples, really donâ(TM)t know that rational behavior is at best a useful fiction, that markets arenâ(TM)t perfect, etc, etc. But does this come as news to Robert Shiller? To Ben Bernanke? To Janet Yellen? To Larry Summers? Would it have come as news to Irving Fisher or Walter Bagehot?

The question is what you do with this insight.

There is definitely a faction within economics that considers it taboo to introduce anything into its analysis that isnâ(TM)t grounded in rational behavior and market equilibrium. But what I do, and what everyone Iâ(TM)ve just named plus many others does, is a more modest, more eclectic form of analysis. You use maximization and equilibrium where it seems reasonably consistent with reality, because of its clarifying power, but you introduce ad hoc deviations where experience seems to demand them â" downward rigidity of wages, balance-sheet constraints, bubbles (which are hard to predict, but you can say a lot about their consequences).

You may say that what we need is reconstruction from the ground up â" an economics with no vestige of equilibrium analysis. Well, show me some results. As it happens, the hybrid, eclectic approach Iâ(TM)ve just described has done pretty well in this crisis, so you had better show me some really superior results before it gets thrown out the window.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/new-thinking-and-old-books-revisited/

Real-world economists are fully aware that humans are highly irrational creatures and they've adjusted economic models to compensate as well they can. Maybe you've been reading too much Austrian lunacy?

Here's a more complete article from the NYT Here..

Even in TFS, this device doesn't target cars specifically, it zapped all of the electronics *in* the car, too.

I think this would merely disrupt. I believe a full on EMP would actually destroy the electronics.

So, in theory at least, you don't wreck every bit of electronics you aim this thing at. Because if police start damaging people's cars for no good reason, there will be hell to pay as people get pissed off at ending up with a huge repair bill -- especially if the officer is mistaken or you're just collateral damage.

The police have little to fear from the people whose property they damage. Hell, New York is refusing to accept liability for the innocent bystanders that their cops shoot! http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/nyregion/bystanders-shot-by-police-face-uphill-fight-to-win-lawsuits.html?pagewanted=all

Oh yes, please tell my why they are so much smarter than the rest of the world. You might want to look at this and other examples.

Probably not much, as long as they got certified. From Justices Shield Medical Devices From Lawsuits

Makers of medical devices like implantable defibrillators or breast implants are immune from liability for personal injuries as long as the Food and Drug Administration approved the device before it was marketed and it meets the agency’s specifications, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc.

HUDs in the OR open up a ton of possibilities, from easier and more intuitive arthroscopic surgery to better endoscopic exploration. X-rays and MRI results can be mapped to the body, eliminating the need to constantly glance at a nearby monitor. Vitals and other telemetry can be updated in realtime. Hell, remember when the whole "we're going to use sharpies to mark the correct surgery location" thing was a big deal?

That's already developing in Fast Food, soon to become Automated Food.

Consider the "strike" today for fast food workers demanding a "living wage".

It's practically a prospectus for Momentum Machines, and their Automated Burger Machine. . .

Don't know about the GP but where I live I go to the doctor, when I'm sick. I don't have to worry about the cost. If I get a prescription I'll pay a small amount (€ 5) out of my pocket. I have a regular physician I go to for basic illnesses and first diagnoses, who would send me to a specialist, if needed, like pretty much everyone in my country has. Waiting time, if I go there without having an appointment is about 60-90 minutes. Getting an appointment with a specialist comes with wildly varying waiting times... from getting one the same day to having to wait several months. That mainly depends on how pressing the issue is, how many of this kind of specialists there are in the area. But then again, you're free to choose the specialist you go to, so if you don't want to wait as long you just call them all and use the earliest appointment you can get.

Americans should get that eat-or-be-eaten-free-economy-everything-else-is-communism-trololololol-stick out of their asses... really... and it's not just about public heal care... there are more things America is pretty much underdeveloped... sometimes even EXACTLY as underdeveloped as, say, Suriname, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Western Samoa and Tonga!

English is not context-free. Begging the question, for example, is an expression with multiple meanings, the correct one of which must be deduced from said context.

Sure, but that's irrelevant. That's how most people make sense of other people who are otherwise not making sense. "Begging the question" has never (correctly) meant "raising the question." Next you'll tell me "I could care less" means "I couldn't care less." Oh, "but context!" is a cheap, meaningless argument.

But hey, feel free to take it up with any of these other folks:

* Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. If you misuse it in court, I'd love to see you say "But context, your Honor! And for my next argument, I'm going argue about what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
* Zoe Triska: "In the long run, misusing phrases like 'begging the question' doesn't make you sound smarter. It makes you sound dumber."
* The New York Times, which felt the need to come clean on their occasional abuses of the phrase.

Where were we? Oh yeah, context. Sure, from the context surrounding the phrase, everyone will be able to figure out what you meant. And a good fraction of them will know you're using it incorrectly and think less of you for it. As Zoe said above "In the long run ... [i]t makes you sound dumber."

Knock yourself out. I could of gone on irregardless, but I could care less. I won't wait with baited breath for your reply, because for all intensive purposes I'm done. (Context: See how dumb misused English sounds?)

Back to the topic at hand:

But even if you overcame that problem, the light would still be bouncing between the walls of the core, and thus traveling a longer distance than the mere length of the fiber.

That's true, especially for multi-mode fiber. For single mode fiber, the fiber plus cladding act more like a wave guide, because the diameter of the fiber is small relative to the wavelength of the light.

I don't claim to be an expert though. I've just been reading up online.

In any case, the mere fact you have to bend the fiber optics at all implies the light contained therein isn't going in a straight line between repeaters.

It seems to be rendering strangely for me in Firefox. The text "Find Health" is bleeding into the top blue bar, or maybe it's just a strangely designed page. I guess that's not enough to break things, though.

In any case, that's just the front end. Apparently there's another 30% that needs to be completed.

What you're ignoring is that with our for-profit health care, we also lead development of medical treatments, largely because of the profit incentive. See Nature, April 2007, Price controls seen as key to Europe's drug innovation lag

For those hoping that Europe might be redressing the imbalance in R&D innovation compared with the United States, two recent reports make gloomy reading. According to a competitiveness report published in November 2006 by the European Commission's high-level Pharmaceutical Forum, the US has established itself firmly as the key innovator in pharmaceuticals since 2000.

Also see the New York Times, Poor U.S. Scores in Health Care Don’t Measure Nobels and Innovation.

Advocates of national health insurance cite an apparently devastating fact: the United States spends more of its gross domestic product on medical care than any nation in the world, yet Americans do not live longer than Western Europeans or Japanese. More Americans lack insurance coverage as well. It is no wonder that so many people demand reform.

But the American health care system may be performing better than it seems at first glance. When it comes to medical innovation, the United States is the world leader. In the last 10 years, for instance, 12 Nobel Prizes in medicine have gone to American-born scientists working in the United States, 3 have gone to foreign-born scientists working in the United States, and just 7 have gone to researchers outside the country.

Meh. They were the ones who reported the CIA's deal with at&t to get call records for $millions a year, so either the NYT isn't (fully) in bed with them or they were tacitly warning at&t to cough up this year's catch Or Else(tm).

What about people who don't have bank accounts?

The oligarchs have accounted for this, which is why many large corporations are now replacing non-direct-deposit paychecks with what are essentially pre-paid VISA cards.

See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/business/as-pay-cards-replace-paychecks-bank-fees-hurt-workers.html?_r=0
http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2013/07/23/are-hourly-workers-being-short-changed-the-truth-about-payroll-cards/
http://consumerist.com/2013/07/01/here-is-why-employers-and-banks-love-putting-wages-on-prepaid-debit-cards-and-why-employees-are-keeping-their-money-in-shoeboxes/

You might not be able to get blood from a turnip, but that little fact won't stop those in power from trying.

Facebook had $2.02 billion in revenue this past quarter, the bulk of which is advertising, up from $1.59 billion a year ago, and generating $621 million in quarterly profits..

They have a good chunk of the worldwide digital advertising market and seek to expand further, especially through mobile. That's their plan.

I really DO like to hide my prescription medications in hard to access places, because I don't want people breaking into my car[...]

Don't keep your prescription meds in your car. A little time in the sun on summer days and your medications can degrade faster than normal. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/health/16consumer.html

• Amex (varies by card)
• Capital One

While a bit old, it's still valid. Sorry to hear about your luck, I've been bitten by return periods (with brakes) but I ended up reselling them on my own. As far as computer components, I prefer to buy those from a walk-in retailer like Microcenter. They're right down the street from me and I prefer being able to do returns same day if there is an issue. Anyway, sorry to hear about your misfortune, that'd piss me off, happy holidays!

It's all fun and games until the insurance companies believe that climate change is a threat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/insurers-stray-from-the-conservative-line-on-climate-change.html?_r=0

Even if you don't believe the scientists, you'll have to believe your insurance company

You mean insurance companies found a reason to increase rates?
I for one am shocked, just shocked.