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We were outsourcing to India. But it is obvious they do not want our business. Protests against the US are going on. Do you want your money over there? Or does anyone think China is a better place to send your money? I try to buy things build in the west not the far east.

Recent articles on private health care in Canada from the "right-wing pseudo-news" orginizations Reuters and the NY Times.

Alberta moves to expand private health care
Feb 28, 2006

As Canada's Slow-Motion Public Health System Falters, Private Medical Care Is Surging
February 26, 2006

Peak Oil could be 2005/2006, but remember, just because its peaked doesn't mean economies that can afford to pay for it wont get their fix.

Betting against the bull can hurt, I want to see all these gloomy peak-oilists short sell stock and make billions on the impending downfall peakers predict.

I fail to understand why people fear peak oil and get all gloomy, like humanity will just give up and die out and not find other ways such as:

microbes

nuclear

wind

ocean current

fusion

shale oil

tar sands

mile deep rigs

etc.

"The United States, she said, has "very serious concerns" about the protection of privacy and data throughout the Internet globally."

WHAT???? First of all, define "privacy."

The US government's definition of "privacy" includes mandating that health records be computerized and forced to be shareable and data-mineable BY THE US GOVERNMENT over the Internet (as usual, all in the name of "terrorist" mitigation).

Read the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 if you want to see in statute some of the requirements for complete loss of medical privacy.

There is plenty of discussion on the Internet about how HIPAA's Privacy Rule was actually a regulation which DECREASED privacy ... but HIPAA only technically governed medical BILLING records. What is coming next is far, far, worse, the entirety of your medical records computerized, on-line, and subject to governmental data-mining.

Want to start fresh with a new doctor and not let him see your previous prescription records? See this article for some details about your loss of prescription privacy:

http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle. aspx?type=governmentFilingsNews&storyID=URI:urn:ne wsml:reuters.com:20060214:MTFH52561_2006-02-14_00- 11-10_N13290984:1

Want to see how Washington is removing privacy protections based on 100+ year old state laws? See "YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE ... Health technology bill could weaken privacy - Critics say measure may preempt state laws protecting confidentiality"

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ ID=48775

As many as 60 members of the group, many of whom work in the computer field and live across the United States, tapped into their tightly controlled computer servers loaded with stolen merchandise that would fill 23,000 compact discs and was valued at $6.5 million, prosecutors said. Initially, the stolen software was sent to servers set up overseas.

23,000 CD's! Nooooooo! That's 14 x 1 TB drives.

So of the 60 members, how many had all 14 TB at home? After all, that's enough illegal mp3's to keep me happy in prison until 2034, loooong after five years plus three years maximum sentence.

The missile defense system, which has not staged any intercept tests for almost a year following two failures, has faced criticism from some lawmakers and government watchdogs, who worry the system has not been adequately tested.

  Lehner said the agency planned four tests of the system this year, including two intercept tests in the second half of 2006, fulfilling another recommendation in the new Pentagon report.

The report said the battle management system was "making progress, but has not yet demonstrated engagement control."

South Korea will help you out with this.

However, I have a problem with a statement like this.

But if we in the West, with our liberal political culture and our attempts to build open societies, do not engage with China then we lose the opportunity to influence them and convince them of the benefits that this brings. If the Chinese government fears instability then we should offer help and advice and support, not closed borders and locked doors.

China boasts 111 million Internet users http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?typ e=internetNews&storyid=2006-01-18T030843Z_01_SHA66 703_RTRUKOC_0_US-CHINA-INTERNET.xml and 393 cell phone users http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/200 6/1/24/business/13197510&sec=business. That's a lot of information flowing around. Chinese know what Western cultures bring, good and bad, probably more than Western people do. To think China as a big dark corner of the world which The West must shine its democratic and liberal lights on, is quite romantic, but is naive.

That depends on the licence, which will be as onerous as MS can get away with. MS's position has always been that even if they are forced to comply with opening up their protocols (which they're still fighting tooth and nail) the protocols are strictly for paying corporate licencees, not dirty FOSS hippies.

There's a good Reuters article which just came out which goes into more depth about how MS is wriggling on the hook and how little they have actually given up the fight.

They certainly have 'fuck you regular Chinese people' money, it seems.

What's the deal here, and when is the big splashy 'Your Rights Online' article going up about Google basically censoring themselves 'to compete more aggressively in the world's second biggest Internet market.'

"Do no evil." Whatta bunch of bull.

I won't even bother submitting the above link. Someone else already has. Slashdot editors???

Because everything *is* going to be fine. As oil gets more expensive (it'll never run out completely, because it'll get prohibitively expensive to extract first), we'll either find a new power source or we'll use less power. Why use less power now, when we *definitely* don't have cheaper alternatives?

That is like me running up massive debt on my credit card. It's okay I am sure to make more money! That's a very liberal attitude towards a finite resources which our economy is based. By the way Kuwait just lost half of it's proven oil reserves on friday. Even more sobering is that many middle eastern countries may have also overstated their reserves.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?typ e=internetNews&storyID=2006-01-19T200124Z_01_N1930 3715_RTRUKOC_0_US-GOOGLE-PORNOGRAPHY.xml

Here's another link - gives a little more info... and looks even worse http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?typ e=internetNews&storyID=2006-01-19T200124Z_01_N1930 3715_RTRUKOC_0_US-GOOGLE-PORNOGRAPHY.xml "SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. has been subpoenaed by the U.S. Justice Department to turn over a database of search terms as part of a government probe of online pornography but Google rejected the demand as overreaching by the government. In a Wednesday filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the Justice Department demanded that Google provide all queries entered on the company's Web search system between June 1 and July 31 of last year." and to quote John from Americablog.org "And again, this has nothing to do with child pornography. It has everything to do with the federal government going on a massive fishing expedition to weed out all the "sinners" in America, and all under the veil of the war on terror." and here's the court filing http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/pdf/ne/2006/google-doj/ mcelvain.declaration.pdf Chelle

Here's an interesting read about the dogs:

What's intriging to me about this is that there is an honorable mention of the actual data from the study. Usually news reports wash over this and just blurt out a percentage. I look forward to the day there is also a link to the test data.

I don't believe we're anywhere near to running out of oil in the next 1000 years

No oil shortage???

gas prices
news article
http://www.hummer.com/

"But either way there is less demand for the dollar, so gold goes up."

Actually, there isn't a link between the two. But don't take my word for it; look into periods when the dollar has declined. Like, well, now. Do a graph of gold prices over time normalized for inflation before you invest.

Also, take a look here:
    http://today.reuters.com/business/newsArticle.aspx ?type=ousiv&storyID=2006-01-12T193135Z_01_SCH27030 3_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESSPRO-MARKETS-GOLD-DOLLAR-DC.XML

"Also, gold was $35/oz in 1970 - so who says it didn't take off"

It was fixed by the government at $35/oz, and as I recall, it was illegal for americans to own gold bullion before this time, so keep that in mind when cmoparing. Incidentally, people would buy krugerands at the time if they wanted to invest in gold.

Its also worth reading this wikipedia article:

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

I suspect a lot of the American ideas about this come from the time of the cultural revolution, where people were widely persecuted, not only for having the wrong opinions, but also for lots of other things, more or less at random. China has moved on from that - this is a common thing in the world: societies change over time; well, maybe not America, what so I know, but certainly China - how could anyone doubt that? Also, are you absolutely sure that you can get away with having the wrong opinions in America?

From the news today:

A blind activist in China and his family have been placed under house arrest for four months and he was beaten by thugs when he tried to venture out, after exposing forced abortions in his home province on the east coast." More

And some older ones (last few weeks):

Forced labor for writing an article about forced labor camps.

Jailed for organizing a signature campaign against a textbook.

It's obvious that the author of the parent post is either a propogandist for the Chinese government or a deranged lunatic with no grasp of reality (i.e. European). Judging by his well written English, I'll go with the latter.

And to answer the question posed in the excerpt: Yes. I have no fear at all of being persecuted by the U.S. government or local governments for saying anything which does not directly incite violence against another person. However, if I said things like you are saying, I would definitely exepect to be ridiculed by any person who is aware of international events.

Except that a few 1.5B here and a few 1.5B here lead to us raising the debt limit:

http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?typ e=politicsNews&storyID=2005-12-29T225501Z_01_KNE98 2458_RTRUKOC_0_US-ECONOMY-DEBTLIMIT.xml

I don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of that.

Was Google just the obvious choice because of its scope, or is there some flirting going on in the hopes of a more lasting relationship?

Pioneer just released a Blu-ray DVD drive for PC's: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?typ e=te...

Today we have news that Dell is not going to support HD-DVD, despite reported incentives that recently induced HP to do so. So, what are some theories as to why Dell has lately been less of a friend to Microsoft,

I don't know about a cohesive theory to tie all of it together, but for the HD-DVD thing, I would suspect Dell's not supporting it because it keeps getting delayed, because they can't seem to get their shit together finalizing the AACS "content protection".

affected Roche financially more info here .

Insightful? More ironic

"Our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school classroom"

I'd link to other news sites, but you can google it yourself.

Because there are NO police state type shenanigans happening there..

You heard correctly.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?typ e=televisionNews&storyID=2005-12-14T084755Z_01_SCH 431622_RTRIDST_0_TELEVISION-ARRESTED-DC.XML

Though I don't have Showtime, I and a lot of people I know would gladly change that for this show.

Yeah well, it's annoying to see stories like that get put on the front page of /. when a newsworthy story like this doesn't get put on /. and winds up with two diggs.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121505E
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Gogh_(film_d irector)
http://www.jihadwatch.org/
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?typ e=topNews&storyID=2005-12-18T102039Z_01_FLE836834_ RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAN-ISRAEL.xml

Anyone who can still deny the threat that Islam presents to the freedoms we hold dear in the West is just not paying attention, or they're just afraid of ending up like Theo Van Gogh.

So, by your lights it's ok to tell lies to start a war that get ~20,000 people killed, but not ok to lie about a blowjob, simply because one was under oath and the other wasn't?

No...if fact it's quite the opposite. My point was that using an arbitrary indicator (such as being under oath) to determine the impact of and retribution for a lie isn't valid.

(And BTW, isn't testimony to Congress and congressional commissions done under oath?)

It depends. If the purpose of the hearing is to Nail(TM) someone (i.e. the baseball steroid hearings), then yes a swearing in will likely take place. However if the purpose of the hearing is to put on a Dog and Pony Show(TM) (like this, for instance), then not only do they not swear you in, but they (apparently) allow you to lie to your heart's content without consequence.

Opera CFO clears things up. Move to the next rumor...

I didn't plan it. I'm not the one who decreased the American workforce by half in just 5 years.

Decrease is a little vague...unemoployment rate is 1.2% higher than it was 5 years ago. ( reuters.com)

And with that trade deficit we'll be able to afford to do so exactly how long? We already can't feed our own population.

US per capita income: $40,100

China per capita income: $ 5,600

(Source www.cia.gov)

We aren't exactly hurting compared to the average Chinese, especially considering US citizens only spend 6.4% of their income on food (the lowest percentage of reported countries). (Source ific.org). No one has to starve in the USA; tragically there are those who still do, but there is plenty of food and money to go around. It's a resource allocation problem, not a question of affordability.

Which is bad enough for the common American LABORER- for whom American businesses are already traitors in this war.

You are probably right here that NEITHER US or Chinese laborers will benefit from a price war...

Then you haven't been paying attention to what the Waltons are saying.

I was surprised by a great NPR piece on the upcoming Walmart Movie which suggested that Walmart really does do some things to help common laborers like provide a lot of unskilled jobs, cashes a LOT of checkes, and keep the price of consumer goods down. Allbeit US manufacturing is suffering, it's not only Walmart's fault..."Traitor" is uncalled for...The Walton are mid-western American buisness owners, not anti-patriotic communists.

Which is bad enough- a Wal*Mart every three miles and no other stores at all.

While the loss of small buisnesses and farm owners preceded the fall of the Roman Empire (college history class), maybe in a World Wide Economy the Walmarts allow for more efficient transfer of goods and services.

Or at least they're pretending to- while they destroy jobs here and close our home retail outlets to sell their shoddy goods through traitors to America.

Do you know anyone who has been to China in the last couple of years!?!? Things ARE changing...and if the worst part of your war is the exchange of shoddy goods, then you clearly don't have much experience with a "World War". It should conjure images of hollocaust and depraved trench war fare, not poorly made can-openers and long check-out lines.

Except for China, who has already stated that if we interfere with their next invasion they will nuke American cities.

Do you have a source for that allegation? China wouldn't make that threat, much less carry it out.

built out? I know it's pulling at obvious strings, but does New Orleans mean anything to you? Built-out == old and crumbling in a great many cases. how about today's apartment building collapse in new jersey? civil engineers are needed in droves to keep people alive (that's totally conjecture, but you know what i mean)

my housemate, for example, is a CE who's field is earthquake engineering... here in CA that's a pretty important field! and as for chemical engineers? i don't know about you, but i'm not going to buy a car until it runs on something other than petrolium products. our future as a society is entirely in the hands of next year's civil, mechanical, and engineering graduates

"'We're excited about this opportunity,' said Larry Williams, who handles international and government affairs for Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. The California-based is planning its debut rocket launch from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific this month."

Microsoft will take over space travel for us. I have ties to NASA and they don't have the funding to do it all (reuters) so people like Paul Allen will do it for us.

I have no idea what kind of content they'd be considering, but apparently ESPN is thinking about Apple's video distribution. Now if only that means seeing stuff like The Ocho would be showing ("If it's almost a sport, we've got it!").

In other (actual) news, LIMBO itself is in Limbo as the Vatican decides if it ever existed.

Reuters has a bit on this as well: Intel working with companies in entertainment push

More often than not, newspapers are simply publishers of articles written and researched elsewhere.

Likewise, most news blogs are restatements of what the blogger read on some other page.

http://reuters.com/ is a fine web site. We now pay an ISP do to what we once payed the newspapers to do: deliver the news to us.

Slashdot has very little original content. It can be useful as a way to organize news from disparate sources, but the standards for review of submissions seem inconsistent.

Newspapers can be better than slashdot at filtering and organizing the news. Newspapers can survive in this way.

Looks like the deadline has been extended from December 5 until late February.

Article text, in case it moves:

-----------

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sharman Networks, the operator of file-sharing network Kazaa, on Friday said an Austrailian court has extended until late February a stay of an injunction barring it from distributing copyrighted recordings.

Sharman said the extended stay is conditional on the company's modifying its software to filter out copyrighted music from the peer-to-peer file-sharing network.

Peer-to-peer networks let users share files rather than relying on a centralized server. In recent years, such networks have been a hotbed of pirated entertainment and software.

I rather expected that to be a link to this

Yeah really, I'm not understanding his shock about Sony just now getting around to authoring their first disc. Most of the technologies behind the authoring and production have already seen heavy testing, and with the decision between BD-J and iHD still up in the air (here), it hasn't made sense to make a disc yet. Besides, Blu-ray Disc isn't due until Spring 2006-- more than enough time to test the final shipping products and ramp up production.

And as you say, unlike the HD DVD group, Sony has been shipping working functional product in Japan now for over a year. HD DVD is the one that's vaporware..

As quoted here:

Scientific-Atlanta also comes with a bushel of excess cash. The money in its bank vault will go to Cisco, shaving the ultimate price tag for Scientific-Atlanta from $6.9 billion to $5.3 billion.

Or here.

Cisco said that the net cost of the acquisition would be $5.3 billion after subtracting Scientific-Atlanta's existing cash balance. It also plans to assume outstanding Scientific-Atlanta options.

Maybe the mainstream media will finally wake up to the very real threat IP poses...

Unfortunately no. Many of the companies involved in these IP scams (Sony, for a few thousand examples) not only own the whores on The Hill, they also own (or are) the media companies. Consider just for a moment how, for many news outlets, the Sony story never broke until they could put a relatively benign spin on it.

Additionally, these kinds of stories are too complex for the average reader to understand, too abstract to raise interest and don't have enough sex or blood to be sensational. Furthermore, people don't want to hear it: Americans want to believe that they live in a functional democracy and that the system has intrinsic checks and balances against corruption. They will actively resist being told the truth: that American-style democracy systematically encourages corruption at the Federal level and that the checks and balances only serve to reinforce that trend.

Consider that IP law is complex and small potatos compared to, for example, Bush's tax breaks to the extremely wealthy. How much interest did Bush's dividend tax cut generate?

Soundless Music Shown to Produce Weird Sensations
Sun September 7, 2003 07:09 PM ET
By Patricia Reaney

MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) - Mysteriously snuffed out candles, weird sensations and shivers down the spine may not be due to the presence of ghosts in haunted houses but to very low frequency sound that is inaudible to humans.

British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment that the extreme bass sound known as infrasound produces a range of bizarre effects in people including anxiety, extreme sorrow and chills -- supporting popular suggestions of a link between infrasound and strange sensations.

"Normally you can't hear it," Dr Richard Lord, an acoustic scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in England who worked on the project, said Monday.

Lord and his colleagues, who produced infrasound with a seven meter (yard) pipe and tested its impact on 750 people at a concert, said infrasound is also generated by natural phenomena.

"Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost -- our findings support these ideas," said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England.

In the first controlled experiment of infrasound, Lord and Wiseman played four contemporary pieces of live music, including some laced with infrasound, at a London concert hall and asked the audience to describe their reactions to the music.

The audience did not know which pieces included infrasound but 22 percent reported more unusual experiences when it was present in the music.

Their unusual experiences included feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting chills down the spine or nervous feelings of revulsion or fear.

"These results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound," said Wiseman, who presented his findings to

The parent post complains about a supposed $18.4 billion spent on AIDS -- that figure equals the entire US foreign aid budget for last year. For the coming fiscal year, we're actually budgeting something less than $3 billion on AIDS spending overseas.
http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=polit icsNews&storyID=10242196&src=rss/politicsNews

The dick head is also making up numbers. A quick check on the internet tells me that the US has budgeted "$2.8 billion to fight the AIDS pandemic as well as tuberculosis and malaria that prey on AIDS victims."
http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=polit icsNews&storyID=10242196&src=rss/politicsNews
The $18.4B figure he cites was the size of the entire US foreign aid budget last year.

Dell makes some fine high end systems. We're talking low cost commodity PCs. The XPS gaming systems hardly qualify since you pay a price premium for them.

If you've ever done any amount of repair work, you would know that contrary to your (obviously) limited exposure the low end systems from practically any manufacturer are exactly worth what people pay for them. Shit.

Apple stands to win out in many ways and lose out in some. They stand to win out by people purchasing the OS to install on unauthorised PCs (which will happen, and they know it) but they don't have to support these people. They will see an increased amount of software support for their growing user base. They will, however, probably take a hit from piracy, though these people aren't going to buy a Mac so it's probably not going to effect their bottom line all that much. Still, even pirates count as installed userbase, adding even further the need for a growth in software support so once again they win this way.

When people start to notice the better support on Apple's own hardware, they're more likely to buy a Mac if they want the support. People will probably buy a MacIntel if the price point comes down a bit, and if the ability to dual boot OS X and Windows exists. And if these people don't buy a Mac, they may still count as a "switch" if they aren't buying Windows. Another win.

Apple's userbase is growing. That's undeniable. Dell and Gateway both have had slumping sales, and many think Dell may be past it's best days.

In the end though, if you don't like OS X or Apple, nobody is making you switch. Use whatever platform you like. I personally am a Windows and FreeBSD user, and there is major appeal for me to add an OS X system to my arsenal.

The Geneva Convention also frowns on hosing down civilians with Willie Pete, but that apparently didn't stop the present gang of psychotics from doing just that.

Can Jesus just like, hurry up and take these people into heaven, so we can have our country back?

I swear, if the My Lai massacre happened today, it wouldn't even merit a raised eyebrow, because hey, the gooks do even more of that kind of stuff, don't they? And Watergate might earn its own Fark headline before disappearing in the noise floor of photo-ops scheduled by Tom Cruise's new publicist.

The shares have recovered after analysts noted that Microsoft would benefit from avoiding a big sales spike after the November 22 launch. Disgruntled customers were a problem for Sony when it launched its best-selling PlayStation 2 console in 2000.

"They want to have more of a constant supply," said Matt Rosoff, analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm.

"They don't want a huge spike in December and then a slump in January and February," Rosoff said, "They're trying to avoid that."

Reuters Article: New Xbox Set for Slow Start. Summary: Microsoft acknowleges lower than anticipated sales, but ensures investors and retailers that they will be able to maintain predictable supply rates (unlike Sony, who had wildly unreliable supply rates for ps2).

Gizmodo version: XBox 360 Tests it's brakes. Summary: Micro$oft slowing production on purpose, yo! WTFLOL!!!??

Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said there wouldn't be a big initial spike