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A lot of people are addicted to television.

I think we all have addictions, but some are dangerous. That line is crossed when it starts affecting other areas of your life in negative ways, like your work suffers, you ignore other pressing needs to feed the addiction, such as socializing, or paying rent.

That said I think I'm mildly addicted to the web, however, I have gone cold turkey from even email during vacations and didn't get the shakes. The big problem however is that I rely on the net for my job, so giving up the web completely would be a problem.

What a shortsighted (and incorrect) view of the situation.

The arab Shia are the largest ethnic/religious group in Lebanon, at 30% (if you break it down by religion only, the Christians are larger, although there are many different, and sometimes conflicting, Christian sects). Hezbollah is their largest *political party*, which has a private militia that is more powerful than the Lebanese army (largely thanks to Iran and Syria's generosity, but also thanks to extensive training in fighting the Israeli army since the early 80's). The next largest political party, Amal, doesn't have near their level of support. Of course, don't think too mildly of Amal, either -- they fought Israel just as hard, even during this war, although they don't have Hezbollah's resources. Hezbollah is not only a major political party, but is the country's second largest employer, mostly for its network of government services that it provided to areas that the Lebanese government was either unable to or unwilling to provide to -- schools, hospitals, etc. Public service activism is one of the main ways that the party wins support, even down to the local level. I saw a documentary recently where one Hezbollah woman talked about an initiative she started in which Hezbollah families would stock medical supplies in their homes. Whenever anyone was injured, they could come and get treated for free, so that even if the hospitals were destroyed or taken over, people could get care. By doing things like this, addition to helping their own people, they rally support for Hezbollah at the same time.

Hezbollah has a very tight military discipline. They've been using what's termed "fourth generation warfare" by US military analysts. It combines classic guerella tactics with modern weaponry and a unique "peer to peer" communications structure. Weaponry is buried until used, then restored immediately, always in numerous, small caches, making it incredibly difficult to destroy. Local cells operate in their hometowns or other supportive territory, and are able to pick and choose targets as will. Groups communicate with their neighbors to exchange intelligence information; critical information is sent through hardened channels, sometimes even through physical runners. Overall strategy and reserves are controlled by Hezbollah itself. In the 2006 conflict with Israel, the army was bogged down in dealing with the local cells, in their supportive terrain.

Contrary to popular myth, Hezbollah (unlike Hamas and the other Palestinian groups) prefers not to operate around civilians. Not for a concern for the civilians' safety -- they'll confiscate buildings to use as shooting positions if needed, whether their owners like it or not -- but for their own safety. Hamas operates openly as a sign of pride and defiance. However, by doing that, it only takes a tiny handful of defectors to point out to Israel where they are and what they're doing. Hezbollah, on the other hand, prefers to operate in areas where nobody is around to reduce the risk of being exposed by defectors.

As we saw in the last conflict, they're a very effective military, and it's a big question mark on how to deal with them. It's almost funny how the major Arab powers were defeated one after another, yet this tiny band was blowing up warships and taking out hundreds of Merkavas, in addition to maintaining a steady rain of over 100 Katyushas per day throughout the entire conflict. And now their popularity is soaring -- not just in other countries, but even in Lebanon, where they started the conflict. Check out these polls. Check out this as well.

There is really no mystery here. More old people means larger government spending on health care. More spending means more jobs in the health care industry.

There are 2 other factors that have increased health-care spending. First is the millions of illegal aliens who have no insurance. They usually go straight to the emergency room, where physicians do not refuse service (even to people without insurance). The services are not paid by the illegal aliens but are paid by the government.

Illegal aliens do become sick. They often work at grueling, backbreaking work. There is no incentive for American businesses (that employ illegal labor) to improve the working conditions because they can always find another desperate laborer if the current laborer becomes too sick to work. After all, the USA has an open-border policy with Mexico and the rest of South/Central America.

The other factor that has increased health-care spending is the excessive hours which Americans are forced to work. "60 Minutes", the renowned CBS program, recentedly reported that the average American now works more hours than even the average Japanese. These additional hours of work take a severe toll on workers' health. For example, 60+ hours of computer work per week leads to cardiovascular problems due to lack of exercise. The excessive hours also strain family relations, leading to the need for counseling or psychotherapy. In Silion Valley, the divorce rate is about 30% higher than the national rate.

Just because you aren't aware of them and haven't put much thought into trying to solve the problem doesn't mean solutions do not exist. Many solutions have been developed and are being developed.

When you withdraw money from the bank it is no longer their money. They have transferred the money to you. It is up to you to protect it. However, authenticating an account holder before transferring the money to them is a bank's job. When they transfer money out of your account to another person, they are at fault. That's why the bank must do everything they can to prevent fraud. If your ATM card gets stolen, that doesn't mean it's your fault for not looking after the card. PIN numbers are implemented because sometimes people lose their cards. People err, that is to be expected.

Also, banks usually have theft and fraud insurance. They are covered when these types of crimes occur, customers are not.

It does make me wonder how long it will be before some rich person or company buys a few islands, establishes a country and bans children from them (think an almost-permananent vacation spot). I would assume that there are a lot of laws designed to push agendas based on 'protecting the children'and so I bet it would be quite an interesting country that only allows childless people to come and live there, and would certainly have interesting TV!

I've been there.

I don't remember if the TV was especially interesting but the clothing shops were Fabulous!!

Just because the Military doesn't think something is lethal doesn't make it so. Back in 1950 they thought a bacteria wasn't harmful and used it for testing, but some people got sick and other(s) died.

"The Army used serratia to test whether enemy agents could launch a biological warfare attack on a port city such as San Francisco from a location miles offshore. For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air while the weather favored dispersal."

"Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, San Francisco, Daly City and Colma, according to reports that later were declassified. Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate operation, had succumbed to an infection with Serratia marcescens that attacked his heart valves."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 004/10/31/SIDER.TMP

"They all are very hot," the governor says of Cubans and Puerto Ricans. "They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it." See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 006/09/09/GUV.TMP

Yeah, that's right up there with all black people can play basketball, cuz you know, it's in their blood man!

"They all are very hot," the governor says of Cubans and Puerto Ricans. "They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it." See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 006/09/09/GUV.TMP

Yeah, that's right up there with all black people can play basketball, cuz you know, it's in their blood man!

the suit charges that visual information is missing "alt-text," or invisible code that allows screen readers to detect and vocalize a description of an image. In addition, the site lacks accessible image maps, an impediment to jumping to different site destinations

I think that it is in the best interest of a business to make themselves accessible to the widest audience possible, but it seems that the litigants want to hold the nation's businesses to standards created by the TTS industry (I'm assuming they use some variant of TTS software - I know very little about software for the blind). An international standard would be ideal, but in an age where technology changes so rapidly, it will be difficult to regulate compliance with ADA laws. If we compare this to wheelchair access ramps, we have a design that has fundamentally remained unchanged - wheels going up a ramp. It would be like requiring companies to rebuild their ramps every few years to accommodate new wheelchair designs while expecting them to maintain backwards compatibility with older models.

"The Washington Post" reports, " California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said yesterday that 'people in high positions" at Hewlett-Packard "could be involved in illegal activity.' 'Do we think a crime occurred?' Lockyer said. 'Yes.' But he said the attorney general's office was still trying to figure out 'who did what, when.' "

According to a report by the "San Francisco Chronicle", Patricia Dunn (the chair of the HP board of directors) ordered the execution of the criminal act.

Give Lockyer's position on this matter, the attorney general will certainly pursue a criminal case against Dunn. She may spend some time in prison since the issue at hand is a criminal matter, not a civil one.

But AT&T said standalone DSL, sometimes called naked DSL, will cost $44.99 a month, about a dollar less than the cheapest regular bundle of DSL and phone service.

Excellent advice, but even that doesn't always work these days. Crooks are now using fraudulent call forwarding requests to divert calls from legitimate businesses that take credit cards over to the crooks's phone numbers. The pizza parlor call forwarding scam.

Isn't security fun?

The kernel of Google's success is its reliance on its Page-Rank algorithm patent.

This means that the FSF (or anybody else) could not create an open source version of the Google search engine. Likewise, its ability to generate revenue with its click ads derives from a patent that it licenses from Yahoo, which acquired the owner of that patent, Overture.

However, Google has been using projects like "Summer of Code" to shut up its critics.

In other words, advocates of open source software are silenced once they see bundles of money dancing in front of their eyes to produce open source projects. The offspring of such largesse is the "Google Fanbois" who post on Slashdot, singing the praises of how great Google is (despite the fact that most of Google's other software is acquired from vendors outside the company).

The holder of the Google PageRank patent is Stanford Univerity.

However, in a twist, Stanford made Google an exclusive licensee of the patent. How did it gain exclusivity?

The President of John Hennessy was made in a member of the board of Google in exchange for 65,000 shares, worth about $7 million in compensation (now worth about $24 million). This could be a problem for the "non-profit" status of the university. "Non-profit" means "free from certain taxes."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 006/07/02/BAGD5JO35U1.DTL

School cites potential conflicts of interest
In IRS form, university details business ties with trustees

by Carrie Sturock
July 2, 2006

Stanford University, one of the Bay Area's largest nonprofit institutions, paid a third of its legal fees to a law firm headed by one of its trustees, according to its most recent filing with the federal Internal Revenue Service that has been made public.

Experts say the arrangement poses a potentially troublesome conflict of interest, one the for-profit corporate world has eliminated in the wake of recent scandals and that large nonprofits are phasing out.

According to its 990 tax form, Stanford paid $2.18 million in legal fees during fiscal 2003-04 to Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a San Francisco law firm headed by university trustee Mary Cranston. All nonprofits must file 990 forms.

Stanford's relationship with Cranston was one of four the university listed as a potential conflict of interest.

The others are:

-- University President John Hennessy, an ex officio member of Stanford's Board of Trustees, serves on the board of Google Inc. Stanford had $282 million invested in Google as of as of Aug. 31, 2004. According to the federal Security and Exchange Commission, Hennessy owns $2.5 million in Google stock and an additional 44,300 shares in stock options.

-- Former Stanford trustee William Landreth served as an advisory director for Goldman Sachs, an investment banking firm that underwrote $50 million in bonds for the university at the time Landreth was a board member.

-- Stanford trustee Jon Blum served as managing director for Morgan Stanley, an investment banking firm that underwrote $80 million in bonds.

Several governance experts interviewed by The Chronicle said the Cranston relationship appears to be the most troubling. Such relationships, they said, while not illegal, can be inherently problematic because they can make it difficult to avoid conflicts of interest or, at least, the appearance of conflicts of interest.

As a trustee, she is a watchdog for the university at the same time her law firm is paid millions of dollars for legal advice and litigation services.

"It affects the perception of her ability to be independent," said Charles Elson, chairman of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "If she voices opposition to the administration, the fear is the law firm loses legal f

I'm attacking his logic.

BTW -1 for your reading comprehension.

What you quoted me as saying is a matter of fact not an opinion of the morality or immorality. It is a fact contempt of court gets you in trouble with judges.

For example this case from SFGate on a case of ringing cell phones in an Indiana courtroom.

Link to SF gate article

In Indiana Judges can punish you on a whim with 40 hours of community service for not turning off your cell phone in their courtroom. In Texas judges can lock up up indefinitely for any slight they consider contempt without appeal. Is that moral or immoral? I don't care. Is it legal under the current laws? Why yes it is.

Actually, the main barrier seems to be the political/military calculus that China is a "threat" nation. Therefore we must avoid at all costs allowing any of our holy aerospace technology from slipping into their hands due to the dual-use nature of rocketry, guidance, et. al. technology.

Witness prosecutions against defense contractors who either deliberately or accidentally transfer aerospace tech to China.

The Department of State has employed a multi-layered approach to protect the privacy of the information and to mitigate the chances of the electronic data being skimmed (unauthorized reading) or eavesdropped (intercepting communication of the transmission of data between the chip and the reader by unintended recipients). Metallic anti-skimming material incorporated into the front cover and spine of the e-passport book prevents the chip from being skimmed, or read, when the book is fully closed; Basic Access Control (BAC) technology, which requires that the data page be read electronically to generate a key that unlocks the chip, will prevent skimming and eavesdropping; and a randomized unique identification (RUID) feature will mitigate the risk that an e-passport holder could be tracked. To prevent alteration or modification of the data on the chip, and to allow authorities to validate and authenticate the data, the information on the chip will include an electronic signature (PKI).

And there were these, errm, lone gunmen that shot up some random Jewish people (link) , some cases of sudden Jihad syndrome and whatnot. And there is that funny website called http://www.thereligionofpeace.com, that counted more than 5500 Jihad attacks since 9-11 worldwide.

And yes, most weren't on North American soil. And yes, there was that Ryder truck and the daycare school. (You forgot to mention all those school shootings.)

I didn't advocate lax security on everyone else, but the time-consuming probing of all body orifices should be spared for the usual recurring suspects. To reference my useless analogy: the fact that one purple turkey made a large attack ten years ago doesn't make our green snakes any yota less dangerous. 99.9 percent of all attacks are from them, so go figure.

"The Onion is satire and makes itself known as such."

Apparently not entirely
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2002/06/08/MN129538.DTL

True. Microsoft may be able to claim some stubborn users, but it seems to have lost much of its ability to inspire enthusiasm. They used to have it, but it's been nearly a decade since the days in which the IE team deposited a giant blue "e" on Netscape's front lawn to celebrate the release of IE4. And those were the developers!

Firefox, Opera, Apple, Linux, various BSDs all manage to inspire enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm results in loyalty. That combo gives you thousands of potential advocates, which can be a lot more fun than a couple of default settings and some marketing brochures (though that wouldn't hurt either).

Actually, there is strong evidence that humans have a very strong evolutionary impulse to not kill each other.

More details here

I guess the big bad mans are just "misunderstood".

You are making a big logical mistake here by assuming that the same people who pay for the war are going to profit for it.

Truth. But you are making a mistake in assuming that they are profiting from it. A 6% net profit doesn't lend much to the theory of:

1. An an elaborate scheme of price gouging through international conspiracy and genocide to "get" oil fields that remain under Iraqi control.
2. ???
3. Windfall profits! (6%)

Maybe instead, the industry functions more like this.

I wonder what people think of the windfall profits from the 1500% markup on soft drinks. or the 16% profits aided by $8,000 per gallon ink.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/20 06/08/08/MNGGTKD03A1.DTL

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375725806/002-89 62410-6073658?v=glance&n=283155

but that out of the way, the scale of the US makes it a bit less than feasible. For instance, here in California we've been arguing on and off for several years about a high-speed rail between SF and LA. It's only 500 miles, and it could follow the course of the old El Camino Real (now Highway 101)... only that's through mountainous territory all the way. Okay, so it could follow Highway 5... but now it's a 600 or 700 mile journey, and it still crosses a mountain range (the Grapevine). Either route is sparsely populated between the suburban outreaches, reducing the pull-through... and before you claim that the new transit corridor will produce new cities, bear in mind that the highways have been there for 40 years (or 300 if you're counting El Camino Real). There also won't be a train stop every where that there's a freeway on ramp.

On the other hand, you can fly down for a day trip for about $100, and on some days it's actually faster than driving to the other side of LA or the Bay Area. The fact is that trains are great for 9-5 commuting where people have 9-5 office jobs, but they kind of suck at flexibility.

Worse, the hub-and-spoke model that gives air travel its flexibility is not replicable with rail because the rail has to be built and maintained, which takes a lot longer than upgrading or building an airport terminal. Even if that problem were overcome, say by a massive government building program that connected all the major and minor cities of the country, it still wouldn't be successful because of the economic requirement to put lots of passengers onto each train and stop relatively infrequently. Greyhound buses on Interstate highways are the proof.

Section 215 of the act allows FBI agents to obtain a warrant from a secret federal court for library or bookstore records of anyone connected to an investigation of international terrorism or spying.

Unlike conventional search warrants, there is no need for agents to show that the target is suspected of a crime or possesses evidence of a crime.

Do you remember in the wake of 9/11 how one person asked a Post Office clerk if there were any stamps without American flags on them and got detained and questioned?

Nope, but if you have a URL I would love to see it.

I dug up a story in the San Francisco Chronicle [I know nothing of California newspapers, so I don't know if it's a good source or not] about what I presume to be the riots in question. Here's a link . It appears there was some degree of violence in both directions, a police officer was pretty seriously injured. I have trouble considering violent riots "civil disobedience". I don't know what actually occured at the 2005 G8, so I can't judge whether it qualifies as our government doing something beyond remit.

Obviously a little conflicted young fundamentalist is:
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This homie is doing is part to go against stereotypes
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Dirty girl...
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I have mod points, but I'd rather reply to this...

The people in this country have something to say about the current state of things but have yet to act upon what the morals that govern them. They talk about how wrong the President is but yet they vote him into office again. They shout " I don't want my phone tapped," but they do it in the comfort of their home where they can't be arrested. They say "let us be moral and leaders of the free world," yet they think "a little bit of torture never hurt anyone as long as its in Cuba." And here we are - you and I paying our taxes and showing our teeth like its all okay.

Just what am I supposed to do? Go and protest at one of GWB's speeches and get arrested? How will that change anything? How will that help? Will my being in prison make other people more free?

I could perhaps donate a little money to the ACLU or EFF - I think they're great causes - but their court actions are subject to a judiciary which is increasingly neo-conservative (aka fascist).

AFAIK, the most effective thing I can do is vote for democrats in the 2006 and 2008 elections. But everyone here at /. knows that recent elections were corrupt. I never voted for Bush in the first place, and that's true of approximately (or perhaps at least?) 50% of American voters. But the opinions of those voters are ignored by the present administration, and I suspect that some of their votes are ignored as well.

Personally, I believe that the current administration is led by criminals who should be impeached, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a very long time. Their crimes are many and egregious. But what can I do about it? I'm not wealthy enough to buy a congresscritter.

So go ahead and mod me down or call me a troll because I don't care. Someone needs to tell America the truth and stand up for whats right. I'm moving to Maine...

Yeah, I'll bet you're going to move to another state just because of a slashdot story. Riiiiight...

Doesn't need to be.

All Trusted Computing provides is a means to verify remotely what software is running on a given system. Cisco have already developed routers which can be set up to only route traffic from something running "approved" software.

    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2003/11/19/BUGP6351V31.DTL

If they only way for your software to be "approved" is that it's the version your vendor shipped & signed, then it matters not whether or not you can modify what they shipped and install it yourself - as soon as you do that, the router will drop any packets from your PC and internet access will stop working.

Maybe that's an extreme example - I can't see many ISPs cutting off most of their customers overnight. But I can see banks requiring a "trusted" setup for online banking, government departments requiring a "trusted" setup for interaction (and if the UK is anything to go by, the online systems will sooner or later replace the existing ones so you can't just post them your tax forms). Add this all up and if you think running Linux on a desktop can be awkward and painful now, imagine what it would be like in that vision of the future.

If this really bothers you, I'll take your apple stock.

For those determined to pillory Jobs for this, I might suggest reading this sfgate article which says, in part:

Some of the nettlesome stock options were given to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, but he voluntarily canceled those in 2003 before cashing them in.

After digging deeper, Apple uncovered enough new problems to prompt the company to hire an outside lawyer to take over the investigation and notify the Securities and Exchange Commission about its findings.

Valuation of stock options is and has been under a lot of debate recently. Apple looked over its books, discovered they had done something wrong according to current (and possibly past) accounting practices, and went to work to correct the problem.

Steve Jobs, who is richer than Croesus and really only bothers to count the number of digits on his bank statement, decided to dodge potential trouble more than TWO YEARS ago, which helps their position now.

Which part of this fits the "Steve Jobs is a greedy corporate raider" theory?

They screwed up. They admitted it. They'll take a hit. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

Stat from this article

Any one concerned about touch screens should be using absentee ballots, and encouraging their friends to do the same, since it automatically creates a paper trail, and bypasses the touch-screen infrastructure altogether.

As a bonus - it also bypasses overcrowded polling places due to shortages in voting booths. And if enough voters stop using Diebold's machines, it will ultimately undercut the rationale for their systems nationwide.

I would agree with the poster above that we are clearly not in the state of the novel/film "1984". Although to suggest that there is no connection between the federal level of government and the local police I point you to a few articles. After looking at the JTTF, the recent news of Oakland police infiltrating non violent protest groups, and punishing independent journalists I think there is plenty of evidence that we have a police state and not just a few arrant officers. Read at your leisure. http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/02/11 /cointelpro/index.html http://www.joshwolf.net/grandjury/ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 006/07/28/SURVEILLANCE.TMP Oh yes and I think I'll post this anonymously. I've got place I would like to fly to.

we're focused in our biofuels technology work is how to make ethanol out of something that is already going to be thrown away, like farm waste products.

He believe as a company that the most important source of new energy is energy efficiency and the company is investment on a number of alternative energy search. Seems quite astute for an oil man.

"What garbage. You're calling free market enterprise a zero-sum game."

Actually, it's a negative sum game. How so? Because America's poor class is growing faster than the rich class, and the middle class is shrinking. Aside from the filthy rich, consumer buying power is shrinking. Wages are currently falling against inflation.

Offshoring has reduced the amount of jobs in this country in relation to the growing populace. No new industries are coming to provide the number of well paying jobs that tech and manufacturing did. Biotech is already on its way out, just in case you were planning on countering with that example.

BTW bite me, looneytarian mods. Nothing I say can be countered with facts because they ARE facts.

Shrinking middle class, growing poor class: http://www.factcheck.org/article249.html

Biotech being offshored: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/04/18/BUGAI66E7I1.DTL

Wages not keeping up with inflation: http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/04/21/sections/ business/business_nation/article_489293.php

So, yes, this IS a negative sum game.

I call you out now. Put aside your theories and back up your "plus sum game" with hard documented facts. I'll even let you cheat: feel free to use Fox News and the Heritage Foundation if you feel you need to.

In fact, the opposite seems to be true - the Olympics was successfully sued over their website being inaccessible, and so was Target. As a consequence, it seems, more and more business are finding reason to make a case for web accessibility - whether they consider themselves a target or not.

Intel's profits fell, according to their earnings report last night.

Not good for an INTC shareholder.

On a completely unrelated note, has anyone seen Sandy Berger recently?

The test scores show that Oakland schools truly do suck (even worse than LA schools), but that the other SF Bay Area schools are doing pretty well. What is it about Oakland that makes their schools so much worse than other SF Bay Area schools? Would giving laptops to Oakland students be a cost effective way to improve test scores?

According to an article in the SF Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2006/01/22/BAG5QGRAK21.DTL&type=printable the San Francisco schools (which includes many Bay Area innercity schools) are doing quite well. Many parents have a problem with a lottery system which can mean that kids don't attend their neighborhood school and there is a perceived quality problem, but the schools themselves seem to actually be pretty good. San Francisco scored 745 on the last Academic Performance Index, with 800 considered excellent; San Jose and Berkeley both scored 737 and Los Angeles scored 649. It wasn't in the article, Oakland scored 634.

What do you have to say about this? Or this?

Judge for yourself.

Google Images to the rescue:

http://www.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/techchro n/2006/07/11/sony_ad300x225.jpg

Pretty crazy, considering that Star Trek inspired the Tablet PC (remember the PADD?), the cell phone (thanks Captain Kirk!), the hypospray, and a number of other elements of modern technology. Well, I guess, maybe not all that crazy, eh? http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/03/15/BUGLV5J6GT1.DTL&type=bu siness

I'm sure that Art practices what he preaches. Indeed, I'm sure he's so "driven to make drugs that help patients fight cancer" that any day he'll announce that he's cutting his own $40,000,000 in compensation so that the company has more money to do that research. ($1.6M in 1999. $21M in 2004.)

Corrections: it's John Lydon, and he didn't actually get snared by the list, but he would have been.

My personal favorite was Jonathan Linden, better known as Johnny Rotten from the popular punk band, the "Sex Pistols." He was detained because "Linden" is phonetically similar to "Ladin."

Your favorite, huh? To bad that it never happened. Several stories have noted that the airlines use software which uses and algorithm derived from an indexing system known as "Soundex" first used in the 1880 census, and that the last name of Johnny Lydon of Sex Pistols fame, has the same value under this system is Laden, of terrorist fame. However, Johnny Lydon has never been detained because of this.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 003/06/08/MN253740.DTL

http://www.csoonline.com/read/010104/briefing_name .html

According to The San Francisco Chronicle:

"Regulators are investigating whether companies broke securities and tax laws by backdating stock-option grants to coincide with the lowest possible price. The practice of backdating is drawing scrutiny because it maximizes the amount of money executives can make in exercising options."

It seems like plenty of As need Cing, but I think it's way to early to say "the technique is not illegal".

That's funny... most other articles say that the data wasn't accessed... so no one's personal information was compromised. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2 006/06/29/national/w085423D04.DTL

We're talking explicitly about the UK, so your comments about the US are irrelevant

Thank you! I was going for a well known case (and trying to document it) but I appreciate the criticism. Some other examples might be comparing JetBlue or SkyWest and United Airlines and other unionized airlines. Albeit there are other obstacles to running an airline business, unions are only one. But these non-unionized airlines are showing consistent profit while their unionized competitors aren't seeing profit even with massive government support (similar non audio link here.)

I might also mention various problems with teachers unions. But that's an entirely different story.

I think most competitive industries that have unions display these tendencies. A government enforced monopoly always seems to be a bad deal for everyone, not just unions. Besides, the main point of my post was not that unions are bad, merely that Carnegie was not an imbecile.

Some kind of beta blocker? (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c /a/2004/10/17/MNGB599PJC1.DTL)

Is it just me or do they look a little pretensious?