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Well, according to this, about 32% of all car accident-related deaths are due to drunk driving. That means, that 68% are due to non-drunk driving! People, if you want to lower the number of people killed in traffic accidents, start drinking, because the sober people are more dangerous.

God DAMN it! Not you but the fact that this will come up in the news again. It was stupid then and it's still retardedly stupid now. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kimkomando/2008-08-07-digital-drugs_N.htm

They were sued for sleazy behavior years ago:
Online daters sue Match.com, Yahoo for fraud
I don't know what happened to that lawsuit, but I think it's safe to say that it hasn't caused them to improve any.

Have you ever looked at average open-source code ? While the kernel's code quality might be called "passable" (though it could adhere to stricter standards), the same cannot be said for most open source projects. It would not be hard, at all, to hide a backdoor in one of a dozen projects, especially GNOME and KDE are utter disasters when it comes to some of the code they run. For projects that are tested, a steady stream of exploits is available, from mozilla, the kernel, apache, tomcat, and gnome and kde (but these last 2 are barely tested at all, yet still quite a few exploits are found on a regular basis).

In commercial projects the NSA needs to infiltrate the company (I doubt anyone just lets this happen, and it would be better if they didn't for the NSA, no-one knows, that means no-one can betray you), and then commit something into it. Before outsourcing it was probably hard for the Chinese government to get backdoors into American software (though there have been incidents with japanese military vessels software suddenly refusing to target things when some Chinese boats were nearby and not behaving all that well). Today, there's little doubt the Chinese government has backdoors in many open and close source software projects.

So this is just a bogus argument. Let's get real : both commercial and open source projects are bugged and contain planted exploits. Both contain backdoors for multiple governments. Besides, software is vulnerable even without planted backdoors. The one attack that was probably government originated (though despite all sorts of predictions still no firm proof exactly which government did it, and since nobody likes Iran's govt, not even Iran's own scientists (ahmadinnerjacket had a few hundred of a run-ins with ... well everybody ... at pretty much every iranian university before becoming "there's no gays in Iran" laughing stock of the world), needless to say, the very people who would obviously be in the best possible position to pull this off)), Stuxnet, didn't need any unpublished holes. Not in the used closed-source software, not in the used open source software, not in the used hardware, not ... It was so basic a commercial company could probably have written it, yet it was capable of introducing sabotage actions in what is arguably Iran's best guarded facility, it's nuclear weapons factory.

Could an equally basic process be used to subtly sabotage an American weapons production plant ? Good question.

Then there's the fact that the Chinese have been caught bugging hardware for espionage. What exactly do you hope to do about that ?

And, yes, the US spies. So does every other country on the planet. So would I if I controlled the government of any particular country. Inside and outside of the country. But the purpose of the American govt is to change the world into America. Great plan ! The purpose of the Chinese government is to change the world into China. Frankly I really, really don't like that plan. I hear the public buses are killers. Similar things go for just about any other government (except perhaps - perhaps western Europe - perhaps, maybe if the EU was anywhere near democratic)

Most of the anti-walmart stuff you read is FUD, targated at them because they're the biggest retailer. And despite what everyone says, they got that way by having honest business practices

Forget random FUD for and against them and just look at what the courts have said. They've paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in class-action suits after it was found that the forced employees to work off the clock (see, for instance, http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2005-11-02-walmart-employees_x.htm "Wal-Mart, which earned $10 billion last year, agreed to pay $50 million in 2000 to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that 69,000 former and current Wal-Mart employees in Colorado had been forced to work off the clock").

They've paid out millions of dollars in dozen of lawsuits over unfair practices with respect to hiring of disabled employees; they've been raided at least 3 different times for having scores of illegal immigrants working in their stores, and not just on an ad-hoc basis--the 2003 raid was of stores in over 20 different states with hundreds of workers involved (see http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/23/news/companies/walmart_worker_arrests/ which notes that "federal law enforcement officials said information from an undercover investigation revealed that some Wal-Mart executives and some store managers knew of the immigration violations.").

They're currently facing the biggest gender discrimination suit in US history--see http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/06/news/companies/Wal-mart-lawsuit-to-Supreme-Court/index.htm

So, yeah, "honest business practices".

Yay, grandparents. Who weren't paying for the debt from WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Cold War, and the ongoing Oil Wars.

But now we're paying less than them. In spite of the massively increased debt load brought to you by the people we voted into office.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2010-05-10-taxes_N.htm

Perhaps if you could give us a list of all that "violence coming from the left" in the US that is somehow being cleverly concealed by all the media of the world (must be some kind of a leftist conspiracy involving all those pinko-commie corporate CEOs!) it would help your points to attain some modicum of credibility. Unless your post was meant to be some very subtle satire, that is.

• It was not the fear of conservative violence that caused Ann Coulter's speech to be cancelled this week.
• It was a liberal who bit the finger off a man who disagreed with him on healthcare.
• It was Obama-loving Amy Bishop who took a gun to work and murdered co-workers.
• Joseph Stack flew his plane into the IRS building after writing an anti-conservative manifesto.
• It was liberals who destroyed AM radio towers outside of Seattle.
• It's liberals who burn down Hummer dealerships.
• It was progressive SEIU union thugs who beat a black conservative man who spoke his mind.
• It's doubtful that a conservative fired shots into a GOP campaign headquarters.
• In fact, Democrats have no monopoly on having their offices vandalized.
• Don't forget it was Obama's friend Bill Ayers who used terrorism as a tool for political change. SDS is still radical, with arrests in 2007 and the storming of the CATO Institute in July 2008.
• It was a liberal who was sentenced to two years for bringing bombs and riot shields to the Republican National Convention in 2008.
• It was a liberal who threatened to kill a government informant who infiltrated her Austin-based group that planned to bomb the RNC.
• It was liberals who assaulted police in Berkeley.
• It was liberals who intimidated and threw rocks through the windows of researchers.
• The two Black Panthers who stood outside polls intimidating people with nightsticks were probably not right-wingers.
• Every time the G20 gets together, it's not conservatives who destroy property and cause chaos.

I could literally go on and on, but let's try to have some perspective here. Violence is a product of the fringe, on either side, and it's sickening to try to use it for political advantage. Those who commit violence in the name of politics deserve political change no more than they deserve leniency in sentencing. Violence furthers no cause. The only call to action that violence has ever moti

if you preach violence and hate, you get it expressed

you reap what you sow

to absolve certain groups who have been violently expressing their distaste of government for an extended period of time from what is an obvious result of that rhetoric, represents a strange way to think about how the world and human nature works

yes, there are crazy people everywhere. but if you give the crazy person easy access to a gun, and yell at them crazy theories about how their own government is their mortal violent enemy, you get crazy people shooting at the government. its a pretty straightforward cause and effect

you can't absolve from guilt the demagogue who has been preaching violence and hate when violence and hate is expressed exactly as the demagogue's words intend

look at the violent anti-abortion rhetoric and the shooting of the abortion provider in kansas. the crazy people are enabled by the rhetoric. plenty act on their own, but plenty more act in the name of the group that enables them

plenty more are motivated to do what they sense everyone else wants done: they derive sustenance and support form the others who clearly want hate and violence expressed, they act as martyrs, they act as fall guys, but they do act in the name of a group and a cause, not completely on their own, when the larger group is clearly filled with violence and hate. don't absolve that violence and hate in certain movements from what crazy people do

they are the tip of the spear, they do not act alone, and you are a fool if you don't understand the hate-filled group and its rhetoric enables them

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-11-09-kansas-abortion-shooting_N.htm

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1343992/Pakistani-politician-Salman-Tasee-shot-dead-stance-blasphemy-laws.html

An 8,000 mile mapless route from Italy to China is a carefully selected course, now? Admittedly, they weren't driving at highway speeds, but that's still pretty damned impressive....

And if it all goes wrong it doesn't matter - it's not their money anyway. Fucking jew bastards.

those 5 guys that bought a Windows phone are gonna be pissed.

I realize this sort of childish comment is popular on Slashdot, but their sales are probably closer to a couple million (they announced 1.5M before Christmas. That number was probably phones shipped to carriers as opposed to customers, but again, it was before Christmas).

All you do is undermine your position with these tired, poor jokes.

(1) Mann and Wegman have nothing do to with anything in the article, or, for that matter future predictions of Global Warming.

(2) The Wegman Report was commissioned by Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield., from the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, not the Senate.

(3) Neither Barton (who recently gained further notoriety by apologizing to the CEO of BP), nor Whitfield were the chairman of the relevant committee at the time. The Republican chairman of the committee and the rest of the Republican and Democratic members commissioned a real report from the National Academy of Sciences. That report was by a team of real researchers, chosen by the normal, careful practices of the National Academy of Sciences. It was then sent out for a formal peer review. It found that while the statistical methods used by Mann et al had a minor problem, correcting the problem made no substantial difference. Moreover, Mann's results had been validated by being repeated by several different researchers that found the same results, using completely different proxies for past temperatures and mathematical analyses.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309102251

(4) In contrast, Wegman was chosen by Barton, whose opinions on climate change were already well known at the time, and Wegman was given material by Barton's staff to include in his report. He has said in interviews that he was under pressure to complete the report faster than he wanted.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-22-plagiarism_N.htm

(5) Wegman's report was *not* peer reviewed. Wegman claims to have sent it to 6 people to look at, but of course even if this is true, they were chosen by *him*, not by any normal process of peer review.

(6) Wegman's report is now known to have been plagiarized and Wegman is now under formal investigation for it by George Mason University.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-21-climate-report-questioned_N.htm

(7) Wegman has refused to release supporting code or data for his report. Prof. David Ritson of Stanford University made such a request in 2006, shortly after the Wegman report was released. Wegman's report called for disclosure of supporting materials and openness generally, but he has himself refused to comply, citing the technicality that his report was not federally funded.

http://deepclimate.org/2010/10/24/david-ritson-speaks-out/

The Wegman report is a piece of crap and it's pretty amusing that people who want to deny the reality of Global Warming keep citing it.

(1) Mann and Wegman have nothing do to with anything in the article, or, for that matter future predictions of Global Warming.

(2) The Wegman Report was commissioned by Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield., from the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, not the Senate.

(3) Neither Barton (who recently gained further notoriety by apologizing to the CEO of BP), nor Whitfield were the chairman of the relevant committee at the time. The Republican chairman of the committee and the rest of the Republican and Democratic members commissioned a real report from the National Academy of Sciences. That report was by a team of real researchers, chosen by the normal, careful practices of the National Academy of Sciences. It was then sent out for a formal peer review. It found that while the statistical methods used by Mann et al had a minor problem, correcting the problem made no substantial difference. Moreover, Mann's results had been validated by being repeated by several different researchers that found the same results, using completely different proxies for past temperatures and mathematical analyses.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309102251

(4) In contrast, Wegman was chosen by Barton, whose opinions on climate change were already well known at the time, and Wegman was given material by Barton's staff to include in his report. He has said in interviews that he was under pressure to complete the report faster than he wanted.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-22-plagiarism_N.htm

(5) Wegman's report was *not* peer reviewed. Wegman claims to have sent it to 6 people to look at, but of course even if this is true, they were chosen by *him*, not by any normal process of peer review.

(6) Wegman's report is now known to have been plagiarized and Wegman is now under formal investigation for it by George Mason University.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-21-climate-report-questioned_N.htm

(7) Wegman has refused to release supporting code or data for his report. Prof. David Ritson of Stanford University made such a request in 2006, shortly after the Wegman report was released. Wegman's report called for disclosure of supporting materials and openness generally, but he has himself refused to comply, citing the technicality that his report was not federally funded.

http://deepclimate.org/2010/10/24/david-ritson-speaks-out/

The Wegman report is a piece of crap and it's pretty amusing that people who want to deny the reality of Global Warming keep citing it.

for correcting themselves, is rather low, don't you think?

It's especially difficult when it becomes clear that measuring extant arctic sea ice, for example, is no longer a cut and dried calculation involving coverage, but also the density of the ice, and thickness. So in that case the error becomes neither intentional nor accidental, but rather one of interpreting the data - but the fact that arctic sea ice is rapidly vanishing has not changed.

Regarding Climate versus Weather, it's New Years Eve in Minnesota, and it's raining. It's been known for a long time that the same system that cooled Minnesota warmed Europe.

So Europe cools while the American midwest warms.

Climate is a vastly interconnected and complex system. Those who recognize the fact that global warming is occurring also recognize this fact. 'Skeptics' will happily latch on to individual errors, localized (either temporally or physically) anomalies, and so on, and ignore the greater picture as it suits them.

And of course you can't only rely on one source. The OP fell into that trap because one year in the period was in fact cooler than before. A one year anomaly does not make a trend, however, and 2010 will most likely be yet another warmest year on record.

McDonalds didn't "buy" an exemption; the Department of Health and Human Services said it granted waivers in late September so workers with such plans wouldn't lose coverage from employers who might choose instead to drop health insurance altogether.

I found it interesting that you chose to mention "Lots of Megacorps" but failed to mention all the unions that "bought" their exemptions too! And, oh, by the way, waivers are available until 2014.

From FactCheck:

Q: Has the Obama administration allowed corporations to "opt out" of the new health care law?

A: No. The government has granted more than 200 waivers, but these merely give companies a temporary delay before being required to improve the coverage of cheap, bare-bones plans they currently offer.

Was it back when the Internet had no trolls and everyone on slashdot wrote thoughtful, well-reasoned commentary?

When did this exist?

1946.

More on topic, am I the only one who thinks the TSA should be disbanded and Michael Chertoff should be standing in an unemployment line with Michael brown?

How about we spend some of that transportation safety money on guard rails? 45,000 people die on American highways each year, but there were no airline fatalities for two years straight. Seems that the government's priorities are highly illogical; the transportation safety money should be spent on safer highways, where people die every day, not wasted on the already safe airports. The only terrorist I'm terrified of is the blond in the SUV texting on the cell phone while eating a hamburger.

Do we now see artworks with cherubs scrubbed from the internet because they're childlike?

You joke, but stuff like that has already happened in the US. Heck, those statues were of apparently adult women, never mind naked little kids...

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-12-13-army-smartphones_N.htm?csp=34tech
The [US] Army wants to issue every soldier an iPhone or Android cellphone — it could be a soldier's choice.
Vane said he wants to use the phones to collect biometrics on enemy combatants.
To track the bad guys, track the troops and what the troops might be writing about.

Cost of both wars over 7 years: $1,124,390,382,240 http://costofwar.com/.

Deficit of a single year of Obama's budget: $1,500,000,000,000 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aNaqecavD9ek.

Budget deficit handed to Obama: $400,000,000,000 http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-02-04-budget-analysis_N.htm

Sticking it to the elitist /. crowd who think ending a 7 year war is the answer instead of reining in a president who spends that in a single year: priceless

Morons.

Federal funding at its finest

I heard that a lot, it's worth checking. At the very least, I didn't find it on Snopes.

It's just USA Today, but this is what I found so far:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2003-09-16-cleancar_x.htm

Civil rights protests where to change laws.

Sure, but they did so by targeting businesses, who were themselves just following the law. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-02-01-sit-ins-civil-rights_N.htm

First of all they didn't have sit ins at dinners. That sat down and tried to be customers!
They didn't block others from being customers!

Of course they blocked others from being customers. That was the whole point. They sat in seats until they were served, but they were never served, so the restaurant or store would have no (or fewer) customers that day.

It is also absolutely dumb to expect a company to stand up to the government they need to work under. To use your own words "why go to jail if you don't have too?"

True. So this is a case of fighting unfairness with more unfairness. Maybe that doesn't work, but it's not like it's making the situation worse either.

Here is some more complete information on this subject if anyone is curious. Interestingly
it looks like Republicans are largely responsible for this.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/47-Percent-Dont-Pay-Taxes-No-Big-Deal-3230

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/business/economy/14leonhardt.html

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-04-16-editorial16_ST_N.htm

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0&.v=1

Yes, they will die from hunger, poor sanitation, wars (civil or otherwise) all of which are going to be made worse by climate change. The World Health Organization already attributes 150,000 deaths annually to the effects of climate change.

Climate change is widely expected to hit the poorest people hardest.

I think you need to consider the effect of making all those factors worse.

As if there's not a competitive market now.

Not for iPhone, iPod, and iPad

So this is a lie: The iPhone 4 faces stiff competition? As is The Year of the Tablet: The iPad's Competition and Ipod Vs Competitors? And there are no businesses looking for Android developers?

I never said Apple's engineering was bad

No, but I said that, and you responded with something totally irrelevant about reinstalling Windows. Hence my question: what does reinstalling Windows have to do with Apple's bad software engineering?

I guess you don't understand simple English. Yes you brought up Apple's bad engineering so I asked if it is so bad then why have I had problems with Apple's competitors' product but not Apple's products? Again I have not had problems with any Apple engineered products but I have had problems with products engineered by Apple's competitors. How stupid can you get?

Falcon

Lenovo has been playing with keyboard configurations for a while. And its VP of design commented on removing the caps lock key a long time ago.

>If you download his Insurance file or donate money to his site, expect to be put under intense surveilence COINTELPRO style.

Be afraid, censor yourself. I'm not saying that's your opinion, but it's sure the impression that certain powers want you to have. John Hancock signed the US declaration of independence in a big bold script to make sure the king could read it. We're under surveillance anyway, might as well be for a good reason.

Then again Kentucky, a creationist theme park probably isn't for you.
It's more of a Shelbyville idea:

Mike Zovath, senior vice president of the non-profit group Answers in Genesis, one of the partners in developing the park, says Kentucky officials have told him the proposal for state tourism-development incentives "looks good," the newspaper says.

The group cautions, however, that they could still move the project to Indiana, depending on available incentives.

1. Clippy: Misunderstood animated pedagogical agent or spawn of Satan? - Invokes Sun Tzu

2. Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents. Impressive 65 Page PDF available from this abstract page.

3. People Who Hate Clippy, the Stupid Paper Clip from Microsoft Word (Wartburg Chapter). Emergency outreach

4. Meme:Clippy. Fanpic uploads @ end.

5. On Youtube.

6. How I Made Clippy Lovable. Stanford again. What is it with these guys? You know their mascot is a tree?

7. DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS. I think my nose just started bleeding.

8. Et tu DARPA?.

9. Senor Pedaso Molesto de Matal NPR transcript.

10. Back At'chya. Remember before they became inertia?

11. Hark the Herald.. Wait, DIE DIE DIE. Just sayin'.

12. Reflection.

Happy Clippymas! Hope the leaks result in a zillion times the cogitation invested in Clippy..

It falls under personality rights which varies country to country but in the United States it is proving to be a very dynamically changing landscape.

In reality this is probably just an annoyed Apple lawyer with too much time on his hand muscling a little guy into submission. They're foreign and can be made to look like leeches, I'm sure. The real kicker is that, as the lawyer on Techdirt mentions, there's no clear motive for this, is Apple making a competing figurine that they're losing sales on? Is the figurine somehow damaging to Mr. Jobs? If it's a parody of Steve Jobs doesn't that fall under fair use? So many questions but the answer will always be "Who has the most money and lawyers?" And that's Apple.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050302138.html

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-11-17-banner17_ST_N.htm

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/19/bush-library-may-show-mission-accomplished-banner-from-2003-ir/

http://articles.cnn.com/2003-10-28/politics/mission.accomplished_1_aircraft-carrier-conrad-chun-banner?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS

http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/05/01/who-was-responsible-for-the-mission-accomplished-banner/

You will note that Rumsfeld has admitted the banner was made by White House staff, and reflected wording from Bush's speech. Bush's production manager flew out to the ship five days earlier, checking every detail for his boss's triumphant deck-swagger in a flight suit. Being the commander in chief, if Bush told the Navy "Take the rap for me on this," they had no choice but to say, "Yeah, we asked for the banner."

And you openly display your pride in the man. Unbelievable.

Not if you live in Nebraska.

While there is truth to the assertion that some private schools are much better than others, this doesn't take into account how bad many government schools are.

Nor does it take into account how good many government schools are; nor does it take into account that private schools get to select their students, while public schools systems don't.

We do not have a public school system in the U.S. -- we have thousands. Each county generally runs its own system, with a bit of oversight and funding at the state level. I live in a narrow strip of Baltimore County between Baltimore City (an independent city, Baltimore is essentially a county unto itself) and Howard County.

Where I live, the schools are decent-to-good; half of Baltimore County public high schools were ranked in the top six percent of high schools by Newsweek, and 85% of graduates go on immediately to higher education. But in a few minutes I can be in Baltimore City -- as seen on The Wire -- which a few years ago had one of the lowest on-time graduation rates in the country, less that 40%, and 11 schools were failing so badly that the State of Maryland tried to take them over directly; there has been marked improvement the past few years, but it's still an underperforming system. Or in a few minutes I can be in Howard County, one of the richest counties in the U.S., where the graduation rate is over 93%, and average SAT scores are over 1100 on the old 1600 point scale.

As one last aside, note that since 1970 real spending per pupil at government schools in the U.S. has more than doubled, with - so far - nothing to show for it.

Nonsense. Since 1970, public schools have had to provide increasing special education, more ESOL education, more free and reduced price meals. They've also introduced more gifted education and AP classes, which didn't exist (or at least, weren't widespread) in 1970. Schools have also become a delivery point for a wide array of social services, which accounts for a very large chunk of spending. Finally, public schools also provide transportation for students -- you may have noticed some increase in gasoline prices since 1970.

In spite of these extra costs, public school expenditures are lower than secular private schools; they spend a bit more than Catholic schools, but get slightly better outcomes. (Note that "expenditure" and "tuition" are very different things, thanks to grants; for example, one school in McLean, Virginia, had a tuition of $25,890 and spending of $35,665.) There are cheaper private schools, but they're usually poor performers. You get what you pay for, and overall, public school price/performance is in line with private schools. The problem is systems like Baltimore; and it's not just the schools that are the problem there, there are enormous issues of economic and social justice at work.

All you need to know: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-11-22-scanner-lobby_N.htm

...namely a locked and reinforced cockpit door and armed air marshals.

I agree with you entirely on the locked cockpit doors, but the air marshals program is irrelevant, costly and ineffective.

There are roughly four thousand air marshals in the United States, and they are deployed in teams of two (or more). Meanwhile, there are something like thirty thousand flights per day (taking off or landing at U.S. airports). The fraction of flights with an air marshal on board runs to an estimated 1-2%. The air marshals program, despite its massive cost, has a negligible chance of 'getting lucky' and catching a terrorist in the act. Had there been air marshals flying at current levels back in 2001, they would have had a less than ten percent chance of being aboard to stop even one of the four suicide hijackings.

Air marshals travel the country - and the world - displacing paying first-class ticketholders to serve as a second-rate deterrent.

Let's be honest -- the paradigm has already changed. Before the last plane crashed in that Pennsylvania field, the window was closed on hijacking an aircraft for use as a weapon; passengers won't sit still for it. In principle, air marshals could constructively be used aboard a few flights where there was good intelligence to suggest a highly elevated risk of attacks, but practically speaking the same goal could be accomplished more effectively through more thorough security screening of those at-risk flights.

The choice between backscatter and pat downs began in 2007 after being tested as far back as 2005.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2005-05-15-airport-xray-bottomstrip_x.htm

READ IT AGAIN, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Now, why wasn't this news back then? Because the GOP gets away with pretending that when they violate basic civil liberties, it's for a good purpose. When Obama came in and declared torture illegal and wanted to shutdown Guantanamo, he's called out for endangering America.

Mandatory screening came after the underwear bomber, and it was pushed by a guy you may remember named Michael Chertoff and the rest of the paranoid fucks like Hannity, Beck, and O'Reilly, who turned it into a political game to try and prove that the Obama Administration was weak on terror. So they responded with more security measures.

Yeah, the Democrats are still a member of the business party. Are they better than the paranoid, ignorant trash the GOP needs to stay relevant? Absolutely, as every uninformed response like this has demonstrated.

The choice between backscatter and pat downs began in 2007 after being tested as far back as 2005.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2005-05-15-airport-xray-bottomstrip_x.htm

READ IT AGAIN, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Now, why wasn't this news back then? Because the GOP gets away with pretending that when they violate basic civil liberties, it's for a good purpose. When Obama came in and declared torture illegal and wanted to shutdown Guantanamo, he's called out for endangering America.

Mandatory screening came after the underwear bomber, and it was pushed by a guy you may remember named Michael Chertoff and the rest of the paranoid fucks like Hannity, Beck, and O'Reilly, who turned it into a political game to try and prove that the Obama Administration was weak on terror. So they responded with more security measures.

Yeah, the Democrats are still a member of the business party. Are they better than the paranoid, ignorant trash the GOP needs to stay relevant? Absolutely, as every uninformed response like this has demonstrated.

Not the sales they're reporting at least.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=4XPMLS5U3OEIRQE1GHRSKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=228200850&pgno=2&queryText=&isPrev=

Microsoft's most recent Windows sales totals got a boost from the fact the company quietly added revenues it previously assigned to other groups to its operating systems unit, a bit of accounting legerdemain that, along with other bookkeeping moves, helped the Windows group post big gains in the past quarter,

Windows sales from the OEM channel, which account for 75% of all Windows sales, increased just 11% year-over-year when the deferral program is considered. Not bad, but it's pretty much in line with most estimates for overall PC market growth during the period, including Microsoft's own.

To boot, data from market watcher Net Applications shows Windows has actually lost more than 1% of market share since last December, though it still commands more than 91% of the PC OS market.

Microsoft is running scared and cooking their books. Ballmer knows - he's dumping 30% of his Microsoft shares.

They're heading for an Enron for sure...

From USA Today: "Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83% of home-schooling parents want to give their children 'religious or moral instruction.'"

So the bulk of th 1.5 million homeschooling market teaches something that has been known to be wrong for 150 years (200 years if it includes Noah's flood and young-earth crap). I found this with 30 seconds of Google. If you look through amazon.com for creationism you'll find hundreds of books on the subject so creationist books conservatively cost the US millions a year in direct costs, but this is then multiplied greatly by the cost of correcting the falsehoods in those books. Multiple creationist ministries (Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research, etc) have multi-million dollar annual budgets that are devoted entirely to obfuscation of well established scientific fact through the creation of those ignorance-promoting textbooks, science and educationally-hostile political advocacy, and legal battles, again amplifying those budgets to create a much larger drain on the US. These groups wield enormous political power: in 2008 multiple Republican presidential candidates (Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo) and the Republican VP nominee (Sarah Palin) declared their support for creationism. If you look through Republican state party platforms you'll commonly see support for damaging education by incorporation of creationism. Widespread and politically powerful opposition to evolution is something that our foreign competitors have much less of a problem with: in one survey of selected countries we only beat Turkey in terms of acceptance of scientific fact. Considering evolution is of critical importance in biotechnology, pharmacology, medicine, etc. this is a grave threat to the USA.

A quick look around shows that this story isnt on Fox, or MSNBC, or CNN, or ABC, or CBS, or igoogle feeds, or Yahoo

USA Today http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/11/white-house-edited-oil-drilling-report/1

One of many on CNN http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/10/report-white-house-edit-led-to-errant-claim-on-drilling-moratorium/

Wash Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/10/AR2010111007479.html

FOX http://nation.foxnews.com/offshore-oil-drilling/2010/11/10/wh-cheated-sell-its-drilling-ban

ABC http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=12112909

There are literally hundreds of articles on the subject. If you can't find it in the "mainstream press", then you aren't looking.

  we could also spend 50 billion fixing the Katrina disaster

  I haven't seen any recent figures, but I do know that federal funding for the cleanup has already cost at least four times that. Heck, here are some figures from 2006.

SB

One, you underestimate the pay of public employees. There are many who are paid BETTER than their private sector counterparts.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm

You also have laid out several problems with the system that add to long-term inefficiencies when a goal - ie "more expensive" to replace - has a short-term outlook. I would debate that we need at MINIMUM a freeze on federal government hiring and allow a certain amount of attrition.

Sorry, I have several friends who work on an AFB who have particular issues with people that don't let them get work done.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm "Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector" There ya go. They're also harder to fire and typically don't have merit-based pay.

No, this is a lie. Unemployment was never under 4% under GWB, Jan of '01 it was at 4.2% and got progressively worse, until '06-'07, when it improved some before entering into the current slide. It was never under 4% under GWB

You may be right. But this graph does show it dropping below 4% early in Bush's term. I got my source. If yours is better we'll take it. It was at under 4.5% in October 2006, about 2 months before D's took control of both houses (source). Now where is it? Where was in 2008? That six year slide you turned into an outright nose dive right after D's took control of congress.

Also, as I'm sure you remember a little incident that happened 9 months and 11 days into 2001 that absolutely wrecked consumer confidence and the economy with it.

Record tax receipts are just a function of a growing GDP and inflation, nothing more.

Yes, that's it. It's all smoke and mirrors. If you don't agree with the numbers, try to make them meaningless. spin-spin-spin-spin. Of course, like we've said, with the 4.1% unemployment (your number), it makes perfect sense that with more people working and paying taxes that the government will take in less money. That is what you are saying, right?

But I have to get back to your main idiocy in your post, which is somehow thinking that the unemployment rate instantly corresponds to who controls Congress and nothing else.

Nope. Lots of things can help/hurt the economy. But if you look over recent history... say 1992 through today, you see Clinton inheriting a recession and not being able to anything with it until 1995. Then the economy boomed, giving Clinton a surplus which got handed to Bush. Bush's economy did extremely well until 2007, then tanked.

Now, pay close attention to those numbers and see if you can tell me what happened in those years. It wasn't the president, because both Clinton and Bush had roughly 6 years of boom and 2 years of bust. Maybe it's congress. Hmmm. Let's see. In 1995 Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House when Republicans took it over. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi became SotH when D's took over the House. Those years also seem to be the exact same years the economy started to boom or bust. Coincidence? Evidently you think so.

If you're really simplistic enough to not understand that any economy is largely a product of recent (to that economy) history, not current activity, then you should probably read a book or two.

You're right. What the Hell do I know? I'm just backed up by historical fact and economic performance. While you are backed up with calling me names and telling me to read a book. You obviously have the upper hand here.

While they don't need to give in to their wishes, there are some motivations that could easily come up:
1. Speaking gigs
2. Donations to their spouse's organization
3. Free hunting trips

It should also be pointed out that Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts also are true believers of their ideology.

Since when has the US paid any money to the UN? If it was paying, it wouldn't owe hundreds of millions of dollars.

The guy who posts a link to actual research on the subject gets modded flamebait while the guy who makes unsupported claims, some of which are contradicted by that very research which was linked to gets modded insightful.

Some of the possibilities are:

(A) The guy making unsupported claims has a lot of sock puppets with mod points.
(B) Slashdot is filled with people that don't care about the facts.
(C) Slashdot is the victim of an organized astroturf.

Wow. I'm hurt Mr. Anonymous.

NO, I don't have any sock puppets. I don't have that sort of time.

But as for links, here a few:
Study links more hurricanes, climate change or
Warming doubles number of hurricanes both referring to this paper but containing their own research, too.
Then there is this: Research Meteorologists See More Severe Storms Ahead: The Culprit -- Global Warming

There is a very clear link between storms, hurricanes and increased atmospheric temperature. I actually thought it was common knowledge by now, so I didn't bother posting links. As to why or who modded the other guy flamebait, I don't know, but the idea that I'd spent extra time creating and logging in with sock puppets is so hilarious from my perspective, that it almost made me smile.

This makes me wonder if they are doing this because scientists say that Global Warming will increase the strength and frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Why not try to combat the sources of global warming at the same time? Green, renewable energy might also help the insurance industry save money.

Boeing 747 as a youth hostel

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-12-29-747-jumbo-hostel_N.htm

High flying?

Network World
AP
Philadelphia Inquirer
USA Today
Over 300 more

Skunkpost? WTF is that?