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I haven't heard of a single case where the lone programmer (inventor?) gets a patent for some smart code he invented and the big companies will pay him for his efforts. All that I heard of is big companies (or maybe small companies that invent nothing but has made it their business to file patents for things that already exist) that have asked money from another big company because of these patents.

What planet have you been on? One of the major news stories of 2006 was the case of the lone inventor, Thomas Campana Jr., and his successful claim against Research In Motion (Blackberry) regarding a wireless email invention. Unfortunately the lone and persistent inventor died, but his survivors successfully brought it to settlement http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/03/AR2006030301489.html.

Always ask yourself why they need it, and do you trust them to secure your information.

In Canada right now their are two separate credit card breaches under investigation. This isn't even a phishing thing, this is just plain old sloppy security.

I suspect that there are many other breaches that haven't been detected and or reported. So I strongly recommend that you refuse to give out personal information to these locations. Don't sign up for rewards cards, don't let them collect your address, and phone, and SSN, when you buy a t-shirt. They don't need it! And I don't trust them.

In that light, here are some handy tools for the justifiably paranoid:

1. TrueCrypt - Excellent free encryption app for most platforms (even Windows)
2. 10 Minute Mail - Free disposable email addresses
3. Private Phone - Free disposable phone numbers
4. MBNA Virtual Cards* - Virtual credit cards for online purchases that won't ruin your credit if stolen

I'm opposed to this simply because I view it as an arguement to essentially dismantle peer review by flooding it with disinformation.

As the article mentions, there are many organizations that don't like scientific information having consensus and respect.

This is very clear by:
1. The Forced ShutDown of EPA Libraries
2. Scrapping the funding of the NASA earth program
3. Censoring of the US Geological Survey

_

Whats more,
The article mentions this guy is from an Exxon PR firm.
A group which stands the most to gain from disinformation.

it may become necessary to protest in street

At which time, it may become necessary for der Abteilung der Heimat-Sicherheit to "detain" those who are protesting, citing the danger to public safety presented by this rebellion. Or were you assuming that these protests would take place in "free speech zones""?

[Apologies to Deütch speaking people who may be offended by my liberal translation of the facist department's title; It's an attempt at satire]

The text still makes sense if you look at who the *target* of the tap is. The warrant is for the *target*. The *target* is foreign and is working under military action. It is part of the battlefield and does not require a warrant. If it did then our soldiers would have to get a warrant to invade a house in the battlefield. This of course does not happen. If the NSA is monitoring the battlefield and notices that a call terminates in the US is makes not sense to me that they would need a warrant for this. It seems to me that if the NSA gets a good leads, they should pass it immediately to the FBI. They did not do this before 9/11, but they do now. They could not get a FISA warrant because they are not invovled in a criminal presecution and really have no standing in civilian courts. They are operating under the authority of the commander in chief in the battlefield. When the NSA passes the lead to the FBI, it makes sense they would need to get a warrant because they are making a US Citizen/Person a *target* of a tap and most likely part of a criminal investigation. The NSA does not normally participate in civilian courts. This is probably why the FISA court considered FBI warrant requests coming from NSA leads as "tainted" (see the WaPo article about this). The court stated outright they would not grant a FISA warrant based solely on a NSA lead and required the FBI to do a follow up on the lead before they would grant a warrant.

If I were a defense attorney and thought that NSA information either obtained illegally or under foreign intelligence provisions was used as a basis for obtaining a warrant I would be filing motions to exclude the evidence obtained in the warranted wiretap as fast as I could write them.

The WaPo article mentions this. The judges called NSA leads "tainted." Somehow this was overcome.

Doubt is irrational

Simplistic and wrong. Some doubt can be irrational. Doubt, in general, is completely rational based on the evidence that something may or may not happen and the consequences of that thing happening.

When a system fails in spectactular, unintended ways, and unpredicted events like hydrogen bubbles that may cause breach of containment occur, there is room for doubt. When statements are made that "the worst case scenario has happened", I say show me it couldn't have gotten worse.

There's evidence it could have gotten worse. From this Washington Post article: "Engineers had told Levine there were four ways of dealing with the bubble, all involving some risk." And: "Despite the encouraging new signs, however, the NRC went ahead with preparations for what surely would have been a risky maneuver to get rid of the bubble later in the week. Plans still were being drawn up to evacuate the entire region around Three Mile Island. Privately, Denton was telling colleagues to pick a day, a time of day and a state of readiness: Operation Bubble was still a strong possibility."

Obviously the more nuclear plants we have, the more risk there is.

This fix is in line with the typical timing and attention given Apple security updates - relatively quick and competent.

Not sure I'd agree with that, actually. Apple is generally regarded as being slower than Microsoft at patching problems. According to the MOAB folks the QuickTime HREF universal XSS was patched slowly and then only for MySpace (huh?). Plugin XSS is pretty serious! It's possible they got better, but according to this study from 2006 it took them 91 days on average to fix known exploits.

IIRC nearly a third of their "Apple Bugs" are 3rd party problems to begin with.

Yes, of course, it's silly to call it the "Month of Apple Bugs" when they are also reporting exploits in third party software. Unfortunately, it's also understandable - the fact that many security problems in Windows are caused by third party software does not stop people blaming Microsoft for the insecurity of the Windows platform. Given that quite a few of these third party exploits are privilege escalation (eg instant root), it is Apples problem. If third party devs cannot write secure code then they'll end up in the same situation as Windows - and it seems they can't write secure code (no surprises here). Apple are already being targetted by attackers.

MOAB are still flaming Apple Inc., Apple users, and anyone else who critiques their methods, and it's gotten personal and insulting. They come out swinging their fists at the Apple community, then cry foul because someone hits back.

I quite agree that these "Month of X bugs" things seem to be quite irresponsible and even immature. I'm not sure what the point of them is, except to make a bad situation worse.

Since it's patently obvious that the Neocons have been diastrous for the Republican Party, I hope they're jettisoned ASAP. We can't wait for them to admit they're wrong, because that does not happen, ever. Conservatives can, eventually, but Neoconservatives have that weird "vision" thing that is never, ever wrong in and of itself. The core Neocons like Cheney will always believe, just as the core still believe that Saddam was linked to 9/11, etc. We just have to hope that the Repubs sideline them and get back to being conservative.

It may be an academic exercise anyway, because neither Romney nor McCain could beat either Hillary or Obama in the election. The question of "would they be good Presidents?" pales next to whether or not the religious right will vote for them, which they won't. Dobson has already rejected McCain, and Romney is a Mormon. Without Dobson et al, they can't get in office. This isn't to say that I particularly want a Hillary/Obama administration, but if the election were held this week, that's what we would get.

The growth of fascism is correlated with the growth of oligarchical private power. When large private organizations (today, known as corporations) gain enough power, they begin to exert influence on the state. Power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few large organizations. After a time, these organizations become inextricably linked to the state; they act in the interests in the state, and the state acts in their interests. The symptoms of this are everywhere today in America, ranging from the lobbyist epidemic in Washington to energy companies actually writing energy legislation.

If you study the rise of the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, I think you will find evidence of a tight coupling of private power and the state. Fascists were supported by many of the largest European (and American) corporations, partly because fascist policies favored their profit margins. There is ample evidence of this; Henry Ford was an early supporter of fascist ideas, and Coca Cola invented the Fanta line of drinks in order to sell to the German regime.

Both the government and these corporations idealized self-interest as the guiding principle of society, believing that the public interest could only be served by individuals and organizations pursuing their own self-interest. However, such a viewpoint implicitly favors the most powerful, giving them license to increase their power with impunity. The worship of self-interest and power was taken to its extreme by Germany, and eventually led to the actions in the late 1930's that we commonly associate with fascism. But the period leading to the rise of European fascism should not be ignored, as it is highly applicable to our current predicaments in America.

Here are some quotes on private power that were written in 1762 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract). When I read these, I am reminded of recent American politics.

However, when the social tie begins to slacken and the state to weaken, when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and sectional societies begin to exert an influence over the greater society, the common interest becomes corrupted and meets opposition; voting is no longer unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of all; contradictions and disputes arise; and even the best opinion is not allowed to prevail unchallenged.

In the end, when the state, on the brink of ruin, can maintain itself only in an empty and illusory form, when the social bond is broken in every heart, when the meanest interest impudently flaunts the sacred name of the public good, then the general will is silenced: everyone, animated by secret motives, ceases to speak as a citizen any more than as if the state had never existed; and the people enacts in the guise of laws iniquitous decrees which have private interests as their only end.

Even Gonzales admitted that FISA makes tapping communications between US and a foreign country is illegal without a warrant. It is nonsense to believe somehow that just because one end of the call is someplace outside the US FISA, the First Amemdment and the Fourth Amendment are all of a sudden not applicable.

I am not sure he did admit this. It is not illegal for the police to listen in on your call if you are communicating with a person that is the *target* of a tap. The *target* is the end that requires a warrant. This is nothing new. We all know that. Now if the police suspect *you* of something and want to listen in on more of your calls, they must get a warrant to make you the *target* of the tap. The NSA has been monitoring communications for years. They have never stopped listening if a call happens to terminate within the US. The issue was that this information could not be used in criminal prosecution. The info would stay within the NSA and not go anywhere. After 9/11, many people decided this was a stupid idea. The NSA should be able to pass a lead to the FBI. For the FBI to make the person *inside* the US a *target* of a tap based on secret sources, they must get a FISA warrant. As this article points out, the FISA judge would not grant a FISA warrant to the FBI based only on a NSA lead. My understanding is this just changed a week or two ago. The FISA *will* now grant a FISA warrant on a NSA lead. In other words, the court apparently agrees with the administration's legal argument.

If you think about it, this is why the administration has used the FISA courts more, not less as has been sited over and over again.

Of course this is a legal issue. What I meant by "courts can't be so selective" is that they can't apply logic to one specific area and ignore the consequences outside other relevant areas, as you are trying to do. Attempting to require federal registration for accepting money in exchange for some activity might be fine in some cases, but in this case the activity in question is the exercise of the constitutionally-protected right of free speech. That's inevitable by the wording of the law in question: "stimulating grassroots lobbying" is impossible without speech. You're attempting to logically separate the monetary exchange from the activity being contracted for, but that makes no sense, legally or logically. Without the promise of the activity, the monetary transaction would not occur. The promised activity involves the exercise of speech. It doesn't matter whether people in individual cases fulfill their promises, the point is that in those cases in which the promises are fulfilled, the exercise of free speech would be inhibited by the requirement to register with the federal government. The right to free speech does not evaporate because someone accepts money to make that speech.

Your use of language is quite revealing of your thinking, and where I think you're making a mistake: "people who charged a client to astroturf on their behalf". You seem to be taking the position that all "stimulation of grassroots lobbying" is astroturfing, and you're treating this amendment as though it were designed to regulate astroturfing, not stimulation of grassroots lobbying. Perhaps you do see the two as synonymous. I don't. Plenty of perfectly honest and legitimate groups, across the political spectrum, communicate their perspective via blogs (and other means), and encourage people to contact their representatives. Not all such efforts are astroturfing, even if money changes hands.

No they would not -- unless they specifically billed a client for pushing certain issues, they would not be affected.

Why should billing a client for pushing a certain issue, to the general public, trigger the requirement to register as a lobbyist? Take, for example, the woman described in this article. She blogs about various issues -- the article describes her entry about Darfur. So here we have a passionate citizen, who (if you read to the end of the article) succeeds in getting people to contact their representatives about issues she feels strongly about. So let's say she decides she is good at this, and finds it fulfilling work, and decides to start soliciting payment for what she does, as long as it's for issues she agrees with, perhaps even personally chooses. So in the next three months she comes up with five issues she feels strongly about, and finds five organizations willing to pay her $5000 each to write about that issue, and encourage people to contact their representatives. At that point she would become a lobbyist under Sec. 220, and would have to register with the federal government, comply with most of the laws that are supposed to apply to lobbyists, and file reports about her activities. I find that prospect utterly abhorrent. It sounds like Soviet Russia, or a science fiction dystopia novel to me.

You might argue that the scenarios I'm describing aren't happening very much. It doesn't matter -- if laws like this are passed, we'll never know what can happen. Blogging is a very new medium, and it's only barely begun to have the political impact that it will have in the future. We shouldn't be hurrying to pass laws that could inhibit this kind of activity. Transparency is a good thing, and I'm completely in favor of that, but this law wasn't about transparency, it was about control. Laws like this will work against the little guy, and favor well-funded organizations that can afford to keep up with the reporting requirements. This is anti-democra

I think the 'bifidus digestivus' and 'bifidus regularus' bacteria are a bunch of marketing bullshit. As noted by previous posters, they basically took some Bulgarian bacteria, renamed and trademarked it, and marketed it.

I do believe in the benefits of probiotics, although I think they are pretty low unless your body is under specific conditions that might kill all or most of the flora in your intestine. Like if you took antibiotics. Intestinal bacteria are very important, and you gotta replace it somehow if it dies off. In fact, some doctors are seriously suggesting that shit is an organ, just like your lungs and heart and whatnot. They think it is necessary for human life and if your intestinal flora is damaged, in some cases they are seriously suggesting poop transplants. Seriously, some doctors are cramming other peopless shit into their patient's colons.

So I did some poking around and i found that the Stonyfield Organic Yogurt is the best. It has 1-3 grams of fiber (depending on the flavor) in the form of inulin, which helps your body ingest the calcium. It also has 6 live cultures, which is the most of any yogurt I've seen. Combine that with the fact that it is organic, so won't be filled with hormones and (ironically) antibiotics, and a great taste (particularly the chocolate) and its a damn healthy snack.

rom what I can gather the important part of the article is that they have been able to slow down each photon in order to buffer it.

'Why can't I find any good information regarding the superiority of any given race over any other given race?'

Because you've never spent an afternoon with La Griffe du Lion.

Be afraid, people, be very, very afraid.

See this article for details. They have sensors on buildings which pinpoint the location of any shots fired & alert dispatchers. The police have to respond slightly differently to these - they're used to getting there after the perp has fled, with this system they can get there so fast that it's likely that the shooter is still there.

Lehk: > actually it has to do with casino lobbyists, remember jack abramoff(sp?)?
Lehk: > he was in deep with the casinos, among others.

Ahhh... Thanks for that Lehk. Wasn't aware of that piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

xjerky: >You're kidding right? You forget that most of the illegality of online
xjerky: >gambling stems from avoiding taxes....and the party that favors increasing taxes just took over.

Which makes this really ironic: "One of Abramoff's first acts as a tribal gaming lobbyist was to defeat a Congressional bill to tax Indian casinos".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff_Indian_ lobbying_scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/04/30/AR2005043001147.html

VGPowerlord: > Actually, we like Japan and China. After all, they make everything sold in stores here!
Was in Japan last year. Much of their stuff is made in China nowdays too!

Specifically, Burke says that it was warmer in England prior (as in within a generation prior) to the medieval ice-age then it was "now" ("now" being when the program was aired - 1979).

You might find this article by the WaPo interesting, it explains how global warming can result in cooling of places such as Northern Europe.

A glance at the map puts the threat in chilling perspective. London is farther north than Winnipeg; Denmark has the same latitude as the Aleutians. Yet European winters are comparatively mild. The reason is that the North Atlantic is warmed by a mighty ocean "conveyor belt" that transports stupendous amounts of heat in a mile-deep layer of warm water that flows northward from the equator.

If that beneficent system were to stop -- as it apparently has many times in the past during glacial periods -- northern Europe's average winter temperatures would be 10 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit below what they are now.

Bullshit

Welcome to the latest round of FUD from the petro-chemical/creationist/right-wing cabal.

Recently they've been taking quotes from articles on milankovitch cycles wildly out of context. They are also now 'finding' evidence for milankovitch cycles in the fossil record, and presenting them as new evidence of past non-anthropogenic global warming.

We know there have been past episodes of warming and cooling. We also have evidence that periods marked by a rapid tripling of CO2 levels are associated with mass extinctions (but I dont think Ive seen anything concrete on whether the die-off caused the CO2 rise or vice versa).

It's not needed anymore because this ruling allows for FISA warrants based purely on NSA leads with no FBI follow up. The NSA will do what it has always done, target foreign communications for tapping. If they happen on interesting communication that terminates in the US, they can pass this information to the FBI and a warrant will be granted. The FBI can now make the US side a target of a tap.

Nothing has changed except the bar was lowered. Previously the FISA court required *more* information from the FBI beyond a simple lead from the NSA. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/02/08/AR2006020802511.html.

What the court is saying is that not only was the TSP legal, but they now make it easier to make the US side a target of a tap.

Read this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/02/08/AR2006020802511.html

Does that sound like a rubber stamp to you? The judge was putting the FBI on notice. They will not grant a warrant based solely on a NSA lead. With this new ruling that is not true anymore. A simple NSA lead is all that will be required for the FBI to get a FISA warrant.

The NSA has monitored communications for years and years and years. The TARGETS of the tapping were foreign communications. If the foreign communication terminated in the US, they could still listen in on it, just like the police could listen in if you called a person that was subject to a tap (suspected criminal). You could become the subject of a tap if you said something that the police wanted to follow up on. They of course would have to go back to the court and get another warrant for you.

This is how the TSP worked. The NSA did what they always do. If they got a domestic lead they would pass it to the FBI so the FBI could follow up and potentially get a FISA warrant. The FBI is subject to civilian courts, the NSA is not.

Oh, and not to mention the fact that it was the Supreme Court that handed Bush the win in 2000, stopping a recount that we now know would have resulted in a Gore win.

Most of that sounded about right, but "we now know"? In the first place, there wasn't just one recount, there were individual recounts in numerous precincts and counties, and in the second place none of the recounting changed the outcome for the entire month of November (sparkly graph).

Subsequent to the Supreme Court ruling, there were numerous independent recounts by news organizations and other interested parties. I think it was in 2002 that I saw a summary of 17 such efforts, most of which used different rules and methods for counting the votes. 15 placed Bush as the winner, and one of the two that favored Gore had done so by discarding absentee votes (including overseas military) as Gore had sought to do in the actual recounts. I don't recall the methods of the other being as questionable, just outweighed by the results of perhaps a dozen other methods.

So maybe you can see how I'm at a loss to understand how "we now know" that the recounts would have given Gore a win. Was there another final, ultimate, and authoritative recount that I maybe missed, or perhaps just yet another method of counting the votes that resulted in putting Gore ahead?

Since when did US civilian courts need to grant warrants for the NSA to target foreign individuals for wiretapping? The NSA has been doing this ever since its creation. What the TSP did is allow the NSA to pass leads to the FBI. The FBI would get the lead and file for a FISA warrant to make the domestic side a wiretap TARGET.

Remember if you call a number that has a tap on it, the police can listen in on your conversation. You are not the target, the person you are calling is. This is the same for the NSA. The idea was to remove the wall so the leads the NSA would discover would get passed on to the FBI. The FISA judges would still require something other than a pure NSA lead to grant the warrant (see: Secret Court's Judges Were Warned About NSA Spy Data.

What is funny about this ruling is that the FISA court is now said that all it needs is a NSA lead. This is a lower requirement than what the TSP was doing.

Check out this link:

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/3 250

AJStrata's point is that now the FISA will grant a warrant purely based on a NSA wiretap intel and nothing else. Under the TSP the FBI would need to do a follow up based on a lead from the NSA and provide additional reason/information to the FISA judge (see .http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti cle/2006/02/08/AR2006020802511.html).

Remember the NSA has no standing in civilian courts and does not need a warrant to do what they do with foreign communications.

By backing down they don't just avoid an investigation, they avoid testing the legality of the program. That could be useful if they want to reinstate the program under the next Congress. But more importantly, the claims about wartime Presidential powers that were used to justify the wiretapping program are still being used to justify other questionably legal actions (perhaps even including the covert expansion of the Iraq war into Iran and Syria). The administration wants to avoid a direct court battle over those powers, and by backing down over the wiretapping program it's hoping to pacify Congress without establishing any precedents.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/08/18/AR2006081800768.html

Social skills are, and always have been, the best predictor of career success. An ancient study at HP attempted to correlate career success with educational success. There was zero correlation. What they did find was that the people who hung out around the water cooler did better than their supposedly harder working fellows who stuck to their offices. Other posters are concentrating on face time with the boss but face time with peers seems more important.

(BTW. I have been quoting that study for years but have lost the citation. If anyone knows, I would be most grateful.)

You talk like there's only a possibility of cheating on one side of the aisle. To do so is to ignore evidence that Democrats are in fact also cheating. In my home state of Wisconsin, there's extensive evidence that fraud is taking place, and the culprits are Democrats:

• Five paid Democratic campaign workers slashed hundreds of tires on rented GOP get-out-the-vote vans the day before the 2004 election.
• The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel discovered multiple-thousand-vote discrepancies in the number of people who voted and the number of ballots cast in a number of Wisconsin municipalities in the 2004 election.
• In the 2000 election, the FBI was called in to investigate thousands of votes from invalid addresses cast in Milwaukee.
• In 2004, the GOP challenged thousands of invalid addresses [The article plays the race card -- good reporting there, Washington Post] based on undeliverable mail from the voter registration rolls in Wisconsin and Ohio. Their challenges were all struck down.
• In 2000, two illegal aliens went to Racine, WI, told the registrar they were illegal aliens, and then were allowed to register anyways.
• Recently, state Senate candidate Donovan Riley was fined and had his bar license revoked for voting twice in the 2004 election: first in the morning at his vacation house in Oconomowoc, WI and then later in the afternoon at his main residence in Chicago. The only reason he was discovered was his candidacy for state Senate -- which makes me wonder seriously how often this sort of thing takes place. There is no checking between neighboring states, and with a big chunk of Wisconsin's population just a couple hours' drive from Chicago and Minneapolis, it would even be theoretically possible to vote in Minneapolis in the morning, Madison in the afternoon and Rockford in the evening -- would anybody know?
• In 2000, a wealthy DNC donor was caught giving cigarettes to homeless people in exchange for their votes. While not demonstrably illegal, it certainly represents shady tactics.
• Governor Jim doyle has repeatedly vetoed voter ID propositions proposed by the Republican-controlled state assembly. I don't understand opposition to such a reasonable requirement that could go a long way towards improving election integrity.

Kerry won Wisconsin by just .38% of votes cast; before him, Gore took the state by just .22%. If improper voter registration, people voting with nonexistent addresses, and illegal aliens casting votes, a few thosuand fake votes for were cast -- the state may have gone a different way; extrapolated to a national scale, and all of a sudden our election integrity is in big trouble.

For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet... In contrast, Internet Explorer's closest competitor in terms of market share -- Mozilla's Firefox browser -- experienced a single period lasting just nine days last year in which exploit code for a serious security hole was posted online before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.

Except that SS is not a funded "pay as you go" system. That's been a fiction since the beginning. Social Security is paid out to recipients based on current receipts, not current receipts plus a surplus set aside and saved for future benefits. The surplus has not been "saved" in some big bank vault. Thanks to Teddy Kennedy's bill in the 1970's, the money in the Social Security Trust fund is used to purchase government savings bonds (with a 0.5% ROI), effectively taking the money from Social Security and adding it to the General Fund. In fact, the Social Security Trust Fund is only solvent when you add in the eight trillion dollars of IOU's that the U.S. Congress has written to them.

When SS was created in 1933, the ratio was one recipient was being paid for by 10 payers. In 1980, the ratio was down to 6 earners paying in for each recipient. As of 2000, the number is three point five to one. By 2015 (when the last baby boomers are jumping on the system), the number will be two to one or less, and the "surplus" will be draining at over 400 billion dollars a year. That's 400 billion dollars that the Congress will now *have* to pay back to the Social Security Trust Fund.

Now, think about that. Not only will they have to pay $400B into Social Security, but the vast amount of money that Social Security used to pay into the General Fund via their savings bonds won't be there any more either. That's about $250 Billion more not going in. So we have an instant additional $650B deficit in the federal budget. Can you imagine coming up with an extra 2/3rds of a TRILLION dollars a year?

Do you really think that the government is going to stop spending money? What will they cut? Education, Health care, Social Services, the Military, the FBI, roads?

Or do you think there will be a new round of tax hikes on "the richest Americans", which, according to the definition of rich in the 1993 tax increase was, "Anyone earning over $32,800 a year."

By 2029, the Social Security Trust Fund is completely broke, and, with raising life expectancies, and fewer children per parent, the payout rate by 2035 is predicted to be 1 payer for each 3 recipients. The only way to support that system is an 80% tax rate. America was formed when the colonists rebelled against an appalling tax rate of... seven percent.

I don't think there's an American alive who would tolerate eighty cents of every dollar going to someone else who didn't plan for retirement.

But you don't have to believe me. The Social Security Trustees don't say it survives until 2056. In fact, they've had to repeatedly move the bankruptcy date up, now to 2029. In fact, over history they've been hopelessly optimistic about the future, and have been repeatedly slapped by reality showing that things are much worse then they claimed. Here, here, here, and here. The first one is the trustee report from 2004. The rest are articles from various sources. I intentionally picked articles from all sides of the political spectrum. There is a broad bi-partisan acknowledgement that the system is in horrible trouble -- President Clinton's own committee recommended privatization as the only alternative to higher taxes or lower benefits. The only people denying it are the ones running on "keeping social security safe". People like Barbara Boxer and the like who continuously say there's no problem with the system, even as it racks up 12 digit shortfalls year after year. ($200,000,000,000+ in 2004).

So, I've been putting my own money away (401Ks, IRAs, etc) because I know I can't count on Social Security to give me anything. In fact, more people under the age of 30 believe that we'll make contact with aliens in the next 30 years than believe that Social Security will still be available for them.

National Security letters (NSLs) have been around a while and the Bush administration has used them extensively. a little over a year ago the Washington Post had a huge story about the extensive use of these with little valid result. The kicker about the NSLs is that there is always a provision to remain secritive that you are handing over the information. If the FBI give my boss an NSL wanting records of all of of my outgoing phone calls, he must give the records and INFORM NO ONE that this happened. If me boss refuses to had over the records or "squeals", he goes to jail.

• "John Ashcroft is not a patriot." -- Howard Dean
• "I don't think it's patriotic to put on a flight suit and prance around on the deck of an aircraft carrier looking for a photo op." -- Wes Clark
• "We hear them in the cries of the false patriots who bully dissenters into silence and submission. These are familiar fights. We've fought and won them before. And with John Kerry and John Edwards leading us, we will win them again" -- Ted Kennedy
• "The policy that the administration is following in Iraq is ... anti-patriotic at the core..." -- Sen. Graham
• "we deserve a president who stands up for patriotism and its real definition, which is doing what makes our country stronger and safer and more secure." -- John Kerry
• "a group of people around the President whose main allegiance is to each other and their ideology rather than to the United States." -- Howard Dean

It sounds like you've been drinking of the state-approved coolaid. Perhaps if certain countries aborted their tried-and-failed policy of toppling home-grown, democratically elected governments and installing their own(see Iran/1953, Palestine 2006 and many others in between), curbed support for oppressive regimes that only serve their interest for a short period of time (Vietnam, Saudi Arabia (and Gulf states), and now Iraq are prime examples of this), and realized that the entire world does not want to walk in their footsteps, people might begin to stop hating us.

On a somewhat related note, the Washington Post recently published an interesting Op-Ed written by Robert Kaiser, entitled "Topped By Hubris, Again". Or wait... perhaps they really do hate us because of our freedom.

Bad analagy. How about if China invaded the UK. Then a bunch of Germans and Frenchies snuck across the chunnel and started bombing/killing UK civilians. That's a more appropriate situation.

Only if you believe the lies. In reality, less than 10% are foreign, with most estimates putting the figure at less than 5%. Here are two articles on this subject:

Among Insurgents in Iraq, Few Foreigners Are Found

Iraq's foreign fighters: few but deadly

The myth that many are foreign is merely to continue the false belief that the War in Iraq is in some way connected to the War on Terrorism. It's not and it never has been. Planning for the Iraqi invasion was started in 1998 by Cheney and Rumsfeld, three years prior to 9/11. The attacks on New York merely gave them the political currency to promote the attack. The literally took a big dump on ground zero and wiped their arse with the US flag then handed it back to the 3,000+ victims families.

Step 1: If practical, all US military bases in Iraq suddenly get very fuzzy on Google Earth. Or better yet, they get photoshopped to try and screw the insurgients into planning their attack with the wrong data.

Step 2: If step 1 is not practical, just fuzz out all of Iraq. I believe they do something similiar with Israel and GPS and space photos - GPS is less accurate and public images are no better than 2M resolution, IIRC.

[The part referenced by my subject line ends here]

Step 3: Just admit that Iraq is the next Vietnam, and save a bunch of lives on both sides by leaving ASAP. The the hated government we're propping up is as useless and corrupt as the South Vietnamese government was. As in Vietnam, we've got a determined insurgiency that's being supported by outside forces (We're looking at YOU, Iran and Syria). As if to rub salt in the wound, this time they (Iran & Syria) finance their support using our own oil money. Once again, the enemy is proving that all our technology is fracking useless against them. Once again, we're spending outselves into a fiscal black hole.

And once again, we're discovering that our government lied to start this war (nit: Yeah, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was just the excuse to escalate), and frankly has been systematically lying ever since. Greeted as liberators - insurgiency in it's death throes - Don't need more troops - Pay for itself in oil exports - We don't torture - Undercounting civilian deaths - Yada yada yada. We even get our own version of Vietnamization ("We stand down as they stand up"), and we all know how well that went last time. Then again, Iraqi-ization is going nowhere because the Iraqi army will never, ever stand up (i.e. don't want to anger the insurgients that will control Iraq when we leave).

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. So the question is... How long until we leave with our tail between our legs this time? And after Bush is impeached (?), will Cheney pardon him?

Why don't the North Koreans just continue to eat dogs?

They did, until they ran out of dogs. Then they started eating each other: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41966-20 03Oct3?language=printer

1. I believe everything I wrote above.
2. Trolling is when you say something you don't believe in order to elicit a desired response. Here I am saying something I do believe and don't expect any particular response - although I guess I should have expected the powers-that-be or one of their sheep to mod me down for speaking my mind.

Perhaps you don't remember this:

"People need to be careful what they say," said Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld stood up in front of the press in the white house and said that people need to be careful what they say. If you follow the link you can see that this is about allegations of desecration of the Koran by U.S. soldiers. If that wasn't a warning, I don't know WHAT it was. You can find more on that story in the Washington Post. This was a case where abuse of prisoners (if we adopt their methods, we become them - of course, we already Are them, we just have money so we don't have to use humans as munitions delivery systems) had been reported and Newsweek was threatened into dropping the story.

If you truly don't believe that this kind of abuse goes on in the USA, then you are part of the problem. Waking up to reality and the fact that a government that will treat other peoples as subhuman doesn't think too much of you either is the first step towards a solution.

We do specialized web-based applications, not IPTV, so we've been following this in terms of "what does that mean to us". Maybe the IPTV companies are demanding free internet links, if so, then they're way out of line, they can buy whatever connections to whichever networks they want, just like everyone else.

This is how we see the issue as a service provider: ISP sees Company X making money (google, iTunes, etc), and wants a piece of it or their thug-routers might see to it that something terrible happens to their packets, where "a piece of it" comes from what is essentially protection money. When they tell us "buy our link for faster service" when our service is already fast enough for their customers, what we're hearing is "buy our link or be penalized". Even a little intentional throttling could become disastrous for us, if our clients' ISPs dropped every other packet, our bandwidth costs would essentially double (consider 1MB file+0.5MB retransmitted packets+0.25MB retransmitted retransmits+...=2MB) while our site would basically become unusable.

These aren't observations we've pulled out of our ass, these are things that the CEOs of the major telecoms are saying by themselves. A competitor could convince Bellsouth to put us out of business (especially if the merger with SBC/ATT completes, making just about everyone in the US who uses DSL affected). Of course, convincing our customers to switch to cable wouldn't help, Comcast is on the bandwagon, and they've already shown that they're more than happy to cut anything they don't like out of their service.

Then I guess the Washington Post 'is tainted by the anti-U.S., anti-capitalism, anti-progress political beliefs'. Huh, and here it is the Wikipedia and scientific community by the way. Ah, but you're right: they are a community, thus they must be Communists.
Then I guess we might overlook the fact that climate's changing faster in these last 20 years than it's been changing over the million years man has existed. And go on running our SUVs on cheap petrol. /sarcasm

Whoever modded you as insightful? Anyhow, here's a link for you: there's no more question manmade global warming is happening.

Please refer to those sceptical scientists. There's no disagreement over man-made global warming in the scientific community and it takes a short trip to wikipedia to see it. Of course, it's harder if your source of information is junkscience.com.

Yet, I completely fail to understand what he did wrong.

Another life long MA residents here (one who has spent 2/3 of my residency in the western part of the state). Here's a few things off the top of my head:

• Spending 212 days away from the state he was supposed to be governing in 2006.
• Joking about the state instead of lobbying for it.
• Claimed his policies resulted in a $1 billion budget surplus, only to tell us after the election it's actually a $1 billion deficit
• Pretty much ignored the western half of the state, (including only marketing the eastern half of the state to prospective employers, and letting them go to other states/countries instead of lobbying for CMass/WMass when EMass proved to be unsuitable) except for...
• Installing a state-run control board in Springfield who's primary goal seemed to be the breaking of unions rather than quality services; that's not to say that the CB wasn't needed, it was - but clearly their first priority seemed to be implementing Romney's ideals (teacher merit pay anyone?) rather than "compromising" with city officials and workers.

IME, most people outside of 495 aren't sorry to see him go...

Bzzt. Now verified as incorrect. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/01/10/AR2007011001309.html As I was saying...

Dave Hamilton, co-publisher of an Apple news Web site called the Mac Observer, said most of the functions Jobs displayed are available on other products.

"I'd say about 80 percent of the features that were talked about today are available on a Treo," he said, "but Jobs is so good at standing on a stage and making you think he invented it."

Given the FBI's inability to buy a useable computer system, I can't think of a safer custodian for everyone's fingerprints.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html

Is not having to show ID at an airport essential to my liberty? No, not remotely, in my own view.

What about a political dissident travelling from Hawaii to Washington to petition their Congresscritter? Just their bad luck for disagreeing with their government, right? Or should they just get a boat, which takes longer and is far more expensive?

People have been stopped and hassled or refused passage because of what they believe (Yusuf Islam being a good example), or because they have a name similar to someone evil (e.g. Khalid El-Masri who had the unfortunate luck of having a similar name to Khalid al-Masri.

I know Internet Explorer is exceptionally buggy It may sound strange but IE6 is one of the most stable pieces of software I've ever seen. Firefox doesn't even come close.

sources:
Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/long term/microsoft/stories/1998/microsoft111398.htm
Euro Union: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Micros oft_antitrust_case#Judgement

The reason Firefox is more secure is because when an exploit is found it's fixed, with IE it takes a long time. Last year Firefox was vulnerable to exploits for 9 days while "Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006." They also have a nice chart showing this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/technology/da ily/graphics/index20070104.html

The reason Firefox is more secure is because when an exploit is found it's fixed, with IE it takes a long time. Last year Firefox was vulnerable to exploits for 9 days while "Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006." They also have a nice chart showing this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/technology/da ily/graphics/index20070104.html

The problem with blogging, is that among those of us with brains, most bloggers have no credibility, whatsoever. Blogging is amateur. Sure, you can make money from it (PerezHilton), but you'll never have any credibility as a real journalist.

Then I guess you read Richard Cohen. He gets paid to write that stuff.

Well if it's a myth, it's one with some serious backing. You have any sources to refute the claims of the Center for Immigration Studies?