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It's hurting their business.

Computer World UK reports a recent Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) survey found 10 percent of 207 officials at non-U.S. companies canceled contracts with U.S. providers after the leaks, and 56 percent of non-U.S. respondents are now hesitant to work with U.S.-based cloud operators.

Kids, whenever a big corp says they're doing something for "the good of the people", "your convenience", or for the "common good", they are always full of shit. It is just for THEM and you better put your hand on your wallet.

To those at the NSA who are just awakening to the new reality that people are, now and forevermore, going to hate you whether you deserve it or not, I can only say "Welcome to my world. Learn to deal with it. It'll drive you nuts if you don't."

Or they could find honest work that betters society. It's hard to feel sorry for them when you read about how much more they make than the rest of the US.

Morale should be low, "the public" doesn't want them to do what they're doing. They are a threat to democracy. The US has long been a threat to any Democratic Government that doesn't favor it, just read about the "Other 9/11".

The fact of the matter is, they are pawns to non-Democratic interests that do nothing to serve the American People as a whole. They serve big monied interest, mega corporations and conglomerates protecting their entrenched positions and bottom lines. Concepts like "freedom," and "liberty" are merely espoused to make the rank and file feel warm and fuzzy about their unconstitutional work, which is ironically the biggest threat to "freedom" and "liberty" that we face today. Higher ups get corrupted by the power. All the rank and file should know, the moment you expose any sort of inconvenient truth, the full weight and force of the apparatus you served will be turned on you and you yourself can be labelled a "domestic terrorist." Just look at the case of Julia Davis which has open court records that backup such facts.

When you job helps create and maintain a system where ordinary citizens can be assassinated and political discourse controlled in the most un-democratic of manners, you -should- feel bad. But hey, if you're working through a contracting firm, I bet that big tax-payer funded pay check will go a long way to making you feel better.

Anyway, it's hard to believe the NSA isn't adept at finding the sociopaths focused purely on career advancement and power gain that it needs. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there is some big boogie man we need to be worried about, but if there is, they've done a really bad job of informing the public as to what actual danger, besides inconvenient truths and things that worry big MegaCorp, they are protecting against. Maybe if we didn't focus on fucking with the rest of the world so much people wouldn't want to strike at us.

To those at the NSA who are just awakening to the new reality that people are, now and forevermore, going to hate you whether you deserve it or not, I can only say "Welcome to my world. Learn to deal with it. It'll drive you nuts if you don't."

Or they could find honest work that betters society. It's hard to feel sorry for them when you read about how much more they make than the rest of the US.

Morale should be low, "the public" doesn't want them to do what they're doing. They are a threat to democracy. The US has long been a threat to any Democratic Government that doesn't favor it, just read about the "Other 9/11".

The fact of the matter is, they are pawns to non-Democratic interests that do nothing to serve the American People as a whole. They serve big monied interest, mega corporations and conglomerates protecting their entrenched positions and bottom lines. Concepts like "freedom," and "liberty" are merely espoused to make the rank and file feel warm and fuzzy about their unconstitutional work, which is ironically the biggest threat to "freedom" and "liberty" that we face today. Higher ups get corrupted by the power. All the rank and file should know, the moment you expose any sort of inconvenient truth, the full weight and force of the apparatus you served will be turned on you and you yourself can be labelled a "domestic terrorist." Just look at the case of Julia Davis which has open court records that backup such facts.

When you job helps create and maintain a system where ordinary citizens can be assassinated and political discourse controlled in the most un-democratic of manners, you -should- feel bad. But hey, if you're working through a contracting firm, I bet that big tax-payer funded pay check will go a long way to making you feel better.

Anyway, it's hard to believe the NSA isn't adept at finding the sociopaths focused purely on career advancement and power gain that it needs. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there is some big boogie man we need to be worried about, but if there is, they've done a really bad job of informing the public as to what actual danger, besides inconvenient truths and things that worry big MegaCorp, they are protecting against. Maybe if we didn't focus on fucking with the rest of the world so much people wouldn't want to strike at us.

Because the rebels themselves are saying so, FSA included?

A recent example. An earlier one.

Or are you saying that al-Nusra is not radical Islamist?

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54564-2005Feb25.html

At long last, Robert Kearns's battles with the world's automotive giants have come to an end. Kearns, who died Feb. 9, devoted decades of his life to fighting Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Corp. and other carmakers in court, trying to gain the credit he thought he deserved as the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper.

From a basement in Detroit, where he devised his invention, to Gaithersburg, where he moved in the 1970s, Kearns carried his lonely fight all the way to the Supreme Court, one man against the might of the industrial world and a patent system he believed had let him down.

Robert Kearns fought for years to be credited as inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. (The Washington Post)
By the time he died at 77 at Copper Ridge nursing home in Sykesville, Md., of brain cancer complicated by Alzheimer's disease, Kearns had gained some vindication in the form of $30 million in settlements from Ford and Chrysler, but he never got what he had sought from the beginning.

"I need the money, but that's not what this is about," he told Regardie's magazine in 1990. "I've spent a lifetime on this. This case isn't just a trial. It's about the meaning of Bob Kearns's life."

All he wanted, he often said, was the chance to run a factory with his six children and build his wiper motors, along with a later invention for a windshield wiper that was activated automatically by rainfall. In the end, his courtroom battles cost him his job, his marriage and, at times, his mental health.

Kearns, who had a doctorate in engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and had taught engineering for 11 years at Wayne State University in Detroit, was no weekend tinkerer. A native of Gary, Ind., he grew up near the giant Ford plant in River Rouge, Mich., and always thought of the auto company as a place that welcomed someone with ingenuity.

He got his idea on his wedding night in 1953, when a champagne cork struck him in the left eye, which eventually became blind. The blinking of his eye led him to wonder if he could make windshield wipers that worked the same way -- that would move at intervals instead of in a constant back-and-forth motion.

After years of experiments at home and on his cars -- "If it ever rained," his former wife, Phyllis Hall, recalled yesterday, "I had to drop everything and go out with him in the car" -- Kearns believed his invention was ready.

He applied for patents, mounted his wipers on his 1962 Ford Galaxie and drove to Ford's headquarters. Engineers swarmed over his car, at one point sending him out of the workroom, convinced he was activating the wipers with a button in his pocket.

Ford's engineers had been experimenting with vacuum-operated wipers, but Kearns was the first to invent an intermittent wiper with an electric motor. After a while, however, Ford stopped answering his calls, and Kearns was left on his own.

In 1967, he received the first of more than 30 patents for his wipers. In 1969, Ford came out with the first intermittent wiper system in the United States, followed within a few years by the other major manufacturers.

After working as Detroit's commissioner of buildings and safety engineering, Kearns moved to Gaithersburg in 1971 to become principal investigator for highway skid resistance at the old National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In 1976, Kearns's son bought an electric circuit for a Mercedes-Benz intermittent wiper, which Kearns took apart, only to discover it was almost identical to what he'd invented. He had a nervous breakdown soon after.

He boarded a bus, with delusions of riding to Australia and being commissioned by former President Richard M. Nixon to build an electric car. Police picked him up in Tennessee, and his family checked him into the psychiatric ward at Montgomery

Shouldn't these bought dogs be looking to balance the budget?

The deficit has been falling for years.

So has employment, buying power, intelligence levels compared to other countries. On the rise, unemployment, homelessness, death by war, death by starvation, death by out of control policy enforcers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nelson-mandela-brought-the-world-toward-a-racial-reconciliation/2013/12/05/4a2dfb7e-2d77-11e0-8dd8-83b74589130a_story.html

Shouldn't these bought dogs be looking to balance the budget?

The deficit has been falling for years.

Since you bothered to post, you could have the decency to post a link...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/world/americas/mexico-radioactive-theft/

http://abcnews.go.com/International/mexican-police-find-stolen-truck-radioactive-cargo/story?id=21091737

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/2013/1204/Hijacked-radioactive-material-found-in-Mexico.-How-dangerous-was-it

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/4/-extremely-dangerousradioactivetheftinmexicoiaea.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/stolen-cobalt-60-found-abandoned/2013/12/04/7d3fe3f8-5d42-11e3-8d24-31c016b976b2_story.html

Yeah, they are. Here is an article on the subject. But this are the key quotes:

Among non-Hispanic white Americans, the average [PISA] score was 525 - not very different from Canada's 524, New Zealand's 521 or Australia's 515. All these countries are heavily white, and all ranked in the top 10 of the 65 participating school systems. The story is the same for Asian Americans. Their average score was 541 - somewhat below Shanghai, about even with South Korea and ahead of Hong Kong (533) and Japan. Again, all these other systems were in the top 10

. . . . . But the most glaring gap is well-known: the stubbornly low test scores of blacks and Hispanics. In the PISA study, their reading scores were 441 (blacks) and 466 (Hispanics).

So, yeah, the affluent white kids out in the suburbs and decent neighborhoods are apparently learning just fine.

Healthcare.gov recently only works so much better because they scrapped the requirement

Uh.. that's not quite accurate. The changes made*, so far, were the typical things you would expect of an ill performing system; Glitches in code, not enough testing, scalability issues and much more. All things which people on 6 digit salaries or contracted consultants (Oracle) don't need to have spelled out to them. If there was a spec, it was the least of the problems. Much of what the ACA suffered from was just plain negligence. Almost to the point of being sabotage.

[*] - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/05/a-techie-walks-us-through-healthcare-govs-two-big-problems/

Been reading about this for years.

At least on the federal level, it's trivial to prove (unless you're a shill for the War on Drugs):

"The most serious charge against 51 percent of [federal prison] inmates is a drug offense. Only four percent are in for robbery and only one percent are in for homicide."

(source)

Why we are going back to the Moon

Paul D. Spudis

The recent release of the details of NASA’s proposed plans for human return to the Moon in response to President Bush’s new Vision for Space Exploration of last year has drawn much comment: some positive, some negative, and some simply perplexed.

Although the reasons for undertaking the new Vision were clearly articulated in the President’s speech, it is important to re-examine why the Moon is the cornerstone of the Vision and what we hope to achieve by returning there.

The Moon is important for three reasons – science, inspiration, and resources. All three aspects are directly served by the new lunar return architecture. Implementation of this program has the potential to make significant contributions to our national economy and welfare.

The Moon is a scientific laboratory of extraordinary facility, richness, and benefit. The history of our corner of the Solar System for the last 4 billion years is preserved and readable in the ancient dust of the lunar surface. This record is lost on the dynamic and ever changing surface of the Earth. Other planets do not record the same events affecting Earth and the Moon, including impacts, space particles, and the detailed history of our Sun. The recovery of this record will let us better understand the impact hazard in the Earth-Moon system as well as unravel the processes and evolution of our Sun, the major driver of climate and life on Earth.

The Moon is a stable platform to observe the universe. The far side of the Moon is the only known place in the solar system permanently shielded from the radio noise of the Earth. That uniqueness allows observation of the sky at radio wavelengths never before seen. Every time we open a new spectral window on the universe, we find unexpected and astounding phenomena; there is no reason to expect anything different from the opening of new windows on the universe from the surface of the Moon.

The Moon is close in space (only three days away) yet a separate world filled with mysteries, landscapes and treasures. By embracing the inspiring and difficult task of living and working on the Moon, we can learn how to explore a planetary surface and how the combined efforts of both humans and machines enable new levels of productive exploration.

In 21st century America, our existence depends on an educated, technically literate workforce, motivated and schooled in complex scientific disciplines. Tackling the challenges of creating a functioning society off-planet will require not only the best technical knowledge we can muster, but also the best imaginations. One cannot develop a creative imagination, the renewable resource of a vibrant society, without confronting and surmounting unknowns and challenges on new frontiers.

Although of fairly ordinary composition, the Moon contains the resources of material and energy that we need to both survive and operate in space. With its resources and proximity to Earth, the Moon is a natural logistics and supply base, an offshore island of useful commodities for use on the Moon, in space, and ultimately, back on Earth.

Water is an extremely valuable commodity in space – in its liquid form, it supports human life and it can be broken down into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. These elements make the highest energy chemical rocket propellant known. Water exists in the dark and cold regions near the poles of the Moon. Scientists estimate that each pole contains more than 10 billion tons of water, enough to launch a fully fueled Space Shuttle once a day, every day for over 39 years. The ability to make fuel on the Moon will allow routine access to Earth-Moon space, the zone in which all of our space assets reside.

The Moon

The [dividing] line between us and those other nations is surely being narrowed. After the Chinese shot down a satellite in 2007, I knew it was just a matter of time.

No wonder they are now challenging us in the east. To make matters worse, they own most of our debt

If nothing is done, we'll be a nation of no consequence in a few decades.

There appears to be no clear boundary between "the website" and "related IT services" such that it's hard to draw an undisputed line. Estimates range from roughly $130 to $350 million, depending on the partitioning used. Left-leaning spinners seem to use the $130 figure and right-leaning spinners use the 350. Because the boundary is fuzzy, neither side is objectively wrong. Funny how that works.

  More info:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/24/how-much-did-healthcare-gov-cost/

> Emergency Economic Stabilization Act committed $7.77 trillion

From Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/no-the-fed-did-not-hand-out-777-trillion-to-banks/2011/12/07/gIQAT3c8cO_blog.html

$7.77 trillion in very short term loans (overnight or similar) and in loan guarantees. There was never anything like 7.77 outstanding at any one time, the loans were very short term, and have all been paid back, and most of it was loan guarantees that were not ever called.

You really need to stop getting your economic information from people grandstanding in front of Congress. Many of them believe things like the moon shines by its own light, dinosaurs coexisted with cavemen and you can't get pregnant from legitimate rape.

It's completely inaccurate distorted bullshit.

Why would one lose ones credibility because of that? If anything I wouldn't trust someone who doesn't watch porn..

Just make sure you trust them just because they're watching porn. It's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

A quick google search of turns up plenty of fires caused by road debris, some of which is much more minor than what the Teslas hit.

Car hits trash and catches on fire: http://www.ksl.com/?sid=25850334
Patrol car bursts into flames after hitting road debris: http://seguingazette.com/news/article_b24f9222-b0fb-11e1-bdef-0019bb2963f4.html
Car catches fire after running over mattress: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30315-2004Sep17.html
Car leaking gasoline catches fire likely due to road debris: http://www.turnto23.com/news/local-news/bakersfield-woman-helps-another-escape-vehicle-fire-on-coffee-road

Or it could be worse.

Metal road debris impales car, barely misses driver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJUWXRWK4xs
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2012/09/14/unknown_to_driver_her_suv_is_impaled_on_metal_bar.html

It's difficult to pin down an exact date.

• It could have been when we started re-electing Congressmen the vast majority of the time, no matter how unpopular they were.
• It could have been when gerrymandering made its debut.
• It could have been when political parties started, leading people to vote for their team rather than who they thought was the best candidate.
• It could have been when money started to mean more than votes.
• It could have been one of the many instances where we have traded liberty for security.

You think Nancy Pelosi is an out of touch extremist or something?

Nancy Pelosi is elected by a constituency which is about as far from the political mainstream as is possible in the U.S. No political pundit of any political persuasion would characterize the politics of San Francisco as "mainstream".

Remember, at one point during the cramming through of a sweeping law on healthcare ins., Nancy Pelosi declared she would "deem" the Senate version of the law to have passed, essentially eliminating the other members of the House from participation in the passing of a law which restructures all of U.S. society. It was only after Pelosi was threatened with a legal challenge to her unconstitutional actions that she relented.

And a quick followup - think about a profession as well researched, as old and rigorous as civil engineering. The engineering of structures. Even in this environment where the concepts are well known, the profession is ancient, snafus happen. There is new metro station in the DC metro area. It is RIFE with problems:

Silver Spring Transit Center to get new layer of concrete to address construction flaws
By Bill Turque,September 06, 2013
Washington Post

"The $120 million bus and train hub at Georgia Ave. and Colesville Rd. is more than two years behind schedule and tens of millions of dollars over budget. Issues with concrete — including cracks, insufficient thickness and questions about strength in some areas — have played a major role in the delay." -- Washington Post

I can imagine managers are thinking, "What the hell? How many metro stations are there in this region? In this country?? There's no new concepts here! You people all have P.E's! The processes for design are totally standardized! How could this possibly happen?"

According to the Washington Post:

"A final 'pre-flight checklist' before the Web site’s Oct. 1 opening, compiled a week before by CMS, shows that 41 of 91 separate functions that CGI was responsible for finishing by the launch were still not working. And a spreadsheet produced by CGI, dated the day of the launch, shows that the company acknowledged about 30 defects on features scheduled to have been working already, including five that it classified as 'critical'".

The question is, what did the President know, and when did he know it? We know the responsible White House staff knew the system would not work because it simply wasn't finished. And that's only for the parts that were to go live on October 1st. As we heard last week from the existing CTO on the project, there is still 30-40% of the backend system that hasn't even been written yet.

I don't think it is reasonable that no one told the President about this. I think the President knew, but decided to push it through anyway. Why? Personally, I think it's because he believed that the glitches would be forgiven, and because the press was behind him, he could always blame the other side, and they would go along as the usually do.

Ok, you like what Heritage has to say about the "EOR Tax Credit" and the "Marginal Well Production Credit." Now you -- and The Atlantic, and the CS Monitor, and the Center for American Progress, and Heritage! -- should get your terminology right by grokking "The Difference Between a Tax Break and a Subsidy" on the aptly-named Reason.com.

It's pure Orwellian doublespeak to assert that confiscating a smaller fraction of a Company X's profits is the same thing as subsidizing Company X. I have no particular love for the oil industry, but freedom from doublespeak is something for which we should all fight passionately.

Then there's the matter of your cherry-picking -- failing to mention Heritage points out that "the oil industry faces a higher marginal tax rate at 41 percent compared to 26 percent for the rest of businesses in Standard & Poor’s 500." I bet the industry would gladly give up small-potatoes stuff like the EOR Tax Credit and the Marginal Well Production Credit in exchange for getting its marginal tax rate reduced to 26%. How much higher than 41% would the industry's rate be, if not for the tax credits you detest?

My position is consistent: there should be no subsidies for oil, ethanol, solar, nuclear, wind, or coal; no subsidies, period. (And when I say "period," I mean the opposite of what was meant in this quote: "no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”)

"Contrary to popular belief, and many a breathless article, the government does not, in fact, book a profit on student loans. As New America's Jason Delisle has explained, that's because the Congressional Budget Office is required by law to use a bizarre and faulty method for determining the cost of government loans."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/20/no-the-federal-government-does-not-profit-off-student-loans/

Here's one example:

GAO says there is no evidence that a TSA program to spot terrorists is effective

"The GAO report recommends that Congress stop funding for the program, which has cost more than $878 million since its launch in 2007."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/gao-says-there-is-no-evidence-that-a-tsa-program-to-spot-terrorists-is-effective/2013/11/13/fca999a0-4c93-11e3-be6b-d3d28122e6d4_story.html

I don't know about your claim but China are also planning AND building very many nuclear power stations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#Future_projects

The one I could find says 363 coal plants and they might not all be built: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/20/1200-coal-are-plants-being-planned-worldwide-what-happens-if-they-all-get-built/

The Republicans defunded part of the project.

Citation to specific bill which caused this please.

The Republicans refused to set up state exchanges in their stats, increasing the traffic load on the website.

If it was a traffic load issue, why does the issue still persist nearly 2 months since launch when the traffic to the site dropped by 88% after the first couple of weeks? http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/visits-to-federal-health-care-web-site-off-88percent/2013/10/15/7a73f45c-35e2-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html

More so, you realize under Federalism... states do still have some rights... right?

And most of all, the Republicans DID NOT ALLOW US TO HAVE SINGLE PAYER, which put us in this situation in the first place.

Remind me... how many Republican's voted for this monstrosity of a law which is forcing people to lose their health insurance plans and pay even more out of pocket for the replacements? Right... ZERO.

Don't blame the Republicans when the liberals couldn't come up with enough votes to implement single payer.

You'd think that mentioning who is in charge of fixing it should be mentioned. That's just a quick google away and his name is Jeffrey Zientz. There's not a lot of information out there, but what is there seems reasonably positive. Here's npr's article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/10/23/240283860/white-house-turns-to-rock-star-manager-for-obamacare-fix

Here's Washington Posts: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/10/24/who-is-jeffrey-zients-and-why-is-he-qualified-to-fix-healthcare-gov/

Every public opinion poll says just the opposite. Too many to cite, but here's one: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-23/politics/40862490_1_edward-snowden-nsa-programs-privacy It's easier to blame the victims than the people in power.

All that gun control laws do is disarm potential victims - lawbreakers, by definition, don't obey laws.

A "No Guns Allowed" sign doesn't deter a suicidal shooter, but it does prevent others from having guns for self-protection and imposes stiff penalties on those that inadvertently violate the gun prohibition.

It's easy to confuse increased publicity for a school shootings with an increase in school shootings (for example).

Consider this recent report with lots of good links within it...

Citations please

Citation.

Which guys does he speak of? In the recently published article, the subject diagram isn't clear on exactly what is going on. My reading of this is that the "SSL Added and removed here!" note with smiley face is pointing directly at the GFE (Google Front End) server, meaning that this activity is occurring on this server (group). Now, in my limited time as a sysadmin, I have yet to see how any outside party can gain ongoing access for such processes without the complicity of the admin. So, perhaps these Google engineers should be looking inwards for someone worthy of their F-bombs.

Actually, the drawing alone doesn't say much. It could simply be a drawing of Google's SSL architecture as it relates to its internal cloud structure. It doesn't say who is adding/removing SSL. The implication made by the Google staff reaction is that this is something nefarious. Could be. Could also be that they don't know how a public SSL gateway on a private Intranet is configured.

HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN
All your base load are belong to US
You are on the way to destruction.
What you say??
Make your time.

Every time some company like Google announces funding for some Tempest or Solaris farm somewhere I wince. It's not the money, it's the very idea of the thing. The Internet is 24/7, and they're supposed to be the smartest guys & gals in the room. How can they get behind and forge ahead on something that won't even solve their own problems?

How did this decades-long solar slash wind fixation even begin?? Why don't at least half the folks out there pause and say, "wait a minute... what are we trying to accomplish?" I'm developing an honest resentment to those so-called 'green' things, and believe me it's not comfortable or fun. Truth is, wind and solar smell bad.

They smell like grid-down Darwin In Action DEATH. If I can easily imagine some awful Event that would render all solar and wind technology useless overnight, for a week or longer... who else can? Take your pick: Dust from a volcanic event or asteroid impact, or a Winter storm with Arctic air meeting warm moist air from the South that sweeps diagonally across the continent with freezing rain, leaving inches of ice accumulation, road and rail impassible.

Or a Little Ice Age. We are more vulnerable to harsh Winter conditions than we were in 1650-1700. Electricity powers everything. Some scientists are baffledby the sun's behavior lately, but Professor Lockwood and the Washington Post aren't: Sun activity is in free fall, but you shouldn’t expect a new little ice age. I did a triple-facepalm when atmospheric physicist Joanna Haigh said, "Even under the most optimistic scenario [of minimal global warming and a deep solar minimum] the solar cooling would only just offset greenhouse gas warming. So no ice age.” Just like that. Human carbon emissions will offset a global weather phenomenon that lasted some 70-300 years. What makes her so sure?

Wind and Solar for grid energy are Rube Goldberg engineering disasters. So many precision cast moving parts out there in the elements, blades that rely on brakes and oil-filled transmission boxes. Everything subject to freeze and fail sooner than intended, and it's all in faraway places with branch feeders running to it at great expense, so it can solve your energy problems completely. Or maybe 20%. Some day. Some times. Not as much as expected. After the first calamity strikes, not at all.

Power plants are strong buildings with machinery inside built to withstand the worst of the elements. The best of these are completely self-contained, generate gigawatts of power and can stock months of fuel. Three guesses.

Solar and Wind grid energy farms are spacious gardens of delicate -- and ultimately useless -- garbage that never would have and will not ensure our survival, built at great expense in an atmosphere of dreamlike foolishness that has got to stop this minute.

My children deserve better. This is madness, people! Ape-shit madness! When discussing base load grid power, especially with aging infrastructure and an uncertain economic outlook... these sources should have been laughed out of the room. Google deserves better, as do we. This is an existential threat. Their money at this point would be better spent on T-shirts for natural gas producers and coal miners.

Or just perhaps... a commitment to fast-track thorium, a national effort on the same scale that put men on the moon. So we can crack this energy thing for the next thousand years, and go to the moon again.

And let's send women to the moon. It's their turn.

Some Google Talks. They should listen.

Okay, it's even more awesome.

On the downloads page you can download the models in various forms - point cloud, mesh, and so on. Different formats, depending on the method used to get the model data (cat scan, laser scan, photographic, &c).

They mention in the about page that it would take 247 years of work 24/7 to capture the entire collection.

We could hire 247 people and get the entire collection online in 3 years (8 hour shifts). At $50,000 per person, that's about $13 million per year(*). Compare to the cost of the Obamacare website currently estimated at around $100 million and it has to be redone.

They've obviously shown "proof of concept" for getting the job done. Can we somehow just give them the money to complete it? Maybe a petition on "We the People"?

(*) Back-of-the-envelope calculation doesn't include cost of scanning equipment or materials, but note that there are a *lot* of museums in this country. We could invest in the infrastructure once and keep 300 people employed for decades putting this great stuff online.

I suspect it's going to be the amount of people turned away from voting because of all these daft ID voter rules. .... I really think it'll be the mass disenfranchisement of a huge % of the US citizens at the next big election.

It doesn't look like there is a problem with that.

Texas voter ID law didn't suppress vote

...it'll take that sharp focused event that'll be the camel back breaker ...

Maybe we've found one.

Calif. Insurance Commissioner: More Than 1M Californians Having Insurance Cancelled Due To ACA

Forbes: White House Predicted in 2010 That 93 Million Would Lose Their Health Plans Under ObamaCare

Troubled HealthCare.gov unlikely to work fully by end of November

Take some work that's already been done, and build a functional shell that doesn't meet the full requirements?

The #1 most effective way to bring a software project in on-time is to shed requirements. I am absolutely certain that right now, this very moment, Sebelius is wishing she had done something closer to Health Sherpa than the farcical mess she did instead.

But they had to have the discounted rates, post subsidy, so they had to have tie-in with sensitive back-ends, which necessitated secure logins, etc., They could not permit all their many low-information voters to suffer the sticker shock of the actual rates, so they blundered into go-live with the biggest laughing-stock roll-out in history.

Over 50 million people are having their non-ACA-compliant coverage cancelled, and they're not signing up for Obamacare plans, so we went from ~30E6 to ~80E6 uninsured. By the time the ACA employer mandate hits about 20% of the workforce will be part-timed to get under the must-provide-coverage threshold.

You voted for it. Enjoy.

Later this week the Administration will have the bullshit hose turned up to 11 as they report on ACA takeup. They're going to backfill with bullshit numbers because the real numbers are pathetic.

Interestingly enough, the Government's website doesn't verify income, either...

It does. Your source is out of date.

That's the one and only concession the Democrats were willing to make in ending their Government Shutdown. Otherwise it would just work on the honor system. The fraud would have been epic.

No, that quote is saying that their website was easier to implement and has less issues because it does only a small fraction of what HealthCare.gov does. They don't have to query all those sources, they don't have to handle magnitudes higher load volume, etc. So of course something that is far more simplistic than HealthCare.gov is likely to have far less issues, but that isn't really saying much.

The CGI/Government website may query all those sources, but apparently does nothing with the information. At least as far as verifying income, residency status, etc.

Oooo. They created a site that connects to a web service and lists stuff. I suppose if we gave them a couple more weeks they will have verified income, immigration status, national security checks, and waded through every states muddled regulations for insurance. It's not a portal. It is a commerce site for a very complicated widget.

The CGI/Government website doesn't verify any of those things, either.

Estimating your subsidy is simple math. Verifying your personal and financial information is a totally different issue. And before they start handing out tax dollars as subsidies, they damned sure better verify the applicant's income.

Interestingly enough, the Government's website doesn't verify income, either...

Sweden also has the highest suicide rates
Strange thing you left out those facts, guess they did not fit your case.

I would hardly call that a fact since it is a myth.

I have never seen a list where Sweden is placed at the top when it comes to suicide rates.
A quick googling gave me a list on Wikipedia

It looks like suicide rates in the US are higher than those in Sweden.

The list from Washington Post places Sweden higher than US but that list is based on 8 years old data.

US visa to Indians must be pegged to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_caste to prevent creeping http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/ in America.

That is why I find the indifference on Slashdot to the admitted political oppression engaged in by the IRS to be so appalling. People here moan, scream, and wail about oppression this and that when it involves the intelligence agencies. But when it involves the IRS, which unlike the NSA really does have considerable formal power to make the lives of individual Americans hell . . .[etc, etc, debunked IRS scandal ranting, etc.]

Benghazi! Secret Kenyan Muslim black man! FEMA Concentration camps! Get a brain Morans!

Know what? Teabaggers would seem a lot more credible if they didn't sound like the guy on a street corner with a misspelled sandwich board yelling "Repent! The end is near!" Actually, I don't even need the "sounds like" modifier. Teabaggers actually say that crap. So really, what are you worried about? It's all gonna get sorted out in the Rapture.

You wish it were just cars.

Welfare for the rich? Private school tax credit programs expanding

Is America a democracy? It only has one more party than the Soviet Union did.

Yes America is a democracy.* And no, the US does not have just one more party than the Soviet Union. The US actually has dozens of active political parties. Only a few of them attract enough support nationally to run a serious campaign for the two national level offices (president and vice-president). Within states, counties, and cities, parties besides the Republicans and Democrats are much more likely to obtain office. US Senator Bernie Sanders is a socialist (no, really - "... the only self-proclaimed socialist in Congress ...). The Reform party started by Ross Perot had a candidate that won the election for governor in the 1990s. Another recent amusing example of a third party win from the "I'm not dead department" - (icing on the cake - he is a software engineer):

Philadelphians Elect First Whig Since 19th Century
And just because: BECOME A WHIG RIGHT NOW! And 6 other vintage parties we should bring back

And the candidates are those nominated by the powers that be.

I think you misunderstand. Anyone that meets the requirements can run for pretty much any office they care to in the US. Nominations are mechanisms used by political parties to determine who the party will put forward as a candidate for a major election such as president. If you are a serious candidate with real support, that isn't going to be much of a problem. The much bigger problem is getting the support needed to be a serious candidate. Nominations generally take place at the national conventions of the parties after they have gone through the many primary elections and caucuses in the states. If you've won most of the primaries or caucuses, you will probably be the candidate.

And what does it matter, when the vote-counting process is highly suspect?

Counting the votes is a local function, the federal government doesn't play a part. If there is a problem it is a local problem. Voting procedures are subject to scrutiny by election judges.

* Democratic republic for the pendants.

We could accomplish this by using a very successful precedent: the president announces, "no matter how we reform HVAC systems, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your ductwork, you will be able to keep your ductwork, period. If you like your woodstove, you’ll be able to keep your woodstove, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

(Four Pinocchios -- the most that are ever given) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/30/obamas-pledge-that-no-one-will-take-away-your-health-plan/

Obama still has his Blackberry. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/24/obama-still-uses-a-blackberry-heres-why-presidents-always-fall-behind-the-times/

Pretty sure the military is our biggest spending item.

Nope, not even close. Spending on social services ("entitlements" is what it is usually called) is far and away the largest expenditure and was expanding rapidly even before Obamacare which has caused a whole new level of fiscal pain.

Lots of sources show this and those sources who tend to support big gov frequently try to hide the fact that entitlements are the real spending culprit by dividing up the budget pie chart in ways which conceal the true total of all entitlement spending. Defense is about 18-20%. Social spending is something like 50-70%, depending on what you include and, as I mentioned earlier, is rapidly expanding whereas defense spending is not.

Ezra Klein at the WashPo is a pretty reliable Dem loyalist who provides a graph.

As the US population ages, spending on entitlements, if not reformed, will crush the US economically. The welfare state does not work in the long run. Eventually, the money used to buy votes will run out, leading to civil unrest and an authoritarian govt.

Reagan ... Bush ... But somehow Democrats are the tax & spend party.

The DP has been using tax dollars to buy votes for nearly a century. Everyone knows this. It is not a secret. DP media partisans throw a tantrum every time a pol or pundit mentions it.

If you want to play the partisan blame game, a chart from Jon Gabriel at Ricochet.com ( a Repub establishment mouthpiece site) is helpful. The chart actually makes Clinton look good because it doesn't provide the context, which is that the deficit increase under Clinton was slowed by the Repubs gaining control over Congress under Gringrich. It also ignores the fact that Reagan had to deal with a Dem congress which kept jacking up domestic spending as the cost of supporting Reagan's main priority which was winning the Cold War.

Do I really need to mention that spending on national defense is actually constitutional while spending on entitlements is not?

The data which would show whether or not this truly applies to "millions of people" aren't yet publicly available. I think lgw has clearly overstated the case. But it is not hard to find anecdotes from sources other than Fox News.

e.g.:

"After receiving a letter from her insurer that her plan was being discontinued, Deborah Persico, a 58-year-old lawyer in the District, found a comparable plan on the city’s new health insurance exchange. But her monthly premium, now $297, would be $165 higher, and her maximum out-of-pocket costs would double."Washington Post, 2013-11-03.

Anyway, so far as politics go, it is perception that matters. It may be true that millions of people are being shifted from crappier insurance to more robust insurance. Notwithstanding this objective advantage, the people with crappier insurance generally did not, do not, and will not know about the deficiencies of their former plans. We should expect that many will become rather upset at being forced to pay thousands more per year for a product that they perceive as having no added value.

The subsidies will make a small premium increase irrelevant to some people, but (as you noted) these subsidies are income-dependent, and many people will not benefit from them at all -- which further feeds the politically damaging "winners and losers" narrative.