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I mean, Ray Kurzweil believes in "alkalinized water" and dismisses just adding sodium bicarbonate, because the HNO3- molecule won't work as well as the HO- molecule... which entirely disregards that HNO3- interacts with H2O to make H2NO3 and HO-. http://glowing-health.com/alkaline-water/ray-kurzweil-alkaine-water.html

Sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda) has a molecular formula of NaHCO3. There is no nitrogen in it, and it seems you merely need to s/N/C in your quote. Somewhat ironically given your particular typo, HNO3 is nitric acid, which is a very strong acid (pKa =~ -1.4, which implies that it will completely dissociate in water) and is most certainly not alkaline. Furthermore, note that HNO3 would have no charge as written, and NO3- (nitrate) would have a - charge for the polyatomic ion. However, your typo and the subject molecules are interesting from a biochemistry perspective.

Bicarbonate (HCO3-) is a weak acid/base and is amphiprotic and amphoteric. Many biological organisms, humans included, use bicarbonate as a buffer molecule to maintain blood pH within the very narrow pH band required for the organism's survival.

The rule of thumb for buffer solutions is that they are most effective within pH +/- 1 of the pKa of the relevant moiety. Of course, in biological systems, the buffer isn't "static" and the organism expends energy to maintain homeostasis. Here's an example of the blood pH bicarbonate buffer using the Hendersen-Hasselbach equation. You can see the blood pH (7.4) is outside the +/- 1 pH of the pKa of bicarbonate (~6.1), and therefore the dissociation ratio is 20:1. Obviously, this buffer solution wouldn't work well if the organism didn't constantly rebalance it.

Your body uses the lungs to maintain the buffer, and this is why your blood can become more alkaline if you hyperventilate (respiratory alkalosis).

Haha, how's that for an off-topic tangent?

Which is why I use 320Kbps VBR mp3. Not only is it proven multiple times to be not distinguishable from the CD in double-blind tests, it also saves a lot of space over FLAC and actually works in pretty much any audio player anywhere that plays anything more than just straight CDs. Compatibility is more important to me than a purely theoretical difference in sound quality.

I can tell the difference between mp3 vs. Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, regardless of bitrate: mp3's inability to indicate what data is actually audio vs. junk used to pad-out a frame leaves glitches between tracks --because there's no way for players to identify the padding as such, they just play it to completion of the frame. Ogg and FLAC don't have that problem.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082926/

With "smell-o-vision" you would avoid the need for the scrath-and-sniff Odorama card.

At one point in time a group of 56 such people gathered together to sign a document, the first published version of which didn't have their names on it since they were in danger of being hanged for treason.

One was captured and imprisoned by the government merely for having signed the document; two were wounded during their struggle against this government; one urged that when the enemy used his home as a headquarters that it be fired upon and destroyed (the owner died bankrupt, never able to re-build his home); another had to leave his ill wife's bedside, he and his 13 children fleeing to live in the wilderness, when he returned he found his wife dead, his business destroyed and died in poverty some years later; two others also saw their businesses destroyed, ultimately dying in poverty.[1]

I was fortunate to be able to purchase a letterpress printed copy of a later version of this document which was printed recently and it hangs in the family living room[2].

1 - http://www.connecticutsar.org/articles/price_paid.htm
2 - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/File-Goddard_broadside.jpg

complete (light) aircrafts are no problem - the technique is working, see ballistic rescue parachutes

The evidence seems to point towards the universe being finite in size and, according to quantum mechanics, quantized, which implies that the universe contains only a finite (albeit unimaginably huge) amount of information. In a way, this is a physical explanation for the incompleteness of mathematics: the reals (and even the integers) are simply constructs that have no physical meaning. Infinities simply make the math simpler. Continuity is an illusion, although time is quantized at several orders of magnitude below our ability to observe even with scientific instruments.

The evidence seems to point towards the universe being finite in size and, according to quantum mechanics, quantized, which implies that the universe contains only a finite (albeit unimaginably huge) amount of information. In a way, this is a physical explanation for the incompleteness of mathematics: the reals (and even the integers) are simply constructs that have no physical meaning. Infinities simply make the math simpler. Continuity is an illusion, although time is quantized at several orders of magnitude below our ability to observe even with scientific instruments.

The evidence seems to point towards the universe being finite in size and, according to quantum mechanics, quantized, which implies that the universe contains only a finite (albeit unimaginably huge) amount of information. In a way, this is a physical explanation for the incompleteness of mathematics: the reals (and even the integers) are simply constructs that have no physical meaning. Infinities simply make the math simpler. Continuity is an illusion, although time is quantized at several orders of magnitude below our ability to observe even with scientific instruments.

Turns out there isn't any single "correct" form for letters. To think Palmer or D'Nealian Script is "Cursive" with a capital c or to think it is "The Script" for cursive writing is to have a limited perspective. Even within the Palmer method you had variation on letters.

Find a nice script you like or make your own. Use it carefully when you write. Do it enough with intention and it'll become easy to write and read.

I think ease or difficulty of reading is what you're referring to when you say "it has always sucked"?

Wow, a whole 14% increase in that per year?

14% a year is huge.

Agreed. That's practically unheard of, though they do have the advantage of starting from way behind, and countries in that situation can grow quickly during their catch-up phase.

My question is how do they control inflation with such fast rising wages?

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon -- Milton Friedman.

The point of the CPI graph was to show that growth != inflation. Inflation was more or less flat throughout the 19th century, and yet during that same period we had the entire industrial revolution.

You are missing two historic facts.

Firstly, inflation was not flat: look at the graph, you can see the business cycles playing out: inflation went up during growth periods and there was deflation and very high unemployment in busts like the Panic of 1893, which was triggered by bank failures that snowballed into a full-blown banking crisis that quickly crashed the stock market and then spilled over into the real economy and caused a real depression that lasted several years with peak unemployment of 14%:

Effects in the U.S.

The failure of the Jay Cooke bank, followed quickly by that of Henry Clews, set off a chain reaction of bank failures and temporarily closed the New York stock market. Factories began to lay off workers as the United States slipped into depression. The effects of the panic were quickly felt in New York, more slowly in Chicago, Virginia City, Nevada and San Francisco.[11][12]

The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days starting September 20. Of the country's 364 railroads, 89 went bankrupt. A total of 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875. Unemployment reached 14% by 1876. Construction work halted, wages were cut, real estate values fell and corporate profits vanished.

Secondly, you are missing the historic fact that in the 18th century US there was a form of inflation not measured via the price level in dollars: the inflation of the gold monetary base in the 18th century, via mining 60 metric tons of new physical gold per year on average.

That gold is a small amount today compared to the size of the highly sophisticated US economy of 300+ million people, but in 1820 there were only about 10 million people in the US so new gold mined amounted to a significant portion of the GDP and it also provided a constant influx of "new money" increasing the effective monetary base, printed out of thin air - erm, printed out of hard rock formations. This free liquidity provided fluid investments and relatively easy credit.

Once the "gold simulus" ended, near the end of the 18th century, when the economy became much bigger for gold mining to have an effect, the negative effects of deflation started causing real bad depressions (see the link above - there were several other crashes in the "gilded age" era): people valued hoarding money over production and this started a positive feedback loop of contraction, which took years to recover from in most of the cases.

So historic facts are not very sympathetic to your hard money arguments I'm afraid. Today returning to the gold standard would be like basing an economy on bitcoins: economic suicide.

Economies want to grow, population wants to grow and people want to produce more value - those kinds of dynamics are not compatible with the concept of a rigid, static amount of gold representing money. Why should money not grow together with the size of the economy?

GPUs are stream processors. They are really good at doing the exact same operation on lots of values at once. If you actually only wanted to do the operation on one piece of data, they are at least an order of magnitude slower. They are really bad at any variations based on data. If your algorithm has any control flow in it, it will probably not work well in a GPU. Also, GPUs work well only with very specific memory access patterns. Doing an operation to all of memory is fast. Doing an operation that requires jumping around memory based on data is slow.

GPUs definitely do seem to be becoming the next-generation math-coprocessor. AMD and Intel have both been working on multi-core chips with both CPU and GPU cores. Back in the old days, math coprocessors added the ability to do floating point operations in hardware. Now GPUs support doing operations involving lots of floating point numbers in hardware.

Prior to the opening of the Federal Reserve, the US fluctuated between 2 and 5%. Today, it's greater than 40%. That is as bad as many African nations.

FYI, that's a false statement, most African nations spend much less than 40% of their GDP on providing civilization to their citizens: Burkina Faso (21.6%), Cameroon (18.5%), Côte d'Ivoire (19.7%) - you name it.

The countries you wanted to compare the US with is Germany (43.7%), Finland (49.5%) or Sweden (52.5%).

What does that spending buy their citizens: universal health-care for all citizens, as a birthright. High quality public education that almost all eduction happens in public schools and universities. Well-developed public transportation systems shipping children to school which transportation system I'm sure you'd enjoy as a tourist as well. Pervasive unemployment insurance and various protections for job-takers and their families: no hire-and-fire. Compare German unemployment during the crisis with US unemployment and guess which one spends more of its GDP on common good services for its citizens?

And you want the US to move to the same level of civilization as Burkina Faso or Côte d'Ivoire? Corporate donors will love it but good luck selling that to your fellow citizens ...

Books were quite expensive one hundred years ago and is was fashionable to write in only the most dense prose which required quite an education to understand.

Er, no.

In other media, we have Mystery Men, and in the Disney movie Sky High, the kids with the lesser powers are forced to become sidekicks aka "hero support".

In other media, we have Mystery Men, and in the Disney movie Sky High, the kids with the lesser powers are forced to become sidekicks aka "hero support".

The US Govt also declared tomatoes as vegetables so they could be "properly" taxed.
(hint: tomatoes are actually fruit)

No, the impeachment is merely about as unnecessary as the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Which is to say, both were pretty darn ludicrus.

Uterine contractions supposedly form part of the female orgasm...

You're thinking of oxytocin, the hormone that stimulates uterine contractions, not so much the uterine muscle itself. Women who have had their uterus removed can have orgasms.

"Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years. During the "Reagan Recovery" (sic) we were paying about 15 percent more across the board and the top tiers were paying more than that. Corporations were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today."

You mean we're paying less per person. While our economy doubled in the same time frame, actual US tax income has actually quadrupled $500Mil -> $2.5 Trillion from 1980 - 2007 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/U.S.-income-taxes-out-of-total-taxes.JPG

FYI that's well past inflation.

It's a tired and out of context argument that somehow we needed to keep these top tax rates (as much as 70%!) and that we've shortchanged ourselves, corporations are not paying enough, etc. Instead the truth is we've got about 100 million more people (and many more businesses) in the US than we did in 1980, and with more people you can lower the burden on all. In fact, if we had maintained government spending at 1980's levels (>$1 Trillion) and tracked to inflation we'd be just fine today - in fact we'd have a slight surplus. Instead, despite a doubling of the economy and the quadrupling of tax income, the government sextupled spending (>$1 Tril/year -> $6Tril/year)

The problem has not been taxes, instead it has been both parties spending far beyond revenues, and taking loans out to pay for it (or just pushing the bills into the future, which is why some reports have us at 70 Trillion in unfunded mandates)

Should these satellites go away? Probably not. But I'd like to see something else (or everything) cut first rather than to just add more tax burden.

>>Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years.

Wrong. Don't confuse the maximum marginal tax rate (which used to go up to 91%) with the actual amount of taxes paid per dollar of GDP. Hauser found (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_Law) that no matter what the tax rates are set to, we pay around 20% of our GDP in taxes. If you're talking about the recent dip due to the recession, you might be able to make an argument there, but the long term trend is actually pretty clear:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/U.S._Federal_Tax_Receipts_as_a_Percentage_of_GDP_1945%E2%80%932015.jpg

The federal government takes in plenty of money from taxes. The problem is that they spend too much. I suggest even, across the board, cuts to balance the budget. No partisanship, just chop the budget by whatever percentage excess they had the year before.

Yes, it can boot an open source OS out of the box.

It can boot multiple open-source OS out of the box :P.

Hmm, who to take the word of... a respected judge, or an anonymous person with nothing but uncited claims.

If we are just going to Appeal to Authority, what is the point of even reading the news? Is it possible that people in authority make mistakes or have biases. I know we've never seen it, but is it conceivable?

Judge Posner has spoken!

I think doing a proper https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_audit should have prevented it.

You are speaking of The 2003 Extradition Act?

No chance to celebrate, no chance to riot. Which didn't stop a Bruins fan from being killed, incidentally, but apparently no one's bothering to cover that. Apparently sports fans being killed in Boston is no longer news, it's just the status quo.

Link please, I had not heard of anyone being killed in Boston. There were some vague rumors of a Bruins fan being killed in Vancouver, but that seems to be unfounded as well. The Boston police did respond in force after the win, which seemed to keep things relatively calm in the city. Calling them jack-booted thugs is a bit over the top. Boston police do not put up with any hooliganism since the Victoria Snelgrove incident in 2004 and will preemptively quell anything of the sort. It seems that the police in Vancouver were ill-prepared, hence the situation getting out of hand so quickly.

It would be useful to provide support for your assertion that there have been times in earth's history when it was much hotter than it is now. According to instrumental temperature records The years 2001-2010 feature among the warmest on record. Before 1880, we have to rely on temperature reconstruction by proxy measurements. The main takeaway from this data is that the "global mean surface temperatures over the last 25 years have been higher than any comparable period since AD 1600, and probably since AD 900"(Originally sourced from Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years). Just randomly asserting that there have been warmer years in history does not make it so. Personally I think haphazard invention of facts is more annoying than any zealous supporter of any philosophy.

It would be useful to provide support for your assertion that there have been times in earth's history when it was much hotter than it is now. According to instrumental temperature records The years 2001-2010 feature among the warmest on record. Before 1880, we have to rely on temperature reconstruction by proxy measurements. The main takeaway from this data is that the "global mean surface temperatures over the last 25 years have been higher than any comparable period since AD 1600, and probably since AD 900"(Originally sourced from Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years). Just randomly asserting that there have been warmer years in history does not make it so. Personally I think haphazard invention of facts is more annoying than any zealous supporter of any philosophy.

By "completely new", do you mean "oldest kind of currency in the world" ?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Private_currency
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Complementary_currency
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Alternative_currency

By "completely new", do you mean "oldest kind of currency in the world" ?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Private_currency
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Complementary_currency
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Alternative_currency

By "completely new", do you mean "oldest kind of currency in the world" ?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Private_currency
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Complementary_currency
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Alternative_currency

Fine. As long as agents provocateurs identified with this method are thrown in jail for treason and undermining democracy.

I believe he belongs to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Forward_caste community

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Economic_mobility != https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_mobility

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Economic_mobility != https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_mobility

They don't, not in every case at least. They do, however, know the magnitude of the output neutrino flux from the accelerator in J-PARC, and from the process that generated them, that they are supposed to be muon neutrinos. The Super-Kamiokande is designed to detect neutrinos, as well as determine the type of neutrino they are detecting, and given the magnitude of the flux directed to them from J-PARC, they have statistical models that allow them to determine the statistical increase in the number of neutrino detection events they ought to see. Presumably they detected just about the number of neutrinos that they were supposed to, except that they weren't all muon neutrinos, as they would have expected if neutrinos did not oscillate, but a certain fraction of the increase were identified as electron neutrinos.

The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations has been suspected for a long time, ever since the number of neutrinos coming from the sun was observed to be significantly less than expected, given the known models of the sun's nuclear reactions (which generate lots of neutrinos). This was before methods for detecting other neutrino types than the electron neutrino were developed, and the solar neutrino problem was a major open problem in physics for a long time. The same Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in establishing that the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation was the solution to the solar neutrino problem.

This experiment is similar, but potentially it can be more finely controlled (not dependent on the far less controllable neutrino flux from the sun), so by fine-tuning it they can determine experimentally more properties of these mysterious particles. The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations is physics that lies beyond the Standard Model, and as such is bound to be extremely interesting. I do hope that J-PARC can continue their experiments soon, as their operations were affected by the Great Touhoku Earthquake last March.

They don't, not in every case at least. They do, however, know the magnitude of the output neutrino flux from the accelerator in J-PARC, and from the process that generated them, that they are supposed to be muon neutrinos. The Super-Kamiokande is designed to detect neutrinos, as well as determine the type of neutrino they are detecting, and given the magnitude of the flux directed to them from J-PARC, they have statistical models that allow them to determine the statistical increase in the number of neutrino detection events they ought to see. Presumably they detected just about the number of neutrinos that they were supposed to, except that they weren't all muon neutrinos, as they would have expected if neutrinos did not oscillate, but a certain fraction of the increase were identified as electron neutrinos.

The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations has been suspected for a long time, ever since the number of neutrinos coming from the sun was observed to be significantly less than expected, given the known models of the sun's nuclear reactions (which generate lots of neutrinos). This was before methods for detecting other neutrino types than the electron neutrino were developed, and the solar neutrino problem was a major open problem in physics for a long time. The same Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in establishing that the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation was the solution to the solar neutrino problem.

This experiment is similar, but potentially it can be more finely controlled (not dependent on the far less controllable neutrino flux from the sun), so by fine-tuning it they can determine experimentally more properties of these mysterious particles. The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations is physics that lies beyond the Standard Model, and as such is bound to be extremely interesting. I do hope that J-PARC can continue their experiments soon, as their operations were affected by the Great Touhoku Earthquake last March.

I see your Wikipedia article quote and raise a quote from merriam-webster.

money (as paper currency) not convertible into coin or specie of equivalent value

and a quote from N. Gregory Mankiw as cited in your Wikipedia article.

Fiat money, such as paper dollars, is money without intrinsic value: It would be worthless if it were not used as money.

Not to mention that I'm sure there are lots of critters down there that love to eat dead bodies.

According to wikipedia,
soft tissue of whale fall is consumed at 40-60 kg PER DAY. the guy has been "down there" for just over three months. I doubt there's much of anything left of him.

I don't know where you live, but in the United States, we believe rights are inherent to all human beings. Rights are not "ganted".

Don't know where you got that from. I understood that in the US, rights were actually granted to you in bills. Such as "The bill of rights".

But, as I'm apparently wrong on this, could provide more precise information on the matter?

Google isn't being very helpful on finding your source material for me.

Mostly because the picture is pretty, I'll note that cache was technically on package; but separate die, though it ran at full core speed and had many of the features that later on-die caches would have, making it pretty glaringly superior to the old on-motherboard cache RAM. The 1MB version even had 3 dice embedded in the same package, no wonder it cost so much...

This arrangement also made the PII-based "overdrive" upgrade card look kind of weird(more or less normal PII on the left, cache on the right).

I believe https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Burakumin are being used/abused to cleanup nuclear waste in Fukushima.

Or the CIA doesn't use the public facing web server for anything important, so they didn't bother securing it very well.

In fact, they probably set it up this way on purpose with an eye towards attracting interesting targets to their honey pot. It's a cheap and effective method when compared to other forms of surveillance and the CIA need only spend minimal effort and resources to promote their honey pot where desirable targets are likely to find it and follow up on any promising leads.

Well Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr (the long distance branch of the German railway system) is turning a profit. (In 2002 they introduced an innovative new pricing system, but they recovered from that 2.5 years later...)

They are running their third generation HSR now (ICE 3) and have just placed orders for 300 IC X trains.

Because GM has vested interest to see that it fails, again.

It is complicated I will admit. There is an apparent contradiction, but both are actually right.

Solar output increases by about 1 W/m^2 when at the maximum of its cycle - as illustrated here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Solar-cycle-data.png

This is not an insignificant amount of energy. It is equivalent energy of about 25000 nuclear bombs per hour. This is enough energy that many strong cycles in a row will overcome the thermal inertia of the Earth and oceans and warm the planet. Inversely, a number of very quiet cycles will cool the planet. So the magnitude of the solar cycles has been a pretty good predictor of global temperatures for a long time.

The confounding factor is that now anthropogenic greenhouse gasses (those greenhouse gasses that we have added to the atmosphere) are contributing about 2.5 W/m^2 to the planet. This is now dwarfing the contribution by the solar cycles - especially considering that the solar cycle is only at a maximum once every 11 or so years while the contribution from greenhouse gasses is constant. As Gavin Schmidt notes in the article:

"If we were to see a return to what's called Maunder Minimum conditions in the next 50 years or so, that would be interesting," Schmidt said. "I think we'd learn a lot about solar physics and solar variability. ... It's going to be scientifically very exciting if all this pans out."

Even then, however, he estimated that the effect of greenhouse-gas emissions would be on the order of 10 times as great. "What you might see over a 20- to 30-year period is a slight slowdown in the pace of warming," Schmidt said. "In terms of how we should think about climate change prediction in the future, reducing emissions and so on, it really wouldn't make much of a difference." - http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/14/6857473-solar-forecast-hints-at-a-big-chill

Yes, there's libgc. It turns malloc() into a GC-backed alloc (optionally from a per-thread allocator) and free() into a no-op. It periodically scans all mapped memory (incrementally, via some tricks) to find unreferenced allocations and frees them. In most cases, the performance is within about 10% of manual memory management, and that's the absolute worst case for it.

That's the worst possible way of using it though. You can get significant performance improvements by explicitly marking pointer locations in structures. I used it to implement Apple-compatible GC in the GNUstep Objective-C runtime, and some tests showed that the GC was only looking at about 5-10% of the total memory allocation. The other 90-95% was guaranteed not to contain pointers to GC'd memory (e.g. frame buffers, images, large strings, and so on). That's actually quite conservative, because a lot of the code wasn't written with GC in mind - with some tuning for GC I wouldn't be surprised if it got well under 5%.

Gold has inherent value. You need it to build useful things like space crafts and (some) electronics, and research in physics. Also, since ancient times it has served as juwelery. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gold#Use_and_applications

If you now say that gold doesn't have value without humans giving it value, then I'd have to argue that the word value doesn't have a meaning.

Why anthropogenic global warming is not a "theory":

If there is warming, it's claimed to be because of human activity.
If there is cooling, it's "climate CHANGE", and hey! That counts! And it's because of human activity anyway.
If there is no change at all, it's because the climate panickers' legislative efforts "worked", which is why they should be in charge of everything and everyone.

There is no condition which can arise which does not somehow fit into this "theory". There is no refutability; it is therefore not science. The scientific method requires that any hypothesis has a method of refutability; climate change/global warming as it is being peddled does not. But as long as there are research grants and "green" subsidies (big ones!) to be had, as long as it puts "white man's burden" thought into political and legal reality, and as long as it forcibly transfers wealth from the West to nations hostile to the West in the form of carbon credits... it's not about climate or science, it's about power and money. Summary of climate change politics: "I want a few tens of billions of oil company money under MY control, and the ability to pauperize anyone who dares try to stand up to me."

Don't worry, though. I'm sure the eco-tards will figure out a way to blame "solar change" on George Bush and on Republicans, then figure out a way to get some nice fat tax credits, subsidies, and "czar-level" appointments that will make the cash and power flow to them and away from the big bad boogeymen.

These attacks by LulzSec, Anonymous, et. al. remind me of the old Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life". In that episode, a child with godlike mental powers causes untold misery when, without understanding, he compels the residents of a small Ohio town to conform to his whim. Likewise, these hacktivist groups wield previously-unknown power, and they use to capriciously destroy whatever offends their ego, whimsy, or underdeveloped sense of justice. In the process, they not only hurt innocent bystanders not only undermine the legitimacy of their cause, but actually encourage more stringent regulation of the Internet. Like a character from a Sophocles play, they hasten the outcome they would fight.

They are legion. They do not forgive. They do not forget. They do not plan. They do not show restraint. They do not not choose their battles. They do not help.