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This is true. Basically all countries in the world run some level of monitoring through their consulates and embassies—this includes US allies spying on the US. Few have the ability to tap everything, but they all do it. For them, it's just basic intelligence gathering. http://news.yahoo.com/obama-suggests-spying-nations-allies-common-210845024.html [AP via Yahoo]

Don't forget holding hostages, and destroying ports.

Well, he's had his passport revoked, is being hunted around the world, and is being vilified in almost all public media.

Snowden isn't being hunted around the world because his passport is revoked. He is in Russia. Snowden isn't being vilified in "almost all public media." It is quite the reverse - he is being hailed as a hero by Chinese, Russians, many Europeans, and others across the world.

Well, at least he took refuge in Russia. What use do they have for four laptops full of NSA secrets?

Russia warns Ireland it will retaliate in spy row
Ireland Is Training Base for Russian Spies
As many Russian spies in UK today as in Cold War: Soviet defector
Canadian navy officer sentenced to 20 years for being Russian spy
10 in US held as spies for Russia
Russian spies in Australia at 'near Cold War level'
Germany jails Russian spy couple
Belgian diplomat suspected of being Russian spy
Finnish academic charged of aiding Russian spies
Spies in Sweden mostly from China, Russia, Iran
Estonia shaken by new Russian spy scandal
Georgia: Russian Spy Ring Smashed in Tbilisi -- Officials
Spain-Russia spy row leads to diplomats' expulsion

Russian warplanes breach NATO airspace - British and Norwegian jets intercepted Russian military aircraft ... close to the U.K. and Finland
Russian spy plane flies by Swedish military drill

This report comes after the newspaper wrote on 22 April, 2013 that Russian fighters had made dummy attacks close to Swedish territory during the Easter weekend.

RAF catches Russian bombers in UK airspace
UK jets shadow Russian bombers
Russian bombers’ secret UK missions ‘not a friendly act’
Russian subs stalk Trident in echo of Cold War - ... hunting down British Vanguard boats in a return to Cold War tactics
Russian around - A DESPERATE hunt was on last night for a Russian nuclear submarine lurking off the coast of Britain.

After years of struggling with an inkjet I dumped it for a B/W laser printer. The ink was always dry every time I needed to print something and cartriges are worth their weight in gold. So should I need to print in color -- it's a trip to a local pharmacy.

So assuming that 3D printer is somewhat related to inkjet in principle but more complex, it is probably only meant for dedicated shops and some hobbyist garages, not for mass market. And even if the above mentioned issues are overcome, handling 3d designs is probably more complex than an average comsumer wants to deal with.

Over its lifetime? Per year? Per what?

This article says, "The new solar farm will provide power to Sierra Pacific Power Co's electric grid that serves Apple's data centre and when completed will generate about hours 43.5 million kilowatt of clean energy a year, Apple said in a statement." So it's per year.

It's also way more efficient.

See, that's what I thought as well, but it turns out it is simply not true.

Power stations have a heat efficiency of around 40-45%, electric engines are around 90% efficient. Modern gas engine are 35-40% efficient. So, in total the direct efficiencies are quite comparable.

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=107&t=3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency
http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100628191919AAh0mSc

Right. There are two pertinent questions.

(1) How much total pollution does driving a set distance generate, and how easy is it to reduce this pollution?

For gas cars, the pollution comes from burning gas, and it can be reduced by increasing ICE efficiency and by burning renewable sources like ethanol or hydrogen. Both are quite limited since ICE efficiency is limited by heat engine physics and has been optimized quite effectively already for around 100 years, and alternative sources require non-renewable energy and/or a limited resource like agricultural land to produce.

For electric cars, the pollution comes from producing the electricity. In most countries, this is 90% or more from burning fossil fuels. It is often said that this is much more efficient that ICE's, but he difference is quite marginal: modern cars operate at up to 35% or even 40% (diesel) while power stations operate in the low 40% efficiency and the electric engine is around 90% efficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency, http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=107&t=3 and http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100628191919AAh0mSc), although gas cars have further losses in gear and transmission systems that electric engines can avoid. However, shifting to less pollution source power is easier as there are almost limitless energy sources (solar, water, wind, waves etc) that do not produce direct pollution and do not compete for e.g. agricultural land. Even nuclear is a viable option based on how you compare carbon and related pollution to nuclear pollution, including risks like spills and meltdowns (damage x probability).

The ease to switch to non-fossil fuels is really the only viable argument for total pollution.

Of course, a real calculation should estimate all indirect inefficiencies such as fuel transport and amortize all non-unit costs such as the pollution cost to build and maintain the car and the infrastructure around it including oil wells, power stations and even the extra road maintenace because of fuel trucks driving on the road. However, this probably won't change the argument that the main gain of electric vehicles is the flexibility to switch power sources.

(2) Where does the pollution go to?

We can weight pollution by location. For global warming this is not so important, although carbon dioxide near a sink (forest, ocean) might be absorbed quicker than far away from a sink, but in general a greenhouse gas is a greenhouse gas. For health considerations however, it makes a huge difference for pollutants like nitrogen oxides and micro particles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_emissions#Main_motor_vehicle_emissions). In a dense city they cause much more trouble than over the ocean or in rural areas, both because of concentration of pollutants and of people.

For this equation, electric wins hands down by shifting the pollution from the population center to the location of the power plant.

tl;dr TFA completely misses the point by focusing on comparing current pollution to current pollution, ignoring the environmental benefits of shifting pollution from cars to power plants, which are both less harmful by being out of the way and by offering a feasible path to clean energy sources.

McDonald's is being sued for allegedly paying less than minimum wage using this method.

What would be better is the *reverse* - a soundproof glass enclosed room at a premium price where people can smoke, talk, and be on their cell phones all they want while the rest of the theater gets to watch a movie in peace.

Or maybe the mainstream theaters could just just get some balls and do what Alamo Drafthouse did...

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/texas-movie-theater-makes-example-psa-texting-audience-170925090.html

LOL, man Foxconn sounds like the US Auto Makers in the 1970s. It's because as others have pointed out. Bolted Down robotic workers don't complain and don't jump out of the nearest window. They depreciate, require routine maintenance but day after day they do what they're instructed within extremely precise tolerances. That means a better quality product for their customers without all of those "soft problems" that complicates business.

With China pushing people out of rural areas and into ever larger cities, it will be very interesting over the next few years to see how all of those people will earn a living. While the jobs at Foxconn are drudgery by any modern standard, they do allow people to earn money and contribute to the economy. Turning them ultimately into those nice wage slaves that all companies love that buy products and need services. Workers in China are already pushing for higher wages and better working conditions, something that the beneficent Foxconn would be very reluctant to go along with given their recent labor relations gaffs and breakup with Apple. Unfortunately the stories about labor shortages in China seem a bit disingenuous and reminds me of how there's a presumed "tech shortage" in this country. It seems even in China getting labor for the absolute cheapest price may be pushing this 12 year urbanization plan. These are all problems for China which are magnitudes of order more complex when you're talking about the scale in terms of a population of over one billion. I don't think China can make enough of anything, electronics, knock-off watches, handbags et al to keep up with the population demanding a better quality of life, which means better wages, better working conditions and all those consumer goodies the rest of us take so much for granted.

As a father with three kids in college and another one one just about there already, I wonder where they're going to make their niche in this world economy where your education and your experience can all be cooped out to some fraud ridden outsourcing firm who brings in a person or outsources your position elsewhere. I've told all of my kids not to follow me into Software and Engineering fields because people employed in those fields are now considered a commodity and subject to too much educational push from an ever increasing wave of immigrants from diploma mills overseas. What people don't really realize is that we've shifted out way of thinking from "value and quality" to "good enough at a low price" because the products and services we use have varying degrees based on those expectations. Entire markets the world over have been shifting in that direction and it's eroding the economic and social landscape of countries everywhere with companies seeking the lowest cost labor they can find that has just enough technical competency to get what they need done.

How could you be nervous about AMD? They're in every single next generation console system.

Maybe Peek at their financials?

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AMD+Key+Statistics

Please, I'm not being critical of your post. But I am very definitely saying that IBM's methods of moving those jobs overseas is entirely immoral. It is big business at its worst. IBM, like many mega corporations (Apple, Microsoft, Google, to name a few), lie through their teeth when it comes to stating the reasons they do what they do that affects many thousands of US jobs. The so called immigration bill passed just yesterday illustrates the problem most vividly. A quote from Yahoo news: "But Corley insisted that the tech industry never had agreed to the restrictions in the original bill and was only trying to ensure the H-1B program would be workable for an industry that's good for American workers and the U.S. economy." Seriously??? The H-1B program is a cheap training program which not only displaces US jobs overseas but also keeps countries like India poor in favor of more profits for US corporations now. If companies like IBM were required to follow all US laws in those outsourced countries -- something I believe they should be required to do -- it would help raise the standard of living in those countries that US corporations are currently exploiting because of cheap labor and eventually help them reach parity with the US and other Western economies, making outsourcing far less appealing, and consequently improve ALL local economies. But as long as corporations can take advantage of poor economies, business practices like these will continue.

Uh, what? By what measurement? Most Americans don't produce anything.

You have to admit: this is an utter nonsense statement.

No, no I don't. Most Americans are engaged purely in the rearrangement of deck chairs into temporarily pleasing patterns.

http://news.yahoo.com/singapore-malaysia-face-economic-hit-prolonged-smog-093307319.html

Really it doesn't matter what we do in the USA if Asia and the middle east are 1000x worse with a larger population.

Hope he speaks Russian. Seems that his stay in Russia may have inexplicably been extended if this news report is correct.

It is already too late. Your exploits/backdoors/identity thieving/vulnerability scans/url guessing and whatever got extremely punished (i.e. 100 years in jail, i think that almost no nazis in nuremberg got that high penalty), while US intelligence agencies do all of that, and far more, in the open and probably getting rewards for it, even with help from software manufacturers.

Face it, what you are calling democracy is just oligarchy with a wrong label over it. Don't let the word fool you.

Coming from the company that is listed to happily give info to the NSA, that send them skype conversation (that was there before MS bought it, but they kept sending it), that have a nice NSAKEY since last century in their main OS, and that just delays fixing vulnerabilities until NSA makes use of them, makes them at the very least dubious as a company to put your trust.

But leaving "hypotetical" company ethics beside, now that you named recent versions of IE, they worsened how they store our passwords, easing the task to retrieve them if your computer is compromised (ok, it runs windows already, so we can skip that requirement).

I'm quite sure most people who've ever heard of him consider him being a true american hero.
 
 

Especially Edward Snowden is a hero to many young Americans, poll suggests. Edward Snowden performed a public service in leaking information about NSA programs, say 60 percent of Americans age 18 to 29, according to a poll. Tea partyers and liberals also approve.

im certain blocking black box technology in cars has nothing to do with, say, the potential to correct a politicians statements after the fact

The sad part is its going down faster BECAUSE of MSFT and their refusal to listen on the "LOL I Iz A Cellphone!" Win 8 douchebaggery!

If you would have come to me or any of the thousands of PC retailers across the country in 2006 we could have told you THEN that the market was gonna take a downturn and it has NOTHING to do with cellphones and tablets, its because the MHz wars were a bubble and when the war ended the bubble burst. I was selling triple cores with 4GB of RAM as the LOW END 5 years ago, now how many users are gonna stress that system hard enough to need a faster PC? Hell my youngest is gaming on a $45 Athlon triple, THAT is how overpowered X86 chips have become.

So PCs are still gonna sell probably a good 100 million units a year, which is nothing to sneeze at, but because MSFT just can't fucking stand the thought of Apple being bigger than them in anything they will end up handing those sales on a silver platter to Google who will be happy to take that business. But Joe and Jane average aren't buying PCs before they break because...there really is no point. What will that new PC do that their Athlon dual desktop or C2D laptop won't do already? Will it surf any faster? hell their videos already play nicely, what do you have to offer them to make them spend hundreds on a new PC?

Well according to MSFT the answer to that is to tell them to throw their monitors and laptops away to buy $1000+ touchscreen systems so they can look at everything in "fingerprint-o-vision" and "enjoy" paying 30% more for cellphone app crap on their desktop...gee, thanks MSFT, that is what we always wanted. Now wonder Acer is putting their money on Chrome, you are losing those sales because you DO NOT LISTEN, and if you refuse to give customers what they want? Somebody else will.

It is quite popular. It's called Chrome.

Ad-friendly features include:
-inability to create ad-blocking add-on as good as FF's
-Permanent built-in serial number (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=google+chrome+serial+number)
so that killing cookies or super-cookies is pointless.

No word yet on Prism compatibility.

Um no, they found one plot and told us about it.

http://news.yahoo.com/usda-modified-wheat-appears-isolated-205944372.html

No other cases have been found.

Apparently, Crawford was an industrial engineer for GE and a KKK member -- which just makes it all that much weirder that they'd try to sell it to Jewish organizations.

http://news.yahoo.com/york-men-accused-plotting-build-radiation-weapon-204445880.html

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/why-phone-cable-internet-bills-cost-much-130914030.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-27/u-s-internet-users-pay-more-for-slower-service.html

Things like 1% management fees and high expense ratios on 401(K)s (which can end up costing you 3/4 of your retirement money), combination life insurance/savings plans (almost always a ripoff), and more specific to day-traders, things like how the AP sells early access to hedge funds, insider trading, that type of thing. I would argue that even the ads on CNBC trying to convince people that they can make money day-trading qualify as a scam. Also, see this video:

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/yes-markets-rigged-survive-shark-infested-waters-143233110.html

In the 2009 reboot, the "pipes and stuff" vibe is not from a movie set. It's an Anheuser-Busch brewery. According to the following article, the latest edition of the reboot had scenes filmed in the National Ignition Facility. http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/star-trek-boldly-goes-unlikely-real-life-locations-153158175.html

Just after NSA deploy its own exploit

They are analog but for the sake of brevity there's no correct answer to this one as far as I can tell. Here's someone who's put the time into authoring a reply to this very idea:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080817073539AAhrHHM

The short answer is, well, call 'em analog. They *can* be digital. I suspect that most modern "telegraph" services are entirely digital. They also use just the 1 really. With Morse code they don't use the "off" dead-space for anything either really. SOS would be ... --- ... which is on, on, on, on longer, on longer, on longer, on, on, on.

Most of these groups were not promoting candidates - and the Tea Party certainly did not promote Orin Hatch. A quick Bing search shows that Orin Hatch is not a Tea Party favorite.

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/06/27/utah-tea-party-targets-orrin-hatch
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/palin-tells-tea-party-lay-off-orrin-hatch-165829376.html

Most Tea Party people are promoting a cause and not candidates; that is one of the reason they are not liked by the Republican Establishment.

With Apple, every consumer is chained only to the app store.

iOS users overwhelmingly like having a one-stop-shop with all the apps in. That's one of the things they chose that platform for.

It wasn't sprung on them as a change from previous practice. Indeed before the Apple Store, the mobile app market was tiny. Apple's one-stop-shop popularised phone apps.

And you're pulling this data from where exactly? Your intuition?

Is that why so millions of people fall over themselves to jailbreak the phones?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/latest-jailbreak-statistics-jaw-dropping-154024296.html
http://www.geek.com/apple/stats-reveal-evasi0n-ios-6-1-jailbreak-1538656/

Looks like you're falling victim to ex post facto reasoning and attributing Stockholm syndrome to iOS users.

Of course when called out on it he said he meant that the NSA doesn't read citizens email:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/intel-chief-clapper-gave-least-untruthful-answer-u-164742798.html
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/spy-chief-clapper-denies-misleading-congress-spying-americans-221024826.html

Which 1) no longer denies phone records are collected and 2) no longer answers the question that was asked in the first place!

Of course when called out on it he said he meant that the NSA doesn't read citizens email:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/intel-chief-clapper-gave-least-untruthful-answer-u-164742798.html
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/spy-chief-clapper-denies-misleading-congress-spying-americans-221024826.html

Which 1) no longer denies phone records are collected and 2) no longer answers the question that was asked in the first place!

Best Buy's former CEO, Brian Dunn, was named Worst CEO of 2012.

Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, "Should Have Already Been Fired." Quote from the article: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today."

More about Steve Ballmer from that article: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value -- and jobs."

Scroll down in this article to see Businessweek's January 16 cover that called Steve Ballmer "Monkey Boy". The cover says "No More", but that doesn't take away from the fact that the magazine called him Monkey Boy -- on its cover.

Looks like your experience is wrong then. On Linux (and to an extent on Mac OS X too), installing software is just clicking on the software you want in the software center, software is well packaged and doesn't come with crapware, and there is no need for anti-virii (at least it's not recommended to install one). Updates that require a restart aren't frequent either.

I agree that Linux software repositories got most of this right a while back. Now that Apple has a Mac App Store, it's becoming easier for Mac users, too. Windows is primarily the one that's lagging behind.

Samsung makes laptops as well as tablets and smartphones. If a laptop with Android is what people wanted, they would sell it.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/samsung-planning-android-laptops-expert-says-50011199/

http://bgr.com/2013/05/10/samsung-androidbook-release-date-rumor/

http://news.yahoo.com/samsung-reportedly-launch-android-notebook-coming-months-154507413.html

Wrong. go talk to a doctor that knows their shit. While many of them have greater effect, they do so at a cost of greater side effects. One of the benefits of many of the newer ones is lower side effects. For example Sertraline (Zoloft) has no serious side effects, all the ones it has are annoying at most, they are not harmful. Also it is non-addictive, non-habit forming, so it is something that can be taken your whole life, no problem.

Ask a scientist about research.

In the early years, drugs easily beat the placebo: They were, on average, 4.5 times as effective, where effectiveness means how well they lowered blood pressure, vanquished tumors, lifted depression or did whatever else they were intended to.

But the trend line was inexorably downhill, found Dr Mark Olfson of Columbia University and statistician Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania. By the 1980s drugs were less than four times better; by the 1990s, twice as good, and by the 2000s just 36 percent better than a placebo. Since older drugs were much superior to placebo and newer ones only slightly so, that means older drugs were generally more effective than newer ones.

Do you know who works on medicine? Companies that make money from you getting sick. Now, medicine is patented, and the price is kept high because a $1500/year medicine costs the consumer $10/mo directly (and $1500/year through insurance... well, okay, not really; it's an averaging game). Generics cost less, and 14 years down the line Pfeizer needs to make a new drug to patent. The patent expiring is good for the consumer, but not so good for Pfeizer who would rather keep price gouging unethically.

Whatever the reason for many new drugs packing less punch than old ones, that will not keep them from reaching patients.

"The way the drug regulatory system is set up, even if you have just a small advance, if you market it right it can be very profitable," said Kesselheim.

Back in the 90s, psychiatrists prescribed very low doses of MDMA to treat PTSD. It worked for about 3-4 months--one tiny dose, 1/10 of what it takes to actually get you high, and you're good for months--then you take another one. No side effects (MDMA is ridiculously benign, it's unheard of--even Piracetam has worse side effects accounting for effect, scale, and frequency) and almost 100% population effectiveness. MDMA is impossible to patent and is cheap. Now we use terribly damaging drugs that aren't nearly as effective... is this a casualty of the War on Drugs making MDMA hard to get even legitimately, or a casualty of Pfeizer not being able to make money on MDMA?

Concession: The study was done by the Government, which under Obamacare (what a stupid buzzname, isn't it like Healthcare Reform Act of Somestupidshityear?) has the interest of reducing costs. A number of alternate explanations were given, such as that people are harder to treat today, or that we're scrutinizing clinical trials more now than before. However, this is interesting:

While experts agree that tougher trials and similar factors explain some of the decline in drugs' reported effectiveness, "something real is going on here," said Olfson. "Physicians keep saying that many of the new things just aren't working as well," and therefore prescribe antidepressant drugs called tricyclics (developed in the 1950s) instead of SSRIs (from the 1980s), or diuretics (invented in the 1920s) for high blood pressure instead of newer anti-hypertensives.

Doctors don't sit around weighing clinical trials; they read a pamphlet and prescribe new drugs. When they stop prescribing new drugs, it's because they've had 2000 patients and found that more than 1000 of them did very poorly on the new shit that they were told was better but did very well on old shit that was i

I'm taking you to the polling station. You're gonna get one ballot and an ink pen. When you are done marking your selections, you take a picture of it with your smartphone OR ELSE.

Yeah, you're right. Nobody could possibly be coerced now. They have a curtain after all.

Mark the ballot as expected and take a picture. Then add another mark that makes it invalid. As I said, votes against your camp: 0.

Exif tells me you spent several extra seconds after you took the picture in the booth. That tells me you were making additional marks on your ballot. I'm beating you within an inch of your life for this infraction.... See how clever you are? You just earned yourself a beating. Now that you have missing teeth and broken ribs, that vote seems pretty insignificant doesn't it? I bet you won't do THAT again.

Besides, your current system allows the same process of forced voting which you describe via absentee ballots. I still believe you are simply setting the bar much higher for online voting than it is set in the current system.

Admittedly reform is unlikely in this case, and no doubt he will either be killed in retribution shortly after serving his sentence, choose to remain in custody for his own safety, or (as it is feared) do something to justify another prolonged sentence.

However, what you suggest is revenge and is immoral. You have no way of knowing whether or not someone can be reformed without knowing his or her full psychology. If a prisoner does get cured or reforms, which people do sometimes succeed at (like this guy) then the default assumption of an aggressive response has caused damage; the experience of prison and the permanent branding of criminality (hiring discrimination, not being allowed to vote, et cetera) creates an impossible gulf to escape. Society has destroyed the potential for a healthy, productive person to ever exist again, and perhaps worse, is actively repressing it by legal enforcement of stigmas.

An ideal punitive system solves the reason the person committed the crime and then puts the criminal back into society whenever possible. Punishment only creates fresh incentives to commit wrongdoing. This is what the Norwegian system is working towards, however unpopular it may be amongst the people for any reason. It will never be popular because justice is a social construct built around anger, which will not go away any time soon, but it is the right thing to do.

According to this article they have sold 100 million copies so far: http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/windows-8-sells-100-million-230105134.html

Not at all bad, if you ask me.

How many of those licenses had the disk reformatted and a pirate copy of Windows 7 installed?

Vista had downgrade rights to XP and a lot of people used them but it still counted as a Vista sale in Microsoft's accounts. If Windows 8 had downgrade rights to Windows 7 then I bet a *lot more* people would use it than they did with Vista.

On the other hand, robots don't go on murderous rampages out of anger:

http://news.yahoo.com/lawyer-soldier-plead-guilty-afghan-massacre-140057614.html

It's difficult to value companies with new business models. I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but you could start by taking a look at analyst targets:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ao?s=FB+Analyst+Opinion

It looks like the median target of $34 which is much higher than the current price of $23.32, so you might want to consider picking some up.

As is common in this matter, you have things badly confused. Israel did nothing to Iran to deserve they way the new Iranian government turned on them. If you think otherwise, please provide a list. One hint to reduce the chances of you going down the wrong path again: the Palestinians are not Iranian, and the Iranians are not Arabs.

As to "untermenschen," that would be the view of post-revolution Iranian government, and many Arabs living in Palestine.

Reading Mein Kampf in Tehran

On Monday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry held an international conference. Nothing unusual in that: Foreign ministries hold conferences, mostly dull ones, all the time. But this one was different. For one, "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" dealt with history, not current politics. Instead of the usual suspects — deputy ministers and the like — the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Theil, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Toeben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers.

The guest list was selective: No one with any academic eminence, or indeed any scholarly credentials, was invited. One Palestinian scholar, Khaled Mahameed, was asked to come but then barred because he holds an Israeli passport — and also perhaps because he, unlike other guests, believes that the Holocaust really did happen.

In response, Europe, America, and Israel expressed official outrage. The German government, to its credit, organized a counter-conference. ...

Hamas video: Killing Jews is 'worship that draws us close to Allah'
The Jews Were Brought to Palestine for the Great Massacre

As to the rest, you should catch up on some reading and get back to me.

UN agency stops aid imports to Gaza, cites Hamas 'thefts'
Looters strip Gaza greenhouses
Gazans seethe over taxes and blackouts
Sewage flood causes Gaza deaths
Hamas Bulldozes UN-Designated Historical Site to Make Room for Terrorist Training Camp
In Gaza, Hamas rule has not turned out as many expected
Rights watchdog accuses Hamas of torture, abuse of Palestinians
Hamas accused of routine torture of detainees in Gaza Strip
Palestinian Authority: Still Stealing "Hundreds of Millions," Hamas Taking Over
NY Times ignores Gaza's millionaires, hypes poverty, blames Israel (natch)

According to reports in the Arab press, a thriving smuggling economy in Gaza has produced no fewer than 600 millionaires. Hundreds of tunnels to Egypt have become bustling export and import conduits -- with the ruling Hamas elite siphoning off milli

Although your point is kind of valid, Closure looks like it could run on a fist-generation Pentium with a 2MB ATi VLB card. Apparently their programmers are just terrible.

Terrible programming generally fails on consoles too:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120408105239AA6tkkR

What would help for PC gaming is if all game programmers could rely on some set of metrics provided by a unified benchmarking application. Creating settings profiles that would 'just work' and even predicting whether a game would run (well) on your system would become fairly trivial.

Ugh, they aren't even in the same ballpark. Microsoft use their cloud server infrastructure for all sorts of things.

THIS is the difference between a shitty cheapskate gaming company that mistreats their employees and a legitimate enterprise vendor.

EA provisioned literally *dozens* of servers for Simcity 5. MSFT is provisioning 300,000 servers out of countless servers operating the Azure network.

But geocities was originally free

And then they improved it with some paid services.

Geocities could have morphed into something similar to blogspot, maybe with ads for Yahoo revenue.

Why would they do that when they have Yahoo! Blog?

If you look at this chart, things look pretty good.

Things get progressively rosy so when you then click on the 2-year, 5-year, and Max historical perspective on the same page.

No, you better check your facts. Their margins are in that range but a company like United Healthcare is, in fact, "rolling in it".

It's just that even more than a cursory examination of these "scandals" reveals them to either be normal function of government misconstrued as a crime or a legitimate problem bent completely out of factual frame of reference in order to blame the president.

Have you ever heard of the phrase "The buck stops here"? The idea is that the President is the top guy, and is responsible for everything.

For example, in the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina, just about the entire news media held George W. Bush personally responsible for the failures of FEMA, because Bush was the President.

There are two possibilities here. Either Mr. Obama knew and approved of the IRS actions, or he didn't. The former means he is a crooked politician, and the latter means he does not have full control of the machinery of government. If you are a fan of Mr. Obama, you better hope it's the latter. (And if you blamed W for Katrina, I hope you also blame Mr. Obama for the IRS scandal; fair is fair.)

So, when I say the government is far too big and needs to be trimmed way the hell down, will you tell me I am "paranoid" for worrying that government will get out of control?

As to the entire rest of your post, I can't imagine the level of self-awareness you must lack to write all that in the context of discussing paranoia and not recognize it as such. There is almost nothing there but conspiracy theories unbacked by evidence.

IRS evidence (citations from IG report, ProPublica, USA Today... and a Jon Stewart Daily Show clip)
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348410/tea-party-irs-scandal-facebook-faq

IRS asked a group to publish the contents of their prayers (freedom of speech? separation of church and state?)
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/irs-conservative-group-2009-members-pray-193833144.html

Discussion of possible union connection.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/20/obama-and-the-irs-the-smoking

Wikipedia discussion of Wide Receiver and FaF.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal#Operation_Wide_Receiver

Inspector General's report on Fast and Furious.
http://www.justice.gov/oig/testimony/t1220.pdf

So now, your turn. What is your explanation for the difference between Wide Receiver and FaF? (If you are going to say "they were the same" then go read that IG report and try again.) Please tell me some theory as to why guns were allowed to walk with absolutely no attempts to track them and without warning the Mexican authorities that this was going to happen.

Well, the total in 2009 was 110,952 according to Yahoo Canada, fwtw. So 27,738 per year and 76 per day, assuming 4 years of non-stop uploading, slow at first of course but reaching high volumes soon enough. Meow, or should we say nyan? But 111k sounds wayyyyyyyyyy too low...

Ants in Weird/Odd Places:

Bugs in the computer: Sun
Microsystems, Inc. knows why Brazil is known to its native inhabitants as the kingdom of the ants.

Ants in yer... Pants? NOT!
(Toshiba notebook/laptop); Ants
Invade Apple iBook; "Yep, those are ants in that laptop".

(Tele)phones: Panasonic Cordless Phone and Ants In My Nokia Mobile Phone (A Yahoo! account is required).

Ants in Omniview switchboxes: An e-mail story of ants invading a network
switchbox.

Argentine ants invade a network hub.

Computerworld on "Ants had taken up residence in a guy's external hard drive. Seen on /.).

A photograph showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his
digital subscriber line (DSL) connection and phone system.

A 38 seconds YouTube video showing crazy ants in a computer mouse.

One minute and 19 seconds Break video, from VideoSift: "Creepy Surprise. -- Wife asked me to try to get the printer to work, since she was having some problems with it. Imagine my surprise when I looked inside..."

Help,
A Colony Of Ants Attacked My Enterprise Rental Car And Ruined My
Vacation!

Ants in Weird/Odd Places:

Bugs in the computer: Sun
Microsystems, Inc. knows why Brazil is known to its native inhabitants as the kingdom of the ants.

Ants in yer... Pants? NOT!
(Toshiba notebook/laptop); Ants
Invade Apple iBook; "Yep, those are ants in that laptop".

(Tele)phones: Panasonic Cordless Phone and Ants In My Nokia Mobile Phone (A Yahoo! account is required).

Ants in Omniview switchboxes: An e-mail story of ants invading a network
switchbox.

Argentine ants invade a network hub.

Computerworld on "Ants had taken up residence in a guy's external hard drive. Seen on /.).

A photograph showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his
digital subscriber line (DSL) connection and phone system.

A 38 seconds YouTube video showing crazy ants in a computer mouse.

One minute and 19 seconds Break video, from VideoSift: "Creepy Surprise. -- Wife asked me to try to get the printer to work, since she was having some problems with it. Imagine my surprise when I looked inside..."

Help,
A Colony Of Ants Attacked My Enterprise Rental Car And Ruined My
Vacation!