There is something to be said about banning the re-importation of US-branded drugs from Canada at a lower price. It's nuts that branded pills sent to Canada at a lower price become impotent when shipped back to the US.
However, the story covers more than this. They were (pretending to) ship RU-486, the abortion drug, along with steroids and human growth hormone into the US, which is illegal. Moreover, it's not the word of a con man. There is evidence that top level Google executives were actually aware of the kinds of drugs that were sold. This is a blockbuster case, and Google should be slapped for aiding what they knew was illegal sales of drugs to the US.
Actually, they probably want to audit the code for backdoors and other security vulnerabilities before deploying the software on their systems. A whole bunch of governments got snookered when Cryto AG sold closed-source encryption software with a backdoor that allowed the US government to easily break their communications. In particular, the NSA was rumored to have backdoored Crypto AG systems since the fifties, allowing the US government to spy on communications from such warm and fuzzy countries as Iran.
(1) Google probably paid more to have exclusive rights to the patents. There's no point in having a patent that a potential defendant can go to IBM to license, thereby circumventing your lawsuit. (2) IBM has so many patents that they are essentially lawsuit-proof. Selling these rights to Google instead of licensing them doesn't lower IBM's ability to defend itself against a patent lawsuit.
I think he was trying to say that Senators make "only" $175,000 a year but lead lavish lifestyles. That's because they can do stuff like trade on inside information, which is pretty awesome as a fringe benefit.
You know, a bunch of real admirals thought the same thing you did: that the US Navy has sufficient defense in depth to defend against an attack by dozens of small, fast ships with Sunburn, Exocet, or Silkworm missiles. They were proven dead wrong. The Millennium Challenge '02 was one of the largest war games in history. In that war game, the mad general in charge of the mock enemy force sunk sixteen US ships, including a carrier and two helicopter carriers filled with Marines.
How did this happen? The enemy force was composed of small ships and light aircraft. They went around the US fleet for hours until the US fleet had a hard time tracking them. Eventually, US fleet was surrounded by the bad guys. Then suddenly, they all attacked at once. Some speed boats made mad suicide dashes at the fleet while attacking with guns and rockets. Prop planes began making suicide dives. Other speed boats opened fire with a whole bunch of Silkworms. All the while, the enemy forces closed with the US fleet, which was busy engaging ships, aircraft, and missiles. An enemy boat got close enough to loose a Silkworm at a carrier, which was sunk when its over-burdened defenses failed to stop the missile.
LastPass is a web-based service that syncs your passwords across your computers, Android devices, iPhone, and Blackberry. Supposedly, it uses client-side encryption so even if the stored data is compromised, it is useless without your password. Most importantly, it supports Google Authenticator so those with Android devices can use it to generate secure keys needed to log in.
We killed Osama Bin Laden by flying our commandos in on a STEALTH HELICOPTER with intelligence provided by a STEALTH UAV. Night vision let the commandos zerg rush unsuspecting defenders while the entire deal with quarterbacked using GPS, which requires a system of satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Meanwhile, we're incinerating (literally) tons of insurgents (and more than a few innocents) using remotely-piloted drones that didn't exist when the conflict began. The bad guys performed their own R&D to come up with ever more sophisticated IEDs. The US comes up with counter-jammers, and more sophisticated armor. Then somehow we engaged in a "secret killing program" that reduced the insurgency in Iraq.
Other than that, R&D has no use in modern warfare.
High cost process? The more you shrink the die, the cheaper it gets to produce. Once the R&D and fabs have been done, you want to move everything to the smaller process if the yields are okay. Smaller dies mean that you get more chips per wafer. That means lower costs.
The doctors charge a whole bunch for a "check up" that confirms some sort of physical disorder that all the other doctors managed to miss. You know, they're specialists who find things that all the other doctors miss, so they have to charge more for their expertise, in uh, finding more reasons to give prescriptions than all the other doctors who have previously treated their patients.
From the other perspective, my brother is an ER doctor. He sees many drug-seekers every week. They'll come in claiming specious injuries (my neck hurts) and demand Oxycontin. Last week, some guy claimed that he never had Oxycontin before but needed it. A quick check revealed he had eight prescriptions already. And it's not just anecdotal evidence. Countering drug seeking behavior is one of the more important lessons ER doctors have to learn.
What is anecdotal is my brother's disdain for pain management doctors. He calls most of them quacks who are legalized drug pushers. That's not to trivialize your experience or to denigrate your doctor, but apparently many of these dudes are making money pushing Oxycontin.
Chrome also has the following advantages that are under the hood yet still very important (for nerds like me): (1) Chrome is sandboxed. (2) Plugins are more secure in Chrome. (3) It is multi-threaded in a way that benefits more from multi-cores. (4) Chrome is faster.
Um, as to your first point, we use Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from submarines. We do use them to initiate first strikes. The missiles cost $1 million a pop but you don't risk a pilot, and you can stick a bunch of them into a submarine. We could make them stealthier and faster but that would violate a nuclear arms treaty. Because a nuclear-capable cruise missile that's supersonic and stealthy would put the emphasis on a first strike lo..
LOL, no. Siri is available for iPhone 4S, you know, the "new" iPhone 4 that they had to release to keep their fans appeased while they were working on iPhone 5. The Samsung Galaxy S II were taking up way too much marketshare so they had to drop something. Siri is NOT available for iPhone 4.
A product exists that might be suitable to your interests. "Once sprayed on your license plate, PhotoBlockerâ(TM)s special formula produces a high-powered gloss that reflects the flash back towards the camera. This overexposes the image of your license plate, rendering the picture unreadable. With PhotoBlocker, your license plate is invisible to traffic cameras yet completely legible to the naked eye."
Why the hate for this comment when it is certainly true for the United States? We have Predator drones being deployed along the US-Mexico border to interdict smugglers. Rick Perry is calling for boots on the ground in addition to more drones. During the Occupy Wall Street protest, the LRAD acoustic cannon was deployed against protesters by the NYPD. Yes, a city police department deployed a military-grade weapon against civilians.
Hahahaha. You say that as if telling the truth makes it all right. There was a gay kid who was outed by his roommate, who tape recorded his sexual congress with another man. The gay kid jumped off a bridge. You have a right to privacy, especially to the facts that are true. If you out the gay kid trying to cause him mental anguish, then you should be punished because there was no value to your actions.
Pretend that there's an abortion doctor. You hate abortions. You start posting the doctor's personal information. You post the time she drops her kid off at school. You post pictures of her house, her car, and her family. You post the kind of security system that she has. You post that she wears a bulletproof vest so you should aim for the head.
To be fair, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not call for the destruction of Israel, or for it to be wiped off the map. Rather, he stated that it was time for the Zionist government of Israel to be wiped off the mapâ"in short, he called for regime change in Israel. I'm no fan of this guy, but everyone claiming that he wants another Holocaust is just stoking the propaganda fires against Iran. That's worse than the demagoguery that so offends you.
The grandparent post did not suggest that Iran can wipe Israel off the map because Christianity is false. Rather, he (correctly) points out that a lot of the neo-con Zionists in America are hardcore Christians who support Israel so all the Jews can go back there and bring forth the Rapture, whereupon they will all die along with the rest of the non-believers in a battle with Satan. I find that disconcerting. And you also falsely assert again that Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map, which it has never said.
It's multiple choice, friendo. Once you realize that it's 47*3, you realize that the answer has to end in 1. There's only one answer choice that fit that requirement. Bingo bango. The other question? 29 is about a quarter less than 40. So you think, well about 72 less so about 216. Just a little under this, eh, 208 will work.
Everyone is missing the really obvious point: the control signals are sent via satellite from ABOVE the aircraft, which flies at 50,000. Any attempt to hijack the controls would require the broadcasting of the signals from ABOVE the aircraft. The chances that Iran tracked this really small stealth drone, then decided not to shoot it down, but rather to track it with radar, then to fly an airplane above it to transmit cyberwarfare signals to it, are very small.
More likely, the drone crashed because, well, shit happens. Iran is getting screwed over by cyberwarfare (LOL, Stuxnet) so it decides to retaliate by talking about cyberwarfare.
I can't wait for everyone to use apps like Google Authenticator to set up two-factor authentication. SMS is a hack, and it is better than not having two-factor authentication at all. However, an app that resides on the phone would require access to the actual phone itself and can't be stolen using remote means (that I can think of). LastPass is the only third-party app I can think of that uses GA for added protection, but hopefully banks will work with Google to set this up for their websites as well.
Junk mail actually subsidizes the USPS. When Congress considered banning junk mail, the USPS and the Direct Mailers Association opposed the move. Without junk mail, the USPS would lose a huge source of funding.
This is bullshit. We have been patrolling enemy countries for their SAM and radar sites since the Cold War. Even stealth aircraft can be seen on radar, and their flight paths have to be routed around radar sites. When the First Gulf War was initiated, the first shots were fired by Apache helicopters that infiltrated Iraqi airspace by flying low altitude then blowing up a radar site. Perimeter air defenses are blown up by cruise missiles and the like to permit stealth aircraft to fly in and blow up other air defense systems. Only then do non-stealth aircraft with anti-radiation missiles come in to play.
America has been probing enemy air defenses since the Cold War. Operation Home Run was one in a series of operations that sent bombers stuffed with electronics into Russian territory to sniff where the defense radars were. At first, the bombers had to fly in international waters. But then the Russians would simply refuse to turn on all their radars to prevent their detection. Therefore, the US started to have their bombers suddenly divert into Russian airspace at a mad dash, which forced them to turn on their radars and shoot down US aircraft. Quite a few were lost in this manner. Both sides didn't make a big deal out of it because they didn't want a nuclear war. The families of the killed aircrews were told that their loved ones died in training accidents. Two hundred Americans and 40 aircraft were lost.
It's also as though someone wants to prevent a full-out shooting or nuclear war. Israel is taking a more and more hostile stance towards Iran. There are stories leaking about how the Israelis are going to attack Iran without US permission. If you were the US, you have to talk the Israelis off the ledge. So what do you do? You have to do what you did in the First Gulf War to stop the Israelis from coming into the war: hunt Scuds and do other shit to show them that you're providing an alternative. Israeli isn't going to let Iran get nukes. They will do anything to stop that, including a shooting war. Crippling Iran's nuclear capabilities in a backdoor way (I mean, Stuxnet was awesome, right?!) delays that war.
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There is something to be said about banning the re-importation of US-branded drugs from Canada at a lower price. It's nuts that branded pills sent to Canada at a lower price become impotent when shipped back to the US.
However, the story covers more than this. They were (pretending to) ship RU-486, the abortion drug, along with steroids and human growth hormone into the US, which is illegal. Moreover, it's not the word of a con man. There is evidence that top level Google executives were actually aware of the kinds of drugs that were sold. This is a blockbuster case, and Google should be slapped for aiding what they knew was illegal sales of drugs to the US.
Don't forget that Captain Crunch ran the ship aground by taking a detour closer to an island where his chef was born.
Actually, they probably want to audit the code for backdoors and other security vulnerabilities before deploying the software on their systems. A whole bunch of governments got snookered when Cryto AG sold closed-source encryption software with a backdoor that allowed the US government to easily break their communications. In particular, the NSA was rumored to have backdoored Crypto AG systems since the fifties, allowing the US government to spy on communications from such warm and fuzzy countries as Iran.
(1) Google probably paid more to have exclusive rights to the patents. There's no point in having a patent that a potential defendant can go to IBM to license, thereby circumventing your lawsuit.
(2) IBM has so many patents that they are essentially lawsuit-proof. Selling these rights to Google instead of licensing them doesn't lower IBM's ability to defend itself against a patent lawsuit.
I think he was trying to say that Senators make "only" $175,000 a year but lead lavish lifestyles. That's because they can do stuff like trade on inside information, which is pretty awesome as a fringe benefit.
You know, a bunch of real admirals thought the same thing you did: that the US Navy has sufficient defense in depth to defend against an attack by dozens of small, fast ships with Sunburn, Exocet, or Silkworm missiles. They were proven dead wrong. The Millennium Challenge '02 was one of the largest war games in history. In that war game, the mad general in charge of the mock enemy force sunk sixteen US ships, including a carrier and two helicopter carriers filled with Marines.
How did this happen? The enemy force was composed of small ships and light aircraft. They went around the US fleet for hours until the US fleet had a hard time tracking them. Eventually, US fleet was surrounded by the bad guys. Then suddenly, they all attacked at once. Some speed boats made mad suicide dashes at the fleet while attacking with guns and rockets. Prop planes began making suicide dives. Other speed boats opened fire with a whole bunch of Silkworms. All the while, the enemy forces closed with the US fleet, which was busy engaging ships, aircraft, and missiles. An enemy boat got close enough to loose a Silkworm at a carrier, which was sunk when its over-burdened defenses failed to stop the missile.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/washington/12navy.html
Lesson: it pays to be paranoid.
LastPass is a web-based service that syncs your passwords across your computers, Android devices, iPhone, and Blackberry. Supposedly, it uses client-side encryption so even if the stored data is compromised, it is useless without your password. Most importantly, it supports Google Authenticator so those with Android devices can use it to generate secure keys needed to log in.
We killed Osama Bin Laden by flying our commandos in on a STEALTH HELICOPTER with intelligence provided by a STEALTH UAV. Night vision let the commandos zerg rush unsuspecting defenders while the entire deal with quarterbacked using GPS, which requires a system of satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Meanwhile, we're incinerating (literally) tons of insurgents (and more than a few innocents) using remotely-piloted drones that didn't exist when the conflict began. The bad guys performed their own R&D to come up with ever more sophisticated IEDs. The US comes up with counter-jammers, and more sophisticated armor. Then somehow we engaged in a "secret killing program" that reduced the insurgency in Iraq.
Other than that, R&D has no use in modern warfare.
High cost process? The more you shrink the die, the cheaper it gets to produce. Once the R&D and fabs have been done, you want to move everything to the smaller process if the yields are okay. Smaller dies mean that you get more chips per wafer. That means lower costs.
The doctors charge a whole bunch for a "check up" that confirms some sort of physical disorder that all the other doctors managed to miss. You know, they're specialists who find things that all the other doctors miss, so they have to charge more for their expertise, in uh, finding more reasons to give prescriptions than all the other doctors who have previously treated their patients.
From the other perspective, my brother is an ER doctor. He sees many drug-seekers every week. They'll come in claiming specious injuries (my neck hurts) and demand Oxycontin. Last week, some guy claimed that he never had Oxycontin before but needed it. A quick check revealed he had eight prescriptions already. And it's not just anecdotal evidence. Countering drug seeking behavior is one of the more important lessons ER doctors have to learn.
What is anecdotal is my brother's disdain for pain management doctors. He calls most of them quacks who are legalized drug pushers. That's not to trivialize your experience or to denigrate your doctor, but apparently many of these dudes are making money pushing Oxycontin.
Chrome also has the following advantages that are under the hood yet still very important (for nerds like me):
(1) Chrome is sandboxed.
(2) Plugins are more secure in Chrome.
(3) It is multi-threaded in a way that benefits more from multi-cores.
(4) Chrome is faster.
Um, as to your first point, we use Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from submarines. We do use them to initiate first strikes. The missiles cost $1 million a pop but you don't risk a pilot, and you can stick a bunch of them into a submarine. We could make them stealthier and faster but that would violate a nuclear arms treaty. Because a nuclear-capable cruise missile that's supersonic and stealthy would put the emphasis on a first strike lo..
LOL, no. Siri is available for iPhone 4S, you know, the "new" iPhone 4 that they had to release to keep their fans appeased while they were working on iPhone 5. The Samsung Galaxy S II were taking up way too much marketshare so they had to drop something. Siri is NOT available for iPhone 4.
A product exists that might be suitable to your interests. "Once sprayed on your license plate, PhotoBlockerâ(TM)s special formula produces a high-powered gloss that reflects the flash back towards the camera. This overexposes the image of your license plate, rendering the picture unreadable. With PhotoBlocker, your license plate is invisible to traffic cameras yet completely legible to the naked eye."
Why the hate for this comment when it is certainly true for the United States? We have Predator drones being deployed along the US-Mexico border to interdict smugglers. Rick Perry is calling for boots on the ground in addition to more drones. During the Occupy Wall Street protest, the LRAD acoustic cannon was deployed against protesters by the NYPD. Yes, a city police department deployed a military-grade weapon against civilians.
Hahahaha. You say that as if telling the truth makes it all right. There was a gay kid who was outed by his roommate, who tape recorded his sexual congress with another man. The gay kid jumped off a bridge. You have a right to privacy, especially to the facts that are true. If you out the gay kid trying to cause him mental anguish, then you should be punished because there was no value to your actions.
Pretend that there's an abortion doctor. You hate abortions. You start posting the doctor's personal information. You post the time she drops her kid off at school. You post pictures of her house, her car, and her family. You post the kind of security system that she has. You post that she wears a bulletproof vest so you should aim for the head.
Legal?
To be fair, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not call for the destruction of Israel, or for it to be wiped off the map. Rather, he stated that it was time for the Zionist government of Israel to be wiped off the mapâ"in short, he called for regime change in Israel. I'm no fan of this guy, but everyone claiming that he wants another Holocaust is just stoking the propaganda fires against Iran. That's worse than the demagoguery that so offends you.
The grandparent post did not suggest that Iran can wipe Israel off the map because Christianity is false. Rather, he (correctly) points out that a lot of the neo-con Zionists in America are hardcore Christians who support Israel so all the Jews can go back there and bring forth the Rapture, whereupon they will all die along with the rest of the non-believers in a battle with Satan. I find that disconcerting. And you also falsely assert again that Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map, which it has never said.
It's multiple choice, friendo. Once you realize that it's 47*3, you realize that the answer has to end in 1. There's only one answer choice that fit that requirement. Bingo bango. The other question? 29 is about a quarter less than 40. So you think, well about 72 less so about 216. Just a little under this, eh, 208 will work.
Everyone is missing the really obvious point: the control signals are sent via satellite from ABOVE the aircraft, which flies at 50,000. Any attempt to hijack the controls would require the broadcasting of the signals from ABOVE the aircraft. The chances that Iran tracked this really small stealth drone, then decided not to shoot it down, but rather to track it with radar, then to fly an airplane above it to transmit cyberwarfare signals to it, are very small.
More likely, the drone crashed because, well, shit happens. Iran is getting screwed over by cyberwarfare (LOL, Stuxnet) so it decides to retaliate by talking about cyberwarfare.
I can't wait for everyone to use apps like Google Authenticator to set up two-factor authentication. SMS is a hack, and it is better than not having two-factor authentication at all. However, an app that resides on the phone would require access to the actual phone itself and can't be stolen using remote means (that I can think of). LastPass is the only third-party app I can think of that uses GA for added protection, but hopefully banks will work with Google to set this up for their websites as well.
Junk mail actually subsidizes the USPS. When Congress considered banning junk mail, the USPS and the Direct Mailers Association opposed the move. Without junk mail, the USPS would lose a huge source of funding.
This is bullshit. We have been patrolling enemy countries for their SAM and radar sites since the Cold War. Even stealth aircraft can be seen on radar, and their flight paths have to be routed around radar sites. When the First Gulf War was initiated, the first shots were fired by Apache helicopters that infiltrated Iraqi airspace by flying low altitude then blowing up a radar site. Perimeter air defenses are blown up by cruise missiles and the like to permit stealth aircraft to fly in and blow up other air defense systems. Only then do non-stealth aircraft with anti-radiation missiles come in to play.
America has been probing enemy air defenses since the Cold War. Operation Home Run was one in a series of operations that sent bombers stuffed with electronics into Russian territory to sniff where the defense radars were. At first, the bombers had to fly in international waters. But then the Russians would simply refuse to turn on all their radars to prevent their detection. Therefore, the US started to have their bombers suddenly divert into Russian airspace at a mad dash, which forced them to turn on their radars and shoot down US aircraft. Quite a few were lost in this manner. Both sides didn't make a big deal out of it because they didn't want a nuclear war. The families of the killed aircrews were told that their loved ones died in training accidents. Two hundred Americans and 40 aircraft were lost.
It's also as though someone wants to prevent a full-out shooting or nuclear war. Israel is taking a more and more hostile stance towards Iran. There are stories leaking about how the Israelis are going to attack Iran without US permission. If you were the US, you have to talk the Israelis off the ledge. So what do you do? You have to do what you did in the First Gulf War to stop the Israelis from coming into the war: hunt Scuds and do other shit to show them that you're providing an alternative. Israeli isn't going to let Iran get nukes. They will do anything to stop that, including a shooting war. Crippling Iran's nuclear capabilities in a backdoor way (I mean, Stuxnet was awesome, right?!) delays that war.