Moving the ISS to the moon would be much harder than you'd think. Not only do you have to accelerate the structure out of the Earth's gravity well, but you also have to decelerate it to get it into orbit around the Moon. Not only that, but is it even possible to orbit the Moon, which has a very low gravity? I don't know if there's even a point to have something orbiting the Moon as opposed to just directly landing on the Moon because the gravity well and lack of atmosphere makes it very easy to leave the Moon. Hrm.
Bwahahahaha. Do you really think that forcing people to use their real names is necessary to track them all over the web for a company that has access to the emails, Internet searches, calendars, smart phones, DNS (for Google DNS users), and Google Voice calls for millions of users across the world? Even if you don't use Gmail, once a friend of yours sends an email to you using Gmail, then yeah, Google knows who you are if they really cared.
Forcing people to use their real names is really meant to stop the crowds of idiots who will use "Joe Blow" or whatever. There's a tipping point in a web community where if more than a certain portion of the users are obvious fakes, then no one will feel obligated to act intelligently. (Look at Myspace, which allows fake names compared to Facebook, which doesn't.) Google just wants to keep it real. Haha. You can still use fake names, they just can't be obviously fake.
PS3 may be catching up to XBox but millions of users spend tons of money every year not only buying video games but are also paying for XBox Live! and for credits on there. Basically, Microsoft worked out an online portal for video game addicts/saps who have demonstrated they are willing to pay every month to play. I wonder how that affects profitability?
This occurred before the crash and resulting unemployment. It is more a problem of over-education more than anything else. As a lawyer, I had bosses before the crash who were complaining about how much we young lawyers whined. But they went to law school at a time when even a pretty bad law school got you a good jobâ"simply put, they couldn't get hired today with their credentials. They also paid a fifth of the tuition we did, even adjusted for inflation, so they didn't have the pressure we have to pay back student loans. The crash only made things worse, but there was already a problem with higher education way before then.
It's the PC media being PC. Oh, you can't say "nigger" even if it's necessary to report what this moron said. They have to say "the N-word" or "racial slur" because they don't want to be caught saying "nigger" on TV.
This is completely wrong. The Republican Party is terrified of the Tea Party, which has repudiated Republicans such as John Boehner and Lindsey Graham. In fact, the Tea Party has threatened Republicans who have tried to make a deal with President Obama over raising the debt limit. Furthermore, the extreme positions of the Tea Party has undermined Republican efforts to reach out to the mainstream and independent voters. TP Michelle Bauchmann claiming that slavery was good for black families is not what the Republican Party needs at this juncture. There is probably nothing more the Republicans want at this point than to be separated from the Tea Party.
I don't have a problem with Islam being abused by psychopaths because every group has its nuts. But I'm concerned with moderate or run of the mill Muslims who refuse to reject Islamic terrorism. I know quite a few Muslims who get angry whenever someone refers to Islam sarcastically as the religion of peace, but then make excuses for terrorists, i.e., "desperate people do desperate things" or "why do you think Bin Laden was behind 9/11â"it could have been the US government."
I know it's awkward to require members of a group to denounce its radicals but I just don't see this happening amongst Muslims. CAIR condemns racism and discrimination but doesn't condemn the acts of terrorism itself as being counter to the teachings of Islam.
Apple and Google do not like each other even though they share some board of directors. Google lost out on really valuable Nortel patents (which could have immunized Google against threats of lawsuits against Android) to a consortium of companies that was funded in large part by Apple. Also, don't forget that Apple is also suing HTC, Samsung, and other large manufacturers and importers of Android smartphones.
Perversely, Microsoft makes more money off Android than it does off Windows Phone 7. It's estimated that HTC pays Microsoft $5 in licensing fees for each Android handset it sells.
Is Facebook going to let Zynga move everyone over to Google+? The game data is all on Zynga, I would think. It would be a bit of a coding challenge, and it would depend on the Google+ API, but FB cannot risk forcing a big source of income walk over to Google+, where it would help move users.
The Supreme Court once ruled that a tomato was a vegetable even though it is scientifically a fruit. That case, Nix v. Hedden, dealt with a tariff on vegetables but not fruits. The government taxed tomatoes as vegetables even though they were botanically fruit. Tomato importers who had paid the taxes sued. The Supreme Court ruled that even though tomatoes were botanically fruit, the law was meant vegetables in the colloquial sense. Go for lawyers!
This is a relatively looney tune response but I'll bite. No one is saying that Communists are nice people. I mean, Hitler was a very religious guy who thought that Jews killed Christ and therefore he had to kill themâ"but I'm not going to say that all religious people are Hitlers. Hell, the Iranians are very religious people, but that clearly doesn't mean that they're our friends, not by a long shot! The Cold War was won by spending Russia to death. Reagan worked up a gigantic national debt in doing so. Does it seem like a good time right now to pursue that policy?
The argument is that we have many nuclear warheads that we are spending hundreds of billions on. The proposal is that the money spend on keeping these weapons on the ready can be better spent elsewhere. Consider: what are the consequences to our national security if we cut that down to 2,500 nuclear warheads? That's enough to irradiate Russia or China a couple of times overâ"certainly enough to dissuade them from launching a nuclear attack. Does reducing the number of warheads reduce the survivability of our force? Depends, but if we keep the bulk of them deployed on ballistic submarines, they'll likely never be tracked or shot at by any other country in the world.
Does the idea of a nuclear-bomb-equipped bomber or cruise missile seem archaic to you in an age of super-reliable ICBMs based in the sea and on land? The US Air Force accidentally flew nuclear bombs across the US without knowing that the bombs were live. Think about that. How much value is the "bomber" part of the nuclear triad adding? We can lower the number of nuclear bombers and base them around the world for backup, but what makes you think that we must have nuclear weapons at current levels of maintain our national safety?
But hey, let's ignore this, and go all hysterical about even considering lowering the level of nuclear weapons. Because Jimmy Carter is an asshole and Reagan is God. Or maybe because you're delusional.
Reducing the size of the American nuclear arsenal would free up a lot of money that can be used to target more present threats. We already have enough nuclear bombs to deter North Korea and Iran even if we cut our arsenal to a tenth of its current sizeâ"the added deterrence of nuked a thousand times versus ten times is not enough to be relevant. But if we get an extra ten billion dollars a year, we can pay down our debt. We can get more UAVs to keep our soldiers out of harms' way. More armored cars to lower their risk to IEDs. The current bulk of the US nuclear arsenal is a relic of the Cold War and is not suited for the threats that currently faces our country.
The Declaration of Independence is not law. It is listed as part of the "Organic law" of the United States along with the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance. However, it has been cited in Supreme Court decisions as the organic law, although I'm not sure which came first.
Perkin Elmer, the contractor working on the lens hated NASA as a result of the shifting budget, and NASA hated Perkin Elmer for spending too much. This caused such a breakdown in their relationships that NASA basically stopped supervising PE. At the same time, PE did not put its best optical design men on the project to save money. PE actually caught the mistake with the main mirror on the ground, but they were so far behind schedule that they rushed it out the door. Backup lens ground using older technologies were perfect, but no one bothered to check them with the same equipment that detected the error in the main mirror because, well, it cost too much to do so, and it would have set the project back even more.
You're missing the point: contemporary technology made it possible to make a better mirror. In fact, the backup mirror was perfect. The "small" error in the main mirror caused only 15% of the entering light to be focused properly. That's a huge consequence. Furthermore, the Hubble main mirror was only 94-inches in diameter. The largest earth-based telescopes have mirrors that are over four times wider.
The mistake in the main mirror and the failure to catch it was the result of cost-cutting.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but parents must have some right over their children's bodies. Otherwise, who can say that we can vaccinate our children? No one can say that vaccines are perfectly safe. Perhaps they would have hated vaccines and they were forced to be immunized. Perhaps they would have become Christian Scientists who wish they were never vaccinated. There has to be a line drawn somewhere about a parent's right to choose what they think is best for their child.
I remember from a book discussing the Hubble Space Telescope that a significant political problem that NASA faces is the shifting political winds with regard to space exploration. If NASA put in a request for how much a project would actually cost, then the project would never be funded because of the "why are we spending so much on space when there are people starving in America" crowd. Thus, NASA would put in a low-ball request, which would be stuffed through. The sub-contractors would have to cut corners to meet the low-ball bid. Of course, these cut corners eventually result in huge catastrophes such as a defective main mirror on the space telescope. However, at that point, so much money has been put into the project that asking for a few billion more seems more attractive than losing all the money already spent.
If politicians would fund NASA appropriately, and more importantly, if they could commit to a certain level of funding past the current administration, then things would probably (not certainly) better. But NASA lives in fear that every four years, its budget might be eliminated. The current movement away from NASA-designed lift vehicles would be a good thing in this regard. If private enterprise were providing all the launch vehicles, NASA could spend the money more effectively on space exploration while other agencies such as the NSA, NRO, Air Force, etc. helped subsidize the research on the private launchers.
Gitmo wouldn't even be the worst of it because we know about Gitmo. Lawyers visit the prisoners and check out the living conditions. I would be terrified about the CIA-run dark sites in the ME and Europe. Imagine Gitmo but with less accountability. See, that's scary.
There are many aspects of the Constitution that need updating. I mean, this bears repeating however obnoxious, but some of the Founding Fathers were slave owners. They were not necessarily the most in tune with human rights.
Perhaps we want to clarify gun rights. Perhaps we should put in a very clear right to privacy (such as the right to contraception, to interracial marriage, and to abortion, perhaps) instead of having a non-elected Supreme Court cobble that together.
I don't know if it's a good idea. I would reject it because we'll end up banning free speech given the current political climate. But it's not stupid enough to dismiss out of hand. If we had another shot at drafting a Constitution, we might be able to do a better job than the Founding Fathers did.
You sound like a moron. Obama's policy regarding space is to expand the private sector's development of novel rockets and delivery vehicles. He believes that NASA's budget should go towards developing high-tech stuff, not rockets.
You are completely fucking wrong if you think this is how things work in real life. Northrop Grumman hires lobbyists who goes up to staffers of the leading Democrats and Republicans and donates ridiculous amounts of money to their campaigns. Then it establishes factories and supply plants for the F-22 in the states and districts of their most bullish supporters. As politicians or their staff retire from civil service, they get job offers from lobbyists and their clients to help lobby their former friends on the Hill. Then all the Republicans and Democrats goes to vote and says, "Let's build a whole shitload of F-22s even though the Pentagon says it doesn't need them."
So, to summarize, there is a free market, but with a twist: our Congressmen are also up for sale.
Now, I'm not going to say that the Pentagon is efficient. However, it's hard to argue that the Pentagon was appreciably more or less responsible in 1988 than it is now. Here are some differences to consider. The scale of the shooting war is much greater now than it was then. In 1988, we were invading Grenada. We were not fighting an unending war on Islamic terrorism with fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia. Right now, there are tens of thousands of American servicemen in harm's way going around killing people and hunting down terrorists like Bin Laden.
Also, the complexity of modern warfare is getting nutty, too. We have lost six thousand servicemen in military operations since 2001, but we have spent tons of money trying to keep them alive. Each man we deploy has a crazy expensive Interceptor body armor. There are drones and other warplanes floating above active war zones basically around the clock to support our troops. We want to reduce civilian casualties, so we shoot guided munitions that cost insane amounts of money. The Small Diameter Bomb costs $70,000 and the anti-tank Javelin costs $150,000 a pop. Stealth stuff like the B-2 Spirit, the Joint Strike Fighter, and the F-22 are taking up a lot of money as well. Lastly, redoing our space-based espionage infrastructure is costing us a shitload of money. And we do all this because the average American demands it. We can't send our boys out without body armor. We can't lose our advantage in space recon. We can't kill civilians because our bombs aren't accurate enough. Stealth is cool, and we (or at least our legislators) want it.
Meanwhile, we now have to deal with a surging China and resurgent Russia, as well as nuclear upstarts in North Korea and Iran. Also, the economy was much better in our recent decade than it was in 1988, leaving many young Americans to join private companies rather than the military.
So, in short, the Pentagon has never been efficient, but I doubt that it has become less efficient or more corrupt than it has ever been.
Stop searching for Indian Viagra, then. Facebook and LinkedIn are convenient ways to keep track of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Of course, it's possible to do it without Facebook, but it's much more complicated to do so.
The scrapers would just remove gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, all.edu and.gov domains, and leave in aol.com. Website owners probably know that most of their traffic comes from relatively few domains so as long as those are not banned, they ought to be okay. The people who were incorrectly banned would just complain and then the website owners can judge the domains one by one.
Slashdot Mirror
Moving the ISS to the moon would be much harder than you'd think. Not only do you have to accelerate the structure out of the Earth's gravity well, but you also have to decelerate it to get it into orbit around the Moon. Not only that, but is it even possible to orbit the Moon, which has a very low gravity? I don't know if there's even a point to have something orbiting the Moon as opposed to just directly landing on the Moon because the gravity well and lack of atmosphere makes it very easy to leave the Moon. Hrm.
Bwahahahaha. Do you really think that forcing people to use their real names is necessary to track them all over the web for a company that has access to the emails, Internet searches, calendars, smart phones, DNS (for Google DNS users), and Google Voice calls for millions of users across the world? Even if you don't use Gmail, once a friend of yours sends an email to you using Gmail, then yeah, Google knows who you are if they really cared.
Forcing people to use their real names is really meant to stop the crowds of idiots who will use "Joe Blow" or whatever. There's a tipping point in a web community where if more than a certain portion of the users are obvious fakes, then no one will feel obligated to act intelligently. (Look at Myspace, which allows fake names compared to Facebook, which doesn't.) Google just wants to keep it real. Haha. You can still use fake names, they just can't be obviously fake.
PS3 may be catching up to XBox but millions of users spend tons of money every year not only buying video games but are also paying for XBox Live! and for credits on there. Basically, Microsoft worked out an online portal for video game addicts/saps who have demonstrated they are willing to pay every month to play. I wonder how that affects profitability?
This occurred before the crash and resulting unemployment. It is more a problem of over-education more than anything else. As a lawyer, I had bosses before the crash who were complaining about how much we young lawyers whined. But they went to law school at a time when even a pretty bad law school got you a good jobâ"simply put, they couldn't get hired today with their credentials. They also paid a fifth of the tuition we did, even adjusted for inflation, so they didn't have the pressure we have to pay back student loans. The crash only made things worse, but there was already a problem with higher education way before then.
It's the PC media being PC. Oh, you can't say "nigger" even if it's necessary to report what this moron said. They have to say "the N-word" or "racial slur" because they don't want to be caught saying "nigger" on TV.
This is completely wrong. The Republican Party is terrified of the Tea Party, which has repudiated Republicans such as John Boehner and Lindsey Graham. In fact, the Tea Party has threatened Republicans who have tried to make a deal with President Obama over raising the debt limit. Furthermore, the extreme positions of the Tea Party has undermined Republican efforts to reach out to the mainstream and independent voters. TP Michelle Bauchmann claiming that slavery was good for black families is not what the Republican Party needs at this juncture. There is probably nothing more the Republicans want at this point than to be separated from the Tea Party.
CRT televisions also have a few pounds of lead in them, don't they? I wonder how much of that is taken out before it reaches the landfill.
I don't have a problem with Islam being abused by psychopaths because every group has its nuts. But I'm concerned with moderate or run of the mill Muslims who refuse to reject Islamic terrorism. I know quite a few Muslims who get angry whenever someone refers to Islam sarcastically as the religion of peace, but then make excuses for terrorists, i.e., "desperate people do desperate things" or "why do you think Bin Laden was behind 9/11â"it could have been the US government."
I know it's awkward to require members of a group to denounce its radicals but I just don't see this happening amongst Muslims. CAIR condemns racism and discrimination but doesn't condemn the acts of terrorism itself as being counter to the teachings of Islam.
Apple and Google do not like each other even though they share some board of directors. Google lost out on really valuable Nortel patents (which could have immunized Google against threats of lawsuits against Android) to a consortium of companies that was funded in large part by Apple. Also, don't forget that Apple is also suing HTC, Samsung, and other large manufacturers and importers of Android smartphones.
Perversely, Microsoft makes more money off Android than it does off Windows Phone 7. It's estimated that HTC pays Microsoft $5 in licensing fees for each Android handset it sells.
Is Facebook going to let Zynga move everyone over to Google+? The game data is all on Zynga, I would think. It would be a bit of a coding challenge, and it would depend on the Google+ API, but FB cannot risk forcing a big source of income walk over to Google+, where it would help move users.
The Supreme Court once ruled that a tomato was a vegetable even though it is scientifically a fruit. That case, Nix v. Hedden, dealt with a tariff on vegetables but not fruits. The government taxed tomatoes as vegetables even though they were botanically fruit. Tomato importers who had paid the taxes sued. The Supreme Court ruled that even though tomatoes were botanically fruit, the law was meant vegetables in the colloquial sense. Go for lawyers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden
This is a relatively looney tune response but I'll bite. No one is saying that Communists are nice people. I mean, Hitler was a very religious guy who thought that Jews killed Christ and therefore he had to kill themâ"but I'm not going to say that all religious people are Hitlers. Hell, the Iranians are very religious people, but that clearly doesn't mean that they're our friends, not by a long shot! The Cold War was won by spending Russia to death. Reagan worked up a gigantic national debt in doing so. Does it seem like a good time right now to pursue that policy?
The argument is that we have many nuclear warheads that we are spending hundreds of billions on. The proposal is that the money spend on keeping these weapons on the ready can be better spent elsewhere. Consider: what are the consequences to our national security if we cut that down to 2,500 nuclear warheads? That's enough to irradiate Russia or China a couple of times overâ"certainly enough to dissuade them from launching a nuclear attack. Does reducing the number of warheads reduce the survivability of our force? Depends, but if we keep the bulk of them deployed on ballistic submarines, they'll likely never be tracked or shot at by any other country in the world.
Does the idea of a nuclear-bomb-equipped bomber or cruise missile seem archaic to you in an age of super-reliable ICBMs based in the sea and on land? The US Air Force accidentally flew nuclear bombs across the US without knowing that the bombs were live. Think about that. How much value is the "bomber" part of the nuclear triad adding? We can lower the number of nuclear bombers and base them around the world for backup, but what makes you think that we must have nuclear weapons at current levels of maintain our national safety?
But hey, let's ignore this, and go all hysterical about even considering lowering the level of nuclear weapons. Because Jimmy Carter is an asshole and Reagan is God. Or maybe because you're delusional.
Reducing the size of the American nuclear arsenal would free up a lot of money that can be used to target more present threats. We already have enough nuclear bombs to deter North Korea and Iran even if we cut our arsenal to a tenth of its current sizeâ"the added deterrence of nuked a thousand times versus ten times is not enough to be relevant. But if we get an extra ten billion dollars a year, we can pay down our debt. We can get more UAVs to keep our soldiers out of harms' way. More armored cars to lower their risk to IEDs. The current bulk of the US nuclear arsenal is a relic of the Cold War and is not suited for the threats that currently faces our country.
The Declaration of Independence is not law. It is listed as part of the "Organic law" of the United States along with the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance. However, it has been cited in Supreme Court decisions as the organic law, although I'm not sure which came first.
Perkin Elmer, the contractor working on the lens hated NASA as a result of the shifting budget, and NASA hated Perkin Elmer for spending too much. This caused such a breakdown in their relationships that NASA basically stopped supervising PE. At the same time, PE did not put its best optical design men on the project to save money. PE actually caught the mistake with the main mirror on the ground, but they were so far behind schedule that they rushed it out the door. Backup lens ground using older technologies were perfect, but no one bothered to check them with the same equipment that detected the error in the main mirror because, well, it cost too much to do so, and it would have set the project back even more.
You're missing the point: contemporary technology made it possible to make a better mirror. In fact, the backup mirror was perfect. The "small" error in the main mirror caused only 15% of the entering light to be focused properly. That's a huge consequence. Furthermore, the Hubble main mirror was only 94-inches in diameter. The largest earth-based telescopes have mirrors that are over four times wider.
The mistake in the main mirror and the failure to catch it was the result of cost-cutting.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but parents must have some right over their children's bodies. Otherwise, who can say that we can vaccinate our children? No one can say that vaccines are perfectly safe. Perhaps they would have hated vaccines and they were forced to be immunized. Perhaps they would have become Christian Scientists who wish they were never vaccinated. There has to be a line drawn somewhere about a parent's right to choose what they think is best for their child.
I remember from a book discussing the Hubble Space Telescope that a significant political problem that NASA faces is the shifting political winds with regard to space exploration. If NASA put in a request for how much a project would actually cost, then the project would never be funded because of the "why are we spending so much on space when there are people starving in America" crowd. Thus, NASA would put in a low-ball request, which would be stuffed through. The sub-contractors would have to cut corners to meet the low-ball bid. Of course, these cut corners eventually result in huge catastrophes such as a defective main mirror on the space telescope. However, at that point, so much money has been put into the project that asking for a few billion more seems more attractive than losing all the money already spent.
If politicians would fund NASA appropriately, and more importantly, if they could commit to a certain level of funding past the current administration, then things would probably (not certainly) better. But NASA lives in fear that every four years, its budget might be eliminated. The current movement away from NASA-designed lift vehicles would be a good thing in this regard. If private enterprise were providing all the launch vehicles, NASA could spend the money more effectively on space exploration while other agencies such as the NSA, NRO, Air Force, etc. helped subsidize the research on the private launchers.
Just my two cents.
Gitmo wouldn't even be the worst of it because we know about Gitmo. Lawyers visit the prisoners and check out the living conditions. I would be terrified about the CIA-run dark sites in the ME and Europe. Imagine Gitmo but with less accountability. See, that's scary.
There are many aspects of the Constitution that need updating. I mean, this bears repeating however obnoxious, but some of the Founding Fathers were slave owners. They were not necessarily the most in tune with human rights.
Perhaps we want to clarify gun rights. Perhaps we should put in a very clear right to privacy (such as the right to contraception, to interracial marriage, and to abortion, perhaps) instead of having a non-elected Supreme Court cobble that together.
I don't know if it's a good idea. I would reject it because we'll end up banning free speech given the current political climate. But it's not stupid enough to dismiss out of hand. If we had another shot at drafting a Constitution, we might be able to do a better job than the Founding Fathers did.
You sound like a moron. Obama's policy regarding space is to expand the private sector's development of novel rockets and delivery vehicles. He believes that NASA's budget should go towards developing high-tech stuff, not rockets.
You are completely fucking wrong if you think this is how things work in real life. Northrop Grumman hires lobbyists who goes up to staffers of the leading Democrats and Republicans and donates ridiculous amounts of money to their campaigns. Then it establishes factories and supply plants for the F-22 in the states and districts of their most bullish supporters. As politicians or their staff retire from civil service, they get job offers from lobbyists and their clients to help lobby their former friends on the Hill. Then all the Republicans and Democrats goes to vote and says, "Let's build a whole shitload of F-22s even though the Pentagon says it doesn't need them."
So, to summarize, there is a free market, but with a twist: our Congressmen are also up for sale.
Now, I'm not going to say that the Pentagon is efficient. However, it's hard to argue that the Pentagon was appreciably more or less responsible in 1988 than it is now. Here are some differences to consider. The scale of the shooting war is much greater now than it was then. In 1988, we were invading Grenada. We were not fighting an unending war on Islamic terrorism with fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia. Right now, there are tens of thousands of American servicemen in harm's way going around killing people and hunting down terrorists like Bin Laden.
Also, the complexity of modern warfare is getting nutty, too. We have lost six thousand servicemen in military operations since 2001, but we have spent tons of money trying to keep them alive. Each man we deploy has a crazy expensive Interceptor body armor. There are drones and other warplanes floating above active war zones basically around the clock to support our troops. We want to reduce civilian casualties, so we shoot guided munitions that cost insane amounts of money. The Small Diameter Bomb costs $70,000 and the anti-tank Javelin costs $150,000 a pop. Stealth stuff like the B-2 Spirit, the Joint Strike Fighter, and the F-22 are taking up a lot of money as well. Lastly, redoing our space-based espionage infrastructure is costing us a shitload of money. And we do all this because the average American demands it. We can't send our boys out without body armor. We can't lose our advantage in space recon. We can't kill civilians because our bombs aren't accurate enough. Stealth is cool, and we (or at least our legislators) want it.
Meanwhile, we now have to deal with a surging China and resurgent Russia, as well as nuclear upstarts in North Korea and Iran. Also, the economy was much better in our recent decade than it was in 1988, leaving many young Americans to join private companies rather than the military.
So, in short, the Pentagon has never been efficient, but I doubt that it has become less efficient or more corrupt than it has ever been.
Stop searching for Indian Viagra, then. Facebook and LinkedIn are convenient ways to keep track of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Of course, it's possible to do it without Facebook, but it's much more complicated to do so.
The scrapers would just remove gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, all .edu and .gov domains, and leave in aol.com. Website owners probably know that most of their traffic comes from relatively few domains so as long as those are not banned, they ought to be okay. The people who were incorrectly banned would just complain and then the website owners can judge the domains one by one.