Yes, just like a little kid, every Republican knows that you see space when you look up. You can't see space when you look down. All you see is dirt, i.e. the Earth. So it can't be in space.
So let's just ignore the fact that the Earth is just one of the many things that are in space, and that it s the easiest thing in space we can get to. We're already here. It just doesn't count.
Also ignore that the Earth is the planet that we know the most about. So if we want to study other planets, we shouldn't study the Earth from space. There is no way that the things that we learn from Earth observation could be a baseline so that we know how to examine other thing that are in space, like say Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and it's moons, Saturn and it's moons and rings, and the same for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (planet or not).
I hope this gives the Republicans amongst you a slight clue how stupid you sound. And how much you've substituted ideology for rational thought. But I warn you, don't let your vision of the US flag over every rock and planet in the solar system go to your head. It's only a mater of time until the christian fanatic wing of the party decides that the Earth is flat, the space program is a front for the devil, and the money needs to be spent on proving that the Earth is 6000 years old.
You have no idea what you are talking about. All FAA certified aircraft software has to conform to the DO-178B / DO-178C standard. The standard imposes design, testing, process and documentation standards that are extremely demanding.
QC isn't just a department or a step in the release process, it is built into the full life cycle of the software. Safety is the goal, and the requirement for good practice starts at the beginning of the process, with the requirement documents.
For example, there are five levels of error severity defined from A to E. E has no impact on safety and A is catastrophic, where a crash could occur. The level of software test and validation depends on the severity level.
The number of objectives to be satisfied (eventually with independence) is determined by the software level A-E. The phrase "with independence" refers to a separation of responsibilities where the objectivity of the verification and validation processes is ensured by virtue of their "independence" from the software development team. For objectives that must be satisfied with independence, the person verifying the item (such as a requirement or source code) may not be the person who authored the item and this separation must be clearly documented. In some cases, an automated tool may be equivalent to independence. However, the tool itself must then be qualified if it substitutes for human review.
Your inability to find a "QC" position is because you don't know the structure of aerospace software development and have no idea of the job titles or terminology used to describe the standards used. You are projecting your lack of knowledge into a inconceivable lapse of competence on the part of Boeing and the FAA. In what universe would there be no software safety requirements for the civilian aircraft industry? All you have shown is that you are ignorant and have a basic lack of common sense.
King George Bush 1st: Head of the CIA, just like Putin was the head of the KGB, and just like Putin, dedicated to democratic government and free enterprise.
King George W Bush 2nd: Dumber then a box of rocks. Hand puppet for Cheney. Known to be comfortable holding hands with (male) Saudi royalty. Ignored warnings about 9/11 attack, then invaded the wrong country. Engineered the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. Will eventually go down as the worst president in the post WW1 era.
King Jeb Bush: If elected, will complete the disastrous projects started by his father and brother. Invade Iran? Russia? North Korea? No matter what, will invade somewhere, since it's a family tradition. Will turn the economy over to Greenspan, or his current equivalent, and complete the destruction of the US economy. Convert the US to a right wing Christian theocracy? Possible. It's impossible to predict what he will do, because the Bush clan is so out of control that no sane person can foresee their future actions.
Before you go slinging mud, you had best consider what happened whey your side was in charge.
Corporations only have one goal: making the upper management as rich as possible. They will throw anyone under the bus to achieve that end: employees, stockholders, customers.
I underestimated just how greedy the bastards really are. They will sell anything, including the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, to a country who's foreign policy goals include getting the US out of the Middle East, the end of the State of Israel, and replacing Saudi dominance with Iranian dominance. (Not that I think much of the Saudi government, but at least they are a devil we know, and can buy off.)
Ending the Iran embargo shouldn't mean helping them with their nuclear energy program. That's insane, unless the west has 100% access to all their facilities. The last I heard access was one of the main unresolved issues.
Clearly this is in the agreement due to corporate influence. At what point does profit become treason?
Everyone is expendable, from the CEO to the janitor.
I suggest that you leave your parent's basement and visit the real world some time. in the real world everyone is expendable except for the CEO and their cronies.
Look at all the big US companies after the 2008 crash. No CEOs, C-anything-O or boards of director were out and out fired. A very few CEOs (for example the head of Bank of America) were "retired", but given their fat golden parachutes they still ended up outrageously wealthy. There is no negative penalty, even for complete failure, for anyone at the top.
Corporations only have one goal: making the upper management as rich as possible. They will throw anyone under the bus to achieve that end: employees, stockholders, customers. If it's ever a choice between stockholders and management, stockholders get screwed.
For the vast majority of S&P 1500 companies, there is a major disconnect between corporate operating performance, shareholder value and incentive plans for executives. New research details an over-reliance on accounting metrics that do not measure capital efficiency, and how total shareholder return obscures a line of sight to the underlying drivers of economic performance. Economic performance explains only 12% of variance in chief executive officer (CEO) compensation.
What universe are you from? How can you make a statement that is so clearly false? Did someone pay to say that, or are you a free lance idiot?
So it's not actually about the software, it's an excuse to throw a temper tantrum in public like a spoiled eight year old.
I would ask you to grow up, but that clearly isn't going to happen because you like being trash talking fool, and you get a lot of reinforcement for acting that way.
The only upside to all this is that if there is a genetic component to you behavior, it won't be passed on because with an attitude like that you will never get close enough to anyone to reproduce.
Suppose you bought a kitchen appliance and under a particular set of conditions it fried all the wiring in you house, and perhaps caused it to burn down. There would be a recall, and a lot of civil litigation. Why are electronic equipment manufacturers allowed to get away with this kind of crap?
It's even worse, because unlike a lot of other gear, they can actually fix the problem in the field. They don't have to do a physical recall like car companies do. What they need is remote update features.
I think it goes back to Windows. Gates and friends set the standard that computers would break, and that the users had no recourse. If it crashed and you lost something important you were just out of luck. No guarantee on anything.
Now that everyone has accepted that manufacturers have no responsibility, we are completely stuck with infrastructure that makes it impossible to have secure online transactions. Users are deliberately kept in the dark and known bugs remain unfixed.
Until there is some change in the law that places liability where it belongs, on the manufacturers, nothing will change. Given the current political climate there is no chance of change. We're just screwed.
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”
It's not they are alone. Most of the large scale US economy is organized this way: media, telecom, Wall Street, big Pharma, agribusiness. It's kind of like a mafia state: everyone has to give some money to the person above them, and all the wealth accumulates at the top.
Welcome to post-capitalist America: no competition, no democracy, no freedom of speech, no financial security.
On the one hand,” Dan Quinn, a spokesman for progressive advocacy group Texas Freedom Network, said, “to run around and say we are sovereign and somehow don’t have to obey a Supreme Court ruling is the quintessential example of a temper tantrum. Some of the lawmakers, including the representative who introduced this bill, just refuse to accept what’s happening. This seems to be a way to stomping their feet and saying we’re not going to let that happen, which is absurd.”
The cost of a single NOAA Doppler radar in 2010 was $7,000,000. That's just to buy the system and install it, no operating budget.
This funding will complete the purchase of a Doppler Radar system for Southwest Washington and provide for the land and installation costs associated with the system.
The cost of the "expensive" earthquake early warning system is around the cost of 5 Doppler systems. As of 2013 the National Weather service has access to 159 Doppler installations.
In addition to the 122 NWS-owned radars, the full nationwide radar network includes another 37 radar sites owned by the FAA and Defense Department, which will be completely upgraded to dual-pol technology this summer. NOAA’s NEXRAD radar program is a tri-agency effort with NOAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the United States Air Force.
Note that the national radar network is being upgraded to high end Doppler for tornado and severe storm detection. So why do those in the Midwest, Gulf Coast and East Coast deserve early warning on tornadoes and California gets peanuts ($5,000,000) for the inevitable large earthquake? Politics.
Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) can't explain why more money wasn't approved.
"It's inexplicable given how much we have at stake here. Obviously these have been very tough budgetary times, but if you're going to invest in something that is significant down the road, this is about the best investment you can make," he said.
Japan, Mexico, Turkey and Mongolia already have similar systems in place.
So they can afford this in Mongolia and it's too much for California? Really?
You are being deliberately obtuse. (That is how adults describe someone who is being willfully wrong.)
In the referenced Nature paper, the authors describe measurements they made on honey bee and bumble bee neurons in response to sugar with and without the neonicotinoid compounds. As I also stated, they also checked if the presence of the insecticides had any impact on the way the insects detect sugar. It did not.
Understand this: they inserted electrodes into nerve fibers that bees use to "taste" what they are consuming. Using these electrodes they monitored the nerve signals going to the bees brain. By varying the concentration of insecticides over a range starting at zero, they were able to show that there was no difference in the response related to the amount of the chemical they were testing. The paper has charts and graphs with error bars and correlation (p) values. It's real science done by real scientists, who know that their academic reputation depends on avoiding mistakes.
This is not a high school "science experiment" with a bunch of bees free flying in a cage with two sources of sugar and a student counting the number of bees going to one or the other. The experiment is based on a fundamental understanding at the neurological level of how bees function. It has nothing to do with nectar.
Your criticism is based on a level of understanding that is extremely childish. Are you actually that uninformed? You are not asking relevant question, but making assertions based in ignorance. Even given the generally low quality of analytical thinking shown on Slashdot, you lack of knowledge is pathetic. Normally I would say that you should look at the paper, but in your case I expect that there are too many big words that you would not understand.
The Nature article examined the neurophysiological response of bees to three of the most common neonicotinoid pesticides. They determined that the bee taste system cannot detect these chemicals, and additionally the chemicals have no influence on the bee's ability to recognize sugar. This means the bees preference for food with these substances results from interaction with their central nervous system. Considering that nicotine is a CNS stimulant, this makes perfect sense.
You didn't like the conclusion of the article, so you read it with the single intent of refuting it. When you found one thing that you thought you could use as an attack, you picked on that. It did not occur to you that the people who do this kind of research are extremely knowledgeable and would would never make that kind of foolish error.
You have revealed your true colors. You are willfully ignorant and have no regard for the truth. You were effectively accusing the authors of fraudulent research. Accusing others of lying to achieve their goals shows that you are a dishonest yourself, because that is the logic of habitual liars.
Yes, there is a US corporation that is a part of Sony, but ultimately they only have an economic stake in the well being of the United States. When the MPAA-RIAA collude with Sony to pass legislation whose side are they on?
Has anyone looked for their lobbying efforts on 1H-B visas? If Sony is able to buy access that influences legislation, what about TATA? They surely have an economic interest in the number of 1H-B visa jobs available. Do you think they would want to get more visas, and be willing to spend money to make that happen?
Our current campaign contribution system makes it impossible to tell who is spending money to on elections. Even if Sony is not technically breaking the law, does that mean that everyone else from overseas is being equally careful in following the rules?
Could China take advantage of these loopholes? Even if the Chinese government is not, why would Chinese business interests ignore the advantages?
What's in the secret Trans Pacific Partnership treaty? The bill has been given fast track status, so the only vote that will be taken by congress is to either accept it or reject it. Just like the DMCA, there will be no time to review a very complex document. Just look how that turned out.
The lack of transparency in political funding didn't happen by magic. It was a result of a long process that including having a right wing majority on the Supreme Court. Defending the current situation by saying it's legal is another way of sidestepping the issue of corruption in the political process. When there is no accounting for money in politics, the law will obviously be for sale to the highest bidder. In the current global economy that means anybody in the world. Does that seem like a good idea?
Clinton signed this, but the legislation is a part of the long term Republican effort to deregulate, well, everything. It goes back at least as far as the Regan administration.
The same arguments were used to justify the North American Trade Agreement, which was another terrible idea. NAFTA made it much easier both to move jobs out of the US to Mexico. Additionally it helped destroy small scale farming in northern Mexico, because these farms couldn't compete with subsidized US agribusiness. Now most of the food imported from Mexico is from large scale farming, because that is competitive. The end of small farms enabled the growth of marijuana farming and the growth of violent drug cartels.
Besides the steaming pile of bull crap that is the DCMA, one of the other Republican moves was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, which directly lead to the Crash of 2008. Glass-Steagall didn't disappear all at once; the dismantling started during the Reagan years. It held up as long as the Democrats were in control and Volker was in charge if the FED. When Greenspan got in then the end of Glass-Steagall became a priority for the Republicans and Wall Street, and they got what they paid for.
If you don't like the DCMA, you should be terrified by the TPP, a secret trade treaty. We, i.e. the public, had no clue about what is in this thing. It's been given so called "fast track" status, so there will very limited debate or opportunity to amend the language. And since it's an international treaty, it supersedes US law. If it passes in Congress, Obama will sign it. How do you feel about letting Asian nations decide our trade policies?
The TPP effectively allows big business interests to offshore the regulatory process. It's so much easier to change the rules of the game in smaller countries where things like environmental and consumer protection have minimal impact. Since we have no idea with the treaty actually says, it seems likely that a lot of the protections that we have in the US will be effectively gutted with no way override it.
They will always use their political capital to protect their position and profit. As long as they are making money they don't give a rat's ass about anything else; who cares about climate change if I'm making money right now.
There are economically viable solutions for distributed solar power, but they change the model for the entrenched players. Since it's about (economic) power and (political) power, they will oppose any change that decreases their (economic/political/electrical) power. Efficiency and sustainability are irrelevant. Just ask the Koch brothers, the Kings of Coal. Can there be any doubt that they are neck deep in this issue?
The issue of regulation and monopoly is meaningless. We live in an era where entrenched interests bend the rules to guarantee their status. Is automobile manufacturing a regulated monopoly? Of course not. But they still have been able to use the law to keep Tesla from selling cars in many states. Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, the United Launch Alliance, have used their clout to keep SpaceX from getting Defense Department contracts. (Elon Musk has to have an iron constitution considering the kind of crap he has had to deal with.)
Welcome to post-capitalist America. No capitalism, no democracy, no privacy, no liberty.
Hot off the press, an article published today about how the "justice" system can put an innocent person in jail for life.
Virginia is still imprisoning an almost certainly innocent man—even after he did the time.
Of all the maddening stories of wrongful convictions, Michael McAlister’s may be one of the worst. For starters, he has been in prison for 29 years for an attempted rape he almost certainly did not commit. For much of that time, the lead prosecutor who secured his conviction, the original lead detective on the case, and more recently, the current Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney, Michael Herring, have argued that McAlister is innocent and that someone else—a notorious serial rapist with the same MO as the perpetrator of the crime for which McAlister was convicted—is in fact the real criminal. “I think our justice system is one of the best on the planet,” Herring told the Richmond Times-Dispatch last week. “But this case makes me ashamed of it.”
Here are the facts: In 1986, McAlister was convicted of attempted rape and abduction with the attempt to defile, after a 4½-hour bench trial. The only evidence presented was the victim’s identification based on her partial glimpse of her assailant’s face, much of which was covered with a mask. The photo array she was shown by the police did not include a picture of Norman Derr, a serial rapist who had already attempted to attack another woman in the same apartment complex. But it did include a photo of McAlister, and the two men looked astonishingly similar.
Derr is currently serving three life sentences. He was caught after the brutal rape of a woman in 1988 and is now linked to six other violent offenses through DNA cold-case testing. (There was no biological evidence from the crime McAlister was convicted of, and thus nothing to implicate Derr and exonerate McAlister.) But the similarities between Derr’s crimes and the alleged McAlister assault are remarkable: Derr attacked women with a knife in apartment-complex laundry rooms, wearing a plaid shirt and a stocking mask. These details all match the crime for which McAlister is still in prison. Subsequent police affidavits reveal that Derr was already being trailed by the police in 1986 and that he had in fact pulled on a stocking mask and approached a female undercover cop in the same apartment complex in which McAlister allegedly later assaulted his victim. Several other laundry room attacks happened after McAlister was already in jail but before Derr was caught.
McAlister was set up. He was asked to wear a plaid shirt in the photo lineup, and he was the only one in a plaid shirt. His release date has passed, but he continues to be incarcerated because he was convicted of a violent sex crime. There is no exculpatory DNA evidence. He has already done 29 years for a crime that the prosecutor in the case thinks was a wrongful conviction.
What was that about the system being perfect again?
Slashdot Mirror
Self righteous much?
Just wondering.
So let's just ignore the fact that the Earth is just one of the many things that are in space, and that it s the easiest thing in space we can get to. We're already here. It just doesn't count.
Also ignore that the Earth is the planet that we know the most about. So if we want to study other planets, we shouldn't study the Earth from space. There is no way that the things that we learn from Earth observation could be a baseline so that we know how to examine other thing that are in space, like say Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and it's moons, Saturn and it's moons and rings, and the same for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (planet or not).
I hope this gives the Republicans amongst you a slight clue how stupid you sound. And how much you've substituted ideology for rational thought. But I warn you, don't let your vision of the US flag over every rock and planet in the solar system go to your head. It's only a mater of time until the christian fanatic wing of the party decides that the Earth is flat, the space program is a front for the devil, and the money needs to be spent on proving that the Earth is 6000 years old.
Nobody gets to steal from Wall Street
QC isn't just a department or a step in the release process, it is built into the full life cycle of the software. Safety is the goal, and the requirement for good practice starts at the beginning of the process, with the requirement documents.
For example, there are five levels of error severity defined from A to E. E has no impact on safety and A is catastrophic, where a crash could occur. The level of software test and validation depends on the severity level.
Your inability to find a "QC" position is because you don't know the structure of aerospace software development and have no idea of the job titles or terminology used to describe the standards used. You are projecting your lack of knowledge into a inconceivable lapse of competence on the part of Boeing and the FAA. In what universe would there be no software safety requirements for the civilian aircraft industry? All you have shown is that you are ignorant and have a basic lack of common sense.
King George W Bush 2nd: Dumber then a box of rocks. Hand puppet for Cheney. Known to be comfortable holding hands with (male) Saudi royalty. Ignored warnings about 9/11 attack, then invaded the wrong country. Engineered the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. Will eventually go down as the worst president in the post WW1 era.
King Jeb Bush: If elected, will complete the disastrous projects started by his father and brother. Invade Iran? Russia? North Korea? No matter what, will invade somewhere, since it's a family tradition. Will turn the economy over to Greenspan, or his current equivalent, and complete the destruction of the US economy. Convert the US to a right wing Christian theocracy? Possible. It's impossible to predict what he will do, because the Bush clan is so out of control that no sane person can foresee their future actions.
Before you go slinging mud, you had best consider what happened whey your side was in charge.
As I posted there:
I underestimated just how greedy the bastards really are. They will sell anything, including the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, to a country who's foreign policy goals include getting the US out of the Middle East, the end of the State of Israel, and replacing Saudi dominance with Iranian dominance. (Not that I think much of the Saudi government, but at least they are a devil we know, and can buy off.)
Ending the Iran embargo shouldn't mean helping them with their nuclear energy program. That's insane, unless the west has 100% access to all their facilities. The last I heard access was one of the main unresolved issues.
Clearly this is in the agreement due to corporate influence. At what point does profit become treason?
Everyone is expendable, from the CEO to the janitor.
I suggest that you leave your parent's basement and visit the real world some time. in the real world everyone is expendable except for the CEO and their cronies.
Look at all the big US companies after the 2008 crash. No CEOs, C-anything-O or boards of director were out and out fired. A very few CEOs (for example the head of Bank of America) were "retired", but given their fat golden parachutes they still ended up outrageously wealthy. There is no negative penalty, even for complete failure, for anyone at the top.
Corporations only have one goal: making the upper management as rich as possible. They will throw anyone under the bus to achieve that end: employees, stockholders, customers. If it's ever a choice between stockholders and management, stockholders get screwed.
For example: Deep Misalignment Between Corporate Economic Performance, Shareholder Return and Executive Compensation
What universe are you from? How can you make a statement that is so clearly false? Did someone pay to say that, or are you a free lance idiot?
I would ask you to grow up, but that clearly isn't going to happen because you like being trash talking fool, and you get a lot of reinforcement for acting that way.
The only upside to all this is that if there is a genetic component to you behavior, it won't be passed on because with an attitude like that you will never get close enough to anyone to reproduce.
It's even worse, because unlike a lot of other gear, they can actually fix the problem in the field. They don't have to do a physical recall like car companies do. What they need is remote update features.
I think it goes back to Windows. Gates and friends set the standard that computers would break, and that the users had no recourse. If it crashed and you lost something important you were just out of luck. No guarantee on anything.
Now that everyone has accepted that manufacturers have no responsibility, we are completely stuck with infrastructure that makes it impossible to have secure online transactions. Users are deliberately kept in the dark and known bugs remain unfixed.
Until there is some change in the law that places liability where it belongs, on the manufacturers, nothing will change. Given the current political climate there is no chance of change. We're just screwed.
1984
It's not they are alone. Most of the large scale US economy is organized this way: media, telecom, Wall Street, big Pharma, agribusiness. It's kind of like a mafia state: everyone has to give some money to the person above them, and all the wealth accumulates at the top.
Welcome to post-capitalist America: no competition, no democracy, no freedom of speech, no financial security.
This funding will complete the purchase of a Doppler Radar system for Southwest Washington and provide for the land and installation costs associated with the system.
The cost of the "expensive" earthquake early warning system is around the cost of 5 Doppler systems. As of 2013 the National Weather service has access to 159 Doppler installations.
Note that the national radar network is being upgraded to high end Doppler for tornado and severe storm detection. So why do those in the Midwest, Gulf Coast and East Coast deserve early warning on tornadoes and California gets peanuts ($5,000,000) for the inevitable large earthquake? Politics.
So they can afford this in Mongolia and it's too much for California? Really?
Any pub worth it's hand pull taps wouldn't let an ice cube in the door. You're implying that they would serve soft drinks or cold beer. The horror!
That would be a step up for the Slashdot contingent that is currently living in their parents basement without a giant aluminum ball.
I hope you're right: potential Darwin award winner.
In the referenced Nature paper, the authors describe measurements they made on honey bee and bumble bee neurons in response to sugar with and without the neonicotinoid compounds. As I also stated, they also checked if the presence of the insecticides had any impact on the way the insects detect sugar. It did not.
Understand this: they inserted electrodes into nerve fibers that bees use to "taste" what they are consuming. Using these electrodes they monitored the nerve signals going to the bees brain. By varying the concentration of insecticides over a range starting at zero, they were able to show that there was no difference in the response related to the amount of the chemical they were testing. The paper has charts and graphs with error bars and correlation (p) values. It's real science done by real scientists, who know that their academic reputation depends on avoiding mistakes.
This is not a high school "science experiment" with a bunch of bees free flying in a cage with two sources of sugar and a student counting the number of bees going to one or the other. The experiment is based on a fundamental understanding at the neurological level of how bees function. It has nothing to do with nectar.
Your criticism is based on a level of understanding that is extremely childish. Are you actually that uninformed? You are not asking relevant question, but making assertions based in ignorance. Even given the generally low quality of analytical thinking shown on Slashdot, you lack of knowledge is pathetic. Normally I would say that you should look at the paper, but in your case I expect that there are too many big words that you would not understand.
The Nature article examined the neurophysiological response of bees to three of the most common neonicotinoid pesticides. They determined that the bee taste system cannot detect these chemicals, and additionally the chemicals have no influence on the bee's ability to recognize sugar. This means the bees preference for food with these substances results from interaction with their central nervous system. Considering that nicotine is a CNS stimulant, this makes perfect sense.
You didn't like the conclusion of the article, so you read it with the single intent of refuting it. When you found one thing that you thought you could use as an attack, you picked on that. It did not occur to you that the people who do this kind of research are extremely knowledgeable and would would never make that kind of foolish error.
You have revealed your true colors. You are willfully ignorant and have no regard for the truth. You were effectively accusing the authors of fraudulent research. Accusing others of lying to achieve their goals shows that you are a dishonest yourself, because that is the logic of habitual liars.
“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
Has anyone looked for their lobbying efforts on 1H-B visas? If Sony is able to buy access that influences legislation, what about TATA? They surely have an economic interest in the number of 1H-B visa jobs available. Do you think they would want to get more visas, and be willing to spend money to make that happen?
Our current campaign contribution system makes it impossible to tell who is spending money to on elections. Even if Sony is not technically breaking the law, does that mean that everyone else from overseas is being equally careful in following the rules?
Could China take advantage of these loopholes? Even if the Chinese government is not, why would Chinese business interests ignore the advantages?
What's in the secret Trans Pacific Partnership treaty? The bill has been given fast track status, so the only vote that will be taken by congress is to either accept it or reject it. Just like the DMCA, there will be no time to review a very complex document. Just look how that turned out.
The lack of transparency in political funding didn't happen by magic. It was a result of a long process that including having a right wing majority on the Supreme Court. Defending the current situation by saying it's legal is another way of sidestepping the issue of corruption in the political process. When there is no accounting for money in politics, the law will obviously be for sale to the highest bidder. In the current global economy that means anybody in the world. Does that seem like a good idea?
The same arguments were used to justify the North American Trade Agreement, which was another terrible idea. NAFTA made it much easier both to move jobs out of the US to Mexico. Additionally it helped destroy small scale farming in northern Mexico, because these farms couldn't compete with subsidized US agribusiness. Now most of the food imported from Mexico is from large scale farming, because that is competitive. The end of small farms enabled the growth of marijuana farming and the growth of violent drug cartels.
Besides the steaming pile of bull crap that is the DCMA, one of the other Republican moves was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, which directly lead to the Crash of 2008. Glass-Steagall didn't disappear all at once; the dismantling started during the Reagan years. It held up as long as the Democrats were in control and Volker was in charge if the FED. When Greenspan got in then the end of Glass-Steagall became a priority for the Republicans and Wall Street, and they got what they paid for.
If you don't like the DCMA, you should be terrified by the TPP, a secret trade treaty. We, i.e. the public, had no clue about what is in this thing. It's been given so called "fast track" status, so there will very limited debate or opportunity to amend the language. And since it's an international treaty, it supersedes US law. If it passes in Congress, Obama will sign it. How do you feel about letting Asian nations decide our trade policies?
The TPP effectively allows big business interests to offshore the regulatory process. It's so much easier to change the rules of the game in smaller countries where things like environmental and consumer protection have minimal impact. Since we have no idea with the treaty actually says, it seems likely that a lot of the protections that we have in the US will be effectively gutted with no way override it.
If you think things are bad now, just wait.
They're fine with fake anything that helps their bottom line.
They will always use their political capital to protect their position and profit. As long as they are making money they don't give a rat's ass about anything else; who cares about climate change if I'm making money right now.
There are economically viable solutions for distributed solar power, but they change the model for the entrenched players. Since it's about (economic) power and (political) power, they will oppose any change that decreases their (economic/political/electrical) power. Efficiency and sustainability are irrelevant. Just ask the Koch brothers, the Kings of Coal. Can there be any doubt that they are neck deep in this issue?
The issue of regulation and monopoly is meaningless. We live in an era where entrenched interests bend the rules to guarantee their status. Is automobile manufacturing a regulated monopoly? Of course not. But they still have been able to use the law to keep Tesla from selling cars in many states. Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, the United Launch Alliance, have used their clout to keep SpaceX from getting Defense Department contracts. (Elon Musk has to have an iron constitution considering the kind of crap he has had to deal with.)
Welcome to post-capitalist America. No capitalism, no democracy, no privacy, no liberty.
What was that again about an absence of religion leading to evil behavior?
McAlister was set up. He was asked to wear a plaid shirt in the photo lineup, and he was the only one in a plaid shirt. His release date has passed, but he continues to be incarcerated because he was convicted of a violent sex crime. There is no exculpatory DNA evidence. He has already done 29 years for a crime that the prosecutor in the case thinks was a wrongful conviction.
What was that about the system being perfect again?