Treason is not the correct term. It refers to betrayal of country.
In law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against one's sovereign or nation. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife or that of a master by his servant.
In law, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. Seditious words in writing are seditious libel. A seditionist is one who engages in or promotes the interests of sedition.
Note the boldface. In this case the "established order" is the rule of law enshrined in the constitution. The NSA has subverted the constitution with warrantless mass surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security (aka Department of Homeland Pork) has ignored the constitutional right to due process with the "no fly list": there is no official way to find out if you are on it or to be removed from the list.
These actions, along with many current policies, are absolutely unconstitutional. In short, sedition. They betray the constitutional rule of law. Treason typically is the betrayal of one's country to another sovereign entity.
The American middle class prospered from the end of WWII up to the time of the Reagan presidency. In the post-Reagan era an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth is the new normal. We have an economical/political system that redistributes wealth upwards. There is no other rational explanation for the current statistics. This is the legacy of Reaganomics: the end of the American Dream.
The US, post-Soviet Russia and post-Communist China are all following the same path to rule by oligarchy. The differences in how control is concentrated are not important to the continuing concentration of power in each system. In Russia, the economic oligarchs are only allowed to slavishly support Putan, or they are jailed or exiled and their wealth stripped. In China the oligarchs are either Party members themselves or the families of Party members. The rest of the rich know that they must participate in the endemic corruption. They were only allowed to succeed because they embraced corruption from the beginning.
In the US the oligarchs have, for the most part, taken over the government and the country is run for their benefit. Examples are too numerous to mention, but I'll highlight a few.
The 2008 market crash. The reason it was so horrific in the first place was that the Bush administration effectively suspended all regulation of Wall Street and Alan Greenspan got to fulfill his Libertarian fantasy. The result, unsurprisingly, was an epic failure. Lack of effective oversight is the wet dream of every oligarch. That's why they love secret unlimited secret campaign contributions, another gift to oligarchs the from the politicians and judges they own.
The bailout from the crash was another astonishing transfer of wealth to the ultra rich. Instead of calling Wall Street to task and making those responsible pay up, the oligarchs were rewarded instead. Many of them are have far more now then they did before 2008, and everyone else is worse off. The new stock market highs are the proof of that. Meanwhile, the job recovery is still lagging, and the jobs that are being generated pay significantly lower then before the crash. This is a mass transfer of assets from the general population to the rich. Again there is no other rational explanation.
An earlier example is Medicare Part D, brought to your pocketbook by Big Pharma and Billy Tauzin,
Two months before resigning as chair of the committee which oversees the drug industry, Tauzin had played a key role in shepherding through Congress the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill. Democrats said that the bill was "a give-away to the drugmakers" because it prohibited the government from negotiating lower drug prices and bans the importation of identical, cheaper, drugs from Canada and elsewhere. The Veterans Affairs agency, which can negotiate drug prices, pays much less than Medicare. Public Citizen called Tauzin's hiring "yet another example of how public service is leading to private riches." Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook said, "a member of Congress who pushed through a major piece of legislation benefiting the drug industry gets the job leading that industry."
The bill was passed in an unusual congressional session at 3 a.m. under heavy pressure from the drug companies. Walter B. Jones (R-NC) said, "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill." The drug lobby invested more than $10 million in campaign contributions during the last election and has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave office, said Jones.
Tauzin received $11.6 million from PhRMA in 2010, making him the highest-paid health-law lobbyist.
I'll even make a prediction: when the FCC announces what they will call "Net Neutrality" rules, it will be the end of the internet as an open platform. It will become just as closed, structured and overpriced as the current cable industry. Just like Wall Street and Big
Yes, fitting a random person into a full body rig will have zero impact on the false positive/false negative rates. No problem.
They tested this on 75 volunteers. This is an example of the kind of bogus "proof" that is used to justify the utility of polygraphs in the first place.
It's in the same territory as drug companies excluding tests that show problems with their drugs. I'm sure if they ran enough small groups that they could find one with better then 90% and report only that.
They clearly are more concerned about the publicity aspects of the hack then anything else. Any other issues, like exposure of employee data, don't mean a damn to them.
That's why there are the DCMA takedown notices and the threats to sue. They figure that if they can keep it out of the press then it will soon be forgotten and they won't have much to worry about.
This might work for the general public, but in Hollywood it's not going to be that easy. Besides the powerful individuals that they trashed, it's now obvious that that they also engage in routine conspiracies to get what they want. That's what the Google maneuver was about. A lot of players are going to realize that Sony had done a lot of dirty deeds already, and some will see that previous problems may be the result of underhanded tactics. Not that anyone else is better, but having confirmation effectively raises the stakes.
Personally, I enjoy looking forward to some real pain in Sony land. They have a bad reputation among the Hollywood rank and file, so there will be a lot of schadenfreude in the new year. It's long overdue.
What are the alternatives? Who will fund things like deep sea diving or space launch systems? (Big game hunting is just a stupid troll.)
There are only two groups outside of individual rich people who can fund these endeavors: governments and normal investment. Governments are already in the game. India just launched their first heavy lift vehicle, for example.
Regular investment will never take that kind of risk. Perhaps in the past you could have raised money on Wall Street or the equivalent, but these days big financial institutions expect government subsidized guaranteed profit. It's so much easier to buy legislation, manipulate the system and control regulators then invest in long term innovation. Acquisitions and mergers along with zero interest prime rate funding lines their pockets without any bothersome "investing". Why bother with risky space investment, for example?
So it's fine if big egos go after these kinds of things. There are a lot worse ways that the ultra rich spend their wealth. Would you rather see Musk with Tesla and SpaceX, or Ellison with his billion dollar yacht?
By the way, you are subsidizing Ellison's yacht and purchase of the island of Lanai in Hawaii. He took out a loan against his stock in Oracle, so the interest he pays defers his income taxes. To quote another rich asshat, "taxes are for little people."
Given how abysmal PHP is as a language, it seems completely consistent that an overwhelming percentage of the deployed systems are security failures. PHP seems to breed incompetence.
Apple is part of the US oligarchy. Just like European royalty in the 18th and 19th century, today's oligarchs often have more in common with each other then they do with the people of their own country. That's why nothing is likely to happen with Apple in China.
If you're going to play the oligarch card, trying to cast primary blame on the peasants/consumers avoids the real issue. There is class warfare going on, but only one side knows it's a war. Right now the peasants are clueless, so they always loose.
2) KKK may be "monitored", but they are allowed to speak, demonstrate, organize, and so forth as long as they commit no actual crimes (arson etc).
In the US the KKK is really close to the government. They, and other right wing advocates of violence, get away with a lot of stuff that would end up in big trouble for non-right wingers.
(Reuters) - U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, gave a speech at a conference of white nationalists when he was a state lawmaker in 2002, the Washington Post reported on Monday, citing his spokeswoman.
Spokeswoman Moira Bagley said Scalise, the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives, was not familiar with the ideology of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO, when he attended the event in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, the Washington Post reported.
EURO was founded in 2000 by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives and ran a high-profile race for governor of the state in 1991.
Given the name of the group, and the participation of David Duke, his claim he was unaware of the white racist nature of the gathering are not credible.
(Reuters) - A pair of motorists in a pick-up truck brandished a firearm and flashed a threatening sign at a federal land management agent in Utah, officials said on Thursday, about a month after a widely-publicized armed standoff with a rancher.
...
Crandall said a BLM employee was driving an agency vehicle on Interstate 15 near Nephi, about 90 miles south of Salt Lake City when two motorists whose faces were covered pulled alongside him and made an obscene gesture.
The suspects pulled away but returned minutes later, flashing a gun and a hand-scrawled sign that read: "You need to die," Crandall said.
She said the incident was reported to the Utah Highway Patrol but the BLM agent could not provide investigators with a license plate number because it appeared to be covered with duct tape.
So imagine if some non-honkies in masks threatened a federal employee with guns. There would be a 100 person team from the FBI on the case immediately, and someone would be arrested shortly whether they were involved or not. Not many resources were spent trying to find the perps in this case. Since it's Utah, all that happened is the the BLM has removed insignia from their vehicles.
So not all terrorists are created equal. It counts less if you are white and Christian.
You realize this has nothing to do with capitalism, at least of the free market variety. They conflict is over who is going to get the money when they raise the rates. It's essentially which group of crooks is going to get to gouge customers.
The primary beneficiaries are the upper management. No big corporation is run for the clients, stockholders, or employes who do the real work. It's all intended to enrich the people at the top.
It's how things are right now: no democracy, no capitalism, no freedom. Nothing to see here, move along.
He's doomed as a Republican because he supports that science stuff. If you support science, then you are obviously in cahoots with them liburuls, so you are on the side of evil with evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and the earth not being flat.
His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.
There's a restaurant/coffee shop and hotel. They have their own brand of beef, and a beef feed lot just up the road. You can buy steaks at a butcher shop to take with you.
This makes a lot of sense as a pilot project location for Tesla. A lot of people already make it a stop going between Southern and Northern California and there are a lot of Tesla owners in the state. I think that many Tesla drivers will just stop to take a break anyway and that would give the swap facility more flexibility to schedule their stations. It's a smart move.
T-Mobile's market capitalization is $21.35 Billion. A $90 million fine is a joke.They spend more then this for office supplies. And they won't have to pay nearly $90 million, because they will game the system so that very few people get the refund. The corrupt asshats who are responsible went home this weekend, had a drink and laughed the heads off over how useless the FCC is. It is a near certainty that they still came out ahead on the deal.
You want a fine that will make them take notice? Fines for companies that do large scale interstate commerce should be scaled to the worth of the company. The pretend $90 million figure is 0.4% of their market capitalization. Make the fine 1% or more of their market capitalization and I guarantee they will pay attention. Make it 2% or more and there might even be a turnover of the CEO and board of directors, which is what should really happen. Remember that they willingly participated in fraud to the tune of $67 million. The fact that no one is exposed to any jail time for this is a measure of how corrupt our pretend capitalistic system has become.
Boston Dynamics is now owned by Google, so Google is now a direct provider of equipment to the US military. Maybe this means their motto has been modified from "Don't do evil" to "Don't avoid evil."
The ultimate bottleneck on human travel to Mars is funding, not technology. Given an Apollo program approach the time could easily be cut in half from current 20 to 30 year estimate.
Since this is a public relations issue, what's needed is a rabid single issue voting block that can sway elections and spark fear in the hearts of elected officials, like the NRA. It helps if the issue can be simplified to a simple "for us or against us" mentality.
So here's the pitch:
Surf a Martian Sand Dune on a Block of DRY ICE in 1/3rd Gravity!!!
Every extreme sport enthusiast will go nuts. And if they are anything, they are fanatics. That's why it's called extreme sports. So there is an already existing community that can be recruited and is crazy enough to focus on only one thing. Additionally, the demographic is alienated from politics, so they don't have to be recruited from existing voter blocks.
I see a Kickstarter campaign, and possible participation from Red Bull and GoPro. What could possibly go wrong?
At best, this is gaming the system for guaranteed profit. At worst, it's murder for profit.
This is not an environment were the consumer can just automatically go to another vendor. The myth of a free market does not apply because there is no parity between the user and the producer. Although generics exist, they cannot always be substituted, and sometimes they don't even exist.
Medical companies are profit driven to the extent that they cannot be trusted. They routinely lie about both the safety and the efficacy of their products. This puts the health and even the lives of patients at risk all the time.
For example, De Puy/Johnson and Johnson produced metal on metal hip implants, and their own internal data showed that they were failing at a high rate and requiring additional surgery. Additionally, metal fragments were released into the bodies of recipients and causing metal poisoning. They decided to phase out the product because of "declining sales" and did not do a recall or inform doctors or the FDA.
At the beginning of 2010, DePuy Orthopaedics said they were phasing out the ASR Hip Implant because of declining sales, but never mentioned the high failure rate data from an Australian implant registry. In March 2010, the New York Times reported that DePuy issued its first warning to doctors and patients about the high early failure rate. However, at this point, they still had not issued a recall of the product. In fact, they claimed any statements referencing a recall were false.
Regulation is a necessity because the history of drug and medical equipment is filled with business practices leading to horrible outcomes, including needless death.
In addition, drug companies get huge direct and indirect subsidies from the government. A lot of the basic research is government funded and handed over the the drug companies at no cost. When a drug is going off patent, it is legal for the patent holder to pay other drug companies to not produce generic versions. This is the polar opposite of free enterprise. It's legalize collusion to maintain state sanctioned monopolies.
I'm routinely baffled and angered by self-styled "defenders of capitalism" who excuse dangerous and grossly anti-competitive business behavior. If the government did things like this they would be screaming like stuck pigs, but when the same or worse is done under the flag of capitalism it somehow is transformed into a sacred act, and negative consequences are left out of the picture. It seems obvious to me that the same kind of scrutiny should be applied to any big organization. Only being critical of one side is just stupid. Stop doing it.
When I see the US flag prominently displayed on the Atlas V rocket I wonder why there isn't a Russian flag right below it. The first stage liquid fuel engines are Russian built RD-180's. Without them the thing would just sit on the pad and go nowhere.
There is an intrinsic problem with the map presentation: it ignores the relative number of papers from each country. This can lead to a distorted perception for countries with a small number of papers in the data set.
To quote the article "It shows only the incidence of flagged authors for the 57 nations with at least 100 submitted papers, to minimize distortion from small sample sizes." If a country has a total number of papers in the hundreds it implies the number of authors is also low. Therefor, a small number of authors who routinely plagiarize can have a major effect.
It's analogous to a small town with a very low crime rate. All it takes is a few significant incidences to cause a huge jump in the statistics.
For comparison, it would be interesting to see the rates for other kinds of text reuse. From the article:
After filtering out review articles and legitimate quoting, about one in 16 arXiv authors were found to have copied long phrases and sentences from their own previously published work that add up to about the same amount of text as this entire article.
For comparison it would be useful to see the percentage of this reuse displayed on another map. I have a strong suspicion that countries that look good on the presented map would not look nearly as good by this measure.
C is important because it directly presents the actual machine memory model. If you want to have an understanding of how software works, you need to understand this. People who never learn how memory is really organized lack fundamental knowledge.
It's as if engineers could skip calculus because there are automated systems that will do it for them. Even if they never work directly with calculus, the experience is critical to being a competent engineer.
Yes, C has features/bugs that can be really ugly. But as a professional you can make a system like C and it's runtime libraries work then you are much better equipped to do other complex tasks. The experience can result in careful habits that will help your entire career.
Ah yes, the downtrodden shareholders. Selfless upper management live near the poverty line in order to maximize value for the shareholders.
Is your head encased in a concrete block? Have you ever looked at the winners and losers in the US economy? Upper management in the US don't give a tinker's damn about shareholders, customers, or employees. They screw everyone in their pursuit personal wealth. Large companies are run primarily for the gain of the corrupt insiders.
Look at what happened in the financial sector in the ten year run-up to the 2008 crash. The people at the top were wildly irresponsible because they were making obscene amounts of money. After the crash, none of them suffered at all.
Consider Angelo Mozilo the former CEO of Countrywide Mortgage. Conde-Nast Portfolio placed him the second on their list of the 25 worst CEOs of all time. It's hard to know the exact figures, but at one point his compensation was $470 million. Even though he had to personally pay a $46 million fine to keep from being criminally charged, he still ended up filthy rich. With the post 2008 stock market gains he may be worth more then $470 million by now.
Meanwhile, the shareholders at Bank of America, which bought Countrywide, are still paying for the bad loans that he was responsible for creating. The only reason banks are profitable right now is because the FED discount rate is between 0.0% and 0.25%, which is basically free money. A senile poodle could run a profitable business with 0% loans.
Those 0% loans from the FED are de facto backed by the people of the US. Effectively the common national debt increases. So the CEO class makes personal profit by siphoning wealth from everyone. We have an economic system that redistributes income upwards. The proof of this is the ever increasing wealth gap between the top 10% and the declining fortunes of the 90%.
So why are you making excuses for greedy incompetent psychopaths who will destroy anything as long as they are making money? What's wrong with you?
The shorter version: you didn't bother to read the article.
It talks a lot about the actual decision making process, which you did not reference. It also goes into great detail on how sport fishing has been a major driving force in fishery policy since the introduction of salmon in the late 1960's. It ends with the current dilemma of balancing between the re-emergence of trout as the primary sport fish vs the salmon, which are not doing well. The irony is that a trout friendly ecosystem is much closer to the way the lakes were before the man made changes that lead to the introduction of salmon in the first place.
You'd rather just whine in complete ignorance rather then read something interesting and become more knowledgeable. Pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct term is Sedition.
Note the boldface. In this case the "established order" is the rule of law enshrined in the constitution. The NSA has subverted the constitution with warrantless mass surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security (aka Department of Homeland Pork) has ignored the constitutional right to due process with the "no fly list": there is no official way to find out if you are on it or to be removed from the list.
These actions, along with many current policies, are absolutely unconstitutional. In short, sedition. They betray the constitutional rule of law. Treason typically is the betrayal of one's country to another sovereign entity.
The US, post-Soviet Russia and post-Communist China are all following the same path to rule by oligarchy. The differences in how control is concentrated are not important to the continuing concentration of power in each system. In Russia, the economic oligarchs are only allowed to slavishly support Putan, or they are jailed or exiled and their wealth stripped. In China the oligarchs are either Party members themselves or the families of Party members. The rest of the rich know that they must participate in the endemic corruption. They were only allowed to succeed because they embraced corruption from the beginning.
In the US the oligarchs have, for the most part, taken over the government and the country is run for their benefit. Examples are too numerous to mention, but I'll highlight a few.
The 2008 market crash. The reason it was so horrific in the first place was that the Bush administration effectively suspended all regulation of Wall Street and Alan Greenspan got to fulfill his Libertarian fantasy. The result, unsurprisingly, was an epic failure. Lack of effective oversight is the wet dream of every oligarch. That's why they love secret unlimited secret campaign contributions, another gift to oligarchs the from the politicians and judges they own.
The bailout from the crash was another astonishing transfer of wealth to the ultra rich. Instead of calling Wall Street to task and making those responsible pay up, the oligarchs were rewarded instead. Many of them are have far more now then they did before 2008, and everyone else is worse off. The new stock market highs are the proof of that. Meanwhile, the job recovery is still lagging, and the jobs that are being generated pay significantly lower then before the crash. This is a mass transfer of assets from the general population to the rich. Again there is no other rational explanation.
An earlier example is Medicare Part D, brought to your pocketbook by Big Pharma and Billy Tauzin,
I'll even make a prediction: when the FCC announces what they will call "Net Neutrality" rules, it will be the end of the internet as an open platform. It will become just as closed, structured and overpriced as the current cable industry. Just like Wall Street and Big
Remember, the real name of DHS is DHP: Department of Homland Pork.
They tested this on 75 volunteers. This is an example of the kind of bogus "proof" that is used to justify the utility of polygraphs in the first place.
It's in the same territory as drug companies excluding tests that show problems with their drugs. I'm sure if they ran enough small groups that they could find one with better then 90% and report only that.
Why do polygraph advocates lie so much?
Binary or Hex. But not Octal.
That's why there are the DCMA takedown notices and the threats to sue. They figure that if they can keep it out of the press then it will soon be forgotten and they won't have much to worry about.
This might work for the general public, but in Hollywood it's not going to be that easy. Besides the powerful individuals that they trashed, it's now obvious that that they also engage in routine conspiracies to get what they want. That's what the Google maneuver was about. A lot of players are going to realize that Sony had done a lot of dirty deeds already, and some will see that previous problems may be the result of underhanded tactics. Not that anyone else is better, but having confirmation effectively raises the stakes.
Personally, I enjoy looking forward to some real pain in Sony land. They have a bad reputation among the Hollywood rank and file, so there will be a lot of schadenfreude in the new year. It's long overdue.
There are only two groups outside of individual rich people who can fund these endeavors: governments and normal investment. Governments are already in the game. India just launched their first heavy lift vehicle, for example.
Regular investment will never take that kind of risk. Perhaps in the past you could have raised money on Wall Street or the equivalent, but these days big financial institutions expect government subsidized guaranteed profit. It's so much easier to buy legislation, manipulate the system and control regulators then invest in long term innovation. Acquisitions and mergers along with zero interest prime rate funding lines their pockets without any bothersome "investing". Why bother with risky space investment, for example?
So it's fine if big egos go after these kinds of things. There are a lot worse ways that the ultra rich spend their wealth. Would you rather see Musk with Tesla and SpaceX, or Ellison with his billion dollar yacht?
By the way, you are subsidizing Ellison's yacht and purchase of the island of Lanai in Hawaii. He took out a loan against his stock in Oracle, so the interest he pays defers his income taxes. To quote another rich asshat, "taxes are for little people."
Given how abysmal PHP is as a language, it seems completely consistent that an overwhelming percentage of the deployed systems are security failures. PHP seems to breed incompetence.
This year, BURPG has been carrying on an extensive test program on a series of engines and rockets in Sudbury, Massachusetts
Additionally, there are no radioactive mind control CIA spiders in your basement. Seek professional help.
If you're going to play the oligarch card, trying to cast primary blame on the peasants/consumers avoids the real issue. There is class warfare going on, but only one side knows it's a war. Right now the peasants are clueless, so they always loose.
2) KKK may be "monitored", but they are allowed to speak, demonstrate, organize, and so forth as long as they commit no actual crimes (arson etc).
In the US the KKK is really close to the government. They, and other right wing advocates of violence, get away with a lot of stuff that would end up in big trouble for non-right wingers.
For example, the incoming House Whip, Steve Scalise, gave a well received speech to a white nationalist group in 2002
Given the name of the group, and the participation of David Duke, his claim he was unaware of the white racist nature of the gathering are not credible.
As for toleration of right wing threats of violence, there's an ongoing problem in Utah with people with guns threatening Bureau of Land Management employees
So imagine if some non-honkies in masks threatened a federal employee with guns. There would be a 100 person team from the FBI on the case immediately, and someone would be arrested shortly whether they were involved or not. Not many resources were spent trying to find the perps in this case. Since it's Utah, all that happened is the the BLM has removed insignia from their vehicles.
So not all terrorists are created equal. It counts less if you are white and Christian.
The primary beneficiaries are the upper management. No big corporation is run for the clients, stockholders, or employes who do the real work. It's all intended to enrich the people at the top.
It's how things are right now: no democracy, no capitalism, no freedom. Nothing to see here, move along.
His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.
This makes a lot of sense as a pilot project location for Tesla. A lot of people already make it a stop going between Southern and Northern California and there are a lot of Tesla owners in the state. I think that many Tesla drivers will just stop to take a break anyway and that would give the swap facility more flexibility to schedule their stations. It's a smart move.
You want a fine that will make them take notice? Fines for companies that do large scale interstate commerce should be scaled to the worth of the company. The pretend $90 million figure is 0.4% of their market capitalization. Make the fine 1% or more of their market capitalization and I guarantee they will pay attention. Make it 2% or more and there might even be a turnover of the CEO and board of directors, which is what should really happen. Remember that they willingly participated in fraud to the tune of $67 million. The fact that no one is exposed to any jail time for this is a measure of how corrupt our pretend capitalistic system has become.
Boston Dynamics is now owned by Google, so Google is now a direct provider of equipment to the US military. Maybe this means their motto has been modified from "Don't do evil" to "Don't avoid evil."
Since this is a public relations issue, what's needed is a rabid single issue voting block that can sway elections and spark fear in the hearts of elected officials, like the NRA. It helps if the issue can be simplified to a simple "for us or against us" mentality.
So here's the pitch:
Surf a Martian Sand Dune on a Block of DRY ICE in 1/3rd Gravity!!!
Every extreme sport enthusiast will go nuts. And if they are anything, they are fanatics. That's why it's called extreme sports. So there is an already existing community that can be recruited and is crazy enough to focus on only one thing. Additionally, the demographic is alienated from politics, so they don't have to be recruited from existing voter blocks.
I see a Kickstarter campaign, and possible participation from Red Bull and GoPro. What could possibly go wrong?
This is not an environment were the consumer can just automatically go to another vendor. The myth of a free market does not apply because there is no parity between the user and the producer. Although generics exist, they cannot always be substituted, and sometimes they don't even exist.
Medical companies are profit driven to the extent that they cannot be trusted. They routinely lie about both the safety and the efficacy of their products. This puts the health and even the lives of patients at risk all the time.
For example, De Puy/Johnson and Johnson produced metal on metal hip implants, and their own internal data showed that they were failing at a high rate and requiring additional surgery. Additionally, metal fragments were released into the bodies of recipients and causing metal poisoning. They decided to phase out the product because of "declining sales" and did not do a recall or inform doctors or the FDA.
Regulation is a necessity because the history of drug and medical equipment is filled with business practices leading to horrible outcomes, including needless death.
In addition, drug companies get huge direct and indirect subsidies from the government. A lot of the basic research is government funded and handed over the the drug companies at no cost. When a drug is going off patent, it is legal for the patent holder to pay other drug companies to not produce generic versions. This is the polar opposite of free enterprise. It's legalize collusion to maintain state sanctioned monopolies.
I'm routinely baffled and angered by self-styled "defenders of capitalism" who excuse dangerous and grossly anti-competitive business behavior. If the government did things like this they would be screaming like stuck pigs, but when the same or worse is done under the flag of capitalism it somehow is transformed into a sacred act, and negative consequences are left out of the picture. It seems obvious to me that the same kind of scrutiny should be applied to any big organization. Only being critical of one side is just stupid. Stop doing it.
Yea 'Merica!
To quote the article "It shows only the incidence of flagged authors for the 57 nations with at least 100 submitted papers, to minimize distortion from small sample sizes." If a country has a total number of papers in the hundreds it implies the number of authors is also low. Therefor, a small number of authors who routinely plagiarize can have a major effect.
It's analogous to a small town with a very low crime rate. All it takes is a few significant incidences to cause a huge jump in the statistics.
For comparison, it would be interesting to see the rates for other kinds of text reuse. From the article:
For comparison it would be useful to see the percentage of this reuse displayed on another map. I have a strong suspicion that countries that look good on the presented map would not look nearly as good by this measure.
You will be attacked by your refrigerator.
It's as if engineers could skip calculus because there are automated systems that will do it for them. Even if they never work directly with calculus, the experience is critical to being a competent engineer.
Yes, C has features/bugs that can be really ugly. But as a professional you can make a system like C and it's runtime libraries work then you are much better equipped to do other complex tasks. The experience can result in careful habits that will help your entire career.
Is your head encased in a concrete block? Have you ever looked at the winners and losers in the US economy? Upper management in the US don't give a tinker's damn about shareholders, customers, or employees. They screw everyone in their pursuit personal wealth. Large companies are run primarily for the gain of the corrupt insiders.
Look at what happened in the financial sector in the ten year run-up to the 2008 crash. The people at the top were wildly irresponsible because they were making obscene amounts of money. After the crash, none of them suffered at all.
Consider Angelo Mozilo the former CEO of Countrywide Mortgage. Conde-Nast Portfolio placed him the second on their list of the 25 worst CEOs of all time. It's hard to know the exact figures, but at one point his compensation was $470 million. Even though he had to personally pay a $46 million fine to keep from being criminally charged, he still ended up filthy rich. With the post 2008 stock market gains he may be worth more then $470 million by now.
Meanwhile, the shareholders at Bank of America, which bought Countrywide, are still paying for the bad loans that he was responsible for creating. The only reason banks are profitable right now is because the FED discount rate is between 0.0% and 0.25%, which is basically free money. A senile poodle could run a profitable business with 0% loans.
Those 0% loans from the FED are de facto backed by the people of the US. Effectively the common national debt increases. So the CEO class makes personal profit by siphoning wealth from everyone. We have an economic system that redistributes income upwards. The proof of this is the ever increasing wealth gap between the top 10% and the declining fortunes of the 90%.
So why are you making excuses for greedy incompetent psychopaths who will destroy anything as long as they are making money? What's wrong with you?
Good. I'll keep posting more of it.
It talks a lot about the actual decision making process, which you did not reference. It also goes into great detail on how sport fishing has been a major driving force in fishery policy since the introduction of salmon in the late 1960's. It ends with the current dilemma of balancing between the re-emergence of trout as the primary sport fish vs the salmon, which are not doing well. The irony is that a trout friendly ecosystem is much closer to the way the lakes were before the man made changes that lead to the introduction of salmon in the first place.
You'd rather just whine in complete ignorance rather then read something interesting and become more knowledgeable. Pathetic.