Twelve murders would be the average amount for a city of 240,000. St. Petersburg Fl, Jersey Ciy NJ and Chandler AZ are all around that size. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population. I haven't found the actual crime figures for these places, but I think that the residents would only be upset if the number was far above twelve per year.
There are a lot more Craigslist users then in any of those places, even though they don't "live" there.
You are a psychopath. All your examples assume manipulation is the only way of interacting with people.
Here is a point by point response:
Compiling information for pressuring VIPs is not equivalent to a "romantic date", unless your idea of "romance" is getting laid by lying and tricks. Are excessive alcohol date rape drugs included in your romantic encounters?
What you call "management" is coercion and intimidation. The idea of leadership by inspiring loyalty is not in your play book. Do you prefer to whip your employees or use the cat-o-nine-tales?
It is just plane illegal for the CIA to spy on US citizens for political purposes. This is the kind of activity that happens in police states, not democracies.
You are conflating use of blogging for psy-ops with taking information out of context and using it as part of a smear campaign. A joke about being so lonely for his wife that he was considering holding hands with a local man is called an inappropriate homosexual gesture? So what does that say about former President Bush, who was commonly seen holding hands with Saudi royal family members when he was in the White House?
So Holmes being investigated means he guilty and should be in jail. So much for innocent until proven guilty. And how is this like insider trading? How did he profit? Did he leak information to the Taliban? He communicated in his chain of command, and then to the JAG. He followed the rules and got screwed.
That team was specifically brought in to influence Afghan civilians, not US personal. How are they screw ups when they are not tasked with doing the job they were supposed to do? The asset was completely wasted, because the commander was incompetent. My tax dollars were wasted, and that was not Holmes fault.
By the way, this is how the Viet Nam war was lost. The military projected an unrealistic picture of how things were going and lost the support of the public in the US, because the fact did not match up to their false projections.
You deserve to live in a police state that has no effective rule of law, someplace like Cuba, North Korea, China or Iran. Everything you promote fits in with how power is used in an anti-democratic regime. Why don't you leave and go someplace you would fit right in.
What are some of the previously LISP techniques that you think could be exploited for this generation of dynamic languages? I am not asking this as a troll, I really want to know. I've programmed in LISP on Symbolics hardware, which is one reason for my curiosity.
Do you have any thoughts on dynamic languages that have a primary optimized virtual machine implementations? I'm thinking of PHP and LUA in particular. The language and the VM are very closely linked, and there are no other languages that target the VM. In theory this should result in good performance because the language and VM should be well matched. I know that LUA has a good reputation for speed, but I never see cross language comparisons with PHP and other sever side systems.
I know that bringing this up has huge troll bait potential, but I'm hoping that there is some meaningful information to be had. On the other hand this is Shashdot....
Globally, evolution is taught in science courses with limited controversy, with the exception of a few areas of the United States and several Islamic fundamentalist countries.
So it's not just radical Islamic regimes, it's Christians in the US.
The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.
Don't forget the wanna-be Christians despots here in the USA.
Being an employer does not give you the right to suspend the constitution. We are citizens, not slaves. Running a business does give to a license to be a tin god. The Founders of the US understood this, and they were willing to die for it. People in the middle east are dieing right now in order to have the right to freely express themselves. Your statement puts you firmly on the same side as King Gorge IV, Stalin, and the Taliban. How does it feel to be on their side? I think you fit right in.
This system is too easy to defeat. All a troublemaker has to do is get a small amount of the target substance and spread it around to trigger a false alert. For example, just walk in the public areas in front of an airport and sprinkle some powder on the sidewalk and leave. All the people walk in the powder, walk inside and then chaos ensues. This can be done at any scale, so even planing over an entire city will not allow bomb making locations to be located. Although this could be very useful in a limited way, it is not a quick fix for everything.
Just looking at two of the high figures, Yuma AZ has 242 clear days a year, and Las Vegas NV has 210/year. Note that the amount of energy available does not drop to zero on partly or even fully cloudy days, it is just reduced. Some energy may have to be expended to keep the biomass in the collectors from getting too cold at night, but this is not likely to be a huge amount.
These areas in the southwest are not agricultural areas, so we are not talking about replacing current cropland with solar facilities. There is a different problem here: where does the CO2 and water come from? This is the question no matter where the solar farm is located. In existing agricultural areas water can come from the same source as water for crops, but the C02 still has to come from somewhere.
If the CO2 is from existing fossil fuel plants then we would want to locate close to existing generating plants, which might not have the best amount of daylight. Still, extracting more energy from burning fossil fuel before it is released into the atmosphere is good with respect to global warming.
The real win would be to recycle CO2 from the atmosphere, which would render the process carbon neutral. If this could also be done with photosynthesis it could be a huge win, and then the farms could be anywhere there is sun and water. Note the claim that the water can be brackish or even salt water, so it could be done in coastal areas all over the world. With crude oil over $90 a barrel on a routine basis, this could be half as efficient as the claims and still be competitive.
Furthermore, Haile says, the high operating temperatures of the reactor mean that fast catalysis is possible, without the need for expensive and rare metal catalysts (cerium, in fact, is the most common of the rare earth metals—about as abundant as copper).
The feasible real world way to stop the problem is to keep illegal aliens from getting jobs. If people found out that they couldn't work no one would bother to cross the boarder. This is, however politically untenable.
US big business interests are dead set against this because they love cheap illegal labor that they can exploit and use to keep the wages of everyone down. This is why there are blue collar Spanish speaking communities all over the US. The unions were shut down in areas like meat packing and construction, and the illegals moved in. Instant cheap disposable workers you can kill, maim and fire at will with no repercussions.
Immigrant communities are clearly against it because they have high levels of resident aliens, both documented and undocumented. The don't trust the government no matter what their immigration status. If you pay any attention to right wing rhetoric about immigration, you'd be scared too. Lot of Republicans are are talking about ending birthright citizenship, and just like the Arizona law would love to ship anyone they think "looks illegal" out of the country without due process.
Civil liberty groups are against this because it would, among other things, require a national ID card, or some equivalent. Sadly, we are effectively way past that point with the current information gathering capabilities already in place. We have all the bad privacy implications of national ID without any of the transparency or oversight. If you doubt this, see how hard it is for someone to get off the DHS automatic search list.
So a feasible solution exists, but nobody wants it.
I think that if there was real capitalism in the mobile phone world this would not happen. Vendors would be competing on price and performance so they would offer free, or very low cost firmware upgrades to keep customers happy.
Of course the corrupt practices of telcos are minor compared to what the banks/credit card companies do. Even with the new regulations, credit card rates and practices are like allowing someone to pick you pocket on a daily basis.
It all goes back to lack of meaningful regulation.
The "invisible hand" is a fictional device intended to dupe consumers into thinking that their choices make a difference.
When all the big players conspire in a pseudo-cartel environment buyers are sheared like sheep, and cost is decoupled from price.
Some combination of real competition and government oversight is the only way to restore actual capitalism.
Competition is preferable but that requires breaking up the big dominant players, and right now they own the political process through campaign contributions, so that is not going to happen. The best hope in the short run is decent regulation,
if we can keep the corrupt government/business complex from shutting it down the way they did in the Bush administration.
This is the kind of crap that Microsoft is famous for: nonsupport of common web standards and substituting their own idiosyncratic replacements. For example, IE had no support for SVG, while it was in all other browsers. Supposedly SVG will be in the next major release of IE, but that is because Sivlerlight has not taken over the world like they planned. I expect that the same thing will happen with Chrome/WebM vs. H.264/everyone else. Meanwhile, all web users and content providers suffer because big arrogant players pretend that they can dictate how the Internet works to try and increase their market share.
So there were multiple parties at fault. So what? If one person robs a bank, is it a lessor crime then if multiple people rob a bank? In some cases more people means extra charges for conspiracy. I think that there is more then enough guilt and responsibility to go around for all the bad behavior.
As for lax government oversight, it's a red herring. (Pun intended.) When there was lax oversight of poultry farmers in the midwest and as a result people got sick from bacteria, the farmers couldn't say "You ignored our bad behavior, so we don't have to pay a fine." They go nailed anyway, it just took longer.
Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week. The report said that investigators "could not discern if any fraudulent alterations were present on these forms."
So how did this oversight failure happen? It was a product of the Bush administration's conscious sabotage of regulation when they were in control. They appointed "pro-business" officials who had a policy of letting business get away with everything up to and including murder. Remember that people died on that oil rig.
So far, all that has happened is that MMS people have quit or been fired. There have been lots of investigations but no one has been charged with anything.
The Obama administration seems to be serious about reinstating meaningful regulation, but now with the Republicans in control of the House that might not happen. Congressman Darrell Issa is asking businesses what government regulations they want eliminated (also known as soliciting bribes) http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/05/business/la-fi-issa-business-20110105. So if you like getting sick from bad food or big environmental disasters then you may be in luck.
The day you are involved any real research project is the day you can refer to NASA as a "whore". You are a congenital knuckle dragging asshat, and I expect that you have accomplished nothing in your entire life. Stop criticizing people who have real accomplishments from your parents basement, you dumb troll.
People who do hard things respect the work of others, and would never make the kind of idiot blanket statement you posted. Saying such a thing marks you as useless talentless and brainless. You trash you betters because you want to drag everyone else down the level of stupidity that makes you comfortable. STFU, moron.
Clearly you have never been the target of bullying or any form of discrimination based upon race, gender, ethnicity or religion. You don't have a clue. When people are harmed for not what they did, but because of who they are, the first response, just like yours, is to deny that anything out of the ordinary has happened. Nothing needs to change, right? That goes with the reality that often times no one is prosecuted for these kinds of crimes because nothing really extraordinary happened. Because there is no linkage between the motivation for the violence, and the criminal charge, nothing changes.
Let's apply your argument to some other crimes. Why make it special when someone kills a police officer? We already have laws for murder, so why do we need to make that a more serious crime? Same goes for judges and any elected official. Why make assassination a crime at all, it's just a murder like any other.
Same goes for terrorism and using weapons of mass destruction. If you use a bomb and kill dozens of people, there is no reason to have a special law making that a specific crime, right? It just means you did a lot of murder at one time, so why go though any extra legal effort. So hijacking airplanes and slamming them into the World Trade Center is a case of theft and murder and trespassing, nothing more. This isn't my logic, it's your logic (or ill-logic, to be more specific).
These are medieval hierarchies, so the protection of the individuals is automatically assumed to be identical to the protection of the company. They will allow untold damage to the organization to protect the leadership.
This was true in Paulson's financial bailout as well. No major CEO, board member or other major player was held accountable or lost their job, or has even been named in public as doing something wrong. For example, the ratings agencies, who clearly failed all their legal fiduciary requirements have been completely ignored.
So far the only big player who has faced any legal action is Earnst and Young, the accounting firm for Lehman Bros. They are accused of helping Lehman avoid disclosure of their weak financial condition by a trick known as "Repo 105". E&Y is being sued by Cuomo in New York State, not by the Feds. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/22/business/la-fi-ernst-young-20101222
The Feds have done almost nothing looking for illegal behavior among the financial elites. Their recent "big announcement" was about going after illegal insider information trading, mostly in the high tech sector. This is about as far from the financial meltdown as you can get and still be pretending that Wall St. is involved.
This is why the WikiLeaks dump of (most likely) BofA is so important. It will show massive wrong doing and that the Feds are consciously ignoring massive criminal activity on the part of the banks. It has the potential to change the public perception and possible change how these institutions are being regulated. One can always hope.
This is why trying to buy up domain names is so lame. This is going to be so meaningless if even part of the truth comes out.
And by the way, in the medieval hierarchy, anyone who reads this is a pesent.
It's the American economic aristocracy in action. And no, you can't really earn your way in, you have to be born into it. The chances of any present (like you) getting in are about the same as winning a $100 million lottery.
Anyone who is looking for "respect" in Hollywood deserves the respect that the upcoming "Yogi Bear" CGI animation deserves. Or Garfield or the TWO chipmunk movies had.
I'd tell the poster to grow up, but that would require leaving their parent's basement, which would be hard for a person over the age of 25 who has never had a real job and has as their most prized possession a collection of McDonald's Happy Meals figures.
The Sequoia super that Lawrence Livermore will be getting in 2012 — IBM said it'd be in late 2011 back when the deal was announced in February 2009, so there's been some apparent slippage — will consist of 96 racks and will be rated at 20.13 petaflops. Argonne National Laboratory said back in August that it wanted a BlueGene/Q box, too, and it will have 48 racks of compute drawers for a total of 10 petaflops of floating-point power.
Both the Chinese machine and the German machine are not cutting edge designs. They represent what you can do with near commodity hardware and good but not fully custom packaging. They may look like top end machines today, but by 2012 they will not be in the top ten.
One more example of how Bush and his greedy incompetent Republican asshats have screwed everybody. This stuff is used because of a conditional waiver that was issued in 2003, against the scientific advices of the experts.
It's just like the BP Gulf oil spill and the coal mine explosion in West Virginia. There are systems in place to protect people and the environment, but when the Republicans gain control they stop all oversight. It takes five to fifteen years to see all the failures, and by then everyone forgets who turned over control to the crooks and lairs.
They just wave the flag, blame everything on the government bureaucrats and illegal aliens, scream about the war on terror, and then lie and deny when the
shit hits the fan. I guess as long as these morons continue to lie and cheat their way into power we deserve to have poisoned gulf seafood and the end of flowering crops.
Don't worry, you can just consume more high fructose processed food and get diabetes.
The corn/agribusiness lobby will continue to do just fine with their massive tax breaks and government subsidies, and they're so rich that they can afford imported fruits and vegetables. If you get sick and loose your health care you can crawl off and die, and that will solve them problem.
This will never change as long as the companies that failed, MSN and Google, don't really bare the cost of their failure. Yes, they're really really sorry, but mostly because they lost some revenue. They couldn't care less about what happens to the end users.
If they had to pay real money proportional to the amount of damages the situation would be completely different. Estimate them number of visits to poisoned web sites, multiply that by the amount of time required to check for and fix damage, multiply that by a real per hour rate for someone to check all the machines, triple the dollar amount for punitive damages and present them with the bill. If this would happen one time I guarantee that neither Google or MSN would ever let this kind of problem happen again.
The same goes for Gawker loosing all those passwords and emails. So it puts them out of business. So what. Someone else will be glad to take their place. Good riddance to the fools who think that security is an unnecessary cost.
Put lame car analogy about exploding tires/engines/electronics here.
Also, income != wealth. Saying that the rich "pay too much" is to ignore that assets are not taxed as income. If you look at distribution of wealth, the story is very different. Check out http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html.
As of 2007 the top 20% of American households have 80% if the wealth. Of this the top 1% had 34% of the wealth and the other 19% had 50%, leaving roughly %15 for the rest. In human terms if you split $100 among 100 people, on person would have $34 and 80 people would average around $0.19. The pattern of the fewest having the most repeats, so the group averaging 19 cents each will have a lot more people with 1 cent or less and a few having more then the average.
This is not a recipe for a world leading economy, or even a viable country. It is poison to democracy. The long term prospects are not good for the US.
"An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men, with only 59 survivors. The death toll includes two crewmen of a rescue vessel. Total insured loss was about £1.7 billion (US$ 3.4 billion). At the time of the disaster the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of North Sea oil and gas production, and was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact."
"People were still getting off the platform several hours after the initial fires and explosions. The main problem was that most of the personnel who had the authority to order evacuation had been killed when the first explosion destroyed the control room. This was a consequence of the platform design, including the absence of blast walls. Another contributing factor was that the nearby connected platforms Tartan and Claymore continued to pump gas and oil to Piper Alpha until its pipeline ruptured in the heat in the second explosion. Their operations crews did not believe they had authority to shut off production, even though they could see that Piper Alpha was burning."
What is the cost/risk ratio? The risk is huge. We are talking about a radically changed world climate for centuries, if not millennia. We don't know, because one of the big uncertainties is how the increased CO2 leaves the atmosphere.
So are you willing to bet the lives of your family? Suppose all the offspring of your immediate family are wiped out and you have no direct descendants? You good with that? Or are you thinking that you live in the first world, and only a bunch of dark skinned people who live near the equator will be in trouble?
So what is the cost of moving away from fossil fuels? More technological development requiring more basic R&D spending? Building solar/wind/ocean based power plants that require more local jobs? Less deaths in coal mines? Less worldwide dependence on politics in the middle east? Except for currently entrenched (and inefficient and incompetent) fossil fuel energy producers who is going to loose anything?
Slashdot Mirror
Twelve murders would be the average amount for a city of 240,000. St. Petersburg Fl, Jersey Ciy NJ and Chandler AZ are all around that size. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population. I haven't found the actual crime figures for these places, but I think that the residents would only be upset if the number was far above twelve per year.
There are a lot more Craigslist users then in any of those places, even though they don't "live" there.
Not a problem.
Here is a point by point response:
Compiling information for pressuring VIPs is not equivalent to a "romantic date", unless your idea of "romance" is getting laid by lying and tricks. Are excessive alcohol date rape drugs included in your romantic encounters?
What you call "management" is coercion and intimidation. The idea of leadership by inspiring loyalty is not in your play book. Do you prefer to whip your employees or use the cat-o-nine-tales?
It is just plane illegal for the CIA to spy on US citizens for political purposes. This is the kind of activity that happens in police states, not democracies.
You are conflating use of blogging for psy-ops with taking information out of context and using it as part of a smear campaign. A joke about being so lonely for his wife that he was considering holding hands with a local man is called an inappropriate homosexual gesture? So what does that say about former President Bush, who was commonly seen holding hands with Saudi royal family members when he was in the White House?
So Holmes being investigated means he guilty and should be in jail. So much for innocent until proven guilty. And how is this like insider trading? How did he profit? Did he leak information to the Taliban? He communicated in his chain of command, and then to the JAG. He followed the rules and got screwed.
That team was specifically brought in to influence Afghan civilians, not US personal. How are they screw ups when they are not tasked with doing the job they were supposed to do? The asset was completely wasted, because the commander was incompetent. My tax dollars were wasted, and that was not Holmes fault.
By the way, this is how the Viet Nam war was lost. The military projected an unrealistic picture of how things were going and lost the support of the public in the US, because the fact did not match up to their false projections.
You deserve to live in a police state that has no effective rule of law, someplace like Cuba, North Korea, China or Iran. Everything you promote fits in with how power is used in an anti-democratic regime. Why don't you leave and go someplace you would fit right in.
This could be a crude (pun intended) reflection of how difficult the languages are to use.
Do you have any thoughts on dynamic languages that have a primary optimized virtual machine implementations? I'm thinking of PHP and LUA in particular. The language and the VM are very closely linked, and there are no other languages that target the VM. In theory this should result in good performance because the language and VM should be well matched. I know that LUA has a good reputation for speed, but I never see cross language comparisons with PHP and other sever side systems.
I know that bringing this up has huge troll bait potential, but I'm hoping that there is some meaningful information to be had. On the other hand this is Shashdot....
Bill O'Reilly thinks that Jesus makes the tides work http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/11/you-cant-explain-bill-oreilly/.
Or the on-going attack on teaching evolution in US public schools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_public_education.
So it's not just radical Islamic regimes, it's Christians in the US.
Or the Conservapedia saying that Einstein's Relativity theories are a "liberal plot". http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/conservapedia_founder_takes_on_the_notorious_liber.php
Don't forget the wanna-be Christians despots here in the USA.
Being an employer does not give you the right to suspend the constitution. We are citizens, not slaves. Running a business does give to a license to be a tin god. The Founders of the US understood this, and they were willing to die for it. People in the middle east are dieing right now in order to have the right to freely express themselves. Your statement puts you firmly on the same side as King Gorge IV, Stalin, and the Taliban. How does it feel to be on their side? I think you fit right in.
is Balmer.
This system is too easy to defeat. All a troublemaker has to do is get a small amount of the target substance and spread it around to trigger a false alert. For example, just walk in the public areas in front of an airport and sprinkle some powder on the sidewalk and leave. All the people walk in the powder, walk inside and then chaos ensues. This can be done at any scale, so even planing over an entire city will not allow bomb making locations to be located. Although this could be very useful in a limited way, it is not a quick fix for everything.
Just looking at two of the high figures, Yuma AZ has 242 clear days a year, and Las Vegas NV has 210/year. Note that the amount of energy available does not drop to zero on partly or even fully cloudy days, it is just reduced. Some energy may have to be expended to keep the biomass in the collectors from getting too cold at night, but this is not likely to be a huge amount.
These areas in the southwest are not agricultural areas, so we are not talking about replacing current cropland with solar facilities. There is a different problem here: where does the CO2 and water come from? This is the question no matter where the solar farm is located. In existing agricultural areas water can come from the same source as water for crops, but the C02 still has to come from somewhere.
If the CO2 is from existing fossil fuel plants then we would want to locate close to existing generating plants, which might not have the best amount of daylight. Still, extracting more energy from burning fossil fuel before it is released into the atmosphere is good with respect to global warming.
The real win would be to recycle CO2 from the atmosphere, which would render the process carbon neutral. If this could also be done with photosynthesis it could be a huge win, and then the farms could be anywhere there is sun and water. Note the claim that the water can be brackish or even salt water, so it could be done in coastal areas all over the world. With crude oil over $90 a barrel on a routine basis, this could be half as efficient as the claims and still be competitive.
RTFM, Moron
US big business interests are dead set against this because they love cheap illegal labor that they can exploit and use to keep the wages of everyone down. This is why there are blue collar Spanish speaking communities all over the US. The unions were shut down in areas like meat packing and construction, and the illegals moved in. Instant cheap disposable workers you can kill, maim and fire at will with no repercussions.
Immigrant communities are clearly against it because they have high levels of resident aliens, both documented and undocumented. The don't trust the government no matter what their immigration status. If you pay any attention to right wing rhetoric about immigration, you'd be scared too. Lot of Republicans are are talking about ending birthright citizenship, and just like the Arizona law would love to ship anyone they think "looks illegal" out of the country without due process.
Civil liberty groups are against this because it would, among other things, require a national ID card, or some equivalent. Sadly, we are effectively way past that point with the current information gathering capabilities already in place. We have all the bad privacy implications of national ID without any of the transparency or oversight. If you doubt this, see how hard it is for someone to get off the DHS automatic search list.
So a feasible solution exists, but nobody wants it.
In the world as it exists now, commerce is about lying and tricking users into contracts that are effectively organized theft. How about the %6500 markup http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1001/gallery.americas_biggest_ripoffs/ on the cost of text messages? Same kind of non-competitive market manipulation.
Of course the corrupt practices of telcos are minor compared to what the banks/credit card companies do. Even with the new regulations, credit card rates and practices are like allowing someone to pick you pocket on a daily basis.
It all goes back to lack of meaningful regulation. The "invisible hand" is a fictional device intended to dupe consumers into thinking that their choices make a difference. When all the big players conspire in a pseudo-cartel environment buyers are sheared like sheep, and cost is decoupled from price.
Some combination of real competition and government oversight is the only way to restore actual capitalism. Competition is preferable but that requires breaking up the big dominant players, and right now they own the political process through campaign contributions, so that is not going to happen. The best hope in the short run is decent regulation, if we can keep the corrupt government/business complex from shutting it down the way they did in the Bush administration.
This is the kind of crap that Microsoft is famous for: nonsupport of common web standards and substituting their own idiosyncratic replacements. For example, IE had no support for SVG, while it was in all other browsers. Supposedly SVG will be in the next major release of IE, but that is because Sivlerlight has not taken over the world like they planned. I expect that the same thing will happen with Chrome/WebM vs. H.264/everyone else. Meanwhile, all web users and content providers suffer because big arrogant players pretend that they can dictate how the Internet works to try and increase their market share.
As for lax government oversight, it's a red herring. (Pun intended.) When there was lax oversight of poultry farmers in the midwest and as a result people got sick from bacteria, the farmers couldn't say "You ignored our bad behavior, so we don't have to pay a fine." They go nailed anyway, it just took longer.
Following up on useless oversight MMS (Mineral Management Services). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/us/25mms.html
Note that this is completely separate from the sex and drug scandal at the MMS that came to light in 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html
So how did this oversight failure happen? It was a product of the Bush administration's conscious sabotage of regulation when they were in control. They appointed "pro-business" officials who had a policy of letting business get away with everything up to and including murder. Remember that people died on that oil rig.
So far, all that has happened is that MMS people have quit or been fired. There have been lots of investigations but no one has been charged with anything.
The Obama administration seems to be serious about reinstating meaningful regulation, but now with the Republicans in control of the House that might not happen. Congressman Darrell Issa is asking businesses what government regulations they want eliminated (also known as soliciting bribes) http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/05/business/la-fi-issa-business-20110105. So if you like getting sick from bad food or big environmental disasters then you may be in luck.
People who do hard things respect the work of others, and would never make the kind of idiot blanket statement you posted. Saying such a thing marks you as useless talentless and brainless. You trash you betters because you want to drag everyone else down the level of stupidity that makes you comfortable. STFU, moron.
Let's apply your argument to some other crimes. Why make it special when someone kills a police officer? We already have laws for murder, so why do we need to make that a more serious crime? Same goes for judges and any elected official. Why make assassination a crime at all, it's just a murder like any other.
Same goes for terrorism and using weapons of mass destruction. If you use a bomb and kill dozens of people, there is no reason to have a special law making that a specific crime, right? It just means you did a lot of murder at one time, so why go though any extra legal effort. So hijacking airplanes and slamming them into the World Trade Center is a case of theft and murder and trespassing, nothing more. This isn't my logic, it's your logic (or ill-logic, to be more specific).
This was true in Paulson's financial bailout as well. No major CEO, board member or other major player was held accountable or lost their job, or has even been named in public as doing something wrong. For example, the ratings agencies, who clearly failed all their legal fiduciary requirements have been completely ignored.
So far the only big player who has faced any legal action is Earnst and Young, the accounting firm for Lehman Bros. They are accused of helping Lehman avoid disclosure of their weak financial condition by a trick known as "Repo 105". E&Y is being sued by Cuomo in New York State, not by the Feds. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/22/business/la-fi-ernst-young-20101222
The Feds have done almost nothing looking for illegal behavior among the financial elites. Their recent "big announcement" was about going after illegal insider information trading, mostly in the high tech sector. This is about as far from the financial meltdown as you can get and still be pretending that Wall St. is involved.
This is why the WikiLeaks dump of (most likely) BofA is so important. It will show massive wrong doing and that the Feds are consciously ignoring massive criminal activity on the part of the banks. It has the potential to change the public perception and possible change how these institutions are being regulated. One can always hope.
This is why trying to buy up domain names is so lame. This is going to be so meaningless if even part of the truth comes out.
And by the way, in the medieval hierarchy, anyone who reads this is a pesent.
It's the American economic aristocracy in action. And no, you can't really earn your way in, you have to be born into it. The chances of any present (like you) getting in are about the same as winning a $100 million lottery.
Next will be Tic-Tac-Tow
Anyone who is looking for "respect" in Hollywood deserves the respect that the upcoming "Yogi Bear" CGI animation deserves. Or Garfield or the TWO chipmunk movies had.
I'd tell the poster to grow up, but that would require leaving their parent's basement, which would be hard for a person over the age of 25 who has never had a real job and has as their most prized possession a collection of McDonald's Happy Meals figures.
Both the Chinese machine and the German machine are not cutting edge designs. They represent what you can do with near commodity hardware and good but not fully custom packaging. They may look like top end machines today, but by 2012 they will not be in the top ten.
It's just like the BP Gulf oil spill and the coal mine explosion in West Virginia. There are systems in place to protect people and the environment, but when the Republicans gain control they stop all oversight. It takes five to fifteen years to see all the failures, and by then everyone forgets who turned over control to the crooks and lairs.
They just wave the flag, blame everything on the government bureaucrats and illegal aliens, scream about the war on terror, and then lie and deny when the shit hits the fan. I guess as long as these morons continue to lie and cheat their way into power we deserve to have poisoned gulf seafood and the end of flowering crops.
Don't worry, you can just consume more high fructose processed food and get diabetes. The corn/agribusiness lobby will continue to do just fine with their massive tax breaks and government subsidies, and they're so rich that they can afford imported fruits and vegetables. If you get sick and loose your health care you can crawl off and die, and that will solve them problem.
If they had to pay real money proportional to the amount of damages the situation would be completely different. Estimate them number of visits to poisoned web sites, multiply that by the amount of time required to check for and fix damage, multiply that by a real per hour rate for someone to check all the machines, triple the dollar amount for punitive damages and present them with the bill. If this would happen one time I guarantee that neither Google or MSN would ever let this kind of problem happen again.
The same goes for Gawker loosing all those passwords and emails. So it puts them out of business. So what. Someone else will be glad to take their place. Good riddance to the fools who think that security is an unnecessary cost.
Put lame car analogy about exploding tires/engines/electronics here.
As of 2007 the top 20% of American households have 80% if the wealth. Of this the top 1% had 34% of the wealth and the other 19% had 50%, leaving roughly %15 for the rest. In human terms if you split $100 among 100 people, on person would have $34 and 80 people would average around $0.19. The pattern of the fewest having the most repeats, so the group averaging 19 cents each will have a lot more people with 1 cent or less and a few having more then the average.
This is not a recipe for a world leading economy, or even a viable country. It is poison to democracy. The long term prospects are not good for the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha
"An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men, with only 59 survivors. The death toll includes two crewmen of a rescue vessel. Total insured loss was about £1.7 billion (US$ 3.4 billion). At the time of the disaster the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of North Sea oil and gas production, and was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact."
"People were still getting off the platform several hours after the initial fires and explosions. The main problem was that most of the personnel who had the authority to order evacuation had been killed when the first explosion destroyed the control room. This was a consequence of the platform design, including the absence of blast walls. Another contributing factor was that the nearby connected platforms Tartan and Claymore continued to pump gas and oil to Piper Alpha until its pipeline ruptured in the heat in the second explosion. Their operations crews did not believe they had authority to shut off production, even though they could see that Piper Alpha was burning."
If the outcome is negative the consequences are severe. The CIA agrees: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121352495?
So are you willing to bet the lives of your family? Suppose all the offspring of your immediate family are wiped out and you have no direct descendants? You good with that? Or are you thinking that you live in the first world, and only a bunch of dark skinned people who live near the equator will be in trouble?
So what is the cost of moving away from fossil fuels? More technological development requiring more basic R&D spending? Building solar/wind/ocean based power plants that require more local jobs? Less deaths in coal mines? Less worldwide dependence on politics in the middle east? Except for currently entrenched (and inefficient and incompetent) fossil fuel energy producers who is going to loose anything?
This is one of the things that really bugs me about the do nothing/know nothing climate deniers and skeptics. (Skeptic in this case is a weaker version of a do nothing attitude.) Moving away from fossil fuels has short term benefits and long term benefits that have nothing to do with climate change. So why fight against it? Or do you like being held hostage to religious strife in the middle east, or watch the morons at BP and Halliburton do a gigantic uncontrolled ecological experiment in the Gulf of Mexico? Perhaps you are a major stockholder in Exxon/Mobile, which has been one of the most profitable companies in history http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&q=exxon+profit&btnG=Google+Search#q=exxon+profit+history&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&prmd=iv&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=1o8ATcW0D4fEsAOhvICwCw&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=11&sqi=2&ved=0CHkQ5wIwCg&fp=1441ab651b23d901 Outside of personal greed I see no motovation to keep on the way we are going.