I live and work in NYC. The Washington Post might love kissing billionaire technocrat ass, but Bloomberg didn't get this money back. In fact Bloomberg is responsible for letting SAIC rob over $600M on this contract, all the way until the bitter end while Bloomberg defended SAIC and its "cost overruns". As he finally admitted last Summer. It's the Federal prosecutor, Manhatttan US Attorney Preet Bharara, who clawed back this money. Though indeed even Bharara couldn't get it all back: the ripoff claimed $652M, the court awarded $540M, and the city might get from $466-518M. Meanwhile Bloomberg whined that getting the $500M wasn't done "in a more pleasant way". (FWIW, when his bankster cops were macing women on public sidewalks last Summer, he had no complaint that it couldn't be done in a more pleasant way). Bloomberg says we now have a functioning system "at a very reasonable cost", because he's not including all the costs of recovering the money in court. He defended this ripoff until the bitter end, and continues to spin it.
"Conservatives" tend to bend or break their "core values" whenever they personally have to deal with something that requires compromise. That's why most "Conservatives" are in the most homogenous environments: they have less exposure to different experiences that would challenge their "Conservative" values, so they're easy to keep.
The reason demanding our rightful trials would crash the system is because the system makes it so goddamn easy to arrest people that the courts are flooded with unnecessary accused people.
Of course it's primarily the Drug War that creates all these arrests. The blockage of our system by all those people destroys its justice at every step, and not just for the people unnecessarily arrested.
But there's no disincentive for the teeming masses of legislators (county/municipal, state, Federal) who created this damaging vulnerability. And for the teeming pool of lawyers from which legislators crawl, there's only guaranteed employment in perpetuating the Drug War and other unnecessary arrests.
Evidently Sony learned nothing from the cause/effect relationship of their brutal approach to both security and their users. Sony set the stage by deploying rootkits and other security attacks on their own customers. Then they retroactively deleted the Linux (OtherOS) option from PS3s, many of which they'd sold to hackers for the very purpose of "hacking Sony". Though OtherOS had been crippled from the beginning, there was little effort by PS3 hackers to crack the lockout from the hardware, until Sony tried shutting all OtherOS users down. Then hacking the PS3 became necessary for every PS3 Linux user.
It was a case of "when guns (OtherOSes) are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns (OtherOSes)". Why stop at just keeping what you paid for, when you had actually paid for more than you'd originally gotten? Sony had destroyed any ethical relationship, and the community was organized.
Now, I'm not pinning all or even most of the attacks on Sony beyond keeping Linux on the small PS3 Linux community - maybe not even any of them. But that episode showed the world Sony was a legitimate target. Then after some success in keeping what they paid for resulted in arresting the hacker, Sony was now a legit target for both legitimate hacking and just plain "bash the bad guy". Combine that with Sony's copyright overreaches, its region-encoding scams, its DVD backup denials (also broken and showing Sony both greedy and vulnerable) - Sony fanned the flames of backlash.
Now Sony is just escalating the conflict. It would be a lot cheaper to give hackers back Linux, this time with some support, to give them more of a common interest with Sony. Instead Sony is further defining itself as an enemy instead of a partner. Sony's awareness of social networks seems to be purely as either enemy or marketing victim. This will not end well. In fact it will not end, and many will suffer.
These twists and turns in deducing how to test physics for the existence of the Higgs Boson is going to make an interesting book when it's either proven or disproven.
Who would you like to see write it?
Who would you like to see star in the movie based on it?
Congratulations on your influential new job. I hope you guide this startup into delivering journalism from the Washington Post. Not just some "new media" buzz factory like most media startups that might even claim to be "journalism", like and the Washington Post online and in print have degenerated into along with their industry.
Journalism is when people tell a true story accurate to the facts and meaning of the events. Just whipping up "a conversation", or featuring "trending memes" isn't journalism.
I hope you've seen enough on Slashdot to recognize what this new venture shouldn't waste it's time on. I hope the Washington Post has brought you on to do better reporting on "stuff that matters", especially interactively.
The 47% of the people who don't pay the IRS are mostly because they're too poor to afford it. They're exempted because the IRS is a progressive tax that doesn't give those people an impossible taxation. They still pay the other taxes, like Social Security, property, sales and use taxes, which are even worse for people who can't afford it.
Meanwhile the top 20% by income pay 63.5% of collected taxes, but receive 66% of tax expenditures. That's a 4% return on their tax investment, which isn't supposed to earn any profit at all. The numbers surely are weighted by the richest of that 20% getting an even better return than the rest. BTW, over 90% of "entitlements" go to old people, disabled people or working people.
Your "entitlement generations" are a fake, designed to make you sick.
Also, any government can take someone's private property, in whatever way they do that. And without a government, anyone with the force can take the property. In fact, we have thousands of years of history showing that "no government" guarantees that people will collect whatever force, even momentarily, to take others' property, and that democracies are the best at protecting private property.
It might be easy to just repeat the corporate anarchy propaganda cooked up for you. But you're helping your masters steal from you.
Democracy is better than other systems, but not necessarily because it's better at picking better leaders. Democracy is better because it obtains the consent of the governed. By putting the rule of the country to vote, the people who are ruled in it get a chance to choose a different rule. The ones who vote for the winning rule are part of the reason it rules.
The benefit is that the people don't just choose what rules them, but they have given their consent.
Better democracies have better ways to get that consent. America's democracy doesn't get enough people to vote, which leaves them without giving consent. Getting more people to vote might or might not get better leaders, but it will get more consent. Getting better ways for them to vote than the bizarre 1800s contraptions we use (gerrymandered districts, backroom-chosen sequences of primaries, electoral college disproportions, a single election day on a Tuesday, riggable voting machines...) would not just improve the sampling of "the will of the people". It would also include more people in the decisions, which would get more consent from them for whatever the system eventually produces.
Of course I'm not in favor of higher unemployment rates. I'm guessing that you're implying that spending on the Pentagon employs people. It does, but it's some of the most wasteful socialism the country indulges in. Spending the $billions elsewhere, instead of through the Pentagon, is a much more powerful stimulus. Unemployment insurance payments are spent locally in the unemployed's economy, which funds local consumption that can reemploy the unemployed. Even a tax cut is more powerful than military spending for the same reason, but better managed government spending on actual value creates jobs, as in road/bridge/rail repair and other infrastructure work. NASA creates far more jobs per dollar than any military spending.
Pentagon spending ships loads of money overseas, has no accountability so is terribly wasteful, and eventually stimulates wars, which destroy value and efficiencies. Pentagon spending is nearly all of our deficit; the interest on that debt generates no jobs but a few bankers (whose work further destroys jobs) while shipping money out to interest payments. If Pentagon spending were a good stimulus, then the Bush/Cheney legacy from their Global Terror War would be low unemployment, but it's the opposite (especially once their credit bubble scam is removed from the stats). $TRILLIONS "invested" in increased Pentagon spending for a decade have destroyed jobs. That's why the Pentagon has to be scaled down, not doubled down.
The price is not to like. The Pentagon should pay for this new system by deleting some other system. In fact the Pentagon should delete more expenses than this one is currently pretended to cost, to accommodate the inevitable cost overruns of the new system.
We are spending far more than what our security needs to cost us. If we really do have a new "highest priority", the Pentagon should cut enough of its lower priorities to pay for it.
Why bother? You climate change deniers will just ignore it and lie about it. Then call it a "joke" when you look stupid (but act like it's serious when stupid people agree with you).
Or maybe you do, and that's what's been missing until these experiments? Generating the neutrinos in Switzerland amidst the greatest banking chaos of all time might have rubbed some lucre off on them. At some point the infinitesimality of the risk quanta of mortgage slices distributed among the Swiss banking networks might have contaminated the local neutrino pool with some warpage at some resonant frequency. Conversely, maybe generating FTL neutrinos inverted the causality of the financial instruments. We might have injected some kind of self-interest in the neutrinos, which compounds during the experiment, so they loop in time to maximize their yield.
Ubuntu isn't getting to LibreOffice 3.5 until 12.04. I haven't even upgraded past 11.04, since I like the old GNOME Desktop. Do you think I can just install the v3.5.tar.gz installer against my v3.3.4 Ubuntu deb?
How come the Visio file format that Microsoft bought and included in MS Office is still proprietary and so closed it hasn't been reverse engineered for use by other diagramming software?
Oh, Big Brother is real, I just thought maybe RFID wasn't His way. NYC just saw reported that its 3/4 $billion "first responder" wireless radio system is such a boondoggle the city tried to sell it to Northrup Grumman and lease it back, but "at least" the Department of Transportation is using it to monitor cars by imaging their license plates and databasing them. The sell/leaseback attempt would have gotten Northrup to lease the same system to other private users. So Bloomberg created a wireless citywide surveillance network that doesn't protect us, but is a platform for private interests to track us all, in realtime video indexed to our government files. The only part that doesn't make sense is that the military contractor isn't taking Bloomberg up on the deal.
As for my own wireless sensors, I'll probably try Zigbee. I'd be happier if there were a way to upgrade the stack in a year or two with 6lowpan or something more open than Zigbee, but it seems the OTA upgrade would kill the remaining batteries. If only there were a $2 thermocouple recharger that could harvest ambient heat faster than the radio/MCU kills the battery, it might be OK.
And then maybe we could get some parity in watching the watchmen.
Thanks for the reality. At least that condemns to fiction the panopticon dystopia where The Man tracks us all in the streets with 3D RFID locators against the swarm of RFID tags in the products and clothes we wear/carry.
The Digi Zigbee sensors are "ready to go", but need more parts to be complete, right? A temperature sensor node would need at least the $17 DIP, PCB, battery/holder, enclosure. Final cost is going to be something like $25, right? Any chance that in qty 1000 that will be under $10 by say 2015?
All those thousands of dams and many other public water "reclamation" and distribution projects across America make our version of "capitalism" a funny one very similar to socialism.
Water used to make a product that's shipped isn't at all necessarily water that's shipped. If the water is consumed in place but not included in the product it's not shipped. So claims that "virtual water flows across borders" is BS.
Likewise water that's used along its natural flow path, and cleaned (enough) to return it to its original destination, is impacting only in the place where it's diverted. When we put a factory on a plot of land we disrupt that land, and we're willing to accept some deletion from nature. Nature is very resilient, and not all diversions and conversions of it have unacceptable consequences.
We do go too far, and we do waste far too much. But exaggerations like these don't do anything except discredit the already difficult efforts to require management of what we use.
Show me Democrats saying "cell phones cause cancer", not "we want to study whether they do". That's science. So is the opposition to GMO crops, which science shows is risky to at least species integrity and possibly human health, as well as the economics of dependency on a corporation for crop reproduction. Nuke power has more than science showing its risks: read the headlines sometime (without a lobbyist "interpreter"). And organic food's ecological benefits are also science, as is the science of the poisonous alternatives.
You're just another Republican who thinks that saying some familiar words when it's your turn to speak means you're right, simply because you can't listen to anyone else.
The horn is made of hair. It appears that the horn was previously hair that either delivered a survival/reproductuctive advantage, or was at least no hindrance. Some random mutations along the way more or less gradually caused the hair to behave more like a horn.
You should look into how evolution actually works. Most examples of it are are either solved or clear when actual biology is applied.
Nonsense. Republicans are very publicly opposed to teaching fact that Earth life evolved to its present state, often proudly declaring that god created it instead and that's what should be taught at least as authoritatively as fact.
The statement that Democrats seek to prevent evolution from happening is too stupid to rebut.
You're just a Republican, willing to say anything to defend your tribe, no matter how shallow and unbelievable.
Slashdot Mirror
I live and work in NYC. The Washington Post might love kissing billionaire technocrat ass, but Bloomberg didn't get this money back. In fact Bloomberg is responsible for letting SAIC rob over $600M on this contract, all the way until the bitter end while Bloomberg defended SAIC and its "cost overruns". As he finally admitted last Summer. It's the Federal prosecutor, Manhatttan US Attorney Preet Bharara, who clawed back this money. Though indeed even Bharara couldn't get it all back: the ripoff claimed $652M, the court awarded $540M, and the city might get from $466-518M. Meanwhile Bloomberg whined that getting the $500M wasn't done "in a more pleasant way". (FWIW, when his bankster cops were macing women on public sidewalks last Summer, he had no complaint that it couldn't be done in a more pleasant way). Bloomberg says we now have a functioning system "at a very reasonable cost", because he's not including all the costs of recovering the money in court. He defended this ripoff until the bitter end, and continues to spin it.
"Conservatives" tend to bend or break their "core values" whenever they personally have to deal with something that requires compromise. That's why most "Conservatives" are in the most homogenous environments: they have less exposure to different experiences that would challenge their "Conservative" values, so they're easy to keep.
The reason demanding our rightful trials would crash the system is because the system makes it so goddamn easy to arrest people that the courts are flooded with unnecessary accused people.
Of course it's primarily the Drug War that creates all these arrests. The blockage of our system by all those people destroys its justice at every step, and not just for the people unnecessarily arrested.
But there's no disincentive for the teeming masses of legislators (county/municipal, state, Federal) who created this damaging vulnerability. And for the teeming pool of lawyers from which legislators crawl, there's only guaranteed employment in perpetuating the Drug War and other unnecessary arrests.
Evidently Sony learned nothing from the cause/effect relationship of their brutal approach to both security and their users. Sony set the stage by deploying rootkits and other security attacks on their own customers. Then they retroactively deleted the Linux (OtherOS) option from PS3s, many of which they'd sold to hackers for the very purpose of "hacking Sony". Though OtherOS had been crippled from the beginning, there was little effort by PS3 hackers to crack the lockout from the hardware, until Sony tried shutting all OtherOS users down. Then hacking the PS3 became necessary for every PS3 Linux user.
It was a case of "when guns (OtherOSes) are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns (OtherOSes)". Why stop at just keeping what you paid for, when you had actually paid for more than you'd originally gotten? Sony had destroyed any ethical relationship, and the community was organized.
Now, I'm not pinning all or even most of the attacks on Sony beyond keeping Linux on the small PS3 Linux community - maybe not even any of them. But that episode showed the world Sony was a legitimate target. Then after some success in keeping what they paid for resulted in arresting the hacker, Sony was now a legit target for both legitimate hacking and just plain "bash the bad guy". Combine that with Sony's copyright overreaches, its region-encoding scams, its DVD backup denials (also broken and showing Sony both greedy and vulnerable) - Sony fanned the flames of backlash.
Now Sony is just escalating the conflict. It would be a lot cheaper to give hackers back Linux, this time with some support, to give them more of a common interest with Sony. Instead Sony is further defining itself as an enemy instead of a partner. Sony's awareness of social networks seems to be purely as either enemy or marketing victim. This will not end well. In fact it will not end, and many will suffer.
These twists and turns in deducing how to test physics for the existence of the Higgs Boson is going to make an interesting book when it's either proven or disproven.
Who would you like to see write it?
Who would you like to see star in the movie based on it?
Congratulations on your influential new job. I hope you guide this startup into delivering journalism from the Washington Post. Not just some "new media" buzz factory like most media startups that might even claim to be "journalism", like and the Washington Post online and in print have degenerated into along with their industry.
Journalism is when people tell a true story accurate to the facts and meaning of the events. Just whipping up "a conversation", or featuring "trending memes" isn't journalism.
I hope you've seen enough on Slashdot to recognize what this new venture shouldn't waste it's time on. I hope the Washington Post has brought you on to do better reporting on "stuff that matters", especially interactively.
The 47% of the people who don't pay the IRS are mostly because they're too poor to afford it. They're exempted because the IRS is a progressive tax that doesn't give those people an impossible taxation. They still pay the other taxes, like Social Security, property, sales and use taxes, which are even worse for people who can't afford it.
Meanwhile the top 20% by income pay 63.5% of collected taxes, but receive 66% of tax expenditures. That's a 4% return on their tax investment, which isn't supposed to earn any profit at all. The numbers surely are weighted by the richest of that 20% getting an even better return than the rest. BTW, over 90% of "entitlements" go to old people, disabled people or working people.
Your "entitlement generations" are a fake, designed to make you sick.
Also, any government can take someone's private property, in whatever way they do that. And without a government, anyone with the force can take the property. In fact, we have thousands of years of history showing that "no government" guarantees that people will collect whatever force, even momentarily, to take others' property, and that democracies are the best at protecting private property.
It might be easy to just repeat the corporate anarchy propaganda cooked up for you. But you're helping your masters steal from you.
Democracy is better than other systems, but not necessarily because it's better at picking better leaders. Democracy is better because it obtains the consent of the governed. By putting the rule of the country to vote, the people who are ruled in it get a chance to choose a different rule. The ones who vote for the winning rule are part of the reason it rules.
The benefit is that the people don't just choose what rules them, but they have given their consent.
Better democracies have better ways to get that consent. America's democracy doesn't get enough people to vote, which leaves them without giving consent. Getting more people to vote might or might not get better leaders, but it will get more consent. Getting better ways for them to vote than the bizarre 1800s contraptions we use (gerrymandered districts, backroom-chosen sequences of primaries, electoral college disproportions, a single election day on a Tuesday, riggable voting machines...) would not just improve the sampling of "the will of the people". It would also include more people in the decisions, which would get more consent from them for whatever the system eventually produces.
Of course I'm not in favor of higher unemployment rates. I'm guessing that you're implying that spending on the Pentagon employs people. It does, but it's some of the most wasteful socialism the country indulges in. Spending the $billions elsewhere, instead of through the Pentagon, is a much more powerful stimulus. Unemployment insurance payments are spent locally in the unemployed's economy, which funds local consumption that can reemploy the unemployed. Even a tax cut is more powerful than military spending for the same reason, but better managed government spending on actual value creates jobs, as in road/bridge/rail repair and other infrastructure work. NASA creates far more jobs per dollar than any military spending.
Pentagon spending ships loads of money overseas, has no accountability so is terribly wasteful, and eventually stimulates wars, which destroy value and efficiencies. Pentagon spending is nearly all of our deficit; the interest on that debt generates no jobs but a few bankers (whose work further destroys jobs) while shipping money out to interest payments. If Pentagon spending were a good stimulus, then the Bush/Cheney legacy from their Global Terror War would be low unemployment, but it's the opposite (especially once their credit bubble scam is removed from the stats). $TRILLIONS "invested" in increased Pentagon spending for a decade have destroyed jobs. That's why the Pentagon has to be scaled down, not doubled down.
And that's why Iran never captured one of our drones.
The price is not to like. The Pentagon should pay for this new system by deleting some other system. In fact the Pentagon should delete more expenses than this one is currently pretended to cost, to accommodate the inevitable cost overruns of the new system.
We are spending far more than what our security needs to cost us. If we really do have a new "highest priority", the Pentagon should cut enough of its lower priorities to pay for it.
Why bother? You climate change deniers will just ignore it and lie about it. Then call it a "joke" when you look stupid (but act like it's serious when stupid people agree with you).
Or maybe you do, and that's what's been missing until these experiments? Generating the neutrinos in Switzerland amidst the greatest banking chaos of all time might have rubbed some lucre off on them. At some point the infinitesimality of the risk quanta of mortgage slices distributed among the Swiss banking networks might have contaminated the local neutrino pool with some warpage at some resonant frequency. Conversely, maybe generating FTL neutrinos inverted the causality of the financial instruments. We might have injected some kind of self-interest in the neutrinos, which compounds during the experiment, so they loop in time to maximize their yield.
I thought that matter is gravity waves, so there can be only one metric for both.
Well, at least they've proved that their work is so riddled with errors that no one will trust it.
Tgus us a catastrophe.
Neato.
Ubuntu isn't getting to LibreOffice 3.5 until 12.04. I haven't even upgraded past 11.04, since I like the old GNOME Desktop. Do you think I can just install the v3.5 .tar.gz installer against my v3.3.4 Ubuntu deb?
How come the Visio file format that Microsoft bought and included in MS Office is still proprietary and so closed it hasn't been reverse engineered for use by other diagramming software?
Oh, Big Brother is real, I just thought maybe RFID wasn't His way. NYC just saw reported that its 3/4 $billion "first responder" wireless radio system is such a boondoggle the city tried to sell it to Northrup Grumman and lease it back, but "at least" the Department of Transportation is using it to monitor cars by imaging their license plates and databasing them. The sell/leaseback attempt would have gotten Northrup to lease the same system to other private users. So Bloomberg created a wireless citywide surveillance network that doesn't protect us, but is a platform for private interests to track us all, in realtime video indexed to our government files. The only part that doesn't make sense is that the military contractor isn't taking Bloomberg up on the deal.
As for my own wireless sensors, I'll probably try Zigbee. I'd be happier if there were a way to upgrade the stack in a year or two with 6lowpan or something more open than Zigbee, but it seems the OTA upgrade would kill the remaining batteries. If only there were a $2 thermocouple recharger that could harvest ambient heat faster than the radio/MCU kills the battery, it might be OK.
And then maybe we could get some parity in watching the watchmen.
Thanks for the reality. At least that condemns to fiction the panopticon dystopia where The Man tracks us all in the streets with 3D RFID locators against the swarm of RFID tags in the products and clothes we wear/carry.
The Digi Zigbee sensors are "ready to go", but need more parts to be complete, right? A temperature sensor node would need at least the $17 DIP, PCB, battery/holder, enclosure. Final cost is going to be something like $25, right? Any chance that in qty 1000 that will be under $10 by say 2015?
All those thousands of dams and many other public water "reclamation" and distribution projects across America make our version of "capitalism" a funny one very similar to socialism.
And then the tornadoes carving through. Eventually a new Grand Canyon. Think of the tourist dollars! :P
Water used to make a product that's shipped isn't at all necessarily water that's shipped. If the water is consumed in place but not included in the product it's not shipped. So claims that "virtual water flows across borders" is BS.
Likewise water that's used along its natural flow path, and cleaned (enough) to return it to its original destination, is impacting only in the place where it's diverted. When we put a factory on a plot of land we disrupt that land, and we're willing to accept some deletion from nature. Nature is very resilient, and not all diversions and conversions of it have unacceptable consequences.
We do go too far, and we do waste far too much. But exaggerations like these don't do anything except discredit the already difficult efforts to require management of what we use.
Show me Democrats saying "cell phones cause cancer", not "we want to study whether they do". That's science. So is the opposition to GMO crops, which science shows is risky to at least species integrity and possibly human health, as well as the economics of dependency on a corporation for crop reproduction. Nuke power has more than science showing its risks: read the headlines sometime (without a lobbyist "interpreter"). And organic food's ecological benefits are also science, as is the science of the poisonous alternatives.
You're just another Republican who thinks that saying some familiar words when it's your turn to speak means you're right, simply because you can't listen to anyone else.
The horn is made of hair. It appears that the horn was previously hair that either delivered a survival/reproductuctive advantage, or was at least no hindrance. Some random mutations along the way more or less gradually caused the hair to behave more like a horn.
You should look into how evolution actually works. Most examples of it are are either solved or clear when actual biology is applied.
Nonsense. Republicans are very publicly opposed to teaching fact that Earth life evolved to its present state, often proudly declaring that god created it instead and that's what should be taught at least as authoritatively as fact.
The statement that Democrats seek to prevent evolution from happening is too stupid to rebut.
You're just a Republican, willing to say anything to defend your tribe, no matter how shallow and unbelievable.