Nope. It is more like $174 million and counting (still plenty of scratch though).
For those that don't follow the link (and are unfamiliar with government contracting practices - which is most everybody): CGI Federal was a successful bidder on an HHS umbrella contract in 2007 (Bush Administration, in other words) to provide IT services to HHS, along with IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., and Quality Software Services. These same four companies were the bidders (under said long term contract) for the specific task of site implementation, and the $634 million figure is for all of the services from CGI Federal under that contract. Only 25% of that total, dating back to 2007, was for the website.
... It isn't that easy to go buying stuff with that kind of volume of cash without hiring an army of accomplices...
This is basically like a drug empire. Drug empires exist because there is an army of foot-soldiers making small illegal financial transactions (sales in this case), collecting real currency in small amounts. With counterfeit currency there is also an army of foot-soldiers making small illegal financial transactions - passing of phony money for tangible assets or real currency.
The very rise of coinage was linked to a technical advance: the availability of the touchstone, which provides a quick non-destructive test for purity that is nominally pretty accurate (accuracy 0.5%).
Why didn't Archimedes employ touchstone tests? Probably because it assumes the material tested is homogenous, which with the crown was a key point in question.
... ever since the Romans got the bright idea to pass off bronze slugs as silver dinari, and kill anyone who refused to pretend they were honest coinage...
-jcr
Which of course did not actually happen.
The drop in silver content in coins occurred gradually over the course of centuries, with periodic attempts by the government to actually boost the silver content, or set a floor for the drop. One of the key reasons for this was the inadequate supply of silver to circulate. There was a continuous drain of silver to the East (mostly India), plus inevitable losses from circulation (the coins we find today being examples of that) which were not made up by Roman silver mines. Some method of assigning an equal amount of value to a smaller amount of silver could not be avoided.
The attempts to reform the currency and establish older levels of silver content always quickly failed, the amount of silver not being increased by decree.
Will management be wearing these, and having their performance judged by the exact same criteria?
No, I thought not.
Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.
But the government doesn't provide this "service". If they did it sure would make the NSA's a lot job easier.
Let's see. Private companies have secretly handed over to the NSA every type of data and data access that the NSA has demanded, and the major challenge that the NSA has been facing as an organization is that it is drowning in all of the data it takes from those private companies. Private companies have even secretly cooperated in blatantly illegal data transfer, receiving retroactive legal authority, thus guaranteeing that future illegal requests will be similarly honored.
The shadow security state already has free and unfettered access to the data flowing through the fabric of the nation. Letting private companies cripple the national infrastructure and gouge us for the "benefit" provides absolutely no compensatory advantages.
... It could just as easily be the case that those books that remained important were translated and otherwise preserved and those that were not considered important were more loosely copied. Then church councils came along and blessed some books as from God and some others as not. Or the opposite: books that remained unchanged were deemed miraculously protected by God and then included in the corpus but those that didn't were dropped. Regardless good scribe/librarian work doesn't make me believe that God must have protected something just that the people doing the copying did a good job and cared enough to do so....
Hold on, there pardner. Can you cite any evidence that "holy writ" scribal transmission has a significantly lower error rate than other document classes? I am rather well acquainted with bible study and I have never heard of any evidence for this (though claims of inerrancy taken purely on faith are common).
... Look up Red Lining. It is hard to get a house somewhere else if you can't get a loan for it, or if you do get a loan, the interest rate is so far above and beyond what the market rate is...
Just to amplify your point, financial institutions are still selectively "guiding" African-Americans into sub-prime loans. Discrimination in the market place remains a living, breathing reality this very day.
... Every synagogue in America has a copy of George Washington's letter welcoming the first Jewish community to America....
Minor correction: the famous Washington letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI in 1790 was not "welcoming the first Jewish community to America", since the synagogue represented a community of Jews that had lived in New England continuously since 1654, i.e. 136 years. It was simply a formal statement of goodwill and religious toleration to a community that had helped win the American Revolution (Haym Solomon for example had a crucial role in financing the Continental Army and supporting French forces).
#1: over 1000 years of temperature records: in the film it is explained that they drill a hole in the artic ice to extract a cilinder of ice. This ice has grown over many centuries and throught the way it has melted the temperature can be derived. At the same time the level of CO2 can be measured too. And here comes the clue: in all those thousands and thousands of years, the CO2 curve and the temperature curve have been closely matched. If you know that the CO2 now is higher than it has ever been since many thousands of years it seems logical to conclude that the temperature will also rise above the 'normal' levels.
You're not going to understand anything if you use that movie for a source. What the movie doesn't tell you that the changes in CO2 follow the changes in temperature by an average of 800 years, indicating that the causal relationship has flowed (during the 800,000 years of data from those ice cores) mostly (if not entirely) from temperature to CO2.
Nice try. You are referring only to a single event - the end of the ice age. Yes indeed, CO2 release does start after the ice age ends and warming has initially started, but we know why the ice age ends - it is orbital forcing (both the 26,000 Milankovitch Cycle and the 100,000 year orbital eccentricity cycle). Orbital forcing does not act directly on CO2 (conjuring it directly from the permafrost perhaps?). It acts on the global insolation and temperature.
But once warming commences its effect is far larger than orbital forcing can explain. How does this happen? It would seem that a CO2 release feedback mechanism is involved to keep driving the warming to higher and higher levels.
Let me put this simply: the criteria you are setting forth as required to support CO2 driving the climate (CO2 release being triggered directly by orbital forcing, without any previous temperature rise) is a physical absurdity.
Me, I can't wait until I can get me a touch screen for the desktop and have 3 ways to input -keyboard, mouse and touch. I love that aspect about my Surface Rt-3 ways to input.
Will you really use a 27" monitor as a touch screen? The fingerprints alone would drive me crazy.
Touch screen technology has been available for decades. Why do we not see touch screen monitors all over the place?
Answer: "Gorilla Arm Syndrome".
It is a lot of work to raise your arm and point at an exact location on the screen (and slow too). After a short time you will be feeling the fatigue building up in your arm, which starts feeling very heavy. Then you will hate your touch screen and go back to using a mouse, touchpad, or keyboard, none of which require you to make large arm movements, or hold up the weight of your arm in front of you.
Touch screens work on tablets and phones because they are small and in your lap, basically just enlarged glowing touch pads.
... But (statistically) no part of the middle class, or any part of the income distribution, has moved downwards over the last few decades.
...
And so you clear a low, low bar (and actually make a false claim to do it).
Per capita GDP in the US has doubled since 1970, and worker productivity has gone up 250%, and yet the best you can claim is that no part of the middle class has moved downwards?! What has happened is that they received no part of that enormous increase in wealth, wages have been flat in real terms that entire time.
The false part of your claim is the one that no "part of the income distribution, has moved downwards". At the low end this isn't true - wages for the lowest quintile have dropped sharply, and only government assistance (like that Socialist Ronald Reagan's Earned Income tax Credit, among others) has kept their total income completely flat. Of course the plutocrats and the right wing are furious about this assistance keeping the poor from absolute starvation.
By the way, for the quarter ending Aug. 25, 2013 Levi Strauss reported a profit of $57.1 million on revenues of $1.14 billion, for a profit margin of 5%.
Interestingly just six men at the top (out 10,500 employees) took home $21.5 million (actually not a complete number - deferred compensation earnings, which could be more (much more) than this figure, are excluded). If their 2012-2013 pay-outs (aka "salary") had "only" averaged a million a piece then the profit margin would have climbed to 6.4%. If we looked at more execs and knew about the deferred compensation schemes, that profit margin would climb much more.
But how can we expect a man to survive on only a million or so a year?
I don't really believe we can or should tax our way out of the problem. Taxes can do many things but they are not the be all and end all solution to systemic problems. At some point is it not the case that adding more sumps is not the real answer to the boat taking on water.
The thing is, corporations are government chartered. They recieve limited liability in exchange for meeting certain regulations, without which, they would have trouble existing and operating as they do today.
Corperate structures account for far more of the economy than the government. Simply shuttling money up through them isn't the answer, you need to fix the corperate structures to not require as much central redistribution.
...
The most obvious fix for corporate structures is simply to require them to pay their workers more: raise the minimum wage. This doesn't require any new mechanisms, is already widely supported by the public*, and will improve the distribution of wealth to most Americans as the floor is raised (a rising minimum wage raises most everyone's wages). Even Wal-mart is in favor of it.
Very true. With companies not "sharing the wealth" and favoring owners over employees in almost every case....
Not quite. With publicly traded companies in almost every case the corporations are favoring the executives, over the stock-holders (aka "owners"), who are in turn favored over the employees: http://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/
...Google may want you to know specifics about certain types of trees for their interview process, but if you need to know that level of detail for a job, you spend a few hours on Google and learn it....
These types of questions are finding out your breadth and depth of knowledge about data structures and algorithms. No, you cannot become proficient in this area in a few hours. You need reasonable proficiency to even be able to intelligently Google the appropriate specific knowledge. I find that knowledge of data structures and algorithms is essential for being a competent programmer.
Ultimately, I don't think you can have a language that good for both small and large projects. Large projects need structure that just gets in the way for smaller efforts.
...
Bingo! Mod parent up!
Python is the premier scripting language. It is far superior in usability and availability to the other options: "shell" (not a language but a collection of only quasi-compatible ones), and Perl (of VB we shall not speak). I use Python whenever I need to script something, like automating a task.
But it is not suitable for large application development. Sure it can be done, but there are no languages so bad that someone has not built a large application with it. But maintenance of these application systems need the structure that a better designed, better thought-out language provides.
I have found that those most critical of Ayn Rand, and Atlas Shrugged in particular, have typically never read it...
Really? How did you determine that? Or are you just assuming?
It is probably accurate to say the those most critical of Ayn Rand, and Atlas Shrugged in particular, have typically never finished it. I fall into that category. I got 10% of the way through, is that not enough punishment? It is one of the longest novels ever published by a regular publisher in English (perhaps the fifth longest) with 645,000 words (and fewer than 100 characters), about 80,000 more than War and Peace (which I had no trouble finishing) covers 8 years of history and has over 500 characters. "Long winded" does not begin to do Atlas Shrugged justice.
I see a parallel with the Snowden revelations of an out-of-control national security apparatus, which has created a vigorous and still growing push-back against flagrant abuse of the the government's powers (search warrants anyone?).
The corruption of the law and legal process by corporations to create a copyright regime that defies the U.S. Constitution* has created a widespread (and growing) view that copyright as it now stands is simply wrong - it is straight-out theft of public property for private gain. With corporate ownership of the lawmakers -- and the lawmakers own institutionalized corruption* - there is no immediate prospect of being able to undo this through legislative action. Before that happens there will likely be many more give-a-ways to corporations that will need to be undone.
Perhaps over the next 20 years we will be able to create movement that restores the rights of the broad public against the spies, CEOs, and Wall Street firms. Trust busting in the Progressive Era was effective only because the leading politician of the day (Teddy Roosevelt) was solidly, vigorously behind it. Without a powerful ally the going will be slow.
The national security abuse case is a little easier since "only" privacy is at stake, not money. Most congress folk aren't raking in money from spying.
*Did they amend the Constitution to change the limited copyright explicitly specified therein? Noooo....
**There are effectively no restrictions on Senators or Congressmen directly profiting from the laws they write; every Senator has a "leadership PAC" slush fund - a legalized bribery vehicle created to nullify anti-corruption laws.
Because giving to your church is a less effective use of charitable monies than "giving" to the government?...
Okay, Dishevel - what fraction of the money contributed to a church actually gets passed on in a form that resembles what is commonly thought of as "charity"?
Many churches (most, I suspect) make the record of their finances public - so it is easy to find out what is typical for the "overhead" of this charitable church operation. Remember - your contention is, I believe, that all of the money given to a church is charity, not just some of it. This is certainly how the sources you point to analyze the data.
As a for-instance, type "church financial statement" into Google and go down the list that is returned in order. You can use some other selection method if you like, but this one can be repeated and has no in-built bias.
The first church that is returned is the First United Methodist Church of Austin. Its 2011 audited financial show contributions of $2.357 million. How much of that is passed on as charity? Well, the only part of their budget that contains items for aiding the community is called "Missions", which expended a total of $735,692. Essentially all of the rest is spent on the same church members who are contributing, mostly in funding its religious worship.
As a charity this is just an awful return - only 31% is being spent on actual charitable services. The remaining 69% is being spent on a religious social club - fine for the members, but in no way a "charity".
But wait! That's a "liberal church"! They must be tight-fisted charity givers, right? The third on the list is the Faith Promise Church of Knoxville, Tennessee, a very conservative Evangelical ministry. It has 2012 revenues of $7.9 million. Its charitable works spending? Its "programs and missions" budget is just $582,000, or 7.4%
You will find this for any church budget you care to analyze, the 31% of the Austin church really surprised me, it is one of the highest I have ever seen. Typically less than a quarter of the money that goes to a church (often much less) gets spent in any charitable fashion.
And when you make this adjustment, the "generous conservative" disappears.
Or possibly they simply have no interest in doing a decent set of concept studies.
I suspect that over time, all we will ever hear is that their revenue is going into "contracts" without any actual mission design ever being presented (and without any transparency into their funding and spending). The fact that it has incorporated as a Dutch private foundation apparently means they have no requirement for any public disclosure.
...But this sounds like the authors made contracts with Elsevier, part of those contracts said NOT to undermine Elsevier's business partly in exchange for getting paid, and the authors violated said contract....
Evidently you are unaware that Elsevier pays authors nothing for their papers! Instead, there may be page fees the author must pay to get the article published (depending on journal).
Pay nothing for the research. Pay nothing to the author. And yet, the believe they can/should own the results of the research, not just the final edited, published paper.
Sounds a bit mafia (or more precisely MAFIAA) practices.
Slashdot Mirror
I always vote for the candidate who has the nicest smile and mentions God the most.
How shallow. You should know that you should really vote height and the best head of hair (in the event of a height tie).
Yeah, $634 million and counting...
Nope. It is more like $174 million and counting (still plenty of scratch though).
For those that don't follow the link (and are unfamiliar with government contracting practices - which is most everybody): CGI Federal was a successful bidder on an HHS umbrella contract in 2007 (Bush Administration, in other words) to provide IT services to HHS, along with IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., and Quality Software Services. These same four companies were the bidders (under said long term contract) for the specific task of site implementation, and the $634 million figure is for all of the services from CGI Federal under that contract. Only 25% of that total, dating back to 2007, was for the website.
... It isn't that easy to go buying stuff with that kind of volume of cash without hiring an army of accomplices...
This is basically like a drug empire. Drug empires exist because there is an army of foot-soldiers making small illegal financial transactions (sales in this case), collecting real currency in small amounts. With counterfeit currency there is also an army of foot-soldiers making small illegal financial transactions - passing of phony money for tangible assets or real currency.
The very rise of coinage was linked to a technical advance: the availability of the touchstone, which provides a quick non-destructive test for purity that is nominally pretty accurate (accuracy 0.5%).
Why didn't Archimedes employ touchstone tests? Probably because it assumes the material tested is homogenous, which with the crown was a key point in question.
... ever since the Romans got the bright idea to pass off bronze slugs as silver dinari, and kill anyone who refused to pretend they were honest coinage...
-jcr
Which of course did not actually happen.
The drop in silver content in coins occurred gradually over the course of centuries, with periodic attempts by the government to actually boost the silver content, or set a floor for the drop. One of the key reasons for this was the inadequate supply of silver to circulate. There was a continuous drain of silver to the East (mostly India), plus inevitable losses from circulation (the coins we find today being examples of that) which were not made up by Roman silver mines. Some method of assigning an equal amount of value to a smaller amount of silver could not be avoided.
The attempts to reform the currency and establish older levels of silver content always quickly failed, the amount of silver not being increased by decree.
Will management be wearing these, and having their performance judged by the exact same criteria?
No, I thought not.
Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.
---- Abraham Lincoln
But the government doesn't provide this "service". If they did it sure would make the NSA's a lot job easier.
Let's see. Private companies have secretly handed over to the NSA every type of data and data access that the NSA has demanded, and the major challenge that the NSA has been facing as an organization is that it is drowning in all of the data it takes from those private companies. Private companies have even secretly cooperated in blatantly illegal data transfer, receiving retroactive legal authority, thus guaranteeing that future illegal requests will be similarly honored.
The shadow security state already has free and unfettered access to the data flowing through the fabric of the nation. Letting private companies cripple the national infrastructure and gouge us for the "benefit" provides absolutely no compensatory advantages.
Indeed. And this monopoly-protection legislation is what corporate ownership of the political process looks like.
... It could just as easily be the case that those books that remained important were translated and otherwise preserved and those that were not considered important were more loosely copied. Then church councils came along and blessed some books as from God and some others as not. Or the opposite: books that remained unchanged were deemed miraculously protected by God and then included in the corpus but those that didn't were dropped. Regardless good scribe/librarian work doesn't make me believe that God must have protected something just that the people doing the copying did a good job and cared enough to do so....
Hold on, there pardner. Can you cite any evidence that "holy writ" scribal transmission has a significantly lower error rate than other document classes? I am rather well acquainted with bible study and I have never heard of any evidence for this (though claims of inerrancy taken purely on faith are common).
In fact there are hundreds of thousands of alterations in biblical texts, and the disagreements in texts were causing problems as early as c. 200 AD.
... Look up Red Lining. It is hard to get a house somewhere else if you can't get a loan for it, or if you do get a loan, the interest rate is so far above and beyond what the market rate is...
Just to amplify your point, financial institutions are still selectively "guiding" African-Americans into sub-prime loans. Discrimination in the market place remains a living, breathing reality this very day.
... Every synagogue in America has a copy of George Washington's letter welcoming the first Jewish community to America....
Minor correction: the famous Washington letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI in 1790 was not "welcoming the first Jewish community to America", since the synagogue represented a community of Jews that had lived in New England continuously since 1654, i.e. 136 years. It was simply a formal statement of goodwill and religious toleration to a community that had helped win the American Revolution (Haym Solomon for example had a crucial role in financing the Continental Army and supporting French forces).
#1: over 1000 years of temperature records: in the film it is explained that they drill a hole in the artic ice to extract a cilinder of ice. This ice has grown over many centuries and throught the way it has melted the temperature can be derived. At the same time the level of CO2 can be measured too. And here comes the clue: in all those thousands and thousands of years, the CO2 curve and the temperature curve have been closely matched. If you know that the CO2 now is higher than it has ever been since many thousands of years it seems logical to conclude that the temperature will also rise above the 'normal' levels.
You're not going to understand anything if you use that movie for a source. What the movie doesn't tell you that the changes in CO2 follow the changes in temperature by an average of 800 years, indicating that the causal relationship has flowed (during the 800,000 years of data from those ice cores) mostly (if not entirely) from temperature to CO2.
Nice try. You are referring only to a single event - the end of the ice age. Yes indeed, CO2 release does start after the ice age ends and warming has initially started, but we know why the ice age ends - it is orbital forcing (both the 26,000 Milankovitch Cycle and the 100,000 year orbital eccentricity cycle). Orbital forcing does not act directly on CO2 (conjuring it directly from the permafrost perhaps?). It acts on the global insolation and temperature.
But once warming commences its effect is far larger than orbital forcing can explain. How does this happen? It would seem that a CO2 release feedback mechanism is involved to keep driving the warming to higher and higher levels.
Let me put this simply: the criteria you are setting forth as required to support CO2 driving the climate (CO2 release being triggered directly by orbital forcing, without any previous temperature rise) is a physical absurdity.
Me, I can't wait until I can get me a touch screen for the desktop and have 3 ways to input -keyboard, mouse and touch. I love that aspect about my Surface Rt-3 ways to input.
Will you really use a 27" monitor as a touch screen? The fingerprints alone would drive me crazy.
Touch screen technology has been available for decades. Why do we not see touch screen monitors all over the place?
Answer: "Gorilla Arm Syndrome".
It is a lot of work to raise your arm and point at an exact location on the screen (and slow too). After a short time you will be feeling the fatigue building up in your arm, which starts feeling very heavy. Then you will hate your touch screen and go back to using a mouse, touchpad, or keyboard, none of which require you to make large arm movements, or hold up the weight of your arm in front of you.
Touch screens work on tablets and phones because they are small and in your lap, basically just enlarged glowing touch pads.
... But (statistically) no part of the middle class, or any part of the income distribution, has moved downwards over the last few decades.
...
And so you clear a low, low bar (and actually make a false claim to do it).
Per capita GDP in the US has doubled since 1970, and worker productivity has gone up 250%, and yet the best you can claim is that no part of the middle class has moved downwards?! What has happened is that they received no part of that enormous increase in wealth, wages have been flat in real terms that entire time.
The false part of your claim is the one that no "part of the income distribution, has moved downwards". At the low end this isn't true - wages for the lowest quintile have dropped sharply, and only government assistance (like that Socialist Ronald Reagan's Earned Income tax Credit, among others) has kept their total income completely flat. Of course the plutocrats and the right wing are furious about this assistance keeping the poor from absolute starvation.
By the way, for the quarter ending Aug. 25, 2013 Levi Strauss reported a profit of $57.1 million on revenues of $1.14 billion, for a profit margin of 5%.
Interestingly just six men at the top (out 10,500 employees) took home $21.5 million (actually not a complete number - deferred compensation earnings, which could be more (much more) than this figure, are excluded). If their 2012-2013 pay-outs (aka "salary") had "only" averaged a million a piece then the profit margin would have climbed to 6.4%. If we looked at more execs and knew about the deferred compensation schemes, that profit margin would climb much more.
But how can we expect a man to survive on only a million or so a year?
I don't really believe we can or should tax our way out of the problem. Taxes can do many things but they are not the be all and end all solution to systemic problems. At some point is it not the case that adding more sumps is not the real answer to the boat taking on water.
The thing is, corporations are government chartered. They recieve limited liability in exchange for meeting certain regulations, without which, they would have trouble existing and operating as they do today.
Corperate structures account for far more of the economy than the government. Simply shuttling money up through them isn't the answer, you need to fix the corperate structures to not require as much central redistribution.
The most obvious fix for corporate structures is simply to require them to pay their workers more: raise the minimum wage. This doesn't require any new mechanisms, is already widely supported by the public*, and will improve the distribution of wealth to most Americans as the floor is raised (a rising minimum wage raises most everyone's wages). Even Wal-mart is in favor of it.
*71% of adults, even a majority of Republicans support it: http://www.gallup.com/poll/160913/back-raising-minimum-wage.aspx
Very true. With companies not "sharing the wealth" and favoring owners over employees in almost every case....
Not quite. With publicly traded companies in almost every case the corporations are favoring the executives, over the stock-holders (aka "owners"), who are in turn favored over the employees: http://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/
...Google may want you to know specifics about certain types of trees for their interview process, but if you need to know that level of detail for a job, you spend a few hours on Google and learn it....
These types of questions are finding out your breadth and depth of knowledge about data structures and algorithms. No, you cannot become proficient in this area in a few hours. You need reasonable proficiency to even be able to intelligently Google the appropriate specific knowledge. I find that knowledge of data structures and algorithms is essential for being a competent programmer.
...
Ultimately, I don't think you can have a language that good for both small and large projects. Large projects need structure that just gets in the way for smaller efforts.
...
Bingo! Mod parent up!
Python is the premier scripting language. It is far superior in usability and availability to the other options: "shell" (not a language but a collection of only quasi-compatible ones), and Perl (of VB we shall not speak). I use Python whenever I need to script something, like automating a task.
But it is not suitable for large application development. Sure it can be done, but there are no languages so bad that someone has not built a large application with it. But maintenance of these application systems need the structure that a better designed, better thought-out language provides.
I have found that those most critical of Ayn Rand, and Atlas Shrugged in particular, have typically never read it...
Really? How did you determine that? Or are you just assuming?
It is probably accurate to say the those most critical of Ayn Rand, and Atlas Shrugged in particular, have typically never finished it. I fall into that category. I got 10% of the way through, is that not enough punishment? It is one of the longest novels ever published by a regular publisher in English (perhaps the fifth longest) with 645,000 words (and fewer than 100 characters), about 80,000 more than War and Peace (which I had no trouble finishing) covers 8 years of history and has over 500 characters. "Long winded" does not begin to do Atlas Shrugged justice.
I see a parallel with the Snowden revelations of an out-of-control national security apparatus, which has created a vigorous and still growing push-back against flagrant abuse of the the government's powers (search warrants anyone?).
The corruption of the law and legal process by corporations to create a copyright regime that defies the U.S. Constitution* has created a widespread (and growing) view that copyright as it now stands is simply wrong - it is straight-out theft of public property for private gain. With corporate ownership of the lawmakers -- and the lawmakers own institutionalized corruption* - there is no immediate prospect of being able to undo this through legislative action. Before that happens there will likely be many more give-a-ways to corporations that will need to be undone.
Perhaps over the next 20 years we will be able to create movement that restores the rights of the broad public against the spies, CEOs, and Wall Street firms. Trust busting in the Progressive Era was effective only because the leading politician of the day (Teddy Roosevelt) was solidly, vigorously behind it. Without a powerful ally the going will be slow.
The national security abuse case is a little easier since "only" privacy is at stake, not money. Most congress folk aren't raking in money from spying.
*Did they amend the Constitution to change the limited copyright explicitly specified therein? Noooo....
**There are effectively no restrictions on Senators or Congressmen directly profiting from the laws they write; every Senator has a "leadership PAC" slush fund - a legalized bribery vehicle created to nullify anti-corruption laws.
Yes, we must leave this to the professional film makers who absolutely did not release two nearly unwatchable Atlas Shrugged movies already...
They are simply being true to their source material. An unreadable book should translate to an unwatchable movie.
Because giving to your church is a less effective use of charitable monies than "giving" to the government? ...
Okay, Dishevel - what fraction of the money contributed to a church actually gets passed on in a form that resembles what is commonly thought of as "charity"?
Many churches (most, I suspect) make the record of their finances public - so it is easy to find out what is typical for the "overhead" of this charitable church operation. Remember - your contention is, I believe, that all of the money given to a church is charity, not just some of it. This is certainly how the sources you point to analyze the data.
As a for-instance, type "church financial statement" into Google and go down the list that is returned in order. You can use some other selection method if you like, but this one can be repeated and has no in-built bias.
The first church that is returned is the First United Methodist Church of Austin. Its 2011 audited financial show contributions of $2.357 million. How much of that is passed on as charity? Well, the only part of their budget that contains items for aiding the community is called "Missions", which expended a total of $735,692. Essentially all of the rest is spent on the same church members who are contributing, mostly in funding its religious worship.
As a charity this is just an awful return - only 31% is being spent on actual charitable services. The remaining 69% is being spent on a religious social club - fine for the members, but in no way a "charity".
But wait! That's a "liberal church"! They must be tight-fisted charity givers, right? The third on the list is the Faith Promise Church of Knoxville, Tennessee, a very conservative Evangelical ministry. It has 2012 revenues of $7.9 million. Its charitable works spending? Its "programs and missions" budget is just $582,000, or 7.4%
You will find this for any church budget you care to analyze, the 31% of the Austin church really surprised me, it is one of the highest I have ever seen. Typically less than a quarter of the money that goes to a church (often much less) gets spent in any charitable fashion.
And when you make this adjustment, the "generous conservative" disappears.
Or possibly they simply have no interest in doing a decent set of concept studies.
I suspect that over time, all we will ever hear is that their revenue is going into "contracts" without any actual mission design ever being presented (and without any transparency into their funding and spending). The fact that it has incorporated as a Dutch private foundation apparently means they have no requirement for any public disclosure.
Evidently you are unaware that Elsevier pays authors nothing for their papers! Instead, there may be page fees the author must pay to get the article published (depending on journal).
Pay nothing for the research. Pay nothing to the author. And yet, the believe they can/should own the results of the research, not just the final edited, published paper.
Sounds a bit mafia (or more precisely MAFIAA) practices.