If iran is preparing to nuke you.. you might want to reconsider that. Being the richest guy in the world makes you a target, whether you deserve it or not (see sept 11).
Paul is an isolationist, that's the problem. The world is interconnected. The US has done the isolation bit before, and found out the hard way you're part of the world, and if shit goes badly, you're getting bombed or torpedoed or whatever, whether you are involved or not, and whether you were at fault or not. You have things people want, they will try and take it from you. You have allies, if you say 'fuck it, we'll let Iran do whatever they want' you're putting Israel, India and most of Europe in a position of having to deal with this on their own, without a substantial deterrent at their back. They won't be your allies if you aren't engaged with them. Maybe that means giving them money, maybe that means parking an aircraft carrier off their coast every now and again, but in exchange they do anything important in US dollars. That benefits you a lot, and they sell you stuff you want, that benefits you, a lot, and they buy stuff from you, that benefits you a lot, it's like the world is all interconnected. And when you try and do stupid things they, as your friends, try and stop you. You know... like trying to recolonize iraq.
Yes, the US withdrawing from the UN would be effectively an unmitigated disaster for pretty much everyone. Everywhere. The whole institution would basically collapse, which hurts everyone big and small. Most US military spending is domestic, it's a giant jobs programme. Nothing more. There are more efficient ways to accomplish that, but the net effect is money for US things. The war on drugs.. what's your alternative? Legalize it? How well did that work out for china for a century? The concept of a government agency responsible for the security of airlines is fine. The implementation is a disaster of course, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater much? How many lawyers can you employ in airports to oversee screenings to make sure that the security company minimizes its liability? That's the route you're headed without the TSA. The government should be doing airport security, just differently (ok, a lot differently).
The Europeans were pissed you invaded iraq without valid evidence. Even a child on the outside could realize that you were wrong about the WMD. France and germany and turkey were prepared to go along with it if you had found WMD. You didn't. But you still invaded - preventing Iraq from having WMD: good, Invading them for having WMD when they didn't: bad. It's so simple ron paul should be able to understand it, but I doubt it. The isolationist doesn't pull his head out of the sand until there's a gas cloud over tel aviv. Or in this day and age we're looking at Ukraine, Georgia, Taiwan, etc. Even the Arab spring. Do you seriously think the Libyans could have been rid of Gaddafhi without help? (Yours included). That man was a disaster to everything he touched. The Libyans will remember who helped them be rid of the bastard, and who didn't. Guess which side you ended up on? Oh right, the right side of the issue. Egypt, tunisa, not so much.
So wait... you're saying you'd be better off without the bailouts that saved a few million jobs and prevented your economy from going into a tailspin, because oh no, they added to the budget deficit (which, by the way, you mostly owe yourselves). Sure, there are more efficient ways to solve that problem, but they staunched the bleeding, which was about as far as they could go, - which was unfortunately no where near far enough, but you take what you can get.
Did you live through the US government shuts downs of the 90's? I'm not even an american and I remember them, they were a disaster here too, because all that stuff we sell you, because we're your ally, ya, we couldn't sell it to you (or organize the selling to you, whatever it was), and that had half the bloody world in a panic. You may not like everything the government does, I certainly don't like everything my government does, but someone like Ron Paul who has such a delusional understanding of what government does, is capable of, or should do should not be anywhere near a high office.
Well first off, not everyone agrees on what the 'liberties' are, other countries do very well with different sets of liberties, so sure, some of them are certainly inappropriate, or at least inconsistent and unclear.
Does the right of free speech extend to collections of people, or just individuals, what (if any) constraints apply to those groups of people? (I.e. can corporations make unlimited campaign contributions, can political parties make themselves into profit making entities in some other business to fund their political activities and so on).
WTF does the right to bear arms mean? Should it only apply to a militia (if so, how do you define a militia, is such a construct even suitable in this day and age?), if it's a personal right, when was it a personal right, was it always? Is that even a good idea? If it was always a personal right, or more accurately, if it has been interpreted to apply to a personal right, was that the intent, and does the intent even matter since the nutters who wrote that part have been dead for 200 years and had no concept of what modern 'arms' might be. If it wasn't interpreted that way before but is now, is that not in effect changing what the liberty is, and do you really want that change? Who should decide that (and how)?
Government necessarily evolves over time. You can agree or disagree with every peace of how it evolves, but trying to run a government like it's 1790 as Ron Paul would have you do would basically turn you into all of those failed, or failing states who've been trying to dig themselves out of the gutter since they were decolonized.
Because a lunatic who wants the US back on the gold standard and wants to piss of all of your allies, withdraw from the UN and has no idea just what is going on in the the world or how interconnected it is really poses a sensible alternative. This is a guy who doesn't realize the role of government might have evolved in the last 200 years.
That's like saying I oppose the social democrats because they're not left enough, so I'm going to vote for the german people's party. All the while some other nutters are working their way to the top....
Tell that to BMW, BioWare and Ubisoft montreal, Airbus, Volkswagon, GM etc. All those game companies who set up shop in texas with local grants (notably in austin), and so on.
You don't see the long term benefit of japanese investments in computing? Remember floppy disks? How about RAM, lots of that stuff was Japan first in innovation. Innovation doesn't necessarily completely change the paradigm of how technology is used, it can be incremental and still be hugely valuable.
And then there's the whole internet. No, that wasn't useful to have been a government sponsored programme at all was it?
Even in the solar arena, the problem they have in the UK with subsidies for power from solar panels being subsidized at some ridiculous rate, is that the cost of solar is dropping so fast that the subsidies are basically free money, and they can't afford the programme. It was too successful. Who's making those innovations? The US.
And yes, american investments in solar have been enormously successful. You've increased solar generation by a factor of 5 in 4 years, brought the cost down by about that same factor per KW/h. Sure, on the scale of total US power generation it's still a drop in the bucket, but when you add a drop to a bucket, you're only going to get a drop. The way I do the math you're looking at doubling that capacity again in the next 3 or 4 years, if not more than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States).
Part of the thrust of the topic is that investment in the US has been inadequate. If I hire you to write a game engine for me, but I only offer you 500 bucks to do it, well guess what, it's going to be bad. The US can (not necessarily will) do a lot of things differently, and could throw a lot more money at the problem. How much is the 'right' amount I have no idea though.
Straight up, it's defamation. If you searched for "thedonger" on google and the results were always "thedonger is a liar, thedonger is a murder etc." you'd have a potential problem.
The trick here is that this is an autosuggest. Google is suggesting, now what that means can vary. I take that to mean google is suggesting that these are things commonly searched together. If you take it to mean 'google is suggesting you should search for' or 'google is suggesting that' then the situation is a bit different. From the perspective of France, and I sort of see where they're coming from with this, - the interpretation that google is suggesting that is simply not acceptable. The google argument "the computer did it" is beyond stupid. It's fine to try the first round I suppose, but once the court has decided that the potentially defamatory interpretation applies you should be going with a different tack.
I'm not sure what I think. This happens often enough in english that you'd think it's sort of obvious what's happening, but maybe the same doesn't apply in french, or maybe the French take defamation much more seriously.
More like the exact opposite. People cannot innovate without education, without protection for those innovations (not being stolen by the chinese), and without some sort of a safety net that allows them to take risks. The government is therefore deeply invested in innovation, and, as the article points out, funds a lot of it.
I'm not in the US, but not far off. My graduate programme in comp sci is 85% foreign I think, so of 120 or so grad students we have less than 20 who are from canada. The rest are from india, china, the middle east (and I'm half indian). The same could be said for most programmes in the US of the same sort (engineering, comp sci etc.). The undergraduate programme is largely domestic, but those guys mostly get stuck implementing boring business process stuff, and not actually innovating.
You can't 'get out of the way' and hope it will all magically work out when other governments are investing in innovation. There are lots of different ways to do that, you could for example, directly fund solar power companies, you could subsidize power from solar sources, you could directly build solar power and a government enterprise and then sell it off if you are so inclined. Hell, you could just pay more money to people who are future innovators, rather than having science and engineering programmes be more expensive, make them less expensive, that sort of thing. You can provide local and provincial level (in the US these would be states but the effect is the same), building space for startup companies, 'innovation centres' as we call them, and so on.
Simply put, given the choice, no one with money is going to invest it in the US if they get a better deal elsewhere, they'll invest in china and india. They get multipliers from governments, they get better people, from better education systems and so on. The only reason to invest in the US is if you want into the US market and have to invest in the US for that, but with the way trade is, you invest somewhere other than the US, and then sell crap to the americans to take their money.
Sure, if you want to build something in europe you probably have more regulatory hurdles than the US. And, all else being equal, that makes the US more attractive. But if a government is chipping in 20 or 25% (or, in my case in the games business 40 or 50%), that makes the paperwork worth it.
right, and lots of big companies fled, or are fleeing the hardware production business in computers, most of the car makers nearly went bankrupt, had massive consolidation or are in part owned by the government (in germany), and crops are subsidized by the government to keep them in business.
As to MS- Nokia. I doubt it. If I was MS I'd be using a pile of money to persuade Nokia and RIM to produce better products, and fold RIM into WP8, as the business oriented product. RIM has thrown their lot in with a half hearted effort at doing Android, and it's going no where fast. I was at a presentation about 6 weeks ago where a RIM guy got up and was talking about BB world statistics and the people at my table were trying to suppress their laughter. But Nokia on its own will never own that market, and they're just a handset maker at this point.
I could see MS buying a huge chunk of Nokia's mobile software division. that's actually a good strategy. Nokia did a lot of really good, useful, innovative stuff, those people have skills, and brains, most of which nokia doesn't need or want to use anymore. It wouldn't hurt MS too bring those guys into the MS family so to speak.
Enabling can be a strong factor. That random hot girl I met 5 years ago and befriended on facebook... why did I befriend her? If I haven't talked to her in 4.5 years (via facebook or otherwise), why am I still 'friends' with her? (Answer, I only defriend people who are bothersome). But before facebook, would I have given her my phone number? Probably not, and even if I had, she wouldn't have my current one.
Does a phone directory that has a section for cheating spouses simply facilitate cheating or does it outright encourage it? (And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? A directory of doughnut shops, cigarette shops or casino's is a double edged sword here).
If you go to the middle east it's the mobile phone that allows 'hookups'. Not being from the middle east I cannot profess to be an expert in the process, but basically you can find people in your area who are interested in a hookup for something that is probably illegal. The key here is that you didn't know the person in advance. With facebook I'm not sure you make the same argument, but my usage model might be atypical. If I'm splitting up with my current GF for that girl I've known since high school well... that happens. But if I'm randomly befriending hot girls on facebook looking for a hookup, well...that's a bit different. If facebook is helping me cheat, by 'recommending' potential hookups (which sounds more like a dating site than facebook) you're into more grainy territory. If I was getting unsolicited but legitimate suggestions sent to me for potential better partners than the current one I could sort of see a problem.
As you indirectly convey, it's not facebook that's the problem, or the car, it's how it is being used. But if your car had a button for 'send fake location data to my spouse" it might be a bit harder to say it isn't intentionally contributing to the situation.
All of this of course assumes (wrongly) that divorce is necessarily bad. If people aren't happy divorce isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least not in this day and age where it's pretty accepted. Facebook, for all of its many, many faults, lets you connect with people, if connecting with someone other than your current partner makes you happier, maybe that's for the best, but I'm sure your partners lawyer will enjoy looking through your logs, just to make sure you're punished for breaking a lifelong contract. After all, marriage is just a contract, and intentionally helping someone breach a contract comes with a messy legal framework. I don't think Facebook does that intentionally, and there are far more guilty sites out there though.
and it's not like china is opposed to clean energy, they're just cheap and corrupt, so at least one part of their society is trying, which is better than nothing.
It's true that younger researchers, myself included, tend to have a lot of ideas that can be tested and worked on. We put a lot of those on the back burner until you get tenure, that idea for a new programming language or a testing operating system or whatever, you just don't try and do that until you're secure, that's not until your mid 30's usually. My boss is about 38, and the moment he got tenure he shifted from one area of computer science into computer games, and now does research there. How 'high impact' it is I will let others to decide (unless he wants to pipe in with his own feedback...) but we do good work overall, and have a few best paper awards and so on. But now that he has tenure his managerial responsibilities are going up, and his direct time spent doing research goes down. Without him overseeing the whole programme though, we wouldn't have a programme at all, and that includes a couple of PhD researchers a couple more MSc's,, and god knows how many undergrads.
Once someone gets up to around 50 they start to know what they don't know, and they start to run out of a lot of radical new ideas of their own they can test. But they know enough about what *is* going on, and how the work is done that they can recognize, support, guide and even lead really high impact work, even if the genesis of the idea wasn't purely their own, or if they didn't have enough staff to do it before.
The thing with giving scientists early retirement is that a lot of them will continue to work for you, or for a local university or the like, and they will maintain their contacts with you. You get less work done in that scenario, or at least less immediately valuable work one, but you still get some, and it's now largely paid out of a different pocket book.
From out here it's hard to distinguish between 'forgot what the specification said they should do' and 'didn't bother to read it in the first place'. Even if your 10 testing guys knew it was in the specification doesn't mean they necessarily understood how to test it properly, and maybe did some sort of relative test (input of x should come out to be 10x in a simple example). The problem with using the wrong unit of measure is that the math is, in isolation all correct and self consistent, it's just off by a constant - which just happens to be enough to cause catastrophic failures.
In the case of an aircraft using only once sensor in the article, did it read in data from all the sensors, and just ignored some of the input? Did it average the inputs, (which, naively, isn't a bad answer, but fails badly when you have really wonky data), was there some race condition in their resolution between multiple sensors? That's a fun one, maybe it works on data on poling intervals and in very rare cases it can read data from only one sensor and not the others and so on. Even if you know the specification it can be tricky to implement (and realize all of the things that can go wrong, it's not like all of these people doing the calculations are experts in distributed systems necessarily, they might be experts in physics and and engineering). Doing something simple like taking an average of an array can fail in really bad ways - what if the array isn't populated on time? How do you even know if the array is fully populated? How does my average handle out of bounds numbers? How about off by 10^6 numbers? Does old data just hang out in those memory addresses, and if so what happens to it? A lot of those underlying problems, especially with how the array (or in this case probably how a handful of floats) is populated and is it aware if it is properly populated are handled by the implementation of the language, which is well beyond the people who actually do most of the programming. And not everyone thinks 'hey for every line of code I need to go and check to make sure the assembler version doesn't have a bizarre race condition in it', assuming you could even find the race conditions in the first place.
Eating while driving is probably already covered under distracted driving rules though. That is a problem that has been around and pervasive for 30 years at least. Using a cell phone while driving is a relatively new thing, and there's a large industry lobby concerned with allowing it to happen so as to not weaken their market.
In the end cell phones will have to fall into some sort of regulatory framework, probably that means at a federal level banning texting regular phones while driving, and coming up with an appropriate penalty. Hands free makers have a vested interest in lobbying their case, regardless of the science, so even if hands free is equally bad, you'll still probably see that persist after other forms of cell use are prohibited.
All 'banning' something means is if you're caught doing it, you get a ticket, and if you cause an accident doing it they can charge with something more serious.
Now if we could ban my girlfriends constant chatter and complaining as a passenger while I'm driving, those would be rules I could support.
That the federal reserver isn't going to randomly conjure a bunch of money just for facebook. They drive a slow persistent hum of inflation (which is preferable to deflation), which has been humming along at under 4% for over a decade. The argument that everyones salary need increase by that amount immediately is sort of silly, but is clearly intended to be hyperbolic, it needs to increase by that amount, but 3-4% yearly salary increases are the norm everywhere I've been since 2000 (some years less, some years more, but well, inflation has been under 3 most of that time).
The federal reserve is also private banks, when they cause inflation they depreciate the value of their own money too (and they decrease the relative value of *debt* which by the way, is kind of important if you have credit card or mortgage or student loans or federal bonds debt, because decreasing the value of that debt effectively increases your net worth).
The money for facebooks IPO will come from people who have control of money moving from somewhere and into facebook under the assumption that they will get some sort of return on investment better than they currently get. Whether or not you think facebook will be able to make any money is another matter entirely.
Note that printing money (or electronically conjuring it) doesn't necessarily cause inflation either. You need to increase the supply of currency to keep up with population growth (kinda... it's more complex than that, but that conveys the point well enough) or else you're reducing the per person currency available, which, well, causes deflation. For the US it's even more complicated because the dollar is so widely held, and with the economic situation world wide a lot of poorer places are seeing their money flee into the dollar (taking dollars away from Americans essentially), but even deflating that at a rate of 3-4%, while paying 2% interest (us 10 year bonds), so a net deflation of 1- 2% is still preferable to being in nigerian currency or bonds or, apparently, greek bonds.
Yes but XDA should then be the maximum time it should take to release, and they aren't anywhere close yet. Given that everything they have thus far is basically garbage, well that's sort of my point. Getting all of this stuff working is hard.
It's not like google has done all the work. That's, to use my actual comparison of Window 8, like saying that MS does all the driver development. They do a driver, which hopefully won't cause it to explode, but that's about as far as it goes. Getting all the drivers written, for all of the different hardware parts, testing them all, integrating them all isn't exactly trivial. On a major product like the Galaxy S II (which I am most familiar with as that's our target platform for an ICS product next year) there are 2 majorly different CPU's it looks like a couple of different revisions of the same camera and flash, several different antennas etc. When samsung actually puts out a build, it needs to have all of those parts working correctly. And each one of them may have some random thing wrong with it, or that needs a special code path for (LTE, HSPA, different cpu's etc).
You're confusing getting into the guts of an existing firmware and software with trying to get a raw fresh from compilation ICS build on there. Assuming you can get it on at all (rooted phone + odin basically) well then there's only the in hardware module problems to deal with (which you dealt with to get custom roms on ages ago anyway)
XDA, in trying to get ICS working on something, is working with the same source google opened up to everyone. On some phones it's more difficult to get your own rom on, but once you have that problem solved, compiling ICS and sticking it on isn't that difficult, getting to actually do something useful is another matter entirely, which is my point. Right 'out of the box' so to speak ICS builds don't actually work worth shit, and that's the starting point for everyone. I'll be worried (though not really surprised) if XDA solves these problems before the actual companies. Until then, it's just guessing randomly as to how long development should take.
The potential for abuse is pretty much limitless the other way too though. I'm a journalist so my reporting that hilary clinton murdered someone isn't libel, I have a source to back it up, but they prefer to remain anonymous. If you can report nonsense you made up as fact and then claim journalistic protection there's no requirement for the truth to appear anywhere in discourse.
In the canadian (and UK) system a politician cannot be held legally liable for anything they say in the house - but that's a relatively narrow definition, it is, in practice, applied somewhat more broadly, but you're still saying everyone else isn't covered by the law. If you're going to give special protection to people which essentially shield them from being liable for the harm they do making shit up free speech is basically worthless (watch a parliamentary debate and you'll get the idea, basically everything they say may as well be a random collection of words its so meaningless a lot of the time) - you can say anything you want and there's no way to know who is telling the truth.
If the government is in the business of enforcing the rules on free speech then you have to limit that freedom to be 'free insofar as you aren't excluding someone else's free speech, and you cannot use free speech to lie and claim it true because you have more money than they do'. That was essentially what tobacco companies tried to do until the 1990's 'cigarettes aren't actually harmful' was 'free speech'.
A journalist has protection if their source used those techniques though. Or else reporting on wikileaks or the pentagon papers would be illegal.
The constitution is a sort of irrelevant document, it says nothing on the point other than broad principles, 'there should be free press' it's up to you to figure out what exactly that means and how to implement it. It isn't a template for how to actually govern, only the broad principles by which one should govern and how to structure the government (many of those ideas have long since been tossed anyway).
And this is like a windows 8 developer preview going out, sure all the basic stuff is there, but to get it to actually work properly with anything with all the parts requires a fair bit of effort. No support for micro sd cards? (or the wrong type of support or whatever) need to fix that. Uses 35 more MB of ram than the previous version? that might break something important.
And whatever is wrong you have to figure out how to fix, which can take a lot of time, especially if the upgrade process breaks something, but you're not sure what initially. I'm sure there's a lot of back and forth between google devs and 3rd party devs trying to figure out wtf is going on.
If the xda developers had fully working ICS builds for major platforms out already I'd be a bit more critical. They don't. They have ICS builds, but a lot of times wireless doesn't work, phone calls don't work, the memory card doesn't work, the camera doesn't work or various other parts don't work. Diagnosing and writing drivers for all of those parts isn't trivial, and while I'd expect the actual companies to be faster about it than XDA it's still not a trivial undertaking.
Because judges are, in the US system, the final arbiter absent any other definition. If some other definition is clearly stated in the law judges can apply that, but absent clarity, they essentially define the rules until congress decides it wants to do something.
That isn't the only system in the world though. Other countries can basically kick a decision up to the legislature in some fashion (sort of like law lords in the UK, but even more direct than that). It actually does make a lot of sense that if 'the press' has special rules applied to it that you clearly define what counts as 'the press'. That also seems like one of those things that would float a lot with time so putting it in a constitution is probably a bad idea (assuming you think constitutions are a good idea at all).
Libel and defamation are serious business, as is phone hacking. Journalists may be shielded from the former if they, in good faith, thought the information they had was legitimate (this is to separate the journalist from the source). But 'the press' isn't allowed to hack your phone or break into your house to get a story either so they are protected from the source of information, but only so much. That seems like you're walking a fine line between a source being 'the press' and a journalist being 'the press', which is why it needs clarification at all, and that seems like a job for parliament (or in the US case congress).
I think that's how it works, people photograph the F18's off the carriers, F15's and F16s from Iraq, afghanistan, and Qatar (or bahrain, I can't remember which, big airbase there anyway), and log what they saw. I'm not say the app is somehow perfectly accurate, you're not going to see an aircraft in the middle of the night, but this has been going on long enough there's almost a joke to it, and everyone knows it's been going on for a long time.
The US flew no fly zones over Iraq for what, a decade almost, you accept the risks, especially if you aren't flying very deep in (this isn't an actual war, and these aren't no fly zones after all). There's basically a ring around Irans western, southern, and eastern borders a hundred or so Km deep where you'd be poking around, much more than that and you're into very serious risks (hence UAV's).
Deliberately lighting them up is more strategic than technical. How deep can you penetrate before they try and do something about it? If you do this often enough they might get accustomed to you flying 100 or 200km inside their territory, a few hundred Km of uncontested flying makes all the difference between getting in missile range, and not (before they shoot back). All the while you're wearing down their supply of parts for their F14's (and other aircraft) as well, which will hopefully reduce their operational capability, without actually killing anyone or shooting.
You're also very interested in what they have defended, and from where. That's why these operations have combined carrier and land based aircraft. Iran is a big country, with a lot of potential nuclear sites scattered around, it's very important that you actually bomb the important ones if you're going to go that route. But you have no fucking clue where their serious facilities are. Which is the problem. Blowing up a bunch of centrifuges doesn't meaningfully set back their nuclear programme if they have a bunch more somewhere else, and that applies to every part of the nuclear programme.
The rhetoric for war is as much from their side as yours. They threaten to wipe out the Israelis, the sunnis aren't to fond of a growing Iran and they're all squabbling over these things, and you're in the middle of it with allies on one side (the Sunni's and the Israelis) and interests (oil and geography for other goods shipped past). The rhetoric is also in large part intended to be a deterrent. You don't really want to bomb them, but you also want to make everyone who could help build nuclear weapons in Iran too scared to show up for work, all of this plays into that, knowing when the probing flights are is part of that. Whether or not you should be allied with the House of Saud and the Israelis is another matter.
Not really. The US has been flying manned combat aircraft into Iran for several years probing air defences. My Persian cooworkers have a social app that tracks when people on the ground see the planes, I don't speak farsi (or understand the language) so I can't point you at it unfortunately. Searches for USAF probing iranian air defences gives some results along these lines.
The US is trying to fly as deep into Iran as they can before all the air defence sites 'light up', they're trying to locate all the air defence radars etc. It's illegal, but it's been going on for years, and everyone knows the game, the americans pretend 'this time is the time' they're going to attack natanz etc. and the Iranians call their bluff. Presumably one of these days the Israeli's or someone else will take this data and go after air defence sites along with the nuclear facilities but who knows.
Hired by banks is sort of wrong. As opposed to a central bank the federal reserve isn't really like the bank of england or US central bank, it's this menagerie of banking institutions and the federal government all collaborating (or colluding depending on your perspective) on monetary policy.
The fed system is tasked with monetary policy, that's one of its core abilities, there's nothing to investigate. Maybe there should be, but if the fed wants to magically create 100 trillion dollars tomorrow they are allowed to do so. Their primary task is prevent banking panics, so if lying to the public about the liquidity of banks does that, well, then that's what they are tasked with doing too (although that might be illegal).
As you say, the Fed lent money to banks who were then allowed to re-lend it. The fed sets interest rates separate from the government, so the government has to pay market rates when it borrows money, which is different than the federal lending rate. The federal reserve banks (which are, in part owned by private banks) created money out of thin air, but it was as much public as it is private, since creating money can cause inflation, and they were also trying to keep the flow of money going to put loans into peoples hands, that they couldn't otherwise afford.
It seems more or less like everything worked the way it was supposed to. That might be a bad system, but that does seem like how the US runs itself. Strangely.
Not for either of these two companies. There are 800 million facebook users, 400 million of which are accessed daily. If you want an advertising base, that would be it.
When you're in the customer service business you aim to connect to your customers how *they* want to connect, not how you think they should be connecting to you.
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If iran is preparing to nuke you.. you might want to reconsider that. Being the richest guy in the world makes you a target, whether you deserve it or not (see sept 11).
Paul is an isolationist, that's the problem. The world is interconnected. The US has done the isolation bit before, and found out the hard way you're part of the world, and if shit goes badly, you're getting bombed or torpedoed or whatever, whether you are involved or not, and whether you were at fault or not. You have things people want, they will try and take it from you. You have allies, if you say 'fuck it, we'll let Iran do whatever they want' you're putting Israel, India and most of Europe in a position of having to deal with this on their own, without a substantial deterrent at their back. They won't be your allies if you aren't engaged with them. Maybe that means giving them money, maybe that means parking an aircraft carrier off their coast every now and again, but in exchange they do anything important in US dollars. That benefits you a lot, and they sell you stuff you want, that benefits you, a lot, and they buy stuff from you, that benefits you a lot, it's like the world is all interconnected. And when you try and do stupid things they, as your friends, try and stop you. You know... like trying to recolonize iraq.
Yes, the US withdrawing from the UN would be effectively an unmitigated disaster for pretty much everyone. Everywhere. The whole institution would basically collapse, which hurts everyone big and small. Most US military spending is domestic, it's a giant jobs programme. Nothing more. There are more efficient ways to accomplish that, but the net effect is money for US things. The war on drugs.. what's your alternative? Legalize it? How well did that work out for china for a century? The concept of a government agency responsible for the security of airlines is fine. The implementation is a disaster of course, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater much? How many lawyers can you employ in airports to oversee screenings to make sure that the security company minimizes its liability? That's the route you're headed without the TSA. The government should be doing airport security, just differently (ok, a lot differently).
The Europeans were pissed you invaded iraq without valid evidence. Even a child on the outside could realize that you were wrong about the WMD. France and germany and turkey were prepared to go along with it if you had found WMD. You didn't. But you still invaded - preventing Iraq from having WMD: good, Invading them for having WMD when they didn't: bad. It's so simple ron paul should be able to understand it, but I doubt it. The isolationist doesn't pull his head out of the sand until there's a gas cloud over tel aviv. Or in this day and age we're looking at Ukraine, Georgia, Taiwan, etc. Even the Arab spring. Do you seriously think the Libyans could have been rid of Gaddafhi without help? (Yours included). That man was a disaster to everything he touched. The Libyans will remember who helped them be rid of the bastard, and who didn't. Guess which side you ended up on? Oh right, the right side of the issue. Egypt, tunisa, not so much.
So wait... you're saying you'd be better off without the bailouts that saved a few million jobs and prevented your economy from going into a tailspin, because oh no, they added to the budget deficit (which, by the way, you mostly owe yourselves). Sure, there are more efficient ways to solve that problem, but they staunched the bleeding, which was about as far as they could go, - which was unfortunately no where near far enough, but you take what you can get.
Did you live through the US government shuts downs of the 90's? I'm not even an american and I remember them, they were a disaster here too, because all that stuff we sell you, because we're your ally, ya, we couldn't sell it to you (or organize the selling to you, whatever it was), and that had half the bloody world in a panic. You may not like everything the government does, I certainly don't like everything my government does, but someone like Ron Paul who has such a delusional understanding of what government does, is capable of, or should do should not be anywhere near a high office.
Well first off, not everyone agrees on what the 'liberties' are, other countries do very well with different sets of liberties, so sure, some of them are certainly inappropriate, or at least inconsistent and unclear.
Does the right of free speech extend to collections of people, or just individuals, what (if any) constraints apply to those groups of people? (I.e. can corporations make unlimited campaign contributions, can political parties make themselves into profit making entities in some other business to fund their political activities and so on).
WTF does the right to bear arms mean? Should it only apply to a militia (if so, how do you define a militia, is such a construct even suitable in this day and age?), if it's a personal right, when was it a personal right, was it always? Is that even a good idea? If it was always a personal right, or more accurately, if it has been interpreted to apply to a personal right, was that the intent, and does the intent even matter since the nutters who wrote that part have been dead for 200 years and had no concept of what modern 'arms' might be. If it wasn't interpreted that way before but is now, is that not in effect changing what the liberty is, and do you really want that change? Who should decide that (and how)?
Government necessarily evolves over time. You can agree or disagree with every peace of how it evolves, but trying to run a government like it's 1790 as Ron Paul would have you do would basically turn you into all of those failed, or failing states who've been trying to dig themselves out of the gutter since they were decolonized.
Because a lunatic who wants the US back on the gold standard and wants to piss of all of your allies, withdraw from the UN and has no idea just what is going on in the the world or how interconnected it is really poses a sensible alternative. This is a guy who doesn't realize the role of government might have evolved in the last 200 years.
That's like saying I oppose the social democrats because they're not left enough, so I'm going to vote for the german people's party. All the while some other nutters are working their way to the top....
Tell that to BMW, BioWare and Ubisoft montreal, Airbus, Volkswagon, GM etc. All those game companies who set up shop in texas with local grants (notably in austin), and so on.
You don't see the long term benefit of japanese investments in computing? Remember floppy disks? How about RAM, lots of that stuff was Japan first in innovation. Innovation doesn't necessarily completely change the paradigm of how technology is used, it can be incremental and still be hugely valuable.
And then there's the whole internet. No, that wasn't useful to have been a government sponsored programme at all was it?
Even in the solar arena, the problem they have in the UK with subsidies for power from solar panels being subsidized at some ridiculous rate, is that the cost of solar is dropping so fast that the subsidies are basically free money, and they can't afford the programme. It was too successful. Who's making those innovations? The US.
And yes, american investments in solar have been enormously successful. You've increased solar generation by a factor of 5 in 4 years, brought the cost down by about that same factor per KW/h. Sure, on the scale of total US power generation it's still a drop in the bucket, but when you add a drop to a bucket, you're only going to get a drop. The way I do the math you're looking at doubling that capacity again in the next 3 or 4 years, if not more than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States).
Part of the thrust of the topic is that investment in the US has been inadequate. If I hire you to write a game engine for me, but I only offer you 500 bucks to do it, well guess what, it's going to be bad. The US can (not necessarily will) do a lot of things differently, and could throw a lot more money at the problem. How much is the 'right' amount I have no idea though.
Straight up, it's defamation. If you searched for "thedonger" on google and the results were always "thedonger is a liar, thedonger is a murder etc." you'd have a potential problem.
The trick here is that this is an autosuggest. Google is suggesting, now what that means can vary. I take that to mean google is suggesting that these are things commonly searched together. If you take it to mean 'google is suggesting you should search for' or 'google is suggesting that' then the situation is a bit different. From the perspective of France, and I sort of see where they're coming from with this, - the interpretation that google is suggesting that is simply not acceptable. The google argument "the computer did it" is beyond stupid. It's fine to try the first round I suppose, but once the court has decided that the potentially defamatory interpretation applies you should be going with a different tack.
I'm not sure what I think. This happens often enough in english that you'd think it's sort of obvious what's happening, but maybe the same doesn't apply in french, or maybe the French take defamation much more seriously.
More like the exact opposite. People cannot innovate without education, without protection for those innovations (not being stolen by the chinese), and without some sort of a safety net that allows them to take risks. The government is therefore deeply invested in innovation, and, as the article points out, funds a lot of it.
I'm not in the US, but not far off. My graduate programme in comp sci is 85% foreign I think, so of 120 or so grad students we have less than 20 who are from canada. The rest are from india, china, the middle east (and I'm half indian). The same could be said for most programmes in the US of the same sort (engineering, comp sci etc.). The undergraduate programme is largely domestic, but those guys mostly get stuck implementing boring business process stuff, and not actually innovating.
You can't 'get out of the way' and hope it will all magically work out when other governments are investing in innovation. There are lots of different ways to do that, you could for example, directly fund solar power companies, you could subsidize power from solar sources, you could directly build solar power and a government enterprise and then sell it off if you are so inclined. Hell, you could just pay more money to people who are future innovators, rather than having science and engineering programmes be more expensive, make them less expensive, that sort of thing. You can provide local and provincial level (in the US these would be states but the effect is the same), building space for startup companies, 'innovation centres' as we call them, and so on.
Simply put, given the choice, no one with money is going to invest it in the US if they get a better deal elsewhere, they'll invest in china and india. They get multipliers from governments, they get better people, from better education systems and so on. The only reason to invest in the US is if you want into the US market and have to invest in the US for that, but with the way trade is, you invest somewhere other than the US, and then sell crap to the americans to take their money.
Sure, if you want to build something in europe you probably have more regulatory hurdles than the US. And, all else being equal, that makes the US more attractive. But if a government is chipping in 20 or 25% (or, in my case in the games business 40 or 50%), that makes the paperwork worth it.
right, and lots of big companies fled, or are fleeing the hardware production business in computers, most of the car makers nearly went bankrupt, had massive consolidation or are in part owned by the government (in germany), and crops are subsidized by the government to keep them in business.
As to MS- Nokia. I doubt it. If I was MS I'd be using a pile of money to persuade Nokia and RIM to produce better products, and fold RIM into WP8, as the business oriented product. RIM has thrown their lot in with a half hearted effort at doing Android, and it's going no where fast. I was at a presentation about 6 weeks ago where a RIM guy got up and was talking about BB world statistics and the people at my table were trying to suppress their laughter. But Nokia on its own will never own that market, and they're just a handset maker at this point.
I could see MS buying a huge chunk of Nokia's mobile software division. that's actually a good strategy. Nokia did a lot of really good, useful, innovative stuff, those people have skills, and brains, most of which nokia doesn't need or want to use anymore. It wouldn't hurt MS too bring those guys into the MS family so to speak.
And it's not clear if a ruling on the broader matter by the supreme court would matter to the specific case (it might, it might not).
Mobile phones certainly.
Enabling can be a strong factor. That random hot girl I met 5 years ago and befriended on facebook... why did I befriend her? If I haven't talked to her in 4.5 years (via facebook or otherwise), why am I still 'friends' with her? (Answer, I only defriend people who are bothersome). But before facebook, would I have given her my phone number? Probably not, and even if I had, she wouldn't have my current one.
Does a phone directory that has a section for cheating spouses simply facilitate cheating or does it outright encourage it? (And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? A directory of doughnut shops, cigarette shops or casino's is a double edged sword here).
If you go to the middle east it's the mobile phone that allows 'hookups'. Not being from the middle east I cannot profess to be an expert in the process, but basically you can find people in your area who are interested in a hookup for something that is probably illegal. The key here is that you didn't know the person in advance. With facebook I'm not sure you make the same argument, but my usage model might be atypical. If I'm splitting up with my current GF for that girl I've known since high school well... that happens. But if I'm randomly befriending hot girls on facebook looking for a hookup, well...that's a bit different. If facebook is helping me cheat, by 'recommending' potential hookups (which sounds more like a dating site than facebook) you're into more grainy territory. If I was getting unsolicited but legitimate suggestions sent to me for potential better partners than the current one I could sort of see a problem.
As you indirectly convey, it's not facebook that's the problem, or the car, it's how it is being used. But if your car had a button for 'send fake location data to my spouse" it might be a bit harder to say it isn't intentionally contributing to the situation.
All of this of course assumes (wrongly) that divorce is necessarily bad. If people aren't happy divorce isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least not in this day and age where it's pretty accepted. Facebook, for all of its many, many faults, lets you connect with people, if connecting with someone other than your current partner makes you happier, maybe that's for the best, but I'm sure your partners lawyer will enjoy looking through your logs, just to make sure you're punished for breaking a lifelong contract. After all, marriage is just a contract, and intentionally helping someone breach a contract comes with a messy legal framework. I don't think Facebook does that intentionally, and there are far more guilty sites out there though.
and it's not like china is opposed to clean energy, they're just cheap and corrupt, so at least one part of their society is trying, which is better than nothing.
"secure government contract" since it's for the PMO. 20x the cost.
It's true that younger researchers, myself included, tend to have a lot of ideas that can be tested and worked on. We put a lot of those on the back burner until you get tenure, that idea for a new programming language or a testing operating system or whatever, you just don't try and do that until you're secure, that's not until your mid 30's usually. My boss is about 38, and the moment he got tenure he shifted from one area of computer science into computer games, and now does research there. How 'high impact' it is I will let others to decide (unless he wants to pipe in with his own feedback...) but we do good work overall, and have a few best paper awards and so on. But now that he has tenure his managerial responsibilities are going up, and his direct time spent doing research goes down. Without him overseeing the whole programme though, we wouldn't have a programme at all, and that includes a couple of PhD researchers a couple more MSc's,, and god knows how many undergrads.
Once someone gets up to around 50 they start to know what they don't know, and they start to run out of a lot of radical new ideas of their own they can test. But they know enough about what *is* going on, and how the work is done that they can recognize, support, guide and even lead really high impact work, even if the genesis of the idea wasn't purely their own, or if they didn't have enough staff to do it before.
The thing with giving scientists early retirement is that a lot of them will continue to work for you, or for a local university or the like, and they will maintain their contacts with you. You get less work done in that scenario, or at least less immediately valuable work one, but you still get some, and it's now largely paid out of a different pocket book.
From out here it's hard to distinguish between 'forgot what the specification said they should do' and 'didn't bother to read it in the first place'. Even if your 10 testing guys knew it was in the specification doesn't mean they necessarily understood how to test it properly, and maybe did some sort of relative test (input of x should come out to be 10x in a simple example). The problem with using the wrong unit of measure is that the math is, in isolation all correct and self consistent, it's just off by a constant - which just happens to be enough to cause catastrophic failures.
In the case of an aircraft using only once sensor in the article, did it read in data from all the sensors, and just ignored some of the input? Did it average the inputs, (which, naively, isn't a bad answer, but fails badly when you have really wonky data), was there some race condition in their resolution between multiple sensors? That's a fun one, maybe it works on data on poling intervals and in very rare cases it can read data from only one sensor and not the others and so on. Even if you know the specification it can be tricky to implement (and realize all of the things that can go wrong, it's not like all of these people doing the calculations are experts in distributed systems necessarily, they might be experts in physics and and engineering). Doing something simple like taking an average of an array can fail in really bad ways - what if the array isn't populated on time? How do you even know if the array is fully populated? How does my average handle out of bounds numbers? How about off by 10^6 numbers? Does old data just hang out in those memory addresses, and if so what happens to it? A lot of those underlying problems, especially with how the array (or in this case probably how a handful of floats) is populated and is it aware if it is properly populated are handled by the implementation of the language, which is well beyond the people who actually do most of the programming. And not everyone thinks 'hey for every line of code I need to go and check to make sure the assembler version doesn't have a bizarre race condition in it', assuming you could even find the race conditions in the first place.
Eating while driving is probably already covered under distracted driving rules though. That is a problem that has been around and pervasive for 30 years at least. Using a cell phone while driving is a relatively new thing, and there's a large industry lobby concerned with allowing it to happen so as to not weaken their market.
In the end cell phones will have to fall into some sort of regulatory framework, probably that means at a federal level banning texting regular phones while driving, and coming up with an appropriate penalty. Hands free makers have a vested interest in lobbying their case, regardless of the science, so even if hands free is equally bad, you'll still probably see that persist after other forms of cell use are prohibited.
All 'banning' something means is if you're caught doing it, you get a ticket, and if you cause an accident doing it they can charge with something more serious.
Now if we could ban my girlfriends constant chatter and complaining as a passenger while I'm driving, those would be rules I could support.
That the federal reserver isn't going to randomly conjure a bunch of money just for facebook. They drive a slow persistent hum of inflation (which is preferable to deflation), which has been humming along at under 4% for over a decade. The argument that everyones salary need increase by that amount immediately is sort of silly, but is clearly intended to be hyperbolic, it needs to increase by that amount, but 3-4% yearly salary increases are the norm everywhere I've been since 2000 (some years less, some years more, but well, inflation has been under 3 most of that time).
The federal reserve is also private banks, when they cause inflation they depreciate the value of their own money too (and they decrease the relative value of *debt* which by the way, is kind of important if you have credit card or mortgage or student loans or federal bonds debt, because decreasing the value of that debt effectively increases your net worth).
The money for facebooks IPO will come from people who have control of money moving from somewhere and into facebook under the assumption that they will get some sort of return on investment better than they currently get. Whether or not you think facebook will be able to make any money is another matter entirely.
Note that printing money (or electronically conjuring it) doesn't necessarily cause inflation either. You need to increase the supply of currency to keep up with population growth (kinda... it's more complex than that, but that conveys the point well enough) or else you're reducing the per person currency available, which, well, causes deflation. For the US it's even more complicated because the dollar is so widely held, and with the economic situation world wide a lot of poorer places are seeing their money flee into the dollar (taking dollars away from Americans essentially), but even deflating that at a rate of 3-4%, while paying 2% interest (us 10 year bonds), so a net deflation of 1- 2% is still preferable to being in nigerian currency or bonds or, apparently, greek bonds.
Yes but XDA should then be the maximum time it should take to release, and they aren't anywhere close yet. Given that everything they have thus far is basically garbage, well that's sort of my point. Getting all of this stuff working is hard.
It's not like google has done all the work. That's, to use my actual comparison of Window 8, like saying that MS does all the driver development. They do a driver, which hopefully won't cause it to explode, but that's about as far as it goes. Getting all the drivers written, for all of the different hardware parts, testing them all, integrating them all isn't exactly trivial. On a major product like the Galaxy S II (which I am most familiar with as that's our target platform for an ICS product next year) there are 2 majorly different CPU's it looks like a couple of different revisions of the same camera and flash, several different antennas etc. When samsung actually puts out a build, it needs to have all of those parts working correctly. And each one of them may have some random thing wrong with it, or that needs a special code path for (LTE, HSPA, different cpu's etc).
You're confusing getting into the guts of an existing firmware and software with trying to get a raw fresh from compilation ICS build on there. Assuming you can get it on at all (rooted phone + odin basically) well then there's only the in hardware module problems to deal with (which you dealt with to get custom roms on ages ago anyway)
XDA, in trying to get ICS working on something, is working with the same source google opened up to everyone. On some phones it's more difficult to get your own rom on, but once you have that problem solved, compiling ICS and sticking it on isn't that difficult, getting to actually do something useful is another matter entirely, which is my point. Right 'out of the box' so to speak ICS builds don't actually work worth shit, and that's the starting point for everyone. I'll be worried (though not really surprised) if XDA solves these problems before the actual companies. Until then, it's just guessing randomly as to how long development should take.
The potential for abuse is pretty much limitless the other way too though. I'm a journalist so my reporting that hilary clinton murdered someone isn't libel, I have a source to back it up, but they prefer to remain anonymous. If you can report nonsense you made up as fact and then claim journalistic protection there's no requirement for the truth to appear anywhere in discourse.
In the canadian (and UK) system a politician cannot be held legally liable for anything they say in the house - but that's a relatively narrow definition, it is, in practice, applied somewhat more broadly, but you're still saying everyone else isn't covered by the law. If you're going to give special protection to people which essentially shield them from being liable for the harm they do making shit up free speech is basically worthless (watch a parliamentary debate and you'll get the idea, basically everything they say may as well be a random collection of words its so meaningless a lot of the time) - you can say anything you want and there's no way to know who is telling the truth.
If the government is in the business of enforcing the rules on free speech then you have to limit that freedom to be 'free insofar as you aren't excluding someone else's free speech, and you cannot use free speech to lie and claim it true because you have more money than they do'. That was essentially what tobacco companies tried to do until the 1990's 'cigarettes aren't actually harmful' was 'free speech'.
A journalist has protection if their source used those techniques though. Or else reporting on wikileaks or the pentagon papers would be illegal.
The constitution is a sort of irrelevant document, it says nothing on the point other than broad principles, 'there should be free press' it's up to you to figure out what exactly that means and how to implement it. It isn't a template for how to actually govern, only the broad principles by which one should govern and how to structure the government (many of those ideas have long since been tossed anyway).
And this is like a windows 8 developer preview going out, sure all the basic stuff is there, but to get it to actually work properly with anything with all the parts requires a fair bit of effort. No support for micro sd cards? (or the wrong type of support or whatever) need to fix that. Uses 35 more MB of ram than the previous version? that might break something important.
And whatever is wrong you have to figure out how to fix, which can take a lot of time, especially if the upgrade process breaks something, but you're not sure what initially. I'm sure there's a lot of back and forth between google devs and 3rd party devs trying to figure out wtf is going on.
If the xda developers had fully working ICS builds for major platforms out already I'd be a bit more critical. They don't. They have ICS builds, but a lot of times wireless doesn't work, phone calls don't work, the memory card doesn't work, the camera doesn't work or various other parts don't work. Diagnosing and writing drivers for all of those parts isn't trivial, and while I'd expect the actual companies to be faster about it than XDA it's still not a trivial undertaking.
Because judges are, in the US system, the final arbiter absent any other definition. If some other definition is clearly stated in the law judges can apply that, but absent clarity, they essentially define the rules until congress decides it wants to do something.
That isn't the only system in the world though. Other countries can basically kick a decision up to the legislature in some fashion (sort of like law lords in the UK, but even more direct than that). It actually does make a lot of sense that if 'the press' has special rules applied to it that you clearly define what counts as 'the press'. That also seems like one of those things that would float a lot with time so putting it in a constitution is probably a bad idea (assuming you think constitutions are a good idea at all).
Libel and defamation are serious business, as is phone hacking. Journalists may be shielded from the former if they, in good faith, thought the information they had was legitimate (this is to separate the journalist from the source). But 'the press' isn't allowed to hack your phone or break into your house to get a story either so they are protected from the source of information, but only so much. That seems like you're walking a fine line between a source being 'the press' and a journalist being 'the press', which is why it needs clarification at all, and that seems like a job for parliament (or in the US case congress).
I think that's how it works, people photograph the F18's off the carriers, F15's and F16s from Iraq, afghanistan, and Qatar (or bahrain, I can't remember which, big airbase there anyway), and log what they saw. I'm not say the app is somehow perfectly accurate, you're not going to see an aircraft in the middle of the night, but this has been going on long enough there's almost a joke to it, and everyone knows it's been going on for a long time.
The US flew no fly zones over Iraq for what, a decade almost, you accept the risks, especially if you aren't flying very deep in (this isn't an actual war, and these aren't no fly zones after all). There's basically a ring around Irans western, southern, and eastern borders a hundred or so Km deep where you'd be poking around, much more than that and you're into very serious risks (hence UAV's).
Deliberately lighting them up is more strategic than technical. How deep can you penetrate before they try and do something about it? If you do this often enough they might get accustomed to you flying 100 or 200km inside their territory, a few hundred Km of uncontested flying makes all the difference between getting in missile range, and not (before they shoot back). All the while you're wearing down their supply of parts for their F14's (and other aircraft) as well, which will hopefully reduce their operational capability, without actually killing anyone or shooting.
You're also very interested in what they have defended, and from where. That's why these operations have combined carrier and land based aircraft. Iran is a big country, with a lot of potential nuclear sites scattered around, it's very important that you actually bomb the important ones if you're going to go that route. But you have no fucking clue where their serious facilities are. Which is the problem. Blowing up a bunch of centrifuges doesn't meaningfully set back their nuclear programme if they have a bunch more somewhere else, and that applies to every part of the nuclear programme.
The rhetoric for war is as much from their side as yours. They threaten to wipe out the Israelis, the sunnis aren't to fond of a growing Iran and they're all squabbling over these things, and you're in the middle of it with allies on one side (the Sunni's and the Israelis) and interests (oil and geography for other goods shipped past). The rhetoric is also in large part intended to be a deterrent. You don't really want to bomb them, but you also want to make everyone who could help build nuclear weapons in Iran too scared to show up for work, all of this plays into that, knowing when the probing flights are is part of that. Whether or not you should be allied with the House of Saud and the Israelis is another matter.
Not really. The US has been flying manned combat aircraft into Iran for several years probing air defences. My Persian cooworkers have a social app that tracks when people on the ground see the planes, I don't speak farsi (or understand the language) so I can't point you at it unfortunately. Searches for USAF probing iranian air defences gives some results along these lines.
The US is trying to fly as deep into Iran as they can before all the air defence sites 'light up', they're trying to locate all the air defence radars etc. It's illegal, but it's been going on for years, and everyone knows the game, the americans pretend 'this time is the time' they're going to attack natanz etc. and the Iranians call their bluff. Presumably one of these days the Israeli's or someone else will take this data and go after air defence sites along with the nuclear facilities but who knows.
Hired by banks is sort of wrong. As opposed to a central bank the federal reserve isn't really like the bank of england or US central bank, it's this menagerie of banking institutions and the federal government all collaborating (or colluding depending on your perspective) on monetary policy.
The fed system is tasked with monetary policy, that's one of its core abilities, there's nothing to investigate. Maybe there should be, but if the fed wants to magically create 100 trillion dollars tomorrow they are allowed to do so. Their primary task is prevent banking panics, so if lying to the public about the liquidity of banks does that, well, then that's what they are tasked with doing too (although that might be illegal).
As you say, the Fed lent money to banks who were then allowed to re-lend it. The fed sets interest rates separate from the government, so the government has to pay market rates when it borrows money, which is different than the federal lending rate. The federal reserve banks (which are, in part owned by private banks) created money out of thin air, but it was as much public as it is private, since creating money can cause inflation, and they were also trying to keep the flow of money going to put loans into peoples hands, that they couldn't otherwise afford.
It seems more or less like everything worked the way it was supposed to. That might be a bad system, but that does seem like how the US runs itself. Strangely.
Not for either of these two companies. There are 800 million facebook users, 400 million of which are accessed daily. If you want an advertising base, that would be it.
When you're in the customer service business you aim to connect to your customers how *they* want to connect, not how you think they should be connecting to you.