What I don't get is why the "Newspapers" app would require the label if Safari wouldn't. Or, since the feature is not available in the current version of iPhone OS, why would they reject the app on this basis while still including a full featured web browser on the phone.
Based on previous stores we've heard of app rejection, I wonder if Apple is planning on including their own newspaper functionality in the next iPhone and is trying to stave off potential competition early.
There are many different kinds of green in the world, and different people assign different priorities to different aspects. It is possible that this request was completely unrelated to carbon footprint or landfill space.
Have you ever been near a large number of running laser printers? At one of my previous employers, one of our bigger jobs was to mail out around a quarter of a million portfolio performance reports every quarter. This required, among other things, a room full of a dozen or so laser printers that ran around the clock for at least a week. Despite the ventilation being done, I would get a headache after spending about 2 minutes just down the hallway from where these reports were being printed.
Fused toner (actually, toner in general, if I understand correctly) is an incredibly noxious compound. It wouldn't surprise me if any company that uses a half a dozen or more laser printers could noticeably improve the air quality in their office by switching to so based inks. If that is the case, then switching to a soy based toner would most certainly be "green" (by some peoples definition anyway) even if it doesn't reduce the waste output of the office by a single ounce.
It is also possible that paper printed with soy inks may be easier to recycle than paper printed with traditional toner. If so, then by using so inks, a company i decreasng the energy expended in the lifecyce of the paper that is used by their office, again, a very green achievement even if it does not reduce the actual waste produced by the printer.
This seems to be a big problem with any attempt to improve the environment. Too many environmentalists seem to be overly willing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There seems to be a prevailing attitude that measures that are better than the status quo are not worth pursuing because we should be able to do better.
The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.
He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.
Polanco looked at the cuts and said they "were weak," according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. "Carve deeper next time," he was said to have told the boy.
It's one thing if you take issue with what they are teaching, or even how they are teaching. There are legitimate differences in the teaching styles of different teachers. But most of the cases cited in the article weren't about teachers who's teaching ability was in question: "The Times reviewed every case on record in the last 15 years in which a tenured employee was fired by a California school district and formally contested the decision before a review commission... In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor."
People are going to pounce on me with comments like "Nothing's secure! I got downsized just last month!" to which I must reply: --And how long was it before you found another job? A month? Two? SIX???
About two and a half years, actually. And when my father-in-law lost his job, it was about a year and a half. Conversely, I know a couple of grade school teachers who got new jobs within a month, and not always within the same state (by their choice).
But for this term, you should act for the people who elected you. That's the principle of representative democracy.
He seems to believe that he is doing exactly that. As he points out, some 200k people who elected him have already switched to the other party. And some people seem to be of the opinion that what you vote for (or against) is more important than what party label you claim. He claims that this will remain unchanged, although I guess time will be the judge of that.
That is, he says 200k registered republicans switched parties in the last election in pennsylvania.
Mostly so they could vote for Hillary or Obama in the presidential primary. But yes, there was a huge shift, and his strongest supporters were among the deserters. He only narrowly won the Republican primary last time he was reelected. Despite the fact that his voting record hasn't changed much since then, he's currently trailing the same challenger by double digits in most current polls.
it is essentially less difficult to write exploits for Mac OS/Linux than it is for Windows, given the many anti-exploitation mechanisms Microsoft has embedded in the last years
This is a terrible non-sequitur. Microsoft has made enormous gains in recent years, but only because they were so far behind to start with. It's like saying "Person A ran the 10th mile of the Boston marathon 2 minutes faster then Person B". It's problematic for two reasons. First, it doesn't actually tell you who was ahead at the end of mile 10 unless you knew where the runners were at the beginning of mile 10. Second, it doesn't tell you anything about where the runners will be relative to each other after mile 15.
People should choose a platform based on their productivity requirements instead of purely security.
People should choose a platform based on all of their requirements. Often compromises do need to be made, because there is never a system that does exactly what you need. It's important to be able to identify which needs you are willing to compromise on, and which you are not. If your users can accomplish their work at all, that is a problem. If their work becomes a little more difficult because of the extra security measures, you have to decide whether that's an acceptable trade off, and at one point the line should be drawn.
Furthermore, most of the web servers broken into during these attacks (to be used as command and control servers) were not Windows, but Linux.
Have you determined how the machines were compromised? Generally speaking, Linux web servers are most likely to be compromised through attacks on third party software such as phpBB. If you switch to Windows and keep using the same third party software, you haven't really improved your situation. This, by the way, is where people often get into trouble when assessing requirements. Many people will say "I need an OS that will allow me to run software X", rather than saying "I need a platform that will allow me to perform task Y". By improperly assessing their requirements in the first place, they limit their options in the long run, and in the worst case, they may have restricted themselves to a platform with inherent flaws.
If you're really looking for the most secure software, look around and see what other people who demand security are using. The NSA uses and has contributed heavily to SELinux. I believe that OpenBSD has similar high profile users/contributers although I don't remember any off the top of my head.
Above all, though, it's important to remember that security is a process. Any system can be made secure with enough work. Any secure system will not remain so without continued work. And finally, the most difficult part is also the most important: The user is almost always the weakest link.
I'm not taking sides on AS2 vs. AS3, and I'm not saying AS3 is necessarily a bad language. I'm just suggesting that it seems to me that AS2 could have been improved upon substantially without throwing out the entire language. Personally, I have relatively limited experience programming either version of Flash, and I wouldn't mind keeping it that way.
On the other hand, I have many years of experience with JavaScript, which I consider to be a wonderfully powerful and expressive language. I would hate to see all of that thrown out because some Java programmers can't (or aren't willing to) wrap their head around an OO model that doesn't have classes. Yet for a while, it was starting to look like that was exactly what was about to happen.
Just because it is not appropriate for your notebook, does not mean it wouldn't be appropriate for some notebooks. When she's not at work (which unfortunately is most of the time lately), my wife would probably be perfectly happy using a computer that had Firefox, Excel, and iTunes as the only installed applications. You are probably a more atypical user than she is, and as such, you would be expected to pay the higher price for the "full" version of Windows.
You can argue against Microsoft's artificial segmentation of the market if you like, and I think you would have a perfectly valid complaint. But saying that this wouldn't be useful for anyone because it isn't useful for you is rather narrow minded.
Personally, the biggest problem I see with this is that it is ripe for abuse. What counts as an application? I would hope that my AntiVirus software running in the background doesn't count against the limit. But if that doesn't count, then there must be some way to run background applications that don't count against your limit. Do my IM and Music Player count as applications or are they the same as my AntiVirus? If they do count, I suspect it wouldn't take long for some enterprising developer to rewrite them in such a way that they don't. Windows won't let me run Firefox and Thunderbird at the same time? Perhaps we'll see a resurrection of the SeaMonkey project. (And while we're at it, let's through Songbird and Chatzilla in there, too...)
It sounds like they decided to go with shoring up the language as it is currently used rather than make sweeping new changes. Good for them. I'm not sure if it was Adobe's doing or Macromedia's, but they really threw out the baby with the bathwater with the "transition" from ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3. Rather than fixing up the obvious problems with AS2, like silently swallowing errors and gaping holes in the functionality of core objects, they abandoned it entirely and replaced it with some bizarre mutant language from a parallel dimension. I still have to wonder why, if they were willing to completely abandon both backward compatibility and developer familiarity, they didn't just decide to switch to an existing language. As far as I can tell, the only thing that AS3 really accomplished was to reimplement Java, and poorly.
For a while, it looked like the next version of JavaScript was following down a similar path. Glad to see that's not going to be the case.
Unless there is the willingness of the local communities to rezone around transit, invest in dense public transit, increase the cost of flying and decrease the flexibility of driving then high speed rail will only work where it works now.
I think even without large changes in city planning, intercity rail could be cost effective if the government supported it on the same scale that they support highways and airlines (or conversely supported highways and airlines in the same way that they support the railroads...)
Many (most?) of the US airlines receive huge federal subsidies. While Amtrak is also subsidized, it doesn't seem to be nearly to the same extent. When you consider how long it takes to get through an airport these days, and how far out many airports are from the cities they serve, just about any flight under two hours should be just as fast on a train, even without high speed rail. The reason it isn't is because Amtrak is stuck using the same tracks as the rail freight companies (which actually make money) and is stuck always playing second place in routing roulette. There is no practical reason that traveling, let's say, 500 miles by train should cost more than flying by plane and take (at least) an hour longer than driving, considering that the train is vastly more efficient than either alternative. (I picked 500 miles because so long as you are traveling along Interstate Highways, I consider that to be about the cutoff where flying becomes significantly faster than driving.) But who would take a train between cities when they can fly for the same price, and they can drive in less time for a fraction of the price? And of course, as others have pointed out, the only reason driving costs so much less than taking a train is because the government pours such huge amounts of money into highway maintenance.
If rail was were playing on equal footing with highways - either by increasing government rail funding or by making highway funding more dependent on fuel taxes - I can think of a lot of places in this country where train service is currently marginal or non existent that would suddenly become competitive. If that happened first, you may start to see some of the urban planning changes you mention start to come about on their own. But even if they don't, we'd still see some benefits.
Soon? OK, introducing the confusion to top level domains will be new, but there are already millions of opportunities for abuse due to many people's fundamental inability to grasp the idea of a hierarchical domain name. It probably took a year for my wife to be able to remember the difference between google.gmail.com and gmail.google.com. Fortunately, that's a relatively benign example - Google owns both domains, so even though one works and one doesn't, the potential for actual abuse is limited. But I have no doubt that there are scammers out there preying on that very weakness with other domains.
I guess it depends what you consider a flagrant tax cheat. Tom Daschle was definitely an exceptional case, and I'm glad he got pulled from consideration. (Although it does make you wonder, with all the talk about "deliberate haste" how that wasn't caught sooner...) The other two I'm not so sure about. I haven't followed the most recent flap too closely, but $7000 over 3 years is certainly in the range that seems like it could have been an honest mistake. As for Geithner... Well, it was a fair amount of money, but have you ever filed self employment taxes? The last time I did, I made a mistake that was bigger (relative to my actual income) than that. Eventually the mistake was discovered, and it was corrected. We move on...
Of course, in the last administration, the big deal was Cabinet nominees who employed illegal immigrants, and in the Administration before that it was... I don't even remember any more. I'm torn between wondering why it's so hard to find a dozen or so people in Washington D.C. that actually follow the law, and wondering whether the laws have become so Byzantine that they could dig up dirt on anybody.
Interesting. I've never looked for a job on Craigslist, so I wouldn't know about that aspect of it, but every single item I've bought or sold on Craigslist was paid for in cash. I thought that was the whole draw of Craigslist - by dealing with people face to face and exchanging cash, you don't have to worry about any of the crap.
Your points are valid - I once lived a few blocks a away from a brand new police center plopped into the heart of the Chicago projects (I lived on a college campus; the projects were across the street). However, the article specifically mentions that any time the computer couldn't identify the address - about 4% of the crimes entered into the system - it used a default location in the center of the region being mapped. I've had MapQuest do the same to me on more than one occasion.
Now, that area may still have a larger crime rate than some of the surrounding areas, but not nearly so much as their online map would suggest.
What got us in to this mess was the government forcing banks to lend money to people who couldn't afford housing.
That was one cause of this mess, but it was far from the only cause. To be honest, I doubt it was even a major cause. When you look at how eager banks and mortgage brokers were to hand interest-only $400k+ loans to pretty much anyone who asked, it's hard to say with a straight face that the government was twisting their arm to do it. Certainly the apparent belief in both parties (Clinton gets a lot of the blame for this, but Bush was every bit as bad) that it is every American's God given right to own their own house has caused a great deal of grief, but there were utter failures on so many levels. When it comes down to it, though, much like the power companies in the mid to late 90's, our financial institutions managed to do such a good job pushing for deregulation only to find out after they succeeded that maybe some of those regulations were actually there for a reason. Ultimately, too many people believed that they could divorce themselves from the risk inherent in the system. At any one level that would have been enough of a problem. But these people were spread out all the way through the system from homeowners up through the brokers, banks, investment firms, insurers, and raters. And because this problem was spread throughout the system from top to bottom, that's where we're seeing it fail.
This wasn't a failure of capitalism, it was a failure of rampant human greed in the absence of any kind of checks or balances.
I was thinking it would be cool to have an achievement for reading Slashdot before accounts existed, but I would imagine there's no good way to verify that. Better yet, who found the site before it was even/. ? I think I stumbled across the old news page when Google turned up some AfterStep tweaks on your site. Or maybe it was ePlus...
Global warming, by definition, is based on the global mean temperature of the earth. Plenty of people try to go for statements like "it snowed in Atlanta, so global warming must be BS"; though of course a statement like that ignores the global aspect of global warming.
Interesting how that logic goes out the window when discussing, say, the decreased snow coverage on the peak of Kilimanjaro.
I know it's become something of a sport here to criticize the editors, but talk about being asleep at the wheel here...
If you do about 90 seconds of research here (which is about what I did), you would see that: 1) this is a non-binding resolution. i.e. it doesn't mean jack. 2) a similar resolution has been proposed (by Pakistan) and passed (by the so-called human rights council) every year since 1999 3) the number of countries supporting the resolution has actually decreased significantly every year for the past few years.
In other words, in terms of the actual effect this will have on anyone at all, this is about as non-news as it gets. If there is any news here at all, it is that this type of proposal has been rapidly losing support on the world stage lately. In particular, almost every major religious group except for Islam (and even many subgroups of Islam) have spoken out against such a measure.
While AIG was perhaps the most visible due to the incredible amount of money that's been required to prop them up, they were merely one in a large chain of dominoes.
According to the indictment, these alleged criminal actions affected the outcome of federal, local, and state primary and general elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006.
I only skimmed through most of the indictment, but I'd say that this would depend on what you consider "affecting the outcome" to mean exactly. The indictment merely charges that they changed votes in all of the above listed elections. To some extent, that in itself is affecting the outcome. Whether their actions actually were enough to change the winner in any election is not stated, and probably not known. We could make guesses based on how narrow the margin of victory of any of the candidates they were supporting, but it would still be only a guess. Based on the description of their actions and the machines, it sounds like it would be impossible to prove or even guess at the number of votes that they altered.
To me, that's a bigger criticism of the system than anything else. Even if the defendants are found guilty, in the face of known fraud, the systems in question provide no way to even guess at how pervasive it was. Even then, there are failures at multiple levels here. According to TFA, the poll workers have to fill out voter assistance forms every time that they assist a voter (presumably for this very reason) and those forms were being destroyed to cover their tracks.
Oh, they definitely exist. I always thought they were apocryphal, too, until I worked with one. You're right, though, that it does take a certain amount of dysfunctional office politics to allow them to do any real damage. In my case, the company was split between multiple offices. "Josh" drove everybody who worked in the same office as he did crazy. But the highest ranking person in his office couldn't fire him without approval from somebody in one of the other offices, who only saw the work that he got done, and not all of the problems that he caused. By the time it became apparent to everyone that he needed to go, there were too many critical systems that only he understood, and he guarded his knowledge jealously. He would talk directly to clients without involving the project managers, so only he knew what was going on with his projects. He would shrug off questions about code that he had written in a very similar way as the Josh described in the article - "Why should I help somebody who's not smart enough to figure it out on his own?" I know at least one person got fired to take the fall for him because we couldn't afford to let him go... yet. When he finally was let go, everything was a disaster for about a month while we scrambled to decipher some of his processes and consistently ran up against little gotchas that he must have known about and figured out how to work around without ever telling anyone else. After the first month, things were far smoother without him than they had been with him, but even six months later we were still running into random surprises buried away in code that he had written.
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't get is why the "Newspapers" app would require the label if Safari wouldn't. Or, since the feature is not available in the current version of iPhone OS, why would they reject the app on this basis while still including a full featured web browser on the phone.
Based on previous stores we've heard of app rejection, I wonder if Apple is planning on including their own newspaper functionality in the next iPhone and is trying to stave off potential competition early.
There are many different kinds of green in the world, and different people assign different priorities to different aspects. It is possible that this request was completely unrelated to carbon footprint or landfill space.
Have you ever been near a large number of running laser printers? At one of my previous employers, one of our bigger jobs was to mail out around a quarter of a million portfolio performance reports every quarter. This required, among other things, a room full of a dozen or so laser printers that ran around the clock for at least a week. Despite the ventilation being done, I would get a headache after spending about 2 minutes just down the hallway from where these reports were being printed.
Fused toner (actually, toner in general, if I understand correctly) is an incredibly noxious compound. It wouldn't surprise me if any company that uses a half a dozen or more laser printers could noticeably improve the air quality in their office by switching to so based inks. If that is the case, then switching to a soy based toner would most certainly be "green" (by some peoples definition anyway) even if it doesn't reduce the waste output of the office by a single ounce.
It is also possible that paper printed with soy inks may be easier to recycle than paper printed with traditional toner. If so, then by using so inks, a company i decreasng the energy expended in the lifecyce of the paper that is used by their office, again, a very green achievement even if it does not reduce the actual waste produced by the printer.
This seems to be a big problem with any attempt to improve the environment. Too many environmentalists seem to be overly willing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There seems to be a prevailing attitude that measures that are better than the status quo are not worth pursuing because we should be able to do better.
It's one thing if you take issue with what they are teaching, or even how they are teaching. There are legitimate differences in the teaching styles of different teachers. But most of the cases cited in the article weren't about teachers who's teaching ability was in question: "The Times reviewed every case on record in the last 15 years in which a tenured employee was fired by a California school district and formally contested the decision before a review commission... In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor."
About two and a half years, actually. And when my father-in-law lost his job, it was about a year and a half. Conversely, I know a couple of grade school teachers who got new jobs within a month, and not always within the same state (by their choice).
He seems to believe that he is doing exactly that. As he points out, some 200k people who elected him have already switched to the other party. And some people seem to be of the opinion that what you vote for (or against) is more important than what party label you claim. He claims that this will remain unchanged, although I guess time will be the judge of that.
Mostly so they could vote for Hillary or Obama in the presidential primary. But yes, there was a huge shift, and his strongest supporters were among the deserters. He only narrowly won the Republican primary last time he was reelected. Despite the fact that his voting record hasn't changed much since then, he's currently trailing the same challenger by double digits in most current polls.
I agree with your premise, but the banking deregulation that (at least partially) led to the current situation was done under Clinton.
This is a terrible non-sequitur. Microsoft has made enormous gains in recent years, but only because they were so far behind to start with. It's like saying "Person A ran the 10th mile of the Boston marathon 2 minutes faster then Person B". It's problematic for two reasons. First, it doesn't actually tell you who was ahead at the end of mile 10 unless you knew where the runners were at the beginning of mile 10. Second, it doesn't tell you anything about where the runners will be relative to each other after mile 15.
People should choose a platform based on all of their requirements. Often compromises do need to be made, because there is never a system that does exactly what you need. It's important to be able to identify which needs you are willing to compromise on, and which you are not. If your users can accomplish their work at all, that is a problem. If their work becomes a little more difficult because of the extra security measures, you have to decide whether that's an acceptable trade off, and at one point the line should be drawn.
Have you determined how the machines were compromised? Generally speaking, Linux web servers are most likely to be compromised through attacks on third party software such as phpBB. If you switch to Windows and keep using the same third party software, you haven't really improved your situation. This, by the way, is where people often get into trouble when assessing requirements. Many people will say "I need an OS that will allow me to run software X", rather than saying "I need a platform that will allow me to perform task Y". By improperly assessing their requirements in the first place, they limit their options in the long run, and in the worst case, they may have restricted themselves to a platform with inherent flaws.
If you're really looking for the most secure software, look around and see what other people who demand security are using. The NSA uses and has contributed heavily to SELinux. I believe that OpenBSD has similar high profile users/contributers although I don't remember any off the top of my head.
Above all, though, it's important to remember that security is a process. Any system can be made secure with enough work. Any secure system will not remain so without continued work. And finally, the most difficult part is also the most important: The user is almost always the weakest link.
I'm not taking sides on AS2 vs. AS3, and I'm not saying AS3 is necessarily a bad language. I'm just suggesting that it seems to me that AS2 could have been improved upon substantially without throwing out the entire language. Personally, I have relatively limited experience programming either version of Flash, and I wouldn't mind keeping it that way.
On the other hand, I have many years of experience with JavaScript, which I consider to be a wonderfully powerful and expressive language. I would hate to see all of that thrown out because some Java programmers can't (or aren't willing to) wrap their head around an OO model that doesn't have classes. Yet for a while, it was starting to look like that was exactly what was about to happen.
Just because it is not appropriate for your notebook, does not mean it wouldn't be appropriate for some notebooks. When she's not at work (which unfortunately is most of the time lately), my wife would probably be perfectly happy using a computer that had Firefox, Excel, and iTunes as the only installed applications. You are probably a more atypical user than she is, and as such, you would be expected to pay the higher price for the "full" version of Windows.
You can argue against Microsoft's artificial segmentation of the market if you like, and I think you would have a perfectly valid complaint. But saying that this wouldn't be useful for anyone because it isn't useful for you is rather narrow minded.
Personally, the biggest problem I see with this is that it is ripe for abuse. What counts as an application? I would hope that my AntiVirus software running in the background doesn't count against the limit. But if that doesn't count, then there must be some way to run background applications that don't count against your limit. Do my IM and Music Player count as applications or are they the same as my AntiVirus? If they do count, I suspect it wouldn't take long for some enterprising developer to rewrite them in such a way that they don't. Windows won't let me run Firefox and Thunderbird at the same time? Perhaps we'll see a resurrection of the SeaMonkey project. (And while we're at it, let's through Songbird and Chatzilla in there, too...)
It sounds like they decided to go with shoring up the language as it is currently used rather than make sweeping new changes. Good for them. I'm not sure if it was Adobe's doing or Macromedia's, but they really threw out the baby with the bathwater with the "transition" from ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3. Rather than fixing up the obvious problems with AS2, like silently swallowing errors and gaping holes in the functionality of core objects, they abandoned it entirely and replaced it with some bizarre mutant language from a parallel dimension. I still have to wonder why, if they were willing to completely abandon both backward compatibility and developer familiarity, they didn't just decide to switch to an existing language. As far as I can tell, the only thing that AS3 really accomplished was to reimplement Java, and poorly.
For a while, it looked like the next version of JavaScript was following down a similar path. Glad to see that's not going to be the case.
I think even without large changes in city planning, intercity rail could be cost effective if the government supported it on the same scale that they support highways and airlines (or conversely supported highways and airlines in the same way that they support the railroads...)
Many (most?) of the US airlines receive huge federal subsidies. While Amtrak is also subsidized, it doesn't seem to be nearly to the same extent. When you consider how long it takes to get through an airport these days, and how far out many airports are from the cities they serve, just about any flight under two hours should be just as fast on a train, even without high speed rail. The reason it isn't is because Amtrak is stuck using the same tracks as the rail freight companies (which actually make money) and is stuck always playing second place in routing roulette. There is no practical reason that traveling, let's say, 500 miles by train should cost more than flying by plane and take (at least) an hour longer than driving, considering that the train is vastly more efficient than either alternative. (I picked 500 miles because so long as you are traveling along Interstate Highways, I consider that to be about the cutoff where flying becomes significantly faster than driving.) But who would take a train between cities when they can fly for the same price, and they can drive in less time for a fraction of the price? And of course, as others have pointed out, the only reason driving costs so much less than taking a train is because the government pours such huge amounts of money into highway maintenance.
If rail was were playing on equal footing with highways - either by increasing government rail funding or by making highway funding more dependent on fuel taxes - I can think of a lot of places in this country where train service is currently marginal or non existent that would suddenly become competitive. If that happened first, you may start to see some of the urban planning changes you mention start to come about on their own. But even if they don't, we'd still see some benefits.
Soon? OK, introducing the confusion to top level domains will be new, but there are already millions of opportunities for abuse due to many people's fundamental inability to grasp the idea of a hierarchical domain name. It probably took a year for my wife to be able to remember the difference between google.gmail.com and gmail.google.com. Fortunately, that's a relatively benign example - Google owns both domains, so even though one works and one doesn't, the potential for actual abuse is limited. But I have no doubt that there are scammers out there preying on that very weakness with other domains.
I guess it depends what you consider a flagrant tax cheat. Tom Daschle was definitely an exceptional case, and I'm glad he got pulled from consideration. (Although it does make you wonder, with all the talk about "deliberate haste" how that wasn't caught sooner...) The other two I'm not so sure about. I haven't followed the most recent flap too closely, but $7000 over 3 years is certainly in the range that seems like it could have been an honest mistake. As for Geithner... Well, it was a fair amount of money, but have you ever filed self employment taxes? The last time I did, I made a mistake that was bigger (relative to my actual income) than that. Eventually the mistake was discovered, and it was corrected. We move on...
Of course, in the last administration, the big deal was Cabinet nominees who employed illegal immigrants, and in the Administration before that it was... I don't even remember any more. I'm torn between wondering why it's so hard to find a dozen or so people in Washington D.C. that actually follow the law, and wondering whether the laws have become so Byzantine that they could dig up dirt on anybody.
Wait, you're saying that Stevens was convicted because of Republican political ideology?
Oh, wait, I get it. Because they were Republicans, they deliberately screwed up the case so that Stevens could get off. OK, that makes perfect sense.
Interesting. I've never looked for a job on Craigslist, so I wouldn't know about that aspect of it, but every single item I've bought or sold on Craigslist was paid for in cash. I thought that was the whole draw of Craigslist - by dealing with people face to face and exchanging cash, you don't have to worry about any of the crap.
Your points are valid - I once lived a few blocks a away from a brand new police center plopped into the heart of the Chicago projects (I lived on a college campus; the projects were across the street). However, the article specifically mentions that any time the computer couldn't identify the address - about 4% of the crimes entered into the system - it used a default location in the center of the region being mapped. I've had MapQuest do the same to me on more than one occasion.
Now, that area may still have a larger crime rate than some of the surrounding areas, but not nearly so much as their online map would suggest.
That was one cause of this mess, but it was far from the only cause. To be honest, I doubt it was even a major cause. When you look at how eager banks and mortgage brokers were to hand interest-only $400k+ loans to pretty much anyone who asked, it's hard to say with a straight face that the government was twisting their arm to do it. Certainly the apparent belief in both parties (Clinton gets a lot of the blame for this, but Bush was every bit as bad) that it is every American's God given right to own their own house has caused a great deal of grief, but there were utter failures on so many levels. When it comes down to it, though, much like the power companies in the mid to late 90's, our financial institutions managed to do such a good job pushing for deregulation only to find out after they succeeded that maybe some of those regulations were actually there for a reason. Ultimately, too many people believed that they could divorce themselves from the risk inherent in the system. At any one level that would have been enough of a problem. But these people were spread out all the way through the system from homeowners up through the brokers, banks, investment firms, insurers, and raters. And because this problem was spread throughout the system from top to bottom, that's where we're seeing it fail.
This wasn't a failure of capitalism, it was a failure of rampant human greed in the absence of any kind of checks or balances.
I was thinking it would be cool to have an achievement for reading Slashdot before accounts existed, but I would imagine there's no good way to verify that. Better yet, who found the site before it was even /. ? I think I stumbled across the old news page when Google turned up some AfterStep tweaks on your site. Or maybe it was ePlus...
Interesting how that logic goes out the window when discussing, say, the decreased snow coverage on the peak of Kilimanjaro.
I know it's become something of a sport here to criticize the editors, but talk about being asleep at the wheel here...
If you do about 90 seconds of research here (which is about what I did), you would see that:
1) this is a non-binding resolution. i.e. it doesn't mean jack.
2) a similar resolution has been proposed (by Pakistan) and passed (by the so-called human rights council) every year since 1999
3) the number of countries supporting the resolution has actually decreased significantly every year for the past few years.
In other words, in terms of the actual effect this will have on anyone at all, this is about as non-news as it gets. If there is any news here at all, it is that this type of proposal has been rapidly losing support on the world stage lately. In particular, almost every major religious group except for Islam (and even many subgroups of Islam) have spoken out against such a measure.
While AIG was perhaps the most visible due to the incredible amount of money that's been required to prop them up, they were merely one in a large chain of dominoes.
I believe the abbreviation ETLA is preferred over FLA.
I only skimmed through most of the indictment, but I'd say that this would depend on what you consider "affecting the outcome" to mean exactly. The indictment merely charges that they changed votes in all of the above listed elections. To some extent, that in itself is affecting the outcome. Whether their actions actually were enough to change the winner in any election is not stated, and probably not known. We could make guesses based on how narrow the margin of victory of any of the candidates they were supporting, but it would still be only a guess. Based on the description of their actions and the machines, it sounds like it would be impossible to prove or even guess at the number of votes that they altered.
To me, that's a bigger criticism of the system than anything else. Even if the defendants are found guilty, in the face of known fraud, the systems in question provide no way to even guess at how pervasive it was. Even then, there are failures at multiple levels here. According to TFA, the poll workers have to fill out voter assistance forms every time that they assist a voter (presumably for this very reason) and those forms were being destroyed to cover their tracks.
Oh, they definitely exist. I always thought they were apocryphal, too, until I worked with one. You're right, though, that it does take a certain amount of dysfunctional office politics to allow them to do any real damage. In my case, the company was split between multiple offices. "Josh" drove everybody who worked in the same office as he did crazy. But the highest ranking person in his office couldn't fire him without approval from somebody in one of the other offices, who only saw the work that he got done, and not all of the problems that he caused. By the time it became apparent to everyone that he needed to go, there were too many critical systems that only he understood, and he guarded his knowledge jealously. He would talk directly to clients without involving the project managers, so only he knew what was going on with his projects. He would shrug off questions about code that he had written in a very similar way as the Josh described in the article - "Why should I help somebody who's not smart enough to figure it out on his own?" I know at least one person got fired to take the fall for him because we couldn't afford to let him go... yet. When he finally was let go, everything was a disaster for about a month while we scrambled to decipher some of his processes and consistently ran up against little gotchas that he must have known about and figured out how to work around without ever telling anyone else. After the first month, things were far smoother without him than they had been with him, but even six months later we were still running into random surprises buried away in code that he had written.