Here's a more complete picture of what was going on. The process for Solyndra started well before the Obama office came into power. It was fast tracked once he got there, but mostly as one of the many projects related to the stimulus. And as a side note, the main reason that Solyndra failed was due to China price-fixing the market for solar panels to the point US companies couldn't compete.
I asked this same question when deciding what frying pan to buy. After some research, I decided that Cuisinart's lack of Twitter support was a dealbreaker and went with the Calphalon.
It produces about 29% and 44% less carbon dioxide per joule delivered than oil and coal respectively, and potentially fewer pollutants than other hydrocarbon fuels.
Natural gas is the lesser of evils. (At least as far as direct CO2 emissions go. Damage from fracking is another story.) I'd consider it to be a stopgap fuel until we have a better infrastructure for renewables.
Nuclear does have a big advantage regarding CO2 though. A carbon tax could be a big help with that.
The long run problem here is that natural gas prices are highly volatile. Prices are super cheap right now because of a big increase in supply while demand doesn't change much and storage costs are big. Prices may stay low for a few years, but nobody knows what will happen later. If we ramp up electricity production through natural gas though, that will increase demand driving up prices again. When natural gas prices go back up, that could be rough on consumers.
N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.
How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”
So various agencies hack companies' servers to obtain their private keys. Those keys get stored in some central NSA database and are used later to decrypt messages. That would indicate they didn't break all the encryption algorithms, but are getting around them via other means. Of course, it does sound like the NSA has backdoors in other protocols which let them get in. That part has been known for years, but hacking companies' servers sounds like something new. And probably illegal.
"Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Opera Software's Fastmail.fm, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast declined to respond to queries about whether they would divulge encryption keys to government agencies."
I'm sometimes surprised at big companies cozying up with big brother. This might help get them some favorable legislation and tax breaks, but it comes at the expense of international credibility. If I worked at a company in Europe, I would have second thoughts about purchasing software from a US vendor with backdoors for the US government. Same goes for cloud service providers where the US government could issue national security letters and read all my data without notifying me. I don't know how this kind of policy could be good for Silicon Valley in the long run.
So why, then, did he choose to go into exile rather than accept the consequences and justify his actions in court?
Have you seen what due process has been for Bradley Manning? During his nine-month stay in Fort Quantico, he was reportedly held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, forced to sleep naked without pillows and sheets on his bed, and restricted from physical recreation or access to television. A military judge ruled that his treatment was excessive and credited him with some time served against any future punishment.
The government has demonstrated that it will crush whistleblowers who try to defy it. Who in their right mind would allow this to happen to them? Extreme measures for Snowden to protect himself just mirror the extreme measures our government has taken to punish those who oppose it.
Unions had already agreed to $100 million in concessions during the previous bankruptcy. The bakers union was being asked for something like an additional 25% in cuts over 5 years, while there were reports of raises and bonuses for management. On top of all that, management had stopped contributing to the pension fund and there is still a lawsuit over that. Agreeing to the cuts would have taken wages well under the market average could have depressed wages for the entire bakers industry. So let's not try to play this as a one-sided "unions are dumb" argument. There were good reasons for the unions to reject the concessions management proposed.
Yes, portable hard drives are almost exactly like cloud storage. Except for the reliability. And the convenience. And ease of sharing. And accessibility. But besides that, it's exactly the same.
I'm not clear what the hardware is worth, but people are ignoring why this is priced so high. What nobody mentions is the laptop comes with 3 years of 1TB Google Drive storage. If you check out pricing for that much storage, you are looking at $50/month, which translates to $600/yr or $1,800 for 3 years.
So if you are a Google Drive power user and need a ton of storage space, this thing is a bargain. You get the storage at a discount and a nice free laptop. Sure, that seems like a crazy amount to spend on cloud storage space but this thing isn't exactly a laptop for the masses.
The big question here is who needs that much cloud storage space. It sounds like something that would be nice to have, but I wouldn't spend $600/yr. I'm not the target audience though.
Funny that a show about talented underdogs used its muscle to rip off the little guy. JoCo could fight this, but would be crushed under the weight of the FOX legal system. It's like being bullied in high school all over again. Irony.
The real crooks are the cops and civil defense people
Corrupt building inspectors were most likely the biggest issue. Newly constructed buildings were not built to code and came crumbling down. Of course, it's a lot harder to go after those guys than just blaming some scientists who were making reasonable predictions based on the available data.
The U.S. government makes an even more bold claim than that. They have argued with Megaupload that the government can continue to seize their servers even if the case is dismissed. I'm halfway surprised that the government bothered to drop the charges against Rojadirecta since they feel they can keep cases like this in limbo indefinitely without any consequences.
I'd guess that a soda tax is more of a first step than a solution. Probably taxing any sugar or refined flour would make come later.
As far as diabetes being passed on, I suppose that is true for type 1 diabetes but I'm not sure what the research says about type 2. While there is probably a family correlation, that probably has more to do with learned behavior than genetics. Not sure if research has made any conclusions on that though, especially since nobody really knows why some overweight people get diabetes while others don't.
I'm not saying that government's motives are completely altruistic here. I do believe though that diabetes is a monumental drain on our society and recently scientific studies indicate it is only going to get worse. So what are your suggestions of fixing the problem? Updating the food pyramid? Having fat people pay more for health insurance? Eliminate diabetes treatment in Medicare and Medicaid?
Citation please. Type 2 diabetes is certainly correlated with an increase in sugar intake. And while sugar intake isn't the only risk factor for diabetes, it is a big one.
What might confuse you is that any carb can result in a high glycemic index. Rice and potatoes can have a similar effect. The difference is that food and drinks have so much sugar in them now, it's having a greater effect on people. Overconsumption of all carbs can be bad though.
So what do you do about this? Let people eat up our healthcare system with obesity related illnesses (no pun intended), or try things out to fix the problem? The government has run educational programs before with little success. Taxing sugar almost seems like a reasonable alternative at this point.
This is a fantastic thing. Take a look at NASA's goal.
To reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind.
Being the tow trucks to space has very little to do with that. NASA has done that for more than half a century now and I'm personally very happy to offload that responsibility to private entities.
So what does this mean for NASA now? I'd say it clears up their responsibilities for space exploration. More rovers. More probes. And if we can justify it, more manned space flights. If private entities can handle sending things up to orbit, then I see that as a good thing.
Comparing any stock to Apple is going to make a company look bad. They have had phenomenal growth.
Obviously they have missed out on opportunities. But at least they have had slight growth over the past 5 years while paying out dividends. That beats the S&P.
I'm not saying that Microsoft has done well. We're steadily moving towards a web centric world where the operating system is less relevant. But worst CEO? Not a chance.
The author criticizes Balmer for the stock not getting back to it's high of $60/share. You can dismiss this article just based on that criticism. Microsoft's stock price skyrocketed to that during the 2000 tech craze and was seriously overvalued at that point. Balmer had nothing to do with the stock price tanking at that point. Reality did.
Stock price is also an incomplete measure of a company's performance. The article fails to mention that Microsoft has steadily paid out dividends or made a special distribution of $3/share in the fall of 2004. That kind of activity isn't reflected in stock price.
I'll be fine with criticizing Microsoft for underperforming. Sure, they haven't found ways to capitalize on their monopoly power in the OS market. The sensationalistic opinions here don't mean much though.
This is the same thing that the TSA previously dismissed as "some guy" making a "crude attempt" at getting around screening procedures. At least they are acknowledging it now.
They have also said that these things are completely safe despite inadequate testing. Or that there are sufficient procedures in place to protect people's privacy. I wonder how long it will take for them to change their minds on that too.
Right, return his stuff after the damage is already done. Megauploads is gone. Nothing they can do now can repair their business.
And to be honest, I think that was the point of this whole exercise. I don't think our government cared about making any kind of legal precedent here. They mostly just wanted to show that they had the ability to take any of these guys down and went after a high profile business to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a more complete picture of what was going on. The process for Solyndra started well before the Obama office came into power. It was fast tracked once he got there, but mostly as one of the many projects related to the stimulus. And as a side note, the main reason that Solyndra failed was due to China price-fixing the market for solar panels to the point US companies couldn't compete.
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2011/nov/15/americans-prosperity/solyndra-ad-president-barack-obama-taxpayer-money/
I asked this same question when deciding what frying pan to buy. After some research, I decided that Cuisinart's lack of Twitter support was a dealbreaker and went with the Calphalon.
It produces about 29% and 44% less carbon dioxide per joule delivered than oil and coal respectively, and potentially fewer pollutants than other hydrocarbon fuels.
Natural gas is the lesser of evils. (At least as far as direct CO2 emissions go. Damage from fracking is another story.) I'd consider it to be a stopgap fuel until we have a better infrastructure for renewables.
Nuclear does have a big advantage regarding CO2 though. A carbon tax could be a big help with that.
The long run problem here is that natural gas prices are highly volatile. Prices are super cheap right now because of a big increase in supply while demand doesn't change much and storage costs are big. Prices may stay low for a few years, but nobody knows what will happen later. If we ramp up electricity production through natural gas though, that will increase demand driving up prices again. When natural gas prices go back up, that could be rough on consumers.
Here's a graph highlighting gas prices over the past 40 years.
I make it easy on myself and just vote for the Judean People's Front.
Here's what I found in the article.
N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.
How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”
So various agencies hack companies' servers to obtain their private keys. Those keys get stored in some central NSA database and are used later to decrypt messages. That would indicate they didn't break all the encryption algorithms, but are getting around them via other means. Of course, it does sound like the NSA has backdoors in other protocols which let them get in. That part has been known for years, but hacking companies' servers sounds like something new. And probably illegal.
"Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Opera Software's Fastmail.fm, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast declined to respond to queries about whether they would divulge encryption keys to government agencies."
I'm sometimes surprised at big companies cozying up with big brother. This might help get them some favorable legislation and tax breaks, but it comes at the expense of international credibility. If I worked at a company in Europe, I would have second thoughts about purchasing software from a US vendor with backdoors for the US government. Same goes for cloud service providers where the US government could issue national security letters and read all my data without notifying me. I don't know how this kind of policy could be good for Silicon Valley in the long run.
So why, then, did he choose to go into exile rather than accept the consequences and justify his actions in court?
Have you seen what due process has been for Bradley Manning? During his nine-month stay in Fort Quantico, he was reportedly held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, forced to sleep naked without pillows and sheets on his bed, and restricted from physical recreation or access to television. A military judge ruled that his treatment was excessive and credited him with some time served against any future punishment.
The government has demonstrated that it will crush whistleblowers who try to defy it. Who in their right mind would allow this to happen to them? Extreme measures for Snowden to protect himself just mirror the extreme measures our government has taken to punish those who oppose it.
Unions had already agreed to $100 million in concessions during the previous bankruptcy. The bakers union was being asked for something like an additional 25% in cuts over 5 years, while there were reports of raises and bonuses for management. On top of all that, management had stopped contributing to the pension fund and there is still a lawsuit over that. Agreeing to the cuts would have taken wages well under the market average could have depressed wages for the entire bakers industry. So let's not try to play this as a one-sided "unions are dumb" argument. There were good reasons for the unions to reject the concessions management proposed.
Here, 1 TB of always-available, portable storage for $99.99, perhaps less if you shop around for a discount.
Yes, portable hard drives are almost exactly like cloud storage. Except for the reliability. And the convenience. And ease of sharing. And accessibility. But besides that, it's exactly the same.
I'm not clear what the hardware is worth, but people are ignoring why this is priced so high. What nobody mentions is the laptop comes with 3 years of 1TB Google Drive storage. If you check out pricing for that much storage, you are looking at $50/month, which translates to $600/yr or $1,800 for 3 years.
So if you are a Google Drive power user and need a ton of storage space, this thing is a bargain. You get the storage at a discount and a nice free laptop. Sure, that seems like a crazy amount to spend on cloud storage space but this thing isn't exactly a laptop for the masses.
The big question here is who needs that much cloud storage space. It sounds like something that would be nice to have, but I wouldn't spend $600/yr. I'm not the target audience though.
Funny that a show about talented underdogs used its muscle to rip off the little guy. JoCo could fight this, but would be crushed under the weight of the FOX legal system. It's like being bullied in high school all over again. Irony.
The real crooks are the cops and civil defense people
Corrupt building inspectors were most likely the biggest issue. Newly constructed buildings were not built to code and came crumbling down. Of course, it's a lot harder to go after those guys than just blaming some scientists who were making reasonable predictions based on the available data.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08codes.html
The U.S. government makes an even more bold claim than that. They have argued with Megaupload that the government can continue to seize their servers even if the case is dismissed. I'm halfway surprised that the government bothered to drop the charges against Rojadirecta since they feel they can keep cases like this in limbo indefinitely without any consequences.
If higher numbers don't mean better, we wouldn't have this problem.
We'll call this the Spinal Tap Syndrome. (But my screen goes to 11.)
I'd guess that a soda tax is more of a first step than a solution. Probably taxing any sugar or refined flour would make come later.
As far as diabetes being passed on, I suppose that is true for type 1 diabetes but I'm not sure what the research says about type 2. While there is probably a family correlation, that probably has more to do with learned behavior than genetics. Not sure if research has made any conclusions on that though, especially since nobody really knows why some overweight people get diabetes while others don't.
I'm not saying that government's motives are completely altruistic here. I do believe though that diabetes is a monumental drain on our society and recently scientific studies indicate it is only going to get worse. So what are your suggestions of fixing the problem? Updating the food pyramid? Having fat people pay more for health insurance? Eliminate diabetes treatment in Medicare and Medicaid?
Citation please. Type 2 diabetes is certainly correlated with an increase in sugar intake. And while sugar intake isn't the only risk factor for diabetes, it is a big one.
Sugar-Sweetened Beverages and Risk of Metabolic Syndrome and Type 2 Diabetes
What might confuse you is that any carb can result in a high glycemic index. Rice and potatoes can have a similar effect. The difference is that food and drinks have so much sugar in them now, it's having a greater effect on people. Overconsumption of all carbs can be bad though.
Yes, this on the surface seems like an overreaching nanny state tax. Consider this though.
So what do you do about this? Let people eat up our healthcare system with obesity related illnesses (no pun intended), or try things out to fix the problem? The government has run educational programs before with little success. Taxing sugar almost seems like a reasonable alternative at this point.
Strange that MS doesn't remove from Bing the same links it asks Google to take out.
No, they just realize that nobody uses Bing :) They send the takedown to Google first since that will do more good.
This is a fantastic thing. Take a look at NASA's goal.
Being the tow trucks to space has very little to do with that. NASA has done that for more than half a century now and I'm personally very happy to offload that responsibility to private entities.
So what does this mean for NASA now? I'd say it clears up their responsibilities for space exploration. More rovers. More probes. And if we can justify it, more manned space flights. If private entities can handle sending things up to orbit, then I see that as a good thing.
Comparing any stock to Apple is going to make a company look bad. They have had phenomenal growth.
Obviously they have missed out on opportunities. But at least they have had slight growth over the past 5 years while paying out dividends. That beats the S&P.
I'm not saying that Microsoft has done well. We're steadily moving towards a web centric world where the operating system is less relevant. But worst CEO? Not a chance.
The author criticizes Balmer for the stock not getting back to it's high of $60/share. You can dismiss this article just based on that criticism. Microsoft's stock price skyrocketed to that during the 2000 tech craze and was seriously overvalued at that point. Balmer had nothing to do with the stock price tanking at that point. Reality did.
Stock price is also an incomplete measure of a company's performance. The article fails to mention that Microsoft has steadily paid out dividends or made a special distribution of $3/share in the fall of 2004. That kind of activity isn't reflected in stock price.
I'll be fine with criticizing Microsoft for underperforming. Sure, they haven't found ways to capitalize on their monopoly power in the OS market. The sensationalistic opinions here don't mean much though.
This is the same thing that the TSA previously dismissed as "some guy" making a "crude attempt" at getting around screening procedures. At least they are acknowledging it now.
http://blog.tsa.gov/2012/03/viral-video-about-body-scanners.html
They have also said that these things are completely safe despite inadequate testing. Or that there are sufficient procedures in place to protect people's privacy. I wonder how long it will take for them to change their minds on that too.
Right, return his stuff after the damage is already done. Megauploads is gone. Nothing they can do now can repair their business.
And to be honest, I think that was the point of this whole exercise. I don't think our government cared about making any kind of legal precedent here. They mostly just wanted to show that they had the ability to take any of these guys down and went after a high profile business to do it.