The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, folks. When they're not allowed to indulge in their scummy rent-seeking in the US, they'll try it on in Europe, hoping to set some dangerous precedents with which to further erode our rights.
Big Content doesn't generate anywhere near as many jobs as they claim , their products are mostly garbage, and they contribute very little to the cultural life of the countries they infest. And they demand privileged treatment all the time, whilst attacking our rights as citizens.
I recently went to an open day at the Joint European Tours near Oxford the UK. It's the world's biggest fusion reactor currently in service, and one of only a few of it's kind that can run on a mix of deuterium-tritium fuel. It can get highly radioactive, so they use some very impressive robots.
The machines they use are in a class all their own. They're huge, high precision machines that can be used on the outside of the tokamak, suspended from a telescoping boom riding on a gantry, and also has a snake like boom to access the inside of the tokamak. It's got human arm-like end effectors, can carry several tons, and supplies force feedback to the operators. They also have lots of what looks like fancy motion planning software to help out.
However the scientist leading the tour didn't look like the type to suffer fools gladly and got a little testy with me, because they're not actually robots. They're "remote handling systems".. and apparently there's a difference between a 'robot' and a 'remote handling system'. He implied, but didn't actually say that very little work with these machines would be automated (too complicated, robots crashing into stuff left lying around be technicians is apparently a bad thing around anything nuclear.
So there you go: as long as there's always a human in the loop, apparently it isn't a robot.
By the way, nobody takes climate deniers and conservative political activists seriously. They're a bit like the eccentric old uncle that the family invites to dinner every Thanksgiving, pretend to take seriously but politely ignore. Or the weird Jesus freak who loves to moralize to other people to prove how morally superior they are, but secretly sneaks into their Mom's room to wear her underwear....
NOBODY takes you and your kind seriously. We laugh about you, and make you the butt of jokes at parties. You were probably the kids that got wedgies off the jocks in the locker rooms at school, and have never lived it down. Your brains exploded and you turned into a Little-Green-Football reading, Fox-watching, Republican voting retard, who thinks that if an absurd and stupid untruth is said often enough, then all of a sudden, as if by magic it turns into truths.
You would remain a sad joke, if there weren't so many of you, to vote like minded maladjusted idiots like yourselves into Congress, to inflict your feeble minded rubbish (and the odd war) on the world.
Science is credible, when evidence is published, peer-reviewed, and continually challenged. Present theories on anthropomorphic climate change has stood the test of time and relentless attack for decades and survived.
When compelling evidence to the contrary appears, then existing theories will be revised. And it'll probably be front page news. Until then, please shut up.
The only dissent comes from political attacks, political hacks, and pseudoscientists.
Of course, lying is the most tried and true tool of political conservatives. Calling scientists "pseudoscientists" is conservative lying. Conservative lying every bit as odious as the oft-repeated lies that drummed us into the fool's errand that was the Gulf War.
Keep sprouting your stupid, ill informed lies. Enjoy being on the wrong side of history.
I have karma to burn, and the rightwing conservative BS echo chamber on this story's comments is really getting to me...
It's hard to believe in this day and age, that despite overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, that there are still hordes and hordes of conservatives and fringe dwellers denying climate change.
Given that the scientific method is the gold standard of finding what the closest thing humans can get to absolute truth, and that real scientists (and not right wing fake scientists and shills paid for by various business, conservative and libertarian interests) have a huge burden of proof to justify their stances, it's absolutely ridiculous that anybody should deny climate change at all.
Climate change deniers are not scientists, and if they're scientists, they're weirdos, and certainly not trained climatologists.
Like many on the conservative side of politics, climate change deniers think that gut instincts, opinions and truths are as strong as scientifically proven fact. It's common amongst irrational, religious people to think that the truth is whatever you decide to believe. This is an affliction of the far Left too, although the Left is always called out on it -- the Right are not.
Climate deniers know they're getting thrashed when objective standards scientific inquiry and applied to their stupid and mistaken beliefs. So they've resorted to the slow drip-drip-drip strategy of conservative lying: repeat a lie over and over and over, and you can turn black into white, and lies into truth. They tried this with the lies that led to the Iraq War, and they succeeded -- at the cost of thousands of needlessly wasted lives.
With climate change however, the stakes are much higher, and it's the duty of all normal, rational scientifically-minded people to oppose the right wing lie machine.
Talk is cheap, and it costs nothing to apologise. Clearly, this is an attempt to mollify angry customers, and nothing more. This is rather typical of Amazon's contempt for their customers. They've demonstrated through their actions -- imposing odious DRM on their paying customers, and setting a dangerous precedent for Big Content to rape their customers at will -- that they cannot be trusted.
Trust is very hard to build and very easy to destroy. I will not spend a red cent with Amazon again.
Interestingly, beyond Jeff's cheap talk, they seem to be showing very little remorse. All my enquiries to their "customer" "service" contact either get a form letter, or are ignored entirely. Likewise, my requests to them to close my account have been ignored.
Amazon doesn't deserve your business. Don't shop with Amazon, and spend your money with book retailers who show their customers at least a token amount of respect.
The problem isn't as insurmountable as you'd think....
I recently had the privilege of visiting JET (the world's biggest experimental fusion reactor), and that thing sucks **HUGE** amounts of power. When you get there, you can see the massive high-tension power lines leading into the place.
Because the required power draw is so insane, they have two huge flywheel batteries which they charge gradually, and they discharge the flywheels as needed. Still, the place is located near a power station, and they're not allowed to draw power during peak periods.
Maybe all they'd need to do in your local gas station (besides getting a huge power supply), is replace the underground tanks with flywheel storage systems. Trickle charge the flywheels continually thoughout the day to even out the load on the power grid.
Oh, and showing up to the emergency room or dialling 911, after your unmanaged diabetes has made you go blind and your feet rot off, does not qualify as "coverage".
Not in a first-world country at least.
The "coward" line is absolutely, gut-bustingly hilarious, coming from an internet tough-guy Anonymous Coward.
I'm not an economist, so I'm not really qualified to say whether or not all these upcoming changes really will sink small business collectively.
I'm inclined to think that the reality will be slightly more complex than businesses being forced to the wall, or a double-dip recession, like a lot of people are predicting.
Pressures, if any, will apply across the board. Rising wages may challenge small and medium sized businesses -- but will crucially increase consumer spending power... a huge part of the US economy. Business which can't cut the mustard will disappear or be acquired, making room for business that can.
Besides, small businesses in other countries, e.g. the UK, continental Europe, my native Australia cope fine where there are death duties, payroll taxes, universal healthcare, etc. Predictions of Armageddon are somewhat premature, I think.
I don't think that a payroll tax supplement for small businesses who don't want to take out private insurance is such a bad thing. I remember reading something in the financial press recently, that a couple of small businessmen (registered Republicans, I might add) testified in committee in Congress, saying that they were getting buggered rotten by private health insurers, and were virtually begging for a public option to pay into, to contain costs and increase certainty to help them plan their budgets.
In the countries where I personally have direct experience with small business, healthcare is single-payer, and there's zero chance of a private health insurer turning around and raping your business prison-style, by jacking up insurance premiums.
Anyway, that this debate really boils down to, is whether or not I, as a small businessman or private individual, is getting value for money. I've travelled a lot, and I've found there's little correlation between overall "efficiency", and the degree of public intervention in the economy. France, for instance, has a huge public sector, but some parts of life there are dramatically more efficient and better-run than free-market Britain, where you can never get to work on time, because the overpriced, privatized trains never run on time.
(Next time I pay £200 a month for my train ticket, and then get told that the train isn't running because the "wrong kind of snow fell", or there are "leaves on the tracks", I'm going to punch somebody in the face.)
The whole public-vs-private thing is way overhyped. I think it's the willingness of everyone to identify and tackle inefficiency that's the issue here. Certainly where I'm sitting, the States has an issue, where everyone's too busy being Simon-pure liberals, conservatives, libertarians, whatnot, to revisit their assumptions, and throw out what doesn't work.
Call Obama what you will, but what I admire about the man, is that he is brutally pragmatic, and has repeatedly expressed the desire to go with what works and throw away what doesn't (e.g. CER research).
"The company is a source of funding for thousands of small and midsize businesses. It's also a big player providing cash advances to clothing manufacturers and suppliers, and credit to retailers to pay off invoices. The impact could be especially acute in California because of the state's large apparel-import business."
Having family in the rag trade, I can just imagine what struggles small businesses dependent on credit from companies like CIT are going through.
Irresponsible companies like CIT who trade dodgy credit instruments and make bad loans make out like bandits in the good times, and hold us all to ransom when they get hit by the downside. It's not like these bastards are too stupid to realise that in a financial crisis, all correlations go to 1...
People like AIG and CIT are punks. They are "too big to fail", because they happen to supply the liquidity that a lot of SMEs need to operate. SMEs are the real generators of jobs, and what's bad for them, is bad for the economy, period.
CIT can go to hell. I feel badly for the collateral damage though, because it's going to make life much harder for a lot of mom-and-pop shops out there.
Folks, don't expect the recession to be ending any time soon. And I'd be shocked if unemployment doesn't hit 15% nationwide. 20% if we pass cap and trade and nationalize the medical industry.
Hey, if there's THAT much blubber to cut from the US private healthcare industry, then clearly, that's a massive misallocation of resources that needs to be put to better use, like investing in education.
Some tough, hard-headed, pragmatic decisions have to be made. And it appears only Mr Obama has balls big enough to make them.
The fact that useless, balding baby boomers are getting heart bypasses, angioplasties and dick pills because they're too lazy and stupid to look after themselves properly -- while 45 million Americans have zero health coverage... is _not_ exactly a ringing endorsement of the current system.
Duplication and waste, after all, isn't the exclusive preserve of the public sector. Just ask the big arms manufacturers.
Congrats on Red Hat reaching the big league. I've got a couple of mates who work for Red Hat, and they say business is booming in the downturn, because they're picking up a lot of business from people looking to save money through Red Hat's Open Source-plus-support way of doing things. I wish Red Hat luck.
Sadly, this doesn't seem to have been the case with CIT, whose criminally incompetent management decided that letting the Government bail them out, was a better business plan than running their business as a going concern.
Too bad Anglo-American culture is far too tolerant of failure, particularly in the business world. The fat cats need to be taken down a few pegs -- and serious repercussions for failure are needed.
The big problem with the government bailouts on both sides of the pond, is that the captains of industry are scum, by and large; and will find a way to be "too big to fail", and profit by bludging off people who pay their taxes and do the right thing. Thankfully, the chaps in charge in the US have let CIT fail. After all, private business are full of people who preach the benefits of free markets in the good times. The Obama administration are wise enough to allow them to be destroyed by the remorseless logic of the free market when they are too weak to survive.
Look at it another way...
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
The other side of the coin is the lawlessness and lack of enforcement of anti-computer crime laws. This is all as much a social, political and legal problem as a technical one.
It's no secret that much of the crime happening online comes from Eastern Europe (particularly, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria), and China. Russia and China in particular, are rabidly anti-West in their outlook. The governments over there think it's funny and cool for legions of bored and greedy kids to rob people and destroy other people's property, so long as they're not Slavs/Chinese.
Of course, the problem is going to get so bad, that the entire generation of criminals they're incubating will start attacking their own countries; but in the meantime, we have what is basically a law enforcement problem (clueless law enforcement), caused by a political problem (clueless and/or hostile foreign governments).
Believe me, if the Russian kids robbing people on the Internet today were actually made to face the consequences of their actions (e.g. chopping trees and dying of AIDS and TB somewhere in Siberia), the problem wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.
But neither was the gonzo crazy ideas the Red Team had either, like sunshades and carbon sequestration.
Reminds me of the Bruce Schneier's 'Chinese Lottery' idea. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's going to work in practice.
By the way, you'll need to try harder on attacking universal healthcare. I haven't yet heard a single convincing argument against it.
I suppose it must be comforting for conservatives to argue against it, to affirm their prejudice that governments can't do anything better than private enterprise apart from running police forces and militaries.
The position of the previous adminstration was not based on scientific consensus: it was based on political opinion and a lot of wishful thinking by a lot of people who thought that if they wished hard enough, that reality would change to fit their world-view. You can't really expect more from politicians who base is composed of free market fundamentalists and young Earth creationists.
On the other hand, the Obama administration, much to their credit, are far more reality-based, and have a much more rational world view generally. Senior Obama advisors are a veritable who's who of great minds. Wooly disfunctional thinking won't get you very far with this lot.
So when a bureaucrat holdover from the previous administration starts trying to claim that there is anything but overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, he deserves to have his arse kicked for his stupidity.
I wonder just to what extend conservative politics, the good 'ol boys network, and lack of accountability and transparency feed upon each other. I know that the US is a model for the world in terms of democracy, but wonder if transparency and anti-corruption safeguards have kept up with the rest of the developed world.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and in most states of Australia, there exists a carefully designed system of anti-corruption watchdogs, whose job it is to keep an eye out for public-sector corruption. And it's needed too, because a major police corruption scandal seems to break every seven years or so. They are definitely needed.
Ripping up asphalt roads into gravel is not unusual when governments are trying to save money. I've seen this happen in Australia.
Years ago, Victoria elected a conservative government, headed by a gentleman called Jeff Kennett. Admittedly, he inherited a massive mountain of debt racked up by a previous Labour government, but he immediately made himself hugely unpopular by slashing and burning all public spending and picking fights with everybody in sight. Much of his brutal cost-cutting was ripping up the roads throughout country Victoria, which undoubtedly endeared him greatly to his rural supporters...
From my limited experience, ripping up roads to save money is a sign of extreme desperation. Things must be bad indeed in parts of Michigan.
We all know that Big Media are greedy, disrespectful, lying scum, who'll say and do anything to attempt to capture regulators and game the legal system.
We saw this decades ago with BSA, and their deceitful, riscible and stupid fake claims of multi-billion dollar "losses" from piracy. These people are the same bastards who market cigarettes to kids in Third World countries, and deny global warming.
It's always the same people, peddling the same lies, the same moral bankruptcy, and the same insane, mindless greed.
With all due respect to Dr Goldacre, why is this news?
That bit of metal that traps cards is known as a 'Lebanese Loop'.
If an ATM looks like its been tampered with, don't use it. If an ATM retains your card, get the card stopped immediatelly.
I'm paranoid, so I've memorized the toll-free phone number of my bank, so I can call them if something bad happens. The crooks aren't stupid, and if they get your card, they'll try and clean out the account as quickly as possible. This is especially serious with debit cards, where the banks shift more of the liabilities for fraud onto their customers (since it's your money, not theirs).
I suppose when everyone realizes that it's less risky to buy DVD off Chinese kids in the street then get them off Usenet or torrents, it'll be funny to see the record companies go 'OH SHIT' when they've realized they've given a massive free kick to organised crime. I'll laugh my arse off when it happens.
I spent a lot of time studying and working at universities in Brisbane, so I have a little first-hand knowledge of the situation in the colleges. Really, it's no different to ANY university college, where there's been traditionally lax enforcement of rules against piracy.
Certainly when I was around a few years ago, the colleges were hotbeds of piracy, since they had some of the best internet connectivity in the whole country -- the colleges have very fat pipes straight to AARNet, which, in the absence of clear rules and enforcement, is a clear invitation to abuse.
To be honest, I'm surprised it took this long for the record industry's hired thugs to start making examples out of college kids. Lack of due process is part-and-parcel of how MediaSentry and their scumbag customers operate, and they probably were counting on the fact that the colleges are run by clueless and credulous religious douchebags who could be very easily bullied around (I know, because I've met a few of them).
Looks like MediaSentry and their dickhead mates have created the chilling effect they were looking for. I just feel bad for the kid losing his college room, even if he was busted doing something wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got news for you. The EU are even bigger bitches to Big Content than the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, folks. When they're not allowed to indulge in their scummy rent-seeking in the US, they'll try it on in Europe, hoping to set some dangerous precedents with which to further erode our rights.
Big Content doesn't generate anywhere near as many jobs as they claim , their products are mostly garbage, and they contribute very little to the cultural life of the countries they infest. And they demand privileged treatment all the time, whilst attacking our rights as citizens.
No corporate welfare for Big Content!
I recently went to an open day at the Joint European Tours near Oxford the UK. It's the world's biggest fusion reactor currently in service, and one of only a few of it's kind that can run on a mix of deuterium-tritium fuel. It can get highly radioactive, so they use some very impressive robots.
The machines they use are in a class all their own. They're huge, high precision machines that can be used on the outside of the tokamak, suspended from a telescoping boom riding on a gantry, and also has a snake like boom to access the inside of the tokamak. It's got human arm-like end effectors, can carry several tons, and supplies force feedback to the operators. They also have lots of what looks like fancy motion planning software to help out.
However the scientist leading the tour didn't look like the type to suffer fools gladly and got a little testy with me, because they're not actually robots. They're "remote handling systems".. and apparently there's a difference between a 'robot' and a 'remote handling system'. He implied, but didn't actually say that very little work with these machines would be automated (too complicated, robots crashing into stuff left lying around be technicians is apparently a bad thing around anything nuclear.
So there you go: as long as there's always a human in the loop, apparently it isn't a robot.
By the way, nobody takes climate deniers and conservative political activists seriously. They're a bit like the eccentric old uncle that the family invites to dinner every Thanksgiving, pretend to take seriously but politely ignore. Or the weird Jesus freak who loves to moralize to other people to prove how morally superior they are, but secretly sneaks into their Mom's room to wear her underwear....
NOBODY takes you and your kind seriously. We laugh about you, and make you the butt of jokes at parties. You were probably the kids that got wedgies off the jocks in the locker rooms at school, and have never lived it down. Your brains exploded and you turned into a Little-Green-Football reading, Fox-watching, Republican voting retard, who thinks that if an absurd and stupid untruth is said often enough, then all of a sudden, as if by magic it turns into truths.
You would remain a sad joke, if there weren't so many of you, to vote like minded maladjusted idiots like yourselves into Congress, to inflict your feeble minded rubbish (and the odd war) on the world.
Idiot.
Science is credible, when evidence is published, peer-reviewed, and continually challenged. Present theories on anthropomorphic climate change has stood the test of time and relentless attack for decades and survived.
When compelling evidence to the contrary appears, then existing theories will be revised. And it'll probably be front page news. Until then, please shut up.
The only dissent comes from political attacks, political hacks, and pseudoscientists.
Of course, lying is the most tried and true tool of political conservatives. Calling scientists "pseudoscientists" is conservative lying. Conservative lying every bit as odious as the oft-repeated lies that drummed us into the fool's errand that was the Gulf War.
Keep sprouting your stupid, ill informed lies. Enjoy being on the wrong side of history.
I have karma to burn, and the rightwing conservative BS echo chamber on this story's comments is really getting to me...
It's hard to believe in this day and age, that despite overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, that there are still hordes and hordes of conservatives and fringe dwellers denying climate change.
Given that the scientific method is the gold standard of finding what the closest thing humans can get to absolute truth, and that real scientists (and not right wing fake scientists and shills paid for by various business, conservative and libertarian interests) have a huge burden of proof to justify their stances, it's absolutely ridiculous that anybody should deny climate change at all.
Climate change deniers are not scientists, and if they're scientists, they're weirdos, and certainly not trained climatologists.
Like many on the conservative side of politics, climate change deniers think that gut instincts, opinions and truths are as strong as scientifically proven fact. It's common amongst irrational, religious people to think that the truth is whatever you decide to believe. This is an affliction of the far Left too, although the Left is always called out on it -- the Right are not.
Climate deniers know they're getting thrashed when objective standards scientific inquiry and applied to their stupid and mistaken beliefs. So they've resorted to the slow drip-drip-drip strategy of conservative lying: repeat a lie over and over and over, and you can turn black into white, and lies into truth. They tried this with the lies that led to the Iraq War, and they succeeded -- at the cost of thousands of needlessly wasted lives.
With climate change however, the stakes are much higher, and it's the duty of all normal, rational scientifically-minded people to oppose the right wing lie machine.
Talk is cheap, and it costs nothing to apologise. Clearly, this is an attempt to mollify angry customers, and nothing more. This is rather typical of Amazon's contempt for their customers. They've demonstrated through their actions -- imposing odious DRM on their paying customers, and setting a dangerous precedent for Big Content to rape their customers at will -- that they cannot be trusted.
Trust is very hard to build and very easy to destroy. I will not spend a red cent with Amazon again.
Interestingly, beyond Jeff's cheap talk, they seem to be showing very little remorse. All my enquiries to their "customer" "service" contact either get a form letter, or are ignored entirely. Likewise, my requests to them to close my account have been ignored.
Amazon doesn't deserve your business. Don't shop with Amazon, and spend your money with book retailers who show their customers at least a token amount of respect.
The problem isn't as insurmountable as you'd think....
I recently had the privilege of visiting JET (the world's biggest experimental fusion reactor), and that thing sucks **HUGE** amounts of power. When you get there, you can see the massive high-tension power lines leading into the place.
Because the required power draw is so insane, they have two huge flywheel batteries which they charge gradually, and they discharge the flywheels as needed. Still, the place is located near a power station, and they're not allowed to draw power during peak periods.
Maybe all they'd need to do in your local gas station (besides getting a huge power supply), is replace the underground tanks with flywheel storage systems. Trickle charge the flywheels continually thoughout the day to even out the load on the power grid.
Oh, and showing up to the emergency room or dialling 911, after your unmanaged diabetes has made you go blind and your feet rot off, does not qualify as "coverage".
Not in a first-world country at least.
The "coward" line is absolutely, gut-bustingly hilarious, coming from an internet tough-guy Anonymous Coward.
The stupid, it buuuuurns!
Lol, somebody forgot to take their meds this morning.
Or perhaps they should avail themselves of a health system that actually works.
That is not cool.
I'm not an economist, so I'm not really qualified to say whether or not all these upcoming changes really will sink small business collectively.
I'm inclined to think that the reality will be slightly more complex than businesses being forced to the wall, or a double-dip recession, like a lot of people are predicting.
Pressures, if any, will apply across the board. Rising wages may challenge small and medium sized businesses -- but will crucially increase consumer spending power... a huge part of the US economy. Business which can't cut the mustard will disappear or be acquired, making room for business that can.
Besides, small businesses in other countries, e.g. the UK, continental Europe, my native Australia cope fine where there are death duties, payroll taxes, universal healthcare, etc. Predictions of Armageddon are somewhat premature, I think.
I don't think that a payroll tax supplement for small businesses who don't want to take out private insurance is such a bad thing. I remember reading something in the financial press recently, that a couple of small businessmen (registered Republicans, I might add) testified in committee in Congress, saying that they were getting buggered rotten by private health insurers, and were virtually begging for a public option to pay into, to contain costs and increase certainty to help them plan their budgets.
In the countries where I personally have direct experience with small business, healthcare is single-payer, and there's zero chance of a private health insurer turning around and raping your business prison-style, by jacking up insurance premiums.
Anyway, that this debate really boils down to, is whether or not I, as a small businessman or private individual, is getting value for money. I've travelled a lot, and I've found there's little correlation between overall "efficiency", and the degree of public intervention in the economy. France, for instance, has a huge public sector, but some parts of life there are dramatically more efficient and better-run than free-market Britain, where you can never get to work on time, because the overpriced, privatized trains never run on time.
(Next time I pay £200 a month for my train ticket, and then get told that the train isn't running because the "wrong kind of snow fell", or there are "leaves on the tracks", I'm going to punch somebody in the face.)
The whole public-vs-private thing is way overhyped. I think it's the willingness of everyone to identify and tackle inefficiency that's the issue here. Certainly where I'm sitting, the States has an issue, where everyone's too busy being Simon-pure liberals, conservatives, libertarians, whatnot, to revisit their assumptions, and throw out what doesn't work.
Call Obama what you will, but what I admire about the man, is that he is brutally pragmatic, and has repeatedly expressed the desire to go with what works and throw away what doesn't (e.g. CER research).
Having family in the rag trade, I can just imagine what struggles small businesses dependent on credit from companies like CIT are going through.
Irresponsible companies like CIT who trade dodgy credit instruments and make bad loans make out like bandits in the good times, and hold us all to ransom when they get hit by the downside. It's not like these bastards are too stupid to realise that in a financial crisis, all correlations go to 1...
People like AIG and CIT are punks. They are "too big to fail", because they happen to supply the liquidity that a lot of SMEs need to operate. SMEs are the real generators of jobs, and what's bad for them, is bad for the economy, period.
CIT can go to hell. I feel badly for the collateral damage though, because it's going to make life much harder for a lot of mom-and-pop shops out there.
Hey, if there's THAT much blubber to cut from the US private healthcare industry, then clearly, that's a massive misallocation of resources that needs to be put to better use, like investing in education.
Some tough, hard-headed, pragmatic decisions have to be made. And it appears only Mr Obama has balls big enough to make them.
The fact that useless, balding baby boomers are getting heart bypasses, angioplasties and dick pills because they're too lazy and stupid to look after themselves properly -- while 45 million Americans have zero health coverage... is _not_ exactly a ringing endorsement of the current system.
Duplication and waste, after all, isn't the exclusive preserve of the public sector. Just ask the big arms manufacturers.
Slash and burn, baby. Bring it on.
Congrats on Red Hat reaching the big league. I've got a couple of mates who work for Red Hat, and they say business is booming in the downturn, because they're picking up a lot of business from people looking to save money through Red Hat's Open Source-plus-support way of doing things. I wish Red Hat luck.
Sadly, this doesn't seem to have been the case with CIT, whose criminally incompetent management decided that letting the Government bail them out, was a better business plan than running their business as a going concern.
Too bad Anglo-American culture is far too tolerant of failure, particularly in the business world. The fat cats need to be taken down a few pegs -- and serious repercussions for failure are needed.
The big problem with the government bailouts on both sides of the pond, is that the captains of industry are scum, by and large; and will find a way to be "too big to fail", and profit by bludging off people who pay their taxes and do the right thing. Thankfully, the chaps in charge in the US have let CIT fail. After all, private business are full of people who preach the benefits of free markets in the good times. The Obama administration are wise enough to allow them to be destroyed by the remorseless logic of the free market when they are too weak to survive.
The other side of the coin is the lawlessness and lack of enforcement of anti-computer crime laws. This is all as much a social, political and legal problem as a technical one.
It's no secret that much of the crime happening online comes from Eastern Europe (particularly, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria), and China. Russia and China in particular, are rabidly anti-West in their outlook. The governments over there think it's funny and cool for legions of bored and greedy kids to rob people and destroy other people's property, so long as they're not Slavs/Chinese.
Of course, the problem is going to get so bad, that the entire generation of criminals they're incubating will start attacking their own countries; but in the meantime, we have what is basically a law enforcement problem (clueless law enforcement), caused by a political problem (clueless and/or hostile foreign governments).
Believe me, if the Russian kids robbing people on the Internet today were actually made to face the consequences of their actions (e.g. chopping trees and dying of AIDS and TB somewhere in Siberia), the problem wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.
Scientifically plausibe, yes. Practical? No.
But neither was the gonzo crazy ideas the Red Team had either, like sunshades and carbon sequestration.
Reminds me of the Bruce Schneier's 'Chinese Lottery' idea. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's going to work in practice.
By the way, you'll need to try harder on attacking universal healthcare. I haven't yet heard a single convincing argument against it.
I suppose it must be comforting for conservatives to argue against it, to affirm their prejudice that governments can't do anything better than private enterprise apart from running police forces and militaries.
The position of the previous adminstration was not based on scientific consensus: it was based on political opinion and a lot of wishful thinking by a lot of people who thought that if they wished hard enough, that reality would change to fit their world-view. You can't really expect more from politicians who base is composed of free market fundamentalists and young Earth creationists.
On the other hand, the Obama administration, much to their credit, are far more reality-based, and have a much more rational world view generally. Senior Obama advisors are a veritable who's who of great minds. Wooly disfunctional thinking won't get you very far with this lot.
So when a bureaucrat holdover from the previous administration starts trying to claim that there is anything but overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, he deserves to have his arse kicked for his stupidity.
Modded +1 Darwin Bait.
I wonder just to what extend conservative politics, the good 'ol boys network, and lack of accountability and transparency feed upon each other. I know that the US is a model for the world in terms of democracy, but wonder if transparency and anti-corruption safeguards have kept up with the rest of the developed world.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and in most states of Australia, there exists a carefully designed system of anti-corruption watchdogs, whose job it is to keep an eye out for public-sector corruption. And it's needed too, because a major police corruption scandal seems to break every seven years or so. They are definitely needed.
Ripping up asphalt roads into gravel is not unusual when governments are trying to save money. I've seen this happen in Australia.
Years ago, Victoria elected a conservative government, headed by a gentleman called Jeff Kennett. Admittedly, he inherited a massive mountain of debt racked up by a previous Labour government, but he immediately made himself hugely unpopular by slashing and burning all public spending and picking fights with everybody in sight. Much of his brutal cost-cutting was ripping up the roads throughout country Victoria, which undoubtedly endeared him greatly to his rural supporters...
From my limited experience, ripping up roads to save money is a sign of extreme desperation. Things must be bad indeed in parts of Michigan.
We all know that Big Media are greedy, disrespectful, lying scum, who'll say and do anything to attempt to capture regulators and game the legal system.
We saw this decades ago with BSA, and their deceitful, riscible and stupid fake claims of multi-billion dollar "losses" from piracy. These people are the same bastards who market cigarettes to kids in Third World countries, and deny global warming.
It's always the same people, peddling the same lies, the same moral bankruptcy, and the same insane, mindless greed.
With all due respect to Dr Goldacre, why is this news?
I've noticed that a lot of the crappier plasticky, insecure-looking ATMs around the place tend to have big DIEBOLD badges on them.
Diebold also make criminally badly-engineered voting machines. Coincidence?
That bit of metal that traps cards is known as a 'Lebanese Loop'.
If an ATM looks like its been tampered with, don't use it. If an ATM retains your card, get the card stopped immediatelly.
I'm paranoid, so I've memorized the toll-free phone number of my bank, so I can call them if something bad happens. The crooks aren't stupid, and if they get your card, they'll try and clean out the account as quickly as possible. This is especially serious with debit cards, where the banks shift more of the liabilities for fraud onto their customers (since it's your money, not theirs).
Who said that intelligence (even advanced intelligence) HAD to be rational?
I suppose when everyone realizes that it's less risky to buy DVD off Chinese kids in the street then get them off Usenet or torrents, it'll be funny to see the record companies go 'OH SHIT' when they've realized they've given a massive free kick to organised crime. I'll laugh my arse off when it happens.
I spent a lot of time studying and working at universities in Brisbane, so I have a little first-hand knowledge of the situation in the colleges. Really, it's no different to ANY university college, where there's been traditionally lax enforcement of rules against piracy.
Certainly when I was around a few years ago, the colleges were hotbeds of piracy, since they had some of the best internet connectivity in the whole country -- the colleges have very fat pipes straight to AARNet, which, in the absence of clear rules and enforcement, is a clear invitation to abuse.
To be honest, I'm surprised it took this long for the record industry's hired thugs to start making examples out of college kids. Lack of due process is part-and-parcel of how MediaSentry and their scumbag customers operate, and they probably were counting on the fact that the colleges are run by clueless and credulous religious douchebags who could be very easily bullied around (I know, because I've met a few of them).
Looks like MediaSentry and their dickhead mates have created the chilling effect they were looking for. I just feel bad for the kid losing his college room, even if he was busted doing something wrong.