For twenty years, it's been "stop asking questions, the science is settled, you're evil people for questioning our well-established and peer-reviewed science!"
Now, after we find out that much of the experimental and observational basis for Global Warmology is actually a scam, it's "you're still evil for asking all of those questions (even though they turned out to have a good foundation for skepticism, and you were pretty much right about the weak science), but we're now very willing to work with you to find out what the REAL science is. And, by the way, we're still going to want to control the debate, and the peer review is going to be under our control, but feel free to submit any questions you may have to our Web page..."
It's even better - the source cited in the story above is the CRU (funny how "University of East Anglia" started being the source when everyone found out that CRU was more than a bit corrupt) - the same people who just got busted with all of that leaked data and incriminating emails just this week.
So they apparently decided to double down on their predictions, instead of trying to pretend nothing happened - but hiding the provenance.
Anyone want to bet the lead author on the paper wasn't the lead author last week, and got "promoted" when the real researchers' names were tainted?
I'm writing from the UK, so no matter what happens to *your* power grid, it won't affect *our* power grid....unless you bought your control hardware and software from the same people we bought ours from (hint: to a moderate degree, you did).
Or unless you have equipment with similar issues in similar conditions.
As far as the "leaving laptops on seats" security issue, you must not have noticed the recent round of "British government officials leaving laptops on trains" stories.
There is now room for both the small, single-person game shop (as long as that person is a programmer, game designer, artist, editor, and publicist) and the major, high-dollar, high-end company (yes, it costs money to create really big games). That small-game person becomes... the publisher. On a smaller scale, but the same thing a "game publisher" does.
If you're good, you can create a one-author game, put it online, and let people download it for some amount of money. If you want to make money with it, or get more than a few dozen people to buy/play it, you're going to need some sort of promotion. Which means you either need to hire a promotion group, or farm the game out to someone who will promote it (take out ads, convince reviewers to play it, etc). You know - a publisher.
If you put together a team (ten or twelve people), create a hugely successful "big" game, market it, and make a lot of money at it, bad news - YOU'RE the publisher...
Ignoring, of course, that by signing the NNPT, Iran agrees to NOT develop nuclear weapons.
They signed as a "non nuclear weapons state." By doing so, they have the right to access peaceful forms of nuclear energy, and to receive assistance from the nuclear weapons owning states to help develop peaceful nuclear power.
Under the NNPT, they also agree to inspections to PROVE they're not trying to build nuclear weapons, and safeguards to show that they're not trying to divert materials and technology to a nuclear weapons program. Iran has completely ignored the last part of this agreement. The fact that they had a secret enrichment plant under construction demonstrates this quite nicely.
On the other hand, Israel never signed the NNPT, and is not bound by it.
Just remember, "building a nuclear weapon" requires technology from 64 years ago.
"Building a thermonuclear weapon" requires technology from 55 years ago.
"Compact thermonuclear warheads" (deployable on medium-sized missiles) requires technology from 47 years ago.
On the engineering and manufacturing side, the hard part is creating metal parts with really, really fine tolerances. Which requires machining equipment you can buy for under a hundred thousand dollars nowadays.
The only hard part about building a nuclear weapon is getting the materials...
Commodore's BASIC was licensed from Microsoft with a one-time fee. If I were Apple, I wouldn't let Microsoft BASIC anywhere NEAR this emulator until I got a signed legal document from Microsoft saying that the license covered all derivatives of the Commodore device, or that Apple had a free and clear right to use it.
We keep hearing about how dumb American kids are, but the big issue isn't whether they know the answers to easy questions - it's whether they're going to bother to give the right answers.
"Well, I can spend the next half hour answering all of the questions on this stupid standardized test that's not going to impact my grade and that will do me no good whatsoever, or I can fill in all of the bubbles in thirty seconds and spend the rest of the time thinking about what I'm going to do after school. Yeah, tough choice." The smart, competitive kids will work hard, the not-as-smart but dutiful kids will do what they can, and the rest of them will blow it off because it really doesn't matter to anyone except the person giving the test.
More than 90% of those "ten thousand" scientists who publicly support global warming did nothing at all to prove or disprove the theory - they're researchers in related (and often unrelated) fields who took government money, wrote a paper, tacked "and was caused by Global Warming" onto whatever they were working on before, and got published. Tens of billions of dollars in government money over the last couple of decades have made sure that many scientists have a distinct financial advantage if they support global warming.
When that doesn't work, there's even private money available, like the several hundred thousand dollars in "awards" given to James Hansen of NASA for coming up with the "right" numbers that seem to support AGW - for example, temperatures which (over the last decade) disagree with pretty much all of the other temperature observations reported by other organizations. Apparently, NASA took their raw data, "corrected" it, and then released it to the world in heavily edited form. Another win for "private" science.
The actual, no-kidding, original "research" (simulations that are still pretty well obscured and/or disproven) leading to the theory of anthropogenic global warming was done by a very small number of scientists. Some of them were working in fields that gave them no practical expertise in the science involved, and much of the initial (and still obscured) results were created in simulations that have since been shown to be completely false, such as the "Hockey Stick" that STILL shows up in many "serious" AGW papers. A big problem is that much of the statistical work was done by people with a very weak background in actual statistics (or just enough of a background to know how to cherry-pick numbers and formulas to get the results they wanted).
You might note that the "knee surgery is no better than sham knee surgery" study was only about osteoarthritis. The vast majority of knee surgeries are for repairing injuries, not for arthritis treatment.
That said, a surprising amount of medical treatment is out of date. Most doctors do the same things they learned in med school, or in the early years of their practices. There are still a lot of doctors who don't believe in (or even know about) the role of Helicobacter Pylori in peptic ulcers.
On the other hand, due to the insane amount of regulation in the medical field, getting the word out on new procedures is often like running through a minefield. If you come out with something new and useful, and make claims about how effective it is, you're setting yourself up for huge lawsuits if some doctor screws up the treatment (or if someone isn't cured when they really think they should be).
A while back, I worked in a video production place where the lead engineer was an asshole. He was rude to everyone, and made a point of telling everyone how irreplaceable he was in every way.
Meanwhile, he spent most of his day sitting in his office, looking through hardware catalogs - and never bought anything useful. Once in a while, some computer or video box would arrive, he'd have me unpack it and set it up, and then he'd berate the poor people who had to use them for not knowing how (he bought a really cool SGI workstation and dumped it on a girl who had never even seen one - she was a Photoshop artist).
He used to set really long schedules for simple things, too - he told me I had to come in for a couple of months on weekends to put connectors and labels on a bunch of prerun video cables. It took me four hours. So he got mad, and told me I had to come in anyway, because he'd already set the schedule, and it was my fault for working too fast (and he also complained about paying me overtime, instead of thanking me for doing it fast and correctly).
They can't return anything from an FOIA request if they don't have anything on you.
I had a friend who was absolutely certain that the FBI had a bunch of stuff on him. He just knew that they were keeping tabs on him so they could "do something" if he ever got out of line.
The thing is, he'd never done anything. No criminal record, no tax issues, no affiliations with any group. He had some extremely mild anti-tax and anti-bureaucracy views, but didn't even talk about them that much, and never acted on them.
So when he filed his FOIA request for all records, he got back nothing. Which made him even MORE paranoid. So he filed another one, for all surveillance tapes and records that they'd "hidden" the first time.
I think he ended up filing three or four FOIA requests, until someone from the FBI came around and explained, very carefully, that he really wasn't very interesting.
1. Richer countries like the US and UK are subsidizing this drug program. You don't honestly think GSK is going to give up its profits now do you...
They've been doing this sort of thing for decades, and YES, they've been giving up profits.
2. They are putting some of their patents in a "patent pool", whatever that means, instead of doing the real "right thing" and releasing those patents to the public domain. Torpedo patents anyone...
It keeps fly-by-night Third World companies from producing crappy, ineffective versions of the real products. It also reduces (by a large amount) the chance that they'll be sued by some idiot because one of those nobody companies comes out with a harmful version of the drug that ends up killing or injuring a lot of people (yes, that happens, and when it does, there will be people just like you complaining because those Big Pharma folks should have done something).
3. This isn't an attempt to "do good" more than it is an attempt to stop countries from ignoring their patents and developing generics on their own. A little profit is better than no profit in their eyes. Besides, as 1 above suggests, they will make it up off the richer countries.
This whole paragraph is just plain old uninformed bashing of a whole industry, with no proof. I've worked with pretty much all of the big pharmaceutical companies, and they've been doing good of this sort for a long time, selling good medicines to people all over the world - and paying for it with profits made from the rich countries. The money has to come from somewhere. IF they give all of their profits away, NOBODY CAN AFFORD TO DO THE RESEARCH.
This is a multi-billion dollar a year industry we are talking about here....creating drugs which literally cost billions of dollars to create. For every drug that makes it to market, there are THOUSANDS of compounds that have to be investigated. Out of those thousands, there are hundreds that take more research to find out if they have obvious harmful side effects. Of those hundreds, there are dozens that may work. When you get down to five or six candidates, you have to spend millions upon millions of dollars to see if they're effective and safe. Then you have to figure out if you can make enough of the stuff, in pure enough form, to be cost-effective. Then (because the patent term has mostly run out while you were doing all of this) you have to sell the new drugs for a lot of money, for a very few years, and hope that it pays for itself before some OTHER company comes out with something similar for half the price, and before the patent runs out.
They have no conscience and no morals. Profit is their only motivator. No company does anything out of the goodness of their heart unless it will lead to greater profits and/or market dominance. This is doubly so with the drug industry.
You really don't know anything about these guys, except what you see in bad Hollywood productions.
I've had the privilege to sit in rooms with hundreds of pharmaceutical employees, from the lowest salesmen to the head of the company, watching dozens of people crying their eyes out because they came out with a new, better treatment for AIDS that would save lives. No, they weren't crying because they were going to make money (the product wasn't going to be that profitable), they were celebrating because they DO GOOD THINGS.
I've listened to CEOs talk, off-the-record, with their top people, happily bragging about a new program to get free drugs to poor people (no, not that "first taste" BS, but long-term free treatment for many hundreds or thousands of people, with no set end date - it's been going on for a long time, too. The under-the-table "free samples for life" thing has been around for years, they just made it official and expanded it).
If you want to see someone with no conscience and no morals, look in a mirror. It takes that sort of person to trash people when you don't know anything about them or about what they actually do for a living - or why they do it.
"It is likely that methane emissions off Svalbard have been continuous for about 15,000 years - since the last ice age - but as yet no one knows whether recent climactic shifts in the Arctic have begun to accelerate them to a point where they could in themselves exacerbate climate change, he said."
In other words, no, anthropogenic climate change doesn't seem to have a real link to this.
The "missing methane" problem is still there. Despite this (and other) clathrate/methane releases, actual MEASURED methane in the atmosphere isn't anywhere near high enough to make up the difference in the IPCC's predictions.
Clathrates at this sort of depth are more pressure-sensitive than temperature-sensitive, and according to the IPCC and others, the oceans are supposed to get deeper as the ice caps melt. So they have to choose one or the other scenario - they can't have both.
Of course, you just misrepresented what the guy actually notes in his article, but one other thing about EDGE vs 3G: a lot of the time, I get solid EDGE connections with good throughput, where the 3G guys are waving their phones around trying to get ANY connection whatsoever.
It turns out that of that 1,000 incidents, 700 of them were from people at the companies sending too much (unrequested) information, not from over-intrusive FBI snooping. A few of the incidents had the agents sending out new letters requesting permission to use the extra info, but pretty much all of them were just discarded or filed away without anyone going through them (because you know someone would want to have a record of what was received, not what the agents actually wanted or used).
So out of that "1,000" it turns out to be 300 or less.
Because, as the article notes, it was "suspected" violations, not proven or even substantially indicated ones.
And this is out of what, almost 50,000 pieces of info requested? And that includes things like credit reports and other semi-public records - it's not like they're digging really deep for most of this. You get more investigation when you apply for a job with many companies.
A much less than 1% error rate is pretty damned good...
...except the CIA never really did what you dreamed they did (the Russian claim is like many - it never had any basis in reality).
Why manufacture AK-47s when they could buy them by the thousands in the open market, from Soviet factories, or from their clients around the world at pennies on the dollar?
The only people the Russians are going after right now are companies that, when they went into production of the rifle, were ORDERED to make them - not exactly a good argument for intellectual property rights, or any property rights at all.
And, as I pointed out below, any patent that might have been possible would have expired about 40 years back.
The whole "1999 Russian patent claim" thing comes from one unsourced comment in one Wikipedia article, anyway - I have to wonder about the actual truth of the claim in the first place.
From the posts here, it seems we have two schools: the people who think it's a bogus claim, and the ones who are still Really Pissed about allofMP3.com having problems.
Ousama Bin Laden who was considered a good guy back then that was financed by the CIA
Actually, he wasn't. The US was funding a different set of Afghans versus the Soviets at the time (there were multiple groups fighting them), and bin Laden was getting his support from the Saudis and other Islamists. That's part of the reason he dislikes the US so much - we were funding his competition.
Generally, "Project Censored" relies on people believing whatever they suggest, and not realizing that most of the reason people ignored those stories was that they were, well, just plain wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
For twenty years, it's been "stop asking questions, the science is settled, you're evil people for questioning our well-established and peer-reviewed science!"
Now, after we find out that much of the experimental and observational basis for Global Warmology is actually a scam, it's "you're still evil for asking all of those questions (even though they turned out to have a good foundation for skepticism, and you were pretty much right about the weak science), but we're now very willing to work with you to find out what the REAL science is. And, by the way, we're still going to want to control the debate, and the peer review is going to be under our control, but feel free to submit any questions you may have to our Web page..."
It's even better - the source cited in the story above is the CRU (funny how "University of East Anglia" started being the source when everyone found out that CRU was more than a bit corrupt) - the same people who just got busted with all of that leaked data and incriminating emails just this week.
So they apparently decided to double down on their predictions, instead of trying to pretend nothing happened - but hiding the provenance.
Anyone want to bet the lead author on the paper wasn't the lead author last week, and got "promoted" when the real researchers' names were tainted?
I'm writing from the UK, so no matter what happens to *your* power grid, it won't affect *our* power grid. ...unless you bought your control hardware and software from the same people we bought ours from (hint: to a moderate degree, you did).
Or unless you have equipment with similar issues in similar conditions.
As far as the "leaving laptops on seats" security issue, you must not have noticed the recent round of "British government officials leaving laptops on trains" stories.
Oops.
There is now room for both the small, single-person game shop (as long as that person is a programmer, game designer, artist, editor, and publicist) and the major, high-dollar, high-end company (yes, it costs money to create really big games). That small-game person becomes... the publisher. On a smaller scale, but the same thing a "game publisher" does.
If you're good, you can create a one-author game, put it online, and let people download it for some amount of money. If you want to make money with it, or get more than a few dozen people to buy/play it, you're going to need some sort of promotion. Which means you either need to hire a promotion group, or farm the game out to someone who will promote it (take out ads, convince reviewers to play it, etc). You know - a publisher.
If you put together a team (ten or twelve people), create a hugely successful "big" game, market it, and make a lot of money at it, bad news - YOU'RE the publisher...
Ignoring, of course, that by signing the NNPT, Iran agrees to NOT develop nuclear weapons.
They signed as a "non nuclear weapons state." By doing so, they have the right to access peaceful forms of nuclear energy, and to receive assistance from the nuclear weapons owning states to help develop peaceful nuclear power.
Under the NNPT, they also agree to inspections to PROVE they're not trying to build nuclear weapons, and safeguards to show that they're not trying to divert materials and technology to a nuclear weapons program. Iran has completely ignored the last part of this agreement. The fact that they had a secret enrichment plant under construction demonstrates this quite nicely.
On the other hand, Israel never signed the NNPT, and is not bound by it.
Just remember, "building a nuclear weapon" requires technology from 64 years ago.
"Building a thermonuclear weapon" requires technology from 55 years ago.
"Compact thermonuclear warheads" (deployable on medium-sized missiles) requires technology from 47 years ago.
On the engineering and manufacturing side, the hard part is creating metal parts with really, really fine tolerances. Which requires machining equipment you can buy for under a hundred thousand dollars nowadays.
The only hard part about building a nuclear weapon is getting the materials...
Commodore's BASIC was licensed from Microsoft with a one-time fee. If I were Apple, I wouldn't let Microsoft BASIC anywhere NEAR this emulator until I got a signed legal document from Microsoft saying that the license covered all derivatives of the Commodore device, or that Apple had a free and clear right to use it.
We keep hearing about how dumb American kids are, but the big issue isn't whether they know the answers to easy questions - it's whether they're going to bother to give the right answers.
"Well, I can spend the next half hour answering all of the questions on this stupid standardized test that's not going to impact my grade and that will do me no good whatsoever, or I can fill in all of the bubbles in thirty seconds and spend the rest of the time thinking about what I'm going to do after school. Yeah, tough choice." The smart, competitive kids will work hard, the not-as-smart but dutiful kids will do what they can, and the rest of them will blow it off because it really doesn't matter to anyone except the person giving the test.
More than 90% of those "ten thousand" scientists who publicly support global warming did nothing at all to prove or disprove the theory - they're researchers in related (and often unrelated) fields who took government money, wrote a paper, tacked "and was caused by Global Warming" onto whatever they were working on before, and got published. Tens of billions of dollars in government money over the last couple of decades have made sure that many scientists have a distinct financial advantage if they support global warming.
When that doesn't work, there's even private money available, like the several hundred thousand dollars in "awards" given to James Hansen of NASA for coming up with the "right" numbers that seem to support AGW - for example, temperatures which (over the last decade) disagree with pretty much all of the other temperature observations reported by other organizations. Apparently, NASA took their raw data, "corrected" it, and then released it to the world in heavily edited form. Another win for "private" science.
The actual, no-kidding, original "research" (simulations that are still pretty well obscured and/or disproven) leading to the theory of anthropogenic global warming was done by a very small number of scientists. Some of them were working in fields that gave them no practical expertise in the science involved, and much of the initial (and still obscured) results were created in simulations that have since been shown to be completely false, such as the "Hockey Stick" that STILL shows up in many "serious" AGW papers. A big problem is that much of the statistical work was done by people with a very weak background in actual statistics (or just enough of a background to know how to cherry-pick numbers and formulas to get the results they wanted).
One of the NASA designs from long ago had a "parachute" made of stainless steel cloth that slowed the capsule during reentry...
You might note that the "knee surgery is no better than sham knee surgery" study was only about osteoarthritis. The vast majority of knee surgeries are for repairing injuries, not for arthritis treatment.
That said, a surprising amount of medical treatment is out of date. Most doctors do the same things they learned in med school, or in the early years of their practices. There are still a lot of doctors who don't believe in (or even know about) the role of Helicobacter Pylori in peptic ulcers.
On the other hand, due to the insane amount of regulation in the medical field, getting the word out on new procedures is often like running through a minefield. If you come out with something new and useful, and make claims about how effective it is, you're setting yourself up for huge lawsuits if some doctor screws up the treatment (or if someone isn't cured when they really think they should be).
A while back, I worked in a video production place where the lead engineer was an asshole. He was rude to everyone, and made a point of telling everyone how irreplaceable he was in every way.
Meanwhile, he spent most of his day sitting in his office, looking through hardware catalogs - and never bought anything useful. Once in a while, some computer or video box would arrive, he'd have me unpack it and set it up, and then he'd berate the poor people who had to use them for not knowing how (he bought a really cool SGI workstation and dumped it on a girl who had never even seen one - she was a Photoshop artist).
He used to set really long schedules for simple things, too - he told me I had to come in for a couple of months on weekends to put connectors and labels on a bunch of prerun video cables. It took me four hours. So he got mad, and told me I had to come in anyway, because he'd already set the schedule, and it was my fault for working too fast (and he also complained about paying me overtime, instead of thanking me for doing it fast and correctly).
Yes, these people do exist...
They can't return anything from an FOIA request if they don't have anything on you.
I had a friend who was absolutely certain that the FBI had a bunch of stuff on him. He just knew that they were keeping tabs on him so they could "do something" if he ever got out of line.
The thing is, he'd never done anything. No criminal record, no tax issues, no affiliations with any group. He had some extremely mild anti-tax and anti-bureaucracy views, but didn't even talk about them that much, and never acted on them.
So when he filed his FOIA request for all records, he got back nothing. Which made him even MORE paranoid. So he filed another one, for all surveillance tapes and records that they'd "hidden" the first time.
I think he ended up filing three or four FOIA requests, until someone from the FBI came around and explained, very carefully, that he really wasn't very interesting.
1. Richer countries like the US and UK are subsidizing this drug program. You don't honestly think GSK is going to give up its profits now do you...
They've been doing this sort of thing for decades, and YES, they've been giving up profits.
2. They are putting some of their patents in a "patent pool", whatever that means, instead of doing the real "right thing" and releasing those patents to the public domain. Torpedo patents anyone...
It keeps fly-by-night Third World companies from producing crappy, ineffective versions of the real products. It also reduces (by a large amount) the chance that they'll be sued by some idiot because one of those nobody companies comes out with a harmful version of the drug that ends up killing or injuring a lot of people (yes, that happens, and when it does, there will be people just like you complaining because those Big Pharma folks should have done something).
3. This isn't an attempt to "do good" more than it is an attempt to stop countries from ignoring their patents and developing generics on their own. A little profit is better than no profit in their eyes. Besides, as 1 above suggests, they will make it up off the richer countries.
This whole paragraph is just plain old uninformed bashing of a whole industry, with no proof. I've worked with pretty much all of the big pharmaceutical companies, and they've been doing good of this sort for a long time, selling good medicines to people all over the world - and paying for it with profits made from the rich countries. The money has to come from somewhere. IF they give all of their profits away, NOBODY CAN AFFORD TO DO THE RESEARCH.
This is a multi-billion dollar a year industry we are talking about here. ...creating drugs which literally cost billions of dollars to create. For every drug that makes it to market, there are THOUSANDS of compounds that have to be investigated. Out of those thousands, there are hundreds that take more research to find out if they have obvious harmful side effects. Of those hundreds, there are dozens that may work. When you get down to five or six candidates, you have to spend millions upon millions of dollars to see if they're effective and safe. Then you have to figure out if you can make enough of the stuff, in pure enough form, to be cost-effective. Then (because the patent term has mostly run out while you were doing all of this) you have to sell the new drugs for a lot of money, for a very few years, and hope that it pays for itself before some OTHER company comes out with something similar for half the price, and before the patent runs out.
They have no conscience and no morals. Profit is their only motivator. No company does anything out of the goodness of their heart unless it will lead to greater profits and/or market dominance. This is doubly so with the drug industry.
You really don't know anything about these guys, except what you see in bad Hollywood productions.
I've had the privilege to sit in rooms with hundreds of pharmaceutical employees, from the lowest salesmen to the head of the company, watching dozens of people crying their eyes out because they came out with a new, better treatment for AIDS that would save lives. No, they weren't crying because they were going to make money (the product wasn't going to be that profitable), they were celebrating because they DO GOOD THINGS.
I've listened to CEOs talk, off-the-record, with their top people, happily bragging about a new program to get free drugs to poor people (no, not that "first taste" BS, but long-term free treatment for many hundreds or thousands of people, with no set end date - it's been going on for a long time, too. The under-the-table "free samples for life" thing has been around for years, they just made it official and expanded it).
If you want to see someone with no conscience and no morals, look in a mirror. It takes that sort of person to trash people when you don't know anything about them or about what they actually do for a living - or why they do it.
"It's called thermal inertia"
No, it's really not, at least in this case.
From the article:
"It is likely that methane emissions off Svalbard have been continuous for about 15,000 years - since the last ice age - but as yet no one knows whether recent climactic shifts in the Arctic have begun to accelerate them to a point where they could in themselves exacerbate climate change, he said."
In other words, no, anthropogenic climate change doesn't seem to have a real link to this.
The "missing methane" problem is still there. Despite this (and other) clathrate/methane releases, actual MEASURED methane in the atmosphere isn't anywhere near high enough to make up the difference in the IPCC's predictions.
Clathrates at this sort of depth are more pressure-sensitive than temperature-sensitive, and according to the IPCC and others, the oceans are supposed to get deeper as the ice caps melt. So they have to choose one or the other scenario - they can't have both.
That way, your wife can say, "It's very, very dense. Just like my husband."
Age?
Why not just buy a ring with +5 INT and +10 WISDOM on it?
Of course, you just misrepresented what the guy actually notes in his article, but one other thing about EDGE vs 3G: a lot of the time, I get solid EDGE connections with good throughput, where the 3G guys are waving their phones around trying to get ANY connection whatsoever.
...for 99 cents, and they could make back a big part of the cost of the test...
It turns out that of that 1,000 incidents, 700 of them were from people at the companies sending too much (unrequested) information, not from over-intrusive FBI snooping. A few of the incidents had the agents sending out new letters requesting permission to use the extra info, but pretty much all of them were just discarded or filed away without anyone going through them (because you know someone would want to have a record of what was received, not what the agents actually wanted or used).
So out of that "1,000" it turns out to be 300 or less.
Because, as the article notes, it was "suspected" violations, not proven or even substantially indicated ones.
And this is out of what, almost 50,000 pieces of info requested? And that includes things like credit reports and other semi-public records - it's not like they're digging really deep for most of this. You get more investigation when you apply for a job with many companies.
A much less than 1% error rate is pretty damned good...
North Carolina has 78,000 miles of roads, the most of any state.
Which means an average of less than $16,000 per road mile for maintenance AND new construction.
Sounds about right.
...except the CIA never really did what you dreamed they did (the Russian claim is like many - it never had any basis in reality).
Why manufacture AK-47s when they could buy them by the thousands in the open market, from Soviet factories, or from their clients around the world at pennies on the dollar?
The only people the Russians are going after right now are companies that, when they went into production of the rifle, were ORDERED to make them - not exactly a good argument for intellectual property rights, or any property rights at all.
And, as I pointed out below, any patent that might have been possible would have expired about 40 years back.
The whole "1999 Russian patent claim" thing comes from one unsourced comment in one Wikipedia article, anyway - I have to wonder about the actual truth of the claim in the first place.
From the posts here, it seems we have two schools: the people who think it's a bogus claim, and the ones who are still Really Pissed about allofMP3.com having problems.
Ousama Bin Laden who was considered a good guy back then that was financed by the CIA
Actually, he wasn't. The US was funding a different set of Afghans versus the Soviets at the time (there were multiple groups fighting them), and bin Laden was getting his support from the Saudis and other Islamists. That's part of the reason he dislikes the US so much - we were funding his competition.
Unfortunately, according to their own patent laws, they can't patent the AK-47.
"The invention shall be granted legal protection if it is novel,
possesses an inventive level and is commercially applicable."
Since it's been in production for over 50 years, it's certainly not "novel."
If they argue for patentability from the initial design, then the patent time lapsed many years ago (their protection limits max out at 20 years).
So no, it's not "the law," it's just Russia being Russia.
...in the Congo story, at least.
Generally, "Project Censored" relies on people believing whatever they suggest, and not realizing that most of the reason people ignored those stories was that they were, well, just plain wrong.