I've never watched or read anything by Ed Schultz and I can't stand MSNBC.
I get it from various online analysts, The Daily Show, RightWingWatch.org, and by watching actual clips of Fox News.
A couple quick examples are Fox's infamous reaction to the "ground zero mosque" and their demonization of one of the fundraisers who happened to be Fox's #2 shareholder (of course they'd never tell a viewer). They also employ contributors who claim in other venues that Obama tried to nuke the US.
So. Do you have any examples of MSNBC telling whoppers as large as the Ground Zero nonsense or employing contributors as whacky as Erik Rush?
Citing a Salon article that exposes Fox News? Pot, meet kettle...
Really? Salon certainly has a liberal slant, but Fox News regularly misleads its viewers and employs complete nutjobs as contributors. Maybe you could compare Salon to the WSJ but the only Liberalish news org I could think to compare Fox to is the Health section at the Huffington Post.
no one wants to get caught having assassinated someone over a bluff.
I think a lot of people learned an important lesson from the little metal ball with traces of ricin that was left in some dissidents leg.
Next time the ball will be made from something that dissolves in the human body.
It doesn't matter. To perform the assassination someone important has to authorize it. And if Snowden has taught them anything it's that no secret is completely safe.
NSLs only work because they're generally only used on companies or Lawyers who are obedient to government wishes, and against Muslim Arabs who are easy to stigmatize and be scared of.
Let them try it against a Caucasian geek who might not even be in the US, it will be a massive media scandal.
I'm not arguing that the US government isn't immensely powerful and willing to use that power, I'm arguing that the way the world is arranged wouldn't allow them to simply sort through the massive list of Snowden's potential insurance holders with heavy handed interrogations and threats.
They could figure it out through quiet and discrete investigative work, but they could also miss someone.
I'm not denying the government can do some pretty underhanded stuff. But they can't shut people up the way you're suggesting and they can't just make people disappear without other people noticing.
Well... reporter Judith Miller went to jail, for refusing to reveal her source.
I think, perhaps, you underestimate the government's capabilities.
I don't think so, my definition of "disappear" doesn't involve articles about your incarceration in the Washington Post and New York Times.
They can spy on people --- they can also potentially react in real-time, to squelch, what people have to say.
And social networks aren't really an end-run around it, either.
Ok, lets assume they have an army of agents watching me around the clock, they've intercepted my phone and internet and are ready at a moments notice to cut off the connection if I'm about to spill.
Then I disappear again and the story gets out anyways.
I don't argue that I can't fully empathize but I find it relevant since my father will probably face a similar situation in the near future (hopefully not nearly as severe).
What I was claiming as hyperbole was Adams' claims of wanting to kill the politicians, if Adams actually met the legislators I doubt it would go further than some emotional discussions.
I have no problem with the view that denying the option of euthanasia when it's their only release from pain is torture. You can claim the torture is necessary to preserve life, and you may be right, but it's still torture.
And if they don't swear and sign the doc what then? Disappear to Guantanamo?
I believe the standard line, is to persuade the person under interrogation, at the threat of being charged with obstruction of justice, or as an accomplice: if they aren't fully cooperative.
That's to extract information. There's a big difference between extracting information and coercing a signature.
they walk out of the cell and into a TV station and say "the government arrested and interrogated me because I'm a friend of Snowden's
That would be lousy surveillance. Agents would be tailing them. If they even approached a TV station, they would be cuffed on the street, and taken back, for further questioning.
So they wait a couple days. Or spill it in a chat session. Or call a reporter. You think they'll have a surveillance detail on Snowden's entire social network?
I'm not denying the government can do some pretty underhanded stuff. But they can't shut people up the way you're suggesting and they can't just make people disappear without other people noticing.
And if they don't swear and sign the doc what then? Disappear to Guantanamo? How long would it take for people to notice Snowden's friends vanishing?
And say they do sign, they walk out of the cell and into a TV station and say "the government arrested and interrogated me because I'm a friend of Snowden's, and they said they would imprison me indefinitely or charge me with trumped up charges unless I signed a doc agreeing to keep quiet about the experience". Hell, I wish the government would arrest me just so I could play those trump cards.
And the people who do want it to go off, well you might be bluffing, and no one wants to get caught having assassinated someone over a bluff.
There is another approach.... start detaining or "making disappear"; everyone Snowden had contact with; all his potential friends or accomplices / other people he is known to have dealt with --- and interrogate them all deeply, until someone reveals information about this doomesday system.
If indeed the password is only valid during limited times each day ---- that suggests some online computer systems to be taken down in a mysterious outage.
If it was Soviet Russia sure, but the whole point of this is that governments were being embarrassed by having their dirty secrets exposed. Look at all the uproar over Glenn Greenwald's husband being detained at Heathrow. Can you imagine if Snowden's friends and associates started receiving threatening visits with government agents? If anyone is going to go after Snowden they're either going to be very very quiet, or very very anonymous.
By having the secrets he's playing a very dangerous game, the safest course of action is to simply stop playing, release or destroy everything you have, tell everyone it's all gone, and now you're safely irrelevant.
Of course this still leaves you vulnerable to an Litvinenko style reprisal assassination.
The other play might be to hint you have a Doomsday Machine, but not actually confirm it. Claim it exists, but then make weird statements like saying the passwords "are valid for only a brief time window each day".
The people who don't want it to go off leave you alive in case you're not bluffing.
And the people who do want it to go off, well you might be bluffing, and no one wants to get caught having assassinated someone over a bluff.
For the record, I believe euthanasia laws need modernized. But wishing mass deaths on people who don't share your views is just wrong.
I don't have a lot of patience for violent political speech but I'm not troubled by this. It's clearly hyperbole designed to communicate his emotional stakes, he's not beseeching others to act violently or even saying the politicians deserve to die, he's saying their votes have caused so much pain he wants to hurt them in response.
I love how when anti-global warming types point at a big snow storm or what-have-you and say 'look, global warming can't be real!' and the pro-global warming crowd points out, rightly, 'weather isn't climate'... but then when there is a big wind storm or what-have-you the pro-global warming types start crying 'look what global warming is doing! waaaaa!'
Weather isn't climate.
Scientists very rarely claim a big weather event is due to global warming, at most they might say extreme weather events will be more likely, but by the nature of extreme events it's hard to get good evidence so they tend to hold back. As for the people who do make those claims, so what? Why should the scientifically unsupported claims of a supporter cast doubt on the scientific claims by researchers?
That being said, any fantasy about humanity being at risk for significant biological hardship is ludicrous considering that we can eat almost anything, live almost anywhere, are more resistant and adaptive to toxins and pathogens than most other large animals, and we have this thing called "technology" that allows us to move anything anywhere, radically adjust our environments, etc. etc.
We really need to get over the conceit that we developed in the one true immutable biosphere. 99% of previously extant species are extinct, and that's going to keep happening regardless of what we do because the environment has never been static. Without mass extinctions like what occurred during the Oxygen Catastrophe, animal life wouldn't even exist.
Technology isn't magic and we're still biological organisms. What happens if the combination of overfishing, temperature, pollution, and acidification cause mass extinctions in the oceans? Do we understand the ecosystem well enough to know that at some point there won't be a collapse of fisheries causing us to lose 90+% of the productivity? What happens if we have to double or triple the percentage of GDP we have to contribute to agriculture because the growing conditions are so much more hostile. In the west that's a pain, in India or China you suddenly have two massive countries with a lot of starving people and Nukes.
The Romans had really good tech for their time, roads, sanitation, agriculture, semi-elected governments (pre-imperial). Then they collapsed and it took a millennium for Western civilization to fully recover. Look how much havoc the meltdown caused with just one year of mild negative GDP growth. What do you think happens if the entire planet endures a decade or two of negative GDP growth due to the effects of global warming? I think we'd probably manage, but I'm sure the banks also thought they could manage the sub-prime crises in '08. I don't want to walk into an avoidable massive crisis just because I think we can probably handle it.
I've been on jury duty in a bullshit patent suit, and despite the obvious sane result, the judge's contrived question list ensures you cannot come up with any result other than what (s)he has already determined. There is no "let's discuss this" based on what was presented. Any jury not doing so will be kicked out and the trial starts from fresh.
Can you think of any non-BS software patents? The role of a jury isn't to write laws, it's to decide contested facts, aside from jury nullification whether or not you agree with the law is irrelevant, the question is whether the law was violated as written.
Western law's most important feature is its reproducibility. To the greatest extent possible you want the outcome to depend on established law and not the particular judge or jury you drew. The patent laws are BS, but the solution to fixing this isn't to have a handful of knowledgeable jurors change a handful of the cases, it's to fix the legislation so jurors can reach the correct decision without feeling it's unjust.
There is also the evolutionary model, which proposes that leadership requires vision that isn't swayed by other people. The tribe will occasionally need leaders, so it's an advantage to have some psychopaths in the population. They are the ones who can step back and analyze a situation rationally, who aren't helpless against the flow of public opinion, and are immune to groupthink and mob psychology.
I propose a simpler evolutionary model that doesn't require group selection.
Psychopathy is a high risk strategy. It could lead to a tribe member killing another tribe member for no good reason and getting killed themselves, or simply getting kicked out of the tribe for being untrustworthy and a poor team player. Or it could allow them to win the tribe leadership and accrue a lot of resources and offspring.
The fact that psychopaths are good at becoming leaders doesn't make them good leaders. They're more rational in some instances but they also have really poor judgment in other instances. And I think a leader is already far better positioned than most to avoid groupthink and particularly mob psychology, I'd be more concerned about the lack of empathy leading them to use groupthink and mob psychology for political purposes.
I wasn't able to find statistics but my understanding is boards don't get booted that often, and if they are afraid of being booted "I helped recruit star CEO X" is a better argument to stay around than "I made sure we paid the CEO 2% less than we would have otherwise!"
As for doing a "good job" there's a few ways that might be the case. First the CEO's increase in pay might cost the company more than the increased revenue over the cheaper candidate. Or the lure of CEO pay might draw talented individuals into management away from other jobs where they might do more good to the economy.
The market is good, but it isn't flawless, and large organizations have the ability to build structures that subvert the will of the market just as effectively as government.
I get the idea that market forces set the CEO wage through a combination of shareholders and customers, but I'm not sure it works well in practice.
Who tells the shareholders that the appropriate wage is for the CEO is $10 million? It's the boardmembers. And who are they? Other CEO's and highly ranked executives. They sincerely believe that company is above average and so their CEO is above average and deserves an above average salary. The marginal pay hike to the one individual is relatively mild to the company as a whole so there's no real market deterrent to this behaviour.
I don't think this Swiss proposal is the solution but I don't think the market forces are doing a good job either.
Even if it takes something as draconian as China's 1-child policy I'd definitely avoid relying on mass starvation as a mechanism of population control.
That's one thing about global warming that's different from other causes. Saw I donate to a charity to help 3rd world hunger, I don't know if the charity is well run, if they'll give away food, put the local farmers out of business, and make the problem worse, if it will end up in the hands of a warlord and also make it worse, etc.
But if I reduce my carbon emissions I have helped, it won't be much, but the contribution will have been unambiguously positive.
The claim isn't that because Christians did it before so it's "OK for Muslims to do it now".
It's that the label "Muslim" or "Christian" is useless when talking about these things.
There's a few beliefs and practices that are shared by nearly all Muslims or Christians, those are Muslim and Christian beliefs.
Jesus was the son of God is a Christian belief, Mohammad was a prophet is a Muslim belief.
There's some other beliefs that are common among Muslims or Christians, those are Muslim or Christian issues.
There are a lot of Christians who are creationist, there's support for this in the Bible. Creationism is a Christian issue. There are a lot of Muslims who follow strict Sharia, there's support for this in the Koran. Sharia law is a Muslim issue.
But to claim Creationism is a Christian belief or strict Sharia is a Muslim belief is false because there's a lot of devout Christians and Muslims who strongly disagree.
So I don't think it's a current threat since the default search is such a valuable commodity, but it's scary if it's their only major source of revenue.
The cash is so big now because Microsoft bid it up to try and steal the default away from Google. If something happens to make that default less valuable (MS pulls back on bing or something comes along and upends the search business) Mozilla loses a huge chunk of their funding. It's just an incredibly volatile revenue stream.
No argument here that's one of the reason I'm so skeptical about the insulin causing obesity theory. The arguments I see aren't even at the level of well done studies but arguments from the effectiveness of low carb diets and hypothesizing about metabolic mechanisms. I just see too much conflicting evidence and a lot of skepticism from researchers in the field.
Google, Yahoo, bing, Amazon, DuckDuckGo, eBay, twitter, Wikipedia
I'm pretty sure Wikipedia doesn't give a referral kickback, what about the others? How much do they pay? The contract between Mozilla and Firefox isn't the standard ad referral contract, there's only 4 big browsers, Chrome, Safari, IE, and Mozilla. Google doesn't care about referral revenue for their own browser, and IE is owned by their biggest competitor, Apple might be interested but they've already got a ton of cash. Mozilla is probably the only one for whom search referral cash is relevant.
Mozilla could threaten to make Yahoo or Bing the default if Google cuts their cash too much and that would definitely hurt, but that's still a huge dependency.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never watched or read anything by Ed Schultz and I can't stand MSNBC.
I get it from various online analysts, The Daily Show, RightWingWatch.org, and by watching actual clips of Fox News.
A couple quick examples are Fox's infamous reaction to the "ground zero mosque" and their demonization of one of the fundraisers who happened to be Fox's #2 shareholder (of course they'd never tell a viewer). They also employ contributors who claim in other venues that Obama tried to nuke the US.
So. Do you have any examples of MSNBC telling whoppers as large as the Ground Zero nonsense or employing contributors as whacky as Erik Rush?
Sadly not surprising. Hell, I believe even solitary confinement should be tossed out as a form of psychological torture.
I think they just found a new enhanced interrogation technique.
MSNBC is pretty awful but I'm not aware of any straight up deceptions (though I don't pay much attention to them so I may have missed them).
Citing a Salon article that exposes Fox News? Pot, meet kettle...
Really? Salon certainly has a liberal slant, but Fox News regularly misleads its viewers and employs complete nutjobs as contributors. Maybe you could compare Salon to the WSJ but the only Liberalish news org I could think to compare Fox to is the Health section at the Huffington Post.
no one wants to get caught having assassinated someone over a bluff.
I think a lot of people learned an important lesson from the little metal ball with traces of ricin that was left in some dissidents leg.
Next time the ball will be made from something that dissolves in the human body.
It doesn't matter. To perform the assassination someone important has to authorize it. And if Snowden has taught them anything it's that no secret is completely safe.
NSLs only work because they're generally only used on companies or Lawyers who are obedient to government wishes, and against Muslim Arabs who are easy to stigmatize and be scared of.
Let them try it against a Caucasian geek who might not even be in the US, it will be a massive media scandal.
I'm not arguing that the US government isn't immensely powerful and willing to use that power, I'm arguing that the way the world is arranged wouldn't allow them to simply sort through the massive list of Snowden's potential insurance holders with heavy handed interrogations and threats.
They could figure it out through quiet and discrete investigative work, but they could also miss someone.
I'm not denying the government can do some pretty underhanded stuff. But they can't shut people up the way you're suggesting and they can't just make people disappear without other people noticing.
Well... reporter Judith Miller went to jail, for refusing to reveal her source.
I think, perhaps, you underestimate the government's capabilities.
I don't think so, my definition of "disappear" doesn't involve articles about your incarceration in the Washington Post and New York Times.
They can spy on people --- they can also potentially react in real-time, to squelch, what people have to say.
And social networks aren't really an end-run around it, either.
Ok, lets assume they have an army of agents watching me around the clock, they've intercepted my phone and internet and are ready at a moments notice to cut off the connection if I'm about to spill.
Then I disappear again and the story gets out anyways.
I don't argue that I can't fully empathize but I find it relevant since my father will probably face a similar situation in the near future (hopefully not nearly as severe).
What I was claiming as hyperbole was Adams' claims of wanting to kill the politicians, if Adams actually met the legislators I doubt it would go further than some emotional discussions.
I have no problem with the view that denying the option of euthanasia when it's their only release from pain is torture. You can claim the torture is necessary to preserve life, and you may be right, but it's still torture.
And if they don't swear and sign the doc what then? Disappear to Guantanamo?
I believe the standard line, is to persuade the person under interrogation, at the threat of being charged with obstruction of justice, or as an accomplice: if they aren't fully cooperative.
That's to extract information. There's a big difference between extracting information and coercing a signature.
they walk out of the cell and into a TV station and say "the government arrested and interrogated me because I'm a friend of Snowden's
That would be lousy surveillance. Agents would be tailing them.
If they even approached a TV station, they would be cuffed on the street, and taken back, for further questioning.
So they wait a couple days. Or spill it in a chat session. Or call a reporter. You think they'll have a surveillance detail on Snowden's entire social network?
I'm not denying the government can do some pretty underhanded stuff. But they can't shut people up the way you're suggesting and they can't just make people disappear without other people noticing.
And if they don't swear and sign the doc what then? Disappear to Guantanamo? How long would it take for people to notice Snowden's friends vanishing?
And say they do sign, they walk out of the cell and into a TV station and say "the government arrested and interrogated me because I'm a friend of Snowden's, and they said they would imprison me indefinitely or charge me with trumped up charges unless I signed a doc agreeing to keep quiet about the experience". Hell, I wish the government would arrest me just so I could play those trump cards.
And the people who do want it to go off, well you might be bluffing, and no one wants to get caught having assassinated someone over a bluff.
There is another approach.... start detaining or "making disappear"; everyone Snowden had contact with;
all his potential friends or accomplices / other people he is known to have dealt with --- and interrogate them all deeply, until someone reveals information about this doomesday system.
If indeed the password is only valid during limited times each day ---- that suggests some online computer systems to be taken down in a mysterious outage.
If it was Soviet Russia sure, but the whole point of this is that governments were being embarrassed by having their dirty secrets exposed. Look at all the uproar over Glenn Greenwald's husband being detained at Heathrow. Can you imagine if Snowden's friends and associates started receiving threatening visits with government agents? If anyone is going to go after Snowden they're either going to be very very quiet, or very very anonymous.
That might actually be a good point.
By having the secrets he's playing a very dangerous game, the safest course of action is to simply stop playing, release or destroy everything you have, tell everyone it's all gone, and now you're safely irrelevant.
Of course this still leaves you vulnerable to an Litvinenko style reprisal assassination.
The other play might be to hint you have a Doomsday Machine, but not actually confirm it. Claim it exists, but then make weird statements like saying the passwords "are valid for only a brief time window each day".
The people who don't want it to go off leave you alive in case you're not bluffing.
And the people who do want it to go off, well you might be bluffing, and no one wants to get caught having assassinated someone over a bluff.
For the record, I believe euthanasia laws need modernized. But wishing mass deaths on people who don't share your views is just wrong.
I don't have a lot of patience for violent political speech but I'm not troubled by this. It's clearly hyperbole designed to communicate his emotional stakes, he's not beseeching others to act violently or even saying the politicians deserve to die, he's saying their votes have caused so much pain he wants to hurt them in response.
I love how when anti-global warming types point at a big snow storm or what-have-you and say 'look, global warming can't be real!' and the pro-global warming crowd points out, rightly, 'weather isn't climate' ... but then when there is a big wind storm or what-have-you the pro-global warming types start crying 'look what global warming is doing! waaaaa!'
Weather isn't climate.
Scientists very rarely claim a big weather event is due to global warming, at most they might say extreme weather events will be more likely, but by the nature of extreme events it's hard to get good evidence so they tend to hold back. As for the people who do make those claims, so what? Why should the scientifically unsupported claims of a supporter cast doubt on the scientific claims by researchers?
That being said, any fantasy about humanity being at risk for significant biological hardship is ludicrous considering that we can eat almost anything, live almost anywhere, are more resistant and adaptive to toxins and pathogens than most other large animals, and we have this thing called "technology" that allows us to move anything anywhere, radically adjust our environments, etc. etc.
We really need to get over the conceit that we developed in the one true immutable biosphere. 99% of previously extant species are extinct, and that's going to keep happening regardless of what we do because the environment has never been static. Without mass extinctions like what occurred during the Oxygen Catastrophe, animal life wouldn't even exist.
Technology isn't magic and we're still biological organisms. What happens if the combination of overfishing, temperature, pollution, and acidification cause mass extinctions in the oceans? Do we understand the ecosystem well enough to know that at some point there won't be a collapse of fisheries causing us to lose 90+% of the productivity? What happens if we have to double or triple the percentage of GDP we have to contribute to agriculture because the growing conditions are so much more hostile. In the west that's a pain, in India or China you suddenly have two massive countries with a lot of starving people and Nukes.
The Romans had really good tech for their time, roads, sanitation, agriculture, semi-elected governments (pre-imperial). Then they collapsed and it took a millennium for Western civilization to fully recover. Look how much havoc the meltdown caused with just one year of mild negative GDP growth. What do you think happens if the entire planet endures a decade or two of negative GDP growth due to the effects of global warming? I think we'd probably manage, but I'm sure the banks also thought they could manage the sub-prime crises in '08. I don't want to walk into an avoidable massive crisis just because I think we can probably handle it.
I've been on jury duty in a bullshit patent suit, and despite the obvious sane result, the judge's contrived question list ensures you cannot come up with any result other than what (s)he has already determined. There is no "let's discuss this" based on what was presented. Any jury not doing so will be kicked out and the trial starts from fresh.
Can you think of any non-BS software patents? The role of a jury isn't to write laws, it's to decide contested facts, aside from jury nullification whether or not you agree with the law is irrelevant, the question is whether the law was violated as written.
Western law's most important feature is its reproducibility. To the greatest extent possible you want the outcome to depend on established law and not the particular judge or jury you drew. The patent laws are BS, but the solution to fixing this isn't to have a handful of knowledgeable jurors change a handful of the cases, it's to fix the legislation so jurors can reach the correct decision without feeling it's unjust.
There is also the evolutionary model, which proposes that leadership requires vision that isn't swayed by other people. The tribe will occasionally need leaders, so it's an advantage to have some psychopaths in the population. They are the ones who can step back and analyze a situation rationally, who aren't helpless against the flow of public opinion, and are immune to groupthink and mob psychology.
I propose a simpler evolutionary model that doesn't require group selection.
Psychopathy is a high risk strategy. It could lead to a tribe member killing another tribe member for no good reason and getting killed themselves, or simply getting kicked out of the tribe for being untrustworthy and a poor team player. Or it could allow them to win the tribe leadership and accrue a lot of resources and offspring.
The fact that psychopaths are good at becoming leaders doesn't make them good leaders. They're more rational in some instances but they also have really poor judgment in other instances. And I think a leader is already far better positioned than most to avoid groupthink and particularly mob psychology, I'd be more concerned about the lack of empathy leading them to use groupthink and mob psychology for political purposes.
I wasn't able to find statistics but my understanding is boards don't get booted that often, and if they are afraid of being booted "I helped recruit star CEO X" is a better argument to stay around than "I made sure we paid the CEO 2% less than we would have otherwise!"
As for doing a "good job" there's a few ways that might be the case. First the CEO's increase in pay might cost the company more than the increased revenue over the cheaper candidate. Or the lure of CEO pay might draw talented individuals into management away from other jobs where they might do more good to the economy.
The market is good, but it isn't flawless, and large organizations have the ability to build structures that subvert the will of the market just as effectively as government.
I get the idea that market forces set the CEO wage through a combination of shareholders and customers, but I'm not sure it works well in practice.
Who tells the shareholders that the appropriate wage is for the CEO is $10 million? It's the boardmembers. And who are they? Other CEO's and highly ranked executives. They sincerely believe that company is above average and so their CEO is above average and deserves an above average salary. The marginal pay hike to the one individual is relatively mild to the company as a whole so there's no real market deterrent to this behaviour.
I don't think this Swiss proposal is the solution but I don't think the market forces are doing a good job either.
Even if it takes something as draconian as China's 1-child policy I'd definitely avoid relying on mass starvation as a mechanism of population control.
But it will be something.
That's one thing about global warming that's different from other causes. Saw I donate to a charity to help 3rd world hunger, I don't know if the charity is well run, if they'll give away food, put the local farmers out of business, and make the problem worse, if it will end up in the hands of a warlord and also make it worse, etc.
But if I reduce my carbon emissions I have helped, it won't be much, but the contribution will have been unambiguously positive.
The claim isn't that because Christians did it before so it's "OK for Muslims to do it now".
It's that the label "Muslim" or "Christian" is useless when talking about these things.
There's a few beliefs and practices that are shared by nearly all Muslims or Christians, those are Muslim and Christian beliefs.
Jesus was the son of God is a Christian belief, Mohammad was a prophet is a Muslim belief.
There's some other beliefs that are common among Muslims or Christians, those are Muslim or Christian issues.
There are a lot of Christians who are creationist, there's support for this in the Bible. Creationism is a Christian issue.
There are a lot of Muslims who follow strict Sharia, there's support for this in the Koran. Sharia law is a Muslim issue.
But to claim Creationism is a Christian belief or strict Sharia is a Muslim belief is false because there's a lot of devout Christians and Muslims who strongly disagree.
So I don't think it's a current threat since the default search is such a valuable commodity, but it's scary if it's their only major source of revenue.
The cash is so big now because Microsoft bid it up to try and steal the default away from Google. If something happens to make that default less valuable (MS pulls back on bing or something comes along and upends the search business) Mozilla loses a huge chunk of their funding. It's just an incredibly volatile revenue stream.
No argument here that's one of the reason I'm so skeptical about the insulin causing obesity theory. The arguments I see aren't even at the level of well done studies but arguments from the effectiveness of low carb diets and hypothesizing about metabolic mechanisms. I just see too much conflicting evidence and a lot of skepticism from researchers in the field.
Checking the search dropdown:
Google, Yahoo, bing, Amazon, DuckDuckGo, eBay, twitter, Wikipedia
I'm pretty sure Wikipedia doesn't give a referral kickback, what about the others? How much do they pay? The contract between Mozilla and Firefox isn't the standard ad referral contract, there's only 4 big browsers, Chrome, Safari, IE, and Mozilla. Google doesn't care about referral revenue for their own browser, and IE is owned by their biggest competitor, Apple might be interested but they've already got a ton of cash. Mozilla is probably the only one for whom search referral cash is relevant.
Mozilla could threaten to make Yahoo or Bing the default if Google cuts their cash too much and that would definitely hurt, but that's still a huge dependency.