There are two problems leading to situations like this, firstly the TSA screeners have little more then a high-school diploma and a weeks training, because of this, management, in true government from, treats them like idiots.
To be frank, some of the staff at US airports appear to have an IQ barely above imbecility. I've been in the US four times, and nowhere else have I seen such unfriendly, unhelpful, and downright hostile personnel than at the airports. A man whose only job appeared to be holding a sign pointing to a gate refused to show us the way to the toilets. Another man went through our bags before we boarded and found the remains of a coconut which we'd intended to eat on the plane; he turned to me (I was 12 at the time), said "you must be a real idiot" and threw it in the garbage. If people like that are employed by the TSA, I'm hardly shocked that situations like the one with the little girl make the news every few weeks. If those dimwits don't know how to properly interact with passengers, put them in a position where they don't have to, or don't hire them.
Last year, we did a trip around Iceland. Before our return flight, when we waited at the security check, we found that we still had some 2 liter bottles of lemonade in our bags. So we started chugging away (don't like to waste food), and a security guy came up to us. He told us to relax and take the bottles on the plane. "This is Reykjavik, not New York. Have a nice flight."
I'm really upset by this. As an Austrian, I'm appalled that our courts would issue an order to clone the complete disk of our Mixmaster node (btw, yes, I know the maintainer personally). The Pittsburgh bomb threats are serious business, and I'd like nothing more than see these "pranksters" (as they see themselves) brought to justice for what they've done. But that doesn't mean that everybody else's secrets have to be exposed at the request of a foreign nation. Where do you draw the line? Which nations can request the data on our servers, and what reason would be strong enough to grant the request? Are the US special in some way? What if the Saudis heard of an unmarried woman having cyber-relations over Mixmaster? What if China wants to track down dissidents?
This shouldn't have been allowed.
And don't forget, so far we've heard of two compromised Mixmaster relays in two weeks. I'm sure that there are others that we'll never hear about, in addition to the ones run by the US agencies in the first place. There is a very real chance that the FBI will soon have collected enough keys to decrypt and follow a significant percentage of Mixmaster-anonymized mails.
Who gives these people the right to snoop into the affairs of thousands of unrelated people in other nations? I know, in this case the answer is: the Austrian courts gave them the right. That's why I'm so upset. The FBI can't be blamed for trying, but small as our country is, we shouldn't have bowed down so readily.
Before someone mistakes you for a troll, I guess I'd better link to an explanation. 14 years ago, somebody at Microsoft left a dangerous backdoor in Frontpage 98, with the phrase "Netscape engineers are weenies!" as the key. People were fired over this, and so should the persons responsible for the SNAFU at Rugged.
Wish I could mod you up. I'd almost forgotten about that.
I have so much stress these last 5 years that I've about had breakdown (life, economy, working long hours to keep my job..ect). I don't drink, smoke, or do anything physically abusive. But I feel like I've aged 10 years.
Have you ever thought about indulging yourself a little and having a beer once in a while, just to take the edge off a little? Too much of anything is bad, of course, by definition, but a little can go a long way. I've long had the suspicion that people in cultures where alcohol is completely prohibited tend to get too worked up over small and unimportant things. I also treasure the evenings where my friends and I drink a little more than we should; we get to collectively step out of our normal controlled selves for a while, bond, and do stupid, childish stuff. In an utterly unscientific way, I suspect that whatever harm the alcohol does to our bodies will be offset by the fun we have. And even if our bodies are harmed a little, and our lives shortened a little, at least we had fun.
I agree, of course. The whole idea is ridiculous, and I won't go beating a dead horse here.
I'm more interested in those "less-than-thrilled" people who would pay $185,000 just for the right to submit an application. The one linked in TFS has this interesting advice on how to deal with a security glitch:
So my advice to ICANN now: get your skates on! A typically British expression with a clear meaning: restart TAS. Stop faffing about trying to verify every single bit of applicant data that may have been impacted by the glitch. Your updates keep on telling us how no data was corrupted and no sensitive data from one applicant was even visible by another. So do a 180 degree shift in your current crisis management.
Horrible advice, if you ask me. We're talking about large corporate entities who think putting down $185k for the right to apply for a vanity domain is money well spent. I'm guessing these guys are also rather competitive, and would really like to know what names the other heavyweights are applying for. No, the only correct response to a security incident like this is to investigate it fully, identify the problem, fix it, identify the likely consequences, inform the victims, and only then put the service back online. Pepsi can live with getting its.pepsi TLD a few weeks late.
Well... it's an interesting project, but with only 5500 articles, it doesn't even come close to what Wikipedia has become for many of us. I know they had to limit the selection to fit on a DVD, but the first subject I checked had surprising blank areas. I wanted to know which programming languages they included; there are articles about Perl, Python, C++, and Forth; but nothing about C, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, or PHP. In other words, four of the five most popular languages didn't get an article.
Other subjects are also quite limited, and the focus on the UK shows strongly. For example, the have an article about Llandudno, but nothing about New Orleans; there's an article about Rebecca Helferich Clarke, but none about Bela Bartok.
Oh well, still a great improvement over the no-name 20 volume encyclopedia from the 70s that I had to use when I was in school.
unless there's some mention in TFA about religious motivations, let's please not jump to inflammatory conclusions about this being faith-motivated
Would you like to offer an alternative explanation? And TFA does mention a religious connection: "Education for women was outlawed by the Taliban government from 1996-2001 as un-Islamic."
atheism and agnosticism--which are, of course beliefs about God, if only by denial and uncertainty
You are mistaken about this. Atheism is the absence of a belief in god(s). It's the zero hypothesis, and as such is a position which sets it apart from all forms of belief in god(s).
If you're looking for privacy, don't store sensitive data in the cloud.
If you have to, avoid companies which have an obvious interest in your connections, your data, and your profile.
If you need strong transparent client-side encryption, you can either use a TrueCrypt container (like olsmeister mentioned), or use an alternative provider which offers this feature: for example, SpiderOak or Wuala. Dropbox, as you mentioned is not secure, because they hold your keys.
Avoid the US and US-based companies for storage of sensitive data. The Patriot Act requires Google to give the DHS access to their servers, even if they are physically located in the EU. Wuala is operated by LaCie, a Swiss company; they guarantee that customer data will always be stored on their servers, which are located in the EU or Switzerland.
I'm not affiliated with either SpiderOak or LaCie, but we've researched possible cloud storage services last month, and settled on Wuala. So far, no problems.
I think you may be seeing bias where simple demographics are at play.
Where I work, my group has eight people when we're fully staffed. When we have an opening to fill and HR starts sending us resumes of potential hires, perhaps one candidate in fifteen is female. So with all other things equal and assuming no gender bias at all, simple percentages result in our department being all male the vast bulk of the time.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
I know this isn't the point you're trying to make, but given your numbers, and assuming that all employees have been selected from these candidates, the probability that your department is all male is roughly 57.6%. An all-male department is most likely, but not by much.
Wuala works the same way. In addition to that, and with direct relevance to the main topic in this story, they also guarantee that all data will be stored in Switzerland and the EU. This is an important factor for some companies (like ours).
If I understand the explanation of the algorithm correctly, the outcome is only "simply fair", meaning that every participant is guaranteed to receive a piece of the cake which he considers at least fair - but some of the participants get what they would value as better than a fair share.
This is easily demonstrated by the simplest case: one cake, two participants. Participant A draws the dividing line, participant B gets to choose his share. The outcome for A will always be fair (because he devided the cake as fairly as he could), but participant B might very well consider one slice as more valuable than the other, and thus select what he considers "more than his share".
The same thing goes for the algorithm in TFA, except that all participants indicate where they would cut the first slice from a (rectangular bar shaped) cake, without seeing the other participants' lines. The third-party automatic arbiter then assigns the smallest indicated slice to the participant who drew that line. This participant will consider his slice as "fair", whereas the others will think that more of the cake than they deserve remains.
One way to game the system would be to intentionally draw one's line in a position which would give them an unfairly large slice. They probably won't win this round, but assuming that the other participants play fairly, the remaining cake will be slightly larger than (n-1)/n. Do this until only two participants are left. If, on the other hand, everybody places their lines in a way that would give them a larger-than-fair slice, the least greedy player will end up with an unfairly large slice.
Thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of Scratch before.
I'm currently teaching my nephew the basics of programming. I had a really hard time finding a good environment suitable for a 10 year old. I finally decided on Robot Karol, mostly because it's available in German, and because it presents a nicely reduced set of commands for beginners. We're going to stick with it for a while, but he's already suggesting a lot of things that Karol can't do. Most of these are multimedia related, like playing sounds or doing animations. I think I'll show him Scratch next.
Also, although I've only ever dealt with a half dozen cell phones in my life where I had to interact with the SIM card, I never once had to enter the PIN after putting the SIM back in to get the phone working again. This ranged from older dumb phones to iPhones and Blackberries.
It might be different in other parts of the world, but where I live (central Europe), all SIM cards are locked by default. When you power up a mobile phone, the first thing you see (after the manufacturer logo) is a PIN entry field. If you don't enter the correct PIN, all you can do with the phone is call emergency numbers. I think not even the service provider's number is available at this point. The point is that the phone can't receive calls as long as the SIM card is locked. Same thing happens when the card jiggles loose while the phone is turned on. This happened quite a lot with my old Nokia phone.
So, at least around here, it would be wisest to leave the phone turned on if you want the owner to contact you. Only if that failed would I take out the battery to check for a name or address.
Just curious - did you pop the battery to look for contact info on the inside of the battery bay?
Yes, but nothing there, I copied down the SIM number and was going to contact the sevice provider to see if they kept a record but they phoned 1st.
How could they call the phone if you had turned it off (by looking under the battery)?
Normally, you'd have to enter a PIN for the SIM card to work again.
I was wondering what was up with the extremely high incarceration rate in the US (around an order of magnitude higher than where I live). This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:
The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world (743 per 100,000 population), Russia has the second highest rate (577 per 100,000), followed by Rwanda (561 per 100,000). As of year-end 2009 the USA rate was 743 adults incarcerated in prisons and jails per 100,000 population. At year-end 2007 the United States had less than 5% of the world's population and 23.4% of the world's prison and jail population (adult inmates).
By comparison the incarceration rate in England and Wales in October 2011 was 155 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents; the rate for Norway in May 2010 was 71 inmates per 100,000; Netherlands in April 2010 was 94 per 100,000; Australia in June 2010 was 133 per 100,000; and New Zealand in October 2010 was 203 per 100,000.
A 2008 New York Times article points out:
Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.... "Rises and falls in Canada's crime rate have closely paralleled America's for 40 years," Mr. Tonry wrote last year. "But its imprisonment rate has remained stable."
Incarceration rate in the USA for federal and state prisons in 2007 was the highest in history of the country. It was 5.5 times greater than the sharp peak that occurred during the Great Depression at 137 per 100,000 in 1939. But historically, the current US incarceration rate is still slightly lower than the record-high Soviet Union's levels before World War II when the USSR's population reached 168 million, and 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in the Gulag system's prison camps and colonies (i.e. about 800 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents, according to numbers from Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde). The Soviet Union's incarceration rates from 1934 to 1953 were historically the world's highest for a modern age country, according to The Gulag Archipelago book by Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The part about the length of the jail terms is enlightening, but I still have to wonder if the average American thinks it's okay that the closest comparison one can find is Russian Gulags from the 40s and 50s...
So to enable this feature, you basically have to tell them when you visit a site over SSL. Good thing it's the EFF, because we're spreading our browsing history every which way as it is. Phishing detection, WOT, sometimes the browser vendors themselves, not to mention all the ads, cookies and trackers. But I guess the people who are likely to install HTTPSEverywhere know how to protect themselves against the last three (AdBlock+, Ghostery, NoScript, etc).
- There's no mention of this thing on the BJA or FBI websites
- Never heard of a "Joint Regional Intelligence Center"
- The website is www.jric.org, not.gov
- The whois information for jric.org has been obscured by a Canadian privacy service (irony, eh?)
- The website has no content, apart from the front page and a "send us a tip" form
- The logos on the PDF are distorted and in the wrong font
- Too "good" to be true
What's interesting (to me) is that this checklist fits so well into what we currently expect from US agencies that most of us initially didn't even think of the possibility that this could be a joke. Where's our humor? This thing hits a little too close to the core to be funny, IMHO.
Too lazy to find it yourself? The first hit on a Google search for that phrase is a 30 second video in which Schmidt says these exact words, plus some context.
In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.
You know what's funny? In Germany, the president is currently under a lot of pressure, and may have to resign, because he got a private credit for his house at too favorable a rate of interest. In the US (the home of democracy, defender of the free world, etc), corporations can openly bribe their senators to get the laws they want.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two problems leading to situations like this, firstly the TSA screeners have little more then a high-school diploma and a weeks training, because of this, management, in true government from, treats them like idiots.
To be frank, some of the staff at US airports appear to have an IQ barely above imbecility. I've been in the US four times, and nowhere else have I seen such unfriendly, unhelpful, and downright hostile personnel than at the airports. A man whose only job appeared to be holding a sign pointing to a gate refused to show us the way to the toilets. Another man went through our bags before we boarded and found the remains of a coconut which we'd intended to eat on the plane; he turned to me (I was 12 at the time), said "you must be a real idiot" and threw it in the garbage. If people like that are employed by the TSA, I'm hardly shocked that situations like the one with the little girl make the news every few weeks. If those dimwits don't know how to properly interact with passengers, put them in a position where they don't have to, or don't hire them.
Last year, we did a trip around Iceland. Before our return flight, when we waited at the security check, we found that we still had some 2 liter bottles of lemonade in our bags. So we started chugging away (don't like to waste food), and a security guy came up to us. He told us to relax and take the bottles on the plane. "This is Reykjavik, not New York. Have a nice flight."
h264 is ubquitous. It's really stupid to deny the reality that people want to use it because of politics which is what it boils down to.
The aren't denying reality, they were trying to shape it.
And I'm glad they tried, even if they didn't win this time.
I'm really upset by this. As an Austrian, I'm appalled that our courts would issue an order to clone the complete disk of our Mixmaster node (btw, yes, I know the maintainer personally). The Pittsburgh bomb threats are serious business, and I'd like nothing more than see these "pranksters" (as they see themselves) brought to justice for what they've done. But that doesn't mean that everybody else's secrets have to be exposed at the request of a foreign nation. Where do you draw the line? Which nations can request the data on our servers, and what reason would be strong enough to grant the request? Are the US special in some way? What if the Saudis heard of an unmarried woman having cyber-relations over Mixmaster? What if China wants to track down dissidents?
This shouldn't have been allowed.
And don't forget, so far we've heard of two compromised Mixmaster relays in two weeks. I'm sure that there are others that we'll never hear about, in addition to the ones run by the US agencies in the first place. There is a very real chance that the FBI will soon have collected enough keys to decrypt and follow a significant percentage of Mixmaster-anonymized mails.
Who gives these people the right to snoop into the affairs of thousands of unrelated people in other nations? I know, in this case the answer is: the Austrian courts gave them the right. That's why I'm so upset. The FBI can't be blamed for trying, but small as our country is, we shouldn't have bowed down so readily.
CJ
Very nice, I remember that one :)
Before someone mistakes you for a troll, I guess I'd better link to an explanation. 14 years ago, somebody at Microsoft left a dangerous backdoor in Frontpage 98, with the phrase "Netscape engineers are weenies!" as the key. People were fired over this, and so should the persons responsible for the SNAFU at Rugged.
Wish I could mod you up. I'd almost forgotten about that.
I have so much stress these last 5 years that I've about had breakdown (life, economy, working long hours to keep my job..ect). I don't drink, smoke, or do anything physically abusive. But I feel like I've aged 10 years.
Have you ever thought about indulging yourself a little and having a beer once in a while, just to take the edge off a little? Too much of anything is bad, of course, by definition, but a little can go a long way. I've long had the suspicion that people in cultures where alcohol is completely prohibited tend to get too worked up over small and unimportant things. I also treasure the evenings where my friends and I drink a little more than we should; we get to collectively step out of our normal controlled selves for a while, bond, and do stupid, childish stuff. In an utterly unscientific way, I suspect that whatever harm the alcohol does to our bodies will be offset by the fun we have. And even if our bodies are harmed a little, and our lives shortened a little, at least we had fun.
Just my 2 cents.
I agree, of course. The whole idea is ridiculous, and I won't go beating a dead horse here.
I'm more interested in those "less-than-thrilled" people who would pay $185,000 just for the right to submit an application. The one linked in TFS has this interesting advice on how to deal with a security glitch:
So my advice to ICANN now: get your skates on! A typically British expression with a clear meaning: restart TAS. Stop faffing about trying to verify every single bit of applicant data that may have been impacted by the glitch. Your updates keep on telling us how no data was corrupted and no sensitive data from one applicant was even visible by another. So do a 180 degree shift in your current crisis management.
Horrible advice, if you ask me. We're talking about large corporate entities who think putting down $185k for the right to apply for a vanity domain is money well spent. I'm guessing these guys are also rather competitive, and would really like to know what names the other heavyweights are applying for. No, the only correct response to a security incident like this is to investigate it fully, identify the problem, fix it, identify the likely consequences, inform the victims, and only then put the service back online. Pepsi can live with getting its .pepsi TLD a few weeks late.
People who where 14 and wanted the top 10 games just got a paper route and bought them.
Ah, the good old days. I remember I had to deliver the morning paper for three weeks before I was able to afford Paperboy...
Well... it's an interesting project, but with only 5500 articles, it doesn't even come close to what Wikipedia has become for many of us. I know they had to limit the selection to fit on a DVD, but the first subject I checked had surprising blank areas. I wanted to know which programming languages they included; there are articles about Perl, Python, C++, and Forth; but nothing about C, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, or PHP. In other words, four of the five most popular languages didn't get an article.
Other subjects are also quite limited, and the focus on the UK shows strongly. For example, the have an article about Llandudno, but nothing about New Orleans; there's an article about Rebecca Helferich Clarke, but none about Bela Bartok.
Oh well, still a great improvement over the no-name 20 volume encyclopedia from the 70s that I had to use when I was in school.
unless there's some mention in TFA about religious motivations, let's please not jump to inflammatory conclusions about this being faith-motivated
Would you like to offer an alternative explanation? And TFA does mention a religious connection: "Education for women was outlawed by the Taliban government from 1996-2001 as un-Islamic."
atheism and agnosticism--which are, of course beliefs about God, if only by denial and uncertainty
You are mistaken about this. Atheism is the absence of a belief in god(s). It's the zero hypothesis, and as such is a position which sets it apart from all forms of belief in god(s).
I'm not affiliated with either SpiderOak or LaCie, but we've researched possible cloud storage services last month, and settled on Wuala. So far, no problems.
I think you may be seeing bias where simple demographics are at play.
Where I work, my group has eight people when we're fully staffed. When we have an opening to fill and HR starts sending us resumes of potential hires, perhaps one candidate in fifteen is female. So with all other things equal and assuming no gender bias at all, simple percentages result in our department being all male the vast bulk of the time.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
I know this isn't the point you're trying to make, but given your numbers, and assuming that all employees have been selected from these candidates, the probability that your department is all male is roughly 57.6%. An all-male department is most likely, but not by much.
Make of that what you will.
Wuala works the same way. In addition to that, and with direct relevance to the main topic in this story, they also guarantee that all data will be stored in Switzerland and the EU. This is an important factor for some companies (like ours).
If I understand the explanation of the algorithm correctly, the outcome is only "simply fair", meaning that every participant is guaranteed to receive a piece of the cake which he considers at least fair - but some of the participants get what they would value as better than a fair share.
This is easily demonstrated by the simplest case: one cake, two participants. Participant A draws the dividing line, participant B gets to choose his share. The outcome for A will always be fair (because he devided the cake as fairly as he could), but participant B might very well consider one slice as more valuable than the other, and thus select what he considers "more than his share".
The same thing goes for the algorithm in TFA, except that all participants indicate where they would cut the first slice from a (rectangular bar shaped) cake, without seeing the other participants' lines. The third-party automatic arbiter then assigns the smallest indicated slice to the participant who drew that line. This participant will consider his slice as "fair", whereas the others will think that more of the cake than they deserve remains.
One way to game the system would be to intentionally draw one's line in a position which would give them an unfairly large slice. They probably won't win this round, but assuming that the other participants play fairly, the remaining cake will be slightly larger than (n-1)/n. Do this until only two participants are left. If, on the other hand, everybody places their lines in a way that would give them a larger-than-fair slice, the least greedy player will end up with an unfairly large slice.
Thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of Scratch before.
I'm currently teaching my nephew the basics of programming. I had a really hard time finding a good environment suitable for a 10 year old. I finally decided on Robot Karol, mostly because it's available in German, and because it presents a nicely reduced set of commands for beginners. We're going to stick with it for a while, but he's already suggesting a lot of things that Karol can't do. Most of these are multimedia related, like playing sounds or doing animations. I think I'll show him Scratch next.
Also, although I've only ever dealt with a half dozen cell phones in my life where I had to interact with the SIM card, I never once had to enter the PIN after putting the SIM back in to get the phone working again. This ranged from older dumb phones to iPhones and Blackberries.
It might be different in other parts of the world, but where I live (central Europe), all SIM cards are locked by default. When you power up a mobile phone, the first thing you see (after the manufacturer logo) is a PIN entry field. If you don't enter the correct PIN, all you can do with the phone is call emergency numbers. I think not even the service provider's number is available at this point. The point is that the phone can't receive calls as long as the SIM card is locked. Same thing happens when the card jiggles loose while the phone is turned on. This happened quite a lot with my old Nokia phone.
So, at least around here, it would be wisest to leave the phone turned on if you want the owner to contact you. Only if that failed would I take out the battery to check for a name or address.
Just curious - did you pop the battery to look for contact info on the inside of the battery bay?
Yes, but nothing there, I copied down the SIM number and was going to contact the sevice provider to see if they kept a record but they phoned 1st.
How could they call the phone if you had turned it off (by looking under the battery)?
Normally, you'd have to enter a PIN for the SIM card to work again.
I was wondering what was up with the extremely high incarceration rate in the US (around an order of magnitude higher than where I live). This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:
The part about the length of the jail terms is enlightening, but I still have to wonder if the average American thinks it's okay that the closest comparison one can find is Russian Gulags from the 40s and 50s...
* is a greedy "match as many as you can", and the first
So the result of -- $_ = "foo:bar:baz:qux"; s/(.*):(.*)/$2:$1/; -- would be "qux:foo:bar:baz".
Your ISP knows all about you, and your family, and what the cat looks at while you are away.
No they don't, because my cat and I are using SSL :)
CJ
So to enable this feature, you basically have to tell them when you visit a site over SSL. Good thing it's the EFF, because we're spreading our browsing history every which way as it is. Phishing detection, WOT, sometimes the browser vendors themselves, not to mention all the ads, cookies and trackers. But I guess the people who are likely to install HTTPSEverywhere know how to protect themselves against the last three (AdBlock+, Ghostery, NoScript, etc).
CJ
You're right - somebody trolled us good.
- There's no mention of this thing on the BJA or FBI websites
- Never heard of a "Joint Regional Intelligence Center"
- The website is www.jric.org, not .gov
- The whois information for jric.org has been obscured by a Canadian privacy service (irony, eh?)
- The website has no content, apart from the front page and a "send us a tip" form
- The logos on the PDF are distorted and in the wrong font
- Too "good" to be true
What's interesting (to me) is that this checklist fits so well into what we currently expect from US agencies that most of us initially didn't even think of the possibility that this could be a joke. Where's our humor? This thing hits a little too close to the core to be funny, IMHO.
CJ
Do you have a source for that quote?
Too lazy to find it yourself? The first hit on a Google search for that phrase is a 30 second video in which Schmidt says these exact words, plus some context.
CJ
I guess someone at Apple has finally watched Galaxy S2 commercial?
That commercial is hilarious!
(girl with iPhone) "That's a Samsung."
(guy with MacBook) "I could never get a Samsung. I'm creative."
(guy with iPhone) "Dude, you're a barista..."
... this is what a Chinese lab looks like.
In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.
You know what's funny? In Germany, the president is currently under a lot of pressure, and may have to resign, because he got a private credit for his house at too favorable a rate of interest. In the US (the home of democracy, defender of the free world, etc), corporations can openly bribe their senators to get the laws they want.
Something's rotten in the state of Merica...
CJ