Here we go, "sovereignty", you do realise any nation can officially turn around and wipe it's arse with a treaty if it so wishes. It has been law in the US for 20ys, it was put there by old school Republicans. It's the only issue Kerry and McCain enthusiastically agree on. The US loses NOTHING by signing it, again but a bit louder for clarity IT HAS BEEN US LAW FOR TWO DECADES, YOU LOSE NOTHING!
And no, other countries do not lose their sovereignty by signing this particular treaty, not everything that comes out of the US is an evil plot to take over the planet. Sometimes the US has good ideas, that are worth spreading.
You think WE are going to be suckered into playing that game from the LOSING SIDE?
Thank you for confirming what I said in my original post about miserable cunts with an ideological aversion to international cooperation.
It seems that if you spend enough money on TV attack ads, you can win elections. At least in America.
We're not that far behind in OZ, we just elected the Mad Monk as PM, one of the first things he did was symbolic, he abolished the cabinet position of Science Minister and put it under the Industry portfolio.
It would be funny if this bullshit was not coming from the most powerful organisation on the planet, the US government. Recently the majority of republicans voted against ratifying this treaty. A treaty that takes poppa Bush's (bipartisan) disability act of the early 90's and promotes it as a global minimum standard with 150+ countries on board. The bat-shit crazy faction of the republicans wouldn't sign it, those miserable cunts knocked it back because of an ideological aversion to international cooperation and rationalised their actions as protecting US sovereignty - WTF the entire treaty is founded on spreading Poppa Bush's good idea to the rest of the world.
To an non-American all this is just too fucking bizzare to be real, it's just as bat-shit crazy and "mean spirited" as the nutty General in Burma who suddenly decided the entire economy should be based on the number '3', unsurprisingly the Burmese economy fell into an open sewer and drowned at that very same moment.
You know why I like the BBC and their sister stations in Australia, over the years they have been accused of biased by all sides of politics. Using 20/20 hindsight their track record of "getting their facts straight" is hard to beat, and that's the reason why the are castigated so heavily by politicians when they do fuck up.
Objective and rational have well defined meanings. Turns out the universe has implemented many ways of "thinking" but the universe itself also has a bias against irrationality and weeds it out pretty much as "soon" as it emerges.
Agree engineering standards must be enforced with a metaphorical punch in the face, don't agree with punishment for an unrelated incident. In this case it may also have caused them to miss a real engineering problem that could be fixed with a short strip of Velcro.
Paying $100 per week is a price point that has become acceptable
And that's the problem in a nutshell, Americans think it's acceptable to be ripped of by big business if the alternative is a government scheme has a that whiff of socialism about it.
US/AU dollars have been close to parity for a while. Currently in Australia a single man on $100K/yr pays ~$30 for UHC, a family of four with a single bread winner on $50K/yr pays ~$15/pw. And yes we are near the top of the list for "health outcomes", in fact our hard working death panels would have to work overtime to kill the extra 20K people per year it would take to catch up with the US. And yes, the government encourages you to buy private insurance if you want first dibs on a private bed, plastic tits, etc. Private insurance won't buy you better doctors, nor will it get you to the front of the queue for anything except cosmetics and a private bed. Nobody pays more that $1200/yr for medicine, once you hit that limit they are free.
For zero extra cost I get the same treatment anywhere in the EU should I fall ill while on vacation, as I did a few years back in the UK. I offered to pay the bill but the doctor just laughed and said - We have a deal with Australia to look after each other's citizens, it's only the silly Yanks who have to pay.
Traction control is more than just ABS, ABS simply prevent the brakes from locking the wheels. Traction control is already taking over the job of steering when it detects the car is about to spin or roll. If the traction control can't keep it on the road then nobody can. Mechanical throttles fail regularly, broken springs / links, frayed / jammed cables, etc. a jammed throttle is much more common in older cars (but so are clutches and key ignition which act as fail-safe devices for jammed throttles).
My question is did they find the alleged bug or did they just find evidence of questionable QA processes? Personally I'm inclined to believe the floor mat theory in preference to the non-reproducible bug theory.
A big red button on the dash marked "emergency stop". As I said elsewhere I've experienced a jammed mechanical throttle on a Honda 750 motorbike. Because I had a clutch the incident was no danger to anyone or anything except the engine, which screamed it's guts out before I turned it off.
I'm in my 50's, I serviced and repaired all my own cars up until the 90's, I currently have a 10yo Mazda 6 with 170,000km on the clock. I've had it for 7yrs and the only problems I've had was a dead battery. Modern cars are incredibly reliable, safe, and economical compared to the cars I grew up with. Having said that, you make a valid point, modern cars are more or less unserviceable by the average owner.
I'm not so sure about the verdict, they may have proved Toyota had lax quality control on the software but I don't see a root cause mentioned, if it was a bug then they need to explain exactly where it is in the code, or failing that demonstrate the circumstance under which it can be reliably reproduced. With such low numbers of incidents in millions of cars I'm more inclined to believe the floor mat theory.
Disclaimer: I have experienced a jammed throttle on a Honda 750 motorbike (frayed cable inside the sleeve), not a big drama if you have a clutch.
I'm pretty sure humans ate snakes more often than the other way around, even here in Oz with 9 of the top 10 deadliest snakes, most species are harmless and quite tasty. As for humans being adapted to spot them, snakes are experts at hiding in plain view, even the aborigines who still hunt them will tell you it's very difficult to spot them until they move. The rattlesnakes of the US, the colourful sea snakes, and a few others species are unusually polite poisonous snakes since they clearly advertise their presence and lethality to anything that comes close. Most Aussie snakes will just sit there looking exactly like a stick until you're practically standing on them. I can't count the number of times I've had the shit scared out of me by a snake bolting for the undergrowth at the last minute, it's not much comfort knowing the snake shit itself more than I did.
I'm waiting to find out about Australia, we have some strategically placed US listening stations out in the bush and the US is our BFF. Over the half century I've watched pollys come and go in Oz I've seen a few prospective PM's take the grand tour of the "secret" listening such as Pine Gap, I've noticed some come out looking rather shaken and are never really themselves again after the experience, especially the ones who had previously criticised US policies. Mark Latham is the most striking recent example, except he didn't stop criticising US policy. Suddenly it seemed all of Oz turned against him, ostensibly because of an awkward looking handshake with Howard that somehow proved he was a "thug".
On the rare occasions Latham is mentioned in the media since that time, he's been largely portrayed as deranged and potentially violent. True he hasn't helped his cause with some of the things he has said since leaving politics, but I think he has some pretty good reasons to be bitter.
Alexander and the UK are odd bedfellows, apparently he was a financial supporter of the IRA before Clinton at the urging of Bono)speech starts @2:21) stopped Americans from donating to the IRA. Say what you like a Bono, but it took the balls of an Elephant to make that speech as an Irishman in Boston.
This is about a whole industry colluding to restrict the movement of labour, you might as well gift wrap the dildo for them and bend over. This is exactly where government rules should step in and confiscate the dildo. The government already have the power to do that, but not if the victims keep insisting that they are not being raped with a corporate dildo.
Also the NSA don't give a flying fuck about you, what Snowden revealed is all about economic espionage. When you've lived through a dozen Snowden's you might realise that it's not about you or the terrorists hiding under Merkel's desk, it's about money.
It's too bad that system wasn't trained on the charlatans on Wall Street
Um, hello? The Snowden revelations are almost exclusively about "economic espionage", the headlines are about who's phones were tapped and which boardrooms were bugged. "Wall street" are the people who want this data and the MI complex are delivering it to them on a silver platter. Why the fuck would they want to point a gun at their own head?
There is no conspiracy, just like minded people playing golf and screwing everyone they can, including each other, this sort of spying has been going on forever and it's not going away. Having said that and given the history of the 20th century, you would have to be a fool to be unconcerned when the NSA appear before congress and either lie or refuse to answer questions, then walk away with their career intact. That is a clear sign the MI complex is telling congress to go fuck itself (in polite political language). Whatever the pro/cons of the argument, the current belligerence of these people is a threat to the rule of law and a wedge that will polarise international relations..
Government funds the research that private enterprise can't or won't. Private enterprise not only funds research in self-interest often funds research with "no strings attached", the institutions set up by Gates, Gore, Clinton and others are all excellent examples if you can see past the politics of the front man. As much as I hate the anti-science FF lobbyist, the $50M spent on them by corporations over 20yrs is a drop in the ocean, I find it bizarre how what amounts to a "rounding error" spent on anti-science propaganda can so effectively whip up an army of useful idiots.
Yes, taxpayer funded science is largely responsible for the modern world around us, at least the last 100yrs or so. The problem here seems to be that a state government is spending a lot of time (aka money) to allocate a paltry $44K. Politicians are there to ask questions, scientists are there to answer them. Politicians have no business telling scientists how to do their job, which is what they are doing here. Funding should be at arms length through an independent institution, the funds are allocated by the institution for equipment and time to pursue the research, they do not tell the researcher's how to research. I believe in the US one such institution is called the NHS.
90% of the world's population are religious and they hold every political ideology you can possibly think of. The right wing in western nations want to make government small enough to "drown in a bathtub", they want it "out of their way", the further right you go the more they bitch about paying tax. Religion just puts a respectable face on greed and xenophobia, regardless of your political leanings.
Take a look at the world around you, 100yrs of taxpayer research built that. Eisenhower warned about the MI complex because it can slide into fascism without anyone noticing until it's too late (eg: 1930's Germany). He went on to say the US can not survive without the MI complex.
Actually, Jane is spot on this time. You seem to have made the same mistake she routinely makes, you failed to properly comprehend* what was written and judged the post by it's source. We all do it to some degree.
properly comprehend* - You have a strawman on your hands since you are refuting a claim she did not make. She answered a question by pointing out that your "duty to others" is much boarder than your "duty to obey the law". Most of the things in your "duty to others" are not legal obligations, eg: table manners.
Well said Jane, I'd mod you up if you were not already at +5 (note user id:). This is the same reason politicians are regarded as "public servants" in Oz/UK. Their job is to serve the public, and although they have serious problems focusing on that, the other way around is basically the definition of "oppression".
Non-American here, but I believe that the law that protects a sysadmin's keys is the same law Dick Cheney relied on to protect the combination to his infamous office safe. I understand these laws need to be balanced against people simply obstructing justice, but it's pretty clear and there seems plenty of precedent that what's in your head is protected information. So why don't courts simply dismiss these case with prejudice? Why do they have to drag it on for years, only to come up with the same fucking answer after a couple of million dollars and a handful of shattered lives?
There's something broken with the public prosecution system in the US. It seems to me that prosecutors are basically promoted by comparing how much jail time they have scored in court, rather than their overall cost / benefit to the well being of society. For example a prosecutor who gives a token fine for smoking a joint in public is more valuable to society than one who insists on jail time for all drug offenses.
The appalling US jail statistics are very strong evidence that prosecutors are systematically making the wrong choices.
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And no, other countries do not lose their sovereignty by signing this particular treaty, not everything that comes out of the US is an evil plot to take over the planet. Sometimes the US has good ideas, that are worth spreading.
You think WE are going to be suckered into playing that game from the LOSING SIDE?
Thank you for confirming what I said in my original post about miserable cunts with an ideological aversion to international cooperation.
Jealousy is a curse.
It seems that if you spend enough money on TV attack ads, you can win elections. At least in America.
We're not that far behind in OZ, we just elected the Mad Monk as PM, one of the first things he did was symbolic, he abolished the cabinet position of Science Minister and put it under the Industry portfolio.
It would be funny if this bullshit was not coming from the most powerful organisation on the planet, the US government. Recently the majority of republicans voted against ratifying this treaty. A treaty that takes poppa Bush's (bipartisan) disability act of the early 90's and promotes it as a global minimum standard with 150+ countries on board. The bat-shit crazy faction of the republicans wouldn't sign it, those miserable cunts knocked it back because of an ideological aversion to international cooperation and rationalised their actions as protecting US sovereignty - WTF the entire treaty is founded on spreading Poppa Bush's good idea to the rest of the world.
To an non-American all this is just too fucking bizzare to be real, it's just as bat-shit crazy and "mean spirited" as the nutty General in Burma who suddenly decided the entire economy should be based on the number '3', unsurprisingly the Burmese economy fell into an open sewer and drowned at that very same moment.
You know why I like the BBC and their sister stations in Australia, over the years they have been accused of biased by all sides of politics. Using 20/20 hindsight their track record of "getting their facts straight" is hard to beat, and that's the reason why the are castigated so heavily by politicians when they do fuck up.
Objective and rational have well defined meanings. Turns out the universe has implemented many ways of "thinking" but the universe itself also has a bias against irrationality and weeds it out pretty much as "soon" as it emerges.
Agree engineering standards must be enforced with a metaphorical punch in the face, don't agree with punishment for an unrelated incident. In this case it may also have caused them to miss a real engineering problem that could be fixed with a short strip of Velcro.
Paying $100 per week is a price point that has become acceptable
And that's the problem in a nutshell, Americans think it's acceptable to be ripped of by big business if the alternative is a government scheme has a that whiff of socialism about it.
US/AU dollars have been close to parity for a while. Currently in Australia a single man on $100K/yr pays ~$30 for UHC, a family of four with a single bread winner on $50K/yr pays ~$15/pw. And yes we are near the top of the list for "health outcomes", in fact our hard working death panels would have to work overtime to kill the extra 20K people per year it would take to catch up with the US. And yes, the government encourages you to buy private insurance if you want first dibs on a private bed, plastic tits, etc. Private insurance won't buy you better doctors, nor will it get you to the front of the queue for anything except cosmetics and a private bed. Nobody pays more that $1200/yr for medicine, once you hit that limit they are free.
For zero extra cost I get the same treatment anywhere in the EU should I fall ill while on vacation, as I did a few years back in the UK. I offered to pay the bill but the doctor just laughed and said - We have a deal with Australia to look after each other's citizens, it's only the silly Yanks who have to pay.
Traction control is more than just ABS, ABS simply prevent the brakes from locking the wheels. Traction control is already taking over the job of steering when it detects the car is about to spin or roll. If the traction control can't keep it on the road then nobody can. Mechanical throttles fail regularly, broken springs / links, frayed / jammed cables, etc. a jammed throttle is much more common in older cars (but so are clutches and key ignition which act as fail-safe devices for jammed throttles).
My question is did they find the alleged bug or did they just find evidence of questionable QA processes? Personally I'm inclined to believe the floor mat theory in preference to the non-reproducible bug theory.
A big red button on the dash marked "emergency stop". As I said elsewhere I've experienced a jammed mechanical throttle on a Honda 750 motorbike. Because I had a clutch the incident was no danger to anyone or anything except the engine, which screamed it's guts out before I turned it off.
I'm in my 50's, I serviced and repaired all my own cars up until the 90's, I currently have a 10yo Mazda 6 with 170,000km on the clock. I've had it for 7yrs and the only problems I've had was a dead battery. Modern cars are incredibly reliable, safe, and economical compared to the cars I grew up with. Having said that, you make a valid point, modern cars are more or less unserviceable by the average owner.
I'm not so sure about the verdict, they may have proved Toyota had lax quality control on the software but I don't see a root cause mentioned, if it was a bug then they need to explain exactly where it is in the code, or failing that demonstrate the circumstance under which it can be reliably reproduced. With such low numbers of incidents in millions of cars I'm more inclined to believe the floor mat theory.
Disclaimer: I have experienced a jammed throttle on a Honda 750 motorbike (frayed cable inside the sleeve), not a big drama if you have a clutch.
I'm pretty sure humans ate snakes more often than the other way around, even here in Oz with 9 of the top 10 deadliest snakes, most species are harmless and quite tasty. As for humans being adapted to spot them, snakes are experts at hiding in plain view, even the aborigines who still hunt them will tell you it's very difficult to spot them until they move. The rattlesnakes of the US, the colourful sea snakes, and a few others species are unusually polite poisonous snakes since they clearly advertise their presence and lethality to anything that comes close. Most Aussie snakes will just sit there looking exactly like a stick until you're practically standing on them. I can't count the number of times I've had the shit scared out of me by a snake bolting for the undergrowth at the last minute, it's not much comfort knowing the snake shit itself more than I did.
There are no terrorists under Merkel's desk, It's economic espionage, UK/US have been the experts in that field since the end of WW2.
I'm waiting to find out about Australia, we have some strategically placed US listening stations out in the bush and the US is our BFF. Over the half century I've watched pollys come and go in Oz I've seen a few prospective PM's take the grand tour of the "secret" listening such as Pine Gap, I've noticed some come out looking rather shaken and are never really themselves again after the experience, especially the ones who had previously criticised US policies. Mark Latham is the most striking recent example, except he didn't stop criticising US policy. Suddenly it seemed all of Oz turned against him, ostensibly because of an awkward looking handshake with Howard that somehow proved he was a "thug".
On the rare occasions Latham is mentioned in the media since that time, he's been largely portrayed as deranged and potentially violent. True he hasn't helped his cause with some of the things he has said since leaving politics, but I think he has some pretty good reasons to be bitter.
Alexander and the UK are odd bedfellows, apparently he was a financial supporter of the IRA before Clinton at the urging of Bono)speech starts @2:21) stopped Americans from donating to the IRA. Say what you like a Bono, but it took the balls of an Elephant to make that speech as an Irishman in Boston.
Just so we're sure, you're saying it's a GoodThing(TM) to take advantage of the weak? - What about taking candy from babies, is that ok nowadays?
This is about a whole industry colluding to restrict the movement of labour, you might as well gift wrap the dildo for them and bend over. This is exactly where government rules should step in and confiscate the dildo. The government already have the power to do that, but not if the victims keep insisting that they are not being raped with a corporate dildo.
Also the NSA don't give a flying fuck about you, what Snowden revealed is all about economic espionage. When you've lived through a dozen Snowden's you might realise that it's not about you or the terrorists hiding under Merkel's desk, it's about money.
It's too bad that system wasn't trained on the charlatans on Wall Street
Um, hello? The Snowden revelations are almost exclusively about "economic espionage", the headlines are about who's phones were tapped and which boardrooms were bugged. "Wall street" are the people who want this data and the MI complex are delivering it to them on a silver platter. Why the fuck would they want to point a gun at their own head?
There is no conspiracy, just like minded people playing golf and screwing everyone they can, including each other, this sort of spying has been going on forever and it's not going away. Having said that and given the history of the 20th century, you would have to be a fool to be unconcerned when the NSA appear before congress and either lie or refuse to answer questions, then walk away with their career intact. That is a clear sign the MI complex is telling congress to go fuck itself (in polite political language). Whatever the pro/cons of the argument, the current belligerence of these people is a threat to the rule of law and a wedge that will polarise international relations..
Government funds the research that private enterprise can't or won't. Private enterprise not only funds research in self-interest often funds research with "no strings attached", the institutions set up by Gates, Gore, Clinton and others are all excellent examples if you can see past the politics of the front man. As much as I hate the anti-science FF lobbyist, the $50M spent on them by corporations over 20yrs is a drop in the ocean, I find it bizarre how what amounts to a "rounding error" spent on anti-science propaganda can so effectively whip up an army of useful idiots.
Yes, taxpayer funded science is largely responsible for the modern world around us, at least the last 100yrs or so. The problem here seems to be that a state government is spending a lot of time (aka money) to allocate a paltry $44K. Politicians are there to ask questions, scientists are there to answer them. Politicians have no business telling scientists how to do their job, which is what they are doing here. Funding should be at arms length through an independent institution, the funds are allocated by the institution for equipment and time to pursue the research, they do not tell the researcher's how to research. I believe in the US one such institution is called the NHS.
90% of the world's population are religious and they hold every political ideology you can possibly think of. The right wing in western nations want to make government small enough to "drown in a bathtub", they want it "out of their way", the further right you go the more they bitch about paying tax. Religion just puts a respectable face on greed and xenophobia, regardless of your political leanings.
Take a look at the world around you, 100yrs of taxpayer research built that. Eisenhower warned about the MI complex because it can slide into fascism without anyone noticing until it's too late (eg: 1930's Germany). He went on to say the US can not survive without the MI complex.
Actually, Jane is spot on this time. You seem to have made the same mistake she routinely makes, you failed to properly comprehend* what was written and judged the post by it's source. We all do it to some degree.
properly comprehend* - You have a strawman on your hands since you are refuting a claim she did not make. She answered a question by pointing out that your "duty to others" is much boarder than your "duty to obey the law". Most of the things in your "duty to others" are not legal obligations, eg: table manners.
Well said Jane, I'd mod you up if you were not already at +5 (note user id :). This is the same reason politicians are regarded as "public servants" in Oz/UK. Their job is to serve the public, and although they have serious problems focusing on that, the other way around is basically the definition of "oppression".
Non-American here, but I believe that the law that protects a sysadmin's keys is the same law Dick Cheney relied on to protect the combination to his infamous office safe. I understand these laws need to be balanced against people simply obstructing justice, but it's pretty clear and there seems plenty of precedent that what's in your head is protected information. So why don't courts simply dismiss these case with prejudice? Why do they have to drag it on for years, only to come up with the same fucking answer after a couple of million dollars and a handful of shattered lives?
There's something broken with the public prosecution system in the US. It seems to me that prosecutors are basically promoted by comparing how much jail time they have scored in court, rather than their overall cost / benefit to the well being of society. For example a prosecutor who gives a token fine for smoking a joint in public is more valuable to society than one who insists on jail time for all drug offenses.
The appalling US jail statistics are very strong evidence that prosecutors are systematically making the wrong choices.