IF Amazon wanted to spend millions to bribe legislators that would only work if YOU voted in corrupt individuals, and why would you do that unless they offered free welfare benefits to YOU? So, who's being greedy? (See how easy it is to make up boogie men!)
I use Amazon extensively and from my experience the savings far exceed the difference between taxed (7% in NE) and untaxed sales prices. Free shipping and rapid deliveries make home shopping nearly as convenient as local shopping, especially for 70+ people like myself. While many local stores disavow warranty or service problems (the stickers say "Don't bring this XXX back to the store. Contact the manufacturer"), Amazon makes returning merchandize free and easy, including printing RMAs from your online account. At tax time I total the amount of the sales for the previous year from emailed invoices and submit the sales tax on my State Income tax filing, in fulfillment of NE tax law. I have yet to see any local store offer the selection that Amazon does. As a Prime member my wife an I enjoy streaming movies to watch on our HD TV, and over 5,000 offerings are free, with the rest being offered at prices from 0.99 to 3.99 for 48 hours. Our most recent viewings include "True Grit (2010)" and "The King's Speech". P.S. -- I don't work for Amazon.
"Common sense" is a common delusion. There is a gap of time, in the Windows ecosystem, between when a new virus is turned loose in the wild and when it is detected, analyzed and its vaccine appears in the latest DAT file. ASSUMING that you keep your AV subscription current, that gap can range from a few days to a few years. (Some holes Microsoft never fixes but requires you to upgrade to the latest version of Windows to receive the "fix") During that gap your box is susceptible to infection, and knowing how promiscuous ANY version of Windows is, the odds are likely that you are among the 95% of all Windows users whose box is infected. The most common infections are the keyboard logger, used by thieves to hijack your bank account and CC info, and zombie viruses used to make your Windows box a zombie member of a bot farm, so that people like LulzSec can make your box a part of a DDoS attack.
Also, have you ever heard of microcode? It's in CPUs, GPU, control chips, ROM, etc... and most of that stuff is manufactured in China. Have no doubt. Not only is the NSA backdoor keys in all versions of Windows, contrary to their denials, I would suspect the Chinese and Taiwanese have put back doors in microcode as well. All they need is your IP address. Use Tor? Sure. Just make sure you have enough jumps AND that your box isn't leaking DNS or other information outside the Tor link.
No, the "only things" holding it back are its performances in mission critical situations like the Chinese Olympics, where the world got to watch a BSOD flash into the ceiling of the Bird Pavilion, and the $1 Billion in lost sales suffered by the London Stock Exchange when their.NET based app, written BY Microsoft and Aventure, crashed for the second time in less than a year.
If Microsoft, which owns the.NET API, both documented and undocumented, can't write an application which is both stable and with the transaction times they promised that.NET could deliver, who can?
That's about the same time they stopped supporting VFP 9.0. We were using VFP 6.0 when MS announced on the UniversalThread (UT) that VFB 6.0 would be the last version of that tool. The 250,000 VFP coders registered at UT were outraged and threatened a mass exodus to a tool MS didn't control. In the end, tens of thousands did migrate to other tools, while Microsoft put VFP on minimal life support to prevent further defections. I saw the handwriting on the wall and I moved my apps to Qt in 2004 and have been well pleased.
Microsoft had their MVP VFP coders, like Kevin McNish (IIRC) and others, start pushing C# and.NET as a replacement for VFP and holding classes on the UT, and many took the leap to.NET. Now it appears that MS screwed them twice in about five years. Will they bend over and take it for a third time?
Are you positive that Lulz is not a government/theocratic cyber warfare unit operating out of Europe or the Mid-East or China or Cuba or Venezuela? In other words, people who have ponies in the race? How can you be sure?
Or, is it your attitude that while the above mentioned countries can and do have cyber warfare units it is wrong for the USA to have its own unit too?
One never reads about these "hackers" breaking into Russian or Chinese government websites and then releasing documents they steal. Why is that? Could it be that they know that they are not as "invisible" as they brag to be, and that if they did attack those sites it wouldn't be long before they were sleeping with the reporters whom Putin didn't like, or they'd suddenly wake up in a Chinese or Iranian prison?
And, to the idiot who claimed that "hacking never hurt anyone", talk to the people who were put in harms way by WikiLeaks sloppy editing of stolen documents containing the names of people.
The RICO and PATRIOT Acts, along with the TSA, have done enough damage to citizens of the USA without having hackers further the harm. It's time for rational people to replace the Rude-Goldberg security arrangements created by the DHS. But, let's imagine that Lulz and WikiLeaks are successful in creating a citizen uproar that results in the activities of USA espionage agencies being severely, although irrationally, curtailed. When those agencies can no longer prevent the smuggling of a disassembled Pakistani or Iranian nuclear bomb into the country and, say, Denver, CO disappears in a mushroom cloud, will you be happen then?
It was "patently" obvious to everyone that SCO was a proxy for Microsoft's attack against Linux.
I suspect that Lodsys is a proxy for Microsoft's attack against Apple. The MO is identical -- don't threaten those who can defend themselves, go after the small fry.
See Trips for Judges: "Corporate special interests are wining and dining judges at fancy resorts under the pretext of "educating" them about complicated legal issues. Nothing for FREE, a July 2000 report by Community Rights Counsel (CRC), showed that these junkets appear to be working as their sponsors intend, encouraging rulings that strike down environmental protections and line the pockets of junket sponsors."
And that info is over five years old. Corporate greed has made great gains since then. Now they don't have to bribe judges, although they still do that, because they have been given Carte Blanche by the US Supreme Court to "donate" to any politician in any amount WITHOUT accountability to the people, who supposedly own this government.
Which is one reason why I won't be buying a Verizon smartphone when my current Verizon cellphone contract expires.
When the local cable and telcos repeatedly refused the request of local governments to install Fiber Optic cables in order to offer affordable high bandwidth internet connections to everyone, the local govenments, like mine, started laying their own Fiber Optic cable. I watched with anticipation as the cable was laid in my yard. It was never hooked up. The cable and telcos whined (and bribed) Congress to pass legislation to forbid local governments from "competing" with their cable and telcos. The legislation also gave the cable and telcos over $200 BILLION to fund and finish what the local governments had started -- conversion from Copper wire to Fiber Optic. Unfortunately, and probably deliberately, the legislation did not include penalty clauses for non-compliance. The GREEDY cable and telcos pocketed the money and returned to squeezing maximum profits out of their Copper wire.
Flash forward 20 years. Internet usage has exploded, creating a perfect storm for greedy cable and telcos to maximize their profit by introducing a "Neutral Internet" PR storm which actually resulted in the ISPs being able to break their Copper wire traffic into "tiers", which aren't tiers at all, but merely ways of marking an Internet packet so as to allow software/hardware on their backbone to let certain packets to go unimpeded (if the customer paid a higher premium), while the others had their packets TTL count reduced or were dropped altogether, forcing resend, thus "slowing" down the cheap connections. The result: for Internet, TV and smartphone services combined consumers in the US now pay $130 AND MORE for CAPPED service. For comparison, France installed Fiber Optic throughout their country, and users can get an uncapped 40Gb Internet connection, 200 channels of TV and unlimited smartphone connections to any other phone in their country for $30/month.
Only Americans would be so ill-informed and sheepish as to allow their current Internet situation to have developed. All because they now have a Cabal, not a Republic.
This is just one of an increasingly endless number of examples of aggressive police or prosecutors twisting existing laws into such pretzels of meaning so they can use them to go after anyone for anything. This technique is being used to circumvent Constitutional freedoms of free speech and press to harass those who run afoul of politically incorrectness. This boy was expressing his opinion of a group of other people and putting those opinions on paper. Regardless of how repulsive they are to some members of society, both activities are, or should be, protected from criminal prosecution by the state by the 1st Amendment. He may not, however, be immune from civil court action for slander filed by offended persons. But, even in civil court, the evidence of guilt has to depend on more than just the "feelings" of the claimants. Feelings are often so fickle and and easily enhanced by thoughts of instant riches.
The ease of manipulation of PC attitudes for political purposes by unscrupulous people exposes society to those who would manipulate or distort social attitudes of news or events to demean a person or a group. Any word, especially those like "those", "they" or "them", or gender jokes, all examples of free speech, are interpreted as evidence of anti-social behavior with the evidence resting solely on the "feelings" of people claiming to be offended. A jar of urine containing a small Christian cross is given a name "Piss Christ" to "label" it as artistic expression of free speech, but a child reading the Bible silently to herself on a school bus heading to or from school is accused of violating "separation of church and state". An unusual argument to be sure, unless our society is so collectively ignorant that the common man cannot distinguish between a group of several hundred peers elected to create, debate and pass laws, and a dozen school administrators and board members making rules. Indeed, it could be ignorance, for it takes zero brains to enforce zero tolerance rules. Such is the fickle state of political incorrectness.
For a comparison the largest Windows botfarm had well over 1 million zombies in it. There were 2.9 million active Windows malware packages last year and probably more than 90% of most Windows boxes have expired AV subscriptions on them, and most are probably infected, but the user isn't smart enough to realize the reason why his box boots and runs so slow at times. Microsoft has relieved the situation somewhat by making available a free and effective AV package: Microsoft Security Essentials. Being free the only thing a Windows users has to do is set MSE for automatic update of the vaccine file. This is still not ideal, however, because there is usually a significant time gap between when a black hat releases a malware package and when it is finally detected, analyzed and the fix added to an AV vaccine file. For really critical security holes the gap may be as short as a few days, but for many of the others the gap may be as long as several months or never (i.e., the "cure" is to upgrade to a newer version of Windows). A LOT of people with "active" AV security have been caught in that gap and had their personal data stolen, sometimes along with a lot of cash.
The Linux botfarm was created by a group of hackers about two years ago and since Linux isn't susceptible to automatic email or browser drive-by attacks it took them 6 months to manually find 770 poorly secured Linux boxes and hack into them. Linux boxes are so hard to break into hackers use them to control the very large Windows bot farms that plague the Internet. When a black hat breaks into a Linux box she usually makes it as secure as it should have been, making it about impossible for other black hats to break in.
The superior security model of Linux, combined with the fact that as a totally Open Source OS the insertion of an NSA backdoor key is impossible, makes it ideal for situations where maximum security is a must. This is probably with that "Security" PDF discussed Windows security and mentioned the Mac OS X, but not Linux.
That model you describe explains why Microsoft & Accenture's work on the London Stock Exchange resulted in its BILLION dollar collapse over two years ago.
I find it interesting that some of those who think nuclear power is safe also believe that DU (U-238) is not. Yet, Fucushima is leaking U-235, Pu-239, and their radioactive isotopes, which are definitely NOT safe.
I also find it interesting that those who think nuclear power is affordable never include the cost of burying and monitoring spend fuel rods for the next several thousand years, nor the costs of the clean up of the Savannah River area, the Hanford site, Rocky Flats, or the many other sites contaminated for centuries with nuclear leakage or disposal.
There are two kinds of nuclear experts: those who work for or are funded by the nuclear industry, and those who are not. The first group consistently praise nuclear power's supposed attributes of economy and safety. The second group consistently points to its dangers and true costs. They point out research on going since August 6, 1945, shows that long exposure to low levels of radiation give rise to more cancers than short exposures to high levels of non-lethal radiation. This has been supported by the release of recent German studies showing that children who live close to nuclear power plants have significantly higher incidents of thyroid cancer. http://tekknorg.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/german-kikk-study-higher-cancer-risc-next-to-atomic-power-plants-unofficial-belarussian-children-cancer-data/
As a Chernobyl class disaster with an exclusion zone with 18 mile radius that should be 30 miles, and counting only the land side of the circle of contamination, they stand to lose 1,400 sq miles of land for several centuries. The coastal land destroyed by the Tsunami, can be restored, and the Japanese people are very industrious and will get it done.
Currently, wind patterns have favored blowing the contamination out to sea, but as the seasons change, and they don't get a handle on the leaking radiation, an entire swath of Northern Japan and North Korea could be contaminated for decades, if not centuries. It all depends on where the Plutonium part of the MOX fuel lands.
the evil, ambulance-chasing lawyers and the politicians who accept corporate bribes (a.k.a. "campaign donations") to make ridiculous laws which have cultivated such a large disrespect for all laws in this country, even though the politicians attempt to bribe voters with "ear marks".
Slashdot Mirror
Greed?
Nonsense. Do you make this stuff up as you write?
IF Amazon wanted to spend millions to bribe legislators that would only work if YOU voted in corrupt individuals, and why would you do that unless they offered free welfare benefits to YOU? So, who's being greedy? (See how easy it is to make up boogie men!)
Nonsense.
I use Amazon extensively and from my experience the savings far exceed the difference between taxed (7% in NE) and untaxed sales prices. Free shipping and rapid deliveries make home shopping nearly as convenient as local shopping, especially for 70+ people like myself. While many local stores disavow warranty or service problems (the stickers say "Don't bring this XXX back to the store. Contact the manufacturer"), Amazon makes returning merchandize free and easy, including printing RMAs from your online account. At tax time I total the amount of the sales for the previous year from emailed invoices and submit the sales tax on my State Income tax filing, in fulfillment of NE tax law. I have yet to see any local store offer the selection that Amazon does. As a Prime member my wife an I enjoy streaming movies to watch on our HD TV, and over 5,000 offerings are free, with the rest being offered at prices from 0.99 to 3.99 for 48 hours. Our most recent viewings include "True Grit (2010)" and "The King's Speech".
P.S. -- I don't work for Amazon.
You think your safe?
"Common sense" is a common delusion. There is a gap of time, in the Windows ecosystem, between when a new virus is turned loose in the wild and when it is detected, analyzed and its vaccine appears in the latest DAT file. ASSUMING that you keep your AV subscription current, that gap can range from a few days to a few years. (Some holes Microsoft never fixes but requires you to upgrade to the latest version of Windows to receive the "fix") During that gap your box is susceptible to infection, and knowing how promiscuous ANY version of Windows is, the odds are likely that you are among the 95% of all Windows users whose box is infected. The most common infections are the keyboard logger, used by thieves to hijack your bank account and CC info, and zombie viruses used to make your Windows box a zombie member of a bot farm, so that people like LulzSec can make your box a part of a DDoS attack.
Also, have you ever heard of microcode? It's in CPUs, GPU, control chips, ROM, etc... and most of that stuff is manufactured in China. Have no doubt. Not only is the NSA backdoor keys in all versions of Windows, contrary to their denials, I would suspect the Chinese and Taiwanese have put back doors in microcode as well. All they need is your IP address. Use Tor? Sure. Just make sure you have enough jumps AND that your box isn't leaking DNS or other information outside the Tor link.
No, the "only things" holding it back are its performances in mission critical situations like the Chinese Olympics, where the world got to watch a BSOD flash into the ceiling of the Bird Pavilion, and the $1 Billion in lost sales suffered by the London Stock Exchange when their .NET based app, written BY Microsoft and Aventure, crashed for the second time in less than a year.
If Microsoft, which owns the .NET API, both documented and undocumented, can't write an application which is both stable and with the transaction times they promised that .NET could deliver, who can?
That they are using it does not mean that VB6 as a tool is still alive. In fact, the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported as of April 8, 2008.
That's about the same time they stopped supporting VFP 9.0. We were using VFP 6.0 when MS announced on the UniversalThread (UT) that VFB 6.0 would be the last version of that tool. The 250,000 VFP coders registered at UT were outraged and threatened a mass exodus to a tool MS didn't control. In the end, tens of thousands did migrate to other tools, while Microsoft put VFP on minimal life support to prevent further defections. I saw the handwriting on the wall and I moved my apps to Qt in 2004 and have been well pleased.
Microsoft had their MVP VFP coders, like Kevin McNish (IIRC) and others, start pushing C# and .NET as a replacement for VFP and holding classes on the UT, and many took the leap to .NET. Now it appears that MS screwed them twice in about five years. Will they bend over and take it for a third time?
just how long have the Russians and Chinese been lounging around in that system? A year? A decade?
attempt to gain control over the Internet and put a tollbooth on everyone's driveway.
The only questions left to ask are: "Did they pay enough congressmen?", and, "have they given enough trips to judges?"
Without those cash payments and "rewards" they can't win. With them they can't lose.
in the sand. (Thought I was going to use another location, didn't you?)
example of head in the sand.
Oh yes you have, you just don't realize it.
If you are not posting with your real name from a country were you feel no fear of exposure then you are doing a LOT of boot licking.
Are you positive that Lulz is not a government/theocratic cyber warfare unit operating out of Europe or the Mid-East or China or Cuba or Venezuela? In other words, people who have ponies in the race? How can you be sure?
Or, is it your attitude that while the above mentioned countries can and do have cyber warfare units it is wrong for the USA to have its own unit too?
One never reads about these "hackers" breaking into Russian or Chinese government websites and then releasing documents they steal. Why is that? Could it be that they know that they are not as "invisible" as they brag to be, and that if they did attack those sites it wouldn't be long before they were sleeping with the reporters whom Putin didn't like, or they'd suddenly wake up in a Chinese or Iranian prison?
And, to the idiot who claimed that "hacking never hurt anyone", talk to the people who were put in harms way by WikiLeaks sloppy editing of stolen documents containing the names of people.
The RICO and PATRIOT Acts, along with the TSA, have done enough damage to citizens of the USA without having hackers further the harm. It's time for rational people to replace the Rude-Goldberg security arrangements created by the DHS. But, let's imagine that Lulz and WikiLeaks are successful in creating a citizen uproar that results in the activities of USA espionage agencies being severely, although irrationally, curtailed. When those agencies can no longer prevent the smuggling of a disassembled Pakistani or Iranian nuclear bomb into the country and, say, Denver, CO disappears in a mushroom cloud, will you be happen then?
It was "patently" obvious to everyone that SCO was a proxy for Microsoft's attack against Linux.
I suspect that Lodsys is a proxy for Microsoft's attack against Apple. The MO is identical -- don't threaten those who can defend themselves, go after the small fry.
See Trips for Judges:
"Corporate special interests are wining and dining judges at fancy resorts under the pretext of "educating" them about complicated legal issues. Nothing for FREE, a July 2000 report by Community Rights Counsel (CRC), showed that these junkets appear to be working as their sponsors intend, encouraging rulings that strike down environmental protections and line the pockets of junket sponsors."
And that info is over five years old. Corporate greed has made great gains since then. Now they don't have to bribe judges, although they still do that, because they have been given Carte Blanche by the US Supreme Court to "donate" to any politician in any amount WITHOUT accountability to the people, who supposedly own this government.
Which is one reason why I won't be buying a Verizon smartphone when my current Verizon cellphone contract expires.
When the local cable and telcos repeatedly refused the request of local governments to install Fiber Optic cables in order to offer affordable high bandwidth internet connections to everyone, the local govenments, like mine, started laying their own Fiber Optic cable. I watched with anticipation as the cable was laid in my yard. It was never hooked up. The cable and telcos whined (and bribed) Congress to pass legislation to forbid local governments from "competing" with their cable and telcos. The legislation also gave the cable and telcos over $200 BILLION to fund and finish what the local governments had started -- conversion from Copper wire to Fiber Optic. Unfortunately, and probably deliberately, the legislation did not include penalty clauses for non-compliance. The GREEDY cable and telcos pocketed the money and returned to squeezing maximum profits out of their Copper wire.
Flash forward 20 years. Internet usage has exploded, creating a perfect storm for greedy cable and telcos to maximize their profit by introducing a "Neutral Internet" PR storm which actually resulted in the ISPs being able to break their Copper wire traffic into "tiers", which aren't tiers at all, but merely ways of marking an Internet packet so as to allow software/hardware on their backbone to let certain packets to go unimpeded (if the customer paid a higher premium), while the others had their packets TTL count reduced or were dropped altogether, forcing resend, thus "slowing" down the cheap connections. The result: for Internet, TV and smartphone services combined consumers in the US now pay $130 AND MORE for CAPPED service. For comparison, France installed Fiber Optic throughout their country, and users can get an uncapped 40Gb Internet connection, 200 channels of TV and unlimited smartphone connections to any other phone in their country for $30/month.
Only Americans would be so ill-informed and sheepish as to allow their current Internet situation to have developed. All because they now have a Cabal, not a Republic.
"you must compensate us for our intellectual property".
This is just one of an increasingly endless number of examples of aggressive police or prosecutors twisting existing laws into such pretzels of meaning so they can use them to go after anyone for anything. This technique is being used to circumvent Constitutional freedoms of free speech and press to harass those who run afoul of politically incorrectness. This boy was expressing his opinion of a group of other people and putting those opinions on paper. Regardless of how repulsive they are to some members of society, both activities are, or should be, protected from criminal prosecution by the state by the 1st Amendment. He may not, however, be immune from civil court action for slander filed by offended persons. But, even in civil court, the evidence of guilt has to depend on more than just the "feelings" of the claimants. Feelings are often so fickle and and easily enhanced by thoughts of instant riches.
The ease of manipulation of PC attitudes for political purposes by unscrupulous people exposes society to those who would manipulate or distort social attitudes of news or events to demean a person or a group. Any word, especially those like "those", "they" or "them", or gender jokes, all examples of free speech, are interpreted as evidence of anti-social behavior with the evidence resting solely on the "feelings" of people claiming to be offended. A jar of urine containing a small Christian cross is given a name "Piss Christ" to "label" it as artistic expression of free speech, but a child reading the Bible silently to herself on a school bus heading to or from school is accused of violating "separation of church and state". An unusual argument to be sure, unless our society is so collectively ignorant that the common man cannot distinguish between a group of several hundred peers elected to create, debate and pass laws, and a dozen school administrators and board members making rules. Indeed, it could be ignorance, for it takes zero brains to enforce zero tolerance rules. Such is the fickle state of political incorrectness.
nt
For a comparison the largest Windows botfarm had well over 1 million zombies in it. There were 2.9 million active Windows malware packages last year and probably more than 90% of most Windows boxes have expired AV subscriptions on them, and most are probably infected, but the user isn't smart enough to realize the reason why his box boots and runs so slow at times. Microsoft has relieved the situation somewhat by making available a free and effective AV package: Microsoft Security Essentials. Being free the only thing a Windows users has to do is set MSE for automatic update of the vaccine file. This is still not ideal, however, because there is usually a significant time gap between when a black hat releases a malware package and when it is finally detected, analyzed and the fix added to an AV vaccine file. For really critical security holes the gap may be as short as a few days, but for many of the others the gap may be as long as several months or never (i.e., the "cure" is to upgrade to a newer version of Windows). A LOT of people with "active" AV security have been caught in that gap and had their personal data stolen, sometimes along with a lot of cash.
The Linux botfarm was created by a group of hackers about two years ago and since Linux isn't susceptible to automatic email or browser drive-by attacks it took them 6 months to manually find 770 poorly secured Linux boxes and hack into them. Linux boxes are so hard to break into hackers use them to control the very large Windows bot farms that plague the Internet. When a black hat breaks into a Linux box she usually makes it as secure as it should have been, making it about impossible for other black hats to break in.
The superior security model of Linux, combined with the fact that as a totally Open Source OS the insertion of an NSA backdoor key is impossible, makes it ideal for situations where maximum security is a must. This is probably with that "Security" PDF discussed Windows security and mentioned the Mac OS X, but not Linux.
That model you describe explains why Microsoft & Accenture's work on the London Stock Exchange resulted in its BILLION dollar collapse over two years ago.
a wholly controlled subsidiary of Microsoft.
It's board and officers are now redundant rubber stamps.
recently dismantled regulations on corporate US presidential campaign donations, thus allowing corporations to nullify the votes of the electorates.
The cabal in this country is almost complete.
I find it interesting that some of those who think nuclear power is safe also believe that DU (U-238) is not. Yet, Fucushima is leaking U-235, Pu-239, and their radioactive isotopes, which are definitely NOT safe.
I also find it interesting that those who think nuclear power is affordable never include the cost of burying and monitoring spend fuel rods for the next several thousand years, nor the costs of the clean up of the Savannah River area, the Hanford site, Rocky Flats, or the many other sites contaminated for centuries with nuclear leakage or disposal.
There are two kinds of nuclear experts: those who work for or are funded by the nuclear industry, and those who are not. The first group consistently praise nuclear power's supposed attributes of economy and safety. The second group consistently points to its dangers and true costs. They point out research on going since August 6, 1945, shows that long exposure to low levels of radiation give rise to more cancers than short exposures to high levels of non-lethal radiation. This has been supported by the release of recent German studies showing that children who live close to nuclear power plants have significantly higher incidents of thyroid cancer. http://tekknorg.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/german-kikk-study-higher-cancer-risc-next-to-atomic-power-plants-unofficial-belarussian-children-cancer-data/
As a Chernobyl class disaster with an exclusion zone with 18 mile radius that should be 30 miles, and counting only the land side of the circle of contamination, they stand to lose 1,400 sq miles of land for several centuries. The coastal land destroyed by the Tsunami, can be restored, and the Japanese people are very industrious and will get it done.
Currently, wind patterns have favored blowing the contamination out to sea, but as the seasons change, and they don't get a handle on the leaking radiation, an entire swath of Northern Japan and North Korea could be contaminated for decades, if not centuries. It all depends on where the Plutonium part of the MOX fuel lands.
using the law to extort competition?
Obviously both Apple and Microsoft found that the Mafia wasn't wrong, the extortion business is profitable.
decide which project survives and which one will languish by the number of their respective downloads and volunteer support.
the evil, ambulance-chasing lawyers and the politicians who accept corporate bribes (a.k.a. "campaign donations") to make ridiculous laws which have cultivated such a large disrespect for all laws in this country, even though the politicians attempt to bribe voters with "ear marks".