I know at least some employers are now taking the slant that if you don't have a Facebook account you automatically either "have something to hide" or "are anti-social to the extreme".
Sounds either urban legend-ish or astroturfy. I looked at your posting history and you don't seem astroturfy. So that leaves urban legend. Kind of like everyone has heard of someone whom got a job on monster.com, got a job thru linked in, got married from online dating, and now can't get hired without facebook. Uh huh...
Maybe a second one bring in some new blood to the industry, especially my step-son (who'll be graduating college in two years and is gonna need a job).
Yeah, let's hope for a bubble. Otherwise people would have to get jobs doing something useful.
Those jobs were mostly exported to China and India, or at least forced out of the US for one reason or another. Its bubble-job, mc-job, or unemployment for the next generation.
-So if they can't charge, how do they generate income? As we know, its largely advertising revenue.
They could sell the aggregated data to every HR department in the world, every government at every level in the world, every private investigator / bail bondsman in the world, all the worlds credit bureaus, every private security firm in the world... Eventually as the bubble pops, they will HAVE to do so as they circle the drain.
These companies have real value - Google's a huge company with a market cap of $202 billion as of this morning's opening.
Thats hilarious placing "real value" and "market cap" in the same line. Market cap is nearly meaningless, its just the marginal price fluctuations times the number of outstanding shares. As if, in a thought experiment, you sold every outstanding share you'd be able to get the exact same price for the last share sold as for the first share sold, ha ha ha.
The actual real value of GOOG can be found at (where else?) finance.google.com, pull up GOOGs financials, click on balance sheet:
total assets 57851 - virtual made up junk slush fund accounting tricks like intangibles and goodwill -6256 -1044, subtract total liabilties 11610 and GOOG is really worth about 39 billion as of the end of last year.
-So if they can't charge, how do they generate income? As we know, its largely advertising revenue
And that brings up problem #2 that the last bubble happened in an inflationary flood of credit and generally increasing (at least nominally) incomes. In a deflationary environment, you can't grab a slice of the pie and watch it grow, even just to stand still you have to convince your customers (advertising agencies, etc) whom have a shrinking revenue stream, that their dollars are better spent on your dotcom ads than spent on TV commercials, print ads, billboards, whatever.
Every millisecond spent on facebook is a millisecond not spent at home depot or related pursuits, not spent eating at a restaurant, not spent buying a car or driving around... Computer product importers / retailers and ISPs are pretty much the only industries that are a good fit for facebook.
You want to reach car buyers so you can sell more cars, you put a billboard on the biggest interstate in town, you advertise on TV during nascar races, and you put print ads in a car magazine. You don't advertise to peasant subsistence farmers, real or virtual farmvillers. The real ones can't afford it, and the virtual ones are more interested in clicking mice than driving cars. Facebook, etc, is too old and too wide spread to dazzle them into investing in something "new", since everyone's had an account for years.
In other words its hard to bubble off shrinking advertising revenue that would be targeted to the wrong people anyway.
Idiots are going to blow us all to Kingdom Come. You know this is just the first step in making a planet buster bomb.
To produce enough anti-matter to match the destructive potential of the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb, you would need the energy output of a gigawatt power station for 6.6 years. And that is assuming perfect production and storage which we are no where close to achieving. In reality, it takes orders of magnitude more energy to crate anti-matter than can get out of the annihilation of that anti-matter, so the actual length of time would be closer to 600 years than 6.
So, sorry, no earth shattering kaboom just yet.
You've answered the total energy problem, but not the power problem. For example a stick of dynamite and a piece of cake have about the same total energy content, its just dynamite releases it at a literally supersonic rate, whereas it takes hour (years?) to use the chemical energy from a piece of cake in my tummy.
Its entirely possible a Tsar Bomba sized antimatter bomb would slowly "burn" like the worlds scariest refinery fire. Might take "a long time" to fully react as a tiny bit blows a very clean vacuum around itself by the gammas heating the air, repeat as an oscillator. Oh it would be very destructive, but probably take many orders of magnitude longer than a nuke to react.
My semi-educated guess here is that any sort of proprietary encryption protocol is more open to attack than a well-known publicly documented system, because once it becomes a valuable target (and public voting mechanisms are definitely high value targets) its security-by-obscurity goes away rapidly.
Not too good. The actual reason is the public algorithms are the best that can be designed without the NSA disappearing the authors and run up against the computer science limits of what can be scaled. Anything else would be less than perfect. Think of the S boxes in DES, which coincidentally happen to be nearly ideal. Random other proprietary values would be easier to break. Another example, md5 isn't bad, to make a "secret private version" you could just replace half the xors with ands and half with ors. Not too wise.
Most crypto algorithms are already as simple as they can be without weakening them, so removing stuff break them and slathering junk on top weakens them.
What does encryption accomplish, in this case, other than to help make sure the vote isn't altered in transit between the voter's machine and the server? That sort of vote-by-vote interference would be a very ineffective way to throw an election.
When I was young and poor the voting site at the dorm had multi-hour lines out the door and most of the machines don't work. Now that I'm old(er) and relatively wealthy and living in the appropriate area, oddly enough the voting site never has more than 5 minutes of waiting and all the machines work.
Oldest trick in the book. So the T-1 to the poor persons voting district will have a BER of about 1e-3, awwww too bad, and the T-1 to my voting district will have a BER around 1e-12. What a surprise!
There are other solutions such as a public ceremony attended by the candidates where a backup of the private keys, on a flash drive, is dropped into a tub of quick epoxy, dropped into a dumpster full of cement, dropped down an abandoned mine shaft, covered with 1000 feet of gravel, capped with reinforced concrete, etc etc until everyone is satisfied but it is theoretically too expensive to easily steal.
Personally, I'd launch a flash drive to the moon. If anyone ever fetches it, send the next to Mars. You get the idea.
If the private key was actually destroyed, then it cannot be recovered in the timeframe of an election unless the system itself is flawed. Someone needs to read a book.
That was what jumped out at me as well. If the election managers can "reconstruct" a supposed private key - how is that key considered secure? The WHOLE POINT of a private key is supposed to be that you - and ONLY you - have the ability to access it.
Lots of dancing around to avoid using "technical terms". Go google for "Shamir's Secret Sharing" or
I am about 99% certain the Shamir in SSS and the Shamir in RSA are the same Shamir but I'm too lazy to look it up and it doesn't really prove anything other than SSS was designed by a smart guy (then again, most broken systems were also designed by smart guys).
Anyway, "apt-get install ssss" on a modern system will provide many interesting and informative lab opportunities.
The idea of SSSS is private data can be made public if you can just get X number of people to agree to conspire and pool their shares, where X might be, say, 200.
Perhaps you should read up on the problems with online voting before you make these sorts of comments. Securing a vote is trivial, as long as you are happy that your ID is attached to the vote. However this has the problem that you no longer have a secret ballot, apart from potential state sponsored discrimination, you can also be a victim of external intimidation, since others can see how you voted. Vote buying is also possible, since you can now prove how you voted.
If you eliminate any association of your ID from your vote, then you also eliminate you ability to verify that the vote you cast is indeed the vote that was counted.
You need to read up on the Debian voting system and hash functions. Not Condorcet, although thats cool.
Also there is a procedure that you can vote multiple times and only the last counts. That would seem to eliminate all but very last moment intimidation. Which can be eliminated by everyone voting at the same time, more or less. How many can realistically be intimidated by one intimidator?
They'll never do it, of course, as most voters consider their political party to be an unalterable demographic, no more so than they could change their race or age. But thinking its possible is good for pacification.
to just send a few dictionaries, school books and novels and send them to some remote schools in developing nations... Not to knock technology but why load up a single electronic device when the same amount of money could by 20 books and they could be used by 20 kids simultaneously without being charged... I think the Kindle is a great device for me when I want to carry 30 books around with me, but it really doesn't make ANY sense to give them to developing nations except for the PR value to Amazon.
20 books? Can you buy a new non-used non-fiction hardcover textbook for less than $7? Also why can you only load 30 books on your kindle? My ipod touch kindle reader has more. Project gutenberg claims 33000 works...
On my server the BIOS battery is dead for the last one or two years. Rebooting it means BIOS gets fucked up and it can't boot and needs manual intervention.
I have a Soekris 5501 that won't boot unless I attach a RS-232 terminal. Not sure if its stuck at the BIOS level or the GRUB level. It draws about an amp, and is hooked up to a 75 amp-hour 12V battery system. It has never crashed, not in several continuous years of operation as an asterisk PBX, so I'm not overly worried, although its an unholy pain to haul out and hook up an old Wyse terminal at the location every time I reboot.
I believe I recall some HP or sun boxes about 20 years ago that wouldn't reboot unless they saw the correct RS-232 signals on the console, this is not a new problem.
Reasonable fear: Sarah Palin is basically an idiot who has no business holding public office.
She would actually be a pretty decent local alderman/council member, or maybe village treasurer. I'd keep her out of the school board because she has some very unamerican ideas about ramming her individual personal religious beliefs into everyones biology and health class, but other that that she would be about average at the local level. She certainly has a lot of experience with teenage pregnancy although not with preventing it, so I'm thinking I would not want her in charge of my daughter, hence strike two against being involved in the local school system. Small village mayor would be a stretch, but she could probably do it if she tried really hard, and by the peter principle thats probably where she would end up. Coincidentally, guess what she was doing before she was "discovered" and shoved into the national spotlight?
Yours are not bad, actually pretty good, one of them was good enough that I remember it from back when it was new, but you only got about one punch in per post. I crammed 11 halfway decent punches into one post. I'm not saying I deserve a +11 mod, but the odds of a single punch post attracting the admiration of the mods is... about 1/11 the odds of one of my eleven punches attracting the attention of a mod.
As far as being "ridiculous, hyper-offensive" "hardcore troll humor" the whole point of the OP was claiming that kind of fear mongering just can't be done by the liberals. I guess you agree with me, by my demonstration that it can. I may not have Ann Coulter's legs but I'll sign a "resident lib fear mongerer" multimillion dollar entertainer contract at MSNBC, if you'll promise to watch me.
Huh? We're discussing fear mongering. Thats like arguing whats fair fighting in a bar brawl.
I'm not saying that Glenn Beck is the only fear monger, but your response to this is completely disingenuous
OP claims liberals cannot be fear mongered. I did a pretty good job, in my opinion, of some traditional rallying cries. Calling fear mongering disingenuous is kind of irrational, "lacking in frankness or sincerity" is pretty much a prerequisite for fear mongering, isn't it?
A truly disingenuous response would be claiming Beck is 100% factual, so I'm guessing neither of us are actually disingenuous?
you can't tell me with a straight face that Palin wouldn't make a disastrous president
Personally I can't stand her either, but, being a disastrous president merely means being prez while the country goes to hell. Whomever won 2008 was going to go down in history as a "disastrous president" looking at greater economic forces and positioning, etc.
If I had a multimillion dollar entertainment contract, I bet i could squeeze out a nice "straight face" to get that paycheck. People have certainly endured worse for a couple bucks.
I was aiming for a funny not an insightful. If you can't laugh about your own beliefs... However I am more libertarian so several of my comments were more anti-statist (someone somewhere is not be taxed, oh noes!). Then again you'll never meet a more hard core statist than an elderly limousine liberal type like my rich grandparents were. Oddly enough we basically agree on all subjects you brought up except I happen to greatly enjoy owning my old Prius.
Your explanation of how their manipulations are based on truth, makes me insightful, even if you claim otherwise. You're (probably) doing what you've been told (presumably, vote D) and claim your manipulations are true.
There is a small aspect of ignorance where you think the elites on one side D or R have it out for the middle class. The problem is that both sides have the same agenda, just slightly different methods to get to the same endpoint. And you seem to have fallen for it by only reporting how the R side is evil. The D are not a heck of a lot different or better.
pepsi owned them and spun them out as "yum brands Inc" in 1997.
Pepsico, aside from innumerable soft drink brands, mostly sells stuff best described as "junk food you would buy at a convenience store, and, weirdly enough, quaker oats"
Slashdot Mirror
I know at least some employers are now taking the slant that if you don't have a Facebook account you automatically either "have something to hide" or "are anti-social to the extreme".
Sounds either urban legend-ish or astroturfy. I looked at your posting history and you don't seem astroturfy. So that leaves urban legend. Kind of like everyone has heard of someone whom got a job on monster.com, got a job thru linked in, got married from online dating, and now can't get hired without facebook. Uh huh...
The cheap kindle does wifi only, correct?
Selling your primary resource (the social graph) to outsiders is creating your own competitors: once I have your data, why do I need to pay you more?
Live feed. Extreme example: Egypt would have paid a lot for a live private facebook feed. Who could possibly know, maybe they did?
Not so extreme example: Local cops pick up a punk, need to find out his current accomplices, not his buddies from half a year ago.
Maybe a second one bring in some new blood to the industry, especially my step-son (who'll be graduating college in two years and is gonna need a job).
Yeah, let's hope for a bubble. Otherwise people would have to get jobs doing something useful.
Those jobs were mostly exported to China and India, or at least forced out of the US for one reason or another. Its bubble-job, mc-job, or unemployment for the next generation.
-So if they can't charge, how do they generate income? As we know, its largely advertising revenue.
They could sell the aggregated data to every HR department in the world, every government at every level in the world, every private investigator / bail bondsman in the world, all the worlds credit bureaus, every private security firm in the world... Eventually as the bubble pops, they will HAVE to do so as they circle the drain.
These companies have real value - Google's a huge company with a market cap of $202 billion as of this morning's opening.
Thats hilarious placing "real value" and "market cap" in the same line. Market cap is nearly meaningless, its just the marginal price fluctuations times the number of outstanding shares. As if, in a thought experiment, you sold every outstanding share you'd be able to get the exact same price for the last share sold as for the first share sold, ha ha ha.
The actual real value of GOOG can be found at (where else?) finance.google.com, pull up GOOGs financials, click on balance sheet:
total assets 57851 - virtual made up junk slush fund accounting tricks like intangibles and goodwill -6256 -1044, subtract total liabilties 11610 and GOOG is really worth about 39 billion as of the end of last year.
-So if they can't charge, how do they generate income? As we know, its largely advertising revenue
And that brings up problem #2 that the last bubble happened in an inflationary flood of credit and generally increasing (at least nominally) incomes. In a deflationary environment, you can't grab a slice of the pie and watch it grow, even just to stand still you have to convince your customers (advertising agencies, etc) whom have a shrinking revenue stream, that their dollars are better spent on your dotcom ads than spent on TV commercials, print ads, billboards, whatever.
Every millisecond spent on facebook is a millisecond not spent at home depot or related pursuits, not spent eating at a restaurant, not spent buying a car or driving around... Computer product importers / retailers and ISPs are pretty much the only industries that are a good fit for facebook.
You want to reach car buyers so you can sell more cars, you put a billboard on the biggest interstate in town, you advertise on TV during nascar races, and you put print ads in a car magazine. You don't advertise to peasant subsistence farmers, real or virtual farmvillers. The real ones can't afford it, and the virtual ones are more interested in clicking mice than driving cars. Facebook, etc, is too old and too wide spread to dazzle them into investing in something "new", since everyone's had an account for years.
In other words its hard to bubble off shrinking advertising revenue that would be targeted to the wrong people anyway.
... even though there will soon be NO fish left for humans to eat.
Not even from aquaculture? aka "farm raised fish"?
The problem with fearmongering is going too far (too far too fast?) and being laughed at.
Idiots are going to blow us all to Kingdom Come. You know this is just the first step in making a planet buster bomb.
To produce enough anti-matter to match the destructive potential of the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb, you would need the energy output of a gigawatt power station for 6.6 years. And that is assuming perfect production and storage which we are no where close to achieving. In reality, it takes orders of magnitude more energy to crate anti-matter than can get out of the annihilation of that anti-matter, so the actual length of time would be closer to 600 years than 6.
So, sorry, no earth shattering kaboom just yet.
You've answered the total energy problem, but not the power problem. For example a stick of dynamite and a piece of cake have about the same total energy content, its just dynamite releases it at a literally supersonic rate, whereas it takes hour (years?) to use the chemical energy from a piece of cake in my tummy.
Its entirely possible a Tsar Bomba sized antimatter bomb would slowly "burn" like the worlds scariest refinery fire. Might take "a long time" to fully react as a tiny bit blows a very clean vacuum around itself by the gammas heating the air, repeat as an oscillator. Oh it would be very destructive, but probably take many orders of magnitude longer than a nuke to react.
My semi-educated guess here is that any sort of proprietary encryption protocol is more open to attack than a well-known publicly documented system, because once it becomes a valuable target (and public voting mechanisms are definitely high value targets) its security-by-obscurity goes away rapidly.
Not too good. The actual reason is the public algorithms are the best that can be designed without the NSA disappearing the authors and run up against the computer science limits of what can be scaled. Anything else would be less than perfect. Think of the S boxes in DES, which coincidentally happen to be nearly ideal. Random other proprietary values would be easier to break. Another example, md5 isn't bad, to make a "secret private version" you could just replace half the xors with ands and half with ors. Not too wise.
Most crypto algorithms are already as simple as they can be without weakening them, so removing stuff break them and slathering junk on top weakens them.
What does encryption accomplish, in this case, other than to help make sure the vote isn't altered in transit between the voter's machine and the server? That sort of vote-by-vote interference would be a very ineffective way to throw an election.
When I was young and poor the voting site at the dorm had multi-hour lines out the door and most of the machines don't work. Now that I'm old(er) and relatively wealthy and living in the appropriate area, oddly enough the voting site never has more than 5 minutes of waiting and all the machines work.
Oldest trick in the book. So the T-1 to the poor persons voting district will have a BER of about 1e-3, awwww too bad, and the T-1 to my voting district will have a BER around 1e-12. What a surprise!
This has been solved before take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing
There are other solutions such as a public ceremony attended by the candidates where a backup of the private keys, on a flash drive, is dropped into a tub of quick epoxy, dropped into a dumpster full of cement, dropped down an abandoned mine shaft, covered with 1000 feet of gravel, capped with reinforced concrete, etc etc until everyone is satisfied but it is theoretically too expensive to easily steal.
Personally, I'd launch a flash drive to the moon. If anyone ever fetches it, send the next to Mars. You get the idea.
If the private key was actually destroyed, then it cannot be recovered in the timeframe of an election unless the system itself is flawed. Someone needs to read a book.
That was what jumped out at me as well. If the election managers can "reconstruct" a supposed private key - how is that key considered secure? The WHOLE POINT of a private key is supposed to be that you - and ONLY you - have the ability to access it.
Lots of dancing around to avoid using "technical terms". Go google for "Shamir's Secret Sharing" or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing
I am about 99% certain the Shamir in SSS and the Shamir in RSA are the same Shamir but I'm too lazy to look it up and it doesn't really prove anything other than SSS was designed by a smart guy (then again, most broken systems were also designed by smart guys).
Or more generally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing
Anyway, "apt-get install ssss" on a modern system will provide many interesting and informative lab opportunities.
The idea of SSSS is private data can be made public if you can just get X number of people to agree to conspire and pool their shares, where X might be, say, 200.
Perhaps you should read up on the problems with online voting before you make these sorts of comments.
Securing a vote is trivial, as long as you are happy that your ID is attached to the vote.
However this has the problem that you no longer have a secret ballot, apart from potential state sponsored discrimination, you can also be a victim of external intimidation, since others can see how you voted. Vote buying is also possible, since you can now prove how you voted.
If you eliminate any association of your ID from your vote, then you also eliminate you ability to verify that the vote you cast is indeed the vote that was counted.
You need to read up on the Debian voting system and hash functions. Not Condorcet, although thats cool.
Here's the last election tally sheet:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2010/vote_001_tally.txt
Also there is a procedure that you can vote multiple times and only the last counts. That would seem to eliminate all but very last moment intimidation. Which can be eliminated by everyone voting at the same time, more or less. How many can realistically be intimidated by one intimidator?
if they know they can get rid of
All thats needed for pacification purposes is:
"if they think they can get rid of"
They'll never do it, of course, as most voters consider their political party to be an unalterable demographic, no more so than they could change their race or age. But thinking its possible is good for pacification.
to just send a few dictionaries, school books and novels and send them to some remote schools in developing nations... Not to knock technology but why load up a single electronic device when the same amount of money could by 20 books and they could be used by 20 kids simultaneously without being charged... I think the Kindle is a great device for me when I want to carry 30 books around with me, but it really doesn't make ANY sense to give them to developing nations except for the PR value to Amazon.
20 books? Can you buy a new non-used non-fiction hardcover textbook for less than $7? Also why can you only load 30 books on your kindle? My ipod touch kindle reader has more. Project gutenberg claims 33000 works...
On my server the BIOS battery is dead for the last one or two years. Rebooting it means BIOS gets fucked up and it can't boot and needs manual intervention.
I have a Soekris 5501 that won't boot unless I attach a RS-232 terminal. Not sure if its stuck at the BIOS level or the GRUB level. It draws about an amp, and is hooked up to a 75 amp-hour 12V battery system. It has never crashed, not in several continuous years of operation as an asterisk PBX, so I'm not overly worried, although its an unholy pain to haul out and hook up an old Wyse terminal at the location every time I reboot.
I believe I recall some HP or sun boxes about 20 years ago that wouldn't reboot unless they saw the correct RS-232 signals on the console, this is not a new problem.
Honestly, Why do churches try to get into multimedia and then fail to budget for it?
I think they're more used to the depreciation schedule of an altar rather than high end AV.
Why spend $50 on a model when you can spend $50 million on a model?
No one wants to see the pr0n made with the $50 model ...
Reasonable fear: Sarah Palin is basically an idiot who has no business holding public office.
She would actually be a pretty decent local alderman/council member, or maybe village treasurer. I'd keep her out of the school board because she has some very unamerican ideas about ramming her individual personal religious beliefs into everyones biology and health class, but other that that she would be about average at the local level. She certainly has a lot of experience with teenage pregnancy although not with preventing it, so I'm thinking I would not want her in charge of my daughter, hence strike two against being involved in the local school system. Small village mayor would be a stretch, but she could probably do it if she tried really hard, and by the peter principle thats probably where she would end up. Coincidentally, guess what she was doing before she was "discovered" and shoved into the national spotlight?
Yours are not bad, actually pretty good, one of them was good enough that I remember it from back when it was new, but you only got about one punch in per post. I crammed 11 halfway decent punches into one post. I'm not saying I deserve a +11 mod, but the odds of a single punch post attracting the admiration of the mods is... about 1/11 the odds of one of my eleven punches attracting the attention of a mod.
As far as being "ridiculous, hyper-offensive" "hardcore troll humor" the whole point of the OP was claiming that kind of fear mongering just can't be done by the liberals. I guess you agree with me, by my demonstration that it can. I may not have Ann Coulter's legs but I'll sign a "resident lib fear mongerer" multimillion dollar entertainer contract at MSNBC, if you'll promise to watch me.
I don't remember giving anything to Beck/Limbaugh/Maddows/whomever.
Unless you had someone edit out the commercials for you, while maintaining a boycott of advertisers, sorry, but you made them some bucks.
To be fair
Huh? We're discussing fear mongering. Thats like arguing whats fair fighting in a bar brawl.
I'm not saying that Glenn Beck is the only fear monger, but your response to this is completely disingenuous
OP claims liberals cannot be fear mongered. I did a pretty good job, in my opinion, of some traditional rallying cries. Calling fear mongering disingenuous is kind of irrational, "lacking in frankness or sincerity" is pretty much a prerequisite for fear mongering, isn't it?
A truly disingenuous response would be claiming Beck is 100% factual, so I'm guessing neither of us are actually disingenuous?
you can't tell me with a straight face that Palin wouldn't make a disastrous president
Personally I can't stand her either, but, being a disastrous president merely means being prez while the country goes to hell. Whomever won 2008 was going to go down in history as a "disastrous president" looking at greater economic forces and positioning, etc.
If I had a multimillion dollar entertainment contract, I bet i could squeeze out a nice "straight face" to get that paycheck. People have certainly endured worse for a couple bucks.
I was aiming for a funny not an insightful. If you can't laugh about your own beliefs... However I am more libertarian so several of my comments were more anti-statist (someone somewhere is not be taxed, oh noes!). Then again you'll never meet a more hard core statist than an elderly limousine liberal type like my rich grandparents were. Oddly enough we basically agree on all subjects you brought up except I happen to greatly enjoy owning my old Prius.
Your explanation of how their manipulations are based on truth, makes me insightful, even if you claim otherwise. You're (probably) doing what you've been told (presumably, vote D) and claim your manipulations are true.
There is a small aspect of ignorance where you think the elites on one side D or R have it out for the middle class. The problem is that both sides have the same agenda, just slightly different methods to get to the same endpoint. And you seem to have fallen for it by only reporting how the R side is evil. The D are not a heck of a lot different or better.
Pepsi, KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell were (are?) owned by the same company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yum!_Brands
pepsi owned them and spun them out as "yum brands Inc" in 1997.
Pepsico, aside from innumerable soft drink brands, mostly sells stuff best described as "junk food you would buy at a convenience store, and, weirdly enough, quaker oats"