There is maybe one feature that MS *must* get into Windows 7...
"Windows 7... will scale to 256 processors
It's gonna need it, considering this is the follow-up to Vista. Ironically, non-Windows users will be the ultimate beneficiaries of MS's bloatware: fast, cheap hardware, designed to run Vista and Windows 7, will be a screaming delight for Linux and OS X users.
"I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody."
"640K of memory should be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates.
The communists are coming, the communists are coming! It's all confabulation, clearly, and you're either a mindless conduit, or you're you've guzzled Far Right Koolaid(tm).
Being afraid of a Democratic trifecta is one thing. But lying, and propagating lies, is the lowest form of electioneering, demagoguery.
Such a law exists for the executive branch of the federal government, but so far nobody's shown whether there is such a law for the executive of Alaska...
Such a law does exist for the Alaska state government. What do you think the DEC/FOIA lawsuit, followed by legal foot-dragging and exorbitant copying fees are all about? The plaintiffs want access to emails about polar bears, and the Palins want to make that very difficult.
They desperately need to avoid having their "private" emails from Yahoo and other non-governmental mail servers subpoenaed and made public, because then the jig is up. Secretly using private email accounts to conduct public business, in order to keep it beyond public scrutiny (they even sent an assistant to AK's Law Dept find out if it was illegal), is not the way to run an "open and transparent" state government. While this sort of behavior in a public official might warm the cockles of Cheney's heart, it's the kind most of us want kicked to the curb on November 4th.
And fortunately, for those of us who care about the rule of law, it looks like that's just what's going to happen.
None of this really means there was malice intended.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, especially when you hold the highest office in your state, sworn to uphold *all* the laws of the land.
At the time that Palin was using her Yahoo accounts for govt business, she was also in the public record as knowing that activists were suing for access to her email.
Using private email accounts for public business is illegal in Alaska. Rather than deny this, surely she should be a big lady and step up to admit... but it doesn't matter. The judge will ensure that the emails will come forth, unless Yahoo says "oops! we lost that backup tape..." like the current White House did.
...and -- poof! -- created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth.
Futhermore, there was no $62 trillion in wealth created. Those numbers are the notional value of the assets behind the swaps behind the CDOs, the credit default swaps' maximum risk. It's not an asset you can tap or easily leverage (particularly not when the issuer no longer has funds to cover the CDSes, see AIG.)
The sum total of all U.S. residential property isn't worth anywhere near that much.
The account that got hacked was actually her personal Yahoo account, not one of the ones normally used for official business.
Some interesting news on this front: because Palin deleted her Yahoo email accounts, she may be up for destruction of evidence charges. Felony if true, up to four years in prison.
One shoe left to drop, and it's the big one. Hopefully we'll hear something about it during October, though it's quite plausible that the current DOJ may drag their feet well past election day.
how would the fact that 3 percent of the mortgages slowed down have brought down the "house of cards"?
The underlying mortgages start missing payments, then Moody's drops their rating, followed by the CDOs shedding value, and investors start avoiding that whole class of CDO. Then the CDSes are called to cover the loss, and some are found to have issuers of record with liquidity problems (AIG for example.)
You, the investment bank, holding onto a fat wad of CDS-backed mortgage CDOs, have both net-loss for assets on your books, and broken CDSes.
AIG issued CDSes that it couldn't cover, in the end, and they issued around half a trillion in CDS coverage this decade. And they're just one player in the market. Maybe they were just another over-leveraged financial services firm.
I am a bit confused about the fact that these CDOs amounted to nearly $55trillion.
The CDSes have a face value (max risk) of $50-60 trillion. The underlying premiums are a fraction of that. I don't fully understand CDSes, but if you want an interesting case study in swaps, read about the Orange County, CA, swap bet that bankrupted them. Interest rate swaps are killer.
Halting short sells wouldn't have prevented the current market tankage -- overrated CDOs backed by crappy mortgages caused it. When cashflow from the homeowners slowed, the House of CDO cards collapsed.
It's my impression that short sellers show up at buzzard-feeding time: when the given equity isn't dead yet, generally after the price has a noticeable downward trend. Like most traders, they tend to respond to public news, excluding action/thriller movie plots where short-sellers work with terrorists to ensure downward acceleration of an equity (Casino Royale 2006.)
Nice red herring you're spreading there, SuperPalinFanBoy!
Were you unaware that "presumed innocent until proven guilty" simply means that she cannot be thrown into prison or otherwise penalized for alleged crimes without a trial? However, it does mean that we can refer to Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin with terms like suspect, under investigation, alleged criminal, and the unindicted governor -- until such time that she's been indicted, prosecuted and sat for trial.
Then perhaps we'll refer to her using terms such as felon, criminal, the former governor, the convicted former governor, the governor who resigned to start her jail sentence, or maybe the disgraced former governor, or maybe just jail bird (my personal favorite.)
But for the circumstance that the attorneys general for the jurisdictions under which she has been alleged to have broken the law are all Republicans, I'd have rated this a likely indictment.
Time will tell whether the "party of the rule of law" will follow through on their commitment to uphold the law.
Nobody has to "have it in for her" if she is under suspicion of having broken the law. Don't you know? All suspects are entitled to equal treatment under the U.S. Constitution.
Palin's other Yahoo! account (gov.sarah@yahoo.com) had already been hacked, so to speak, by federal authorities who are investigating her role in the firing of Walt Monegan, Alaska's public safety commissioner. Critics charge that Palin fired Monegan for refusing to dismiss her former brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper. (The scandal has already earned a -gate suffix.) After Tuesday's hacks were made public, both private accounts were deleted -- an act that could technically constitute destruction of evidence.
The Alaska governor could also face charges for conducting official state business using her personal, unarchived e-mail account (a crime); some critics accuse her of skirting freedom-of-information laws in doing so. An Alaska Republican activist is trying to force Palin to release more than 1,100 e-mails she withheld from a public-records request, the Washington Post reported last week.
Given that she apparently conducted official business through the accounts, and that she subsequently deleted the accounts, it appears that she may well be in violation of multiple laws, in multiple jurisdictions. Destruction of evidence will be a particularly sticky charge for her attorneys to deal with. And of course, that particular crime is a felony, so the penalty could land her a prison term longer than her potential four-year term as VP.
Sounds like there is enough evidence made public already (and who knows what the Feds drummed up while watching her), that she can be investigated for multiple violations of the law. If found to have broken the law, she should be indicted and prosecuted, and pay the price for having broken the law.
Nobody is above the law, least of all a member of the "party of the rule of law."
And given that she is running for a top federal office, you'd want her to step forward and clear her name, wouldn't you? Make plain that she's a law-abiding citizen, worthy of your vote, certified free of legal problems, so she can hold office? Or at least continue to hold the one she's got now?
In some certain ways, she's the perfect successor to Cheney. The secrecy thing, pursuing political vendettas, disregard for the law, that type of stuff.
Well yes - and by what criteria are these people (their names, really) getting on the list in the first place? If it's a simple name match, no biographical details, no biometric data - what was the point of US-VISIT, the program to collect biometric data from foreign travelers crossing our borders?
Outward indicators show she's a well-educated, upstanding member of society. I mean, if she had some sort of criminal or terroristic background to justify being on No-Fly, wouldn't the government have presented that in their defense of the suit? A quick read of the court's findings show the defense seems to be about jurisdiction and standing.
Some of us doprotesttorture. Generally the US media do not cover protests, except to point out that protesters are hippies and extremists. The media are by-and-large owned by big corporate conglomerates, who in turn see long-term economic benefit in US involvement in resource wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Torture==profits, for them.
My friends and I have done it to each other to see what it's all about, and it's not bad at fucking all if you have any willpower/brains.
Waterboarding's not so fucking bad, eh? Then why is the US even using it? And if amateur/non-hardened terrorist types like you and your buddies are able to easily withstand it, then what good is it as a form of torture? (Note that John McCain flip-flopped and voted *for* waterboarding even after he denounced it.)
Regardless, torture is considered a lossy means of extracting information from interrogation subjects. Because with the threat of imminent death (e.g. repeated waterboardings, with the drowning response telling your body that you're about to die), you'll do anything to save your life, won't you? Like making shit up. (Of course, making shit up is just what the US did to get us into the Iraq war in the first place.)
I'd be unsurprised to learn that waterboarding is a kind of red herring - there are many far more simple, painful and damaging techniques that our rendition and torture outsource partners (and let us not forget contractors) are all too willing to employ. That's what you can do when you partner with dictatorships in a war on terror.
Even the current Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, considers waterboarding to be torture, saying, "it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Potâ(TM)s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today."
Besides, many consider any form of pain compliance, for forced information extraction, to be torture. Waterboarding is essentially forced drowning with a medic in attendance, to revive the "patient" in case his/her vitals falter.
Grove's Law: While microchip performance doubles every 12-18 months, telecommunications bandwidth doubles every 100 years.
It should be clear he was referring to the American telecom industry. There's also that bit about the $200bn in fees tacked onto everybody's phone bill in the U.S., to pay for the development of 100Mbps residential bandwidth - which never appeared, no Congressional or FCC oversight thank-you-so-much.
Slashdot Mirror
A question I've got is, were they always planning to sell out, or did that just become Plan B, when they got sued?
Copiously missing from the post, and the article, was the part were they instantiated a clone based upon DNA extracted from the mosquito.
It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex!
Chuckle-chuckle snarf snort...
Interestingly, the Bush admin is reported to be tracking American journalists' phonecalls, in an effort to catch leakers from his own team.
Government Begins Tracking Phone Calls of Journalists
That was back in May '06. Fuck knows if this is technically legal, given all the executive orders and constitutionally dodgey laws this decade...
But the First Amendment seems to want to apply here.
"Aging constitutional amendment seeks job. Superpowers include: protecting freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion, occasionally acting as governmental grievance liaison."
"Work history: 1791-2001 United States, job title: First Amendment. Fired for insubordination, by leader of Republican party."
Last seen along I-495, holding sign: "Will work for freedom, liberty and democracy."
There is maybe one feature that MS *must* get into Windows 7...
It's gonna need it, considering this is the follow-up to Vista. Ironically, non-Windows users will be the ultimate beneficiaries of MS's bloatware: fast, cheap hardware, designed to run Vista and Windows 7, will be a screaming delight for Linux and OS X users.
"640K of memory should be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates.
The communists are coming, the communists are coming! It's all confabulation, clearly, and you're either a mindless conduit, or you're you've guzzled Far Right Koolaid(tm).
Being afraid of a Democratic trifecta is one thing. But lying, and propagating lies, is the lowest form of electioneering, demagoguery.
Shame on you.
Such a law does exist for the Alaska state government. What do you think the DEC/FOIA lawsuit, followed by legal foot-dragging and exorbitant copying fees are all about? The plaintiffs want access to emails about polar bears, and the Palins want to make that very difficult.
They desperately need to avoid having their "private" emails from Yahoo and other non-governmental mail servers subpoenaed and made public, because then the jig is up. Secretly using private email accounts to conduct public business, in order to keep it beyond public scrutiny (they even sent an assistant to AK's Law Dept find out if it was illegal), is not the way to run an "open and transparent" state government. While this sort of behavior in a public official might warm the cockles of Cheney's heart, it's the kind most of us want kicked to the curb on November 4th.
And fortunately, for those of us who care about the rule of law, it looks like that's just what's going to happen.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, especially when you hold the highest office in your state, sworn to uphold *all* the laws of the land.
At the time that Palin was using her Yahoo accounts for govt business, she was also in the public record as knowing that activists were suing for access to her email.
Using private email accounts for public business is illegal in Alaska. Rather than deny this, surely she should be a big lady and step up to admit ... but it doesn't matter. The judge will ensure that the emails will come forth, unless Yahoo says "oops! we lost that backup tape..." like the current White House did.
Got any info on that?
Futhermore, there was no $62 trillion in wealth created. Those numbers are the notional value of the assets behind the swaps behind the CDOs, the credit default swaps' maximum risk. It's not an asset you can tap or easily leverage (particularly not when the issuer no longer has funds to cover the CDSes, see AIG.)
The sum total of all U.S. residential property isn't worth anywhere near that much.
Some interesting news on this front: because Palin deleted her Yahoo email accounts, she may be up for destruction of evidence charges. Felony if true, up to four years in prison.
Shortly after the email account hack, Time revealed that the feds already had access to her Yahoo email accounts, as part of a federal investigation into Troopergate.
One shoe left to drop, and it's the big one. Hopefully we'll hear something about it during October, though it's quite plausible that the current DOJ may drag their feet well past election day.
This is bad, but not much compared with the number of names being taken off the voter rolls in preparation for the upcoming presidential election. See "How to Swing an Election."
Oh really?
The underlying mortgages start missing payments, then Moody's drops their rating, followed by the CDOs shedding value, and investors start avoiding that whole class of CDO. Then the CDSes are called to cover the loss, and some are found to have issuers of record with liquidity problems (AIG for example.)
You, the investment bank, holding onto a fat wad of CDS-backed mortgage CDOs, have both net-loss for assets on your books, and broken CDSes.
AIG issued CDSes that it couldn't cover, in the end, and they issued around half a trillion in CDS coverage this decade. And they're just one player in the market. Maybe they were just another over-leveraged financial services firm.
The CDSes have a face value (max risk) of $50-60 trillion. The underlying premiums are a fraction of that. I don't fully understand CDSes, but if you want an interesting case study in swaps, read about the Orange County, CA, swap bet that bankrupted them. Interest rate swaps are killer.
That's been done for ... years. Just about every exchange publishes lists of their stocks that have current failure-to-delivers from naked shorting. If you compare the short-seller positions against regular long buys/sells, it's not much.
Halting short sells wouldn't have prevented the current market tankage -- overrated CDOs backed by crappy mortgages caused it. When cashflow from the homeowners slowed, the House of CDO cards collapsed.
It's my impression that short sellers show up at buzzard-feeding time: when the given equity isn't dead yet, generally after the price has a noticeable downward trend. Like most traders, they tend to respond to public news, excluding action/thriller movie plots where short-sellers work with terrorists to ensure downward acceleration of an equity (Casino Royale 2006.)
You forgot the kinesthetic senses, like acceleration, and the primary vestibular sense organ, the cochlea. Everybody forgets that one.
Nice red herring you're spreading there, SuperPalinFanBoy!
Were you unaware that "presumed innocent until proven guilty" simply means that she cannot be thrown into prison or otherwise penalized for alleged crimes without a trial? However, it does mean that we can refer to Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin with terms like suspect, under investigation, alleged criminal, and the unindicted governor -- until such time that she's been indicted, prosecuted and sat for trial.
Then perhaps we'll refer to her using terms such as felon, criminal, the former governor, the convicted former governor, the governor who resigned to start her jail sentence, or maybe the disgraced former governor, or maybe just jail bird (my personal favorite.)
But for the circumstance that the attorneys general for the jurisdictions under which she has been alleged to have broken the law are all Republicans, I'd have rated this a likely indictment.
Time will tell whether the "party of the rule of law" will follow through on their commitment to uphold the law.
Nobody has to "have it in for her" if she is under suspicion of having broken the law. Don't you know? All suspects are entitled to equal treatment under the U.S. Constitution.
According to Time, Palin's Yahoo accounts were already being monitored by Federal investigators, researching the Troopergate case.
Given that she apparently conducted official business through the accounts, and that she subsequently deleted the accounts, it appears that she may well be in violation of multiple laws, in multiple jurisdictions. Destruction of evidence will be a particularly sticky charge for her attorneys to deal with. And of course, that particular crime is a felony, so the penalty could land her a prison term longer than her potential four-year term as VP.
Sounds like there is enough evidence made public already (and who knows what the Feds drummed up while watching her), that she can be investigated for multiple violations of the law. If found to have broken the law, she should be indicted and prosecuted, and pay the price for having broken the law.
Nobody is above the law, least of all a member of the "party of the rule of law."
And given that she is running for a top federal office, you'd want her to step forward and clear her name, wouldn't you? Make plain that she's a law-abiding citizen, worthy of your vote, certified free of legal problems, so she can hold office? Or at least continue to hold the one she's got now?
In some certain ways, she's the perfect successor to Cheney. The secrecy thing, pursuing political vendettas, disregard for the law, that type of stuff.
+1
2-3 seconds on a fast machine. more features than the OP is asking for, but it's both nifty and handy.
Clip from Adam's talk, the part about RFID and CC company lawyers.
Well yes - and by what criteria are these people (their names, really) getting on the list in the first place? If it's a simple name match, no biographical details, no biometric data - what was the point of US-VISIT, the program to collect biometric data from foreign travelers crossing our borders?
According to Stanford's website, Ibrahim was a doctoral candidate in construction engineering, and her resume details her bachelors and masters in architecture. Ibrahim's doctoral thesis was about organizational disorganization - perhaps the very thing DHS is suffering from with the No-Fly list.
Outward indicators show she's a well-educated, upstanding member of society. I mean, if she had some sort of criminal or terroristic background to justify being on No-Fly, wouldn't the government have presented that in their defense of the suit? A quick read of the court's findings show the defense seems to be about jurisdiction and standing.
Some of us do protest torture. Generally the US media do not cover protests, except to point out that protesters are hippies and extremists. The media are by-and-large owned by big corporate conglomerates, who in turn see long-term economic benefit in US involvement in resource wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Torture==profits, for them.
Waterboarding's not so fucking bad, eh? Then why is the US even using it? And if amateur/non-hardened terrorist types like you and your buddies are able to easily withstand it, then what good is it as a form of torture? (Note that John McCain flip-flopped and voted *for* waterboarding even after he denounced it.)
Regardless, torture is considered a lossy means of extracting information from interrogation subjects. Because with the threat of imminent death (e.g. repeated waterboardings, with the drowning response telling your body that you're about to die), you'll do anything to save your life, won't you? Like making shit up. (Of course, making shit up is just what the US did to get us into the Iraq war in the first place.)
I'd be unsurprised to learn that waterboarding is a kind of red herring - there are many far more simple, painful and damaging techniques that our rendition and torture outsource partners (and let us not forget contractors) are all too willing to employ. That's what you can do when you partner with dictatorships in a war on terror.
The US "doesn't torture" only because it asserts that it doesn't. It also asserts that inflicting pain would not be considered torture unless it caused "death, organ failure or permanent damage."
Even the current Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, considers waterboarding to be torture, saying, "it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Potâ(TM)s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today."
Besides, many consider any form of pain compliance, for forced information extraction, to be torture. Waterboarding is essentially forced drowning with a medic in attendance, to revive the "patient" in case his/her vitals falter.
Obligatory quotage:
Grove's Law: While microchip performance doubles every 12-18 months, telecommunications bandwidth doubles every 100 years.
It should be clear he was referring to the American telecom industry. There's also that bit about the $200bn in fees tacked onto everybody's phone bill in the U.S., to pay for the development of 100Mbps residential bandwidth - which never appeared, no Congressional or FCC oversight thank-you-so-much.
Oh yes, the gov't has felt the pinch! Reducing revenues while increasing expenses ought to put anyone in a pinch, financial that is...