The people who run these big companies (not necessarily) RedHat are known for being egotistical, nasty sons of bitches. It would be nice if the response we saw more and more from them to patent trolls was "crush them, burn them, leave their wives and children in the poor house." I mean be so nasty and vindictive that even after the troll goes bankrupt, they "pierce the corporate veil" and pursue the management and their families into bankruptcy.
Some little girl could think that Stallman is evil because he doesn't raise, feed and have the pony at his home as part of the family, but while Stallman doesn't have time to raise a pony, he wants to ride one.
"I remember the day when men were men and broke their own horses!" Sound familiar?
That means stop chasing after everyone in a turban or every angry blogger named Mohamed or Assad who criticizes your government or sticking GPS monitoring devices under their cars.
Mohamed and Assad the blogger are easier targets than groups like CAIR with their vast funding from foreign sources and media exposure. The Islamic community in the US is a target-rich environment for real counter-terrorism and intelligence operations because there are so many Saudi and Iranian-funded groups of dubious or outright illegality working behind the scenes.
It's not even the dude screaming "Allah Akbar" and "Death to Israel and the US" on Youtube that should scare anyone. It's the guys in the suits, working for the NGOs and "charities" that are fronts for radical Islamic groups in the Middle East. Every moderate Muslim writing on the subject I've seen points out that the commanding heights of the American Islamic community are increasingly controlled by these foreign sources.
The tragedy of this situation is that liberals are attacking Peter King who is the only member of Congress with the stones to even raise real questions about the radicalization. The left is living in denial by blaming it exclusively on its usual hobbyhorses: poverty, discrimination and US foreign policy. While those are certainly factors, the left is openly in denial about the fact that there are powerful groups in the Middle East that want to radicalize the US Muslim community and turn it into a weapon against the US (which causes suffering to Americans, Muslim and non-Muslim).
In 1995, a distinction between the Internet and "real life" might have made sense. Today, it's everywhere. Something like 20% of all romantic relationships begin online. You can get online at **McDonald's**.
People need to realize that pretending to be someone else online is about as realistic as driving to a neighboring county and using a fake identity unless they're really good and dedicated.
Read the Market Ticker. Seriously. It is probably the most insightful site I've seen on the scope of the fraud being waged against the American public. In particular, note the number of times Bank of America or "Bank of America employees" get referenced in behavior that sounds more like it should be happening in Zimbabwe than the US.
Because Janet Napolitano has little interest in terrorism. She has been bought and paid for by Corporate America, to keep the sheeples in line with their vision of the future. Napolitano has prostituted herself and her agency to Big Business.
You're right, she has little interest in terrorism except where it empowers her department. It has nothing to do with "selling out to corporate America." If you knew anything about Customs, which you obviously don't, you'd know that Customs/ICE brings in a few dozen dollars to the treasury for every dollar it receives in base funding. Customs, not the IRS, was the original revenue-generating service of the federal government.
The reason that DHS is pursuing this is that corporate America's interests coincide with Customs/ICE's revenue-generating ability. If Customs didn't stand to make oodles of money for the treasury, they would be pursuing other work because their revenue-generating potential is simply too important to the federal government to waste on something that some lackeys in the DoJ could handle.
Try taking any random PC, wiping the disk and installing Windows on it from an official Microsoft install CD and you'll find it at least as hard to get working as Linux.
No, you'll find Linux is now as easy to get up and running as Windows. It wasn't until recently that installing Linux became a minimal hassle process.
In the past 6 months, I've installed OS X, CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows XP and Windows 7 on various machines at home and at work. OS X was the only "dead simple" installation process. It's so simple that if you booted the machine onto the CD for each person, you could use it as a voting test. After that, Windows 7 was the easiest. I selected the drive, clicked format, clicked next and the only 3 things I remember it asking were for me to create a user, tell it which wireless network to use and decide on automatic updates. Ubuntu, CentOS and Windows XP were about evenly tied.
The good news must be that all issues of unemployment, finance and social service must be resolved in Utah for their legislature to spend time on this. It must be a utopia!
Yeah, and Obama wants to put $50B into high speed trains when:
1) He not only didn't get Bush's spending under control, but increased it. 2) He knows damn well that the American public has no broad interest in high speed trains (thus it would be Amtrak 2.0, at best).
This diversion at least doesn't add insult to injury by costing a ton of money Utah doesn't have and should take a committee in the legislature all of about half an hour to push out the appropriate language for a general vote.
Yet, for most daily uses, you don't need much CPU power. We got so used to "Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away" that most people forget they ran software with about the same functionality ten years ago on machines a hundred times slower. Dropping some of worst software bloat can get us a really long way.
I have a nearly 6 year old Dell laptop running Windows XP. For fun, I put a demo license of Windows 7 on it and found that Windows 7 actually runs faster than XP on it. Not only that, but I get the full Aero desktop. Four years ago, I would have expected that from Linux. Instead, I find that Linux runs slower than ever on that older hardware.
If I were representing the music industry, this is what I'd do...
1) Go to Limewire and offer them $20M in cold hard cash, an iron-clad settlement for $0 and the ability to dissolve their business peacefully in exchange for them releasing a version of Limewire that contains code that actually tracks user transactions with audio and video files. Stuff like sending back to the RIAA a list of "Windows/Mac user johnqsmith from IP address A.B.C.D successfully sent file 01 - Top Hit.mp3"
2) I'd even fund Limewire's defense and we'd do a big legal kabuki in front of the press making it look like Limewire was fighting the good fight.
3) I'd shake hands with their CEO, publicly say that Limewire is forgiven and "oh, by the way, thanks for all of the **legally actionable information** on your users, nice doing business with you."
The jewish tribes could not empty a bottle in a river and kill off an entire ecosystem 100 km downstream.
The US is also no better able to deal with it in its current laws. The Mosaic Law at least regarded willful negligence that lead to deaths as a form of capital murder, plus its laws covering willfully harming property are cut and dry. It would be almost impossible to escape execution under the Mosaic Law for killing someone as a result of toxic dumping. The only scenario would be is if no one actually knew that the chemicals were toxic.
Meanwhile, the worst that came of the Deepwater Horizon fiasco was a lawsuit and possibly a little jail time for some people. This is despite the fact that the executives who cut the corners that caused the incident should have faced felony murder (Google it) charges.
They couldn't mount a Ponzi scheme big enough to tear an entire nation down in its fall.
True, but you're obviously ignorant of the fact that Madoff was actually caught well before the stock market crash. Private analysts caught him almost a decade ago and alerted his customers who were primarily Jewish and shrieked "you eeeevil anti-Semites, how dare you attack Bernie?!" Our system didn't stop him. The FBI or state police in New York didn't get involved. Heck, the FBI gave testimony about the mortgage fraud in 2004 that caused the crash in 2008 and still didn't bust any skulls despite what they were seeing.
In other words, all of your complicated, high falutin' laws ain't done a damn thing to stop these serious things from happening.
Meanwhile, your "response" does nothing to address the fact that the federal government has over 7 million lines of income tax code.
7 million lines of income tax regulations. Think about that. What on Earth justifies a tax code that complicated?
We live in a society that begrudges good pay to workers who actually make things. Many people regard the medical profession as damn near crooks for, *gasp*, actually wanting to be paid very well because of the risks that come with their work and the amount of real education they need to get in the door.
So what in the hell would make lawyers think they'd be immune? Most of the "complexity" of their education is self-created by their profession. It used to be that anyone could read the laws of their state and become a lawyer; today you need a juris doctorate to get in the door. A degree that is closer to a PhD than a high school degree.
Our legal system needs a reset on its entire code. There are over 4,000 federal crimes; to whit, there were only about 620 total laws (religious, civil and criminal) in the Old Testament. That means that there are likely more felonies in the federal criminal code than there were total regulations on every aspect of civilized life back then. Heck, the Roman law of the 12 tables, on which many of our ideas are based as well, is practically a foot note compared to just our personal income tax code.
Amazing how they can't seem to find time to shut down the Saudi religious schools in the US which use blatantly seditious indoctrination, but they can find all the time they need to go after a guy who's probably at worst just a 20 year old punk.
Of course this is the same federal government that can find a 100 illegals at the BP clean up site, but can't find the illegals at the day laborer site down the street from my office which is in one of the areas of metro DC with the largest populations of illegals in the region...
So? Just because he didn't have the right motivation didn't mean that he didn't reveal whole heaps of unethical behavior. I can tell you're very much biased because you're trying to use unrelated facts (his motivation) to discredit other facts (the leaked material).
Motivation is critical to many crimes. Heck, the whole concept of a mens rea which is fundamental to many felonies, is based on the state of mind and motivation of the individual.
Manning cannot attach a legally reasonable connection between his motivation and his chosen course of action which would motivate a non-brain dead jury to say "this man clearly acted to uphold the spirit of the law or protect the public."
If you don't get the difference between leaking specific documents that you know show clear criminal acts and dumping a volume of documents that would take a small army of readers to verify out of sheer spite, then you are the moron. The difference between that is the difference between shooting someone in self-defense under legally questionable circumstances and gunning down an entire public space while claiming you did public good because a few of the victims just so happened to have warrants for their arrest.
1) They see a specific act of crime or a whole culture of crime. 2) They see what their options are for working within the legal system to address it. 3) They gather the evidence needed to prove their case. 4) They release it to outside sources if they can't work within the system.
What Manning did:
1) Couldn't deal with Don't Ask, Don't Tell. 2) Got very angry at having to be a closet homosexual, even though the military is generally not interested in punishing people who are "discrete homosexuals." 3) Grabbed 250k pages of documentation from a classified network. 4) Dumped it on the public.
His supporters are being emotional nutjobs about this. He did what he did as an act of revenge against a policy he disliked. There was no "crime" for him to reveal, no unethical behavior, and he certainly did not try to either work within the system first or limit the amount of damage his leak would cause. It was indiscriminate in a "you screwed with me, so I'll screw you right back" way.
All he did was make it that much easier to tarnish legitimate whistleblowers and make their supporters look like unpatriotic people.
"App Store" by itself is inherently generic. It literally just means "place where apps are sold." Trademarking it is as ridiculous as trademarking "shoe store" or "electronics store." Windows, used in the context of a computer product, is not generic. Rather, it's a specific, well-known product.
What is it with everyone trying to blame Facebook and Craigslist for all the ills of the world? They are tools, and nothing more.
Because the alternative is to admit that the real moral culpability is with the user of said tool and our society can't stand the idea of actually being "judgmental" toward someone who actually cheats on their spouse. Even that is asking too much since many Americans now stridently denounce you for being "judgmental" for even saying that you have to be a pile of dog $H%& as a human being to cheat on your spouse or break up your family just because you find your spouse "boring" (not abusive, just not interesting).
The mainstream media simultaneously celebrates the divorce culture as "women's empowerment" and then wonders why many men are turning to pickup artists and douchebaggery instead of emulating Ward Cleaver...
and although i'd really love to hear your john birch society conspiracy theories about the fed, i'm sorry, but i have an appointment with economic reality and psychological stability that i really must keep, adieu
Don't read the news much do you? Apparently you missed the fact that the federal reserve has spent the last few years laying waste to the US dollar in an effort to save the private banking sector.
Here's a dose of economic reality for you: we traded periodic spats of instability for a system which empowered the banks to nationalize their losses while privatizing their gains.
In other words, we traded the uncertainties of finance capitalism for Fascism with a capital "F" in the banking sector.
The US Constitution does not permit **any** ex post facto laws. Therefore nothing Assange has done to date is actionable under the SHIELD Act.
If Assange is smart, he'll publicly retire from Wikileaks now. Once he's gone, he won't have any links to it that would make it worthwhile to extradite him because a federal judge would just laugh at the DoJ if they actually try to prosecute him under the SHIELD Act for anything he's done so far.
1. Convert phone call wave data to moderately high bitrate mp3 for transfer. 2. Send back a message with the phone numbers and mp3 attachment to the state security agency. 3. Add it to a batch operation to process for words and phrases of interest. 4. Build profiles along the way with tallies on each phone number. 5. Once a threshold has been reached, pass it onto a human to see if it's worthwhile to strap on the jackboots. 6. Arrest at your convenience.
This virus is probably a simple proof of concept for that scenario to test Android.
The problem is that these valuations are likely not at all realistic for what these companies are making. I would bet that Twitter's revenues are about 1/100 of its market valuation. When you have a company that is that highly priced relative to its revenues, you are basically playing cards at a casino where Goldman Sachs is the one that controls the house.
IANASB (IANA Stock Broker), but I wouldn't touch these companies with a ten foot pole if these are their prices when they hit the market. I know people who did that with RedHat and got burned very badly...
You're right, they do have viable business plans, but I'd be shocked if their plans were viable enough to maintain those stock prices for more than a year or so.
3) Police + minorities = minority is guilty of "X while (INSERT_RACE/ORIENTATION)"
4) Religion + anything = ZOMG TEH CROOSADRZ & ZIONISTS R PERSECUTIN PEOPLE
5) Talk of Islamic terrorism + Republicans = Quick hide your Muslims because the ovens are getting fired up
6) Oil prices + car technology + no discernible cash payments to big car companies = obvious sign that the big car companies are getting fellated by big oil.
Where are these jobs going to come from, aside from the telecoms building out the infrastructure? Does anyone other than politicians actually believe that if you give everyone broadband internet access, we'll suddenly have this cool new economy where every unemployed worker can start retraining for a STEM job?
Andy Grove (fairly) recently made a sobering speech about how naive the US is about the role startups play. I think the broadband argument plays into his point. You can't rely on just startups to rebuild the US economy. Every would-be Apple that starts in a future Steve Jobs' garage must eventually reach the ability to employ hundreds or even thousands of employees and handle unsexy work like running factories.
No amount of broadband penetration or legions of startups will change the fact that the US regulatory system makes it very difficult for the US to have a robust, diverse and productive economy. The people who advocate broadband as a key recovery point are also the same sorts who often throw out soundbites on this issue. "Yeah, regulations suck, but having dirty water sucks harder, stupid libertarian." Gee, you fucking moron, you notice what the state of the environment in China looks like today, you know China, where your iToy was fabricated? Like a lot of what's wrong with America, this is more duct tape and chewing gum used to hold together a system that is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions and kludgish design and all people want to do is throw out snarky comments instead of getting into the trenches and restructuring things.
Slashdot Mirror
Most business software doesn't need to be a "real application." It works really well as a web application.
Oh I'm sorry, did that just make it harder to have "equality" for the disabled?
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
The people who run these big companies (not necessarily) RedHat are known for being egotistical, nasty sons of bitches. It would be nice if the response we saw more and more from them to patent trolls was "crush them, burn them, leave their wives and children in the poor house." I mean be so nasty and vindictive that even after the troll goes bankrupt, they "pierce the corporate veil" and pursue the management and their families into bankruptcy.
"I remember the day when men were men and broke their own horses!" Sound familiar?
Mohamed and Assad the blogger are easier targets than groups like CAIR with their vast funding from foreign sources and media exposure. The Islamic community in the US is a target-rich environment for real counter-terrorism and intelligence operations because there are so many Saudi and Iranian-funded groups of dubious or outright illegality working behind the scenes.
It's not even the dude screaming "Allah Akbar" and "Death to Israel and the US" on Youtube that should scare anyone. It's the guys in the suits, working for the NGOs and "charities" that are fronts for radical Islamic groups in the Middle East. Every moderate Muslim writing on the subject I've seen points out that the commanding heights of the American Islamic community are increasingly controlled by these foreign sources.
The tragedy of this situation is that liberals are attacking Peter King who is the only member of Congress with the stones to even raise real questions about the radicalization. The left is living in denial by blaming it exclusively on its usual hobbyhorses: poverty, discrimination and US foreign policy. While those are certainly factors, the left is openly in denial about the fact that there are powerful groups in the Middle East that want to radicalize the US Muslim community and turn it into a weapon against the US (which causes suffering to Americans, Muslim and non-Muslim).
There, fixed it for you.
In 1995, a distinction between the Internet and "real life" might have made sense. Today, it's everywhere. Something like 20% of all romantic relationships begin online. You can get online at **McDonald's**.
People need to realize that pretending to be someone else online is about as realistic as driving to a neighboring county and using a fake identity unless they're really good and dedicated.
Read the Market Ticker. Seriously. It is probably the most insightful site I've seen on the scope of the fraud being waged against the American public. In particular, note the number of times Bank of America or "Bank of America employees" get referenced in behavior that sounds more like it should be happening in Zimbabwe than the US.
You're right, she has little interest in terrorism except where it empowers her department. It has nothing to do with "selling out to corporate America." If you knew anything about Customs, which you obviously don't, you'd know that Customs/ICE brings in a few dozen dollars to the treasury for every dollar it receives in base funding. Customs, not the IRS, was the original revenue-generating service of the federal government.
The reason that DHS is pursuing this is that corporate America's interests coincide with Customs/ICE's revenue-generating ability. If Customs didn't stand to make oodles of money for the treasury, they would be pursuing other work because their revenue-generating potential is simply too important to the federal government to waste on something that some lackeys in the DoJ could handle.
No, you'll find Linux is now as easy to get up and running as Windows. It wasn't until recently that installing Linux became a minimal hassle process.
In the past 6 months, I've installed OS X, CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows XP and Windows 7 on various machines at home and at work. OS X was the only "dead simple" installation process. It's so simple that if you booted the machine onto the CD for each person, you could use it as a voting test. After that, Windows 7 was the easiest. I selected the drive, clicked format, clicked next and the only 3 things I remember it asking were for me to create a user, tell it which wireless network to use and decide on automatic updates. Ubuntu, CentOS and Windows XP were about evenly tied.
Yeah, and Obama wants to put $50B into high speed trains when:
1) He not only didn't get Bush's spending under control, but increased it.
2) He knows damn well that the American public has no broad interest in high speed trains (thus it would be Amtrak 2.0, at best).
This diversion at least doesn't add insult to injury by costing a ton of money Utah doesn't have and should take a committee in the legislature all of about half an hour to push out the appropriate language for a general vote.
I have a nearly 6 year old Dell laptop running Windows XP. For fun, I put a demo license of Windows 7 on it and found that Windows 7 actually runs faster than XP on it. Not only that, but I get the full Aero desktop. Four years ago, I would have expected that from Linux. Instead, I find that Linux runs slower than ever on that older hardware.
If I were representing the music industry, this is what I'd do...
1) Go to Limewire and offer them $20M in cold hard cash, an iron-clad settlement for $0 and the ability to dissolve their business peacefully in exchange for them releasing a version of Limewire that contains code that actually tracks user transactions with audio and video files. Stuff like sending back to the RIAA a list of "Windows/Mac user johnqsmith from IP address A.B.C.D successfully sent file 01 - Top Hit.mp3"
2) I'd even fund Limewire's defense and we'd do a big legal kabuki in front of the press making it look like Limewire was fighting the good fight.
3) I'd shake hands with their CEO, publicly say that Limewire is forgiven and "oh, by the way, thanks for all of the **legally actionable information** on your users, nice doing business with you."
The US is also no better able to deal with it in its current laws. The Mosaic Law at least regarded willful negligence that lead to deaths as a form of capital murder, plus its laws covering willfully harming property are cut and dry. It would be almost impossible to escape execution under the Mosaic Law for killing someone as a result of toxic dumping. The only scenario would be is if no one actually knew that the chemicals were toxic.
Meanwhile, the worst that came of the Deepwater Horizon fiasco was a lawsuit and possibly a little jail time for some people. This is despite the fact that the executives who cut the corners that caused the incident should have faced felony murder (Google it) charges.
True, but you're obviously ignorant of the fact that Madoff was actually caught well before the stock market crash. Private analysts caught him almost a decade ago and alerted his customers who were primarily Jewish and shrieked "you eeeevil anti-Semites, how dare you attack Bernie?!" Our system didn't stop him. The FBI or state police in New York didn't get involved. Heck, the FBI gave testimony about the mortgage fraud in 2004 that caused the crash in 2008 and still didn't bust any skulls despite what they were seeing.
In other words, all of your complicated, high falutin' laws ain't done a damn thing to stop these serious things from happening.
Meanwhile, your "response" does nothing to address the fact that the federal government has over 7 million lines of income tax code.
7 million lines of income tax regulations. Think about that. What on Earth justifies a tax code that complicated?
We live in a society that begrudges good pay to workers who actually make things. Many people regard the medical profession as damn near crooks for, *gasp*, actually wanting to be paid very well because of the risks that come with their work and the amount of real education they need to get in the door.
So what in the hell would make lawyers think they'd be immune? Most of the "complexity" of their education is self-created by their profession. It used to be that anyone could read the laws of their state and become a lawyer; today you need a juris doctorate to get in the door. A degree that is closer to a PhD than a high school degree.
Our legal system needs a reset on its entire code. There are over 4,000 federal crimes; to whit, there were only about 620 total laws (religious, civil and criminal) in the Old Testament. That means that there are likely more felonies in the federal criminal code than there were total regulations on every aspect of civilized life back then. Heck, the Roman law of the 12 tables, on which many of our ideas are based as well, is practically a foot note compared to just our personal income tax code.
Amazing how they can't seem to find time to shut down the Saudi religious schools in the US which use blatantly seditious indoctrination, but they can find all the time they need to go after a guy who's probably at worst just a 20 year old punk.
Of course this is the same federal government that can find a 100 illegals at the BP clean up site, but can't find the illegals at the day laborer site down the street from my office which is in one of the areas of metro DC with the largest populations of illegals in the region...
Motivation is critical to many crimes. Heck, the whole concept of a mens rea which is fundamental to many felonies, is based on the state of mind and motivation of the individual.
Manning cannot attach a legally reasonable connection between his motivation and his chosen course of action which would motivate a non-brain dead jury to say "this man clearly acted to uphold the spirit of the law or protect the public."
If you don't get the difference between leaking specific documents that you know show clear criminal acts and dumping a volume of documents that would take a small army of readers to verify out of sheer spite, then you are the moron. The difference between that is the difference between shooting someone in self-defense under legally questionable circumstances and gunning down an entire public space while claiming you did public good because a few of the victims just so happened to have warrants for their arrest.
Whistleblowers fit this basic description:
1) They see a specific act of crime or a whole culture of crime.
2) They see what their options are for working within the legal system to address it.
3) They gather the evidence needed to prove their case.
4) They release it to outside sources if they can't work within the system.
What Manning did:
1) Couldn't deal with Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
2) Got very angry at having to be a closet homosexual, even though the military is generally not interested in punishing people who are "discrete homosexuals."
3) Grabbed 250k pages of documentation from a classified network.
4) Dumped it on the public.
His supporters are being emotional nutjobs about this. He did what he did as an act of revenge against a policy he disliked. There was no "crime" for him to reveal, no unethical behavior, and he certainly did not try to either work within the system first or limit the amount of damage his leak would cause. It was indiscriminate in a "you screwed with me, so I'll screw you right back" way.
All he did was make it that much easier to tarnish legitimate whistleblowers and make their supporters look like unpatriotic people.
"App Store" by itself is inherently generic. It literally just means "place where apps are sold." Trademarking it is as ridiculous as trademarking "shoe store" or "electronics store." Windows, used in the context of a computer product, is not generic. Rather, it's a specific, well-known product.
Because the alternative is to admit that the real moral culpability is with the user of said tool and our society can't stand the idea of actually being "judgmental" toward someone who actually cheats on their spouse. Even that is asking too much since many Americans now stridently denounce you for being "judgmental" for even saying that you have to be a pile of dog $H%& as a human being to cheat on your spouse or break up your family just because you find your spouse "boring" (not abusive, just not interesting).
The mainstream media simultaneously celebrates the divorce culture as "women's empowerment" and then wonders why many men are turning to pickup artists and douchebaggery instead of emulating Ward Cleaver...
Don't read the news much do you? Apparently you missed the fact that the federal reserve has spent the last few years laying waste to the US dollar in an effort to save the private banking sector.
Here's a dose of economic reality for you: we traded periodic spats of instability for a system which empowered the banks to nationalize their losses while privatizing their gains.
In other words, we traded the uncertainties of finance capitalism for Fascism with a capital "F" in the banking sector.
The US Constitution does not permit **any** ex post facto laws. Therefore nothing Assange has done to date is actionable under the SHIELD Act.
If Assange is smart, he'll publicly retire from Wikileaks now. Once he's gone, he won't have any links to it that would make it worthwhile to extradite him because a federal judge would just laugh at the DoJ if they actually try to prosecute him under the SHIELD Act for anything he's done so far.
1. Convert phone call wave data to moderately high bitrate mp3 for transfer.
2. Send back a message with the phone numbers and mp3 attachment to the state security agency.
3. Add it to a batch operation to process for words and phrases of interest.
4. Build profiles along the way with tallies on each phone number.
5. Once a threshold has been reached, pass it onto a human to see if it's worthwhile to strap on the jackboots.
6. Arrest at your convenience.
This virus is probably a simple proof of concept for that scenario to test Android.
The problem is that these valuations are likely not at all realistic for what these companies are making. I would bet that Twitter's revenues are about 1/100 of its market valuation. When you have a company that is that highly priced relative to its revenues, you are basically playing cards at a casino where Goldman Sachs is the one that controls the house.
IANASB (IANA Stock Broker), but I wouldn't touch these companies with a ten foot pole if these are their prices when they hit the market. I know people who did that with RedHat and got burned very badly...
You're right, they do have viable business plans, but I'd be shocked if their plans were viable enough to maintain those stock prices for more than a year or so.
1) Big corporation + third world = exploitation
2) Big corporation + politics = corruption
3) Police + minorities = minority is guilty of "X while (INSERT_RACE/ORIENTATION)"
4) Religion + anything = ZOMG TEH CROOSADRZ & ZIONISTS R PERSECUTIN PEOPLE
5) Talk of Islamic terrorism + Republicans = Quick hide your Muslims because the ovens are getting fired up
6) Oil prices + car technology + no discernible cash payments to big car companies = obvious sign that the big car companies are getting fellated by big oil.
Black bear*, FTW.
* Ref
Where are these jobs going to come from, aside from the telecoms building out the infrastructure? Does anyone other than politicians actually believe that if you give everyone broadband internet access, we'll suddenly have this cool new economy where every unemployed worker can start retraining for a STEM job?
Andy Grove (fairly) recently made a sobering speech about how naive the US is about the role startups play. I think the broadband argument plays into his point. You can't rely on just startups to rebuild the US economy. Every would-be Apple that starts in a future Steve Jobs' garage must eventually reach the ability to employ hundreds or even thousands of employees and handle unsexy work like running factories.
No amount of broadband penetration or legions of startups will change the fact that the US regulatory system makes it very difficult for the US to have a robust, diverse and productive economy. The people who advocate broadband as a key recovery point are also the same sorts who often throw out soundbites on this issue. "Yeah, regulations suck, but having dirty water sucks harder, stupid libertarian." Gee, you fucking moron, you notice what the state of the environment in China looks like today, you know China, where your iToy was fabricated? Like a lot of what's wrong with America, this is more duct tape and chewing gum used to hold together a system that is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions and kludgish design and all people want to do is throw out snarky comments instead of getting into the trenches and restructuring things.