To be fair, Rushdie did not anticipate that level of reaction. Before the novel Satanic Verses was published, he was a minor novelist from India. It is very difficult to tell, and even he might believe otherwise today, but it is possible he would have done some kind of self censorship if he thought he was going to be seeing the blunt end of the fatwa. So it is possible Rushdie comes under the category of people on whom greatness is thrust upon.
Right now there is a controversy going on in India. A top Muslim actor played the lead role in a movie that makes fun of Hindu godmen, has scenes where the prime Hindu deity Shiva gets chased down the streets of India, losing his clothes and ends up in underwear. Many Hindu organizations are outraged, but none of them have urged any of their followers to kill anyone. They petitioned the courts to ban the movie. India has a board of film censors, it approved the movie. The head of the board is a Catholic Christian. She has been quick in the past to ban movies that "hurt the sentiments of the Christian/Muslim communities and might endanger communal harmony". Courts have refused to ban the movie. And all the Hindu organizations are being lectured on tolerance, freedom of expression etc.
My problem with the West is that never find good things to encourage and praise. With all that caste, linguistic, religious divisions and abject poverty India is struggling to be a democracy, to uphold values of freedom of expression etc etc. Ostensibly West wants to promote these values. But most stories about India are about its problems.
In the face of Paris outrage, as part of denouncing terrorism, if they have shown a token respect for India/Hindus, that would send shock waves among the Muslim communities. "You attack us violently, we will show sympathy and support for your enemies, the Hindus" is an angle that might play well.
There are things that could be fine tuned. For really long term assets, I mean 5 year is long term, not 12 months, we could provide inflation adjustment on cost basis. Something bought for 100$ in 2009, sold at 125$ in 2015, should not pay tax on all that 25$ gain. Some of the gain is due to inflation, we can provide for it. We can provide for inheritance tax to be paid in installments over a longer stretch based on the cash generation potential of the asset. There are highly valued but low cash flow assets.
It is the principle of the thing. The system is structurally biased. If you can't make it to top 1% even after making it to top 1% by income, it is not good for the country, not for the future, not even for the people in the top 0.5%.
Actually not a bad idea. We can even exempt cars, jewelry, home equity etc for the first million. Then tax the assets, at some rate that brings in the same value. We can slowly transition from one system to next to reduce shock.
This guy Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter does not seem to understand the basic first amendment. How else can we explain Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter threatening to sue a newspaper for calling him Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter? He is Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter right? How else can the newspaper refer to Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter?
BTW Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter is prohibited from using my name without my express written consent. If he wants to sue me, Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter has to first contact me and get my permission to use my name to file the suit is a court. How about that Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter, he should follow what he preaches, right? By "he' I mean Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter.
The formula to calculate the "true" expense ratio of a mutual fund:
ERc = (ERr - beta * 0.2) / ( 1 - beta)
Where
ERc is the corrected expense ratio
ERr is the reported expense ratio
beta is the correlation coefficient with an underlying index, what fraction of the fund is made up of the index. Expressed as a fraction not percentage.
0.2 is assumed to be the typical expense ratio for an index fund.
A US Large cap fund bench marked against S&P 500 with an expense ratio of 1.2% and high correlation with its benchmark, beta = 0.85 is actually costing you 6.9% for the actively managed portion. Unless that part beats the index by 7 points, you are better off shoveling the money into an index fund. This is why most money managers do not beat the index. The trading cost, the commission, research staff salaries, their own pay and bonus just overwhelms any marginal value the manager brings to the fund.
There is some truth to that. Almost all the fund managers do very well, till their funds reach 1 or 2 billion. Then they struggle.
There was a nice paper that looked at beta between a fund and the underlying index, and adjusted the expense ratio to account for the actual "active management". But still the Kochs control so much of investments, but they clearly are not in the top 10 smartest investment managers. That was my point.
A handful of these trust fund babies spent some 400 million dollars in a heavy public relations campaign to label inheritance tax as death tax and had a long
relentless campaign to reduce it. It was fear, uncertainty, doubt and outright lies. But eventually they succeeded in cutting 1 trillion dollars out of their tax burden.
That trillion is going to flow to more trust fund babies, most of them mediocre and they will control the economy far more than any of us working stiffs. I am not talking about the median household (58K a year) or even the 80 percentile at 100K. I am talking about the top 1% of the professionals, doctors, lawyers, top programmers. We are the working stiffs, even if we make 200K a year, we do not stand a chance of cracking 5 million net worth to make it to top 1%. The only people at the 99.5% are heirs, or an extremely lucky small business owner. I say lucky because for each such business owner making to 15 million networth, there would 10 or 50 who worked equally hard who was equally smart, who did well, but did not crack the top 0.5%.
[*] If S&P500 is the benchmark for a fund, and it has a beta of 0.75 with S&P 500, then only 25% of the fund is actually "actively managed". So if its expense ratio is 1.1%, it is actually 3.6% assuming index fund expense ratio is 0.2%. (1.1 - 0.2) */0.25 = 3.6%
When it comes to making money by themselves, without the inheritance, the trust fund babies have to be below average than others. Children of Sam Walton, without inheritance would be lucky to make median pay by their ability. The inheritance of Koch brothers, if it had been invested in plain index funds back in 1960 and if these guys had spent their lives playing golf, they would have more money than what they have today. With all their dalliance and cultivating of the politicians, taking the long view to cultivate think tanks to push their point of view, subverting the integrity of academic and scientific research, after all that, they made less money. Shows they are below average in their ability to manage the investments for the long haul and below average in their ability to make money on their own. It is the same story all the way down to your local business owning a chain of three restaurants or four gas stations or the lawn equipment dealership.
If you take ALL the heirs and measure their ability to make money it has to be below average. Only then when you add all their parent's above average ability to make money you would come to average. This is the principle of Regression to the mean. Which means, very high portion of the investments are made by people with below average ability to deploy capital wisely.
You can already buy quartz and plastic mixture by the yard, (ogive edging extra). There is this whole class of manufactured stone. Fiber-glass, glass fibers in a matrix of epoxy has been used to make everything from boats, aircraft to suitcases. So far we were limited in the way these composites could be structured. Isotropic (meaning uniform in all directions) like in countertops and fiber-glass with randomly cut short fibers, or orthotropic (similar to plywood strength varies in different directions).
This 3D printing allows us to precisely place and orient the components of the composites. At this point it can't be called composite materials but should be called composite structures , may be with some adjectives like micro or precision to distinguish them from plain old structures made with fiberglass. Even this is not really new. Circuit boards and IC Chips are theoretically custom made precision structures using a process similar to 3D printing.
To take full advantage of these precision built composite structures, we need similar breakthroughs in analysis methods. We would like to take some expensive material, place very small quantities of it strategically in a matrix of inexpensive materials and get very good thermal, strength or vibration characteristics.
Companies like Ansys, Ansoft, Nastran, SDRC (does it still exist?) should do well in the coming years, you need their design/analysis tools to design structures that could take advantage of this emerging technology.
No, the taxes are not high. Government is not always evil. Some taxation is necessary. You are the one who drank the kool aid. We have tried the Reagan idea of cutting taxes relentlessly. We are in worse shape than ever. High time we stop trickle down and start feeding the roots. By taxing the super rich, ones making more than half a million dollars a year. Exempt first 200K and tax all the rest at some flat 25% or so. ALL, earned income, capital gains, gifts, inheritance, dividends, interest, carried interest everything.
Some 33% of the fortune 400 have inherited their wealth. All six children of Sam Walton are in fortune 400. The Koch brothers, for all their manipulation and access to the government would have more money if they had just invested their inheritance in index funds.
People without inheritance, even if they make it to top 1% by income, most of them will not be able to accumulate to make it to top 1% by net worth. Of the 97% of the Americans who don't inherit much, about 2% barely make it to a million net worth including their home equity. It takes 4 million to crack the 1% by networth mark. These low end millionaires with home equity are what counted to tout "95% of the millionaires are self made". Most of the people below the fortune 400 but in the top half of the 1% are all inheritors, with more than 15 million dollars of financial net worth. Working stiffs never get a shot at getting there.
These trust fund babies are not as smart as their daddy or mommy who made the dough. How many children of Nobel prize winners win Nobel prizes? It is called regression to the mean, and these trust fund babies are below average. They control some 50% of all the investments. They reward loyalty not competence. That misallocation of capital is detrimental to all of us. We need to tax estates with more than 5 million dollar worth significantly.
Yes, Amtrak is bad. The freight lines are also quite bad when it comes to innovation. But instead of shuffling passengers from ancient railway stations from downtown to downtown, they could build a clean loading ramps near the major highway interchanges, like I-79 @ I-76 or I75 @ I80-90. Away from crowded cities, a mile or so from the highway. The flatbed railroad cars should form a long continuous strip and a string of cars and trucks should just roll into it from the last flatbed car. Cars and trucks have been rolling on and rolling off ferries for quite some time. It is an operation that can be streamlined a lot.
Price it to compete with the cost of tolls, gas, wear & tear, motel stop overs and a rental car on the other end, we could create a rail based long distance transportation for autos. If the long haul is taken care of by rail, 100 to 150 mile range electric cars will get lots of traction.
Our family follows patronymic system. My last name, as recorded in my passport, is my dad's first name. My wife and daughter use my first name as their last names. We used to follow the system of village_name fathers_name given_name caste_name. But urbanization made the village name quaint. Caste names have become taboo in the last few decades. Leaving us with just a dad's name + given name.
For the common American, fracking was the reason gas is cheap. Either fracked oil reduced the price or it forced the "arabs" to reduce the price. Either way, fracking is the reason. It is possible Saudis are trying to drive the frackers out of business. If the Saudis succeed in bankrupting the frackers, are we going to thank Saudis for it?
That is why Elon released his battery car patents pre-emptively?
Come on Elon, please quit fooling around with stupid things like hyper loop or manned mission to moon or orbital space colonies. Give us a 40 K sedan with 150 mile range.
Convince railroads to haul 18wheelers and cars on flatbed cars. 200 miles at a stretch. Build roll-on roll-off terminals at the highway intersections. We will happily sit in our cars while being hauled at 80 to 100 mph. It is not perfect, but it is better than the alternative, which is to stay cooped up exactly like that in a car, but one would be driving at less than 80 mph. Money saved on toll, gas and wear and tear will pay for the train fare. The damned trains are getting 450 ton-mile per gallon of diesel. Almost all of us are within 150 miles of a major highway intersection. We could even charge our electric cars while being hauled. Solve range anxiety using railroads.
Why blame government officials? Gas is below 2 bucks a gallon. A significant majority of the Americans would support fracking even if you prove fracking is adding carcinogens in their cereal and in the baby formula. They would think it is a price worth paying to get gas below 2$. You and I might disagree. But we would be in the minority.
We seem to have done a piss poor job of explaining the benefits of clean air and clean water to our fellow citizens.
It is possible that there are 17.5 million men with the last name Khan. It is extremely common in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh and the former soviet republics *stans. But the Khans range from mega superstars of Bollywood to lowly "orderlies" serving marginally less lowly Inspector of Post & Telegraph Department of India. My dad was an inspector and I practically lived in the arms of his orderly Khan till age 3, according to my mom.
I seem to have underestimated his legacy. In fact 0.5% of the males of this planet are direct descendents of Genghis Khan. It works out to 17.5 million male descendents for Genghis Khan. According to the table presented, in a small sample size of 46 men from Mongolia, some 35% carried Genghis Khan's markers in their y-chromosomes.
I cant believe these gun rights guys are still scared of the government and their feeble berettas, glocks, AR15s are enough to ward off their enemies and protect their liberties.
The goal and dream of the "starve the beast" group has been realized, the government has been shrunk small enough to be drowned in a bath tub. And the big banks and the financial industry has promptly drowned it in the bath tub. What these people see as government is nothing but reanimated corpse, the zombie totally under the control of these big players. The banks are still too big to fail, they have to be protected at all costs, and the costs are being paid by the ordinary American citizens. For example they took the money printed by the Feds during the "Quantitative Easing" and "invested" it all over the world. Now they are bellyaching, if the oil prices fall and the US dollar strengthens they will suffer losses. They want to be bailed out or dollar weakened to protect their "investments". With the cheap money they have bought commodities and are speculating on it, sucking all profits from all economic endeavors of all the sectors.
These guys banded together and make the BLM back off from collecting the million dollar grazing fee default by Cliven Bundy. Can they make the big banks back off from any fraudulently signed eviction notices or auctions? Can they save one small business from the banks?
The banks are the serious threat to our liberties, they have taken control of the government machinery with all the legislators from both parties in their pocket. And now printing a few plastic guns is going to restore our freedom and liberty? These guys are joking, these guys are probably put up by the banks to distract us from the real issues. They probably don't even realize they are being played by the banks.
The blind earth bender Toph is the best lie detector on record. She detects the tiniest of the vibrations on earth and uses it to detect lies, even though she is totally blind. Her earth bending skills are so good she can fight many fire and water benders without even seeing them. But, despite all that, despite becoming the earth bending guru to Aang, she was fooled by the Fire nation circus performers. Shows there is no way to reliably detect a lie.
It does not appear to be a serious hole by itself. Microsoft claims you need a valid log-on to exploit this, In reality all you need to do is to get your code run in a machine with the privilege of ordinary user. There are ways and other vulnerabilities to do it. There are numerous holes where the browser executes supplied malware from the net, without admin privileges. These two holes, when combined forms a serious threat.
Agree with you, the east coast Chinese are not kind to even their own countrymen from the western interior. People with connections get ahead and don't care who they tear down in that process. My Chinese-American colleague visited Shanghai and came back with very disturbing social trends. His classmates stayed back while he emigrated some 20 years ago. He has done well in Ameica, but his classmates have reached the rank of Colonel or its civil service equivalents. A significant portion of them, somewhere north of 40%, have divorced their first wife and married women 10 to 15 years younger, Given the one child policy for three generations, a couple supports all their surviving ancestors. The divorced woman and her family would face enormous hardship. While trophy-wives are known in the West too, solid middle class does not engage in it at that significant percentage. It bodes very ill for both China and all those who interact with it, voluntarily or not.
Yeah, may be I confused this with some other weapon. I could not find the link to a full colonel being the firing officer for the gun either. May be it was a different gun, may be it is the second gun they built, named Dora.
Despite all the unity and centralized command economy, China is essentially two countries. About 100 million Chinese, mainly near the coast, in the fertile deltas of their great rivers form one China. It has the factories and its residents reap the economic benefits. Then there is the hinterland where the remain 1 billion Chinese come from. They work their fingers to the bone in abysmal conditions in the East for 50 weeks a year for a 2 week holiday home. Spend threes day going and three days coming back to the factories.
The Elite China has no soft corner for their own brethren from the interior. They would happily out source and drive the wages down even further if they could get a few more yuans. Exactly like our US corporate titans who would out off shore everything to increase their income, and keep the income off shore to reduce taxes. Neither of them have a shred of kindness to rest of their own countrymen. It is them who are looking for low wages across the globe. They are as shortsighted as the oil men who triggered the Iraq war in 2003 hoping to lock in the Iraq oil for themselves. They may be able to start something, but they may not be able to control it very well.
Slashdot Mirror
The main tenet of the anthropogenic climate change is that this climate change was engineered by human activity.
Right now there is a controversy going on in India. A top Muslim actor played the lead role in a movie that makes fun of Hindu godmen, has scenes where the prime Hindu deity Shiva gets chased down the streets of India, losing his clothes and ends up in underwear. Many Hindu organizations are outraged, but none of them have urged any of their followers to kill anyone. They petitioned the courts to ban the movie. India has a board of film censors, it approved the movie. The head of the board is a Catholic Christian. She has been quick in the past to ban movies that "hurt the sentiments of the Christian/Muslim communities and might endanger communal harmony". Courts have refused to ban the movie. And all the Hindu organizations are being lectured on tolerance, freedom of expression etc.
My problem with the West is that never find good things to encourage and praise. With all that caste, linguistic, religious divisions and abject poverty India is struggling to be a democracy, to uphold values of freedom of expression etc etc. Ostensibly West wants to promote these values. But most stories about India are about its problems.
In the face of Paris outrage, as part of denouncing terrorism, if they have shown a token respect for India/Hindus, that would send shock waves among the Muslim communities. "You attack us violently, we will show sympathy and support for your enemies, the Hindus" is an angle that might play well.
It is the principle of the thing. The system is structurally biased. If you can't make it to top 1% even after making it to top 1% by income, it is not good for the country, not for the future, not even for the people in the top 0.5%.
Actually not a bad idea. We can even exempt cars, jewelry, home equity etc for the first million. Then tax the assets, at some rate that brings in the same value. We can slowly transition from one system to next to reduce shock.
BTW Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter is prohibited from using my name without my express written consent. If he wants to sue me, Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter has to first contact me and get my permission to use my name to file the suit is a court. How about that Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter, he should follow what he preaches, right? By "he' I mean Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter.
ERc = (ERr - beta * 0.2) / ( 1 - beta)
Where
ERc is the corrected expense ratio
ERr is the reported expense ratio
beta is the correlation coefficient with an underlying index, what fraction of the fund is made up of the index. Expressed as a fraction not percentage.
0.2 is assumed to be the typical expense ratio for an index fund.
A US Large cap fund bench marked against S&P 500 with an expense ratio of 1.2% and high correlation with its benchmark, beta = 0.85 is actually costing you 6.9% for the actively managed portion. Unless that part beats the index by 7 points, you are better off shoveling the money into an index fund. This is why most money managers do not beat the index. The trading cost, the commission, research staff salaries, their own pay and bonus just overwhelms any marginal value the manager brings to the fund.
A handful of these trust fund babies spent some 400 million dollars in a heavy public relations campaign to label inheritance tax as death tax and had a long relentless campaign to reduce it. It was fear, uncertainty, doubt and outright lies. But eventually they succeeded in cutting 1 trillion dollars out of their tax burden. That trillion is going to flow to more trust fund babies, most of them mediocre and they will control the economy far more than any of us working stiffs. I am not talking about the median household (58K a year) or even the 80 percentile at 100K. I am talking about the top 1% of the professionals, doctors, lawyers, top programmers. We are the working stiffs, even if we make 200K a year, we do not stand a chance of cracking 5 million net worth to make it to top 1%. The only people at the 99.5% are heirs, or an extremely lucky small business owner. I say lucky because for each such business owner making to 15 million networth, there would 10 or 50 who worked equally hard who was equally smart, who did well, but did not crack the top 0.5%.
[*] If S&P500 is the benchmark for a fund, and it has a beta of 0.75 with S&P 500, then only 25% of the fund is actually "actively managed". So if its expense ratio is 1.1%, it is actually 3.6% assuming index fund expense ratio is 0.2%. (1.1 - 0.2) * /0.25 = 3.6%
If you take ALL the heirs and measure their ability to make money it has to be below average. Only then when you add all their parent's above average ability to make money you would come to average. This is the principle of Regression to the mean. Which means, very high portion of the investments are made by people with below average ability to deploy capital wisely.
This 3D printing allows us to precisely place and orient the components of the composites. At this point it can't be called composite materials but should be called composite structures , may be with some adjectives like micro or precision to distinguish them from plain old structures made with fiberglass. Even this is not really new. Circuit boards and IC Chips are theoretically custom made precision structures using a process similar to 3D printing.
To take full advantage of these precision built composite structures, we need similar breakthroughs in analysis methods. We would like to take some expensive material, place very small quantities of it strategically in a matrix of inexpensive materials and get very good thermal, strength or vibration characteristics.
Companies like Ansys, Ansoft, Nastran, SDRC (does it still exist?) should do well in the coming years, you need their design/analysis tools to design structures that could take advantage of this emerging technology.
Some 33% of the fortune 400 have inherited their wealth. All six children of Sam Walton are in fortune 400. The Koch brothers, for all their manipulation and access to the government would have more money if they had just invested their inheritance in index funds.
People without inheritance, even if they make it to top 1% by income, most of them will not be able to accumulate to make it to top 1% by net worth. Of the 97% of the Americans who don't inherit much, about 2% barely make it to a million net worth including their home equity. It takes 4 million to crack the 1% by networth mark. These low end millionaires with home equity are what counted to tout "95% of the millionaires are self made". Most of the people below the fortune 400 but in the top half of the 1% are all inheritors, with more than 15 million dollars of financial net worth. Working stiffs never get a shot at getting there.
These trust fund babies are not as smart as their daddy or mommy who made the dough. How many children of Nobel prize winners win Nobel prizes? It is called regression to the mean, and these trust fund babies are below average. They control some 50% of all the investments. They reward loyalty not competence. That misallocation of capital is detrimental to all of us. We need to tax estates with more than 5 million dollar worth significantly.
Price it to compete with the cost of tolls, gas, wear & tear, motel stop overs and a rental car on the other end, we could create a rail based long distance transportation for autos. If the long haul is taken care of by rail, 100 to 150 mile range electric cars will get lots of traction.
Our family follows patronymic system. My last name, as recorded in my passport, is my dad's first name. My wife and daughter use my first name as their last names. We used to follow the system of village_name fathers_name given_name caste_name. But urbanization made the village name quaint. Caste names have become taboo in the last few decades. Leaving us with just a dad's name + given name.
For the common American, fracking was the reason gas is cheap. Either fracked oil reduced the price or it forced the "arabs" to reduce the price. Either way, fracking is the reason. It is possible Saudis are trying to drive the frackers out of business. If the Saudis succeed in bankrupting the frackers, are we going to thank Saudis for it?
Come on Elon, please quit fooling around with stupid things like hyper loop or manned mission to moon or orbital space colonies. Give us a 40 K sedan with 150 mile range.
Convince railroads to haul 18wheelers and cars on flatbed cars. 200 miles at a stretch. Build roll-on roll-off terminals at the highway intersections. We will happily sit in our cars while being hauled at 80 to 100 mph. It is not perfect, but it is better than the alternative, which is to stay cooped up exactly like that in a car, but one would be driving at less than 80 mph. Money saved on toll, gas and wear and tear will pay for the train fare. The damned trains are getting 450 ton-mile per gallon of diesel. Almost all of us are within 150 miles of a major highway intersection. We could even charge our electric cars while being hauled. Solve range anxiety using railroads.
We seem to have done a piss poor job of explaining the benefits of clean air and clean water to our fellow citizens.
It is possible that there are 17.5 million men with the last name Khan. It is extremely common in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh and the former soviet republics *stans. But the Khans range from mega superstars of Bollywood to lowly "orderlies" serving marginally less lowly Inspector of Post & Telegraph Department of India. My dad was an inspector and I practically lived in the arms of his orderly Khan till age 3, according to my mom.
I seem to have underestimated his legacy. In fact 0.5% of the males of this planet are direct descendents of Genghis Khan. It works out to 17.5 million male descendents for Genghis Khan. According to the table presented, in a small sample size of 46 men from Mongolia, some 35% carried Genghis Khan's markers in their y-chromosomes.
In Mongolia, today, 2% of the Y-Chromosomes alive are Genghis Khan's.
The goal and dream of the "starve the beast" group has been realized, the government has been shrunk small enough to be drowned in a bath tub. And the big banks and the financial industry has promptly drowned it in the bath tub. What these people see as government is nothing but reanimated corpse, the zombie totally under the control of these big players. The banks are still too big to fail, they have to be protected at all costs, and the costs are being paid by the ordinary American citizens. For example they took the money printed by the Feds during the "Quantitative Easing" and "invested" it all over the world. Now they are bellyaching, if the oil prices fall and the US dollar strengthens they will suffer losses. They want to be bailed out or dollar weakened to protect their "investments". With the cheap money they have bought commodities and are speculating on it, sucking all profits from all economic endeavors of all the sectors.
These guys banded together and make the BLM back off from collecting the million dollar grazing fee default by Cliven Bundy. Can they make the big banks back off from any fraudulently signed eviction notices or auctions? Can they save one small business from the banks?
The banks are the serious threat to our liberties, they have taken control of the government machinery with all the legislators from both parties in their pocket. And now printing a few plastic guns is going to restore our freedom and liberty? These guys are joking, these guys are probably put up by the banks to distract us from the real issues. They probably don't even realize they are being played by the banks.
Buddy, you are taking about Toph Beifong. Look at all the references and citations provided. Are you claiming internet is lying?
The blind earth bender Toph is the best lie detector on record. She detects the tiniest of the vibrations on earth and uses it to detect lies, even though she is totally blind. Her earth bending skills are so good she can fight many fire and water benders without even seeing them. But, despite all that, despite becoming the earth bending guru to Aang, she was fooled by the Fire nation circus performers. Shows there is no way to reliably detect a lie.
It does not appear to be a serious hole by itself. Microsoft claims you need a valid log-on to exploit this, In reality all you need to do is to get your code run in a machine with the privilege of ordinary user. There are ways and other vulnerabilities to do it. There are numerous holes where the browser executes supplied malware from the net, without admin privileges. These two holes, when combined forms a serious threat.
Agree with you, the east coast Chinese are not kind to even their own countrymen from the western interior. People with connections get ahead and don't care who they tear down in that process. My Chinese-American colleague visited Shanghai and came back with very disturbing social trends. His classmates stayed back while he emigrated some 20 years ago. He has done well in Ameica, but his classmates have reached the rank of Colonel or its civil service equivalents. A significant portion of them, somewhere north of 40%, have divorced their first wife and married women 10 to 15 years younger, Given the one child policy for three generations, a couple supports all their surviving ancestors. The divorced woman and her family would face enormous hardship. While trophy-wives are known in the West too, solid middle class does not engage in it at that significant percentage. It bodes very ill for both China and all those who interact with it, voluntarily or not.
Yeah, may be I confused this with some other weapon. I could not find the link to a full colonel being the firing officer for the gun either. May be it was a different gun, may be it is the second gun they built, named Dora.
The Elite China has no soft corner for their own brethren from the interior. They would happily out source and drive the wages down even further if they could get a few more yuans. Exactly like our US corporate titans who would out off shore everything to increase their income, and keep the income off shore to reduce taxes. Neither of them have a shred of kindness to rest of their own countrymen. It is them who are looking for low wages across the globe. They are as shortsighted as the oil men who triggered the Iraq war in 2003 hoping to lock in the Iraq oil for themselves. They may be able to start something, but they may not be able to control it very well.