The Koch and Norquist denounced "widely denounced" by conservatives? Horsecrap.

Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, has let Norquist's organization, Americans for Tax Reform, decide state tax policy:

What gives Norquist and his lieutenants the control they clearly have is that Jindal has simply given it to them.

In defending their role, ATR officials like to point out that the pledge reads as a promise to a politician’s constituents, not to the group.

It’s the interpretation of the pledge that’s the rub. As many people who’ve had conversations with the administration have said, and as Jindal and his aides have pretty much publicly admitted, the governor is not just refusing to raise taxes. He’s hewing to ATR’s highly debatable interpretation of the pledge’s terms.

That means refusing to consider anything that would increase revenue unless it’s paired with an equal, explicit offset. That means eliminating only those tax breaks that exceed a payer’s liability so the action can be counted as a spending cut. A couple of years ago, that meant vetoing a 4-cent cigarette tax renewal — 4 cents! — because refusing to let it expire somehow counted as a tax increase.

The interpretation is almost comically strict. That’s not on Norquist, who has no power to enforce the pledge. It’s on Jindal.

When you announce that you are planning on spending $889 billion on the next election politicians stand in line to meet you. The Koch brothers have already held the first audition for their candidate:

A large group of Republican presidential hopefuls will gather for lunch at billionaire conservative David Koch's oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday and meet face-to-face with some of the party's most influential contributors.

The event at Koch's 30,050-square foot home is being sponsored as a fundraiser for the Republican Governor's Association, one of the many conservative interests Koch supports, reports The Washington Post. It is attracting prospective candidates such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

On Slashdot, it's not about the technology, it about the whining and complaining. A quick scan of all the comments reveals that no one has anything good to say about a $9 card size computer that runs Linux.

Are you all nuts? This is an incredible price performance point. Yet all I see is nit picking: it can't do this, it doesn't run that, the "real' price is X (what about SHIPPING!!!), the Raspberry Pi is the same only better, etc. What the hell do you expect for $9? A cold six pack and a back massage?

Speaking of the R Pi, if you go back and look at the responses to those announcements, you see the same kind of mindless bitching. The complaints are similar: t doesn't do enough, It's overpriced for what it does, it should be cheaper, more things should be optional, etc. Pretty much the same crap. Yet here the R Pi is the gold standard, and this board sucks. Make up you damned minds.

No matter what anybody comes up with, it's wrong. Have any of the legions of critics done anything even remotely like this? Of course not. They're all just sitting in their parents basement sniping at people who get stuff done. It sounds bunch of pathetic losers who knock everyone else down so they can try and feel superior. It's a disgusting display.

Got to Photograhpy is Not a Crime and you will see a huge collection of videos showing cops acting like thugs. In very few of these cases are they ever held accountable. The more that the public gets involved in monitoring the police the more people are finding out that the police are lawless.

If you want to live as a citizen in a democracy, you have to hold officials responsible. When the police decide that they are above the law, it is up to us to show them that the law applies to everyone.

On the other hand, if you want to be a peon in a police state, just go ahead and support the status quo. Let the TSA steal you stuff when you fly. Let the NSA put you on a watch list based on a mass surveillance algorithm that no one will ever review. Or get on a list by posting something on Slashdot. It's your choice.

Wow, both illogical and a paranoid fantasy. Two birds with one stone.

No one except you has said anything about a national police force. Where the hell did that come from?

The post is about how the Feds are not doing their job and letting the cops get away with bad behavior. How would a national police force, which you imply would be unaccountable, be any different then a local police force that doesn't obey the law?

Do you have any point to make except flaunting your delusional conspiracy theory? Off you meds? WTF?

The world is flat and you stand at the exact center of the universe. How nice for you.

You are absolutely correct. The world has no ambiguity, your opinions are fundamental truths of the universe, and you shit doesn't stink.

Self righteous much?

Just wondering.

Yes, just like a little kid, every Republican knows that you see space when you look up. You can't see space when you look down. All you see is dirt, i.e. the Earth. So it can't be in space.

So let's just ignore the fact that the Earth is just one of the many things that are in space, and that it s the easiest thing in space we can get to. We're already here. It just doesn't count.

Also ignore that the Earth is the planet that we know the most about. So if we want to study other planets, we shouldn't study the Earth from space. There is no way that the things that we learn from Earth observation could be a baseline so that we know how to examine other thing that are in space, like say Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and it's moons, Saturn and it's moons and rings, and the same for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (planet or not).

I hope this gives the Republicans amongst you a slight clue how stupid you sound. And how much you've substituted ideology for rational thought. But I warn you, don't let your vision of the US flag over every rock and planet in the solar system go to your head. It's only a mater of time until the christian fanatic wing of the party decides that the Earth is flat, the space program is a front for the devil, and the money needs to be spent on proving that the Earth is 6000 years old.

Wall Street gets to steal from everybody.

Nobody gets to steal from Wall Street

You have no idea what you are talking about. All FAA certified aircraft software has to conform to the DO-178B / DO-178C standard. The standard imposes design, testing, process and documentation standards that are extremely demanding.

QC isn't just a department or a step in the release process, it is built into the full life cycle of the software. Safety is the goal, and the requirement for good practice starts at the beginning of the process, with the requirement documents.

For example, there are five levels of error severity defined from A to E. E has no impact on safety and A is catastrophic, where a crash could occur. The level of software test and validation depends on the severity level.

The number of objectives to be satisfied (eventually with independence) is determined by the software level A-E. The phrase "with independence" refers to a separation of responsibilities where the objectivity of the verification and validation processes is ensured by virtue of their "independence" from the software development team. For objectives that must be satisfied with independence, the person verifying the item (such as a requirement or source code) may not be the person who authored the item and this separation must be clearly documented. In some cases, an automated tool may be equivalent to independence. However, the tool itself must then be qualified if it substitutes for human review.

Your inability to find a "QC" position is because you don't know the structure of aerospace software development and have no idea of the job titles or terminology used to describe the standards used. You are projecting your lack of knowledge into a inconceivable lapse of competence on the part of Boeing and the FAA. In what universe would there be no software safety requirements for the civilian aircraft industry? All you have shown is that you are ignorant and have a basic lack of common sense.

King George Bush 1st: Head of the CIA, just like Putin was the head of the KGB, and just like Putin, dedicated to democratic government and free enterprise.

King George W Bush 2nd: Dumber then a box of rocks. Hand puppet for Cheney. Known to be comfortable holding hands with (male) Saudi royalty. Ignored warnings about 9/11 attack, then invaded the wrong country. Engineered the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. Will eventually go down as the worst president in the post WW1 era.

King Jeb Bush: If elected, will complete the disastrous projects started by his father and brother. Invade Iran? Russia? North Korea? No matter what, will invade somewhere, since it's a family tradition. Will turn the economy over to Greenspan, or his current equivalent, and complete the destruction of the US economy. Convert the US to a right wing Christian theocracy? Possible. It's impossible to predict what he will do, because the Bush clan is so out of control that no sane person can foresee their future actions.

Before you go slinging mud, you had best consider what happened whey your side was in charge.

Disney Replaces Longtime IT Staff with H-1b Workers

As I posted there:

Corporations only have one goal: making the upper management as rich as possible. They will throw anyone under the bus to achieve that end: employees, stockholders, customers.

I underestimated just how greedy the bastards really are. They will sell anything, including the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, to a country who's foreign policy goals include getting the US out of the Middle East, the end of the State of Israel, and replacing Saudi dominance with Iranian dominance. (Not that I think much of the Saudi government, but at least they are a devil we know, and can buy off.)

Ending the Iran embargo shouldn't mean helping them with their nuclear energy program. That's insane, unless the west has 100% access to all their facilities. The last I heard access was one of the main unresolved issues.

Clearly this is in the agreement due to corporate influence. At what point does profit become treason?

I suggest that you leave your parent's basement and visit the real world some time. in the real world everyone is expendable except for the CEO and their cronies.

Look at all the big US companies after the 2008 crash. No CEOs, C-anything-O or boards of director were out and out fired. A very few CEOs (for example the head of Bank of America) were "retired", but given their fat golden parachutes they still ended up outrageously wealthy. There is no negative penalty, even for complete failure, for anyone at the top.

Corporations only have one goal: making the upper management as rich as possible. They will throw anyone under the bus to achieve that end: employees, stockholders, customers. If it's ever a choice between stockholders and management, stockholders get screwed.

For example: Deep Misalignment Between Corporate Economic Performance, Shareholder Return and Executive Compensation

For the vast majority of S&P 1500 companies, there is a major disconnect between corporate operating performance, shareholder value and incentive plans for executives. New research details an over-reliance on accounting metrics that do not measure capital efficiency, and how total shareholder return obscures a line of sight to the underlying drivers of economic performance. Economic performance explains only 12% of variance in chief executive officer (CEO) compensation.

What universe are you from? How can you make a statement that is so clearly false? Did someone pay to say that, or are you a free lance idiot?

So it's not actually about the software, it's an excuse to throw a temper tantrum in public like a spoiled eight year old.

I would ask you to grow up, but that clearly isn't going to happen because you like being trash talking fool, and you get a lot of reinforcement for acting that way.

The only upside to all this is that if there is a genetic component to you behavior, it won't be passed on because with an attitude like that you will never get close enough to anyone to reproduce.

Suppose you bought a kitchen appliance and under a particular set of conditions it fried all the wiring in you house, and perhaps caused it to burn down. There would be a recall, and a lot of civil litigation. Why are electronic equipment manufacturers allowed to get away with this kind of crap?

It's even worse, because unlike a lot of other gear, they can actually fix the problem in the field. They don't have to do a physical recall like car companies do. What they need is remote update features.

I think it goes back to Windows. Gates and friends set the standard that computers would break, and that the users had no recourse. If it crashed and you lost something important you were just out of luck. No guarantee on anything.

Now that everyone has accepted that manufacturers have no responsibility, we are completely stuck with infrastructure that makes it impossible to have secure online transactions. Users are deliberately kept in the dark and known bugs remain unfixed.

Until there is some change in the law that places liability where it belongs, on the manufacturers, nothing will change. Given the current political climate there is no chance of change. We're just screwed.