Tsunami's tend to only be bad where they hit coasts or shallow water. In the open ocean and deep water they move very fast but wave height is usually never more than a meter.

So what did Unions, OSHA, Workmens Comp and the EPA accomplish in the long run?

They made the U.S. a horrible place to engage in any business that could easily be outsourced to another country with a lower regulatory burden, taxes and wages. The worker's paradise angle worked until the economy globalized, now it doesn't.

So increasingly there are no low skilled jobs in the U.S. Automation is also a union and job killer because its better to spend a lot of money on a machine than deal with employees. Wage rates are dropping, the U.S. runs massive trade deficits and government is massively in the red because its spending more than its shrinking tax base will support (tax cuts for the rich under Bush certainly helped, as did over promising on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and squandering on the defense-intelligence complex.

Wonder why healthy unions in the U.S. tend to only be fire, police, teaching, government, truck driving. Because those are the jobs that can't be outsourced.

There was a sweet spot in there, maybe around 1950 where unions and government regulation hit a sweet spot, they'd wiped out all the massive abuses of workers earlier in the century and built a big middle class, and then they over rotated and made the U.S. a horrible place to do business. If you don't have business you tend to not have jobs, then you have a lot of people living on food stamps and Medicaid.

Pinnacle of PVP shooters was and still is BF2 Karkand Infantry only. They want the perfect game just fix:

- Squad bug
- C4 jumping
- Team switching and balance
- Tone down nade spamming a little, not a lot
- Botting, glitching and assorted other hacks
⦠ship

Overdone graphics add nothing to game play, they just increase game expense and hardware requirements. They are marketing, they don't make games fun.

Endless fur balls shooting at each other like COD are just boring. Strategy and tactics is what makes PVP interesting, and being a better team than your opponents.

Air and armor just aren't that much fun. Its really hard to maintain balance between players with that wide a gamut of capabilites. Infantry only is a blast because everyone is relatively equal and its ability that makes the difference.

Karkand is a great map because it compels confrontation, has some room to manuever but not too much. Big maps like in PS3 result in endless running around trying to find a battle and when you find one the team are almost NEVER balanced so the play just sucks.

Balanced team of evenly matched players in a properly sized map for the number of players is the secret to PVP success. Don't know why gaming companies have so much troublt figuring this out. The excitement and challenge is playing against other players not against gimmicky vehicls or weapons and not gawking at overdone graphics.

Oh, and MY GOD DON'T PUT HEAD BOB IN YOUR GAME. IT IS JUST NAUSEA INDUCING INNER EAR TORTURE AND ADDS NOTHING TO YOUR GAME.

Didn't RTFA but there is nothing stopping them from building a massively parallel, electronic, analog machine composed of a large number of heavily interconnected pattern recognizers with the ability to self modify.

Then the only challenge is for it to learn how to learn and then to actually learn.

Some of the mechanisms evolution developed to create the human brain may well not be optimal so humans probably can do better once they understand how the basic mechanisms works which they increasingly do.

AAPL was elevated to stratospheric heights because of a bubble in their stock. Every hedge fund on the planet was buying it because the price was going up and the price was going up because every hedge fund on the planet was buying it. Its not really useful to compare to a time its stock was at stratospheric heights due to speculators.

On the other hand since Jobs died they do seem to be completely sucking. Hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe was the most vivid illustration of that I can think of. I wager Jobs would have instantly fired anyone dumb enough to hire that guy.

Its probably an interesting question if those same hedge funds are pushing GOOG to heights greater than it deserves. Android is doing well but its a has a weird business model.

Japan has been using unmanned helicopters to spray crops for decades. Yamaha makes them, though they are a little expensive. They are extremely good at it, the down wash from the rotor helps spread the spray all through the plants.

UC Davis, if memory serves, has started trials on them in the U.S. recently but the restrictive drone regulatory climate needs to relax a little

Politicians would generally be clueless enough to not grasp that rapidly evolving technology has eliminated the need for human involvment in the analysis part most of the time. A crafty bureaucrat would let them restrict his human staff and point to this as proof for how our civil liberties are being protected.

Meanwhile in the server room the AI's are raping us.

Unless AC's are using Tor or a public computer, the NSA knows who you are.

Someday soon there will be no anonymity on the Internet.

I've been wondering, maybe the NSA's analysts are constrained from spying on American's but are there loopholes allowing AI's to spy on them instead?

Actually one of the Bush's started that, Obama is just continuing and expanding it. All of the other people I listed would have kept it too. Its probably the only tool that can attack Al Qaeda affiliates around the globe without the quagmires involved in invading countries to root them out.

I don't think drone wars are the worst thing happening right now, they are the least bad alternative to fighting Al Qaeda affiliates. The two down sides are A) killing innocent bystanders which radicalizes all their friends and family B) it can be over used to kill people who probably shouldn't be killed. Since its such an easy way to fight a war chances are everyone will be doing it soon and it things are going to get really messy. Read Suarez, Kill Decision

You think Romney or Hillary Clinton or any of the Bushes would have done anything different? Only candidates that would would try to put an end to the corruption and abuse of power in the American system these days would be Ron or Rand Paul. They will never get elected because all the powers that be fear and hate them. If, by some fluke, they did get elected by the actual American voters, inspite of the negative media bombardment aimed at them, they would be assassinated in months.

It is a correct sentence though isn't it :)

Pedants this is your chance to strike.

As far recording goes within their respective countries it sound like the NSA and China are probably on par. China is censoring much more heavily and probably acting on the traffic with a heavier hand than the NSA.

NSA almost certainly dwarfs China in recording global fiber optic traffic. First a lot of it flows through the U.S. and second the NSA has cuts deals with governments and telecoms all over the world to get more access. China is probably trying to play catch especially through Huawei, and subsidizing telecom in places like Africa, but I wager they are far behind the NSA.

Not sure why the world trusted the U.S. government, tech and telecom companies with so much, while they feared China, since the NSA's voracious appetite for information has been no secret for a long time. Maybe it was just the U.S. pioneered the Internet and it was so cool, so everyone forgot you can't trust the U.S. with your comm traffic.

Bruce Sterling had some great lines in his recent piece The Ecuadorian Library

On the role of the FISA court in controlling the NSA:

"It's like a cardboard steering wheel in the cockpit of a Predator drone"

Most people don't realize the FISA court is appointed entirely by one person, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts. Its a bizarre anomaly, a critical protector of the American Constitution completely controlled by a single person. If he or one of his successors goes bad, the Constitution can be eviscerated overnight and since its completely secret we probably wouldn't even know it.

Hogwash.

In the "Jungle" animals are pretty much born on a level playing field. Only thing you have going for you is if you are born or raised to be stronger, smarter, faster or to work harder.

It was the creation of political structures, money and inheritence that led to the massive inequality endemic in and unique to the human race. This allows clearly inferior individuals to triumph over their superiors because they "were born with it" or actually inherited their wealth and power from their ancestors or caste.

Trust fund babies would most probably die a horrible death if they were actually living in the "Jungle".

Their might be some concept of inheritence in the animal kingdom, I'm thinking among insects who are builders like ants and bees, but its just really not very common.

The CEO of Aetna was on CNBC recently. He insisted medical insurance would be a buyer's market under Obamacare. For some reason he didn't explain, it was just going to be really expensive to buy.