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Comment Re:Where does the Fed claim to get power to ban th (Score 2) 363

The sentence referring to Supreme Court rulings between 1876 and 1939 is a lie. In U.S. vs. Miller, for example, the court never questioned that the Second Amendment was an individual right, only whether or not a short-barrelled shotgun was an appropriate military weapon.

Transportation

The Auto Industry May Mimic the 1980s PC Industry 287

An anonymous reader writes: An article at TechCrunch looks at some interesting parallels between the current automobile industry and the PC industry of the 1980s. IBM was dominant in 1985, employing four times as many people as its nearest competitor. But as soon as Windows was released, the platform became more important for most end users than the manufacturer. Over the next decade, IBM lost its throne. In 2015, we're on the cusp of a similar change: the computerized car. Automakers, though large and well-established, haven't put much effort into building the platform on which their cars run. Meanwhile, Google's Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are constantly improving. As soon as those hit a breakthrough point where it's more important for a customer to have the platform than the manufacturer's logo on the side, the industry is likely to resemble a replay of the PC industry in the 1980s.
Software

Windows 10 IE With Spartan Engine Performance Vs. Chrome and Firefox 181

MojoKid writes: In Microsoft's latest Windows 10 preview build released last week, Cortana made an entrance, but the much-anticipated Spartan browser did not. However, little did we realize that some of Spartan made the cut, in the form of an experimental rendering engine hidden under IE's hood. Microsoft has separated its Trident rendering engine into two separate versions: one is for Spartan, called EdgeHTML, while the other remains under its legacy naming with Internet Explorer. The reason Microsoft doesn't simply forego the older version is due to compatibility concerns. If you're running the Windows 10 9926 build, chances are good that you're automatically taking advantage of the new EdgeHTML engine in IE. To check, you can type 'about:flags' into the address bar. "Automatic" means that the non-Spartan Trident engine will be called-upon only if needed. In all other cases, you'll be taking advantage of the future Spartan web rendering engine. Performance-wise, the results with IE are like night and day in certain spots. Some of the improvements are significant. IE's Sunspider result already outperforms the competition, but it has been further improved. And with Kraken, the latency with the Spartan-powered Trident engine dropped 40%. Similar results are seen with a boost in the Octane web browser test as well.
Mars

Curiosity Detects Mysterious Methane Spikes On Mars 68

astroengine writes: A gas strongly associated with life on Earth has been detected again in the Martian atmosphere, opening a new chapter in a decade-old mystery about the on-again, off-again appearance of methane on Mars. The latest discovery comes from NASA's Curiosity rover, which in addition to analyzing rocks and soil samples, is sniffing the air at its Gale Crater landing site. A year ago, scientists reported that Curiosity had come up empty-handed after an eight-month search for methane in the atmosphere, leaving earlier detections by ground-based telescopes and Mars-orbiting spacecraft an unexplained anomaly. "We thought we had closed the book on methane. It was disappointing to a lot of people that there wasn't significant methane on Mars, but that's where we were," Curiosity scientist Christopher Webster with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

Comment Re:The Middle Class is the Bedrock of Society (Score 1) 839

At Homestead, Pinkertons were trying to escort replacement workers into a steel mill. The strikers opened fire first, murdered a few Pinkertons, tried to burn alive Pinkertons who were attempting to surrender, and then after accepting the Pinkertons' surrender, proceeded to torture them.

From The New York Times, July 7, 1892, John T. McCurry quoted:

I was down at the foot of Beaver Avenue, Allegheny, yesterday, when Captain Rogers employed me to go up the river on his boat â" the Little Bill.

Our boat had in tow one barge of Pinkerton men and the Tide had the other. While going up, the Tide was disabled, and we took our barge up in front of Homestead, and then went back for the Tide's.

We made a landing at the Homestead mills about five o'clock this morning. The shore was crowded with the locked out men and their sympathizers.

The armed pinkerton men commenced to climb up the banks. Then the workmen opened fire on the detectives.

The men shot first, and not until three of the pinkerton men had fallen did they respond to the fire.

I am willing to take an oath that the workmen fired first, and that the Pinkerton men did not shoot until some of their number had been wounded.

The workmen were so strong in numbers that it was useless for the three fifty or four hundred Pinkertons men to oppose them further, so they retreated to the barges, carrying their dead and wounded.

One Pinkerton man was shot through the head and instantly killed, and five were wounded.

We backed out into the river, anchored the barges, and then took the dead and wounded men up to Port Perry, whence they were sent on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to Pittsburg. We then went down to Homestead again.

We were going along peaceably and expecting no trouble. When we reached the mills the strikers opened fire on the Little Bill from both sides. It was then I was hit.

The bullets broke the glass and splintered the woodwork. Captain Alexander McMichaels was at the wheel. The bullets crashed through the glass pilothouse, and to save his life, he had to rush below. Captain Rogers was on board, and he displayed great bravery.

When the firing commenced, we all laid down on the floor to escape the bullets, but I was not quick enough, and was wounded. There was a cessation in the firing, and the pilot secured control of the boat before it ran into the bank, which it came near doing.

There was no one on board at the time we were fired upon, but the crew, Captain Rogers, and one Pinkerton man, J.H. Robinson of Chicago.

When we approached Homestead from Port Perry we could see the attempts to set fire to the barges.

The strikers had a carload of what appeared to be oil, and were pouring it on the river and igniting it. The barges at this time were out in the middle of the river.

Comment Re:Completely And Utterly Wrong (Score 1) 835

"General Bradley said that we must draw the line somewhere. The President stated he agreed on that. General Bradley said that Russia is not yet ready for war. The Korean situation offered as good an occasion for action in drawing the line as anywhere else."

The Korean War did not start with the partition. It started when North Korea invaded South Korea at the behest of Stalin.

"In 1961, Kennedy agreed that America should finance an increase in the size of the South Vietnamese Army from 150,000 to 170,000. He also agreed that an extra 1000 US military advisors should be sent to South Vietnam to help train the South Vietnamese Army. Both of these decisions were not made public as they broke the agreements made at the 1954 Geneva Agreement."

North Vietnam had made the decision to attempt to conquer the South well before Kennedy's action.

The article is entitled "Covert United States foreign regime change actions." What are you claiming it is discussing instead of covert foreign regime change actions executed by the United States? Why are you denying the validity of US government provided declassified information?

The article does not claim what you say it does. The US was not involved in the coups that occurred in Brazil and Chile, for instance.

Comment Re:Completely And Utterly Wrong (Score 1) 835

The US did not start the Korean War, nor did it start the Vietnam War. The figures for military and civilian deaths are from both sides. I can only conclude that the figures for the civil wars in Cambodia and Laos were pulled from his ass, as Wikipedia lists the total number of dead (presumably both civilian and military) for the Cambodian Civil War at 200,000 to 300,000, and the Laotian Civil War at 20,000 to 200,000.

For Iraq, the vast majority of killings is Muslims slaughtering other Muslims.

The Wikipedia article you cite gives a long list, but fails to prove that the US was directly responsible for most of the regime changes that actually occured.

Comment Re:Correction (Score 1) 461

The whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley is people had no clue Enron was doing weird shit.

Untrue. Those who carefully examined Enron's books smelled something funny, and then when word got out, investors and creditors panicked, causing Enron's demise. Compare this with MF Global, where nobody who carefully examined MF Global's books could tell that MF Global had pissed away its customer's money.

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