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Comment Re:And guess how many vacation days we Americans g (Score 2) 710

In this economy, the question is rather whether you're not well enough connected to find something else. Skill plays little role anymore when it comes to unemployment.

If you are highly skilled and those skills are in demand, hire yourself. You can't be fired unless you fire yourself. You can't be underpaid unless you underpay yourself. You can take as many vacation days as you like.

If you succeed, that's great. If not, you have no one left to blame but yourself.

Comment Re:So, what's the correction? (Score 2) 347

None of your questions can be answered by science. Science is a great tool, but can't answer "why" things are the way they are. Just be grateful it is not different, otherwise we wouldn't even be here to ask the questions.

Similarly, asking what happened before the big bang is meaningless. Stephen Hawking puts it beautifully:

Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them.

This doesn't mean you can't enjoy pondering these questions if that's what you want to do, but do so with full realization you're now in the realm of philosophy, religion, and mysticism - not science.

Comment Re:Bitcoin mining? (Score 1) 89

Why do researchers have to sacrifice an industry paycheck to do it? In other words, why won't industrial pharma hire more talented scientists.

There is more money in treating a medical condition than in curing it. Once a disease is cured, there is no need to take expensive medications anymore. The financial incentives for both doctors and pharmaceutical companies is to keep a patient in treatment for as long as possible.

Comment Re:Fox News? (Score 1) 682

_WHY_ would this be important in a historic perspective?

The emails document correspondence to and from White House officials. That's an invaluable resource to future historians. All correspondence with the White House is.

Comment Re:Fox News? (Score 1) 682

And to top it all off, the information probably does exist somewhere on a government server ...

I'll bet it does. These are important historical documents. For that reason alone I'm sure someone is archiving them.

They may not become public for another 50 years or so but they'll turn up.

Comment Re:Massive conspiracy (Score 5, Insightful) 465

It's quite a coincidence that all seven of the computers storing information that Congress is requesting all "crashed" and the emails were lost to seven computer "glitches". Just think of the odds. What an uncanny streak of misfortune. The emails just vanished and the investigation can't continue. Oh well.

Just ignore the fact that the words "crashed" and "glitch" are not technical terms an IT professional would use and only serve to obfuscate rather than clarify how those emails might be retrieved. Those boxes with the blinky lights are just subject to the whims of fate, I reckon.

I can't really fault the IRS for not handing over evidence that would at a minimum would put them out of their jobs and/or ideally behind prison bars. What surprises me is what bad liars they are.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 465

Actually, anyone who has handled email admin for a big business knows they have email "retention polices" [d4discovery.com] where they explicitly delete all email older than X days (often just 90 days) except for what each user deliberately saves off.

Except the IRS isn't a business; it's a government agency. It's completely irrelevant what retention policies businesses use because government officials work for and are accountable to the American people, amirite?

The alternative to saying "we lost the emails you want to use as evidence against us in a criminal inverstigation" is to hand over the emails and turn around to make it easier to put the handcuffs on. Not really surprising they chose the path they did.

Comment Re:The eventual redefinition of "privacy" and the (Score 2) 89

For what it's worth, the government has yet to use any of the information to actually destroy lives, at least lives of people that it wasn't coming to.

The most obvious counter-examples being Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. The "crimes" these people committed were that they told the truth. I guess we could argue semantics about whether or not their lives were "destroyed" or not but I think we can all agree that their mobility is severely restricted and their long prospects aren't looking so hot.

The lesson to be learned here is to never tell the truth when discussing the working of government. It's the highest crime you can commit. Nothing good can possibly come from it.

Comment Re:OCA (Score 2) 184

That assumes that the information is classified because it's genuinely sensitive rather than classified because classifying it helps cover up wrongdoing.

"You can't handle the truth!" That's the thinking by political insiders and goes a long way to explain why so-called "whistle-blowers" are dealt with so harshly.

Once the public sees the extent classified status is used to cover up government malfeasance rather than issues of national security they become informed voters, and then they might vote in their own self-interest.

Comment Re:Intentional misprints? (Score 1) 210

Have you examined the pattern of misprints? Maybe they're there to uniquely identify your copy of the e-book.

I think mostly people are talking about obvious OCR errors. Like a lower case L (l) turning into a numeral one (1) or an exclaimation point (!)

More interesting to me are the questions "If you purchase an eBook and what you receive is not a faithful representaion of the printed copy, what exactly have you purchased?" "Was that money well spent?"

I believe I would ask for my money back if my KIng James Bible eBook quoted God as saying "Let there be light: and there was blight."

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