Do you mean have we become like Wall Street and expect the government to bail us out when we are greedy, stupid and incompetent?

When you are the king of the hill, like Blackberry was, you have a walled garden and you want the government to "protect your rights".

When you're in deep trouble, you decide that it's the government's absolute duty to use the law keep you in business.

All that "free market" talk is for the suckers. What capitalists want is government guaranteed profit; i.e. they want the same free ride that Wall Street gets.

No, no. American's aren't dense, they will float because they are so fat,

I didn't bother to read anything but the headline, because I'm tired of the endless crap that spews out of the Republican party. It's a never ending flow of sewage, and it stinks in every way.

They might as well be voting on whether the world is flat or not. This falls into the category of "not even wrong".

We already know how this is going to come out; the Republican House and Senate will scream "Hoax".

They will do this for a combination of ugly and stupid reasons. First, they are the party of greed. As long as the top 1% are raking it in they don't care who gets screwed. Second, they hate Obama personally, because he is an Uppity N*****. This is a way of telling him to go screw himself.

Finally, it's an expression of the one value that all Republicans agree on: Fuck You. This is the real motto of the Republican party. Being for something is not what motivates them, but being violently against something is what gets them off. They even love to do it to one another, which is why they sling the term RHINO around: Republican In Name Only. For them, it's a curse word.

If there is a scintilla of good to come from this, it's from the stain it will leave on the Republican party. When climate change effects start to really kick in over the next 20 years, they will be on record as being horribly wrong. Since climate change is going to be the defining issue of the 21st century, it will be hard to escape the shadow of this very high profile blunder.

Personally, I hope that not only the Republican party will be held accountable, but that the individuals who vote for this will suffer. When things get ugly, I want them to hounded and blamed in public, and have their lives ruined. It's all that they deserve, and it might serve as a lesson for the future that willful ignorance can have personal, as well as global, consequences.

Many Slashdot Pundits are being hyper critical of his project because hardware X may be compromised by the NSA, or chip Y has blob drivers, or software stack Z is encumbered by patents. Since they are all so worried about the lack of Open Source Purity, they must already running some fantastic setup that has solved all these problems.

Obviously. since the problem is solved, they should be sharing the details with the rest of the poor slobs on Slashdot who are at the mercy of the evil forces of closed proprietary systems.

For a start, none of them are running any Microsoft or Apple product, so no Windows or Mac Os. And they can't be using the latest generation of any CPU, since the NSA has already infiltrated those designs. To be really secure, they must be using something pre-Pentium II, like a 486 generation CPU, or maybe a Motorola 68000. And it can't have USB, since USB sticks are now known to be an attack vector. And they have ATA disks or SCSI and floppies for offline storage and VGA adapters with VGA analog output. Because if they don't go go really old school, how can the be really sure that they aren't under the thumb of The Man?

Yes, all the whiners are running really old gear, because if they weren't they would be horrible hypocrites, and none of them would do that ever, right?

What other phone manufacturer would touch Tizen with a 10-foot pole? That would put them at a significant disadvantage because Samsung would never let them build a better product. So the only ones using will be Samsung, and somehow it doesn't seem likely that Samsung can create the same kind of walled garden that Apple has developed.

It seems like Google is has no long term commitment to building phone hardware. They didn't keep Motorola, for example. And this attempt to make a modular phone seems more like a technology demonstration then a product role out. Does anyone think they will try and make a business line out of it? I doubt it. So hardware vendors can continue use Android and not be worried about competing with Google directly, which is why I think they got rid of Motorola.

Yes, the efficient private sector is vastly more efficient at lots of things, like nearly destroying the world financial system through a mixture of greed and stupidity.

Many causes for the financial crisis have been suggested, with varying weight assigned by experts. The U.S. Senate's Levin–Coburn Report concluded that the crisis was the result of "high risk, complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street." The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded that the financial crisis was avoidable and was caused by "widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision," "dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk management at many systemically important financial institutions," "a combination of excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack of transparency" by financial institutions, ill preparation and inconsistent action by government that "added to the uncertainty and panic," a "systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics," "collapsing mortgage-lending standards and the mortgage securitization pipeline," deregulation of over-the-counter derivatives, especially credit default swaps, and "the failures of credit rating agencies" to correctly price risk. The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act effectively removed the separation between investment banks and depository banks in the United States. Critics argued that credit rating agencies and investors failed to accurately price the risk involved with mortgage-related financial products, and that governments did not adjust their regulatory practices to address 21st-century financial markets. Research into the causes of the financial crisis has also focused on the role of interest rate spreads.

And before you jump on the culpability of the US Government, the regulatory failures were the results of decades of deregulation that started during the Reagan eras, and were advanced by Alan Greenspan, a life long opponent of financial regulation.

As early as 1997, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan fought to keep the derivatives market unregulated. With the advice of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the U.S. Congress and President Bill Clinton allowed the self-regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives market when they enacted the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Derivatives such as credit default swaps (CDS) can be used to hedge or speculate against particular credit risks without necessarily owning the underlying debt instruments. The volume of CDS outstanding increased 100-fold from 1998 to 2008, with estimates of the debt covered by CDS contracts, as of November 2008, ranging from US$33 to $47 trillion. Total over-the-counter (OTC) derivative notional value rose to $683 trillion by June 2008. Warren Buffett famously referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction" in early 2003.

And speaking of telecommunications, our national policy is now being dictated by Tom Wheeler as head of the FCC, who previously was head of both the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. That means he was representing Comcast with one of the worst customer rankings of any organization in the US, including the IRS.

In 2004 and 2007, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) survey found that Comcast had the worst customer satisfaction rating of any company or government agency in the country, including the Internal Revenue Service. The ACSI indicates that almost half of all cable customers (regardless of company) have registered complaints, and that cable is the only industry to score below 60 in the ACSI. Comcast's Customer Service Rating by the ACSI surveys indicate that the company's customer service has never improved since the surveys began in 2001. Analysis of the surveys states that "Comcast is one of the lowest scoring companies in ACSI. As its customer satisfaction eroded by 7% over the past year, revenue increased by 12%." The ACSI analysis also addresses this contradiction, stating that "Such pricing power usually comes with some level of monopoly protection and most cable companies have little competition at the local level. This also means that a cable company can do well financially even though its customers are not particularly satisfied." In 2009 Comcast rebounded on its ACSI rating for television and Internet services, moving ahead of Charter Communications and into a tie with Time Warner Cable.

...

Consumer affairs blog The Consumerist named Comcast "Worst Company in America" in 2010 and 2014. The company received the "Golden Poo" award to its Philadelphia headquarters in commemoration of the victory. The company also finished in the top three in 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2013. Since 2006, it has received more Golden, Silver and Bronze awards for poor customer service performance than any other company in the country, including Wal-Mart, Bank of America, and Ticketmaster.

So private enterprise does a great job, if your definition of "great" includes gross incompetence, government enforced monopolies, greed of epic proportions and taxpayer bailouts.

Are we talking about Google Docs in space? Google Glass for astronauts? What hardware or software are you talking about? Do you have the fainest clue about space rating anything? It's not going down to Best Buy and getting a laptop with TurboTax, you realize, right?

Family Outraged After North Miami Beach Police Use Mug Shots as Shooting Targets

A South Florida family is outraged at North Miami Beach Police after mug shots of African American men were used at a shooting range for police training.

It was an ordinary Saturday morning last month when Sgt. Valerie Deant arrived at the shooting range in Medley, or so she thought.

Deant, who plays clarinet with the Florida Army National Guard’s 13th Army Band, and her fellow soldiers were at the shooting range for their annual weapons qualifications training.

What the soldiers discovered when they entered the range made them angry: mug shots of African American men apparently used as targets by North Miami Beach Police snipers, who had used the range before the guardsmen.

Even more startling for Deant, one of the images was her brother. It was Woody Deant’s mug shot that taken 15 years ago, after he was arrested in connection to a drag race in 2000 that left two people dead. His mug shot was among the pictures of five minorities used as targets by North Miami Beach police, all of them riddled by bullets.

“I was like 'why is my brother being used for target practice?'" Deant asked.

She immediately called her brother, Woody Deant, who was 18 years old when the picture was taken.

“The picture actually has like bullet holes,” Woody Deant said. “One in my forehead and one in my eye. I was speechless," he added.

The City of Medley owns the Medley Firearms Training Center and it leases the facilities to law enforcement agencies in the area. The shooting range staff doesn’t select the targets used by law enforcement and the military.

North Miami Beach Police Chief J. Scott Dennis admitted that his officers could have used better judgment, but denies any racial profiling.

He noted that the sniper team includes minority officers. Dennis defended the department’s use of actual photographs and says the technique is widely used and the pictures are vital for facial recognition drills. But the Deant family questions why officers were firing targets with images of real people, in this case African-Americans, especially at a time when relations between minority communities and law enforcement are so tense.

“Our policies were not violated,” Dennis said. “There is no discipline forthcoming from the individuals who were involved with this.”

NBC 6 Investigators spoke with sources at federal and state law enforcement agencies and five local police departments that have SWAT and sniper teams in an attempt to find out if this is a common practice. All law enforcement agencies said they only use commercially produced targets, not photos of human beings for target practice.

Yes, the short answer is that in the USA minorities are second class citizens. They are often are denied the rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

Now consider what would happen if a minority gun club had targets made of white people. They would be slapped with the label "terrorist" and end up in a Federal maximum security lockup for life.

You don't think so? No matter who you are if you did the same thing with pictures of cops it would happen to you. But if you have a gun and badge and you do the equivalent, then it's just bad judgement.

Wertheimer is the Directer of Research a the NSA. He was quoted on Slashdot two days ago apologizing in the Notes of the American Mathematical Society. The issue was a possible trap door in a set of encryption standard parameters submitted by the NSA. This was noticed by some researchers at Microsoft, and when it was brought up in the standards committee NSA just ignored the criticism.

This made some member of the AMS very unhappy. Here is what angry mathematicians sound like:

“AMS Should Sever Ties with the NSA” (Letter to the Editor), by Alexander Beilinson (December 2013); “Dear NSA: Long-Term Security Depends on Freedom”, by Stefan Forcey (January 2014); “The NSA Backdoor to NIST”, by Thomas C. Hales (February 2014); “The NSA: A Betrayal of Trust”, by Keith Devlin (June/July 2014); “The Mathematical Community and the National Security Agency”, by Andrew Odlyzko (June/July 2014); “NSA and the Snowden Issues”, by Richard George (August 2014); “The Danger of Success”, by William Binney (Sep tember 2014);

If you read his statement, it is content free. As a admission of wrongdoing, it's completely worthless.

"With hindsight, NSA should have ceased supporting the dual EC_DRBG algorithm immediately after security researchers discovered the potential for a trapdoor. In truth, I can think of no better way to describe our failure to drop support for the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm as anything other than regrettable"

This is more of an apology for getting caught then anything else.

So when Dr. Wertheimer pontificates about filtering email and national security, you should not be very impressed. His agenda assumes the end of constitutional protections for privacy. He is not an honest man doing an honest job for an honest employer.

Graphene is like affordable solar cell energy. It takes a long, long time to get started, and it seems that it's always five to ten years off, and then "suddenly" it has a major impact. Let's face it, the low hanging fruit, like transistors, has all been exploited. And even transistors had their begging in the 1930s with research at places like Bell Labs.

Introducing fundamental technology takes decades of incremental improvements and theoretical discovery. If you are looking for instant gratification perhaps you should shift your focus to web startups or multi-level marketing schemes. Things like graphene require a long attention span and lots of dedicated work. That doesn't seem to fit with your attitude.

RTFA, moron.

They are using the WhiteKnightTwo with a unmanned rocket payload for orbital launches.

Branson wrote in his blog that the company is working to build a two-stage rocket, known as LauncherOne that would air-launch launch from the companies existing WhiteKnightTwo aircraft at about 45,000 to 50,000ft.

“LauncherOne will be built using advanced composite structures, and powered by our new family of LOX/RP-1 liquid rocket engines. Each LauncherOne mission will be capable of delivering as much as 225 kilograms (500 pounds) to a low inclination Low Earth Orbit or 120 kilograms (265 pounds) to a high-altitude Sun-Synchronous Orbit, for a price of less than $10M,” Branson wrote.

So far the responses to this post indicate that Slasdot should change it's name to Slashdolt because of the shear stupidity of what's being said. The first post is by Frosty Piss, and he is living up (or more accurately down) to his name. It seems like the nerds have been displaced by drooling fools.

I'm starting to wonder if I should waste my time on the likes of you.

Treason is not the correct term. It refers to betrayal of country.

In law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against one's sovereign or nation. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife or that of a master by his servant.

The correct term is Sedition.

In law, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. Seditious words in writing are seditious libel. A seditionist is one who engages in or promotes the interests of sedition.

Note the boldface. In this case the "established order" is the rule of law enshrined in the constitution. The NSA has subverted the constitution with warrantless mass surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security (aka Department of Homeland Pork) has ignored the constitutional right to due process with the "no fly list": there is no official way to find out if you are on it or to be removed from the list.

These actions, along with many current policies, are absolutely unconstitutional. In short, sedition. They betray the constitutional rule of law. Treason typically is the betrayal of one's country to another sovereign entity.

The American middle class prospered from the end of WWII up to the time of the Reagan presidency. In the post-Reagan era an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth is the new normal. We have an economical/political system that redistributes wealth upwards. There is no other rational explanation for the current statistics. This is the legacy of Reaganomics: the end of the American Dream.

The US, post-Soviet Russia and post-Communist China are all following the same path to rule by oligarchy. The differences in how control is concentrated are not important to the continuing concentration of power in each system. In Russia, the economic oligarchs are only allowed to slavishly support Putan, or they are jailed or exiled and their wealth stripped. In China the oligarchs are either Party members themselves or the families of Party members. The rest of the rich know that they must participate in the endemic corruption. They were only allowed to succeed because they embraced corruption from the beginning.

In the US the oligarchs have, for the most part, taken over the government and the country is run for their benefit. Examples are too numerous to mention, but I'll highlight a few.

The 2008 market crash. The reason it was so horrific in the first place was that the Bush administration effectively suspended all regulation of Wall Street and Alan Greenspan got to fulfill his Libertarian fantasy. The result, unsurprisingly, was an epic failure. Lack of effective oversight is the wet dream of every oligarch. That's why they love secret unlimited secret campaign contributions, another gift to oligarchs the from the politicians and judges they own.

The bailout from the crash was another astonishing transfer of wealth to the ultra rich. Instead of calling Wall Street to task and making those responsible pay up, the oligarchs were rewarded instead. Many of them are have far more now then they did before 2008, and everyone else is worse off. The new stock market highs are the proof of that. Meanwhile, the job recovery is still lagging, and the jobs that are being generated pay significantly lower then before the crash. This is a mass transfer of assets from the general population to the rich. Again there is no other rational explanation.

An earlier example is Medicare Part D, brought to your pocketbook by Big Pharma and Billy Tauzin,

Two months before resigning as chair of the committee which oversees the drug industry, Tauzin had played a key role in shepherding through Congress the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill. Democrats said that the bill was "a give-away to the drugmakers" because it prohibited the government from negotiating lower drug prices and bans the importation of identical, cheaper, drugs from Canada and elsewhere. The Veterans Affairs agency, which can negotiate drug prices, pays much less than Medicare. Public Citizen called Tauzin's hiring "yet another example of how public service is leading to private riches." Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook said, "a member of Congress who pushed through a major piece of legislation benefiting the drug industry gets the job leading that industry."

The bill was passed in an unusual congressional session at 3 a.m. under heavy pressure from the drug companies. Walter B. Jones (R-NC) said, "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill." The drug lobby invested more than $10 million in campaign contributions during the last election and has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave office, said Jones.

Tauzin received $11.6 million from PhRMA in 2010, making him the highest-paid health-law lobbyist.

I'll even make a prediction: when the FCC announces what they will call "Net Neutrality" rules, it will be the end of the internet as an open platform. It will become just as closed, structured and overpriced as the current cable industry. Just like Wall Street and Big Pharma, the cable/telco oligarchs want their non-competitive guaranteed profit margins. And since they have paid for the privilege they'll get it. You have no say in the matter.

So remember, if you like loosing your economic well being and personal liberty in a corrupt surveillance state, it all started with your hero, Ronald Reagan.

Remember, the real name of DHS is DHP: Department of Homland Pork.