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.

To be more precise, de facto monopoly, which enables non-competitive pricing. The lying goes along with the rest.

1984

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”

It's not they are alone. Most of the large scale US economy is organized this way: media, telecom, Wall Street, big Pharma, agribusiness. It's kind of like a mafia state: everyone has to give some money to the person above them, and all the wealth accumulates at the top.

Welcome to post-capitalist America: no competition, no democracy, no freedom of speech, no financial security.

Texas Lawmakers Want To Defy Supreme Court On Same-Sex Marriage

On the one hand,” Dan Quinn, a spokesman for progressive advocacy group Texas Freedom Network, said, “to run around and say we are sovereign and somehow don’t have to obey a Supreme Court ruling is the quintessential example of a temper tantrum. Some of the lawmakers, including the representative who introduced this bill, just refuse to accept what’s happening. This seems to be a way to stomping their feet and saying we’re not going to let that happen, which is absurd.”

The cost of a single NOAA Doppler radar in 2010 was $7,000,000. That's just to buy the system and install it, no operating budget.

The cost of the "expensive" earthquake early warning system is around the cost of 5 Doppler systems. As of 2013 the National Weather service has access to 159 Doppler installations.

In addition to the 122 NWS-owned radars, the full nationwide radar network includes another 37 radar sites owned by the FAA and Defense Department, which will be completely upgraded to dual-pol technology this summer. NOAA’s NEXRAD radar program is a tri-agency effort with NOAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the United States Air Force.

Note that the national radar network is being upgraded to high end Doppler for tornado and severe storm detection. So why do those in the Midwest, Gulf Coast and East Coast deserve early warning on tornadoes and California gets peanuts ($5,000,000) for the inevitable large earthquake? Politics.

Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) can't explain why more money wasn't approved.

"It's inexplicable given how much we have at stake here. Obviously these have been very tough budgetary times, but if you're going to invest in something that is significant down the road, this is about the best investment you can make," he said.

Japan, Mexico, Turkey and Mongolia already have similar systems in place.

So they can afford this in Mongolia and it's too much for California? Really?

Any pub worth it's hand pull taps wouldn't let an ice cube in the door. You're implying that they would serve soft drinks or cold beer. The horror!

That would be a step up for the Slashdot contingent that is currently living in their parents basement without a giant aluminum ball.

I hope you're right: potential Darwin award winner.

You are being deliberately obtuse. (That is how adults describe someone who is being willfully wrong.)

In the referenced Nature paper, the authors describe measurements they made on honey bee and bumble bee neurons in response to sugar with and without the neonicotinoid compounds. As I also stated, they also checked if the presence of the insecticides had any impact on the way the insects detect sugar. It did not.

Understand this: they inserted electrodes into nerve fibers that bees use to "taste" what they are consuming. Using these electrodes they monitored the nerve signals going to the bees brain. By varying the concentration of insecticides over a range starting at zero, they were able to show that there was no difference in the response related to the amount of the chemical they were testing. The paper has charts and graphs with error bars and correlation (p) values. It's real science done by real scientists, who know that their academic reputation depends on avoiding mistakes.

This is not a high school "science experiment" with a bunch of bees free flying in a cage with two sources of sugar and a student counting the number of bees going to one or the other. The experiment is based on a fundamental understanding at the neurological level of how bees function. It has nothing to do with nectar.

Your criticism is based on a level of understanding that is extremely childish. Are you actually that uninformed? You are not asking relevant question, but making assertions based in ignorance. Even given the generally low quality of analytical thinking shown on Slashdot, you lack of knowledge is pathetic. Normally I would say that you should look at the paper, but in your case I expect that there are too many big words that you would not understand.

Your are factually incorrect. The directly linked article in Chemistry World linked to an article published in Nature entitled Bees prefer food containing neonicotinoid pesticides

The Nature article examined the neurophysiological response of bees to three of the most common neonicotinoid pesticides. They determined that the bee taste system cannot detect these chemicals, and additionally the chemicals have no influence on the bee's ability to recognize sugar. This means the bees preference for food with these substances results from interaction with their central nervous system. Considering that nicotine is a CNS stimulant, this makes perfect sense.

You didn't like the conclusion of the article, so you read it with the single intent of refuting it. When you found one thing that you thought you could use as an attack, you picked on that. It did not occur to you that the people who do this kind of research are extremely knowledgeable and would would never make that kind of foolish error.

You have revealed your true colors. You are willfully ignorant and have no regard for the truth. You were effectively accusing the authors of fraudulent research. Accusing others of lying to achieve their goals shows that you are a dishonest yourself, because that is the logic of habitual liars.

“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”