Not entirely true. Wall street did back Romney much more than Obama, but Obama was also primarily supported by the 1%, just not to the extent that Mitt was. A quick search shows that large tech firms (M$, Apple, Google), the MPIAA firms (Disney, Time Warner, etc.), and various finance firms (many were also top Romney supporters) among Obama's top supporters.

Doesn't everyone know that

Indeed, I'm only running an intel CPU right now because the Bulldozer architecture...lets say it needs work.

Actually, I haven't seen any evidence recently that the democrats aren't just as supportive of the military front as the republicans.

Don't forget Ubuntu.

While what you said is all true, instruments are also much less likely to give false positives just because the handler wants it to do so. I agree that dogs can be reliable when used well, but in situations where the true positive rate is less than 0.01%, there are other issues with dogs.

It isn't that there should be a very light sentence for reckless actions unless injury occurs, it is that no reckless action of this type has *ever* caused detectable injury despite thousands of instances of this reckless action occurring. Think for a moment about what is necessary to cause injury.

The laser can only cause injury when shone directly into an area of a few square centimeters (although the actual target area may be larger if the beam is somewhat diffuse, but still sufficiently focused). And this from a distance that would likely need to be half of a mile away (unless the plane is just taking off or landing, in which case its probably more like a quarter-mile). In addition, this is only possible if the aircraft is flying more or less directly towards the laser source. In any case, anyone who succeeds in such marksmanship should probably be offered a large salary by a military contractor as soon as they get out of jail. The person would probably even be enough of an idiot to accept.

Prosecution, fine. What these people are doing *can* cause harm. Three years is idiotic.

So what exactly are you proposing then, a Russian revolution? Seriously, what *can* they do? They have no governmental authority outside of a vote, and even supposing Putin steps down (itself a ridiculous proposition) they still will have no governmental authority. All they would be able to do, without guns and ammo, is make some noise and hope his replacement listens.

They already have a plan of action and it is shout into the wind and hope people hear. Perhaps enough people will hear so that Putin won't win the next election, perhaps Putin will make some effort to be less of a PITA for them, and perhaps Putin's eventual replacement will take note of their discontent more than he does. Year sure, they can hope Putin will step down, but who among the protestors really think that's gonna happen. Remember that Putin in all likelihood won the vote without direct fraud, so making noise in public really is an end to itself right now.

Indeed. To give the government that kind of moral power seems to be a bit of a slippery slope to me.

Mod parent up.

Hrm, the article refers to DNA evidence as a "gold standard". I suppose its better than fingerprint analysis, but I do wonder if DNA evidence is also trusted too far.

Hrm, that "litany of lies" seems rather informative to me...

911 may be ambiguous for phone systems where you must dial 9 to get to the outside. For instance, at my workplace we had serious trouble with employees dialing 911 by accident. People dialed 9 to get out, then 1 for international, then another 1 either by mistake, or as the first part of an area code. The emergency services were not amused.

No, he is correct. There are two types of inflation, monetary inflation and price inflation. Your parent is clearly talking about the latter. This is the standard definition of the term inflation (look at the titles of the wikipedia articles there).

By that definition, bitcoin should be measured against what it can buy, or the real value of bitcoins. However, few things can be bought directly with bitcoins, and even some of those things might automatically fluctuate with the value of bitcoins in USD. So when bitcoin fluctuates against the dollar, that is indeed inflation/deflation due to what can be bought. You can substitute USD for CAD, AUD, or Euro as you prefer, that is just the only way to buy most of the goods on any reasonable price index. Your comparison with imports/exports is mistaken.

If bitcoin was adopted by a country, most of these problems would disappear, at least for those living in that country anyways. Since you must tie bitcoin to any other currency at the moment in order to buy necessary goods, let us use the fiction I'll call "Euro-Bitcoin", which is bitcoin as tied to the euro currency, instead of giving bitcoin a country of its own (which would change the current situation considerably). You will notice some bonus deflation in Euro-Bitcoin should the euro decrease relative to bitcoin, and some bonus inflation in Euro-Bitcoin should the euro rise relative to bitcoin, or should the market decide to raise the prices of common goods (which can happen completely separately from monetary inflation). This will be negligible for our discussion, as that plagues all currencies, not just bitcoin.

Now, the fact that you cannot just buy milk at the local grocery store using bitcoin creates another problem for Euro-Bitcoin. This is that someone must be willing to exchange bitcoin for euros in order for your Euro-Bitcoin value to be spendable. Now, the price at which someone is willing to exchange your bitcoins depends on the perceived demand for bitcoins in the market. If people want to own 10x as many bitcoins, the price of bitcoins jacks up, and the value of Euro-Bitcoin increases. If the reverse happens, the price of bitcoins plummets and the value of Euro-Bitcoin decreases. This is the inflation which the GP was talking about, the purchasing power of the bitcoin, with respect to buying real goods, can decrease or increase significantly according to bitcoin demand.

Right now, should any one major holder of bitcoins get rid of a significant portion of their bitcoins for the euro, it is conceivable that would saturate the market for bitcoins and decrease demand. This could cause the price of bitcoins to drop fantastically, since there are only so many people trying to buy, say, several hundred thousand euros worth of bitcoins. Bear in mind that since most bitcoins are being held, rather than being used, in general the pool of bitcoins available for exchange is much smaller, so the whole bitcoin economy must fit inside a fraction of the total Euro-Bitcoin value of bitcoins in existence. Should any significant fraction of that value be suddenly put up for exchange, that will tank the price. That may or may not happen, but if it does, it will mean inflation, lots of inflation.

I think it is also reasonable for the price of bitcoin to drop gradually, which also creates significant inflation (by definition), but that won't kill bitcoin, only decrease the value of everyone's bitcoin.

Personally, I don't like the "rich get richer" nature of (monetary) deflationary currencies, but bitcoin can suffer from inflation under the wrong circumstances.

The laws that the RIAA folks got passed would say otherwise, with very stiff penalties.