I point out it's the other way around.

The other claim is backed up by every news article on the subject that you care to google.

Crazy pills?

You have an agenda here, and it is not to have an interesting discussion or provide useful information, therefore I'm wasting my time. Good bye.

Which is why Lehman Brothers is still a successful private bank, yes?

Let's not build roads, because the Nazis did it, too. What a solid argument.

Sources?

My (german) magazines tell that they invested exactly because they were looking for profits. The mix of unexperienced bureaucrats looking for profits and too-good-to-be-true investment opportunities made the mess.

Nobody wants to give politicians control over banking. Some of us want regulations, which means courts can force banks to not play russian roulette with the economy.

Yeah, I mean, take a look at NASA, it always had such a proud and distinguished record...

Oh, wait...

Seriously though: whether in Russia or in the USA, such an important agency, in charge of a large budget, is bound to generate fraud and shady dealings. At least, the Russian government is doing something about it.

How misleading.

The "credit" from KfW was the german part of the bailout money. They didn't speculate in Greece, they were simple the vehicle through which the german government sent its share. Also, KfW is not a bank in the normal sense of the word. For example, you can't go there and open an account. It's a specialized government investment institute that is primarily used as a low-interest credit bank for government subsidized investment. For example, because the government wants to support renewable energy, you can get very cheap credits from KfW if you want to build solar panels on your roof.

I usually exit these discussions when people begin to argue ad hominem. You have no idea what I like, because we haven't talked about it. Also, you're wrong.

As far as the partially government-owned banks are concerned, they're not owned by the German government, but by regional governments. The national government is too much in bed with the major banks (Deutsche Bank, etc.) to run their own.

Actually not. Some of them are partially government-owned. That's a difference. It is now that all the debt is transferred to state-owned banks.

Which is basically what happened.

"Please buy me! Won't someone please buy me?" How FUBAR is TWC that they're so ready to sell to someone, anyone? Either a) they had this in the pipeline before the Comcast deal fell through, in which case how many other deals are on standby?, or b) they brokered a major corporate sell deal entirely within the last month, presumably under immense pressure.

In my opinion, TWC is desperate to sell because there's an internal house of cards that's about to fall over. Someone needs to unload it quickly so that a pending spectacular failure will be on someone else's watch.

Plus a lot more to operate the data centers needed to store and sync all that data around. For Mozilla to build that they'd have to find some way to pay for it. Given that people are generally not willing to pay monthly fees for that sort of service, advertising is the obvious option. But to make the advertising effective, it needs to be targeted, so...

How would this be attractive to OEMs? Google already offers an extremely well-developed open ecosystem. Amazon wanted to have their own walled garden, but you're assuming there are OEMs that don't want to do that, but want to have a different ecosystem, and want it enough to be willing to accept smaller sales numbers. What would make them want to do that?

It's HIPAA, not HIPPA.

Normally, the implication of that question is that there are a bunch of blindingly obvious problems which are being blithely overlooked.

So, what are they?

I think unrealistic portrayals of sex create bigger problems than those other examples you cite -- though they are problems. The reason I think that is that the other unrealistic portrayals don't affect core human relationships to the same degree. I hope I'm wrong, actually. We'll know in a generation or so.

One more point: I find your choice of example to be odd, because the US charges against Hamsa have nothing to do with speech; they're about kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder. The UK's charges against Hamsa are largely speech-related.

Manning or Snowden would have been better examples.

Oh, I'm not claiming there are no problems. Clearly the US does have some big issues at present with some particular forms of restriction of free speech. I'm fairly confident that will get sorted out over the course of the next couple of decades, though. The pendulum is swinging that direction. Not that perfection will ever be achieved, but there really is a strong bias towards protecting freedom of expression.