IIRC, the rape setup was a squeeze play perpetrated by the maid and her accomplice. DSK was a habitue of sex clubs/prostitutes, making it seem not unlikely that his aristocratic privilege and sexual appetite would have led him to be vulnerable to that situation.

On top that, the idea of replacing the dollar with another currency was hardly some new idea, it's an idea that has floated around for a long time. It doesn't seem plausible that a conspiracy against one man would be enough to suppress this idea if it was actually a viable alternative. Euro market weakness and the risks of default in some Euro countries mostly rules out the Euro, the lack of Chinese transparency and currency manipulation rules out the Renminbi. Beyond those two alternatives, there aren't any global currencies with enough depth and market adoption able to replace the dollar.

Further, if dropping the dollar was a profitable idea, why wouldn't global markets just do it? I'm sure many countries would LOVE to stick it to Uncle Sam and our banks, but it seems like they like profitability even more.

Do you know anything about running a business? In a service industry, people costs are often a huge portion of a company's overall costs. Minor changes in that structure can have major impact on the bottom line.

Even in traditional manufacturing jobs, where a large percent of the costs are tied up in capital and materials, a modest change in employee costs filters through. Just ask GM and Chrysler.

I'd like to be able to set that as a toggle in my search results for apps.

Um, if it makes Apple "evil" to protect their IP from being directly ripped off by well-heeled competitors (cough, Samsung, cough), then I think you need to adjust your definition of "evil".

I mean, if you were the CEO of Apple, what would you have done in that instance? I mean, look at the Techcrunch article with the "Before iPhone" and "After iPhone" Samsung pictures. Tell me you wouldn't have been incensed, probably moved to litigation.

This one trick with rare earths will save you money (but don't tell the Chinese!)

The way he described it, basically never. They play a key role in so many things that you basically kiss metals and oxides goodbye without them.

Wow, I feel misinformed despite my NY Times subscription. You mean to tell me there's a war going on in 90+% white Scandinavia and I didn't know about it? Given how oppressive their governments are known to be and the complete absence of social welfare there, such barbarism I guess should be expected.

I'm especially glad to know that multiethnic regions like Africa and the Middle East are so peaceful and nonviolent, that must have been another article I missed out on.

Reminds me of a Book that has been around since the late 1970s (and still available on Amazon, I believe) :

"Why S.O.B.s Succeed And Nice Guys Fail In a Small Business"

No truer words were ever penned.

In fact, when writing physical checks to pay bills was the norm, and based on some ideas from that book, I would regularly fill-in pieces of the MICR OCR field-delimiters at the bottoms of my personal checks to delay their processing by the Federal Reserve Clearinghouse, I know it worked, because I would receive those checks back "re-striped" with new (no doubt manually-generated) OCR strips stuck on the bottoms of the check. It was usually good for a 3 to 5 business-day delay "float", while (I assume) the check got kicked-out of the automatic scanner, and routed to the "manual processing" pile. And, since my account wasn't debited until the check "cleared" this process, I avoided a non-sufficient-funds "bounce" fee, and the payor thought that I had paid "on time" (which I technically had).

I kept waiting to get a nasty letter from my bank or the Fed saying "quit it, or you're going to jail!", but I never did.

it's all, once again, a lot of buzzwords, and zero security.

That's a bit unfair. Yes, any security system that tries to be entirely transparent cannot really be end to end secure, but nobody has ever built a mainstream, successful deployment of end to end encryption that lets you use a service even if you don't trust it. There are many difficult problems to solve here. Forward secure end to end encryption behind the scenes is clearly an important stepping stone, and OWS has said they will expose things like key verification in future updates. Just because they haven't done everything all at once, and solved every hard problem, does not mean it's just a lot of buzzwords.

Can someone explain to me how a city getting whiter is necessarily worse for the city?

Is there a specific race that is missing? If you made it 30% Chinese, 30% White and 30% Indian is that good enough, or do you need some minimal proportion of every race?

And is it really "race" we need -- ie, if we bulk up on suburbanized, native-born nonwhites (like Mindy Kaling or Aziz Ansari as an example) does that really count, or is what we're looking for some kind of non-white cultural influence, so non-whites who act white don't count?

Please, someone tell me what the ideal racial combination is.

Solar only feels like half a solution without cheap, high capacity heavy-cycle batteries capable of running everything for several days with zero power input and providing boost power for when solar output lags.

I'm thinking like 120kWh for under $10k.

If there's some way to store enough potential solar energy you can generate then even something like 15w/sq ft ought to be adequate.

What it means is that Google has a tendency to assume the set of intelligent people in the world (outside academia perhaps) is a subset of the set of Google employees.

You oughta temper your glee; we go down, we're taking the whole ball of mud with us.

I am sure somewhere there is a Federal Law Enforcement agency that already has plans to buy about two dozen of these things and establish a jet pack SWAT team.

If its even halfway successful, expect every agency with a SWAT team to have one.

lolwut?

Too bad for your theory that Apple remains the top performer and the tops in quality and customer satisfaction.