But weren't the real investments actually taxpayer dollars many years ago when the basic infrastructure of the internet was built? I don't know about in the US, but in Canada, that's what happened. Public pays for building infrastructure, private companies get it handed to them on a silver platter. Companies make huge profits, don't re-invest a dime into maintaining or improving it. Quality diminishes over time, companies get more and more nefarious as their monopoly power increases. The question I have is, why should ISPs free-ride over taxpayer funded investments?

Yeah, I think he's gotten both parts of "live long and prosper" done by now.

Damn, that has to be the best post I've seen yet for being on topic, while eloquently saying "fuck beta". Well done AC!

Thanks for that. I guess I have some more reading to do. This whole story just gets crazier every time I hear a new piece of it.

Pardon my ignorance, as I'm not American, but I'm confused about this. I thought that the two parts of the contention that you quoted were the "true" parts. Ie. that the website cost taxpayers millions, and that it was a no-bid contract. The part I thought was debunked was that there was any connection between Michelle Obama and this former classmate. Yet, you were modded insightful for calling the OP a fuckwit based on his first two premises...multiple times. What did I miss...?

So, if this contrast agent attaches to cancer cells more than normal ones, could it be used to deliver targeted death to the cancer cells?

Funny, I was going to mention this. I remember in the early 80s, holding the phone up to the speakers and sharing the latest drum pattern I'd programmed into the TR-808, or whatever. No chance in hell you could do that now. Now, I get on conference calls to do system change deployments in the middle of the night, and the guy with his radio or TV on in the background just ends up flooding the whole call with this horrible undercurrent of digital burbling. If it weren't for the insane level of compression, that would just be a bit of background music, and wouldn't matter. Compression on phones these days has made it so that I can no longer understand ANYONE speaking English as a second language to me. I never used to have that problem, and I don't have it IRL either.

Looks like "RTFT - Read The F*cking Title" needs to become the new baseline around here.

"I thought it sounded crazy until he told me the list of famous billionaires who have invested in the company." "Then I realized it was actually a money laundering scheme."

I wish I had mod points to mod you up. I love my Q10. I'm an annoyance to my peers. Every time they launch into a rant about some issue they're having with their iPhone, I listen respectfully for however long it takes them to fizzle out, and then I just pull out the Q10, and while starting to check my messages, I just casually say "I think you already know what my solution to that issue is". I gave up trying to sell people on it a long time ago, and I also gave up trying to help people work around their iPhone problems years ago. I use my phone for work and personal stuff, and I work *a lot*, and I commute several hours a day. So I need something that always just works unobtrusively. I dunno what I'm going to do once BlackBerry is gone, and nobody makes a decent phone with a physical keyboard, decent security, decent battery life (with a self replaceable battery), decent stability, non-proprietary connectors, non-proprietary hot-swappable storage media support, decent corporate VPN integration support, seamless Exchange server integration...etc.

The summary says "had increased from 40 million to 70 million", but the title of this post says 110 million. I note that 40 + 70 = 110, so I think somebody parsed it wrong.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds, written in 1841 by Charles Mackay. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds ) Classify this one under "Those Who Fail to Learn from History Are Doomed to Repeat It".

Summary is spot on: Obviously, patents exist "so that companies can concentrate on true development which benefits all their users". An individual with a patent? Yeah, right...

You should offer to edit it for him then, because this article is otherwise excellent. I admit I've only read about 30% of it so far, but I'll be reading the rest soon.

I have to admit, seeing their setup, the first thing I thought they would do is make somebody jump, and take the shot while they're at the apex of the jump.