Says the guy on /.

I suspect most of the good journalists have already left the country, and those that remain are kept in line by any combination of receiving their pay-cheque directly from the Kremlin, selective enforcement of anti-defamation laws, and straight up physical intimidation and assault. There is basically no media freedom in Russia. If I was a journalist in Russia and I had to report on something clearly dodgy, I would probably report something so obviously absurd that most people would take the hint. "Hey look over there, the Ukraine military sent a plane full of dead people and plowed it into the ground just to make Russia look bad". See ;-)

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Article 12: Right to Privacy...

It's one of our fundamental human rights, right up there with other inconvenient courtesies such as right to life, freedom from slavery, freedom from arbitrary detention, freedom from torture, right to asylum, and freedom of thought and religion. Everyone should know their rights. If you don't know your rights, you won't know what you risk losing.

The United States voted in favor of the declaration at the time. How times have changed...

Just from a technical and financial point of view, I wouldn't recommend Oracle either. Oracle Advanced Analytics just seems to be a very expensive way to get R.

Financially - R is open source and free (as in both free as a bird, and free beer), so you don't need to buy it from Oracle. No doubt Oracle will make you buy their DBMS as well to work with Advanced Analytics, and a big server to run it on, plus support to get it up and running.

Technically - Oracle make a good DMBS for sure, but you don't need all the advanced features their DBMS is good at, such record level locking, three phase commit, redo logs, conflict resolution etc. You need that sort of stuff to maintain data integrity on transaction processing systems, but not for analysis. For analysis you just need a giant de-normalised table, and maybe indexes if you want to pick out specific subsets of records without full table scans.

Personally I use SAS. It's not sexy, but I have never found a dataset too large to handle. It will thrash the harddrive all night if it has to to get a result, but it won't crash. SPSS will definitely crap itself with even moderate datasets. Stata does OK, but even that can't handle the larger datasets. I haven't pushed R hard enough to find it's limit.

Salary secrecy is no better trade secrecy.

I work for a company where pay scales are listed publicly on the website. You can pretty much guess every employees salary based on their job title and number of years at that level. There is no bickering or backstabbing. There is however transparency and accountability. Managers know they cant hide their bad decisions, so they are much more careful in the first place. If they get it wrong, they know anyone can ask awkward questions, such as "why does the dipshit down the hall gets 30% more than me?", or "why do women earn an average of 22% less than men, for the same job titles and years of service?".

Who really benefits from salary secrecy? When an employee tries to negotiate a pay raise, but he has no knowledge of what his colleagues earn, and his manager knows exactly what his colleagues earn, then the manager can use this information asymmetry to his advantage to give a smaller raise while giving the impression it's a good deal. Advantage to the company. If the other employees don't know that someone got a pay rise then they are less likely to ask for one themselves. Another advantage to the company. If someone fucks up and pays women significantly less than men, then women won't file collective lawsuit for discrimination if they don't know about the discrepancy. Again, advantage to the company. The company wins every time.

At least with international trade negotiations both parties send their best negotiators and lay their cards on the table at the same time, so there should be less information asymmetry to take advantage of (NSA spying on your leader aside of course).

I don't know man. Its gotta take courage from somewhere to vote for most filth riddled cretins in politics. I couldn't.

Boosh Junior, is that you?

His holiness the great Flying Spaghetti Monster would approve :-)

I suspect it's just the cheapest way to avoid fines for allowing money laundering.

HSBC got pinged $1.9 billion a while back for allowing illegal money laundering. Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo, too big to fail) paid a much smaller fine for handling millions of Mexican drug cartel money. The US has imposed strict anti money laundering laws on the worlds financial institutions, and has proven it's willing to enforce them.

If banks pay a thinly veiled kickback to former NSA top brass for "security" then it becomes a lot easier to defend themselves against money laundering lawsuits. Next time a bank is investigated, at the very least they can say they paid $1 million a month to people in the best possible position to detect money laundering, and they didn't even detect it, so how is it the banks fault. The alternative is to actually try to comply with the laws, and still risk being fined for any oversights. I'm sure the banks crunched the numbers and found paying these guys is cheaper. Think of it as $12 million a year lawsuit insurance.

Our Computer Science department does that here. Very Long password, numbers, lower-case, upper-case, symbols, dissimilar to previous passwords... I end up writing long sentences on a piece of paper, even just to remember it long enough to enter it a second time. If it's not random enough then the system rejects it and I write another sentence and try again.

Sure enough, next time I try to login I enter the wrong sentence, get the character case wrong and max out my failed attempts, or simply don't have the paper with me. Then I go to the helpdesk and they give me a shiny new (SHORT!) password, on a sticky note. Every single time! Something is seriously broken when the quickest and simplest way to log into my student account is to ask for a password reset each time.

... & blow your family to smithereens!

http://i.imgur.com/0BSZXxl.jpg

Look around you. The entire economy is a giant money merry-go-round. Someone buys your product or service, you use that money to pay your suppliers, and you pay yourself what's left. You then go home and spend that money on food, gas, clothing, etc. Other businesses. They then take your money and pay their suppliers and pay themselves and their staff what money is left. And so it goes, around and around, in a giant money merry-go-round. And the faster that money goes around, the more chances you get to take a cut as it goes past. You may even end up spending some of the money you earned at a business that spent their money at your business, or vice versa.

Oh nooos, da gub'mint took mah moneyz!

Relax. The government will spend your money paying its suppliers, staff, and dog forbid some people less fortunate than ourselves, some of whom may even buy your product of service, and your money will just take a slightly different route around the same giant merry-go-round. Money doesn't magically disappear when you give it to poor people. They are so desperate they will spend that money almost immediately. And so that money keeps on moving.

Now, if you do the opposite, and enough businesses lay people off or outsource jobs to other countries, then more and more people will simply stop spending money. You can't spend what you don't have for very long. And if people are not spending, then businesses are not earning. The giant money merry-go-round stalls. Who will buy your product or service? Not people without jobs. The super rich already have 600 meter yachts and 787s, so good luck trying to sell whatever you have to them, especially while every other business is trying to do the same. Other businesses? Doubt it, they are trying to sell to you. And the people who still have jobs? They are struggling to supporting most of their family who got laid off by a ruthlessly efficient capitalist economy.

Wait and see what Japan does over the next few decades. They have a high proportion of baby boomers heading into retirement, with longer life expectancy than ever before, and low fertility rates. There should be far more people leaving the workforce than entering right about now. My guess is the people who still work by 2025 work will have to pay more tax than they do now to cover social welfare for those that don't, and the people without work will have to learn to live on less (smaller apartments, fewer gadgets, public transport, etc...) so as to be a smaller burden on those that still work. Less consumption all around. Probably need an entirely new economic model to keep a country running like that.

The other 80% is explained by eating your vegetables. Thanks mom.