Here's some more handy links about this research:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_...
Unfortunately, Latin was not one of the languages they investigated in this research, but I do find it very interesting how Latin, which is one of Spanish's parent languages, is far, far more efficient (in dI/dS terms) than Spanish is, and in fact is probably more efficient and complex than any of its derivatives.
Silk Road did a spinoff where guns were being sold as the primary goods (the Armory) and they closed it because it wasn't profitable enough.
You're probably unaware that the GP specifically used 'HSBC' because they were caught laundering trillions of dollars of drug money and nobody was indicted.
He probably isn't unaware of that. He may well have actually read the indictment itself or a detailed summary of it, which made clear that the US case was very weak to the point of hardly working at all. In particular, not only did they fail to clearly establish that drug money was really moving (their case was "there is so much cash, some of it must be from cartels") but in particular they failed to show intent by HSBC execs to help drug cartels. Actually their case boiled down to HSBC didn't try hard enough, they weren't suspicious enough, etc. (I'm ignoring the Iranian transactions here which gets into issues of international jurisdiction, as you only brought up drugs).
The reason you think the are guilty is twofold. Firstly US anti money laundering laws are unbelievably extreme. The PATRIOT Act removed the need to have intent to be found guilty of money laundering. Bankers can now be found guilty of AML violations even if they genuinely tried hard and had no intent to break the law. Hence the accusations from the DoJ that were of the form "HSBC should have designated Mexico as high risk", etc. Secondly as part of the plea agreement HSBC had to act guilty and accept whatever the DoJ said about them. So you only heard one side of the story, the prosecutions side (except there was no court case). No surprises that you think the whole thing is cut and dried.
It's no crime to be ignorant of such things, but just try not to hold any policy positions on the subject.
Given that there was never any court case and HSBC was never able to defend themselves, pretty much everyone is ignorant in this case because we never heard the full story. But I'm pretty sure if DoJ had emails from HSBC execs that looked like the ones from BitInstant there would indeed have been prosecutions.
Everything I've ever seen in both English and Spanish looked about 1.5-2 times longer in the Spanish version.
Don't take my word for it; some linguistic researchers actually looked into this, which you can read about here.
Here's an excerpt:
For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of
but I'm guessing a lot of it is from open source fanboys that love to hate Microsoft and have never taken time to use the recent (last 3-5 years) iterations of it's products.
All you have to do is try out Windows 8/Metro to renew any hatred for MS products that may have subsided.
You probably can't find a better place to have a farm.
Sure, if you don't mind mosquitos the size of horses.
Vic Mignogna actually has very intentionally made his Kirk rendition as close to Shatner's as he could, down to the way Kirk walks.
Enterprise was actually surprisingly good, with a few exceptions; I only watched it a few months ago, since I had turned my nose up at it when it was new. It did start out a big rough and had a little too much gratuitous sexuality at first, but when it settled down it was pretty good. The main problems with Enterprise are: 1) the opening theme music. It's absolutely horrible. I don't know WTF they were thinking with that whiny emo crap. But there's an exception here: the two mirror-universe episodes in Season 4 had excellent music and intro scenes of humans blasting everything and conquering. And 2) the whole Xindi attack plot arc in Season 3 was too much. It was an obvious parallel to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and just didn't go over that well.
I also didn't bother with the second Abrams movie; the first one was too much of a disappointment.
"It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive" is an odd phrase indeed. Is this the first time it has ever been used?
The Soviet Union couldn't have gotten on the internet, there would have been too much free information floating around. To heck with the internet - the Soviets couldn't even sell Xerox machines to the general public, they would have been used by the people for anti-Communist activities. But don't trust me, listen to one of the Soviet leaders (and, by extension, one of the smartest people in their entire empire).
In a remarkable tete-a-tete with a US journalist and former arms control official, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, interpreted the real meaning of SDI:
"We cannot equal the quality of U.S. arms for a generation or two. Modern military power is based on technology, and technology is based on computers. In the US, small children play with computers... Here, we don't even have computers in every office of the Defense Ministry. And for reasons you know well, we cannot make computers widely available in our society. We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution."
What were those reasons that everyone knew well? Ever heard of samizdat? No, eh?
He have jaywalking laws in the US because car drivers are considered more important than pedestrians.
It's a simple matter of terciles and life expectancies. Average life expectancy in the post-industrial world is about 80 years. Dividing that into three equal categories, you get (roughly) 0-26 = young age, 27-53 = middle age, 54-80 = old age. Of course with increases in life expectancy (and to make the math easier), you could use 30-59 as the middle group, and save a bunch of late-20s people the anxiety of already being "middle-aged", but it's still a bit silly how that term has become (in some people's minds) a euphemism for "old".
(And for the record, I'm 49: very accustomed to being "middle-aged".)
Now, on to the fight: America is explicitly NOT a democracy.
Yes, it is. You even say so yourself:
America is a democratic Republic.
"Democracy" in modern parlance == "democratic republic". When the word "democracy" is used in regular conversation, NO ONE is talking about Athenian-style direct democracy, unless they explicitly say so. It's only pedants like you who even think of this.
It was formed that way EXPLICITLY to prevent mob rule.
Democratic republics exist for several reasons. One is because no one citizen can possibly be competent at voting on every single issue that faces a large and populous nation, nor can every citizen be expected to invest that much time into the governing process. So we "outsource" most of the work of governing to politicians called "representatives", and elect them to represent us and do our bidding. The rules you talk about do exist to make sure there's a longer feedback loop, so people's short-term reactionary tendencies don't make a mess of things, and so that there's a rule of law: people have to follow laws, until the laws are changed.
The Constitution and Bill of rights spell out what America is supposed to be. If there is a true need for the Republic to change the rules it is built upon, then there are mechanisms in place to do that... but THEY HAVE NOT BEEN USED.
Yes, they have. The Constitution has been amended dozens of times since it was written, and countless Supreme Court cases have further changed laws. And if you have some kind of problem with a court effectively legislating and deciding law, then you have a problem with English Common Law, which this country was explicitly founded upon.
Why? We can argue about that forever. Regardless, the basic rules from which all other rules rest upon, have not been changed. That means a police state is incompatible with American law; both in the letter and spirit of the law.
Completely incorrect. If case law and legislation (at all levels of government) have resulted in a police state, then a police state is indeed compatible with American law, by very definition.
It's sad how poorly educated in basic Civics most Americans are these days.
Don't be stupid. Anyone who's an American Citizen is by definition an American, whether you like it or not, and whether you agree with them (and their idiotic ideas) or not. They certainly are "welcome" in America, they're Citizens and they were born here. Whether something is against the "spirit" of the founding laws is open to debate, and quite frankly, totally irrelevant since, as a representative democracy, this country (and any other with the same form of government) is supposed to reflect the will of the citizenry. If the citizens are a bunch of fools who vote for police-state laws, then that's what they're supposed to have. You're obviously the one here who opposes democracy and wishes to have an authoritarian government, because any government which does not reflect the will of the voters can only be authoritarian.
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger