Use the dictionary of your choice and check the words "continent" and "country".

Actually according to Doug Adams definitive history:

On a planet called Golgafrincham there was an an nouncement that the planet would soon be destroyed in a great catastrophe They planned an evacuation using a group of arcs:.

The passengers of the “A” ark were to be all the brilliant leaders, scientists, great musicians, data analysts, engineers and architects. The passengers of the “B” ark were to be all the “middle men” , marketing executives, telephone sanitizers , sales assistants and telemarketers etc. The passengers of the “C” ark were to be the real workers, construction, manufacturing and other craftsman.

As I remember it, everyone fought for a place on the B Arc which blasted off into space programmed to land on the third planet of an obscure star at the edge of the galaxy. Shortly after its departure, they discovered it was all a mistake and the planet was not going to be destroyed.

Golgafrincham entered into a period of exceptional peace and prosperity.

The planet that was the destination of the B Arc had a different kind of history.

Back in the bad old days, IBM had a solution for down time in mission critical systems - such as for United Airlines. It was called redundancy - a complete dual system. Or as we described it: when one of the two parallel systems detected an error, it automatically sent a signal to the second system so that it could go down too.

It's relative. Microsoft is still as evil as ever, but they have been outclassed in the evil department by everyone else - with Apple leading the way and Oracle and Google struggling to catch up.

Until the drone blows hs server farm away, Kim Dotcom's Mega might actually be secure. At least that's the plan. And it will all be good until we find that Kim Dotcom is a CIA agent. (There is no such thing as being too paranoid.)

Actually, a detective who had been investigating the OJ case for 30 or so years came to the conclusion that the probable killer was OJ's oldest son Jason - his son from his first marriage. I think the tile of the book was something like "OJ was innocent and I can prove it".

Allegedly, Jason had been treated for mental illness involving violence at least twice. At the time of the murders he was on probation for attacking his former boss with a knife, out of the set of chef's knives he always carried with him. He was also a friend of Nichole and spent a fair amount of time in her company - On the evening of the murders, she was supposed to be a guest at the restaurant where he was a chef.

The book documented all of his theories in detail (about 600 pages worth) and appeared pretty convincing.

The interesting part is that no one tried to rebut the contents of the book. The people you would expect to care simply ignored the book completely.

It's kind of like the original trial where the defense claimed that the LAPD was bigoted and framed people for crimes they were not guilty of. Then we had the Rampart scandal where a member of the LAPD testified that they were bigoted and framed people and planted evidence to convict the not guilty.

And most of America decided screw the evidence, he's guilty.

In Las Vegas, Circle Park was shut down because some people were feeding the homeless.

(The park had become a place for homeless people to congregate, and there were other problems caused by some of the homeless in the neighborhoods surrounding the park.)

The courts said it was illegal to prevent feeding the homeless so they shut the park down completely.

There was a time when parts of the federal government actually did an honest job - most of the time. Drug regulators actually blocked marketing of drugs that were dangerous to your health. The SEC kept crooks from selling dishonest investments. The Bureau of Land Management kept people from buying horses and selling them to slaughterhouses.

Some time in the last thirty or so years, large parts of government (and private enterprise) became thoroughly corrupt.

The patent office is just one more example where a bought-and-paid-for-congress (along with the patent office bureaucracy) modified the rules so they no longer protect the public interest - they protect Corporate America.

  If you have a valid patent, you can't afford to defend it. If some corporation has a completely bogus patent, you can't afford to challenge it.

Read up on the Enclosure acts of the early 18th Century. At this time the aristocracy essentially invented our modern form of private property. Intellectual property is a modern day way of inventing something new - Intellectual property rights that didn't really exist until someone bought the right politicians. Much of it is a form of governmental theft covered up by a concept (patents) that was once honest and a benefit to everyone.

Another brilliant thinker who can't tell cause from effect. The patent system is not broken because of this patent. This patent was approved by the patent office BECAUSE the system is broken.

The article doesn't tell us what to think or how to think. It's just a wake-up for those who are already capable of thinking.

This is actually a fairly important discovery. The poster of the article seems to be completely clueless as to why it is important.

Without going into all of the details, being able to predict the shape of proteins is one of the things needed to make nanotechnology fulfill its potential - to build a nanotech "assembler".

If you want all the details you would have to go back to "Engines of Creation" by Eric Drexler.

Proteins of the right shape can be used to create complex structures - anything from a virus to a nano-computer. Construct some RNA, feed it into a cell and get back as many copies of the protein chain as you please.

Do this for several different proteins.

Leave all of these proteins in the same chemical soup and they will combine on their own to form the more complex structuresl

But if you can't predict the shape the protein folds into, you can't get started. This has been a key problem in nano-tech going back to the 1970s.

Of course, almost none of the liars' loans made by the brokers and banks fulfilled the requirements of CRA, but it makes a good story for those who want to excuse the thieves and blame it on the government.

I know one former investor who lost $3M dollars (75% of his net worth) because of what the banks did to him - and he wanted to blame it on Obama (who wasn't even in office when most of the theft occurred). I wouldn't care that much if you need your deluded beliefs, but your delusions keep the crooks out of jail and that is a shame.

Way back in the early days of the Mac, Apple should have been able to rule the world. Unfortunately Apple was run by and anal-retentive asshole who actually tried to rule the world. The Developers and hardware manufacturers who could have participated in Apple's success figured out really quickly that Apple didn't want anyone to share in their success.

So the developers and hardware companies made Microsoft and PC's a success. Apple would have lost out completely, but they actually built a decent graphics display and a few software developers were able to build some very desirable products that couldn't be run on a PC clone.

MS could have run Apple out of the marketplace at any time, but they didn't have to because Apple had already cut their own throats. And the bean-counters were unable to make Apple competitive company again.

When Jobs was invited back (out of sheer desperation on the bean-counters part) he invented the iToys and revitalized a dying company, but in 20 or so years he had never learned a thing and was still an anal-retentive asshole.

Android has already captured 50% of the smartphone market and once it becomes possible for developers to make a buck (without all the walled garden BS) Apple is once again destined for a 5-10% market share - unless the marketing guys for Android think they can make a buck with their own walled garden.

Unless they finally learn something, that high-flying Apples stock might turn into an excellent opportunity for short-sale speculators Rim used to make more money than god. It didn't take much to turn that around...

It's almost certain that a technical school associates degree will be worthless as far as employment goes. If it does (by some kind of magic) help you get an IT job, it will most likely be a job that will bore you spitless. In the long term it will be useless for promotion into senior jobs or into management.

If you've been out in the real world for ten years starting on a real education could be personally beneficial, but I wouldn't think of it as a way of getting IT employment (or any other kind of employment). Unless the game has changed again, when you hit age 30 or so they want to replace you with someone younger who will be willing to work 12 hour days for low money.

A full four-year diploma might be a little more helpful. If there is any way you can get into a four-year program at a state institution (with grants or scholarships rather than loans), I would recommend a math major with CS as a minor. That probably won't get you a job directly, but it will be a lot more satisfying.

The person who recommended law was trying to be helpful, but there is currently a crisis among law school graduates who have passed the bar but can't find a job. Getting a diploma in most professional fields is likely to be similar.

Even careers like health care may not be outsource-able, but are likely to be dumbed down. Imagine nurses and physician's assistants with an iToy on their hip that tells them what to do next. Great job if that were what you wanted, but the paycheck may not be there.

If you are currently affording your outrageous tuition with loans, jump ship. If you are paying on your own, put the money in a bank or in your mattress and after a few years you might have enough to buy a place in a small business - if you have self-educated yourself in the meantime.

That's today's advice. It might be better in a year or two or it might be worse. In either case, a bucket full of money can't hurt.

"We" have been here before. Politics never seems to change. The following is a very loose description of a complex process over a few hundred years. It's hardly exact history, but it's reasonably true and close enough for government work.

Somewhere between 1750 and 1850 the Brits invented the Enclosure Acts as a way of throwing people off the "commons" (and off of their own property). It's not the only time when this occurred, but it was significant.

The dumbed-down version is that to keep the crappy little piece of land that had been in your family for a couple of centuries you had to build a fence or plant a hedge around it. Of course the cost of either of these was more than the value of the land.

A lot of people became dispossessed and their decedents wandered the roads of Great Brotain for two or three generations begging and starving. The smart guys sold out for the few pennies they could get and bought a boat ticket to the colonies.

When they arrived, many of them had one simple goal - to find a piece of ground, draw a circle around it, and make sure that no one ever gor to f%ck with them again.

The Native Americans never had a chance.

For those who need the still more dumbed-down version: The 16th and 17th Century British Aristocracy invented property and made sure that they got to keep most of it. Currently, Corporate America invented "Intellectual Property". In order to do this they corrupted the Patent Office and the Patent Court.

Prior to the Enclosure Acts, any peasant could raise a goat or a cow on the commons. It was part of their livelihood for a lot of years. Once they got thrown off their own land and the common land the got the "opportunity" of working for one of the pre-industrial revolution factories.

By the time of the American Revolution, British Manufacturing had become so sophisticated that no one in the colonies had a chance of setting up a competing factory. (Kind of like us and China btw).

And all this intellectual property crap does make a difference. When Lotus sued Borland, claiming that Borland's Quattro Pro spreadsheet emulated the "look and feel" of Lotus 1-2-3, it took ten years to get the judgment overthrown. During that period of time, one of the most creative companies in the US was unable to get financing. The couldn't even sell the company.

By the time they got out from under the judgment, the bean counters wound up in charge of Borland and Microsoft had moved on to the .Net platform. Borland's Delphi was a significantly better RAD development tool than Microsoft ever dreamed of, but by the time Borland was again able to compete, it was too late.
   

You can care all you please about the multi-resistant bugs those people are training, but it's mostly a waste of outrage. The bugs are being trained by corporate agriculture, and the residue from those antibiotics are being served up with every hamburger or pork chop you eat.

And at the same time, you are supporting a pharmaceutical industry that charges US consumers as much as the blockaded free market will bear.

In a corrupt system it's silly to pick sides - when there are no rules. there are no rules.