Larry Page's demonstrated acumen and record of success in his business endeavors do not necessarily equate to divinely-inspired wisdom on all things ethical and economic.

Based on his remarks in TFA, I can only wonder if his quaintly naive understanding of the insurance industry is born of true ignorance or is he just pretending to toe the public-perception mark so not to offend the bigger fish in the pond.

Insurance companies are owned by the same incestuous, anonymous equity holding consortiums that own the big banks, mass media, and energy companies. Nobody rocks the boat for long till he gets chucked overboard and drowned.

The same privacy and fairness issues that apply to medicine apply to employment, social reputation, and access to credit.

Sure, he made a lot of money compared to us plebeians, but on the grand scale he's a just a lucky amateur.

Hasn't Professor Irwin Corey already claimed the title of World's Foremost Authority?

The CIA and MI5 on one side, with the "no such thing as a former Chekist" FSB on the other, makes for more hijinks than anything Hal Roach could have produced with Laurel and Hardy or The Little Rascals.

At least the Russians have some foxy spies, even if they perform like ZaSu Pitts in a custard pie fight.

And these people are professionals? It is to laugh.

No wonder the CIA leans on the Mossad for a great deal of information.

I'm sure they are perfectly aware that their claims are groundless and probably illegal. They're also aware that their lifespan is shrinking rapidly.

I think what they're doing is seeing how many poor schmucks they can scare into settling for a few quick bucks before the whole scheme implodes.

Clearly, SCO's "Linux Licensing" was a model modus operandi for trolls everywhere.

Google analysts are no doubt watching the FB decline and making comparissons to Yahoo, MySpace, et al.

We'll soon have an answer to the question, "How many nails does it take to seal a social network coffin?"

That still leaves open the question of what sort of nails. How many nails are bollocksed user interface features, like this one, and how many are an overabundance of marketing crappola?

Aye, there's the rub.

Might this not be an opportune time for the US to stop living up to its image overseas as a big, blundering, international bully and just let the locals fend for themselves?

With a millions of Islamic loonies on their doorstep, and their own disasters in Afghanistan and Chechnya to remind them, one would think that the Russians would have better sense than to keep exacerbating and encouraging Middle-Eastern instability.

No, I suppose both powers' energy and defense industries are more important than anybody else's self-determination.

Economic and political pragmatism trumps idealism every time.

The problem isn't government. The problem is the passive, benighted electorate that tolerates it. We, as a population, get the government we deserve.

Being a VM, the machine both exists and doesn't exist.

Entanglement theory proven!

Beat that!

I'd wait until a real linguist, rather than an archaeologist, makes this hypothesis. I wonder what Noam Chomsky would make of this theory.

Three letters, my friend: AT&T.

The backbone your moderate-size telco routes traffic over is all the access anyone needs to to monitor and record as they wish.

The fact that most people are so naive about government surveillance isn't what hurts. It's that people who know are so passive about accepting it.

We are not far from that defining moment when the last facade of private communication is dropped and we welcome our Big Data / Big Brother overlords into the sunlight with open arms.

In a manufacturing business, engineering will often have direct expenses like one-off charges for trial materials, and esoteric accounting items like built-in down time costs, amortized efficiency, etc. that can be considerable but never approach the necessary travel, printing, and ad-buy costs the marketing weasels must budget for.

OTOH, engineering gets next to nothing in indirect expenses like printer cartridges or the occasional professional class/seminar, but marketers are usually treated like golden children of the gods, and they get opulent offices, extravagant "team-building" and "sales-force development" group vacations, and the latest and greatest of everything.

Is thinly-veiled jealousy or bitterness on the part of engineers justified by this? In a capitalist economy, no. It's just the way it works.

The payback for me, personally, is the satisfaction of retaining a shard of self-respect and integrity. I will never be lumped together with salesmen, lawyers, politicians, clerics, and the other professional sociopaths.

No and yes.

Just try doing periodic security tasks. Siemens security is still a bloated, badly implemented kluge-fest. Hell, on big systems you're down for days just migrating to a new IP address range. Don't even get me started on S7 subnet ID's. Know-how Protect has bricked more 300's than all the maintenance doofusses in history.

Honeywell Distributed, Delta V, and Rockwell are all miles ahead of Siemens on this.

Yes, I am an evil manufacturing systems integrator. I have put hundreds of honest, hard-working, but low-paid and low-skilled people out of a job in my career.

However, I've also created dozens of jobs for highly-skilled and well-paid operators and maintenance personnel.

Go ahead and hate me, but the companies I work for are still in business and still employ people. Without automation, they'd have been long gone.

Any serious effort to bring more manufacturing back on-shore has to include maximing the operational efficiency of the factory.

you can be absolutely certain that it will

1. Benefit comapaign-contributor busnesses.
2. Cost consumers money.
3. Result in uneven, draconian enforcement.
4. Require a bigger burocracy to implement (3).
.

China's economic and political power structure is merely the reverse-polarity flow of the USA's, all of it biased by the Big Global Capital Dynamo. In China, government controls and enables companies; in the US, companies control and enable the government.

Oh, that crap about Constitutions, Manifestos, and other political ideology? C'mon, mate. That's SO mid-20th Century. It's window dressing for the masses, nothing more.

There is no "competition" with China, because there is no competition. Just international profiteering.

Insert obligatory "In Soviet Russia..." remark here:___________________