Which curiously is how BFG got its start, buy selling veideo cards in stores like Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA. The problem was how BFG got its start. It did so by sabotaging the original VisionTek that made nVidia graphics cards. They violated confidentiality agreements, stole trade secrets, saved plenty of files they should not have from VisionTek, used previous contacts illegitimately, managed to get Visiontek's old suppliers, including nVidia, to dump them, and got customers (like Best Buy) to dump them as well. It is disgusting behavior that no one did any jail time for and for which very little money was recovered from BFG, or anyone else in the end. It also appears "John Slevin" is mentioned in the press release in TFA, and is probably the same guy mentioned in the complaint in US Bankruptcy Court documents as being a part of the slime that made up BFG from day one. Interestingly, nVidia and Mitac (the board manufacturer) were sued and settled as well.

The amended complaint:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B--kPjOMTMyPNGQzYzdjYmUtYjI5ZC00NzJlLWE3N2MtZTM2MWQ5MjAwNWVl&hl=en

Article in Forbes that mentions Visiontek, but not BFG by name:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0901/048b.html

I suppose Advanced Equities will soon be able to add BFG in as a failure.

A Chapter 7 bankruptcy should not take this long, but it did here (includes payments):
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B--kPjOMTMyPNTg4NmVlZmMtMzRjYy00YzUwLWJhNDQtYzExMmZhNDczMjk3&hl=en

This interview from May 12 with Bob Bennett I find interesting:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126782931

While I don't agree with the guy very much on political issues, he does make some interesting points. This time around tea partiers flooded primaries with themselves. Worse, they didn't want to engage in rational discussion of the issues and were unwilling to consider compromise. They also seem to misunderstand what exactly one senator, or every Republican senator could do with respect to HCR. All you got was just a drumbeat about the "loving" the Constitution. This will get them nowhere in Congress.

Also, if TARP was unconstitutional, why has there been no case heard before the Supreme Court on it? If TARP had not been passed allowing the large banks to fail we would have probably followed a path similar to that of Herbert Hoover administration after the crash of 1929, a steep decline in the economy and a recovery only when the remaining banks were propped up. It would have been nice for the government to have been able to take the banks over, saving the depositors' money, but clearing out the investors. However, the final trashing of Glass-Stegall in 2002 made separating these two groups impossible.

FTC and FCC decisions have been overturned usually because of a perceived lack of legal authority and not due to constitutional reasons. Congress is still free to make these tools available to the FTC and FCC in the form of new legislation. Legislation that might seem more urgent if their current legal authority appears insufficient to allow then to complete their current roles.

There would need to be evidence of that, and I've not seen any mention of such from any credible article indexed on MedLine. You can find any articles like that here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

And even if there was an article or two on Medline that still wouldn't meet the Daubert standard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard

Even then, bovine growth hormone would need to have a significant effect at the concentrations found in dairy products. I haven't heard of anything like that yet, and with that in mind, please provide some evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._R._Grace_and_Company
On the other hand, W.R. Grace and Company did sell vermiculite insulation contaminated with tremolite asbestos, one of the really nasty forms of asbestos. The crysotile asbestos that is intentionally used in asbestos containing products is not nearly so bad. Neither form is that dangerous unless you are disturbing its fibers on a daily basis, like in an occupational setting.

The individuals suffering the most from the tremolite asbestos W.R. Grace and Company unintentionally mined, are those living near where it was mined originally near Libby, Montana and the factory workers and their family members where the vermiculite was processed into insulation.

In any case, how much the executives at W.R. Grace knew, when they knew it, what they did with the information, and how much one could have done is another question. The residents of Libby, Montana suffering from health problems related to asbestos are receiving compensation for medical care from W.R. Grace. To a certain degree it isn't perfect, but it is better behavior than Exxon's with respect to its actions to a certain oil spill in Alaska.

Yes, but corporations still can't act against the interests of the public. Try making dangerous products. In such cases, the corporation would be making money, their suppliers would be making money and 401(k) accounts would be making money, but it would be dwarfed by the long term costs from people would end up injured. Making money in the short term is not a justification for bad behavior in the least.

If Comcast thinks that its actions related to FCC v. Comcast and other unrelated behavior should have no bearing on its current attempt at acquiring NBC, I assure you that both the FCC and FTC will have something to say about that. Either agency can and potentially even object to or block the sale of NBC to Comcast.

Hell, my parents have had a using a system like this since 1997, and they can't even override it. Granted, they get a discount on their electric bill. However, I'm going to guess that increasing rates hasn't worked and too many roadbloacks, for instance: regulatory, judicial, economic, and otherwise make building a new generating facilities not worth it. It also probably doesn't make sense to do when you've got several million people who have enough money to not have to care about using the set back feature on their thermostat when they are at work. It may also help if these same residents maintained their air conditioner and ventilation more often than once a decade. While you could keep raising rates, it generally starts to hurt lower income individuals.

However, I suppose one could implement a progressive billing scheme for residential customers where for instance as random numbers, the charge for the first kWh was $0.10 and the charge for the 1000th kWh was $50, the costs listed are for each kWh and not the cost of all 1000 kWh. The a monthly bill for a customer using 100 kWh would ideally be much less than 1/10 of a bill from a home using 1000 kWh. Ideally, one would be trying to cause sticker shock for the owners of the extremely wasteful homes having a $5,000 electric bill, while to offering assistance for energy saying improvements to those with lower incomes. However, if a manager tries this they should plan on laying low for a few months. No one likes being shot by a crazy person who is mumbling about the Founding Fathers, I would imagine.

Oil will last much longer, much, much, longer than the alarmists claim. The oil estimates that the oil companies release as to their reserves is only that oil they are 90% sure that they can extract from their currently operational wells at current prices and still make a profit. The 90% estimates are far lower than a more reasonable figure, like 50%, but we don't know those figures, oil companies do not release them. Drilling wells in new locations can also yield additional oil that would not be reported in current estimates of reserves, but would show up in future estimates. If oil prices go up moderately the reported reserves will also increase, wells which are currently not economical to extract oil from become profitable to operate at higher oil prices and are put into operation. Estimates of the total reserves would increase as expected. Refurbishing now profitable mothballed wells or using a new extraction technique because the profits would outweigh the costs also increases reserve estimates. While oil is a finite resource, what would get us to stop using oil for a purpose would be the realization that the total cost of its use is more than its benefits. We would probably switch to other methods of energy storage and generation in the case of oil.

By modifying the above, the reasoning also holds for any resource. For instance, it applies to wheat(organic or otherwise), indium(in your LCD panel), or gold (in your basement/sock drawer or in electrical contacts).

On the other hand, what about electrostatic filters? Err, maybe not. I don't want to imagine redesign of the engine and where large banks batteries and or banks of supercapacitors would go.

Planes aren't encountering suspended volcanic ash very often, and any filter that worked probably would not be worth the added expense and lowered reliability. So grounding flights in northern Europe for the time being it is.

On the other hand, this volcanic ash is yet another fine export from Iceland to the rest of the world, right up there with Bjork and rock solid Icelandic banking.

I'm sure that joke has been made, and it is mean. I still felt like posting it.

The 727 IIRC is the only common western passenger airplane that had an optional rear stairway so that passengers could disembark normally after landing without a needing a gate or stairs at the destination. Well, that feature wasn't very useful, and the stairs themselves were heavy, so operators frequently removed them to improve fuel economy in the 727. In some cases the exterior door was welded to the rest of the fuselage, making it inoperable, and resulted in additional weight savings. The fuel economy of the 727 was not great, the engines were of an older design, fuel inefficient, noisy, and there were three engines on top of that. When the cost of fuel started to increase after 9/11, most 727 operators decided to stop flying them, they were mostly cargo jets anyway at that point.

Funny, I thought the proxies stopped being accurate due to above ground nuclear tests that left behind large amounts of carbon-14 in their fallout.

And once upon a time there was much less land above water. Specifically this was back when the Earth had a far warmer climate and no permanent ice caps. For that matter, Mars, Earth, and Venus all have wildly different topographies, chemical compositions, rotational rates, and natural satellites. I'd imagine that we'd really have to fuck the Earth up hardcore to make it entirely uninhabitable and worthless and to force us to consider colonizing Mars or Venus.

Mars has been geologically dead for billions of years and the oldest terrain on Venus is less than a billion years old. This is important because the Earth has had four billion years of continuous volcanism, physical weathering, and chemical weathering to concentrate useful elements. This is less so the case on Mars and Venus, which are certainly far more homogeneous in their distribution of elements than the Earth. This would present a problem for one attempting to obtain something critical but not too rare like titanium, useful as paint and in its metallic form. Who wants to build and maintain machines that would need to excavate and process cubic miles of rock for a small quantity of titanium? It gets worse when one considers that iridium is orders of magnitude more rare than titanium. So no prospecting on Mars, yet or maybe ever.

Don't go looking to far into the future, global warming is here, and is already lowering your quality of life. The technology to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions is also here already and is not something that needs to be developed yet. You may have to be willing to buy the car that handles 95% of your car related needs that uses a quarter the gas as one that fills all your needs. For the other 5%, renting a vehicle may help.

If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that contracts should always be enforceable as long as both sides agree. Which is a bit stupid, contracts can be misleading and/or unconscionable. Fortunately, contracts are regulated by the government and are invalidated by the court system.

For instance, a contract with Verizon that includes a clause written in microprint unreadable to the naked eye as part of an innocent looking dividing line that allows Verizon to flay off your skin while you are conscious at any time at their option would be both misleading and unconscionable. In this case, the clause with the microprint is present is readable with the proper equipment, and you did agree with the language, so that would be an entirely enforceable contract, right?

I'd be happy with either, the government is (ideally) responsible to and must answer to its citizens on election day. A corporation only (theoretically) answers to its shareholders based on the amount of shares each shareholder owns. Guess which is most likely to be more responsive to reasonable complaints? I'd say the government.

Note: I do not support more regulations for the sake of more regulations, and a reasonable complaint is not a complaint about the existence of income taxes or any spurious complaints on health care reform.

Of course this is meaningless if global warming changes weather patterns and causes droughts on a scale similar to the Dust Bowl in the 1930's or worse. Did I also mention that for unclear reasons the Central US during the 20th century had an unusually low number of Dust Bowl scale droughts as compared to previous centuries? Heck, the drought during the 1930's was short when compared to droughts during previous centuries.

In any case, I am not aware of any successful historical violent insurrection that afterward didn't end up with immediate results that were suboptimal. The Continental Congress formed after the American Revolutionary War was weak and nearly useless. It was also on its way to collapse and leading towards a civil war. Fortunately, the current Constitution was written with an effective central government. The results in this case are the exception rather than the rule. The French Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, and the actual American Civil War are more likely results from a violent insurrection. Theoretical NRA members trying a rebellion today would be more delusional than the southerners who attempted to secede. At least the Confederacy had a decent supply of small arms and some heavy weapons. The Confederacy had little industrial capacity, unlike the Union which had a massive amount and with the effective Union blockade able to prevent imports to the Confederacy, the Civil War's outcome was assured before it began.

By contrast, a poorly regulated militia today would have all sorts of different weapons with no common parts making logistics a nightmare. They would have no meaning no aircraft, no tanks, and no armored off-road vehicles. Worse, they would have no way to produce or obtain more equipment. After a winter or two in the freezing cold and after losing all engagements, I would imagine a warm bed in prison might not sound so bad.