No, Actually, they're not facts.

And I suppose you know more about the situation than CNN and the WSJ? It's possible they reported incorrectly, but businesses keep financial records so it should be easy to verify. What reason do you have to doubt those assertions besides their conflict with your predetermined narrative?

And would you please offer evidence that I'm a "feudalist"?

Capitalism is feudalism with better PR.

You're clearly an unabashed socialist; why be insulted by the mere reference?

I'm not insulted by the assertion that I'm a socialist. I'm insulted by the assertion that my support is blind. It's well supported by the available facts.

Go back and read my first post in this thread. All it did was more accurately describe the situation that actually happened, and I was able to provide references from respected journalistic sources. YOU were the one that interpreted my post as support. Why is that? Because the facts support the union, that's why.

Read the link. They provide citations CNN, KansasCity.com, and the WSJ. Do you have any reason to believe that the events did not happen as described?

It would be nice if internet feudalists didn't offer totally blind support for every robber baron.

I mean, are you denying that the union accepted several wage consessions before striking? Are you denying that management then gave themselves raises? Are these not facts?

The article's depiction of the company's fall omits crucial context and leaves readers with the impression that the act of discarding union workers is what allowed the "trimmed-down" company to re-emerge. The AP did not tell readers that, just three years prior to Mr. Rayburn's negotiations with labor, union workers made "substantial concessions" to aid the company's financial health, or that Hostess stopped contributing to workers' pensions and cut wages and benefits "by 27 to 32 percent."

Nor did the AP story mention the dramatic pay raises Hostess provided its executives during its financial struggles. For example, Brian Driscoll -- Hostess CEO in March 2011 -- received a salary increase from $750,000 to $2.25 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Tell me, in what way is my support blind? It appears to be supported by facts.

b) The only real motivation for the management team to stay with a sinking ship instead of looking for work elsewhere, when a management team was needed.

If you want to provide incentive for management to save the company, you have to tie financial reward to actually saving the company. These vultures sunk the company and still got paid. There's no reason to believe that wasn't their plan from the start.

It went more like this.

Mgt: We need wage concessions, etc.
Union: OK
Mgt: Let's pay our selves some handsome bonuses
Later...
Mgt: We need wage concessions, etc.
Union: OK
Mgt: Let's pay our selves some handsome bonuses
Later...
Mgt: We need wage concessions, etc.
Union: We're going on strike
Mgt: We're going to liquidate the company if you do that
Union: You're a bunch of liars and poopyheads
Mgt: We warned you
                                        Mgt takes company into Chapter 7
Union: Oh shit, they weren't kidding.
Mgt: Let's pay our selves some handsome bonuses before this thing completely goes under [/evil cackle]

This is a US problem. I stopped caring about a week ago. If he's broke the law, issue an international arrest warrant. If he hasn't, don't.

I agree, but who are we going to get to arrest President Obama?

That is exactly what I was thinking. Since their secret program just blew up like semtex in a times square car bomb, they need to do some quick spin control. Look how we move tech forward people! Don't look at what we are doing now....look at new stuff we want to tell you about the past!

Don't pay any mind to the way we spread our own brand of terror like anthrax spores through the sears tower ventilation system. Just pay attention to the muslamic terror groups that we want you to be afraid of, thats the terror that we are trying to create here for our purposes.

Actually, the law came first, then the low-thc "hemp". There was no real distinction other than the basic variant types Sativa, Indica, and Ruderalis.

After it was banned, some french botanists bred a new variety of cannabis with very low THC content. They then pushed for laws internationally to define "hemp" as cannabis with an artificially low THC content, so low that it could only be achieved, without a breeding program, by the purchase of their seeds.

Of course, there was little to no hemp industry at that point, and the thc content so low that nobody cared and they easily got these regulations passed.... creating, for the first time, truely low THC hemp.

While its true there are natural variations in THC content, and some natural strains have less than others, prior to their breeding program (which I believe was in the late 70s or early 80s) I am not aware of any streain that was "equivalent to smoking a handful of straw." unless you had already taken off the flowers, and turned it into...well....straw.

There seem to be a few ways of looking at the question. I never read this article before, as my previous statement was based on a different article that I read many years back and can't properly cite. Here is one telling the same story though:
http://www.forces.org/Archive/articles/245-The+Early+State+Marijuana+Laws+History+Of+The+Non-Medical+Use+Of+Drugs.html

Well, from state to state, on the theory that this newly encountered drug marijuana would be substituted by the hard narcotics addicts or by the alcohol drinkers for their previous drug that had been prohibited, state to state this fear of substitution carried, and that accounted for 26 of the 27 states -- that is, either the anti-Mexican sentiment in the Southwest and Rocky Mountain areas or fear of substitution in the Northeast. That accounted for 26 of the 27 states, and there was only one state left over. It was the most important state for us because it was the first state ever to enact a criminal law against the use of marijuana and it was the state of Utah.

The wikipedia article on the legal status of cannabis doesn't mention this as far as I can find, however, it does show several previous laws which included cannabis, not to directly ban it, but to try and classify it as a poison and put it in the hands of doctors and only available by prescription as a medicine.

> 1) Botanically, marijuana equals hemp. These are basically two
> names for the same plant.

Yup. Adding to this, few people had even heard the term "marijuana" (which, if it arose new today, would be considered an ethic slur) when it was made illegal.

It wasn't until much later, 70s/80s when French botanists bred a low THC strain of cannabis and began pushing for a legal distinction between the two; enshrining into the law the use of a plant which could only be obtained from them (talk about shrewd business)

> 3) Jefferson farmed grew hemp on his Virginia farm
> commercially.

Not only that, but look at his buddy George (thats Washington) and the instructions that he gave is slaves. Specifically they had been instructed to sew hemp seed and collect it for several crops, and then, once a large enough seed stock was available, to kill the males on the next crop.

I am aware of no claims of benefit to removing the males on in a crop intended strictly for rope or canvas use. GW grew the sticky icky for the head.

> 4) No great social stigma was attached to smoking pot in
> the late 1700s and early 1800s â" pot use wasn't
> considered a problem until the early 1900s.

There are some interesting connections between this and both Alcohol prohibition AND the mormon church. The first state to ban cannabis was actually Utah, an event which followed the return of many still polygamist mormons back to the area after having left to mexico years earlier. The story goes that some had picked up cannabis smoking in Mexico and this was an attempt to make them unwelcome. Texas then apparently picked up on this and decided to ban it on the supposition that they should prevent the problem from coming there.

Around this same time we saw Alcohol prohibition end, and the newly created "Federal Bureau of Narcotics" (precursor to the DEA) which had been created partially to fight illegal alcohol, had precious little left to do, and their main man Harry Anslinger went on his crusade to give his agency a purpose, and to deamonize the weed.

I highly recomend checking out the Senate testimony at the time, including the portion where a Doctor from the AMA is told to go home because he stood against making cannabis illegal, calling it an important medicine.

Their drivers aren't crap, but they aren't up to nVidia's standards. I've a 7970M in my laptop, which I got when it was a brand new chip, and it has been a trial. So there are two big issues it has had, only which could be relevant to the PS4:

1) Issues with Enduro, that's AMD's hybrid GPU switching. The laptop can use the integrated Intel 4000 graphics for easy stuff and fire up the 7970M for hard stuff. Well until fairly recently, that didn't work that well. The 7970M didn't operate at full capacity, something with the drivers was inefficient. You could see it on other laptops which has a mux to allow you to switch off the iGPU. With just the 7970M they ran much faster. AMD finally got it (mostly) fixed, but it took for damn well ever. Also when it first came out, the interface for choosing GPUs was really clunky.

2) OpenGL issues. AMD has sucked at the OpenGL for as long as I can remember, and it never seems to get better. They SUPPORT it, but it doesn't work well. On nVidia, GL and DX run equally fast. They are both first-class APIs and there really is no speed or capability difference between them. On AMD, not so much. Recently the issues I've seen were with Brink and HFSS. Brink was a shit (man it was a waste of money) game that used iD Tech 4. As such, OpenGL. On my AMD GPU, it never ran well despite being WAY passed the spec needed. Tried it on a lesser spec nVidia system, flawless. Said problems were all over the forums. With HFSS we set up a desktop at work with a cheap AMD chip, a 7570 or something like that, just for basic graphics (it was server class hardware, so no good iGPU). The user reported HFSS worked over RDP, but not local and sure enough, that was the case. So it occurred to me: HFSS will use OpenGL to accelerate its interface. Out came the AMD card, in went a cheap nVidia GT 210, and HFSS worked fine.

Now of those, the OpenGL problem could be problematic to the PS4, since that's what it uses. Maybe they won't have a problem since this is ONLY a GL driver and they've had time and all that, but I worry. The PS4 may lose its, on paper, graphics advantage due to driver issues. It would suck for Sony if their console which has more graphics units and more memory bandwidth had lesser GPU capabilities because AMD can't work out a good GL driver.

At any rate the overall situation is AMD still has problems nVidia drivers don't. I really like AMD's hardware, it is often faster and is nearly always a good price, but I get continually bit with driver issues. Not something huge like "The system blue screens and won't run," but things that are very real and very annoying. Hence I have nVidia in my desktop and I've seriously considered replacing the card in my laptop (it is a Clevo laptop and the card is field replaceable). They aren't perfect, but I find them WAY less problematic.

And don't even get me started on Linux drivers. There is NO comparison there. nVidia binary drivers is lightyears ahead of anyone else.

Sony actually intended for it to be the graphic chips. Early on they were doing graphics demos of things running on a number of Cell chips. However, it wasn't good at that either and as the PS3 went in to hardware development, it was clear that they'd need a real GPU.

Well rather than just admit that the Cell wasn't ready for a consumer device (I mean who the fuck tries to put first gen technology in a consumer device) they decided to make it the CPU instead, and had nVidia make them a GPU.

Ultimately Cell's long term problem has been GPUs themselves. As you say Cell sucks as a general purpose CPU. No problem, that wasn't really its design. However as a stream processor it can't keep up with the new GPUs. That wasn't an issue when it was designed (this was back in the pre nVidia 8800 days) but now it gets out stream processed by GPUs.

Hence it has kinda just languished. IBM has chattered about it a bit, but nothing has happened.

Because they can't do anything about you. The reason your own government is more of a concern than foreign governments is they have power over you whereas foreign governments do not. Now yes, technically foreign governments can go after someone, like North Korean kidnappings or the US drone program, however by and large they have little control over citizens of other nations.

In terms of looking at civilians, you think that is new? Most people in a country are civilians, as in not in the military. That doesn't mean they aren't involved in things a nation might take interest in. A simple example would be spies. You think they are military officers? No, they are regular civilians, or often diplomats.

Also in some countries, like China, the line is considerably less clear. The PLA outright owns many industries, and has their hands in many others, so even were you to take the line that spying is only for military things, well that would be rather unclear there.

That aside, I've seen little enough protesting period, and none that seems to be people mad about civilian spying. It is DOMESTIC spying that seems to bother them. They are mad that the NSA is (allegedly) spying on Americans which they are not supposed to do according to the law. I haven't seen any protests complaining about foreign spy agencies doing it, and they do it, make no mistake.

Spying on foreign nations is the NSA's business. If you don't like that, then it is something to take up with your representitive, but I would have to ask why all of a sudden you have a problem with it, since that has ALWAYS been its business. The NSA is the US's signals intelligence agency. It's reason to be is to spy on the electronic communications of foreign powers.

Now, you can argue the US shouldn't spy at all if you like, but you do have to realise that would put the US at basically the only major nation that didn't. More or less all nations have intelligence agencies. The UK has the SIS (and the Security Service to an extent), France has the DGSE, Canada has the CSIS, Switzerland has the NDB, Finland has the SUPO, China has the MSS, Russia has the SVR (and realistically the FSB, FSO and GRU as well). Nations spy on each other. They have for a long, LONG time.

The flap with the NSA is that they have been spying on American citizens. That is something they are not supposed to do. While some countries, like China, have a unified intelligence apparatus (the MSS is their spy agency, secret police, all that jazz), the US purposely has divided agencies. The NSA, CIA, etc are not supposed to collect intelligence on Americans. That is only supposed to be done by law enforcement, and then only in compliance with court orders.

That the NSA would spy on other nations is not only unsurprising, it is the reason they exist.

In terms of China being an enemy, well you can't really think in those terms. Nations don't have friends and enemies so much as they have interests. As such other nations can align or not align with those interests to different degrees. If you mean an enemy as a nation they are at war with then no, but of course they US hasn't officially gone to war in a rather long time. However China is certainly a nation the US would have many reasons to watch. They are quite authoritarian, the military is heavily mixed up in their economy (I'm talking direct ownership of things), they have imperialistic ambitions and they have a lot of weapons. Thus it should not be surprising if the US has interest in watching them.

Also if you think the US is irrelevant, you need to wake up and have a look at world affairs. The US is an extremely influential country in a tremendous amount of ways. It is the only military superpower at the moment, it controls the world's reserve currency, it has the largest economy in the world, it exports culture (in the form of books, TV movies, video games, that kind of thing) like no other in history and so on. You might wish the US was not relevant, but it is, very much so.

Also it isn't small. Buy a globe. Or use a search engine. The US is the 4th largest country in the world by land area, and 3rd largest by population. If that is "too small" by your metric, then I don't want to know what you rank most countries (which are, by definition, much smaller).

The top of mine broke, but its quite fixable. The way it was made the top "brush" (twisted stranded wire) is soldered to a thicker wire in an "A" shape. It had two holes in the top end of the shaft, one of them cracked out. At this point the belt is a good 20 years old, but, last time I rigged it up to work for a few minutes it gives some sparks.

H+ ions eh? Just so happens I was looking at a water torch video recently (sadly, nearly everyone working on such things seems to be a crackpot who is trying to fit an oxyhydrogen generator to his car) and wondering if there was any other silly excuse I could use to set up a rig to make some hydrogen.

Course when you really get down to it, if you are going to go through that much trouble to make a table top accelerator, it seems like it would be easier to skip the electrical energy to mechanical energy and mechanical energy to electrostatic potential steps. Seems like charging a capacitor and using some sort of cathode/annode setup..... and that is how the VDG ended up in the museum :)

Though, still pretty cool. It may be one of the cheaper and safer ways to get some of the high voltages, high voltage diodes and capacitors are not exactly the cheapest components to build up ladders of.

The faint throbbing that returned to my elbow once in a while for several years after I got the bright idea to put a plastic report cover on the wall next to the VDG and let it run, discharging a stream of small sparks at the plastic surface. It lit up a bright, thick spark, close to 4" to my finger, and traveled right down to the elbow.

But as strong as it can be, at least you only have to deal with as much energy as you store. Not quite dealing with line current.