Funny, I don't remember any slashdot mod that caused giant mechanical arms to reach out of your keyboard and compel you to read every article. ...I mean, maybe it's part of that 2.0 thing everybody's talking about...?

What CBO analysis? They said they have not had time to review the new revised bill, so there is NO analysis.

And Kucinich is a politician, yes, but he also has to explain himself to the people who voted for him as a Socialist. He's already on record as saying he will never vote for a bill that does not include a Governement-run Option, and now he's flipped. That won't please the people back home.

I agree. We've been slowly changing from McAfee to Microsoft Security Essentials at work for the last 4 months and it's worked really well. Its fast, has a small footprint and you can't beat free. I've read that it doesn't do a great job on behavioral detection, but I think that's why it has that small footprint, it's not using processing power 24/7. Highly recommended.

The military?

The question was regarding US government institutions run efficiently.

Texas passed tort reform so why aren't my rates cheaper?

"After controlling for enabling and need characteristics in logistic regression models, Veterans Administration (VA)-only users were 2 to 8 times more satisfied with their outpatient care than were VA nonusers on 5 out of 10 satisfaction measures.". Oh, and I have a source. You appear to have a mysterious "Someone in Congress".

Also, the proposed health care bill doesn't set up anything even slightly like the VA. VA -> single provider of health care, like the NHS in Britain. The proposed public option would have been a step toward having a single payer, but still with multiple independent providers. The proposed bill doesn't introduce either.

It's no worse than Fantasy records suing John Fogerty when he recorded "The Old Man Down the Road" for sounding too much like Creedence Clearwater Revival.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogerty_v._Fantasy

This was mentioned in the article, but not as size, but weight. The power to weight ratio is more important. Density of the individual battery cells, and continuous use vs. burst usage also come into play.

How about a "targeted" email of the results of this study to all online advertisers. Certainly it's important enough that they won't mind receiving 2 or 3 copies since it's "business relevant". We do want to make sure these people are inconvenienced, er I mean informed.

Good luck. The first hurdle in creating an amendment to the Constitution is that it has to be passed by a 2/3 majority of Congress. If the **AA's can get over %50 to pass the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, then they can easily get over %33 to stall an amendment.

I'd be curious to hear what players of the old pen and paper RPG version of Champions think. The best part of the game was the separation of game mechanics from character type. It sounds like CO got that part right. The differences between normal, killing, no normal defense, and ego/psi attacks also made for interesting character variety. Combat in the original RPG was somewhat tedious and arithmetic-intensive. The review mentions "killing" henchmen. One of the hallmarks of the RPG were characters with "Code Vs. Killing" psychological limitations. What world would accept superheroes who casually walk into a fight and kill their enemies?

One problem that the music and movie industries have created for themselves with consolidation, is that the large overhead of the consolidated organizations has exacerbated the need for a multi-platinum CD or a blockbuster movie bringing in $500 million in order to be profitable. In a feast-or-famine sink-or-swim environment there is little opportunity for independent artists (film-makers or bands) to develop. The *AA only see immediate return on investment.

In the music industry especially, the larger labels will add in contractual obligations to spend %X of the advance on recording, using a pre-approved list of producers and studios. Of course the label has a financial interest in these studios/producers, and by having these stipulations in the contract, get to squeeze more profit from the artist by essentially being paid twice, once when the artist uses his/her advance, and again when the label recoups the advance from royalties.

Indie bands, singer-songwriters and other artists that don't get much airplay, and rely on touring to survive, have found it much easier to be profitable off smaller sales volume by either recording for an independent label, or forming their own label. The artist then controls his/her costs, rather than suffer the label inflating the costs to compensate for not selling X million copies.

No, for several reasons.

1.) Having recorded for nearly 30 years, Al knows the ins and outs of what's legal, what he can easily fight, and what he can't.

2.) The original songwriter is credited on all parodies (and polka medleys) meaning Al pays royalties to the original songwriter on all songs recorded on CD or receiving airplay. ASCAP and the original artist are making money from Al.

3.) Al gets permission from the artist before recording a parody, even though it isn't legally necessary. In the case of parodying James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" (as "You're Pitiful") the label (not the artist) withheld permission after recording, so instead of releasing it on the "Straight out of Lynwood" CD, he put out an mp3 from his website. Other parodies for which he doesn't have artist permission, he will perform live in concert, but will not record.

More details at his Wikipedia page.

Compuware had 3 essential tools for mainframe development (IBM 370)

Abend-Aid - automated dump solver for when you program core-dumped.

File-Aid - Easily the best file browser for the mainframe. I'd love to see a similar tool on Windows or Linux that allowed you to create customized text and binary file formats for viewing file innards.

Xpediter - mainframe debugger.

Actually, Micro Focus made a great deal of cash in the nineties by providing COBOL development on the PC. COBOL programmers who were maintaining applications on a mainframe were no longer tied to an 8-color terminal connected at 9600 baud, or by using a terminal-emulation program that was just as bad. Compuware also put out a number of mainframe tools that were heavily used. I wonder if Micro Focus got those as well?