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Comment Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (Score 3, Informative) 367

Then there is the $1 million patrol boat he donated to the Belizean coast guard. (In a letter to The New York Times, he described it as an act of philanthropy; later, he tells me he had to bribe members of the coast guard to prevent them from hassling his ferry business: "This is a third-world country. I had to bribe a whole bunch of folks.

indicating that he routinely gives large, overt, public bribes to get whatever he wants in Belize

Bribing foreign officials is a violation of the US law Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. So it's surprising that he would admit this to a journalist.

Comment Re:Good for them, too. (Score 1) 595

Business taxes are a competitive fucking market. Governments like to whine about it cause.. cause.. "its our money!!!" when that isn't the case at all. Spend tax money effectively and you might be able to retain businesses in "high" tax environments.

Businesses have a way to get government services without paying for them. How effectively the governments spend the money is not at issue. If businesses can get services for free, they will.

Comment Re:Get me a hammer! (Score 5, Insightful) 130

I think the assumption was that the brother's disease, which was genetic, was causing problems with the new kidney. But because $recipient2 did not have that disease, if transplanted to $recipient2's body, the kidney would recover and work correctly. A genetic disease not present in the kidney should not follow the kidney. The actual results would vindicate that theory.

Comment Re:Can't we detect something that size? (Score 1) 279

Conveniently, NASA's latest budget request quadruples the asteroid detection budget.

However, this asteroid is too small to have been in scope for NASA's asteroid detection. NASA's asteroid detection is focused on objects 1 kilometer or larger. As others pointed out, the much smaller obejcts that NASA does track are in Earth orbit. Tracking small objects in Earth orbit is both more achievable (they're always relatively close to Earth!) and more important (they pose a ongoing hazard to spacecraft, both manned and robotics.) Small asteroids pose relatively little threat -- they burn up in the atmosphere in a single pass. And they're really hard to detect. So NASA doesn't even try.

[Posting in part to undo a bad moderation.]

Comment slashdot is dying (Score 1) 410

The average number of comments per post seems to be declining. slashdot articles are less germane. The code is rotting. The new videos are useless and/or slashvertisements.

Looks like slashdot is dying.

Comment Re:What's the hype? (Score 4, Insightful) 215

Sure, Steve Jobs made big mistakes, too. Not just the NeXT, either. During his original stint at Apple, the Apple Lisa was a total faillure. And he did some pretty nasty things in his personal life. He certainly wasn't perfect, and he made some pretty collosal mistakes. All that said -- Apple's major succcesses have come to significantly outweigh their failures, as evidenced by the current market for iPhones, iPads, etc. A lot of that success can be attributed almost directly to the vision and ideals of Steve Jobs. I'm not an Apple fan myself, but I can understand why the Apple fans revere him.

Comment Re:What's the hype? (Score 5, Insightful) 215

Engineers design to specs and requirements. Jobs tended to specify the high-level requirements. The engineers who worked for him are very clear on this -- Jobs was a micromanager who pushed hard for certain elements of design and usability. The Jobs approach was unique, and resulted in the distinctive Apple products of the 70s, 80, and 2000s. Unlike most CEOs, Steve Jobs had a close personal hand in the the successes and failures of Apple.

NB: I'm not a big fan of either Jobs or Apple. But his contributions are pretty clear.

Australia

Australian Gov't Bans Huawei From National Network Bids 168

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like paranoia regarding Chinese cyber-espionage is riding sky-high within the Australian Government. It was confirmed today that the country's Attorney-General's Department had banned Chinese networking vendor Huawei (the number two telco networking equipment vendor globally) from bidding for work supplying equipment to the government's $50 billion National Broadband Network universal fibre project. The unprecedented move comes despite Huawei offering to share its source code with security officials, and despite Huawei not being accused of breaking any laws in Australia. Questions over the legality of the Government's move are already being raised."

Comment Re:No (Score 1) 405

I deliberately did not provide my list of queries, for three reasons:

(1) As I said, the queries are relevant to me, personally. All queries include my first and last name. I have never posted my last name on slashdot, and do not intend to. I prefer not to have slashdot come up on searches for my name.

(2) I assume shills for both sides are present here. I don't want my test queries to become special cases.

(3) The point of my post is to test what is relevant to myself. Your needs could be different, and testing is easy. So you don't need to take anyone else's word for it, and shouldn't. Test for yourself.

That said, if you want to see my list of queries, post an email address (a throwaway email address is fine) and a promise not to post the list to the web or any public location.

Comment No (Score 5, Interesting) 405

I just tried bing on a list of sample (obscure, complicated) queries that are relevant to me, personally. google found the correct page in 3 out of 4. bing got 1 out of 4.

I wouldn't make any grandiose claims on a sample size of 4. But from a "quick and dirty check" perspective, I won't be trying bing again anytime soon.

BTW: since when are vendor competitiveness claims newsworthy? It always annoys me when stories like this show up on slashdot. Yes, the high-powered $vendor_X executive whose livelihood depends on $product_X has publically claimed that it is equivalent. This is a story? I don't care which vendor you're talking about: the vendor's own claims about relative competitiveness are not newsworthy. Wait for an (impartial) third party to declare that $vendor_X's products, which historically were viewed as inferior to $vendor_Y, are now equal or superior. Or wait for $vendor_X to announce a new feature. Then you have a story.

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