Don't forget restricting religious practices. Although, to be fair, the 1st Amendment only forbids Congress from restricting exercise of religion. It makes no such prohibition on the executive.

If you want to argue the Communist propaganda, just as an advise, don't try to argue racism. Anyone making an accusation of racism is nowadays considered to have no legitimate point to make. In fact, most people will stop listening the moment you make that accusation. It just doesn't carry water anymore.

or the fraking? <ducks/> Hey, it's the weekend. Let the flame wars begin. </trolling>

Belize couldn't get a better publicity if it paid for it. It's a nation of less than half a million people. They are trying to attract US retirees as a business model. Powerful people? C'mon.

The media really is evil. Actually, by design. It's an evil business. Any business which produces physical things that enable or improve life must have waste. Such business must take natural resources (which have no use) and turn it into something useful. News business just has to talk. When there a true danger, the "real" news businesses are often too late to cover it. So they must constantly invent reasons to complain. The ones which don't invent reasons to complain simply go out of business. One must, therefore, assume that the only general news outlets which survive are the ones which complain about the side effects of real life-enabling businesses. And since they cannot be sued for lying or exaggerating, they have little to lose by lying or exaggerating the extent of harm brought about by life-enabling businesses vs the benefit they produce for society. They pooh pooh anyone who does something useful by pointing out the waste that useful activity generates. Of course, they could complain about their own harm (exorbitant salaries, social unrest, excessive political influence and waste of resources which they are responsible for) but they rarely do.

Not gonna convince me that FB are the good guys. Not going to open a FB page anyway. Although kudos to them for getting *one* thing right. They sell information. Creation of that information does not take roads, public telecommunications (the info goes over private networks), etc. Why should they pay for services of which they consume none?

Who take money from other human being and promise to pay them dividends at some future time (that's what a stock is -- a right to vote in an entity which promises but does not guarantee future dividends). And that money which they take from those human beings has been taxed at least once (and in many case multiple times).

You can't stop it. But you can withstand it. I find it amusing that they would do it to Bank of America, to be honest. Their service was always spotty without any outside "assistance".

Nah, only religions which have not gone through a reformation causing an introspection and self moderation. Islam is one of them. Christianity, for example, doesn't cause irrational behavior in otherwise rational people. Nor does Judaism or Buddhism. Islam does.

The delayed execution is the 3rd option. Or an event model. Think of something like a make file where you don't do anything until all the pre-requisites have been satisfied. Error checking is necessary because ultimately you want to be able to have programs which can adjust to real world events (mouse motions, changing screen sizes, stuff arriving on the network wire). And in the real world thinks may not happen in the order you hope they would or in one of the orders you thought they could. Probably the most common way to handle this is publish subscribe or event model.

Everything Assange does is now easier to do if you are in the government? This is an obvious deflection on his part.... "hey look pay no attention to how I violate privacy of others communications.. look at how the government could theoretically violate YOUR privacy of communication".

Not past a certain point. At a certain point, a billion dollars tomorrow is worth less than 100 million dollars today. Simply because once you don't pay the 100 million today, you don't exist at all anymore. In banking, contracts are structured on multiple conditions (legs). If any of the legs doesn't make a payment, the whole contract is worthless. There was one fund which went bankrupt (CIT I think) a few months after the bail out. The only reason it didn't cause ripples is that everyone was preparing for their bankruptcy months in advance. So the logistics for it were in place when it actually happened.

Why? They are the only party who didn't play the part that they are supposed to play in the the whole system. Banks structured debt obligations and lent money around. Government was supposed to either cut back the supply of money or liquidate a bankrupt bank in time for the creditors to survive. They weren't able to do that. So instead they handed the creditors a blank check.

Nonsense. It takes months to do a simple foreclosure. A bank the size of Lehman would enter into BILLIONS of obligations every day. It's not even possible to tally their positions at any one time without massive programming endeavor. If someone owe Lehman 50 dollars two weeks from now and Lehman owes them 100 dollars two hours from now, do they get paid or does the money go to those whom Lehman owes 70 dollars 2 days from now? Time and trust is the only real commodity banks trade. Bankruptcies of corporations are much much simpler.

No, I didn't miss it. I disagreed with it.

You honestly believe the world wants to know what they were thinking more than it wants to know what they were doing?

They didn't just get away with it. They won 2 elections in the process. The amount of money stolen through "stimulus" spending dwarves TARP. AND TARP administration, despite TARP having been repaid by the banks, still exists and administers the same amount of money. No one wants to psychoanalyze the politicians who voted for the stimulus spending. Meanwhile, they steal at (literally) 100 times the rate that the banks are even accused of stealing.

I'll give you that the statement would be helped by citation. But I won't give you the BS. I would agree with the gp post. I heard it from other sources (which I trust). The sources were academic. This type of inquiry was within their field of academic interest. But I too don't have a citation. The causal link seems to be that to cut into a human being and not be repulsed by it takes a certain sadistic inclination. So, while these people are not your mobster type psychopaths, a good fraction of surgens tortured animals for pleasure (or did something to that effect) as kids.

Sometimes, it's ingenuity, and sometimes planning. But sometimes it's blind stumbling in the dark. But those are the prophets of progress. It takes the system for the new advances to gain wide adaptation. I pretty much covered this here http://slashdot.org/~superwiz/journal/169837 5 years ago. Pardon the typos.

I am not sure I see this as a problem though. You are meant to try to gain advantage when you on a job. Otherwise, it's a dead end job. Progress happens because people find subversive ways to work inside the system. The system either gets patched to prevent the problem from happening again or it recognizes it as the new and better way of doing things. Creative destruction is there by design. I am saying that it has not been demonstrated that it is a disability. Once again, computers have NO empathy. And yet, in many case, they make great bankers.