In addition, at least in the Washington example the poor pay no sales tax on food, which makes up a great deal of most poor families' monthly budgets.

In that case, when one owns another, can they be charged with slavery? It might go a long way toward allowing corps to sidestep responsibility through subsidiaries and shell companies.

many poor people pay for telecommunications services out of their own pockets.

That's becoming increasingly untrue. Anyone on food stamps now qualifies for subsidized or free telephone services under Federal programs.

Costs three times as much as the originally budgeted cost, is delivered five times past the deadline and doesn't do a tenth of what was promised.

I find it both very amusing and very aggravating that government at all levels has been wasting so much of the public's time and money on things like this, considering how INEFFECTIVE they have proven to be.

In most cities where they have been tried, traffic cameras have increased traffic accidents. There are some lawsuits going on in my area, which will probably result in them getting banned statewide. Not just because they are ineffective, but because enforcing anything via camera violates long-standing state law. (I know that sounds weird but it's true. The officer who catches you violating the law has to be the one issuing the citation. In the case of traffic cameras, the one doing the "catching" is an employee of the company that owns and operates the cameras. And the public won't tolerate them hiring more officers to do it. PLUS the issue that it is the car being "caught", not the driver.)

In London, with over 1,000,000 surveillance cameras in the city, after years of this it has been found that on average, the cameras have "helped" solve 1 crime per 1000 cameras. Not annually, total. And not serious crimes, just crimes. Like stealing candy bars, for example.

I could go on. They continue to waste their time, still thinking these things will work, in the face of years of solid evidence that they won't. It's just hilarious that they would spend $150,000 + each on traffic cameras, or probably upward of $2000 apiece on iris scanners, when both can be utterly defeated with a $2 can of spray paint or $0.10 worth of vaseline,

If someone ever tells me that Climate Change exists with their Android device in hand, now I can call them a hypocrite.

And if someone tells you that they don't like Nazis, while driving their Ford, you can call them a hypocrite, too.

Not to mention the priest who tells you to keep it in your pants.

I have many complaints about the first company I worked for out of school hiring and paying me as an intern instead of a full employee, but I will admit that I did get quite good experience out of the deal.

I graduated with Honors last year, went through a 6-month internship (we're going to hire you on full time and pay you market rate! Honest! It's just this is a bad time right now, we don't have the authorization for more manpower, we'll keep you on as an intern though...) - found another job with that experience easily enough.

Now with only a year's experience, I'm getting headhunter E-mails once or twice a month.

I would not even be a student there. I would immediately cancel my registration and take my money elsewhere. Period.

This has 3 possible outcomes. The first one could be combined with either of the other 2.

(A) University enrollment will suffer.

(B) Some clever students will find a way to bypass this, just as they have always found ways to bypass everything else.

(C) The scanners will somehow, mysteriously, get "accidentally" broken.

Seriously, I have a hard time understanding how they could even consider something like this, given the current backlash against data-gathering and surveillance!

The truth is, the universities have been trying shit like this for the sole reason that it gets them more Federal money. Which I am sure many students feel is an excellent reason to hack it.

The price eBay payed was so astronomical that it could only have been with back-door funding from the Government. The point was to get Skype out of Estonian hands because there was no reliable way for the NSA to tap into it.

<neo>whoa</neo>

Shut up, already. It's SCIENCE!

To be a successful corporation in today's Amehrica, you cannot just spend all your time and money on a single party. You have to buy members of both parties in order to maintain your cozy relationship with the federal bureaucrats.

you're basically left with no beliefs at all.

"It's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant." - the Apostle Rufus

The basic technique has been used in the laboratory for ages

Yeah, a friend of mine worked for a private research lab a decade ago and they were curing MS in mice models using an HIV vector, as just SOP (the HIV vector part was already old at that point). BTW, they abandoned that work for something that could pay the bills as they didn't have a business model that could earn enough to pay for the FDA-mandated trials. He tells me this kind of thing happens at labs all over the country and when it's a for-profit lab, they don't publish if they're going to reuse part of the tech in their next endeavor.

Of course it does. I didn't claim otherwise. But you ought to be asking yourself what the real cost of that convenience is.