Yes agreed. I used to work in a bank (many moons ago) We used to get in from a corresponding banks thousands of checks a day from each one and it totalled up to probably 100 million (on a slow day).
Trying to clear that amount of checks is pretty close to impossible but the Fed does a near perfect job at doing it. Whether its a 23 cent check or one for 90,000,000 (90 million) dollars it runs at a fast pace and it is done quickly and securely with the FED.

I will not say anything about any other FED operations as I was not high enough in the food chain to know anything else.

ahhh binding arbitration the business way of screwing the customer (legitimately?) .
I had a friend (I am not going into to specifics here) who had a job offer from our corporate offices in NY. His boss did not like that so he fired him. At the end of the day his only option was to go to binding arbitration as the company had deep pockets and he didn't. Binding arbitration on the surface sounds good, right? Well as it turns out the company gets to pick the "judges" and the judges know if they ever need a job they have one with the company as the judges are the pawns.

Then the literalists come in and says that man shall not lie with another man, right?

So what about Lesbians? They are not men in any sense of the word. So since it is not explicitly mentioned in the bible is it right or wrong?

People have picked and chosen parts of the bible that they wish to use to interpert it the way they want. The bible can be used pretty much in anyway people want. It is the ultimate cop out.

No the reason why they are red is because they are embarassed that people still believe in the devil.

Sacking Constantipole? More like pillaging young boys.

I can understand priest going in for a drink to a bar now and the and even a night out now and then. Where it stops though is the molesting of younger people. That is bad enough but when the church covers it up that is way past the line. If that was all there was too it OK but then the churches turning their backs on the Jewish people during WWII that is so far over the line that what was a 1 yard offsides offense is now out of the solar system. We should have demanded the church re-organized or disbanded 500+ years ago and it just gets itself deeper and deeper.

The church in the US should have stopped paying the vatican any money say past 1960. We should also withdraw diplomatic ties and any other "niceties" with the church. What bothers me alot is the idiotic priests cannot see past their noses and even if they do they just come up with excuses. Hell mayber we can get Luxemburg to declare war on them so we can join them in the wiping out of the church.

Hobbit in 3D? Well it will be the first movie I will not watch or buy.

Ahh... but the Bush administration out a former CIA operative. That is illegal but they sure did not get punished for it.

Of course you are correct. But US law says you are just as guilty if you facilitate any lawbraking. a n example you were not physically present when a group killed a person but you help them (either before or afterwards), like getting them passports or paying for their tickets etc etc. In the eyes of the law you are just as guilty as the people who broke the law.

I can agree that there are some erors in that law but its difficult (or impossible) for law enforcement to get people to admit that they helped people break the law. SO there has to be a case for going after the people who do help escape or pull off a bank job or whatever. Where it gets into grey areas is when religion is involved and it just gets plain messy.

1. Its close to impossible to fire a civil servant.
2. Believe it or not some civil servants actually do an outstanding job.

The GS people are close to impossible to manage. They have their own set of regulation and rules. I worked with a GS-17 (long long ago and far far away) when I was in the military. My memory isn't great but somewhere in the mists of memory in order to get a GS-17 grade you have to be approved by Congress.

The other GS-12's & 13's I worked with were super sharp. I worked with them while in Germany and most of them came from France when the French kicked the US bases out (now that was a long time ago). They were exempted (if memory serves me) from having to go back to the states. Normally they have 3-4 years(?) limit. Most of the long timers married locals and of course some didn't. In all my dealings with GS types I have only run across a few that were well average. I still keep in touch after 40 years.
I have not worked with any stateside GS's but from my poor memory only the cream got to go overseas with the military.
I was not too surprised about the number of data centers "hidden". The problem with the discussion they did not define what a data center was. So theoretically 1 server could be considered a data center it is impossible to tell. So any numbers that were derived have to be sifted through to figure out what is the true number.

Yes, but you could reasonably argue that you had no idea what the device was and thus could not be held accountable.
However if there was identifying marks on it (say Property of FBI)it would be a whole different situation.

Yes well just look at the budget for "terrorism" it is extremely bloated and it looks like the FBI (or any federal agency for that matter) can say you are a suspected terrorist under almost any circumstance and the government gives you carte blanche to investigate the "suspect". Under ideal circumstances this probably would not be all that bad but the abuse is there no doubt about it.
The terrorism act as enacted by the Bush administration essentially gives federal agencies a blank check. When is the last time that you ever heard of a governement official not spending all that they can get away with. Terrorism is the latest boondoogle the bureaucrats have up their sleeve to make themselves out to be the gangsters of terror.
     

I believe there have been studies (students at least) were told that it is alright to send electrical shocks to another student.
Not only did the students do so but it turned out they enjoyed doing so.
Which I believe is part of the "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" suggestion that the item is about. This addresses the German (Nazi's) and the other nasty people since in various armed forces (Pol Pot comes to mind) or the people in the US armed srvices that interrogated people in IRAQ prison(s).
Or the last president of the US for that matter, although he specifically did not use torture he OL'd it and even encouraged it, so he is just as guilty (if not more) that the jailers were.
 

Well Sarah Palin seems to think she knows where Russia is, let her decide.

The technical angle is how will Sarah Palin break into their computer system to retieve emails.
I know Sarah is dumb but to break into Windows OS must be really easy if she can do it.

Look, back in the 1980's (and before) IBM really had a great program to train programmers and the like. They let education institutions use IBM computers and they helped out educators train future programmers. Somewhere around 1990's they slashed all education subsidiies and essentially yielded the education to Microsoft. Once that happened the drain of future people to use IBM equipment was cut off at the knees.
IBM had *ONE* higher education university (NIU if memory serves me) to show off to everybody that they did not abandoned the education system. Well in fact they did, eventually even loosing NIU although NIU still teaches IBM, it is slowly drawing back and reducing the number of classes. Approximately 3 (?) years ago IBM found "religion" for education. IBM paraded 10 institution's throughout the world as preparing for the next generation. My memory is iffy here but my memory says there might have been 1 or 2 higher learning colleges here in the US. The others being in Germany and India and some other countries. India is busy selling itself as an ideal outsourcing place as they have so many IBM trained people (do not get me started on that) and indeed INDIA does have lots of people trained on IBM equipment. My only comment here is that "trained" is relative as their education has not kept up with IBM current OS's (Mainframe). Not that I am an expert in this but one of the mail list I belong to we seem to get a lot of questions from INDIA that indicates a definite lack of familiarity of modern IBM OS's. There isn't one expert on the list from India as we see some really less than bright questions that are asked.
IBM lost the battle when it stopped its education subsidies to Microsoft.