I can see the parasites move from finance into pharma... create a nasty virus mutation... and then sell the vaccine... create a mutation... and sell the vaccine... way better than creating fake capital.

Perhaps this indicates that I'm a fatalist, but can they just take me straight to the blue screen of death?

Marx was continuing Adam Smith's line of thinking. You don't have to "be a Marxist" to recognize that certain elements of Marx's analysis were on target. I think what's become clear is that we have to have mechanisms to keep that basic driver -- greed -- in check... because greed, combined with that other great human tendency -- moral laziness -- produces some pretty awful progeny, especially when smart people get drawn up in it. Enron. Mortgage Backed Securities. etc. The "entrepreneur" field is also littered with greedy, clever twits. I've lost count of the number of "business plans" and "strategies" I've seen that were based on bullshit, and premised on "someone will buy me out."

Yep, there's no reason they can't be more specific and just cover the area that's going to be subjected to mayhem. Dunderheads.

Gentlemen, get out your tinfoil hats.

The actual opinion is published at http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/03/30/09-10139.pdf . Pretty calm and sensible, actually. Search of laptops falls under border doctrine. Issue was whether border doctrine extended to a place 170 miles away, and over a period of time. The reason they shipped the laptop to a forensic facility was because they had a known sex offender with portions of his hard drive encrypted. Unlike a suitcase, which can easily be searched at the Port of Entry, an encrypted laptop cannot be. Pedophilic images are evidence of a crime against children. Where there are pictures of children being abused, there's a child who's been abused. Seeking and trading such images create demand for someone to abuse a child. The pedophile sought to have the evidence on his laptop suppressed. The Ninth District said No. From the opinion: "Today we examine a question of first impression in the Ninth Circuit: whether the search of a laptop computer that begins at the border and ends two days later in a Government forensic computer laboratory almost 170 miles away can still fall within the border search doctrine. The district court considered the issue to be a simple matter of time and space. It concluded that the search of property seized at an international border and moved 170 miles from that border for further search cannot be justified by the border search doctrine. We disagree. We find no basis under the law to distinguish the border search power merely because logic and practicality may require some property presented for entry—and not yet admitted or released from the sovereign’s control—to be transported to a secondary site for adequate inspection. The border search doctrine is not so rigid as to require the United States to equip every entry point—no matter how desolate or infrequently traveled—with inspectors and sophisticated forensic equipment capable of searching whatever property an individual may wish to bring within our borders or be otherwise precluded from exercising its right to protect our nation absent some heightened suspicion. Still, the line we draw stops far short of “anything goes” at the border. The Government cannot simply seize property under its border search power and hold it for weeks, months, or years on a whim. Rather, we continue to scrutinize searches and seizures effectuated under the longstanding border search power on a case-by-case basis to determine whether the manner of the search and seizure was so egregious as to render it unreasonable."

Twatter.

As a gadet geek, I upgraded hardware in that period... but simply transferred everything from one machine to another. And yes, I have upgraded the OS... but that was not anything near a Windows re-install experience. In the past 5 years, I've "retired" 3 windows machines at home, so I'm well aware of the comparative effort associated with their normal use and maintenance. The Apple experience just lets me do the work I get paid to do.

I bow in your general direction. You clearly have the skill to do all this yourself, and the general understanding to avoid trouble and be resilient when it does strike. But you did probably spend considerable time researching which components to put together, installing the operating systems, applying the patches, making the snapshots, etc. I took my machine out of the pretty box, turned it on, and started working. So we just spent our money/time differently . For the average user, it's not just "infections" that drive a reinstall... it's also registry corruptions and god-knows-what... my corporate brick, for example, just seized up the other day, puking on all the security and encryption shite that's been loaded on to it (by our corporate guys). Blue screen of death.

As opposed to what? Wintel fan-boys, who have Stockholm syndrome from decades of abuse from crappy hardware and software? In 5 years of running a MacBook Pro, I have reinstalled my operating system exactly: ZERO times. That's worth several hundred bucks in saved time and aggravation each year.

Bachman, Turner, Overdrive. 4 Men, One Ton, On Stage.

I think what Moryath was suggesting -- in a very oblique manner -- was "get someone to proof-read your resume and cover letters." As a non-HR person who has in the past (not "passed") hired (not "highered") people, I can tell you that when weeding through the pile of resumes, glaring spelling and grammatical errors immediately drive the resume to the "no thanks" pile. It's brutal, but true. And yes, I might be missing someone who has a lot of talent. But more importantly, if you aren't taking care of these details, you're not doing yourself any favors. Your employer, by encouraging education, obviously sees value in you, and wants to help further develop your talent. And a university degree is about much more than simply building knowledge about "stuff." Most of the jobs I've hired for have involved writing, and have called for attention to detail. The bottom line is that managers don't have time to proof-read your work.

First they came for the Home Button, and no one spoke up...

Let's see: * Goldman gets its transaction fee on the $450 million. Win! * if Goldman holds any shares and sells them for a profit... it wins! * if Goldman holds enough shares and loses their shirts when a Facebook competitor obliterates Facebook... and cumulatively they've made a lot of unfortunate decisions like this... then the US government will bail them out. It wins! Why would they give a flying f$%k whether Facebook is worth $50 Billion? It's good to be Goldman.

Sarah Palin is an alien. Her last name rhymes with alien. Therefore she is.