The impresion I have is that Obama "was convinced" to go along with these programs after elected. He might have truly believed the system was not abusive, or if he didn't he would be risking creating enemies inside his government, or both. The problem is, no matter how much non-abusive such a system might be today/yesterday, it will/would derail into abuse in the future (1 year, 5 years, 10 years time, who knows). There's no way people with this kind of power would always "be responsible".
I don't know. If not in my own home (I've thought about it, but since I moved around so many times it's not feasible), maybe Iceland? I really don't know. Europe is farily good in privacy laws, except maybe Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
Here's an example: http://blog.workhere.io/mozilla-needs-to-move-persona-out-of.../ And as much as I love Google, I don't know how much comfortable I am in using their cloud services for everything... Unless they allow me to choose which of their datacenters my email is being stored.
I don't see this as an economic problem but as a moral problem. If they had applied a stimulus program in Greece instead of austerity, maybe the economic contraction wouldn't be too big, but there would still be some. In corrupted countries neither austerity or stimulus are the solution. The solution is not an economic one, but a moral one. Iceland solution, which is so much used as an example in these discussions, wasn't an economic one of defaulting on their debt, but of jailing corrupt bankers, putting the blame in the right places, taking out the defective cogs out of the great system and adding mechanisms to prevent new defective cogs from appearing. The defaulting is a consequence of that, not the reason. A stimulus program in Greece wouldn't do much neither, because most of the money would be concentrated in a few corrupted pockets instead of trickling down to a large amount of the population.
Phages probably suffer from the same disease antibiotics do these days, "capitalism-unfriendliness":"It's quite simple - if they make something to treat high blood pressure or diabetes and it works, we will use it on our patients everyday.
"Whereas antibiotics will only be used for a week or two when they're needed, and then they have a limited life span because of resistance developing anyway."
I'd say 2500 deaths per year from antibiotic resistant bacteria in the UK alone is already a bigger risk than terrorism.
Yeah, I'd like to know that as well...
The impact of the video would be much greater if there was a small/big stick figure in one of the corners that changes size depending on the shoot to give a sense of proportion.
This is quite good as well: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of The World by Niall Ferguson Epsd. 1-5 (Full Documentary)
But I'm not sure I agree that steps to mitigate climate change are being taken. Or if they are enough. There are still too many and strong economic interests not to do so, even though is just a really bad idea to burn up all the oil right now. What's interesting here is that this project was funded by the very people that do not want to take steps to mitigate climate change, but the scientist responsible for it, being a scientist, had his mind reversed by the facts. Kudos to him.
It doesn't need to diverge so much from capitalism as communism did. Capitalism is great, it just needs some more polishing. (And the polisher is not called free market).
But the thing I like about G+ is the privacy and social tools/interface. It's very easy to group people and share stuff with just specific people. And it's clear in that regard. Facebook is a mess in this area and aims to make everything public. And their fame of changing privacy settings each 6 months or less does not help either. *edit: AND being able to select what timeline/wall you want to see. Filters a LOT of the noise.
http://futureoftheinternet.org/ Free to download/read here: http://futureoftheinternet.org/download
Really, one need only to read, to travel, to talk, to look around oneself and try to understand the world to question religion. I still think laziness plays a bigger part. And because it's "easier", a canned solution. You get to the answers faster, albeit wrong, with religion than you do with facts. Religion is a sort of "tl;dr" of the world written 2000+ years ago. And comes with an hypocritical morality that served that period, and that period only.
I thought so also. But they were able to place ex-employees and current advisors in high positions everywhere around Europe governments and banking system. They will NEVER allow a default when they probably have stakes with Goldman Sachs. PS: Is there a way to properly quote?
This does not bodes well: "Mr Draghi has been dogged by controversy over the accounting tricks conducted by Italy and other nations on the eurozone periphery as they tried to squeeze into the single currency a decade ago. By using complex derivatives, Italy and Greece were able to slim down the apparent size of their government debt, which euro rules mandated shouldn't be above 60 per cent of the size of the economy. And the brains behind several of those derivatives were the men and women of Goldman Sachs. The bank's traders created a number of financial deals that allowed Greece to raise money to cut its budget deficit immediately, in return for repayments over time. In one deal, Goldman channelled $1bn of funding to the Greek government in 2002 in a transaction called a cross-currency swap. On the other side of the deal, working in the National Bank of Greece, was Petros Christodoulou, who had begun his career at Goldman, and who has been promoted now to head the office managing government Greek debt. Lucas Papademos, now installed as Prime Minister in Greece's unity government, was a technocrat running the Central Bank of Greece at the time."
As for a United States of Europe, if it happens I don't think it would be as much "capitalistic centered" as it is with the USA. There's no aversion to communism here as there is in the US (maybe with exception of ex-communist countries...). You can see by the latest announcements, they are all pushing to put some of the burden onto the private finance sector, and for a 50% cut on Greece debt. The social welfare is wide and ample in most countries, works great and they won't be taking that out anytime soon. Pension ages yes, but that's something related to general life expectancy. That is a change hard enough to push through, I don't think they will touch education and health care, for example, specially when these same leaders experienced their lives through these social benefits. And personally, I think the European Union does a very good job. Most their so called directives do serve the common good. There are some exceptions when they go a bit too far, like on the dictating how vegetables should look like, but these are exceptions. One of the directives I find most interesting is that you can drink water anywhere on Europe, for example. Anywhere on the streets. If the water is not drinkable, it should be stated somewhere clearly. There are many related to the environment, trash collection, pollution, and so on. I would trust more a central European government than an Italian one, for example.
To make things worse, he owns the only private TV channels all over Italy. And 75% of Italians main news source is TV. So you have Mediaset (private and owned by Berlusconi's group) and RAI (state channel, which responds, ultimately, to Prime Minister, currently Berlusconi). There was even a video circulating on Facebook from RAI where they "played down" and completely inverted the meaning of the Merkel-Sarkozy "smirk" that happened recently. It's like Murdoch being president of the USA. Opposition to him is growing though, thanks to young people and the internet. TV is still widely used because there are lots of old people. But those with around 20 or 30 already get lots of their news from the internet. So there's hope. Plus, he's 75 years old, I really hope he will get out of politics soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_personal_computer All they did was merge all these different technologies into a single, barely affordable, phone. And market it really really really well. I agree the iPhone is easier to use than a Blackberry. But it's not "revolutionary easier". Just "a bit easier", not enough to grant it a game changer status. (For me, at least). :)
All this "destroy the Android" babble from late Jobs is quite infuriating, since the iPhone itself was built on ideas already used on established products (Palm, Blackberries and Pocket PC), innovations which Jobs himself mentions on that 2007 iPhone presentation. Just adding a touch screen to it is not revolutionary, Apple was just "the first" to do it. The Macintosh in 1984 was revolutionary. The biggest problem is that the cult of Apple allows them to be considered an almost "legitimate patent troll" and get away with it.
*edit: which in turn was just the spark to fire the discontent against the Tunisian goverment that was already at a boiling point due to Wikileaks embassy cables.
Either way, it's great to add competition to Dropbox, maybe they might lower their prices.
For international transactions, it's just a matter of ruling if you are taxing inbound or outbound transactions.