ancienthart's Prediction Channel

Sorry New Zealanders, even for somebody who doesn't follow the game, traditional performance is again'ya. ;p

The SEC is interested in keeping the market stable, even if it has to do so artificially. Wikipedia argues quite reasonably for short selling in the "Opinions" section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(f...) Also good to have a look in the article for the difference between short selling and naked short selling.)

1: Too much risk of destabilising the entire region, especially since network access is looking to secularise the country anycase.
2: Too expensive. The first war propped up the american economy the first time around, but now there are too many things broken for it to work a second time.

Issue of quality management here.

Why?

Nope, or at least no further than the current limitation to low-power, short-distance transmitters.

The last thing we need is an unregulated free-for-all on the airwaves. We'd probably end up with radio-broadcasts, emergency services and warning systems drowned out by a pervasive digital noise.

As pointed out in the intro, Google's strategy is the software Android platform.
As a basic rule, if you provide a service or software platform that you WANT others to adopt, the worst thing you can do is then compete directly with the retailers or hardware manufacturers. They will perceive this as a threat (correctly) and then refuse to use your service/software.

I imagine that China's economy will still rise after the Olympics, but it won't be the massive burst we've seen over the last few years. From a biological/non-linear dynamics viewpoint, the first burst was when China entered a new economic "region" and had several new opportunities to exploit. (Much like an organism entering a new ecological niche and had lots of food/nutrients to grow explosively with.) This fuelled a rapid growth, but there were probably lots of hidden inefficiencies. E.g. they wanted to use the Olympics as a tourism-attractor, but the behaviour of their police towards the media kinda fought against that.
Now China is beginning to enter the consolidation phase. In this phase, the economic "organisms" have to remove inefficiencies and consolidate cooperative (symbiotic) links with others in the economy. As Frank Herbert pointed out in his Dune book, the biggest problem for any organism is not availability of resources, but competition with members of your own species.
At the tail end of the consolidation phase, we'll see a lot of Chinese companies and economic bodies consumed by their more successful brethren, or just plain straight go bankrupt.

Already started this. The first few days were HELL on my legs, but I quickly acclimatised.

I don't have children, but am a high-school teacher. As someone who deals with 25+ children per lesson with laptops fitted with such filtering technology, I can honestly say two things:
a) Children, especially teenagers, are much better at circumventing technology than adults are at designing such technology. Currently they're using usb-sticks to share content they've downloaded from home/internet cafe's/smart-phones.
b) It's much easier to be computer-savvy and actually monitor the uses children put computers to.
Common tricks kids/teenagers tend to use are in order of increasing tech-savvy: set up their history so that there is always an innocuous site one click backwards; fast use of minimise keyboard shortcuts; quick ctrl-tabs to switch between maximised windows (top window then hids all the windows below); set the toolbar to autohide so window titles are hidden; open lots of windows so that the toolbar only shows a grouped "Internet Explorer" and not site-titles; use Google-cache to bypass site-based filtering software; use of anonymous proxy sites.

Most effective method of controlling such behaviour as a teacher: "Use the computers appropriately or you're logged off, two warnings only. No I don't care if this is for an assignment, if you're mucking around, you're not doing your assignment, and someone else can use the computer."

Bittorrent - useful for downloading massive files that you will watch later, as file parts are (usually) accessed randomly.
Streaming - useful for downloading files that you want to watch immediately, as file parts are accessed sequentially.
As most users (youtube, live broadcasts) prefer to "watch-while-downloading", streaming has the advantage at the moment for video. When the bandwidth, pricing (of network access and content) and licensing of movies becomes available to the common public, bittorrent, or bittorrent-like protocols will start to rise.

The UN may send diplomats or observers, but I doubt anyone wants to start another cold war.

How long did it take for warning labels to appear on cigarettes? Have we banned them?

Hmmm. Phone spam.

But they might lose the conservative vote then ... o_0

Build, no. Maybe offer to sell a seperate solar charger, maybe.

Hard to see it getting off the ground.

You're a captive market once you get on a plane. Of course they'll make you pay.

To put this into context, during Uni, I shared a flat with a young Chinese couple that had immigrated to Australia.

They hadn't even _heard_ of the Tiananmen Square Massacre until they left China.
Add that to Google's filtering within China, and the situation doesn't look good.

I would like to point out that the problem isn't with the amount of food available in the world, but the cost of transport. Even if overproducing countries were to give food away for free, by the time the food got to the areas where it is needed, the cost of transport would put it out of the reach of the typical consumer in that region. This will only get worse with rising oil prices.

It may sound harsh, but the only real solutions to the problems are:

Reversal of local environmental problems.
Investment in agricultural research, education and improvement in semi-marginal areas.
Encouraging migration to more environmentally sustainable regions.
Reduction of population sizes in very marginal areas. (I.e. gradual phasing out of non-emergency food aid, encouraging contraception, and of course migration.)

These measures will be difficult, cause a lot of disruption and emotional anguish, but they are really the only things that will permanently solve the problem.

However, people on all sides of the fence are unlikely to agree to these measures, as either being uneconomic, culturally damaging or even "inhumane". Thought what exactly is humane about giving people food to live in an unsustainable region rather than an immigration pass or a chance at developing a sustainable agriculture I really can't see.