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This, gotten from the comments at TFA, has a bit more details on it.

Apparently it's a mix of both, a structural problem with the fact it needs to grant the Calendar class special priviledges to access ZoneInfo objects, and merely a common pitfall in that nobody had thought to limit those priviledges before to *just* accessing the calendar.

Beautiful stuff they used in the exploit, though, it's as if they actively tried to use every OOP-derived feature in Java on it at the same time ;)

When you load it into RAM, you have made a copy for purposes of copyright law.

That is simply not true. See, e.g. the Cartoon Networks which held that copies in RAM and buffered for 1.2 seconds were not in RAM for a long enough period to be considered "copies" under the Copyright Act. I personally think that copies which exist only in RAM should not be considered copies at all, but we would need the Supreme Court to reach that question to know for sure.

I took pictures of this last year, old news. http://tastypint.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-street-view-rickshaw.html I wish I had a voice on the Internet.

Just out of curiosity,Ray, if one were so inclined, how could an individual (or group) file an amicus brief with a court? Is there a boilerplate example to reference?

There's no such thing as boilerplate, the way I look at it. Legal documents have consequences, and need to be drafted with reference to the situation at hand. I have actually submitted an amicus brief, and a revised amicus brief, in this very case, on the subject of the due process evaluation of the RIAA's statutory damages theory. Here and here.

Just out of curiosity,Ray, if one were so inclined, how could an individual (or group) file an amicus brief with a court? Is there a boilerplate example to reference?

There's no such thing as boilerplate, the way I look at it. Legal documents have consequences, and need to be drafted with reference to the situation at hand. I have actually submitted an amicus brief, and a revised amicus brief, in this very case, on the subject of the due process evaluation of the RIAA's statutory damages theory. Here and here.

Linux is notoriously finicky when it comes to hardware, windows has always been more forgiving, and even Vista at release had fewer hardware issues than Linux has always been stuck with.

In my anecdotal experience, Windows and Linux can both be finicky with hardware. Upgrading Windows frequently makes too-old or too-new peripherals useless (usually due to driver issues). Linux (and BSD) drivers typically, though certainly not always, continue working or get updated across operating system upgrades.

My company uses just one image for at least 50,000 pc's, maybe more, about 10 different manufacturers and about 20 models apiece. So, yeah. It's harder to set up in Vista, but it is doable.

Which doesn't jibe with this:

I can't wait till Windows7 gets cleared for my environment so I can start playing with the server side tools, since Vista will never be approved and the server tools don't work for making XP images (they work for deployment though).

So the server tools don't work for making XP images, Vista will never be allowed on your 50 000 PCs, but everything will work great on yet-to-be-released Win7? Sounds like marketing talk, not experience. In case you're young, MS is famous for saying their next version will be so much better, old-timers have learned to wait for proof.

If you try to go with imagine for Linux without a mass deployment tool to save time (and therefore money), you are talking hundreds of images to deploy Linux vs just one for Windows. I guess you'd have to be rolling your own mass produced images (like I do, heh) to understand how much manpower that is going to add to the sale of a Linux PC.

So mass deploying Linux without a mass deployment tool is time consuming? Well, yes, but then so is mass deploying Windows without a mass deployment tool. You would have to explore mass deployment tools to understand how much manpower they save.

Whoever modded this as flamebait obviously didn't get the joke. Everything you need to understand is is contained in the following link: Dr. Cow Nut Cheese - A Tasty Splurge.

I've been subjected to raw food. Some of the desserts are actually quite amazing, I would buy them on purpose, but basically everything else is a pathetic imitation. I belong to the camp that believes that if you have to pretend a nut or a bean or is meat, that's a sign that you need to eat some meat. If you're happy eating nuts and beans and grains, right on. I do like a nice salad... especially with bacon.

1. No reliable sound system,

Alsa?

no reliable unified software audio mixing,

PulseAudio?

Did you miss the word "reliable" in GP's post?

Oh, but the problem is that the real reasons why working in Ubuntu is better than working on Windows can't be seen in screenies. It's the sum of many small great touches :)

Overall, I've been a Linux user (at home) since 1993. I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work since 2002- until January this year. (My new boss isn't a fan.) So I'm in a great position to do a feature comparison of all the things that function better for doing work in Linux than with Windows.

Check out this blog: Linux in Exile (updated about once a week)

The difference between Windows and Linux has been shocking, to say the least. Since I find it interesting when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for me to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years.

How amazing is it to have a vibrating belt (of all things) that helps one make up for an astounding lack of reliable directional sense, when there's apparently stuff out there that can help you make up for a far more commonplace lack of reliable ESP?

http://jointreconstudygroup.blogspot.com/ : "DARPA, Army fund Telepathic Research"

What supported Windows configuration requires the use of RegEdit?

RegEdit in Windows is analogous to about:config in Firefox: it's the place where the unsupported/unworking configuration options go. It's not intended to be used by end-users, ever. RegEdit only ships with the OS for two reasons:
1) To help advanced users troubleshoot issues
2) To allow the registry to be exported/backed-up. (And now that Windows makes internal Registry backups, *and* ships with good backup software, this reason is legacy at this point.)

When I wanted to change the DPI on my laptop running Ubuntu 9.04, and "DPI" didn't show up in the Help system, I Googled it. The first and third Google results reference either config files and the CLI. The second was totally irrelevant. It wasn't until the fourth result that the *correct* (GUI) solution is listed. (At which point, knowing that a GUI for this exists, I just got pissed that it didn't show up in the online help at all!)

Then you set it and all your applications are in the correct DPI except the one you actually cared about (Firefox).

There is a bunch of sadhus in India called the Aghoris, who live near crematoriums around the river Ganga. Their staple food includes remnants of cremated bodies.

Food (I know :P) for thought:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/10/28/documentary-takes-a-bite-out-of-cannibals/
http://venom-mylife.blogspot.com/2008/05/aghori-sadhus-in-india-practise.html

We're pretty much on the same page. I just lean towards the Jung/collective unconscious camp of myths, rather than the retelling of historical events. But hey, I've seen sand dollars in the Sahara, and a catastrophic flood sure fits the bill.

Good link on Aboriginal mythology! Didn't know any of that. Thanks.

Some people seem to find the BoycottNovell website interesting, Bryan Lunduke for one and the Linux Haters blog, which is recommended by none other than Miguel de Icaza

"I was getting a little worried that I wouldn't have something appropriate to close of K-pride week with, but then sweet feces rained down from heaven"

Well, I certainly appreciate Cliffski's support, but he's not me (HJ). I'm me.

Yes, Ray did respond to my question -- but part of his response exhibits precisely the disingenuous splitting-hairs kind of reasoning that gives lawyers a bad name* and was the motivation for my original question. It may very well be literally true that he has not expressed any opinion about the underlying case. But I have a very hard time believing he is truly "not familiar with the facts of this particular case," given how many comments he has made on his blog and in various Slashdot forums on the subject. Perhaps not familiar in the sense of "sat in the courtroom and took notes," but in the ordinarily understood sense of the word? Give me a break.

I have not seen a single instance in which Ray or Ty Rogers ever admitted that a single argument raised by the plaintiffs in this case had any merit whatsoever. As an experienced, knowledgeable legal professional who has no direct attachment to this case, I find it incredibly hard to believe that such a completely unilateral view would be objectively justified.

Whether or not Ray (or anyone else) thinks I'm a troll is something I can't do much about. As I said, I can't stand the plaintiffs' tactics in this case, or in any of the dozens of others I've read about. (And I've submitted something to the Librarian of Congress every time the DMCA review / comment period has comes up, arguing exactly along those lines.) I'm on the same side as (almost) everyone else here. But I get a bit riled up when someone claims to have a dispassionate, objective view of something, when that view ends up being so uniformly one-sided. /HJ

* With one exception: when it's your lawyer, arguing against the other guys' lawyer(s) in court. In that case, both sides act as disingenuous as the law will allow, and justice is supposed to come out of that tension. In theory, anyway.

In sorting a terabyte, Hadoop beat Google's time (62 versus 68 seconds). For the petabyte sort, Google was faster (6 hours versus 16 hours). The hardware is of course different. (from Yahoo's blog and Google's blog)

Terabyte:
    Machines: Yahoo 1,407 Google 1,000
    Disks: Yahoo 5,628 Google 12,000
Petabyte:
    Machines: Yahoo 3658 Google 4000
    Disks: 14,632 Google: 48,000

Yahoo published their network specifications, but Google did not. Clearly the network speed is very relevant.

The two take away points are: Hadoop is getting faster and it is closing in on Google's performance and scalability.

I'm sorry, but Slony-I is not a serious replication solution.

I believe the PostgreSQL devs themselves have said as much (officially, on their site). They've also said that the reason for this situation is that the project had previously taken the stance that it should not include its own replication, but should instead allow third-parties to implement replication as they see fit.

However, they've now said that, since this hasn't worked so well in practice, the next version of PostgreSQL WILL include direct, built-in support for basic replication, as well as making sure that heavyweight, third-party replication solutions are still supported.

Either way, I don't think these replication issues are a good enough reason to use MySQL instead. Worst case scenario, there ARE good replication options for PostgreSQL. There are even third-party products out there that can replicate from Oracle to PostgreSQL. Interestingly, that particular solution was targeted at MySQL first, as it has similar issues.

Google's sorting results from last yeat (link) are much faster; they did a petabyte in 362 minutes, or 2.8 TB/sec. They minute sort didn't exist last year, but Google did 1TB in 68 seconds last year, so I think it may be safe to assume that they could do 1 TB in under a minute this year. Google just hasn't submitted any of their runs to the competition.

From the sort benchmark page, the list the winning run as Yahoo's 100TB run, leaving out the 1PB run; that implies the 1PB run didn't conform to the rules, or was late, or something.

People have commented that this is a "who has the biggest cluster" competition; the sort benchmark also includes the 'penny' sort, which is how much can you sort for 1 penny of computer time (assuming your machine lasts 3 years), and 'Joule' sort, how much energy does it take you to sort a set amount of data. Not surprisingly, the big clusters appear to be neither cost efficient nor energy efficient.

well, actually... i sort of do. look, google has already reported on sorting 1 PB in 6 hours on a 4000 node cluster. their implementation is in C++. yahoo's result is 16.25 hours on a 3800 node cluster and hadoop is written in java. even taking into account the 200 node difference, yahoo's implementation is ~2.6 times slower than google's. it may not all be java's fault, but still.

Is this the kind of justice we can expect in America? Having your life financially ruined by astronomical damages for copying songs?! How can any sane judge with any sense of justice even allow this to continue?

This particular judge seems to be aware of the problem. On September 24, 2008, he wrote:

"The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer to peer network cases.... The defendant is an individual, a consumer. She is not a business. She sought no profit from her acts..... [T]he damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs."

If you're unsure of how to make a copy for yourself if you'd like to do such a thing, visit this site which explains how to download Youtube videos.

It's actually a little piece of javascript that you throw on your bookmark bar and click whenever you're on a Youtube video page and you want to download that video. It's damned handy.

"Army Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, told an audience attending the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco in April that about 20 billion e-mails are sent globally every day, of which 65 percent to 70 percent are spam."

That's a terribly low estimate. Postini processes upwards of 3bn emails per day, of which over 95% is spam. And that's a tiny, tiny portion of global email traffic.

Blanket spam solutions are an ongoing battle with ever-evolving methods - not a "we'll buy this thing for $100m and then it will Just Work." There are filtering and archiving services that spend their energy battling spammers every day. I don't understand why the DoD would want to pay for someone to create and maintain a custom infrastructure, much less take on the responsibility of reacting to new spam methods for a single customer that generates only 50m emails per day.

Moreso, the effectiveness of a spam filtering solution is dependent on the richness of the IP blocklists it maintains plus the header, attachment, and spam content definitions. Why start from scratch when there are rich data sets that these services have been building for years?

Postini does this well.
Exchange Hosted Filtering does this well.
The DoD or whoever it hires will never do this well.

This is one area of IT best left to the pros or client-side filters customized to the specific end-user.

Bargain with a service for a few dollars a year per end-user and it'll be 7 years before you approach that $100m price tag, which I'm sure doesn't include servicing the equipment or adding new features.

What a complete waste of taxpayer's money.

Did an analysis of the figures, mostly because there was none to be found. There's actually a pretty striking exponential relationship between speed and adoption. Here's a graph:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lhmAHZ1VwRE/Sg2k-WLthEI/AAAAAAAAACk/iub7fBGjcfQ/s1600-h/results.png

Did an analysis of the figures, mostly because there was none to be found. There's actually a pretty striking exponential relationship between speed and adoption. Here's a graph:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lhmAHZ1VwRE/Sg2k-WLthEI/AAAAAAAAACk/iub7fBGjcfQ/s1600-h/results.png

If you really think that users can 'enhance' anything than you inexperienced, uninformed or just plain stupid. ...thinking that random users will enhance your game is like thinking that DIY bike enthusiast can beat Yamaha. You will wreck your game period, but may be we have a different game in mind..

Excluding your user base from the possibility of creating content because of your preconceived notions shows a lack of forethought and imagination.

Ah, what am I saying. We all know that users can't create content that's worth a damn, especially not for free.

Those examples are fan creations for a game that's more-or-less a niche game that does not have top-end graphics. You really believe there's no talent in an audience many hundreds of time the size? Good thing you're not in charge...

Gartner also made the case that EU governments should not abandon open standards, but rather redefine open standards by removing royalty free use. Thats basically tossing the success story of the Internet out the window and still using it as branding name for the new EIFv2 "European Interoperability Framework" See EU-commission pages at: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728 and a post about it here: http://bosson.blogspot.com/2009/05/stealing-free-from-open-standards.html

Sometimes, those IQ quiz sites use your phone number to initiate a monthly charge on your phone bill.

For analysis, please see: http://privacylog.blogspot.com/2009/01/security-hole-in-sms-spam-websites.html

Also, this page shows you how to initiate these charges to arbitrary phone numbers due to an utter failure of security on these sites.

My statement made it's own case. Re-read it.

But since you're a little dense, I'll expand it for you: a 12oz can of Coke has approx 150 calories. A 20oz bottle has 240 calories. Even TWO BOTTLES PER DAY is not going to make anyone obese.

As for broccoli, too much of that or anything will make you overweight. It may be more difficult, but point being, if the issue is that certain items should be taxed because those items can bring about obesity, well, then ALL FOOD, not just Coca-Cola would have to have taxes levied. Google around and you'll see many examples, including this one.

http://jawbonejournal.blogspot.com/2007/08/sugar-vs-broccoli-does-it-really-matter.html

As "danomac" stated rather concisely, it's not rocket science.

Other than a minimal amount of safety regulations to prevent injury and/or illness due to faulty packaging or spoiled food product, the government should stay out of the business of telling us what and what not to eat. We can, should and must be allowed to make our own decisions.

Since Sun has had mysql they've had a disasterous release, a mass exodus of their mysql developers, and at least three forks. If that is great management and strong leadership then I stand corrected.

Have you ever read Monty's blog?

MySQL AB was the reason that the release wasn't up to Monty's standards and they had done that in the past before Sun bought them. It wasn't Sun that made it that way.

One would have thought that MySQL AB (now the MySQL department at Sun) should have learned something from our too early release of MySQL 5.0 but unfortunately this is not the case.

So yeah, technically they are Sun employees now, but it was the former MySQL AB guys doing the same thing they did before that caused the release to be the way it was.

The problems Monty seems to have exist before Sun bought them. I remember rumors and news stories about spats with Mickos all th time. Monty created MySQL, then got VC money and didn't have the same amount of control he had. When Sun bought them, he was hoping things would change but they didn't.

Seems like if Monty wanted to be happy, he never should have received outside financing and accepted people he couldn't fire to the companies executive team. Unfortunately, you can be extremely rich or you can be extremely happy, you can't always be both.

What mass exodus? I've only read of maybe 3 people leaving.

I didn't think I needed to expand on Oracle since everyone is speculating about whether mysql even has a future.

Yes you do. Just because people are speculating about something doesn't make it reasonable. Oracle already owns InnoDB which is an important part of MySQL and hasn't used it to screw over MySQL. They also own Berkley DB and have said they will not kill MySQL.

According to Google: in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query. Another article points out that Google datacenters are more efficient than anything anyone else has published for a colo/datacenter.

Typical scare articles forget to divide by the number of users. For example, 50MW used to serve 10M users is 5w/user. Some TVs use that when they are "off".

Looking at the Google status page at http://www.google.com/appsstatus# has some live info.

ZDNet is reporting that any traffic that is routed through AT&T was not able to get to Google
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18064

Google says that a traffic overload in Asia was the problem:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/this-is-your-pilot-speaking-now-about.html

So it looks like a switch/router issue caused a long packet path with caused timeouts which caused unhappy users.

Nice try - but the term 'piracy' has been associated with 'media' for nearly two centuries.

Citation needed. Thanks.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
  http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/piracy
  http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2009/04/piracy-as-copyright-infringement.html

... would be the most important in my opinion of "user sophistication", a lot of times google will pull a lot of sites quite frankly should be able to be punished by users by users beign able to filter them out of their search results.

Isn't Search Wiki what you're looking for?

Gibbs said that he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint.

Genetic recipe, not blueprint

Obviously, this was planned by the government to kill us all...

Years ago I built a panoramic, stereographic photography system (spaceshot) and also did a great deal of work with rendering and measuring spaces using stereo images. This leads me to the following theory, which, if Google are NOT doing what I describe here would be pretty damn surprising. J from: http://jerrykew.blogspot.com/ If you have a perfect spherical photo of a city, taken at equidistant intervals, then you have the necessary information (think stereo images) to reverse engineer the 3D form of the city. Google will build a virtual version of every city, and we will click on objects in that 'space' to go to sites. PPC ads will follow in the space, and thus their investment in Google Maps, Earth, Sketchup and Streetview will deliver their returns. I am sure they will be playing with it now in their labs.

Without having RTFA everyone needs to read this: http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/05/what-difference-10-years-make-arizona.html In short, this project is way too expensive (inexplicably so) for its size and is no where near as important as a number of other rail projects.

Is there any kind of Mercurial hosting for open source projects you can recommend?

http://bitbucket.org/

And soon, google code

See: the diary of a rover driver

And indeed you sound like a typical pompous ass. =)

The truth is that although we have made rudimentary steps in brain scanning, there are people who have the ability to recognize microexpressions, involuntary flashes of your true feelings that break through the expression you wear as a mask. First Google result has some details and also appears to be written by a pompous ass, so you should check it out.

This is by no means perfect, but it is light years ahead of any fancy-pants brain scanner that exists right now, and considering that this ability has presumably been present in humans since we learned the art of deception, I'd say it's pretty well-tested--we can all probably point to someone who can tell when we're not happy despite all outward appearances.

At night, there's a small red light in the sky. On that light lives four hundred pounds of thinking metal sent from Earth. I tell that metal what to do, and it does it.

Scott Maxwell, one of the rover's drivers, has a blog detailing the events of the mission exactly five years behind schedule.

By the way, here's an article I wrote for the Journal of Internet Law, which discusses, at page 19, the main issue in the Cartoon Networks case which is "When is a copy transitory?" And here's an editorial comment I wrote for my blog after learning of the Cartoon Networks decision.

By the way, here's an article I wrote for the Journal of Internet Law, which discusses, at page 19, the main issue in the Cartoon Networks case which is "When is a copy transitory?" And here's an editorial comment I wrote for my blog after learning of the Cartoon Networks decision.

The solution is obvious

It's very nice! ---- Free Share Sex 18 Girls Porn Videos. http://zord800.blogspot.com/ No Signup,No username.

Rackable is a small server vendor with revenues in the hundreds of millions while they big boys in that space (HP, IBM, Dell, Sun) are in the billions.

They build x86 based rack servers. They're focus seems to have been in high density rack systems. I think one of their first/biggest innovation was creating a half depth chassis so you could put two servers back to back in a 1u space leaving a hot air plenum in the middle to keep things from getting overheated. They also have 12V Motherboards like Google uses on their systems.

The goal of Rackable isn't to sell you one x86 server, it's to give you a solution including a rack full of their servers. That seems to have also been the focus of SGI lately. They went from big single systems to clustered super computers. So the deal appears to make sense. I'm sure there's a lot of good talent and patents that Rackable could use to help it become a bigger player.

In 2007 Rackable's 4 biggest clients were Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook.

The name change might be good because SGI is a more recognizable name in the industry. I think some people see Rackable as an x86 server vendor but they're really a server farm vendor.

The past couple of years haven't been great for Rackable with some pretty big losses in proportion to their revenue so they need to make some bigger moves and this might do the trick.

Richard Bejtlich from the TaoSecurity Blog was invited by NSA's Tony Sager to visit the CDX in person:

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2009/05/thoughts-on-2009-cdx.html

Bejtlich mentions that CDX participants were given a budget for the exercise. This means it cost them "marks" (in exercise language) to replace the Windows images NSA provided with alternative systems like FreeBSD or Linux. That decision caused the team to have less resources for other tasks.

The Army didn't win just because they used Linux. Bejtlich posts reasons why they won here:

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2009/05/lessons-from-cdx.html

Richard Bejtlich from the TaoSecurity Blog was invited by NSA's Tony Sager to visit the CDX in person:

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2009/05/thoughts-on-2009-cdx.html

Bejtlich mentions that CDX participants were given a budget for the exercise. This means it cost them "marks" (in exercise language) to replace the Windows images NSA provided with alternative systems like FreeBSD or Linux. That decision caused the team to have less resources for other tasks.

The Army didn't win just because they used Linux. Bejtlich posts reasons why they won here:

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2009/05/lessons-from-cdx.html

If there were one change I'd have made to Fallout 3, I'd have included the ability to have lovers/wives/etc. There are enough subplots in the game involving family, enough families, heck the whole Republic of Dave thing, that it would have added another element to the game. The unfortunate problem with this is that American society is prudish and stunted when it comes to sexuality, to the point where what is considered "normal" is actually quite unhealthily repressed.

The problem here is that the game is in 3D... The previous iteration of Fallout would let you have non-graphical sex with multiple partners as well as homosexual sex, given that the screen go black and there is barely some comments on your "performance" afterwards... nothing much, but at least you knew what happened...

Now that Fallout is in 3D, having anything close to any sexual relasionship is a big no-no.... why? because americans are scared of sex!

You complain about all those sex games coming from Japan... yet you fail to see that they have much harsher laws... the simple fact that they can't legally show any genitals in a game/comic/movie makes them much more harsher than us...

But all you americans see is the sexual content in some games while most of the games with sexual content in Japan actually uses the sex as a reward for your hard-earned gameplay... just look at Katawa Shoujo, the content that is available for now is not even close to pornographic... the part of the game that has been released (for free) contains nothing of sexual nature... yet it WILL contain pornographic images as a reward to the player who will play hours upon hours to form a relationship with a single character or walk the thin line of the "harem" route... but, as for now, you already have multiple hours of story without even a hint of anything sexual... Still, the game is included in the Japanese pornographic dating-sim game genre wich is extremely hard to get in America.. why? because the ESRB rates those games as "Adult Only" like they should be, no retailer will have a single copy available in his store...

America is scared of censored genitals... just because they imply sex... Even if the average gamer is well over the limit of buying his own porn, he can't buy a game that contains porn because the industry prefers showing mass murdering than scrambled genitals...

What a bunch of pussies(should that be censored?)

European social democracies have been sitting there, giving their citizens a better quality of life than the US, for decades,

Lie. Pew Some guy. Besides that, any EU countries that do come out ahead are tiny little pissant countries compared to US (300 million). Let's hand-pick some US states of similar population and see how you do. Next please.

and there's no reason at all to assume it won't continue.

Bad logic. What would it continue, because it's worked "OK" in the past? False identification of future performance with past performance. The EU did OK post-WW2, during Internet bubble, during worldwide credit bubble, etc... Do you think that means that entitlement policies will _always_ work? Sorry. Doesn't work that way.

As the EU and the world increases in population (poor people breed like rabbits), per-capita productivity will go down. Now tell me how that effects a system where per-capita costs will stay flat or actually rise?

Good luck with that.

(Given how your national debt's going, the US should be more worried about where it will be in five years.)

Agreed. The socialist policies we've implemented will be our doom, as will the military adventurism of the neocons.

How is that an argument _for_ EuroSocialism again?