I have seen bad CD burns from Mitsui Gold, usually on a burner that is not working particularly well or on blank media that is a bit old. However I have never (7 years now) had a Mitsui Gold CD go bad on me in storage.
I suppose it could happen, but BR players generally have quite a bit of firmware upgradeability. I'd bet most if not all could support new encryption schemes via a firmware update.
The stock market over a very long period of time is a good investment. The problem is that this comes with a lot of volatility. Imagine that you are 65 years old and in the current market. You have lost 40% of your accumulated savings this year. And there have been times when it takes a decade to recover.
Can you imagine the anger if the Republicans had gotten their way with the privatization of social security? Even today McCain is still pushing this idea. With traditional pensions dead, and every increasing equity market volatility the idea of a defined benefit social security systems is looking pretty good right now.
Yes, in order to pay for it the cap will have to go. But that is not such a big deal.
The elephant in the room is Medicare. THAT cannot continue its current course.
Well, the problem is more deficit spending rather than the "crushing" national debt. The US pays less than 10% of its national budget on debt service. This is a rather moderate amount and quite sustainable long term.
The problem is that the debt is increasing too fast. Much faster than the rate of economic growth. If the debt was growing at a rate lower than the economic growth, no big deal. But at current rates of growth it WILL become crushing.
Most of what makes up the federal budget can be controlled and balanced vs. taxation without too much difficulty. Even social security.
The big exception is Medicare. There is no way that program can continue as structured. There will have to be major changes in that area. Social security isn't going away, but Medicare will be changed considerably.
There are a few other problems, such as the balance of trade deficit. However I believe that this is mostly a neutral thing economically, and is likely to gradually decline as China and India become more developed their citizens will be less likely willing to accept substandard wages and working conditions. At the same time these countries are going to need massive infrastructure investments which will reduce their foreign exchange accounts.
Energy prices will go higher, but as they do alternatives will come into play.
Germans shmermans. It's simple. Science education post-Cold War has gone into the crapper. There were plenty of good American engineers on the Apollo project, drawn from all aspects of the US military industrial complex. My dad was one; he was on the design panel for the Saturn V booster combustion chamber. When I was a grad student it seemed that half of the PhD engineers in the country were getting some sort of funding related to the space program. I was working on modeling chemical reactions at the surface of the space shuttle heat shield tiles during re-entry. The guy next to me was writing code for deep space navigation routines for Pioneer and Voyager.
Now the only area that gets this sort of support is in biotech. Want funding? Tie your project to cancer research. Otherwise get a law degree.
"If you wish to argue that it is, please explain where the information is that makes terrorism on commercial airlines a valid and imminent threat. Please explain all the wasted money by DHS and TSA."
The wasted money is due to a very old phenomena - the use of the existence of external treats trumped up by political leaders in order to justify their positions of power. The threats do not have to be real, and they do not have to be large. They just need to be wrapped in the powerful totems of nationalism by the ruling parties. It has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the intelligence community. It has everything to do with the greed of the politicians running the country and the apathy of the electorate.
At the lower levels of the intelligence agencies I believe there are a lot of good and dedicated people. The administrators however serve at the whim of politicians who require conclusions that suit their own agendas. Unfortunately this results in disasters like the war in Iraq.
"Basically, after those and other brilliant blunders regarding information, I do not believe that the US government has any clue where it's collective ass is, never mind how to scratch it when it comes to terrorist activities and communications."
There are two items you are commenting on, the WMA / Iraq issue, and 9/11. The first was obviously a politically motivated attempt to find an excuse, not an intelligence failure. The second was an intelligence failure.
The problem with your analysis is that it sets an impossibly high standard for success. One mistake over a period of a decade and you are labeled a total incompetent. The fact of the matter is that no humanly devised system can achieve perfection. This is why terrorists will always find a way to wreak havok given enough time.
It is that - just the Army doing their job. Evaluation of security implications means analysis of capabilities. Is twitter capable of being used for nefarious purposes? Of course.
If you bother to read TFA you'll see that the same analysis is being applied to several other ubiquitous technologies including GPS.
This sort of thing is very routine; nothing to see here, move along.
What would have been the outcome if Franklin, Washington, Huntington, Jefferson, Monroe, Adams and countless others throughout US History decided that the solution to being oppressed is to cut and run?
Yes, there are a lot of abuses. Is it better elsewhere? Doubtful, every place on the planet has problems. Is bugging out better than staying and working to make it better? Has that EVER worked? I don't think so.
Well, the issue is people are buying larger TVs and monitors. Back in the day my biggest CRT was 25". Now my biggest LCD is 65". The power consumption is similar between the 25" CRT and the 65" LCD.
For example, you still seem to be missing his entire point. Solving "the problems of identity matching" won't make TSA any more effective because TSA is not the effective part of airline security.
Wrong. Identity matching is one of the most important reasons that the TSA is so ineffective.
"the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. 'Spend the rest of your money [elsewhere, for better effects.]'"
Like this was an original conclusion. This has been widely documented elsewhere, many times, and over a period of years. For example:
Like I said, Bruce is missing something here. His conclusions are not original, and their is much he is missing, including the problems of identity matching that are at the forefront of much research in the area.
Exactly right. Bruce is missing something that he normally understands quite well. Security begins and ends with the individual. Anyone trying anything funny on an airplane for the next 30 years will immediately get swarmed by the rest of the passengers who won't give a shit for their own lives so long as they can prevent the terrorist from carrying out his plan.
There is no system or process you can build that is stronger or more robust than this.
You can run a data center cheaper at a cooler temperature simply by having better insulation.
That assumes that the outdoor temperature is higher than the indoor temperature. My bet is that a data center run at 80 F in the Pacific Northwest would be warmer inside for most of the year than outside. Insulation under those conditions could actually increase cooling costs.
Well, there is occasional enforcement of the prevailing wage requirement (see below). Tack on another 10% fee to fund enforcement, add a H1-B Czar and make violations a felony and I think we would be good to go.
Labor Violation
R Square, a company that provides IT services to large and mid-sized companies, has agreed to pay $95,711 to 12 non-immigrant workers, according to a statement by the U.S. Department of Labor.
The Department of Labor reports that an investigation turned up the fact that R Square had underpaid computer professionals between July, 2006, and July, 2007. "This case demonstrates our commitment to enforce the H-1B provisions which guard against employers undercutting American workers by underpaying temporary foreign workers," Pat Reilly, district director of the Wage and Hour division's southern New Jersey office, said in a prepared statement.
Officers of the company, which has its offices at 5 Independence Way, were not available for comment by press time.
R Square, 5 Independence Way, Suite 150, , Princeton 08540; 609-520-8204; fax, 609-520-8204. Anil Kumar. Home page: www.r-square.com.
The main problem with the gold standard is that it ties the amount of money available to the economy to the amount of gold available to governments. Well guess what this has nothing to do with the size of the economy. Especially in an economy that is very service oriented. Gold is a natural resource that is becoming increasingly difficult to dig out of the ground. People tend to hoard gold (see Roosevelt's gold confiscation in 1933) taking it out of circulation. Gold has other uses - jewelry, inert plating in electronics, etc. that assure competition with its use as an asset backing currency.
All of this means that use of a gold standard will place a deflationary bias on money supply. This is very dangerous; it causes a positive feedback loop during recessions intensifying them and making recovery difficult. This is not an acceptable way to operate, and been shown to be so by some really severe depressions in the US over the past 200 years, many triggered by a mismatch between the money supply constrained by the gold standard and the actual size of the economy and rate of economic growth.
I know you Ayn Rand fanboys like the idea of a gold standard, but sorry it is just a really bad idea.
And if you are going to complain about fractional reserve banking have you considered just where a bank is going to actually generate any income if this business model is outlawed? What is exactly the purpose of a bank in the first play if there is no business model? Better count on stuffing your money in a mattress because there won't be any banks.
Now there is a problem of governments getting carried away putting too much money into circulation etc. but the solution to that is verty simple. Make the damn government run a balanced budget. Of course NeoCons don't like that because they are tied to the insane idea of reducing taxation increases tac revenues (NOT!!!).. too bad.
Quite a few of the larger banks avoided this mess too. JP Morgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are among the most notable. It is clearly a case that badly managed banks who ignored historically proven risk management practices to chase increased returns got burnt. NOBODY WAS FORCING THESE BANKS TO DO THIS.
Yes, it was public policy to encourage lending into inner cities. But NINAs, interest-only, HELOCs and ARMs? I DON'T THINK SO, and the fact is that these wacky loans are the biggest part of this.
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen bad CD burns from Mitsui Gold, usually on a burner that is not working particularly well or on blank media that is a bit old. However I have never (7 years now) had a Mitsui Gold CD go bad on me in storage.
I suppose it could happen, but BR players generally have quite a bit of firmware upgradeability. I'd bet most if not all could support new encryption schemes via a firmware update.
The stock market over a very long period of time is a good investment. The problem is that this comes with a lot of volatility. Imagine that you are 65 years old and in the current market. You have lost 40% of your accumulated savings this year. And there have been times when it takes a decade to recover.
That is a very very scary proposition.
Can you imagine the anger if the Republicans had gotten their way with the privatization of social security? Even today McCain is still pushing this idea. With traditional pensions dead, and every increasing equity market volatility the idea of a defined benefit social security systems is looking pretty good right now.
Yes, in order to pay for it the cap will have to go. But that is not such a big deal.
The elephant in the room is Medicare. THAT cannot continue its current course.
Well, the problem is more deficit spending rather than the "crushing" national debt. The US pays less than 10% of its national budget on debt service. This is a rather moderate amount and quite sustainable long term.
The problem is that the debt is increasing too fast. Much faster than the rate of economic growth. If the debt was growing at a rate lower than the economic growth, no big deal. But at current rates of growth it WILL become crushing.
Most of what makes up the federal budget can be controlled and balanced vs. taxation without too much difficulty. Even social security.
The big exception is Medicare. There is no way that program can continue as structured. There will have to be major changes in that area. Social security isn't going away, but Medicare will be changed considerably.
There are a few other problems, such as the balance of trade deficit. However I believe that this is mostly a neutral thing economically, and is likely to gradually decline as China and India become more developed their citizens will be less likely willing to accept substandard wages and working conditions. At the same time these countries are going to need massive infrastructure investments which will reduce their foreign exchange accounts.
Energy prices will go higher, but as they do alternatives will come into play.
Germans shmermans. It's simple. Science education post-Cold War has gone into the crapper. There were plenty of good American engineers on the Apollo project, drawn from all aspects of the US military industrial complex. My dad was one; he was on the design panel for the Saturn V booster combustion chamber. When I was a grad student it seemed that half of the PhD engineers in the country were getting some sort of funding related to the space program. I was working on modeling chemical reactions at the surface of the space shuttle heat shield tiles during re-entry. The guy next to me was writing code for deep space navigation routines for Pioneer and Voyager.
Now the only area that gets this sort of support is in biotech. Want funding? Tie your project to cancer research. Otherwise get a law degree.
"If you wish to argue that it is, please explain where the information is that makes terrorism on commercial airlines a valid and imminent threat. Please explain all the wasted money by DHS and TSA."
The wasted money is due to a very old phenomena - the use of the existence of external treats trumped up by political leaders in order to justify their positions of power. The threats do not have to be real, and they do not have to be large. They just need to be wrapped in the powerful totems of nationalism by the ruling parties. It has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the intelligence community. It has everything to do with the greed of the politicians running the country and the apathy of the electorate.
At the lower levels of the intelligence agencies I believe there are a lot of good and dedicated people. The administrators however serve at the whim of politicians who require conclusions that suit their own agendas. Unfortunately this results in disasters like the war in Iraq.
"Basically, after those and other brilliant blunders regarding information, I do not believe that the US government has any clue where it's collective ass is, never mind how to scratch it when it comes to terrorist activities and communications."
There are two items you are commenting on, the WMA / Iraq issue, and 9/11. The first was obviously a politically motivated attempt to find an excuse, not an intelligence failure. The second was an intelligence failure.
The problem with your analysis is that it sets an impossibly high standard for success. One mistake over a period of a decade and you are labeled a total incompetent. The fact of the matter is that no humanly devised system can achieve perfection. This is why terrorists will always find a way to wreak havok given enough time.
It is that - just the Army doing their job. Evaluation of security implications means analysis of capabilities. Is twitter capable of being used for nefarious purposes? Of course.
If you bother to read TFA you'll see that the same analysis is being applied to several other ubiquitous technologies including GPS.
This sort of thing is very routine; nothing to see here, move along.
Hardly. None of these people were born in England. The first colonies were founded 150 years prior to the American Revolution.
What would have been the outcome if Franklin, Washington, Huntington, Jefferson, Monroe, Adams and countless others throughout US History decided that the solution to being oppressed is to cut and run?
Yes, there are a lot of abuses. Is it better elsewhere? Doubtful, every place on the planet has problems. Is bugging out better than staying and working to make it better? Has that EVER worked? I don't think so.
Well, the issue is people are buying larger TVs and monitors. Back in the day my biggest CRT was 25". Now my biggest LCD is 65". The power consumption is similar between the 25" CRT and the 65" LCD.
The fact that they haven't contacted us proves that they are smarter than we are.
Not to mention that this situation has nothing to do with the state of our copyright system.
I'm 58, and the only black and white things in my dreams are the TVs that I dream about watching when I dream of my youthful experiences.
For example, you still seem to be missing his entire point. Solving "the problems of identity matching" won't make TSA any more effective because TSA is not the effective part of airline security.
Wrong. Identity matching is one of the most important reasons that the TSA is so ineffective.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0UBT/is_/ai_n15662920
Expenses that you pay out of pocket as part of volunteer activities to a not profit organization are generally deductible. The actual time is not.
www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p535.pdf
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p526/ar02.html#d0e867
"the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. 'Spend the rest of your money [elsewhere, for better effects.]'"
Like this was an original conclusion. This has been widely documented elsewhere, many times, and over a period of years. For example:
http://www.dawn.com/2002/03/28/int8.htm
Like I said, Bruce is missing something here. His conclusions are not original, and their is much he is missing, including the problems of identity matching that are at the forefront of much research in the area.
http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MSP.2006.169
I would be much more impressed if he added something new and meaningful to the discussion.
Exactly right. Bruce is missing something that he normally understands quite well. Security begins and ends with the individual. Anyone trying anything funny on an airplane for the next 30 years will immediately get swarmed by the rest of the passengers who won't give a shit for their own lives so long as they can prevent the terrorist from carrying out his plan.
There is no system or process you can build that is stronger or more robust than this.
You can run a data center cheaper at a cooler temperature simply by having better insulation.
That assumes that the outdoor temperature is higher than the indoor temperature. My bet is that a data center run at 80 F in the Pacific Northwest would be warmer inside for most of the year than outside. Insulation under those conditions could actually increase cooling costs.
Well, there is occasional enforcement of the prevailing wage requirement (see below). Tack on another 10% fee to fund enforcement, add a H1-B Czar and make violations a felony and I think we would be good to go.
Labor Violation
R Square, a company that provides IT services to large and mid-sized companies, has agreed to pay $95,711 to 12 non-immigrant workers, according to a statement by the U.S. Department of Labor.
The Department of Labor reports that an investigation turned up the fact that R Square had underpaid computer professionals between July, 2006, and July, 2007. "This case demonstrates our commitment to enforce the H-1B provisions which guard against employers undercutting American workers by underpaying temporary foreign workers," Pat Reilly, district director of the Wage and Hour division's southern New Jersey office, said in a prepared statement.
Officers of the company, which has its offices at 5 Independence Way, were not available for comment by press time.
R Square, 5 Independence Way, Suite 150, , Princeton 08540; 609-520-8204; fax, 609-520-8204. Anil Kumar. Home page: www.r-square.com.
study Jabberwocky's code in order to learn the logic patterns used to 'woo the ladies'.
Since Captain Picard is bald in the 23rd century it appears this idea went nowhere.
The main problem with the gold standard is that it ties the amount of money available to the economy to the amount of gold available to governments. Well guess what this has nothing to do with the size of the economy. Especially in an economy that is very service oriented. Gold is a natural resource that is becoming increasingly difficult to dig out of the ground. People tend to hoard gold (see Roosevelt's gold confiscation in 1933) taking it out of circulation. Gold has other uses - jewelry, inert plating in electronics, etc. that assure competition with its use as an asset backing currency.
All of this means that use of a gold standard will place a deflationary bias on money supply. This is very dangerous; it causes a positive feedback loop during recessions intensifying them and making recovery difficult. This is not an acceptable way to operate, and been shown to be so by some really severe depressions in the US over the past 200 years, many triggered by a mismatch between the money supply constrained by the gold standard and the actual size of the economy and rate of economic growth.
I know you Ayn Rand fanboys like the idea of a gold standard, but sorry it is just a really bad idea.
And if you are going to complain about fractional reserve banking have you considered just where a bank is going to actually generate any income if this business model is outlawed? What is exactly the purpose of a bank in the first play if there is no business model? Better count on stuffing your money in a mattress because there won't be any banks.
Now there is a problem of governments getting carried away putting too much money into circulation etc. but the solution to that is verty simple. Make the damn government run a balanced budget. Of course NeoCons don't like that because they are tied to the insane idea of reducing taxation increases tac revenues (NOT!!!).. too bad.
Quite a few of the larger banks avoided this mess too. JP Morgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are among the most notable. It is clearly a case that badly managed banks who ignored historically proven risk management practices to chase increased returns got burnt. NOBODY WAS FORCING THESE BANKS TO DO THIS.
Yes, it was public policy to encourage lending into inner cities. But NINAs, interest-only, HELOCs and ARMs? I DON'T THINK SO, and the fact is that these wacky loans are the biggest part of this.