So, you mean we're like the China or Mexico of the gun industry? We can put a bunch of people to work in a factory building stuff because our labor's cheap, but we're not smart enough to do the engineering work? Yeah, that sounds like a big achievement.
While you have a good point about the H&K, your point about personal protection is pretty important: US companies do indeed make a lot of guns for personal/individual buyers, but (the point I was trying to make) they largely fail at making guns for US police agencies and the US military. You'd think government agencies in the gun-happy US wouldn't feel the need to go to anti-gun Europe to get guns, but they do. How many police departments *don't* use Glocks as their standard service-issue handgun? US companies have had decades now to develop competing models, but they've mostly failed. And as for your H&K example, OK, their US subsidiary is apparently doing much of the design, but why is a German-owned company going to be a supplier for the US military at all? It's not like there's a shortage of US-based (entirely), US-owned gun-making companies to go to. But apparently, none of them are good enough for the US military, since they all have recycled versions of ancient designs. It's not just the zillions of AR-15 clones out there, some US gun companies are even making spruced-up versions of the truly ancient M1 Garand rifle from WWII. WTF? Obviously, US gun companies are good at making expensive, boutique guns with oiled black walnut stocks and pearl inlays and other such things, but for designing cutting-edge weaponry to be mass-produced for large military forces, they simply don't have the capability.
It's weird, but it's not a rule by any means. Canada has stronger gun-control laws too, but I don't know of any guns made there. Mexico has very strong gun-control laws, but I don't know of any guns made there either (and if they did, they'd probably suck; Mexico isn't exactly known for Swiss-level precision manufacturing). Japan has ultra-strict laws but they don't make guns either. China probably has very strong gun-control laws too, and while they do make guns, theirs generally suck (crappy AK-47 clones).
Don't misinterpret my post: America *does* make guns, and lots of them. There's still lots of gun makers in America: Mossberg, Remington, Smith & Wesson, Colt, Ruger, Springfield (except for their imported XD line), Kimber, and dozens if not hundreds more smaller companies. I'm just pointing out how many of the better weapons, including many used by police forces and the military, come from Europe, not gun-happy America.
A lot of America's gunmakers (including most of those unnamed smaller companies, and some of the ones I listed) are fairly low-volume, and make specialty guns for niche markets. Ruger, for instance, makes a lot of revolvers, including the very nice GP100.357 Magnum. It's a nice self-defense gun, though a bit large and heavy, but it's not something that you'll see any police forces using. Kimber seems to make nothing but fancy 1911 clones. Again, I'm sure they're very well-made weapons that 1911 collectors will love, but the 1911 design is ancient and obsolete (102 years old now), and not something at all suitable as a modern sidearm for the police or military (they can't even be taken apart quickly and toollessly like a Glock or XD). There's lots of other companies also making 1911 clones. Mossberg and Remington make very reliable shotguns, though Italian-made Benellis look nicer and are preferred by police.
The problem here is that RSA's software actually does do its job, just not 100%. It's more than 0%: their products will, presumably, protect your data and systems from being accessed by most attackers. It just doesn't protect your data and systems from the NSA, because they have a back door. As long as that exploit (and how to do it, not just its existence) doesn't become public knowledge, then RSA's systems will make you secure, in the same way that a strong door with a key-lock makes you safe from everyone except people who have a copy of the key (like whoever built the lock).
Doesn't matter, GP is correct what's important is keeping traffic flowing, not how fast the occupants want to go because they have a faster car. Speed is eventually going to be irrelevant because the car will chose the proper speed for conditions.
You seem to be assuming all cars have the same capabilities. This isn't true. Your car may be able to drive up a hill with no problems, but a fully-loaded 18-wheeler is not going to have that same capability, and you'll want your automated car to pass it so you don't creep up the hill at 10 mph when you could be driving up it at 65 mph (or whatever the highway speed limit is). Same goes for other vehicles, such as trucks and SUVs pulling trailers; a "safe speed for conditions" will still be faster than these vehicles can drive. You want to limit all vehicles to the speed of the slowest vehicle on the road? What if someone's driving a construction or farm vehicle on the road at 5 mph? That's why we need passing, even in a fully driverless world.
As for who's responsible when a driverless car crashes it will probably be the same as when a dog kills someone, the owner of the dog is responsible.
I've almost never heard of owners being imprisoned when their dog killed someone, except for the one exceptional case in California of a couple who basically encouraged their dog to kill a lesbian neighbor of theirs. At best, you can sue the owner for damages or wrongful death, but big deal, good luck collecting on the judgment.
Just because the owner wasn't operating the wheel doesn't make them any less responsible, but just like we have learned to trust cruise control and drive by wire gas pedals to not suddenly accelerate, we will learn to trust driverless cars.
What are you talking about? We just had a big scandal with Toyotas having sudden accelerations. Anyway, these are small potatoes compared to driverless cars. Cruise control just controls the gas pedal, and is easily disengaged (just press the brake pedal), and is mainly there to make highway driving a little easier, but you're still actively in control of the vehicle, with full control being only a tap of the brake (or clutch) pedal away. DbW is doesn't remove control from the driver at all, it just replaces a mechanical cable with an electronic connection. A fully driverless car removes all control from the driver, and there's talk of having them do things which normal drivers simply cannot be trusted to do, such as drive bumper-to-bumper in high-speed caravans. You can't expect a normal driver to take over operation of a vehicle when it's in that state; they'll immediately bump into another car and/or crash.
Maybe he's talking about child protection that's difficult or impossible to disable?
Child protection is all fine and well as long as you can turn that crap off when you don't have children to protect against. It's like those horrible child-proof medicine bottle that senior citizens had so much trouble opening, but were required to have because of some stupid law mandating them. It was such a problem, they finally (after many years) changed the laws so that pharmacies could give easy-to-open bottles to seniors.
Government takes out my brakes? No problem, shift into first and engine-brake going 10 mph down the hill.
Good luck with that at any speed which would have the potential to kill you
The OP is mostly right here. Without brakes, you can slow a car down with engine braking if you have a manual transmission. The question is how fast; if you have plenty of room ahead of you, it's really not a problem; just successively shift to lower gears until you stall out. If you shift to a gear that's too low, you'll overrev the engine and damage it. But it does work well for most cases; the problem is if you're going fast and need to stop quickly to avoid hitting a person or stopped vehicle ahead, then you're screwed, but you can at least slow down a lot so the damage isn't as bad. Also, you can pull the emergency/parking brake to get a little (not a lot) additional braking.
Stuck accelerator? Put 'er in neutral. Or turn off the ignition.
Just make sure to only turn it off one notch instead of two, or else you'll lock the steering which is very bad. With a stick, you can just press the clutch pedal if the accelerator becomes stuck; it's much faster to react this way than to mess with the ignition key (though in the stick, you'll still want to turn off the ignition one notch after pressing the clutch because it'll redline the engine). But it's worse now: with today's push-button-start cars, you'll have to press and hold the "start" button to turn off the engine, which takes several seconds. If there's traffic or pedestrians around, the results could be disastrous. With a manual transmission, you just jam the clutch and brake pedals to immediately disengage the engine and slow the car.
Get caught in a storm or drive into a lake? I can simply unlock the door or roll down my windows and swim out, no power components to sieze up or go inactive.
Car doors can usually be opened from the inside even when locked. An exception are back doors with stupid-child protection engaged
You're both wrong here, at least until the car is entirely full of water. The locks aren't an issue, physics is: you can't open the door when there's water on one side and air on the other, unless you're Hercules or The Hulk. Even The Rock or Conan-era Arnold aren't strong enough. Anyway, I don't think I've ever seen a car where you couldn't manually unlock it from the inside just by pulling a knob or flipping a lever. The power locks just provide an additional way of moving that lever or knob, which is why it's fairly easy to break into a locked car with a coat hangar inserted in the window or door frame.
Save gas? Coast in neutral down large hills.
No, you're wasting gas that way, since you still need some to keep the idle rev. Non-ancient cars will actually shut off fuel injection when gravity happens to temporarily become 'fuel'
You're correct here for any car that has electronic fuel injection (any "non-ancient" car as you put it). But this doesn't have anything to do with government spying either, just like the previous point. I think the OP is just on a tirade about the overall superiority of his car.
Disclaimer: i drive manual transmission too, but for none of the reasons you mention. My reasons are: a) simpler/more robust design (i.e. one less part which can fail fail), b) more control, c) avoid ridicule
You must be a European. Over here in America, almost everyone (except maybe a subset of 16-25 males who are into fast import cars) drives automatics and feels no shame about it. However, one of the other big reasons, fuel efficiency, is no longer true with new cars, as many get better fuel efficiency with automatics than manuals. Frequently, they get a little better city mileage as the autos have better shift algorithms and sometimes more gears, but sometimes they get better highway mileage as they appear to use a better gear ratio for highway driving. But with the DSG-equipped cars (Audis, VWs, and some Fords), all the numbers are better with the DSG than with manuals. Of course, DSGs are basically two manual transmissions in parallel with computer-controlled shifting and clutches.
Here in New Jersey, all the school board superintendents make around $250k. What's really interesting is that just about every little town and municipality has its own, separate school board, so a typical "school district" probably only comprises 2 or 3 schools (elementary, middle, high school). Yet each one has its own superintendent and associated bureaucracy, with lots of administrators making huge salaries and getting generous retirement pensions. This is a big reason why the property taxes in this state are the highest in the nation.
Um, this seems wrong. If senior management doesn't like the way the IT manager is running things, then why are they letting him keep his job? If they're above him (i.e., they're his bosses), then they need to either follow his rules, or they need to fire him and replace him someone who does things they way they like.
It's still cursed with the direct-impingement system of operation (except for the variants that replaced that with a gas piston, but those are not common or normal, and are usually high-priced), which makes it extremely vulnerable to malfunctions if it isn't kept meticulously clean. That's not a good trait for a battle rifle.
The H&K G36, SIG 550, FN F2000, Steyr and others are all far superior weapons.
Scenario A: "Software A is a horrible piece of shit that costs a fortune and is far, far worse than Software B, C, D, E, etc., which are all free (not to mention G, H, I, and J which are all expensive and proprietary but still far better than A), but Software A's vendor insists it's great so we believe him and we're buying it anyway."
Scenario B: "Software A claims to be highly secure, even though there's evidence that it's not, which has been aired by multiple reputable media outlets. Software A's vendor insists it's highly secure and the evidence is hogwash; we believe him and we're buying it anyway."
In both cases, the customer is believing the vendor despite much outside evidence to the contrary.
The OP seemed to be assuming the use of non-backdoored encryption, so I was just pointing out that having perfect encryption still doesn't give you perfect privacy.
One way is to pay an offshore subsidiary huge amounts of money for relatively little actual work. They can then call that a "cost" in the USA and reduce taxes owing, then show the profits in another country with lower taxes.
Again, these seems like a failure of the US (or any national government in the same position) to create decent laws to regulate this sort of thing. One obvious easy fix is to simply disallow companies from owning offshore subsidiaries or being multinational. Another would be to heavily regulate MNCs and have government regulators look over all their transactions with their subsidiaries. Another would be to forbid MNCs from owning subsidiaries in particular countries (low-tax locales), or set up all kinds of stringent laws governing their activities with subsidiaries in such locales. For instance, what business does just about any company have owning a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands? There's no industry to speak of there, except banking. Therefore, unless a company can prove they're actually doing something useful there, they're not allowed to have a subsidiary there. Problem solved. There's no need to pressure GC banks to give them information, just don't allow companies to operate there since it's such a problem.
How exactly does a friggin' carpet-cleaning business determine that reviews are by "fake" customers? And what kind of carpet-cleaning business maintains a "database" of their customers? Companies like that frequently operate on a cash basis.
It's worse than that. The EU is where the US gets its guns from, because the US is too incompetent to make its own guns any more. Most police departments use Glocks, which come from Austria, and the US military is going to use an H-K rifle from Germany for their next-generation assault rifle. The US military already uses the Beretta M-9 for its standard sidearm: Beretta is an Italian company. All the best guns come from the EU (or Switzerland, which is surrounded by the EU): FAL in Belgium with their P90 submachine gun and F2000 rifle (standard rifle used by many countries' armies including Pakistan), H-K in Germany with their MP5 submachine gun used by lots of militaries and police departments including probably every US SWAT team, Glock in Austria, SIG in Switzerland, HS in Croatia, Steyr in Britain, I'm sure there's lots more. The US gunmakers mostly only make historical replicas (e.g. Colt 45s from the 1800s) and copies of aging and obsolete guns like the 1911 and the AR-15. When they want something new and innovative, they import it from Europe and rebadge it (like the Springfield XD series, made by HS in Croatia).
US companies shouldn't be able to shirk tax laws just by going to an overseas bank.
Yes, they should. It's up to the US government's law enforcement arms to enforce tax laws within its own borders; foreigners have no obligation to help them enforce their laws. If a company is located within a country, it's pretty hard for them to move money outside the country in a way that's impossible to monitor for authorities inside that country. If the company is getting some kind of tax break by moving the money outside the country, then it's that country's responsibility to fix its own laws so that there's no tax advantage in doing so. A bank is just a place to store money, and really shouldn't affect taxation. The fact that people avoid taxes by moving money offshore just shows the system is broken and needs to be fixed, instead of bullying foreign institutions to give private banking information to the authorities.
Cryptography can't protect all information. It can protect the content of your communications, but it can't protect the fact that you communicated. If you send an encrypted message to someone, if it's strongly-encrypted, then yes, it's very difficult to decipher the message, but the NSA will still be able to (assuming they're monitoring you, or the communications links between you and the receiver) see that you've communicated with that person. From the patterns of your communications, they can infer a lot of things.
For instance, if you exchange communications with someone who's later found to be a drug dealer, they can infer that you're probably either a customer or a supplier to him, without ever decrypted your communications with him.
There was the whole "stop loss" program, where enlistees were prevented from leaving the military after their enlistment term ended. That sounds pretty close to conscription to me. Only a lawyer would argue otherwise.
what are we SUPPOSED to do, when the world's biggest (and essentially only) superpower has us fully under its control? what exactly do you propose when the powerful hold ALL the cards?
fighting a less powerful government could be possible, but fighting the US government is not going to happen anytime soon.
I think people care but they feel utterly unable to do a single thing to fight it or bring about change. I'd love to hear what you think we COULD do, for real, that will have any effect.
Who's "we"? American citizens, or citizens of other nations? If you're not American, the answer is pretty simple: shunning. You don't *have* to do business with American companies. Stop buying from RSA, Microsoft, etc. (esp. companies which most likely have NSA backdoors). Start buying from companies in your own country instead.
The US is a lot like the Roman Empire. Eventually, it collapsed because of excessive corruption and overextension. The same thing is going to happen to the US, it's just a matter of time. The process will accelerate if the economy collapses, caused by other countries not trading with them.
Not necessarily. Before the leaks, who really thought that much about the NSA and what it was doing? Maybe some of us really thought about it and suspected the NSA was spying on us all, but most of us were unaware; it just wasn't something that came up on our radar. Now that there's lots of evidence about what the NSA's been doing, including admissions from the NSA themselves (and a lot of nasty statements by NSA leadership about various people who oppose their spying programs), the onus is on the NSA to disprove any new allegations that arise. At this point, for me (and the OP I'm sure), the NSA has proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy, so for any new allegations against them, I'll choose to believe the allegations until the NSA can really prove them wrong. Why would I do otherwise? It's all about trust: without good evidence, you can only go on trust (and knowledge of what's really feasible; e.g., the NSA monitoring our thoughts by brain implants is obviously fantasy so allegations that aren't feasible like that can be dismissed). Since I distrust the NSA completely, I'll always believe the other side until they're proven wrong.
Depends on the company. Lots of places will probably still happily spend enormous sums of money on RSA products, even though everyone knows they're backdoored. It's a big company, and as they say, "you can't get fired for buying from $BIG_VENDOR".
Just look at how many large corporations and governments continue to buy products from big, overpriced enterprise software firms, even though that software is all crap. Hell, look at how many companies still spend millions to license and use IBM/Rational ClearCase, even though it's a bloated, obsolete piece of shit that doesn't even support something as utterly basic as atomic commits, when you can download and use many different open-source version control systems for free which all work far better (and faster) than CC.
Rest assured, lots of places will continue to buy from RSA, no matter how obvious it becomes that that decision is idiotic.
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So, you mean we're like the China or Mexico of the gun industry? We can put a bunch of people to work in a factory building stuff because our labor's cheap, but we're not smart enough to do the engineering work? Yeah, that sounds like a big achievement.
While you have a good point about the H&K, your point about personal protection is pretty important: US companies do indeed make a lot of guns for personal/individual buyers, but (the point I was trying to make) they largely fail at making guns for US police agencies and the US military. You'd think government agencies in the gun-happy US wouldn't feel the need to go to anti-gun Europe to get guns, but they do. How many police departments *don't* use Glocks as their standard service-issue handgun? US companies have had decades now to develop competing models, but they've mostly failed. And as for your H&K example, OK, their US subsidiary is apparently doing much of the design, but why is a German-owned company going to be a supplier for the US military at all? It's not like there's a shortage of US-based (entirely), US-owned gun-making companies to go to. But apparently, none of them are good enough for the US military, since they all have recycled versions of ancient designs. It's not just the zillions of AR-15 clones out there, some US gun companies are even making spruced-up versions of the truly ancient M1 Garand rifle from WWII. WTF? Obviously, US gun companies are good at making expensive, boutique guns with oiled black walnut stocks and pearl inlays and other such things, but for designing cutting-edge weaponry to be mass-produced for large military forces, they simply don't have the capability.
It's weird, but it's not a rule by any means. Canada has stronger gun-control laws too, but I don't know of any guns made there. Mexico has very strong gun-control laws, but I don't know of any guns made there either (and if they did, they'd probably suck; Mexico isn't exactly known for Swiss-level precision manufacturing). Japan has ultra-strict laws but they don't make guns either. China probably has very strong gun-control laws too, and while they do make guns, theirs generally suck (crappy AK-47 clones).
Don't misinterpret my post: America *does* make guns, and lots of them. There's still lots of gun makers in America: Mossberg, Remington, Smith & Wesson, Colt, Ruger, Springfield (except for their imported XD line), Kimber, and dozens if not hundreds more smaller companies. I'm just pointing out how many of the better weapons, including many used by police forces and the military, come from Europe, not gun-happy America.
A lot of America's gunmakers (including most of those unnamed smaller companies, and some of the ones I listed) are fairly low-volume, and make specialty guns for niche markets. Ruger, for instance, makes a lot of revolvers, including the very nice GP100 .357 Magnum. It's a nice self-defense gun, though a bit large and heavy, but it's not something that you'll see any police forces using. Kimber seems to make nothing but fancy 1911 clones. Again, I'm sure they're very well-made weapons that 1911 collectors will love, but the 1911 design is ancient and obsolete (102 years old now), and not something at all suitable as a modern sidearm for the police or military (they can't even be taken apart quickly and toollessly like a Glock or XD). There's lots of other companies also making 1911 clones. Mossberg and Remington make very reliable shotguns, though Italian-made Benellis look nicer and are preferred by police.
The problem here is that RSA's software actually does do its job, just not 100%. It's more than 0%: their products will, presumably, protect your data and systems from being accessed by most attackers. It just doesn't protect your data and systems from the NSA, because they have a back door. As long as that exploit (and how to do it, not just its existence) doesn't become public knowledge, then RSA's systems will make you secure, in the same way that a strong door with a key-lock makes you safe from everyone except people who have a copy of the key (like whoever built the lock).
You have that backwards. It's the idiots that drive too slow, and the assholes who drive too fast.
Doesn't matter, GP is correct what's important is keeping traffic flowing, not how fast the occupants want to go because they have a faster car. Speed is eventually going to be irrelevant because the car will chose the proper speed for conditions.
You seem to be assuming all cars have the same capabilities. This isn't true. Your car may be able to drive up a hill with no problems, but a fully-loaded 18-wheeler is not going to have that same capability, and you'll want your automated car to pass it so you don't creep up the hill at 10 mph when you could be driving up it at 65 mph (or whatever the highway speed limit is). Same goes for other vehicles, such as trucks and SUVs pulling trailers; a "safe speed for conditions" will still be faster than these vehicles can drive. You want to limit all vehicles to the speed of the slowest vehicle on the road? What if someone's driving a construction or farm vehicle on the road at 5 mph? That's why we need passing, even in a fully driverless world.
As for who's responsible when a driverless car crashes it will probably be the same as when a dog kills someone, the owner of the dog is responsible.
I've almost never heard of owners being imprisoned when their dog killed someone, except for the one exceptional case in California of a couple who basically encouraged their dog to kill a lesbian neighbor of theirs. At best, you can sue the owner for damages or wrongful death, but big deal, good luck collecting on the judgment.
Just because the owner wasn't operating the wheel doesn't make them any less responsible, but just like we have learned to trust cruise control and drive by wire gas pedals to not suddenly accelerate, we will learn to trust driverless cars.
What are you talking about? We just had a big scandal with Toyotas having sudden accelerations. Anyway, these are small potatoes compared to driverless cars. Cruise control just controls the gas pedal, and is easily disengaged (just press the brake pedal), and is mainly there to make highway driving a little easier, but you're still actively in control of the vehicle, with full control being only a tap of the brake (or clutch) pedal away. DbW is doesn't remove control from the driver at all, it just replaces a mechanical cable with an electronic connection. A fully driverless car removes all control from the driver, and there's talk of having them do things which normal drivers simply cannot be trusted to do, such as drive bumper-to-bumper in high-speed caravans. You can't expect a normal driver to take over operation of a vehicle when it's in that state; they'll immediately bump into another car and/or crash.
Maybe he's talking about child protection that's difficult or impossible to disable?
Child protection is all fine and well as long as you can turn that crap off when you don't have children to protect against. It's like those horrible child-proof medicine bottle that senior citizens had so much trouble opening, but were required to have because of some stupid law mandating them. It was such a problem, they finally (after many years) changed the laws so that pharmacies could give easy-to-open bottles to seniors.
Government takes out my brakes? No problem, shift into first and engine-brake going 10 mph down the hill.
Good luck with that at any speed which would have the potential to kill you
The OP is mostly right here. Without brakes, you can slow a car down with engine braking if you have a manual transmission. The question is how fast; if you have plenty of room ahead of you, it's really not a problem; just successively shift to lower gears until you stall out. If you shift to a gear that's too low, you'll overrev the engine and damage it. But it does work well for most cases; the problem is if you're going fast and need to stop quickly to avoid hitting a person or stopped vehicle ahead, then you're screwed, but you can at least slow down a lot so the damage isn't as bad. Also, you can pull the emergency/parking brake to get a little (not a lot) additional braking.
Stuck accelerator? Put 'er in neutral.
Or turn off the ignition.
Just make sure to only turn it off one notch instead of two, or else you'll lock the steering which is very bad. With a stick, you can just press the clutch pedal if the accelerator becomes stuck; it's much faster to react this way than to mess with the ignition key (though in the stick, you'll still want to turn off the ignition one notch after pressing the clutch because it'll redline the engine). But it's worse now: with today's push-button-start cars, you'll have to press and hold the "start" button to turn off the engine, which takes several seconds. If there's traffic or pedestrians around, the results could be disastrous. With a manual transmission, you just jam the clutch and brake pedals to immediately disengage the engine and slow the car.
Get caught in a storm or drive into a lake? I can simply unlock the door or roll down my windows and swim out, no power components to sieze up or go inactive.
Car doors can usually be opened from the inside even when locked. An exception are back doors with stupid-child protection engaged
You're both wrong here, at least until the car is entirely full of water. The locks aren't an issue, physics is: you can't open the door when there's water on one side and air on the other, unless you're Hercules or The Hulk. Even The Rock or Conan-era Arnold aren't strong enough. Anyway, I don't think I've ever seen a car where you couldn't manually unlock it from the inside just by pulling a knob or flipping a lever. The power locks just provide an additional way of moving that lever or knob, which is why it's fairly easy to break into a locked car with a coat hangar inserted in the window or door frame.
Save gas? Coast in neutral down large hills.
No, you're wasting gas that way, since you still need some to keep the idle rev. Non-ancient cars will actually shut off fuel injection when gravity happens to temporarily become 'fuel'
You're correct here for any car that has electronic fuel injection (any "non-ancient" car as you put it). But this doesn't have anything to do with government spying either, just like the previous point. I think the OP is just on a tirade about the overall superiority of his car.
Disclaimer: i drive manual transmission too, but for none of the reasons you mention. My reasons are: a) simpler/more robust design (i.e. one less part which can fail fail), b) more control, c) avoid ridicule
You must be a European. Over here in America, almost everyone (except maybe a subset of 16-25 males who are into fast import cars) drives automatics and feels no shame about it. However, one of the other big reasons, fuel efficiency, is no longer true with new cars, as many get better fuel efficiency with automatics than manuals. Frequently, they get a little better city mileage as the autos have better shift algorithms and sometimes more gears, but sometimes they get better highway mileage as they appear to use a better gear ratio for highway driving. But with the DSG-equipped cars (Audis, VWs, and some Fords), all the numbers are better with the DSG than with manuals. Of course, DSGs are basically two manual transmissions in parallel with computer-controlled shifting and clutches.
Here in New Jersey, all the school board superintendents make around $250k. What's really interesting is that just about every little town and municipality has its own, separate school board, so a typical "school district" probably only comprises 2 or 3 schools (elementary, middle, high school). Yet each one has its own superintendent and associated bureaucracy, with lots of administrators making huge salaries and getting generous retirement pensions. This is a big reason why the property taxes in this state are the highest in the nation.
Um, this seems wrong. If senior management doesn't like the way the IT manager is running things, then why are they letting him keep his job? If they're above him (i.e., they're his bosses), then they need to either follow his rules, or they need to fire him and replace him someone who does things they way they like.
It's still cursed with the direct-impingement system of operation (except for the variants that replaced that with a gas piston, but those are not common or normal, and are usually high-priced), which makes it extremely vulnerable to malfunctions if it isn't kept meticulously clean. That's not a good trait for a battle rifle.
The H&K G36, SIG 550, FN F2000, Steyr and others are all far superior weapons.
I don't see the difference.
Scenario A: "Software A is a horrible piece of shit that costs a fortune and is far, far worse than Software B, C, D, E, etc., which are all free (not to mention G, H, I, and J which are all expensive and proprietary but still far better than A), but Software A's vendor insists it's great so we believe him and we're buying it anyway."
Scenario B: "Software A claims to be highly secure, even though there's evidence that it's not, which has been aired by multiple reputable media outlets. Software A's vendor insists it's highly secure and the evidence is hogwash; we believe him and we're buying it anyway."
In both cases, the customer is believing the vendor despite much outside evidence to the contrary.
The OP seemed to be assuming the use of non-backdoored encryption, so I was just pointing out that having perfect encryption still doesn't give you perfect privacy.
One way is to pay an offshore subsidiary huge amounts of money for relatively little actual work. They can then call that a "cost" in the USA and reduce taxes owing, then show the profits in another country with lower taxes.
Again, these seems like a failure of the US (or any national government in the same position) to create decent laws to regulate this sort of thing. One obvious easy fix is to simply disallow companies from owning offshore subsidiaries or being multinational. Another would be to heavily regulate MNCs and have government regulators look over all their transactions with their subsidiaries. Another would be to forbid MNCs from owning subsidiaries in particular countries (low-tax locales), or set up all kinds of stringent laws governing their activities with subsidiaries in such locales. For instance, what business does just about any company have owning a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands? There's no industry to speak of there, except banking. Therefore, unless a company can prove they're actually doing something useful there, they're not allowed to have a subsidiary there. Problem solved. There's no need to pressure GC banks to give them information, just don't allow companies to operate there since it's such a problem.
How exactly does a friggin' carpet-cleaning business determine that reviews are by "fake" customers? And what kind of carpet-cleaning business maintains a "database" of their customers? Companies like that frequently operate on a cash basis.
The UK seems like they're the EU's red-headed stepchild these days.
It's worse than that. The EU is where the US gets its guns from, because the US is too incompetent to make its own guns any more. Most police departments use Glocks, which come from Austria, and the US military is going to use an H-K rifle from Germany for their next-generation assault rifle. The US military already uses the Beretta M-9 for its standard sidearm: Beretta is an Italian company. All the best guns come from the EU (or Switzerland, which is surrounded by the EU): FAL in Belgium with their P90 submachine gun and F2000 rifle (standard rifle used by many countries' armies including Pakistan), H-K in Germany with their MP5 submachine gun used by lots of militaries and police departments including probably every US SWAT team, Glock in Austria, SIG in Switzerland, HS in Croatia, Steyr in Britain, I'm sure there's lots more. The US gunmakers mostly only make historical replicas (e.g. Colt 45s from the 1800s) and copies of aging and obsolete guns like the 1911 and the AR-15. When they want something new and innovative, they import it from Europe and rebadge it (like the Springfield XD series, made by HS in Croatia).
US companies shouldn't be able to shirk tax laws just by going to an overseas bank.
Yes, they should. It's up to the US government's law enforcement arms to enforce tax laws within its own borders; foreigners have no obligation to help them enforce their laws. If a company is located within a country, it's pretty hard for them to move money outside the country in a way that's impossible to monitor for authorities inside that country. If the company is getting some kind of tax break by moving the money outside the country, then it's that country's responsibility to fix its own laws so that there's no tax advantage in doing so. A bank is just a place to store money, and really shouldn't affect taxation. The fact that people avoid taxes by moving money offshore just shows the system is broken and needs to be fixed, instead of bullying foreign institutions to give private banking information to the authorities.
Cryptography can't protect all information. It can protect the content of your communications, but it can't protect the fact that you communicated. If you send an encrypted message to someone, if it's strongly-encrypted, then yes, it's very difficult to decipher the message, but the NSA will still be able to (assuming they're monitoring you, or the communications links between you and the receiver) see that you've communicated with that person. From the patterns of your communications, they can infer a lot of things.
For instance, if you exchange communications with someone who's later found to be a drug dealer, they can infer that you're probably either a customer or a supplier to him, without ever decrypted your communications with him.
There was the whole "stop loss" program, where enlistees were prevented from leaving the military after their enlistment term ended. That sounds pretty close to conscription to me. Only a lawyer would argue otherwise.
what are we SUPPOSED to do, when the world's biggest (and essentially only) superpower has us fully under its control? what exactly do you propose when the powerful hold ALL the cards?
fighting a less powerful government could be possible, but fighting the US government is not going to happen anytime soon.
I think people care but they feel utterly unable to do a single thing to fight it or bring about change. I'd love to hear what you think we COULD do, for real, that will have any effect.
Who's "we"? American citizens, or citizens of other nations? If you're not American, the answer is pretty simple: shunning. You don't *have* to do business with American companies. Stop buying from RSA, Microsoft, etc. (esp. companies which most likely have NSA backdoors). Start buying from companies in your own country instead.
The US is a lot like the Roman Empire. Eventually, it collapsed because of excessive corruption and overextension. The same thing is going to happen to the US, it's just a matter of time. The process will accelerate if the economy collapses, caused by other countries not trading with them.
Not necessarily. Before the leaks, who really thought that much about the NSA and what it was doing? Maybe some of us really thought about it and suspected the NSA was spying on us all, but most of us were unaware; it just wasn't something that came up on our radar. Now that there's lots of evidence about what the NSA's been doing, including admissions from the NSA themselves (and a lot of nasty statements by NSA leadership about various people who oppose their spying programs), the onus is on the NSA to disprove any new allegations that arise. At this point, for me (and the OP I'm sure), the NSA has proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy, so for any new allegations against them, I'll choose to believe the allegations until the NSA can really prove them wrong. Why would I do otherwise? It's all about trust: without good evidence, you can only go on trust (and knowledge of what's really feasible; e.g., the NSA monitoring our thoughts by brain implants is obviously fantasy so allegations that aren't feasible like that can be dismissed). Since I distrust the NSA completely, I'll always believe the other side until they're proven wrong.
Depends on the company. Lots of places will probably still happily spend enormous sums of money on RSA products, even though everyone knows they're backdoored. It's a big company, and as they say, "you can't get fired for buying from $BIG_VENDOR".
Just look at how many large corporations and governments continue to buy products from big, overpriced enterprise software firms, even though that software is all crap. Hell, look at how many companies still spend millions to license and use IBM/Rational ClearCase, even though it's a bloated, obsolete piece of shit that doesn't even support something as utterly basic as atomic commits, when you can download and use many different open-source version control systems for free which all work far better (and faster) than CC.
Rest assured, lots of places will continue to buy from RSA, no matter how obvious it becomes that that decision is idiotic.