If a suit has already been filed at the time a settlement is reached, you typically don't just withdraw the suit; you ask the judge to enter judgement in the amount of the agreed settlement. That saves a step later if one party breaches the settlement agreement, or is tempted to, because the court has already ordered them to abide by the settlement they agreed to. If you withdraw your petition at settlement and the other party breaches, you have to file suit to enforce the settlement. Better to get that out of the way as part of the existing suit, while everyone is in agreement as to the settlement.
Similarly, even if settlement is reached before suit is filed, you go ahead and file and the judge enters the settlement terms as judgement if the state or a third party has an interest. A very common case of this type is divorce. Suppose husband and wife agree to the division property, before the divorce suit is filed. They go ahead and ask the court to render the settlement as to property as judgement because they already have to be in court to make th divorce itself official. Since you're going to be at the courthouse anyway, you may as well have the court approve the settlement now rather than having to file a new suit about it later if an issue arises.
The judgement was in fact entered for $80 million. That's true. A judgement doesn't mean you're going to get paid. I've had a judgement for $2,500 against a guy for fifteen years. He paid $40. There's basically no way to make someone actually pay a judgement, especially if they are going out of business. The executives take their last pay check and close up the business. The judgement creditor can send demand letters all day long to where the business used to be, demanding that the now non-existent business pay the judgement.
Here, they agreed that Sony would get a judgement for $80 million, so reporting that judgement isn't exactly a lie. In addition, they agreed that the defendant would actually pay $4 million of that judgement, since they probably didn't have the money to pay the whole thing and even if they could, it's pretty easy to avoid paying a judgement in most cases. Just ignore the judgement. Then the plaintiff has to file additional law suits trying to get specific property seized to pay the judgement, after they identify specific non-exempt property that won't disappear before it's seized.
I had to take another look because I remembered I had decided it was silly, but I didn't remember WHY I decided it was silly. I just took another quick glance, and noticed two things. There may be another, larger, issue I noticed last time and didn't notice this time. The two I noticed this time are language silliness, rather than security silliness.
First, it's the same as crypt($p,makesalt($alg)). Redundant language bloat. PHP has more duplicate functions than C has functions in total. In Perl, C, C++, PHP itself, and just about every other language you call it as crypt(). Essentially they've just renamed an existing well-known system call, obscuring what it really is.
Second, it takes an "algorithm " parameter, which has exactly one legal value, bcrypt. That's pointless. It should at least accept SHA256 in that parameter as well. It's not like it require any significant addition to the code - it just being passed to crypt() anyway.
I am aware of that. PHP's password_hash is kind of stupid, not really a good example of best practices for secure systems. Given that PHP was designed for non-programmers, though it _might_ be a net benefit, if people use password_hash rather than plaintext or MySQL PASSWORD().
Both brypt and scrypt would PROBABLY work, especially bcrypt, but they're designed for a different use. What you want for password storage is confidence that if the bad guy gets F(plaintext,salt), (the hash) they can't derive the plaintext. It's a one-way trap door - you can compute the hash from the plaintext password, but not the other way around. You do not care about any aspects of the output, other than that it can't be used to infer the input (and that it has a guaranteed reasonable maximum length).
For a key derivation function, it's ALL about the output. You're trying to create output that has particular attributes, such as pseudo- random bits, long length, and bonus points if they length can be extended to go on forever.
Key derivation algorithms sometimes work okay as hashes (for password storage), but almost by accident. That's not what they're designed for. To achieve the very different goals of KDAs, they tend to be much more complex, and therefore much more likely to contain subtle undiscovered weaknesses. I'd rather use something designed for the job at hand. I wouldn't, however, say someone is WRONG to use bcrypt for the purpose. If a student turned in a project that used bcrypt for password storage, I wouldn't mark down their grade. It's just not my personal preference.
You can, given a budget that's a pettance for Microsoft, prevent the attackers from taking you down. The three aspects of security are CIA: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Giving up one of those aspects is silly.
Cloudflare and F5 provide excellent protections against even extremely large flooding-type attacks, and Prolexic also operates in this space.
Most of the listed sites have far more than 13,000 registered users, so access to the member database of just ONE of the sites would have yielded a much larger dump.
Also, some of the sites store only a properly salted, modern hash of the password, so there's almost no way to get passwords from the sites' servers.
It's pretty clear the hack is in the client side. We may have a look to see of the logs go back far enough to tell us which browser version, OS, and toolbars or addons those members were using.
Source - I designed the authentication and authorization systems for some of those sites.
Now that many different planes are being replaced with the F-35, I'm sure they'll NEVER make an upgraded camera module specifically for it. It's not like they ever upgraded the cameras on anybof the aircraft it's replacing.
Oh space. There's no room for a high res camera. Looking at the 4mm X 4mm , 8MP camera on my phone, I'm having trouble believing that they'll never be able to fit a high-res camera in the plane.
The Carter case is f_ed up. Remember, though 10,000 cases were handled that day, and Carter's made the news because it was handled so wrongly. The 9,999 cases handled properly aren't newsworthy.
I'd like to see Carter sue Comal county in federal court for violating his Constitutional right right under the 8th amendment, which bars excessive bail.
The traction control system should kick in when the tires _actually_ lose traction. If they programmed it for an estimate of the traction of new tires on dry, clean pavement they're doing it very, very wrong. A TCS is supposed to kick in when one tire hits a patch of ice, or there's sand on the road. It doesn't care what kind of tires there are - any tire is going to slip on ice.
Note also the engagement of traction control actually reduces the traction available to make a curve or other maneuver, by "wasting" some of the available traction to use in braking the wheel. The idea is to use traction more effectively to point the car in the direction of the steering wheel, but with a net loss of traction it does a worse job than a trained driver. Of course most drivers are untrained.
Without getting into heavy math, you need a LOT of water pumped up VERY high to get much electricity. Rarely does it work. The one case where it sometimes makes sense is certain existing hydroelectric plants where you already have all of the equipment in place. If the dam is very high (large head value) it can make sense.
To apply that to all of the energy needs for the US, you'd have to cover just over half the country in reservoirs to provide two days of energy storage. Since large storm systems cover a significant portion of the country with clouds, you need that two-day supply at minimum.
So pumped storage is one of many ways to get an extra 1%-2% out of the existing power plants, and thereby reduce fossil fuel usage by 1%. That doesn't seem like much, but there are ten different ways to provide 1%-2% of our energy, and in total that can reduce the usage of fossil fuels and nuclear by 10%-15%, which is significant.
Owners might want to take a close look at the NHTSA testing of the tires. Generally speaking, lower rolling resistance means less traction, which means less safe when cornering, maneuvering around an accident or animal ahead, or braking.
> Potential flight risk means a judge is facing a black and white decision. It's not that the thought of an inconvenience is unthinkable, but it is usually a blanket to the alternative of "nothing at all". The solution is to tag and release, like anyone else we want to track and/or you have an escort. Someone gets out of the country, that's the border patrol's problem...in an ideal world. Go track em down and execute them
No escort needed, catch and release is called "bail" and it's been around for thousands of years. No need for an escort either; you (or someone willing to take responsibility for you) just put up 10% of the cost of your fine or of the cost to track you down, or put up collateral. When the 5% flee, the bail money pays the bounty hunter.
I suppose if you opt for paying just the 10%, you end up with something of an "escort" in that your bondsman, who is on the hook for the full amount, will want you stop by or call in once per week.
I worked as a bounty hunter for a short time. Interesting work. Some people took care of their FTA after the bondsman called and reminded them they were subjeft to arrest. Of the people who didn't do that, most would immediately bond out again, at twice the price, and show up the second time.
If you consider something 2,300 years old a "new idea". Tell me, though what does democracy have to do with the founding of the republic? You know the US is a republic, not a democrqcy, right? Maybe you don't, given you thought democracy was a new idea.
The kernel and friends manage hotplug devices quite nicely. I take that to mean you want a clickity-click GUI, so you can see what the system has already detected and handled properly for you, and do things without needing to understand what you're doing. If that's what you're looking for, hardinfo is a well-known option. Your choice of graphical desktop environment probably has one it provides by default as well. Look under "System" or similar.
That hawk video is impressive. I know just the guy for the job, smart as heck and he works on machine vision and drones, but early proposals have to be done January 6th.
If you want malls, freeways, and fiber, live in town. If you want wide open spaces, live out in the country.
If you insist on having a fiber line run two miles across your neighbors' pastures to reach you, the only interested customer on your road, you can get that too. That two miles of trenching and fiber work isn't going to be cheap - I've priced it.
> your description would paint Bush as a liberal. What with his pet project to fix Iraq, bailouts for failed corporate ventures
And indeed Bush Jr's approval rating among republicans was nearly as bad as Obama's among Democrats. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity regularly took him to task. They much preferred the elder Bush, who made a clear decision to NOT invade Iraq. I myself criticized junior on national radio, based on the argument that he was not following conservative principles.
I guess we know who was stoned out of their mind during history class. Other than me, I mean.:) Corporations you say? The colonists dumped the cargo of the East India Company. The East India Company, founded in 1600, officially ruled countries. No corporation today comes anywhere near the power of the corporations of the founding era. You might also want to look up the words "corporation" and "corporal" in the dictionary.
You might also look up "tar and feather ", a common practice at the time the republic was founded. See also "drawn amd quartered".
Here's the opening line from George Washington's announcement of the Constitution, the one that protects the rights "endowed by your creator ":
"Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor..."
The concept that the founders were liberal hippies is laughable. American liberalism, the secular movement we have today, came to America in the 1960s.
Once you have clue about American history, you can go to the hardware store and buy some hemp rope. Hemp is a fiber that os legally sold in the US. Marijuana is a drug. They are similar genetically, but not as genetically similar as Clinton and Romney are.
The Bill of Rights is a list of things the federal government isn't allowed to do. It doesn't put any limitations on you, me or Dice. You and I can do bad things, but we can't violate the Bill of Rights because the B of R is a set of restrictions on the feds.
Therefore, ONLY big government can violate your Constitutional rights. Businesses can make you mad, they can provide'poor customer service, but only government can violate your Constitutional rights. The reason for this? Because only government can send men with guns to enforce their will upon. Comcast you can simply cancel, and get Dish or Verizon instead.
I had accidentally looked at 2013 rather than 2014. The average for 2013 was 7.5%. BLS says November 2004 was 5.4%, not 5.5% - close enough. If we're trying to compare this year to ten years ago, looking at just November only is a bit misleading, though.
For 2014: Jan 6.6 Feb 6.7 Mar 6.7 Apr 6.3 May 6.3 Jun 6.1 Jul 6.2 Aug 6.1 Sep 5.9 Oct 5.8 Nov 5.8
I'd say that the fundamental, defining difference between conservative thinking vs progressive is that while progressives say "let's change things for the better" conservatives say "don't throw the baby out with the bath water". Conservatives think America is basically pretty good, progressives think it needs it be "fundamentally transformed", as Obama put it. Progressives say "we need to do something" (and proposal X is something, so we need to do it). Conservatives think we shouldn't lose sight of the principles that once made this the greatest country on earth.
If you belief, based on the news you see, that the place is falling apart, then indeed "we need to do something" (liberalism) is a reasonable response. If you believe life is pretty good, and slowly getting better, then you should stick with what's been working (conservatism). So I'd come to the opposite conclusion as you.
If having more women in nursing and more men in programming is a terrible, horrible thing, then we have to do something about it. If black people can never succeed, if it's unimaginable that any black person could ever be a judge, a mayor, or a senator, then we need to do something about that. On the other hand, if black people can be judges, mayors, senators, and even president of the United States, then all the liberal progressivism is unnecessary, and indeed their complaints of being "kept down by the man" are just whining, excuses. If the society isn't basically racist, then Al Sharpton is out of a job. Progressivism REQUIRES big problems. If you don't believe there are big problems everywhere you look, you have no interest in liberals' big "solutions".
Personally, I think some things could be improved. Liberals do a pretty good job at identifying the problems. However, they all-too-often fall into the trap of "we have to do something, and proposal X is something, so we have to do proposal X". Conservatives are hesitant to change things, so they don't screw things up. Perhaps the ideal would be for liberals to set the agenda of which problems we want to solve this year, then for conservatives beancounters to get out their calculators and figure out which proposed solutions have worked well elsewhere or in the past, and which ones are economically feasible. So the liberals force the conservatives to do SOMETHING, and the conservatives ensure that the SOMETHING has a reasonable chance of working, and without making us bankrupt.
Slashdot Mirror
If a suit has already been filed at the time a settlement is reached, you typically don't just withdraw the suit; you ask the judge to enter judgement in the amount of the agreed settlement. That saves a step later if one party breaches the settlement agreement, or is tempted to, because the court has already ordered them to abide by the settlement they agreed to. If you withdraw your petition at settlement and the other party breaches, you have to file suit to enforce the settlement. Better to get that out of the way as part of the existing suit, while everyone is in agreement as to the settlement.
Similarly, even if settlement is reached before suit is filed, you go ahead and file and the judge enters the settlement terms as judgement if the state or a third party has an interest. A very common case of this type is divorce. Suppose husband and wife agree to the division property, before the divorce suit is filed. They go ahead and ask the court to render the settlement as to property as judgement because they already have to be in court to make th divorce itself official. Since you're going to be at the courthouse anyway, you may as well have the court approve the settlement now rather than having to file a new suit about it later if an issue arises.
It is of course best to use factors from different groups. Your theory takes a much stronger stance than that. I'm not sure your theory is correct.
I would say that a six-digit PIN is slightly more secure than a three-digit pin. Not twice as secure, but somewhat better. Agreed?
Two pins of three digits each is the same as a six-digit pin. Agreed?
Therefore, two three-digit pins is somewhat better than one three-digit pin.
Two from the same group are therefore somewhat better than just one, but not as good as two from different groups.
The judgement was in fact entered for $80 million. That's true. A judgement doesn't mean you're going to get paid. I've had a judgement for $2,500 against a guy for fifteen years. He paid $40. There's basically no way to make someone actually pay a judgement, especially if they are going out of business. The executives take their last pay check and close up the business. The judgement creditor can send demand letters all day long to where the business used to be, demanding that the now non-existent business pay the judgement.
Here, they agreed that Sony would get a judgement for $80 million, so reporting that judgement isn't exactly a lie. In addition, they agreed that the defendant would actually pay $4 million of that judgement, since they probably didn't have the money to pay the whole thing and even if they could, it's pretty easy to avoid paying a judgement in most cases. Just ignore the judgement. Then the plaintiff has to file additional law suits trying to get specific property seized to pay the judgement, after they identify specific non-exempt property that won't disappear before it's seized.
Interesting. That must be quite challenging. Good luck with it.
I had to take another look because I remembered I had decided it was silly, but I didn't remember WHY I decided it was silly. I just took another quick glance, and noticed two things. There may be another, larger, issue I noticed last time and didn't notice this time. The two I noticed this time are language silliness, rather than security silliness.
First, it's the same as crypt($p,makesalt($alg)). Redundant language bloat. PHP has more duplicate functions than C has functions in total. In Perl, C, C++, PHP itself, and just about every other language you call it as crypt(). Essentially they've just renamed an existing well-known system call, obscuring what it really is.
Second, it takes an "algorithm " parameter, which has exactly one legal value, bcrypt. That's pointless. It should at least accept SHA256 in that parameter as well. It's not like it require any significant addition to the code - it just being passed to crypt() anyway.
I am aware of that. PHP's password_hash is kind of stupid, not really a good example of best practices for secure systems. Given that PHP was designed for non-programmers, though it _might_ be a net benefit, if people use password_hash rather than plaintext or MySQL PASSWORD().
Both brypt and scrypt would PROBABLY work, especially bcrypt, but they're designed for a different use. What you want for password storage is confidence that if the bad guy gets F(plaintext,salt), (the hash) they can't derive the plaintext. It's a one-way trap door - you can compute the hash from the plaintext password, but not the other way around. You do not care about any aspects of the output, other than that it can't be used to infer the input (and that it has a guaranteed reasonable maximum length).
For a key derivation function, it's ALL about the output. You're trying to create output that has particular attributes, such as pseudo- random bits, long length, and bonus points if they length can be extended to go on forever.
Key derivation algorithms sometimes work okay as hashes (for password storage), but almost by accident. That's not what they're designed for. To achieve the very different goals of KDAs, they tend to be much more complex, and therefore much more likely to contain subtle undiscovered weaknesses. I'd rather use something designed for the job at hand. I wouldn't, however, say someone is WRONG to use bcrypt for the purpose. If a student turned in a project that used bcrypt for password storage, I wouldn't mark down their grade. It's just not my personal preference.
You can, given a budget that's a pettance for Microsoft, prevent the attackers from taking you down. The three aspects of security are CIA: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Giving up one of those aspects is silly.
Cloudflare and F5 provide excellent protections against even extremely large flooding-type attacks, and Prolexic also operates in this space.
It's been 48 hours since Microsoft's XBox network was downed by hackers. That's not the worst news for Microsoft security this year.
What a short memory we have.
Most of the listed sites have far more than 13,000 registered users, so access to the member database of just ONE of the sites would have yielded a much larger dump.
Also, some of the sites store only a properly salted, modern hash of the password, so there's almost no way to get passwords from the sites' servers.
It's pretty clear the hack is in the client side. We may have a look to see of the logs go back far enough to tell us which browser version, OS, and toolbars or addons those members were using.
Source - I designed the authentication and authorization systems for some of those sites.
Now that many different planes are being replaced with the F-35, I'm sure they'll NEVER make an upgraded camera module specifically for it. It's not like they ever upgraded the cameras on anybof the aircraft it's replacing.
Oh space. There's no room for a high res camera. Looking at the 4mm X 4mm , 8MP camera on my phone, I'm having trouble believing that they'll never be able to fit a high-res camera in the plane.
The Carter case is f_ed up. Remember, though 10,000 cases were handled that day, and Carter's made the news because it was handled so wrongly. The 9,999 cases handled properly aren't newsworthy.
I'd like to see Carter sue Comal county in federal court for violating his Constitutional right right under the 8th amendment, which bars excessive bail.
The traction control system should kick in when the tires _actually_ lose traction. If they programmed it for an estimate of the traction of new tires on dry, clean pavement they're doing it very, very wrong. A TCS is supposed to kick in when one tire hits a patch of ice, or there's sand on the road. It doesn't care what kind of tires there are - any tire is going to slip on ice.
Note also the engagement of traction control actually reduces the traction available to make a curve or other maneuver, by "wasting" some of the available traction to use in braking the wheel. The idea is to use traction more effectively to point the car in the direction of the steering wheel, but with a net loss of traction it does a worse job than a trained driver. Of course most drivers are untrained.
Without getting into heavy math, you need a LOT of water pumped up VERY high to get much electricity. Rarely does it work. The one case where it sometimes makes sense is certain existing hydroelectric plants where you already have all of the equipment in place. If the dam is very high (large head value) it can make sense.
To apply that to all of the energy needs for the US, you'd have to cover just over half the country in reservoirs to provide two days of energy storage. Since large storm systems cover a significant portion of the country with clouds, you need that two-day supply at minimum.
So pumped storage is one of many ways to get an extra 1%-2% out of the existing power plants, and thereby reduce fossil fuel usage by 1%. That doesn't seem like much, but there are ten different ways to provide 1%-2% of our energy, and in total that can reduce the usage of fossil fuels and nuclear by 10%-15%, which is significant.
Owners might want to take a close look at the NHTSA testing of the tires. Generally speaking, lower rolling resistance means less traction, which means less safe when cornering, maneuvering around an accident or animal ahead, or braking.
> Potential flight risk means a judge is facing a black and white decision. It's not that the thought of an inconvenience is unthinkable, but it is usually a blanket to the alternative of "nothing at all". The solution is to tag and release, like anyone else we want to track and/or you have an escort. Someone gets out of the country, that's the border patrol's problem...in an ideal world. Go track em down and execute them
No escort needed, catch and release is called "bail" and it's been around for thousands of years. No need for an escort either; you (or someone willing to take responsibility for you) just put up 10% of the cost of your fine or of the cost to track you down, or put up collateral. When the 5% flee, the bail money pays the bounty hunter.
I suppose if you opt for paying just the 10%, you end up with something of an "escort" in that your bondsman, who is on the hook for the full amount, will want you stop by or call in once per week.
I worked as a bounty hunter for a short time. Interesting work. Some people took care of their FTA after the bondsman called and reminded them they were subjeft to arrest. Of the people who didn't do that, most would immediately bond out again, at twice the price, and show up the second time.
> Democracy was a radical new idea
If you consider something 2,300 years old a "new idea".
Tell me, though what does democracy have to do with the founding of the republic? You know the US is a republic, not a democrqcy, right? Maybe you don't, given you thought democracy was a new idea.
The kernel and friends manage hotplug devices quite nicely.
I take that to mean you want a clickity-click GUI, so you can see what the system has already detected and handled properly for you, and do things without needing to understand what you're doing. If that's what you're looking for, hardinfo is a well-known option. Your choice of graphical desktop environment probably has one it provides by default as well. Look under "System" or similar.
That hawk video is impressive. I know just the guy for the job, smart as heck and he works on machine vision and drones, but early proposals have to be done January 6th.
If you want malls, freeways, and fiber, live in town.
If you want wide open spaces, live out in the country.
If you insist on having a fiber line run two miles across your neighbors' pastures to reach you, the only interested customer on your road, you can get that too. That two miles of trenching and fiber work isn't going to be cheap - I've priced it.
> your description would paint Bush as a liberal. What with his pet project to fix Iraq, bailouts for failed corporate ventures
And indeed Bush Jr's approval rating among republicans was nearly as bad as Obama's among Democrats. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity regularly took him to task. They much preferred the elder Bush, who made a clear decision to NOT invade Iraq. I myself criticized junior on national radio, based on the argument that he was not following conservative principles.
I guess we know who was stoned out of their mind during history class. Other than me, I mean. :) Corporations you say? The colonists dumped the cargo of the East India Company. The East India Company, founded in 1600, officially ruled countries. No corporation today comes anywhere near the power of the corporations of the founding era. You might also want to look up the words "corporation" and "corporal" in the dictionary.
You might also look up "tar and feather ", a common practice at the time the republic was founded. See also "drawn amd quartered".
Here's the opening line from George Washington's announcement of the Constitution, the one that protects the rights "endowed by your creator ": ..."
"Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor
The concept that the founders were liberal hippies is laughable. American liberalism, the secular movement we have today, came to America in the 1960s.
Once you have clue about American history, you can go to the hardware store and buy some hemp rope. Hemp is a fiber that os legally sold in the US. Marijuana is a drug. They are similar genetically, but not as genetically similar as Clinton and Romney are.
The Bill of Rights is a list of things the federal government isn't allowed to do. It doesn't put any limitations on you, me or Dice. You and I can do bad things, but we can't violate the Bill of Rights because the B of R is a set of restrictions on the feds.
Therefore, ONLY big government can violate your Constitutional rights. Businesses can make you mad, they can provide'poor customer service, but only government can violate your Constitutional rights. The reason for this? Because only government can send men with guns to enforce their will upon. Comcast you can simply cancel, and get Dish or Verizon instead.
I had accidentally looked at 2013 rather than 2014. The average for 2013 was 7.5%. BLS says November 2004 was 5.4%, not 5.5% - close enough. If we're trying to compare this year to ten years ago, looking at just November only is a bit misleading, though.
For 2014:
Jan 6.6
Feb 6.7
Mar 6.7
Apr 6.3
May 6.3
Jun 6.1
Jul 6.2
Aug 6.1
Sep 5.9
Oct 5.8
Nov 5.8
That's a very interesting perspective.
I'd say that the fundamental, defining difference between conservative thinking vs progressive is that while progressives say "let's change things for the better" conservatives say "don't throw the baby out with the bath water". Conservatives think America is basically pretty good, progressives think it needs it be "fundamentally transformed", as Obama put it. Progressives say "we need to do something" (and proposal X is something, so we need to do it). Conservatives think we shouldn't lose sight of the principles that once made this the greatest country on earth.
If you belief, based on the news you see, that the place is falling apart, then indeed "we need to do something" (liberalism) is a reasonable response. If you believe life is pretty good, and slowly getting better, then you should stick with what's been working (conservatism). So I'd come to the opposite conclusion as you.
If having more women in nursing and more men in programming is a terrible, horrible thing, then we have to do something about it. If black people can never succeed, if it's unimaginable that any black person could ever be a judge, a mayor, or a senator, then we need to do something about that. On the other hand, if black people can be judges, mayors, senators, and even president of the United States, then all the liberal progressivism is unnecessary, and indeed their complaints of being "kept down by the man" are just whining, excuses. If the society isn't basically racist, then Al Sharpton is out of a job. Progressivism REQUIRES big problems. If you don't believe there are big problems everywhere you look, you have no interest in liberals' big "solutions".
Personally, I think some things could be improved. Liberals do a pretty good job at identifying the problems. However, they all-too-often fall into the trap of "we have to do something, and proposal X is something, so we have to do proposal X". Conservatives are hesitant to change things, so they don't screw things up. Perhaps the ideal would be for liberals to set the agenda of which problems we want to solve this year, then for conservatives beancounters to get out their calculators and figure out which proposed solutions have worked well elsewhere or in the past, and which ones are economically feasible. So the liberals force the conservatives to do SOMETHING, and the conservatives ensure that the SOMETHING has a reasonable chance of working, and without making us bankrupt.