In your example, I think the inventive step is how your car figures out how you're close to it, but does so in a way that is effective with one half of the system required to be low power (the keyfob), and is accurate enough that it doesn't unlock while you're not present, as well as determining that you want it to be unlocked, and you're just not walking around with your keys inside your house (which could trigger it, based on how close you are). A workable, comprehensive, and accurate solution to this could be fairly non-trival.
While I agree with this, that would only justify a patent on the specific non-obvious concepts and innovations needed to enable that system. It's not acceptable to then patent the entire concept (which would then allow you to sure somebody else for a different implementation of the basic idea).
Unfortunately, in practice that's not how it works. The patent office routinely accepts the general claim, as long as its accompanied by some specific claims. Then once the patent is granted, companies will routinely file suit under the broadest possible claim. Of course at that point, it's theoretically possible to challenge the patent on grounds of obviousness, but it's ferociously expensive and success is not guaranteed.
The PTO needs to be more proactive in dealing with these claims. And there should be new legislation that requires infringement suits be filed on the most specific claims first, with a heavy prejudice towards invalidation when this isn't adhered to.
I've heard that frogs have the ability to detect single photons. This is from a cryptographer who jokingly proposed a frog-based system for quantum key distribution.
But on a more serious note, what does it really mean for two people to become entangled? And does it matter that the photons are detected by a human retina? Could the entanglement just as easily happen if the photons were fired into my left butt-cheek?
Because I'm ALREADY PAYING for those roads. I pay gasoline taxes, I pay income tax.
Income tax is insufficient to pay for our Federal spending (defense spending alone has roughly doubled since 2000). The US has a shockingly low gasoline tax by world standards (about 35 cents/gallon). And on top of that the taxes are collected and distributed inefficiently--- the barely-used Interstates in my home state (Vermont, pop ~600,000) are routinely repaved, while the highways in New York State (pop. 20 million+, not to mention traffic from neighboring states) are falling apart. This is inefficient.
Additionally, it's a fairly basic reality that if you underprice a resource it will be overconsumed. This is one of the cornerstones of our economy, but for some reason we have the notion that we shouldn't apply this logic to public resources. I would much rather exchange the inefficient blanket gasoline tax in exchange for a targeted tax that collects revenue from actual road usage, at least for roads that are running near their capacity. This would reduce taxes and make sure the roads are maintained in accordance with their usage.
Take a look at all the stupid earmarks on the last 2 bailout/stimulus plans. I bet that would fix plenty of roads.
Sadly that's exactly what Congress insisted on. It's a stupid and inefficient use of Federal money.
But... *gasp* that isn't simply the Democrat way! The Democrat way is to simply throw money at a problem without any oversight or planning, call it "solved", and then gasp again when the problem comes up next election cycle and they need to "fix" it by throwing more money without any oversight or planning... repeat ad nauseum.
You just described the TARP program that was created by George W. Bush and his appointees. Don't pretend the Republicans are any better.
As to the rest of it --- the economy is bleeding to death. See this image if you disbelieve me. Most reputable economists think that with monetary policy maxed out (interest rates are effectively zero), the only thing we can do to stop the bleeding is to use fiscal policy, i.e., spend a ton of money and pray.
They may indeed be wrong. However, it's generally agreed that the alternative (doing nothing) is going to be much, much worse. Balancing our budget sure isn't going to do anything if the economy drops into a deep recession, so this is a risk worth taking. Again, not a politically popular risk --- just our only chance to avert catastrophe.
I would mind this less if Google was known for care in developing its client code. I specifically remember uninstalling Google Desktop last time due to its consumption of system resources and nasty vulnerabilities.
Well, you'd start by moving our electric grid to about 20% renewables (wind, solar), and transitioning a large portion of our transportation system to the electric grid. That would be tricky, but it's doable with a modern grid and careful planning. Then you'd probably make some changes that would lead to smaller, more efficient vehicles, better home insulation, less consumption of cheap plastic crap, more walking, less beef consumption, etc.
Life would definitely change, but we're not talking about Mad Max levels of change.
So it was a few months before my wedding and I wanted to look good in the pictures (you have them for life, you know). So I vowed to start eating right and going to the gym. But then the gym turned out to be inconvenient and kind of expensive, so instead I decided I'd just wait 'til the last month and go on a crash diet. But unfortunately, the stupid crash diet didn't work out either (I ask you: who can eat cabbage soup for four weeks!?)
Why shouldn't geoengineering climate (dumping Fe in the India ocean, for example) be a substitute for cutting CO2?
You know, when I was a kid they found out that aerosol spray cans (spray cans!) had eaten a huge hole in the ozone layer. Who could have anticipated that? But obviously nothing like that will happen this time.
"SSL protects data in transit but the problem isn't eavesdropping on the transmission. Someone can steal the credit card on some server somewhere. The real risk is data in storage. SSL protects against the wrong problem," [Schneier] said.
I respect Bruce, but I think if you say something true enough times, you lose sight of the fact that in this case it may not actually be a valid point. While credit card theft is a major problem, Phishers frequently target bank account login credentials--- which are not stored all over the place. In this case, SSL is one of the primary protections keeping you from all kind of hell (losing your credit card is a pain in the butt, but usually it's insured... losing your banking credentials can be a huge disaster). Now imagine that instead of a few rubes being conned by Phishing emails, you had millions of relatively savvy customers at a large ISP diverted to a fake Bank of America site (perhaps with help from insiders at the ISP). The losses could be substantial.
Again, Bruce is right about one problem but not necessarily about every problem (and I can't help but notice that he works for a storage company...)
... If the airline in fact acted as the article portrays, F them. But let's hear all the facts before we call this a vast racially-based evil act by the airline.
Nobody should ever have to go through the indignity of having their family arrested, questioned, found innocent, then left without alternative transit or reimbursement. They were able to purchase tickets on another airline which indicates that they were no longer considered a security risk by the TSA or the FBI. From your post it sounds like your company was once abused by an irresponsible plaintiff. That sounds traumatic, but it doesn't change the fact that this family has a legitimate complaint.
This certainly doesn't indicate racism on Airtran's part, but it indicates negligence and awful customer service. I certainly don't see any reason why Airtran should be expected to behave this way without additional financial penalty.
Now once again mod me troll for a well-reasoned, informative post that dares dissent from the racist airline meme du jour.
Note to would-be Slashdot posters: attaching this to your post is like writing "I am an asshole" on your forehead.
The way I understand it, for example, 4096-bit RSA either requires a dramatically new approach (quantum computing), or, with current technologies, requires every atom in the Universe to be assembled into a massive compute cluster, and that cluster needs to run for longer than the heat death of the Universe.
You've neglected to mention: a significant advance in the mathematics behind factoring and/or solving the RSA problem itself. There's been an impressive amount of work in this direction overthe past 20 years, so it's not ridiculous to imagine further advancements in sub-exponential factoring algorithms.
Fortunately, if such an advance does take place we'll probably hear about it well before the botnets have a chance to take advantage of it (on the other hand, we've had plenty of warning about collisions in MD5, and that didn't help RapidSSL).
How did I know that environmentalists already had an objection? It's like I didn't even have to read the response... The usual thing to do in these circumstances is pump water uphill, but I'm sure there's an immediate objection to that, too.
Hills have an enormous carbon footprint:)
Seriously, right now you're having a problem with reality, not "environmentalists". For some reason many otherwise rational Americans have developed a persecution complex--- if something doesn't make sense (scientifically, or engineering-wise) they get pissy and blame the evil environmentalists. But in reality it's just life getting in the way, and life does that. We engineer around it.
In other words, if concrete has a huge CO2 cost (more than is acceptable for the application described by the parent poster) then that's just bad luck. If the application itself doesn't make sense, then that's even worse luck. But move on and try something else, don't shoot the messenger.
Keep in mind that it wasn't just the President, it was also the Republican party who controlled much of Congress from 1994 to 2006, and had a complete monopoly on government from 2002-2006. These are the people who set regulation, taxation rates, sign trade agreements, etc. They have a lot of economic power.
I am pointing at both parties who have politicized this issue for their own gain... the public at large doesn't the read journals and papers on the latest scientific findings, instead they listen the political figure heads and corporations and news reporters, all of which have an agenda to push.
Well, what is that agenda? Clearly there are massive profits to be made from extracting and selling fossil fuels. CO2 reduction measures place those profits at risk, so that agenda is obvious, linear, and grand in scale. But what is the agenda for the other side?
Fame? Fortune? Glamour? I'm sure there's a little bit of that. I just don't see how it can amount to a tiny fraction of the motivation for the "anti-GW" crowd.
The basic issue with Net Neutrality is not how the service should be offered, or anything to do with the technology. It's fundamentally just an issue of who pays. Telecoms would like to collect subscriber revenue from their customers, then turn around and collect more revenue from content providers as well.
The important thing to understand here is that as bad as the current ISP situation is, under the current model a customer theoretically has the option to respond to price signals by changing their service options, e.g., switching to another provider, or --- if none is available --- simply reducing their consumption. That keeps costs under control to some extent.
Under the proposed model, it's the content provider who pays. Since a content provider is not a direct "customer" of the ISP, they have very little leverage with the ISP. If, say, Google wants to reach a given class of customers (e.g., the tens millions of customers served by Comcast), they have no choice but to deal with Comcast on whatever terms it chooses--- or give up a huge percentage of the market.
Now on the surface this seems like a fine deal to Comcast's customers, since they get enhanced network services without any additional service charges. But this leads to a problem: without any price signals, there's no strong incentive on Comcast to moderate their prices. Anything they charge will ultimately be passed along to the customers by the content providers, in the form of higher service charges, reduced quality, and/or dramatically increased advertising. But customers won't see this directly and link it to the ISP, so there will be very little incentive to control costs (no doubt Comcast will mandate that content providers distribute these costs equally, and not single out their customers for additional surcharges). It imposes a huge tax on a very dynamic and growing part of our economy, and it's certainly one we don't need now.
(Larger providers, incidentally, will have some leverage in this model--- since who wants to be the ISP to cut off iTunes service? But their leverage will come at the cost of squeezing smaller providers for more revenue, dramatically increasing barriers to entering the market. Goodbye new ideas.)
There are various solutions to this problem, all of which require the ISP to bill their enhanced services to the customer. In the end this gives the same set of enhanced services, but also allows customers to make a decision as to whether they want to pay the ISP, cut down on service, or switch to another provider. Done correctly this should encourage ISPs to open up their networks to many providers, since their revenue will be driven by customer interest and not self-interest.
So, what was the main criteria for choosing them? Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy or they've both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies in the past year.'
You act like these are two distinct, unrelated issues--- when in fact, they're deeply interdependent.
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out... It's quite possible that industrial civilization will just run down.
There's more than enough available energy to avoid the doomsday scenario you're talking about. Nuclear (with breeder reactor technology) can sustain us for hundreds of years. There's plenty of coal, and a lot of expensive oil out there if we don't care about emissions. Similarly, it's been noted that the entire US's electricity requirements could be met by approximately 20 mi^2 worth of solar thermal reactor located in the south of the United States. Even if we ultimately had to generate all of our energy from renewable technology, we could increase our total energy output by many times over what oil is giving us now.
And these are just the technologies that we have today, which produce energy that's marginally more expensive (i.e., less than double) what we're paying to extract and haul oil. They may be a lot less convenient (i.e., solar output depends on the weather and time of day), but we'll engineer around these things if the alternative is the destruction of industrial society. Given that Europe was able to rebuild from WWII in less than fifty years, I'm confident that the world can handle this situation as well.
I can match your anecdotal evidence with several anecdotes - including a Scottish godfather of mine who, in order to receive excellent care for cancer, had to move to Lichtenstein for six months (for tax purposes) and then come to the Mayo clinic for treatment - otherwise it would've bankrupted him due to the relationship between healthcare and taxes in the UK.
I would have to reject that anecdote. My understanding is that the UK has a bizarre form of health insurance which is fundamentally different from that of France's (single provider, etc.), while France has a much more successful single-payer system. These are hugely different concepts, and health outcomes & satisfaction are very different between the two countries.
There are many health systems in the world, some of them better than others. Certainly we could adopt a poor system of socialized health care. On the other hand, I believe that there's evidence that such systems can be run well. And certainly I believe that any such system should permit citizens to purchase additional health insurance above and beyond what the government offers.
Obama's solution, while pleasing to my checkbook in the short term, is philosophically abhorrent to me because - like many Democratic programs - it absolves everyone of having a stake in the system. McCain's solution was more of a band-aid than a solution - rejiggering how premiums are taxed to provide a credit (which would have been a net positive for me) - but I found it less objectionable, even if it was less ambitious.
From what I can tell McCain's solution was a series of tax incentives designed to push most people out of the employer-provided health insurance market and onto the individual market. This rings gigantic red alarm bells, because the individual market tends to average 20-30% more expensive even for healthy patients, and substantially more so for older patients/patients with pre-existing conditions (an inevitable consequence of individual vs. collective bargaining). Furthermore, McCain indexed his credit to CPI and not the cost of healthcare (which is rising much more rapidly), so any immediate advantages you saw would have been quickly eaten away.
The problem with praising this as a "band aid" is that in the best case this plan doesn't really try to solve any particular problem, and in fact could have made the situation enormously worse. I suppose there's a cogent (if wrongheaded) argument that by reducing people's access to health care, we could ultimately drive prices down, and McCain's plan would probably have succeeded at the first part (over time). But I don't think McCain sold it that way, so the whole thing left me cold.
Certainly your preference for the/much worse/ McCain plan would indicate that you have strong reasons to dislike the Obama plan. It's just that I've become leery of arguments that such and such plan is "philisophically abhorrent" without the person explaining the reasoning behind that judgement.
Any chance we could delay the Titan mission and instead deploy an infrared telescope to study the asteroid belt? This would not only provide us with valuable scientific knowledge, but would also give us a chance to detect earth-bound asteroids with enough time to perhaps do something about them. My understanding is that Congress has specifically asked NASA to prioritize such a mission, but the directive has mostly been ignored.
This is too bad, since there's a non-trivial chance of a serious impact in the next couple of centuries. Nothing we learn about TItan will do us much good if we're dead.
I run a business that has been profitable, and stand to see a tax increase in the next few years. I'm still excited about Obama, though, because I don't think a McCain administration would have been much of an economic steward in the next few years, particularly for the tech industry. I'd rather pay the taxes and keep my business running than go through another multi-year recession with no hand on the tiller.
But what I don't get is this part:
My SO is altering course from medical school to Physician's Assistant school just so she can get a regular salary and regular hours (even if it's under $100k) rather than establish a Byzantine bureaucracy in her own eventual practice to double- and triple-book patients just so she can run a profitable practice.
You've just described life under private insurance, which clearly sucks. I'm not proposing that Obama will necessarily make all of these problems go away, but I find it hard to criticize the guy for wanting to make things better.
My only personal experience with socialized medicine was in France when I got a nasty case of bronchitis. Rather than double- and triple- booking me, collecting co-pays, etc., the doctor took plenty of time. When he realized I wasn't a citizen (and thus had to actually compensate him) he laughed it off as a hassle and handed me the antibiotics from a sample case. I can't see this being worse than the utter disaster we have now...
Am I reading the data from the Congressional Budget Office wrong? Look at 2007, for example: the chart lists an "On-Budget" deficit of $342.2 billion, a Social Security surplus of $186.5 billion, a Postal Service deficit of $5.1 billion, and a "Total" deficit of 160.7. No year (up to 2007) had a "On-Budget" deficit of greater than $600 billion.
You're completely right, I was adding in my head and getting 700bn when in fact it's "only" in the 500-600bn range. Which is, of course, completely insane. (Maybe the discrepancy between total debt and deficit is due to interest payments?)
In any case, my original point is that the total numbers are high and not well reported. It's frustratingly common to see news reports cite "on-budget" deficits as the real measure. Here's just one example I found in 30 seconds of Googling:
Excluding off-budget items such as the Social Security Trust Fund, the on-budget deficit rose to $437.7 billion so far this year, compared with $264.7 billion a year ago.
Senior citizens tend to have high voter turnout. There is a strong obligation to pay back Social Security. The last attempt to privatize Social Security failed. Obama is likely to win the election. He appears to be against cutting benefits and instead favors imposing new Social Security taxes on those making over $250 thousand per year.
I'd like to agree with you on this. In fact, I'm 70% confident you're right. However, I'm not complacent about it. First, imagine the consequences of another 10-20 years of mismanagement. Then imagine a popular politician pushing the idea that in the face of such financial problems Social Security should be "means-tested"--- essentially becoming a program that benefits the non-rich. Then imagine the threshold of "non-rich" gradually slipping downwards due to poor yearly increases, until it becomes a program for the poor. At that point it will have lost a lot of public support and becomes vulnerable to cuts, particularly if we're faced with a choice between reducing SS and cutting, say, education spending. I think that's the long-term recipe for eliminating Social Security, and you can be someone somewhere is planning the whole thing.
This story comes from the guy doing the Tasering, not from the child being Taser'd. Weight the evidence accordingly.
From the Anchorage Daily News (reporting on the formal investigative report):
In his interview with troopers, the stepson said it hurt for about a second, according to Wall's report. The boy said he wanted to be tased to show his cousin, Palin's daughter Bristol, that he wasn't a mama's boy. The probe left a welt on his arm, he said. His mother was upstairs yelling at them not to do it, the boy said.
There is some dispute as to how much it hurt the boy, but all parties in the incident seem to agree on the general outline: the kid wanted the father to do it. The dad maybe shouldn't have done it, but the kid got at most a little bit of temporary pain. This is all quite contrary to the original implication, which holds that Wooten is a monster who tasers the crap out of kids.
Palin, as governor of the state, is essentially the CEO of the state. State employees technically work for her. She felt the PSC wasn't doing his job and removed him. If he'd been dragging his heels on a case like this I'd have fired him, too
But she didn't fire him because of Wooten! She fired him because of something else. Then it was something else. I think along the way he was being too helpful to rape victims or something. The reasons kept changing. In any case, let's be clear about this whole "Wooten is CEO and can do what she wants line". There are strong limitations on what the governor can do with regards to state employees.
... With each of the calls, Monegan became more concerned and warned each caller about exposing the state to litigation from Wooten. Monegan told Tibbles: "This is not your issue. This is something I am supposed to handle. Every time we talk about this, it is discoverable. Do you want this trooper to own your house?"
Basically the guy who "wasn't doing his job" wasn't doing it because he was concerned he was breaking state law and exposing the government to massive liability. Which/is/ his job to avoid.
And Al Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion because that's the only thing the government could get on him. Doesn't mean that Capone wasn't guilty of far more heinous things the government couldn't get a solid case on.
Al Capone was a murderer and criminal. Wooten's rap sheet includes things like misusing cellphone time and shooting a moose without a permit (apparently the permit was in his wife's name and she asked him to pull the trigger). He once said something threatening about his father-in-law, which was truly nasty but doesn't make the guy into a monster.
But let's forget about the pesky details. The simple fact is that Sarah Palin has a lot of baggage beyond this one thing. So much baggage that more than 55% of those polled cite her as the reason they're not voting for McCain. She gutted the "inexperience" argument they'd built against Obama over many weeks. For whatever reason you choose, she's a lousy candidate to have on a ticket that wants to win. McCain's people should have done enough research to figure that out and stayed the heck away. Now they're going to lose the election and have nobody but themselves to blame.
How was the shortfall from the Reagan tax cuts made up? It wasn't. The government ran large deficits. Yes, much of the money was borrowed from Social Security, but without the trust fund the money could just as well have been borrowed from the public.
Congressionally- and Presidentially-reported deficit numbers are traditionally calculated after Social Security funds have been taken. You can Google for examples. For example, our deficits have been widely reported at 400-500bn throughout this decade when in fact they've been 700bn+. That's the major political advantage of borrowing from the SS trust fund.
Additionally, the difference between borrowing from the SS trust fund and the public is that the government has a strong obligation to pay back money borrowed from the public. They have no such obligation to pay themselves back.
Yes, I'm aware that the law says the government/is/ obligated to pay back the SS trust fund before the rest of the debt. And I don't dispute that. The thing is, even though the government is obligated to pay itself back, it's not obligated to use that money for actual Social Security payments. It could, if it wanted to, slash SS payments and use that money for something else--- like repaying other debt.
In fact, there has been a lot of talk about cutting Social Security payments because we're in a "crisis" (whatever). That's just laying the groundwork.
Actually, McCain was well aware of Palin's "Troopergate" situation. She called for the firing of a police officer who tasered a minor child for punishment. Do you want to defend that officer's behavior?
Troopergate was about firing a public safety commissioner who didn't taser anyone (he was allegedly fired because he wouldn't bend the rules to fire another trooper.)
But in any case, when I found out that Sarah Palin's family accused her brother-in-law of tasering an 11-year old I got really mad. Mad that someone would do such a thing. But a skeptical part of me was thinking--- who would do that? Is this for real, or is this just a nasty custody battle (where the name of the game is to slander the father so he never gets to see his kids.)
I decided that this story better hold up, cause if Palin et al. were making it up or exaggerating it to win a custody dispute (and deprive a guy of his income so he couldn't afford to fight for his kids then they're scum. Scum of the earth. Unforgiveable scum beyond redemption. The kind of people who shouldn't just be voted against, but should be locked up in the darkest prison known to man. For life.
And so I read the story and found out--- and it's not been disputed as far as I know--- that Wooten's 11 year old stepson asked his stepfather to show him what a Taser felt like. Wooten gave in and used it on the//test// setting which is not harmful. Now, he technically shouldn't have done that, but as a father I know that you do all sorts of things you technically shouldn't do to make your kids happy. The kid wasn't hurt, and certainly nobody reported it as a problem until the marriage was over.
Furthermore, his alleged misconduct in this case is not the tasering, but rather "misusing government property".
The point is, this is powerful stuff, to accuse a man of hurting a child. If you're going to stand behind that you'd better be absolutely sure you can back it up. Because there are a lot of men in this country who do not take kindly to other men being accused of BS (abuse, whatever) in a custody dispute. It's playing with fire.
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In your example, I think the inventive step is how your car figures out how you're close to it, but does so in a way that is effective with one half of the system required to be low power (the keyfob), and is accurate enough that it doesn't unlock while you're not present, as well as determining that you want it to be unlocked, and you're just not walking around with your keys inside your house (which could trigger it, based on how close you are). A workable, comprehensive, and accurate solution to this could be fairly non-trival.
While I agree with this, that would only justify a patent on the specific non-obvious concepts and innovations needed to enable that system. It's not acceptable to then patent the entire concept (which would then allow you to sure somebody else for a different implementation of the basic idea).
Unfortunately, in practice that's not how it works. The patent office routinely accepts the general claim, as long as its accompanied by some specific claims. Then once the patent is granted, companies will routinely file suit under the broadest possible claim. Of course at that point, it's theoretically possible to challenge the patent on grounds of obviousness, but it's ferociously expensive and success is not guaranteed.
The PTO needs to be more proactive in dealing with these claims. And there should be new legislation that requires infringement suits be filed on the most specific claims first, with a heavy prejudice towards invalidation when this isn't adhered to.
I've heard that frogs have the ability to detect single photons. This is from a cryptographer who jokingly proposed a frog-based system for quantum key distribution.
But on a more serious note, what does it really mean for two people to become entangled? And does it matter that the photons are detected by a human retina? Could the entanglement just as easily happen if the photons were fired into my left butt-cheek?
Because I'm ALREADY PAYING for those roads. I pay gasoline taxes, I pay income tax.
Income tax is insufficient to pay for our Federal spending (defense spending alone has roughly doubled since 2000). The US has a shockingly low gasoline tax by world standards (about 35 cents/gallon). And on top of that the taxes are collected and distributed inefficiently--- the barely-used Interstates in my home state (Vermont, pop ~600,000) are routinely repaved, while the highways in New York State (pop. 20 million+, not to mention traffic from neighboring states) are falling apart. This is inefficient.
Additionally, it's a fairly basic reality that if you underprice a resource it will be overconsumed. This is one of the cornerstones of our economy, but for some reason we have the notion that we shouldn't apply this logic to public resources. I would much rather exchange the inefficient blanket gasoline tax in exchange for a targeted tax that collects revenue from actual road usage, at least for roads that are running near their capacity. This would reduce taxes and make sure the roads are maintained in accordance with their usage.
Take a look at all the stupid earmarks on the last 2 bailout/stimulus plans. I bet that would fix plenty of roads.
Sadly that's exactly what Congress insisted on. It's a stupid and inefficient use of Federal money.
But... *gasp* that isn't simply the Democrat way! The Democrat way is to simply throw money at a problem without any oversight or planning, call it "solved", and then gasp again when the problem comes up next election cycle and they need to "fix" it by throwing more money without any oversight or planning... repeat ad nauseum.
You just described the TARP program that was created by George W. Bush and his appointees. Don't pretend the Republicans are any better.
As to the rest of it --- the economy is bleeding to death. See this image if you disbelieve me. Most reputable economists think that with monetary policy maxed out (interest rates are effectively zero), the only thing we can do to stop the bleeding is to use fiscal policy, i.e., spend a ton of money and pray.
They may indeed be wrong. However, it's generally agreed that the alternative (doing nothing) is going to be much, much worse. Balancing our budget sure isn't going to do anything if the economy drops into a deep recession, so this is a risk worth taking. Again, not a politically popular risk --- just our only chance to avert catastrophe.
I would mind this less if Google was known for care in developing its client code. I specifically remember uninstalling Google Desktop last time due to its consumption of system resources and nasty vulnerabilities.
Well, you'd start by moving our electric grid to about 20% renewables (wind, solar), and transitioning a large portion of our transportation system to the electric grid. That would be tricky, but it's doable with a modern grid and careful planning. Then you'd probably make some changes that would lead to smaller, more efficient vehicles, better home insulation, less consumption of cheap plastic crap, more walking, less beef consumption, etc.
Life would definitely change, but we're not talking about Mad Max levels of change.
So it was a few months before my wedding and I wanted to look good in the pictures (you have them for life, you know). So I vowed to start eating right and going to the gym. But then the gym turned out to be inconvenient and kind of expensive, so instead I decided I'd just wait 'til the last month and go on a crash diet. But unfortunately, the stupid crash diet didn't work out either (I ask you: who can eat cabbage soup for four weeks!?)
I'm sorry, what was this story about...?
Why shouldn't geoengineering climate (dumping Fe in the India ocean, for example) be a substitute for cutting CO2?
You know, when I was a kid they found out that aerosol spray cans (spray cans!) had eaten a huge hole in the ozone layer. Who could have anticipated that? But obviously nothing like that will happen this time.
"SSL protects data in transit but the problem isn't eavesdropping on the transmission. Someone can steal the credit card on some server somewhere. The real risk is data in storage. SSL protects against the wrong problem," [Schneier] said.
I respect Bruce, but I think if you say something true enough times, you lose sight of the fact that in this case it may not actually be a valid point. While credit card theft is a major problem, Phishers frequently target bank account login credentials--- which are not stored all over the place. In this case, SSL is one of the primary protections keeping you from all kind of hell (losing your credit card is a pain in the butt, but usually it's insured... losing your banking credentials can be a huge disaster). Now imagine that instead of a few rubes being conned by Phishing emails, you had millions of relatively savvy customers at a large ISP diverted to a fake Bank of America site (perhaps with help from insiders at the ISP). The losses could be substantial.
Again, Bruce is right about one problem but not necessarily about every problem (and I can't help but notice that he works for a storage company...)
Nobody should ever have to go through the indignity of having their family arrested, questioned, found innocent, then left without alternative transit or reimbursement. They were able to purchase tickets on another airline which indicates that they were no longer considered a security risk by the TSA or the FBI. From your post it sounds like your company was once abused by an irresponsible plaintiff. That sounds traumatic, but it doesn't change the fact that this family has a legitimate complaint.
This certainly doesn't indicate racism on Airtran's part, but it indicates negligence and awful customer service. I certainly don't see any reason why Airtran should be expected to behave this way without additional financial penalty.
Now once again mod me troll for a well-reasoned, informative post that dares dissent from the racist airline meme du jour.
Note to would-be Slashdot posters: attaching this to your post is like writing "I am an asshole" on your forehead.
The way I understand it, for example, 4096-bit RSA either requires a dramatically new approach (quantum computing), or, with current technologies, requires every atom in the Universe to be assembled into a massive compute cluster, and that cluster needs to run for longer than the heat death of the Universe.
You've neglected to mention: a significant advance in the mathematics behind factoring and/or solving the RSA problem itself. There's been an impressive amount of work in this direction overthe past 20 years, so it's not ridiculous to imagine further advancements in sub-exponential factoring algorithms.
Fortunately, if such an advance does take place we'll probably hear about it well before the botnets have a chance to take advantage of it (on the other hand, we've had plenty of warning about collisions in MD5, and that didn't help RapidSSL).
How did I know that environmentalists already had an objection? It's like I didn't even have to read the response... The usual thing to do in these circumstances is pump water uphill, but I'm sure there's an immediate objection to that, too.
Hills have an enormous carbon footprint :)
Seriously, right now you're having a problem with reality, not "environmentalists". For some reason many otherwise rational Americans have developed a persecution complex--- if something doesn't make sense (scientifically, or engineering-wise) they get pissy and blame the evil environmentalists. But in reality it's just life getting in the way, and life does that. We engineer around it.
In other words, if concrete has a huge CO2 cost (more than is acceptable for the application described by the parent poster) then that's just bad luck. If the application itself doesn't make sense, then that's even worse luck. But move on and try something else, don't shoot the messenger.
Keep in mind that it wasn't just the President, it was also the Republican party who controlled much of Congress from 1994 to 2006, and had a complete monopoly on government from 2002-2006. These are the people who set regulation, taxation rates, sign trade agreements, etc. They have a lot of economic power.
I am pointing at both parties who have politicized this issue for their own gain... the public at large doesn't the read journals and papers on the latest scientific findings, instead they listen the political figure heads and corporations and news reporters, all of which have an agenda to push.
Well, what is that agenda? Clearly there are massive profits to be made from extracting and selling fossil fuels. CO2 reduction measures place those profits at risk, so that agenda is obvious, linear, and grand in scale. But what is the agenda for the other side?
Fame? Fortune? Glamour? I'm sure there's a little bit of that. I just don't see how it can amount to a tiny fraction of the motivation for the "anti-GW" crowd.
I've said this before, but why not say it again :)
The basic issue with Net Neutrality is not how the service should be offered, or anything to do with the technology. It's fundamentally just an issue of who pays. Telecoms would like to collect subscriber revenue from their customers, then turn around and collect more revenue from content providers as well.
The important thing to understand here is that as bad as the current ISP situation is, under the current model a customer theoretically has the option to respond to price signals by changing their service options, e.g., switching to another provider, or --- if none is available --- simply reducing their consumption. That keeps costs under control to some extent.
Under the proposed model, it's the content provider who pays. Since a content provider is not a direct "customer" of the ISP, they have very little leverage with the ISP. If, say, Google wants to reach a given class of customers (e.g., the tens millions of customers served by Comcast), they have no choice but to deal with Comcast on whatever terms it chooses--- or give up a huge percentage of the market.
Now on the surface this seems like a fine deal to Comcast's customers, since they get enhanced network services without any additional service charges. But this leads to a problem: without any price signals, there's no strong incentive on Comcast to moderate their prices. Anything they charge will ultimately be passed along to the customers by the content providers, in the form of higher service charges, reduced quality, and/or dramatically increased advertising. But customers won't see this directly and link it to the ISP, so there will be very little incentive to control costs (no doubt Comcast will mandate that content providers distribute these costs equally, and not single out their customers for additional surcharges). It imposes a huge tax on a very dynamic and growing part of our economy, and it's certainly one we don't need now.
(Larger providers, incidentally, will have some leverage in this model--- since who wants to be the ISP to cut off iTunes service? But their leverage will come at the cost of squeezing smaller providers for more revenue, dramatically increasing barriers to entering the market. Goodbye new ideas.)
There are various solutions to this problem, all of which require the ISP to bill their enhanced services to the customer. In the end this gives the same set of enhanced services, but also allows customers to make a decision as to whether they want to pay the ISP, cut down on service, or switch to another provider. Done correctly this should encourage ISPs to open up their networks to many providers, since their revenue will be driven by customer interest and not self-interest.
You act like these are two distinct, unrelated issues--- when in fact, they're deeply interdependent.
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out ... It's quite possible that industrial civilization will just run down.
There's more than enough available energy to avoid the doomsday scenario you're talking about. Nuclear (with breeder reactor technology) can sustain us for hundreds of years. There's plenty of coal, and a lot of expensive oil out there if we don't care about emissions. Similarly, it's been noted that the entire US's electricity requirements could be met by approximately 20 mi^2 worth of solar thermal reactor located in the south of the United States. Even if we ultimately had to generate all of our energy from renewable technology, we could increase our total energy output by many times over what oil is giving us now.
And these are just the technologies that we have today, which produce energy that's marginally more expensive (i.e., less than double) what we're paying to extract and haul oil. They may be a lot less convenient (i.e., solar output depends on the weather and time of day), but we'll engineer around these things if the alternative is the destruction of industrial society. Given that Europe was able to rebuild from WWII in less than fifty years, I'm confident that the world can handle this situation as well.
Meanwhile, we *do* have projects to catalog all such asteroids *and* a mission to the asteroid belt in play right now. So what's your complaint?
This: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11356
I can match your anecdotal evidence with several anecdotes - including a Scottish godfather of mine who, in order to receive excellent care for cancer, had to move to Lichtenstein for six months (for tax purposes) and then come to the Mayo clinic for treatment - otherwise it would've bankrupted him due to the relationship between healthcare and taxes in the UK.
I would have to reject that anecdote. My understanding is that the UK has a bizarre form of health insurance which is fundamentally different from that of France's (single provider, etc.), while France has a much more successful single-payer system. These are hugely different concepts, and health outcomes & satisfaction are very different between the two countries.
There are many health systems in the world, some of them better than others. Certainly we could adopt a poor system of socialized health care. On the other hand, I believe that there's evidence that such systems can be run well. And certainly I believe that any such system should permit citizens to purchase additional health insurance above and beyond what the government offers.
Obama's solution, while pleasing to my checkbook in the short term, is philosophically abhorrent to me because - like many Democratic programs - it absolves everyone of having a stake in the system. McCain's solution was more of a band-aid than a solution - rejiggering how premiums are taxed to provide a credit (which would have been a net positive for me) - but I found it less objectionable, even if it was less ambitious.
From what I can tell McCain's solution was a series of tax incentives designed to push most people out of the employer-provided health insurance market and onto the individual market. This rings gigantic red alarm bells, because the individual market tends to average 20-30% more expensive even for healthy patients, and substantially more so for older patients/patients with pre-existing conditions (an inevitable consequence of individual vs. collective bargaining). Furthermore, McCain indexed his credit to CPI and not the cost of healthcare (which is rising much more rapidly), so any immediate advantages you saw would have been quickly eaten away.
The problem with praising this as a "band aid" is that in the best case this plan doesn't really try to solve any particular problem, and in fact could have made the situation enormously worse. I suppose there's a cogent (if wrongheaded) argument that by reducing people's access to health care, we could ultimately drive prices down, and McCain's plan would probably have succeeded at the first part (over time). But I don't think McCain sold it that way, so the whole thing left me cold.
Certainly your preference for the /much worse/ McCain plan would indicate that you have strong reasons to dislike the Obama plan. It's just that I've become leery of arguments that such and such plan is "philisophically abhorrent" without the person explaining the reasoning behind that judgement.
Any chance we could delay the Titan mission and instead deploy an infrared telescope to study the asteroid belt? This would not only provide us with valuable scientific knowledge, but would also give us a chance to detect earth-bound asteroids with enough time to perhaps do something about them. My understanding is that Congress has specifically asked NASA to prioritize such a mission, but the directive has mostly been ignored.
This is too bad, since there's a non-trivial chance of a serious impact in the next couple of centuries. Nothing we learn about TItan will do us much good if we're dead.
I run a business that has been profitable, and stand to see a tax increase in the next few years. I'm still excited about Obama, though, because I don't think a McCain administration would have been much of an economic steward in the next few years, particularly for the tech industry. I'd rather pay the taxes and keep my business running than go through another multi-year recession with no hand on the tiller.
But what I don't get is this part:
My SO is altering course from medical school to Physician's Assistant school just so she can get a regular salary and regular hours (even if it's under $100k) rather than establish a Byzantine bureaucracy in her own eventual practice to double- and triple-book patients just so she can run a profitable practice.
You've just described life under private insurance, which clearly sucks. I'm not proposing that Obama will necessarily make all of these problems go away, but I find it hard to criticize the guy for wanting to make things better.
My only personal experience with socialized medicine was in France when I got a nasty case of bronchitis. Rather than double- and triple- booking me, collecting co-pays, etc., the doctor took plenty of time. When he realized I wasn't a citizen (and thus had to actually compensate him) he laughed it off as a hassle and handed me the antibiotics from a sample case. I can't see this being worse than the utter disaster we have now...
Am I reading the data from the Congressional Budget Office wrong? Look at 2007, for example: the chart lists an "On-Budget" deficit of $342.2 billion, a Social Security surplus of $186.5 billion, a Postal Service deficit of $5.1 billion, and a "Total" deficit of 160.7. No year (up to 2007) had a "On-Budget" deficit of greater than $600 billion.
You're completely right, I was adding in my head and getting 700bn when in fact it's "only" in the 500-600bn range. Which is, of course, completely insane. (Maybe the discrepancy between total debt and deficit is due to interest payments?)
In any case, my original point is that the total numbers are high and not well reported. It's frustratingly common to see news reports cite "on-budget" deficits as the real measure. Here's just one example I found in 30 seconds of Googling:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/budget-deficit-soars-rebate-payments/story.aspx?guid=%7B7DC4F7B8-CEB2-4D30-AF91-43EE5BC5E3B2%7D
Senior citizens tend to have high voter turnout. There is a strong obligation to pay back Social Security. The last attempt to privatize Social Security failed. Obama is likely to win the election. He appears to be against cutting benefits and instead favors imposing new Social Security taxes on those making over $250 thousand per year.
I'd like to agree with you on this. In fact, I'm 70% confident you're right. However, I'm not complacent about it. First, imagine the consequences of another 10-20 years of mismanagement. Then imagine a popular politician pushing the idea that in the face of such financial problems Social Security should be "means-tested"--- essentially becoming a program that benefits the non-rich. Then imagine the threshold of "non-rich" gradually slipping downwards due to poor yearly increases, until it becomes a program for the poor. At that point it will have lost a lot of public support and becomes vulnerable to cuts, particularly if we're faced with a choice between reducing SS and cutting, say, education spending. I think that's the long-term recipe for eliminating Social Security, and you can be someone somewhere is planning the whole thing.
This story comes from the guy doing the Tasering, not from the child being Taser'd. Weight the evidence accordingly.
From the Anchorage Daily News (reporting on the formal investigative report):
http://www.adn.com/politics/story/476430.html
There is some dispute as to how much it hurt the boy, but all parties in the incident seem to agree on the general outline: the kid wanted the father to do it. The dad maybe shouldn't have done it, but the kid got at most a little bit of temporary pain. This is all quite contrary to the original implication, which holds that Wooten is a monster who tasers the crap out of kids.
Palin, as governor of the state, is essentially the CEO of the state. State employees technically work for her. She felt the PSC wasn't doing his job and removed him. If he'd been dragging his heels on a case like this I'd have fired him, too
But she didn't fire him because of Wooten! She fired him because of something else. Then it was something else. I think along the way he was being too helpful to rape victims or something. The reasons kept changing. In any case, let's be clear about this whole "Wooten is CEO and can do what she wants line". There are strong limitations on what the governor can do with regards to state employees.
Basically the guy who "wasn't doing his job" wasn't doing it because he was concerned he was breaking state law and exposing the government to massive liability. Which /is/ his job to avoid.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/30/AR2008083002366_3.html?hpid=topnews
And Al Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion because that's the only thing the government could get on him. Doesn't mean that Capone wasn't guilty of far more heinous things the government couldn't get a solid case on.
Al Capone was a murderer and criminal. Wooten's rap sheet includes things like misusing cellphone time and shooting a moose without a permit (apparently the permit was in his wife's name and she asked him to pull the trigger). He once said something threatening about his father-in-law, which was truly nasty but doesn't make the guy into a monster.
But let's forget about the pesky details. The simple fact is that Sarah Palin has a lot of baggage beyond this one thing. So much baggage that more than 55% of those polled cite her as the reason they're not voting for McCain. She gutted the "inexperience" argument they'd built against Obama over many weeks. For whatever reason you choose, she's a lousy candidate to have on a ticket that wants to win. McCain's people should have done enough research to figure that out and stayed the heck away. Now they're going to lose the election and have nobody but themselves to blame.
How was the shortfall from the Reagan tax cuts made up? It wasn't. The government ran large deficits. Yes, much of the money was borrowed from Social Security, but without the trust fund the money could just as well have been borrowed from the public.
Congressionally- and Presidentially-reported deficit numbers are traditionally calculated after Social Security funds have been taken. You can Google for examples. For example, our deficits have been widely reported at 400-500bn throughout this decade when in fact they've been 700bn+. That's the major political advantage of borrowing from the SS trust fund.
Additionally, the difference between borrowing from the SS trust fund and the public is that the government has a strong obligation to pay back money borrowed from the public. They have no such obligation to pay themselves back.
Yes, I'm aware that the law says the government /is/ obligated to pay back the SS trust fund before the rest of the debt. And I don't dispute that. The thing is, even though the government is obligated to pay itself back, it's not obligated to use that money for actual Social Security payments. It could, if it wanted to, slash SS payments and use that money for something else--- like repaying other debt.
In fact, there has been a lot of talk about cutting Social Security payments because we're in a "crisis" (whatever). That's just laying the groundwork.
Actually, McCain was well aware of Palin's "Troopergate" situation. She called for the firing of a police officer who tasered a minor child for punishment. Do you want to defend that officer's behavior?
Troopergate was about firing a public safety commissioner who didn't taser anyone (he was allegedly fired because he wouldn't bend the rules to fire another trooper.)
But in any case, when I found out that Sarah Palin's family accused her brother-in-law of tasering an 11-year old I got really mad. Mad that someone would do such a thing. But a skeptical part of me was thinking--- who would do that? Is this for real, or is this just a nasty custody battle (where the name of the game is to slander the father so he never gets to see his kids.)
I decided that this story better hold up, cause if Palin et al. were making it up or exaggerating it to win a custody dispute (and deprive a guy of his income so he couldn't afford to fight for his kids then they're scum. Scum of the earth. Unforgiveable scum beyond redemption. The kind of people who shouldn't just be voted against, but should be locked up in the darkest prison known to man. For life.
And so I read the story and found out--- and it's not been disputed as far as I know--- that Wooten's 11 year old stepson asked his stepfather to show him what a Taser felt like. Wooten gave in and used it on the //test// setting which is not harmful. Now, he technically shouldn't have done that, but as a father I know that you do all sorts of things you technically shouldn't do to make your kids happy. The kid wasn't hurt, and certainly nobody reported it as a problem until the marriage was over.
Furthermore, his alleged misconduct in this case is not the tasering, but rather "misusing government property".
The point is, this is powerful stuff, to accuse a man of hurting a child. If you're going to stand behind that you'd better be absolutely sure you can back it up. Because there are a lot of men in this country who do not take kindly to other men being accused of BS (abuse, whatever) in a custody dispute. It's playing with fire.