So if that Millionare had the infinate libality for SSI that you want, would you be whinning if he also had an infinate size to the Check he picked up at 65?
No, thales, you don't get the point of my last post. That money I'm spending isn't going towards providing me with social security benefits in the future-- I'd be ok with it if it were. The problem is that a lot of it's being hijacked by Congress to pay for completely unrelated things. That money isn't being saved, and there's an excellent chance that-- barring a major tax increase-- the gov't won't have anything left when I need it.
To answer your question: I certainly don't need that millionaire to pay an equal percentage for Social Security, as long as the money I pay to SS actually goes to providing benefits, not to paying for general government expenses. Right now our government considers those excess Social Security funds I'm paying just another form of revenue that it can "borrow" to pay for the war in Iraq, Congressional pork, and so on.
Note that I said "borrow", above. See what happens is that the government takes the money I pay in Social Security and spends it. Then it puts US bonds into a big fund-- basically a big pool of IOUs. If I'm ever going to collect Social Security when I retire, someone's going to have to pay back all of those IOUs. Who do you think it's going to be? The taxpayer, of course. So essentially, the government is taking my money as a loan that I have to pay back if I ever want to use it. Should I ever collect SS benefits, I will have paid for them twice-- once in payroll taxes today, and again in income taxes to pay back the "borrowing" the government did in my name.
Don't underestimate the importance of these taxes. The only reason Bush and Gore were able to talk about a surplus in the 2000 election was the fact that Social Security taxes were being lumped in with general gov't revenue. If we were actually saving those taxes for this check I'm supposed to get someday, there would have been no surplus, and Bush wouldn't have had an excuse to "give money back to the people" (which, even if the 10-year surplus hadn't been a fiction, would have put us in a Federal tax deficit "hidden" by my Social Security taxes.)
So here's what I'm asking for: If Social Security's going to be a general tax, let's call it that and distribute the liability for it across all income brackets. If Social Security's going to be a retirement program, let's not spend that money for things unrelated to the program-- if we're collecting too much, either save it for future need, or slash the tax. (And given that the boomers begin retiring in a decade, we should probably be doing the former.)
Or... You could see that Mr. Bush is trying to stop the $pending $pree that states are on.
See, I would buy this "Bush is forcing the states to balance their checkbooks" line if I saw the Federal Government doing the same. Leading by example, if you will.
But of course, the Federal situation makes most of the states' budgets look good by comparison. I'm sure there are equally compelling excuses to explain why spending is way up (and not just on military or homeland security measures), while tax revenue is way down (from both the bad economy and the tax cuts.) But I think at some point you just have to stop deluding yourself.
The worst part of this all is that many states, like New York (and NYC in particular) are going under paying for homeland security measures, which are inarguably part of "the common defense". But Homeland Security funds are being assigned in a manner that provides more per-capita funding to relatively safe states like Wyoming than to the ones with the most vulnerable targets. In fact, perhaps coincidentally, funding allocation mirrors the number of electoral votes that a state has to give rather than any realistic threat model.
I could go on, but the numbers speak for themselves. This government is not a model of fiscal restraint, it's a money-hungry glutton. The only lesson it's sending to the states is that political greed and incompetence are much easier to pull off inside the Beltway.
Sales tax tends to be pretty equal. Why? Because the more money you have, the more you spend
I'd like to see some numbers on that before you claim it as simple fact. Because, quite frankly, I haven't even heard this claim broadcast by even the most tax-averse think-tanks in the country. If it were at all supportable, I think we would have heard it shouted from the rooftops by now.
And yes, food is taxed-- heavily. You might live in one of the states where it isn't, but the majority of us pay taxes at the supermarket, restaurants and so on, in addition to the built-in costs from gas tax, energy, etc, etc.
And income tax is quite a bit more equal than you would imagine, due to the massive number of exemptions claimed by the very wealthy, low capital-gains tax rates, and-- most of all-- the fact that payroll taxes like Social Security (which are not set aside solely for use in that program) cut off at around $88,000. This last means that the average Joe is being taxed about 15% of his income (7.5% on his side, and an additional 7.5% to his company) on top of anything he pays in income tax, while a millionare is paying about 1.3% of his income (or less) to SS.
I believe New Hampshire has no sales tax either. They don't have income tax to boot. I have no idea where they get their money frankly.
Lotteries and New Hampshire State Liquor stores. Combined with the near-absence of services funded by the state (as opposed to local services funded by property tax.)
replace "MS" with "Sun" or "Oracle" or any other company you like, and I bet his higher-ups still wouldn't be happy about it. You may not like who you work for, but it's not a good idea to bite the hand that feeds you.
Well, I imagine it's a particularly bad idea if that company has a tendency towards paranoia and retribution.
You, slashdot editor, member of the press, are actually encouraging and suggesting that false and misleading information be interpolated from a small number of facts.
Lighten up. I think the tagline at the end of the article is just a little bit of healthy irony. At worst, it's nothing more than cutesy, at best it at least reminds people not to take themselved too seriously. The immediate instinct of many Slashdotters upon reading the skimpy facts of this case is to assume that there's something terribly unwholesome going on. At least Slashdot is reminding us to put on our tinfoil hats before we start ranting.
And don't get me started on calling Slashdot "the press"...
This is just bad business. We all know how this is going to turn out-- it'll bounce back and forth from Verisign to ICANN to the tech press and eventually to the mainstream press until the negative publicity reaches the point where Verisign won't have any alternative but to yank it.
See, two days ago this was a technical issue that only a handful of nerds cared about. Two months from now it's going to be "Verisign, the organization granted a monopoly on control of the entire Internet and insists on defyingthe rest of the Internet community." People who never even heard of DNS will come away from this thinking that Verisign means shady.
Save us all the time and dozens of inevitable Slashdot stories (+ dupes) and dump the thing.
Re:Not RFID
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
but so long as it is restricted to people on probation as stated
Actually, the article is vague on this point. It doesn't specifically say that the individuals to be tracked are on probation; rather, it offhandedly mentions that these tags will be useful for probation officers.
It's a shame. As much as people like to point out that CS is about "concepts, not specific implementations", it is easier to learn those concepts using certain implementations. More of the inner workings are accessable in *nixes than they are in Windows, and the development tools are often a lot more flexible (once you learn them.) On top of that, it just feels cooler to realize you've got the proverbial hood open and are touching the actual guts of the OS, rather than (by necessity) playing around with simulations in Windows.
For instance, I never would have understood Operating Systems as well if we hadn't been using *nix systems; it made the difference between actually writing real code for class assignments and "pretending" to write code.
The next year after I finished my basic classes, the department began a transition from Linux/BSD/GCC to Windows/Java. Tutoring those kids, I noticed that they were having a hard time, and displayed a lot less interest. There's just something compelling about doing "real stuff" at a low-level, as opposed to working in a much higher-level environment.
It's not just a number, it's a functional password that makes the difference between describing a working or non-working system for decoding DVDs. Would you consider this password more worthy of protection if it was the words "Open Sesame" rather than a string of bits?
To extrapolate your argument, you're suggesting that the mathematical formula E=MC^2 can be protected, but the actual value of the speed of light (C) can't, thus rendering the entire formula meaningless. For no better reason than that you don't like numbers.
You are correct, they are not guaranteed by an amednment, but in the original text.
Hmm. I always thought that the purpose of an amendment was to modify/override what was there before. To give an unrelated example: Article I dictates that the state legislatures choose senators, however we actually follow the text of Amendment 17, which requires popular election of Senators. Given this order of precedence, why shouldn't the First Amendment be considered to take priority over the text of Article I?
Admittedly, the fact that the Bill of Rights was ratified at the same time as the rest of the Constitution makes this rather tricky. Still, saying that Article I "is in the original text" seems to imply that it's actually less important.
the state Supreme Court ruled that property and trade secrets rights outranked free speech rights in this case, because the DVD code was never meant to be public
If I'm not mistaken, this code wasn't stolen, it was reengineered from scratch, wasn't it? If that's the case, what does it matter if the code was "meant to be" public? It became public the minute its author wrote it. Is the court really saying that the manufacturer's intent bars me from writing original descriptions of a product?
PS I realize that this may be an issue of the code containing "stolen" trade secrets such as keys. If this is the case, would the decision still apply to a truly "clean-room" version of DeCSS?
As an erstwhile Vermonter, let me point out that the Big Dig-- and all matters relating to the Interstate system in Massachusetts-- are relevant to more than just the cityfolk. Boston is (unfortunately) right the hell on the direct line between Northern New England/Northern Mass and southern Mass/the Cape. (Yes, you can take the long way around, but it adds a lot of time to the trip.)
The problem is that I93/Route 3 don't end at the city limits. They go off to service a lot of rural folk, throughout the region. This is precisely why they receive so much state and Federal funding. Now obviously I wish the Federal gov't would do a better (and less corrupt) job at it, but the ultimate benefit and blame lies with everyone who ever thought "golly, it'd be great if it was easier to get through into/through Boston".
Then I won't try to defend the massive federal and state subsidies to urban areas to provide public transportation, roads, etc. that you need to make highly populated areas livable.
Funny. In New York State (where I live), rural areas receive a much greater per-capita share of State and Federal Transportation funds than urban areas.
All forms of transportation are more cost-effective when you can take advantage of the massive economies-of-scale provided by crowded urban areas.
I admit that it's one of those well-designed systems that should be foolproof. Until some extraordinary set of circumstances leads to a catastrophic failure (for instance, the extremely unlikely combination of broken electronic and mechanical backup breaking systems.)
Don't poo-poo this; it's the ridiculously unlikely things that lead to pretty much every massive transportation accident these days.
Unless, I assume, there's a problem with the braking system and nobody knows about it because the monitoring boxes are down. Isn't that precisely why the monitoring boxes exist in the first place?
He got caught because of his sheer laziness and possibly his own ignorance.
He got caught because in the process of running a business, he decided not to devote absolutely ridiculuous amounts of time to wiping the harddrives of unused PCs.
And before you accuse the guy of whining, note that he paid his fine, in addition to the presumably hundreds of thousands of legitimate licensing fees that he'd already paid to BSA members.
Now he's doing precisely what a smart businessman should do: recognize that the cost of policing for such tiny violations (and the potential fines that can result) is much higher than the software is worth. He's taking his business elsewhere. And good for him.
Try being a pedestrian during one of these Critical Mass things. It's ironic that bicyclists, who feel so put upon by motorists, have absolutely no regard whatsoever for people who choose to use their own two feet to get around.
Last time one of these CM things came through, I stood waiting at a crosswalk for almost ten minutes as the bikers blithely ignored the traffic signals. Think bikes are the perfect form of transportation? Wait until some idiot's coming at you at 15 miles per hour when you've got a Walk signal.
Made me want to buy a Humvee, that's what it accomplished.
Why doesn't this article mention Larry Niven even once? I was under the impression that he coined the term ("flash crowd") in his earlier short stories.
It takes at least 5 years for a human brain to be "programmed" to do most simple, coordinated tasks.
Yes, but you have to program each and every human being to do these tasks. With a machine, you simply teach it once and then clone the resulting "mind" as many times as you need. So even if it takes us an additional 50 years to develop a machine capable of doing many human tasks, we could produce millions of them the next day, and every day from there on out.
How do you make a connection between a kiosk where you can order food at McDonalds and robots taking over every job in the United States?
The question is, how do you not make this connection?
Ask yourself the following questions:
1) Is there a compelling reason to believe that computer/robot technology won't reach the point where most basic service jobs can be (almost) entirely automated? Think food service, janitorial, banking, etc.
2) Is there a compelling reason to believe that this technology will remain too costly or inconvenient for employers to adopt it?
3) If (1) and (2), is there some compelling reason why employers will choose not to adopt a cheaper, more convenient technology for these purposes, in order to increase their profits?
If you can't answer with confidence to any of these questions, then it's probably not a matter of whether robot technology will absorb these jobs, but of when it will happen. The 50 year prediction may be off by quite a lot. But over some reasonable time span (less than a couple of centuries, barring global disaster), the technology will be available and-- assuming our economic system remains similar to what we have today-- it will be in use.
Makes me think of John Varley's novels, in which future workers are organized into unions, like the Hod Carriers Union. They carry symbolic tokens, like shovels or tools, which they never actually use, as all of the work is performed by machines.
In a sense, that's one logical extension of our current economic system to a world where most human labor isn't necessary. The question is, does our system continue to function properly in that environment?
Everyone said the same thing when ATMs came around, "Oh no, they're going to replace actual tellers!" But it didn't, banks still hire quite frequently for bank tellers.
What bank do you use? Many of the banks in my area have reduced teller hours to the point where most working people can't use them. Some have instituted fees for seeing an actual person.
Others (my neighborhood Washington Mutual) have so completely automated the process of withdrawals and deposits with special kiosks, that actual human presence in a bank is much lower than it ever was when I was growing up. You go to one kiosk to prepare your deposit, and another to withdraw cash. The actual teller transaction, if necessary at all, is minimized. And tellers double as customer-service people, opening new accounts and the like-- one of the few remaining tasks that isn't machine automatable.
Then there are online banks like ETrade, which seem to do ok with no human contact at all.
So no, humans haven't been written out of the equation. But their numbers have been substantially reduced, and the process is a long ways from complete.
As long as it means that the government pirates are plundering less booty from us, fine!
As long as they borrow money in our name, they're still plundering. It's just a lot easier for them to sneak it past us that way. Unfortunately, it costs us a lot more in the long run this way.
As my dad always told me, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And anyone who tells you different is either a fool or a Republican.
No, it can't be easily defeated. The tests have been partially successful, but that is how research and development goes! Glad you were not Edison or a Wright brother.
Oy. Go read a little about NMD. Go read about how multiple warheads and decoys can defeat the system.
Then go read about how the entire budget for the program is a complete blank, with no details whatsover. Basically one huge blank check.
Then go read about how Congress, noting that Bush's budget underfunded homeland security operations, politely suggested that some money be transferred from NMD to homeland security (notably, finding and detecting nuclear weapons transported into this country by alternate transportat) and were rebuffed.
(As a New Yorker, this one scares the shit out of me. Any president that would underfund programs to protect the US from a clear and present danger-- in favor of a wasteful and unexplained project that might never work, can be circumvented, and doesn't protect us now-- is a fool.)
Of course not. [The BBA] is a great idea.
Sure it is. It's a great idea that the Republicans have completely abandoned. Probably because they never seriously supported it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
No, thales, you don't get the point of my last post. That money I'm spending isn't going towards providing me with social security benefits in the future-- I'd be ok with it if it were. The problem is that a lot of it's being hijacked by Congress to pay for completely unrelated things. That money isn't being saved, and there's an excellent chance that-- barring a major tax increase-- the gov't won't have anything left when I need it.
To answer your question: I certainly don't need that millionaire to pay an equal percentage for Social Security, as long as the money I pay to SS actually goes to providing benefits, not to paying for general government expenses. Right now our government considers those excess Social Security funds I'm paying just another form of revenue that it can "borrow" to pay for the war in Iraq, Congressional pork, and so on.
Note that I said "borrow", above. See what happens is that the government takes the money I pay in Social Security and spends it. Then it puts US bonds into a big fund-- basically a big pool of IOUs. If I'm ever going to collect Social Security when I retire, someone's going to have to pay back all of those IOUs. Who do you think it's going to be? The taxpayer, of course. So essentially, the government is taking my money as a loan that I have to pay back if I ever want to use it. Should I ever collect SS benefits, I will have paid for them twice-- once in payroll taxes today, and again in income taxes to pay back the "borrowing" the government did in my name.
Don't underestimate the importance of these taxes. The only reason Bush and Gore were able to talk about a surplus in the 2000 election was the fact that Social Security taxes were being lumped in with general gov't revenue. If we were actually saving those taxes for this check I'm supposed to get someday, there would have been no surplus, and Bush wouldn't have had an excuse to "give money back to the people" (which, even if the 10-year surplus hadn't been a fiction, would have put us in a Federal tax deficit "hidden" by my Social Security taxes.)
So here's what I'm asking for: If Social Security's going to be a general tax, let's call it that and distribute the liability for it across all income brackets. If Social Security's going to be a retirement program, let's not spend that money for things unrelated to the program-- if we're collecting too much, either save it for future need, or slash the tax. (And given that the boomers begin retiring in a decade, we should probably be doing the former.)
See, I would buy this "Bush is forcing the states to balance their checkbooks" line if I saw the Federal Government doing the same. Leading by example, if you will.
But of course, the Federal situation makes most of the states' budgets look good by comparison. I'm sure there are equally compelling excuses to explain why spending is way up (and not just on military or homeland security measures), while tax revenue is way down (from both the bad economy and the tax cuts.) But I think at some point you just have to stop deluding yourself.
The worst part of this all is that many states, like New York (and NYC in particular) are going under paying for homeland security measures, which are inarguably part of "the common defense". But Homeland Security funds are being assigned in a manner that provides more per-capita funding to relatively safe states like Wyoming than to the ones with the most vulnerable targets. In fact, perhaps coincidentally, funding allocation mirrors the number of electoral votes that a state has to give rather than any realistic threat model.
I could go on, but the numbers speak for themselves. This government is not a model of fiscal restraint, it's a money-hungry glutton. The only lesson it's sending to the states is that political greed and incompetence are much easier to pull off inside the Beltway.
I'd like to see some numbers on that before you claim it as simple fact. Because, quite frankly, I haven't even heard this claim broadcast by even the most tax-averse think-tanks in the country. If it were at all supportable, I think we would have heard it shouted from the rooftops by now.
And yes, food is taxed-- heavily. You might live in one of the states where it isn't, but the majority of us pay taxes at the supermarket, restaurants and so on, in addition to the built-in costs from gas tax, energy, etc, etc.
And income tax is quite a bit more equal than you would imagine, due to the massive number of exemptions claimed by the very wealthy, low capital-gains tax rates, and-- most of all-- the fact that payroll taxes like Social Security (which are not set aside solely for use in that program) cut off at around $88,000. This last means that the average Joe is being taxed about 15% of his income (7.5% on his side, and an additional 7.5% to his company) on top of anything he pays in income tax, while a millionare is paying about 1.3% of his income (or less) to SS.
Lotteries and New Hampshire State Liquor stores. Combined with the near-absence of services funded by the state (as opposed to local services funded by property tax.)
Well, I imagine it's a particularly bad idea if that company has a tendency towards paranoia and retribution.
Lighten up. I think the tagline at the end of the article is just a little bit of healthy irony. At worst, it's nothing more than cutesy, at best it at least reminds people not to take themselved too seriously. The immediate instinct of many Slashdotters upon reading the skimpy facts of this case is to assume that there's something terribly unwholesome going on. At least Slashdot is reminding us to put on our tinfoil hats before we start ranting.
And don't get me started on calling Slashdot "the press"...
See, two days ago this was a technical issue that only a handful of nerds cared about. Two months from now it's going to be "Verisign, the organization granted a monopoly on control of the entire Internet and insists on defyingthe rest of the Internet community." People who never even heard of DNS will come away from this thinking that Verisign means shady.
Save us all the time and dozens of inevitable Slashdot stories (+ dupes) and dump the thing.
Actually, the article is vague on this point. It doesn't specifically say that the individuals to be tracked are on probation; rather, it offhandedly mentions that these tags will be useful for probation officers.
Can anyone clarify?
For instance, I never would have understood Operating Systems as well if we hadn't been using *nix systems; it made the difference between actually writing real code for class assignments and "pretending" to write code.
The next year after I finished my basic classes, the department began a transition from Linux/BSD/GCC to Windows/Java. Tutoring those kids, I noticed that they were having a hard time, and displayed a lot less interest. There's just something compelling about doing "real stuff" at a low-level, as opposed to working in a much higher-level environment.
To extrapolate your argument, you're suggesting that the mathematical formula E=MC^2 can be protected, but the actual value of the speed of light (C) can't, thus rendering the entire formula meaningless. For no better reason than that you don't like numbers.
Hmm. I always thought that the purpose of an amendment was to modify/override what was there before. To give an unrelated example: Article I dictates that the state legislatures choose senators, however we actually follow the text of Amendment 17, which requires popular election of Senators. Given this order of precedence, why shouldn't the First Amendment be considered to take priority over the text of Article I?
Admittedly, the fact that the Bill of Rights was ratified at the same time as the rest of the Constitution makes this rather tricky. Still, saying that Article I "is in the original text" seems to imply that it's actually less important.
If I'm not mistaken, this code wasn't stolen, it was reengineered from scratch, wasn't it? If that's the case, what does it matter if the code was "meant to be" public? It became public the minute its author wrote it. Is the court really saying that the manufacturer's intent bars me from writing original descriptions of a product?
PS I realize that this may be an issue of the code containing "stolen" trade secrets such as keys. If this is the case, would the decision still apply to a truly "clean-room" version of DeCSS?
As an erstwhile Vermonter, let me point out that the Big Dig-- and all matters relating to the Interstate system in Massachusetts-- are relevant to more than just the cityfolk. Boston is (unfortunately) right the hell on the direct line between Northern New England/Northern Mass and southern Mass/the Cape. (Yes, you can take the long way around, but it adds a lot of time to the trip.)
The problem is that I93/Route 3 don't end at the city limits. They go off to service a lot of rural folk, throughout the region. This is precisely why they receive so much state and Federal funding. Now obviously I wish the Federal gov't would do a better (and less corrupt) job at it, but the ultimate benefit and blame lies with everyone who ever thought "golly, it'd be great if it was easier to get through into/through Boston".
Funny. In New York State (where I live), rural areas receive a much greater per-capita share of State and Federal Transportation funds than urban areas.
All forms of transportation are more cost-effective when you can take advantage of the massive economies-of-scale provided by crowded urban areas.
Don't poo-poo this; it's the ridiculously unlikely things that lead to pretty much every massive transportation accident these days.
Unless, I assume, there's a problem with the braking system and nobody knows about it because the monitoring boxes are down. Isn't that precisely why the monitoring boxes exist in the first place?
He got caught because in the process of running a business, he decided not to devote absolutely ridiculuous amounts of time to wiping the harddrives of unused PCs.
And before you accuse the guy of whining, note that he paid his fine, in addition to the presumably hundreds of thousands of legitimate licensing fees that he'd already paid to BSA members.
Now he's doing precisely what a smart businessman should do: recognize that the cost of policing for such tiny violations (and the potential fines that can result) is much higher than the software is worth. He's taking his business elsewhere. And good for him.
Last time one of these CM things came through, I stood waiting at a crosswalk for almost ten minutes as the bikers blithely ignored the traffic signals. Think bikes are the perfect form of transportation? Wait until some idiot's coming at you at 15 miles per hour when you've got a Walk signal.
Made me want to buy a Humvee, that's what it accomplished.
If I'm wrong, I stand corrected (in advance.)
Yes, but you have to program each and every human being to do these tasks. With a machine, you simply teach it once and then clone the resulting "mind" as many times as you need. So even if it takes us an additional 50 years to develop a machine capable of doing many human tasks, we could produce millions of them the next day, and every day from there on out.
The question is, how do you not make this connection?
Ask yourself the following questions:
1) Is there a compelling reason to believe that computer/robot technology won't reach the point where most basic service jobs can be (almost) entirely automated? Think food service, janitorial, banking, etc.
2) Is there a compelling reason to believe that this technology will remain too costly or inconvenient for employers to adopt it?
3) If (1) and (2), is there some compelling reason why employers will choose not to adopt a cheaper, more convenient technology for these purposes, in order to increase their profits?
If you can't answer with confidence to any of these questions, then it's probably not a matter of whether robot technology will absorb these jobs, but of when it will happen. The 50 year prediction may be off by quite a lot. But over some reasonable time span (less than a couple of centuries, barring global disaster), the technology will be available and-- assuming our economic system remains similar to what we have today-- it will be in use.
In a sense, that's one logical extension of our current economic system to a world where most human labor isn't necessary. The question is, does our system continue to function properly in that environment?
What bank do you use? Many of the banks in my area have reduced teller hours to the point where most working people can't use them. Some have instituted fees for seeing an actual person.
Others (my neighborhood Washington Mutual) have so completely automated the process of withdrawals and deposits with special kiosks, that actual human presence in a bank is much lower than it ever was when I was growing up. You go to one kiosk to prepare your deposit, and another to withdraw cash. The actual teller transaction, if necessary at all, is minimized. And tellers double as customer-service people, opening new accounts and the like-- one of the few remaining tasks that isn't machine automatable.
Then there are online banks like ETrade, which seem to do ok with no human contact at all.
So no, humans haven't been written out of the equation. But their numbers have been substantially reduced, and the process is a long ways from complete.
As long as they borrow money in our name, they're still plundering. It's just a lot easier for them to sneak it past us that way. Unfortunately, it costs us a lot more in the long run this way.
As my dad always told me, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And anyone who tells you different is either a fool or a Republican.
Oy. Go read a little about NMD. Go read about how multiple warheads and decoys can defeat the system.
Then go read about how the entire budget for the program is a complete blank, with no details whatsover. Basically one huge blank check.
Then go read about how Congress, noting that Bush's budget underfunded homeland security operations, politely suggested that some money be transferred from NMD to homeland security (notably, finding and detecting nuclear weapons transported into this country by alternate transportat) and were rebuffed.
(As a New Yorker, this one scares the shit out of me. Any president that would underfund programs to protect the US from a clear and present danger-- in favor of a wasteful and unexplained project that might never work, can be circumvented, and doesn't protect us now-- is a fool.)
Of course not. [The BBA] is a great idea.
Sure it is. It's a great idea that the Republicans have completely abandoned. Probably because they never seriously supported it in the first place.