"If OpenStack isn't an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it? "
OpenStack is basically an operating system for large clusters. It exposes it's system api's as REST interfaces you can call over http. It's components are: Nova: handles compute resources, such as VM's (work is underway to handle bare-metal provisioning, too), These can be provided by many hypervisors, such as XenServer, KVM, HyperV and VMWare, or containers like LXC. Nova handles resource allocation across the cluster of hosts. When you ask for a VM/container of a certain compute capacity, it finds a host with available resources and sets up a VM. Think of it like Linux's process scheduler and process management functions.
Glance: handles metadata about VM images, and acts as a 'pump' to schlep images to/from storage.
Swift: object store. Someone likened it to a key/value store. Similar, but it is designed to handle large data values (whole files, including multi GB server images) in a fault tolerant fashion. (it replicates your data 3 times on separate hardware in the cluster.) ala S3.
Keystone: identity management. Handles user authentication, multi-user accounts, and information on what users can do. Think PAM/kerberos.
Cinder: Block storage. Handles allocating block (ie iSCSI) devices you can mount filesystems on.
Quantum: Handles virtualized networks between VM's. Basically sets up private tunnels between VM's
Plus web admin gui's for above (Horizon), and all of the admin tools for the operators of the cluster(s) to check who's using what, etc.
Basically, if you you need, say, 3 webheads running CentOS with 2gb of ram, a DB server with 16gb and an attached 500gb storage array, a Windows server, and a private network between those, Openstack is what lets you make a REST call (or click a few buttons in a web gui that then makes the call) and, if you have authorization to request that, and resources are available, it will give you that.
Actually, *any* liquid metal that wets aluminum will work. Mercury works quite well for this, as does any liquid indium alloy. This is why mercury thermometers are prohibited on airplanes. If you destroy the oxide layer on aluminum, it will not only react with water, it will react with oxygen. You can put a few *drops* of mercury on a solid aluminum slab an inch thick, and you will have a hole through it, and a pile of white oxide, in an hour or two. The reaction is catalytic, as the mercury is not consumed, and seeps further into the al.
They are probably using gallium because it's relatively nontoxic, but still, I'm not sure how they keep an AlGal alloy from oxidizing in air. Anyway, this tech is just the n-millionth re-invention of the battery. An aluminum-air battery would probably be more efficient, (and obviate the need for the gallium) It's also not very origional. Pretty much the same thing has been proposed for years with Zinc as the working 'fuel' metal.
If you are going to complain about logically impaired people who believe what they want to, it is wise not to commit a logical fallicy in your argument . Specifically a strawman argument. The claim is not what you said it was.
The claim being made is not just that A (CO2) causes B (increase in surface temp), but that changes in B are necessarily caused by changes in A. Logically, that can only be true if A is the sole cause of B. If A is not the sole cause of B, then changes in B could come from changes in A or changes in other causes X, Y and Z, or some combination thereof. The observation that B is changing absent changes in A does indeed invalidate that claim, since it proves that A is not the sole cause of B.
Also, how in the world would CO2 emmissions affect insolation?? Insolation = amount of energy being received from the sun. Insolation has increased in recent years, due to changes in solar output, but CO2 on earth dosen't make the sun shine brighter. CO2 could reduce the radiation of thermal IR from the Earth into space, but that is something different from insolation.
Amusingly enough, when RIM was developing the device, it was infact, origionally named the 'Strawberry' ('coz of the shape of the keyboard, you see. The keys looked like seeds on a strawberry) I think it was going to be red too. Then some marketroid decided that 'straw' sounded too much like 'slow' (?!!) and it was changed to Blackberry.
Nearly every building in downtown was flooded. The company my dad worked for was one of the (many) HVAC companies that supplied pumps and temporary HVAC gear during/after the flood. I recall being downtown during the flood, and it was very weird having such a big city downtown area be basically empty of people in the middle of the day.
It was ruddy expensive too, most of the buildings downtown had their AC gear and boilers destroyed by the flood (the boilers were ruined because they were drained, and the buoyancy tore them off their mounts), and the local power substations were in underground vaults (which flooded). As they pumped out the subbasements, they were finding *fish* in them, sucked in from the river.
Yup. The apple store in San Antonio, TX is often mobbed with Mexican folks coming up to get their Apple gear. I'm gonna suspect there's some kindof tariff involved (not to mention the freefall plummeting of the US $ (Thank YOU, Federal Reserve Bank!!))
Actually, there's an important point being missed there... The OP says "*Institutions* aren't deserving of loyalty, because they have none." Not just businesses... All institutions. This goes for governments, social organizations, etc. too. *People* can have loyalties to each other. Institutions of any kind are just figments of the imagination of the people who make them up. They can't do/feel/be loyal to anything.
And, yes, that aught to be taught in grade school.
Actually, the UK origionaly DID use dns names in left-to-right order (uk.ac.cam.phy, for example) rather than the right-to-left order (phy.cam.ac.uk) used worldwide today. IIRC they flipped the order sometime round 1994 to be in line w/ the rest of the world.
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 1
Er, there is a bit of a historical error there.... The pre WWI business cycle was actually fairly mild by comparison to modern times. And the Great Depression had nothing to do with it. The Great Depression was *caused* by the Federal Reserve Bank. It was a classic bubble-bust (like the dot-com crash of 2000). What happened was the newly-created Fed (1913) started inflating the money supply to try to help pay for WWI. This caused a massive bubble-type boom in the 1920's (that's why it was the "roaring twenties") At the time, there was little economic understanding of what the consequences would be, and the Fed kept it up, thinking they had found a method for a permanent economic boom (2000 era "New Economy" anyone?). Eventually, the bubble popped, as they all do, causing the Crash in 1929.
Of course, on top of that came much meddling in the economy by an economically ignorant government, in an attempt to "fix" things, and much flat out totalitarian micromanagement by FDR. That wound up turning what would have been the Really Nasty Recession of 1929-1932 into the Great Depression of 1929-1938.
Many people already do pay for schools. Museums have entry fees. Many rural fire departments are supported by user fees (they'll still put out a blaze if you don't pay, but you WILL be handed a nice bill afterwards. )
Toll roads work quite well (if you don't pay, you don't drive on the road), and some are nicely designed (one of the plains states (Oklahoma?) has a nice system: You pay once to access the toll road, and you get a ticket that lets you on the road for the whole day. You can go on & off as many times as you like, and the toll boths are only at the highway entrances. Combine this with weekly/monthly/yearly toll passes and most people would hardly notice it, esp. if you nuke the gas taxes that currently fund the roads. ) Many local roads are maintained by homeowner's associations.
And, while I would be ermm... reluctant to give money to the government voluntarily, because of the utterly irresponsible way they handle money, I sure as heck will give money to all sorts of charity organizations, and so will alot of other people. And when a charity is found spending money irresponsably, people can simply support a different one. Or start a new one.
The only thing you *might* have a point on is the military/courts/law enforcement, but that is such a small cost compared to all the other crud the government gets into, that you could repeal the federal income tax, and every state income and sales tax and still not have to cut any military, police, or court budgets. (existing federal excise and state property taxes would cover it.)
People *will* pay for stuff they use. And they *will* donate to charitable organizations to help out other people. The argument that these things would not be done if the government did not force money out of people is just plain bull.
Re:Zap (watch your ground/polarity) and a school f
on
10 Computer Mishaps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeh, I once had two $1000+ specialized video cards explode on me due to that.
The GPU blew right off the board. Twice.
(These cards were "multiconsole cards", essentialy 4 video cards crammed onto one board, plus a usb-like serial bus. the card had 4 rj45 connectors, and you used cat-5 to connect 4 port expander boxes w/ standard svga, mouse, and keyboard connecters on 'em. It allowed you to put 4 extra monitor+keyboard+mouse comboes on a single computer. Usefull for POS stuff. ) The first time it happened, we didn't know what was going on. We thought it was a short or something in the board. The second time, tho, I got a nasty shock as I was plugging the cable in, and the chip exploded inches from my nose (the case was open). I recognized the feel of 120vac, and checked the outlets. Turns out that someone took a shortcut wiring the building. They only used 2 wire cable in the walls, so they wired the ground prong of the outlets to the neutral. That would have been fine, except for the fact that the cable for the outlet the computer was plugged into had it's hot & neutral flipped at the fuse box. Thus the ground of the computer was 120vac off from the ground on the monitor I was plugging in. Yikes.
Oddly enough, the computer survived both incidents just fine.
Ahhh, yeh, for many coders not well versed in security, when they discover that they have a security problem with an algorithim, they think "Well, I know how to fix this! I'll add another algorithim!"
No, actually Greenland was named quite accurately at the time.
The settling of Greenland was done during a climactic period known as the Medieval Warm Period, and the Greenland coast was quite habitable (the interior has been frozen for quite a while, tho) at the time. Note that global temperatures still have not returned to the levels found during the MWP, and it will be some time before they do.
What did in the Greenland Vikings was the fact that when the MWP ended, the global climate went into a cold snap called the Little Ice Age, which was signifigantly colder than today. That lasted into the 1800's
Yes, there is actually a metric time system like that, called Astronomic time. It is used occasionally as an alternative to the Julian calendar for astronomical observations.
The units other than the second are informal, but it goes:
second = 1 SI second (same unit) kilosecond = 1000 seconds day = 100 kiloseconds week = 10 days (1 megasecond)
Dates are listed in weeks since the first New Years (GMT) after the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
These kind of mistakes make me wonder. WHY does NASA *HAVE* to re-design every freakin' thing on every freakin' mission from the ground up every freakin' time?
We're flying alpha-test spacecraft.
Re-usable modules anybody?? Heard of those? Standard designs? Sure, some parts are going to be different, namely the actual scientific instruments, but fer ghodssake an accelerometer?! WhyTF do we need to redesign that (its a weight, a spring and a switch, fer the love of pete) ?!!
Heh. Yeh, actually things should be more focused on grass-roots efforts. I suspect that the main reason for this, however, lies with the many very restrictive ballot-access laws. In many states and local areas, a party can avoid the tedious signature requirements if they are considered a "major" party, and that is generally determined by how well their candidate for President did in the last election.
Gandhi pursued his nonviolent methods because he knew they stood a good chance of working. He knew his enemy very well. He was not, however, against the right of a people to defend themselves, with force of arms if need be.
Quoth: "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
Although the term "liberal" has been widely fudged into near-meaninglessness over the years, in it's origional meaning, it does NOT mean just "promoting change".
Liberal is from the latin Liber (same as Liberty), and origionally refers specificly to a political philosophy promoting individual rights and freedoms, and the primacy of the individual as the founding element of society. People who hold that political philosophy today are generally called "classical liberals" or "libertarians".
It should be noted that distorting the meaning of "liberal" may have been a deliberate political tactic by american socialists in the early 1900's, done for the purpose of selling the typically classically-liberal american populace on a very nonliberal political philosophy.
Fah. You don't trust the markets, so you're going to trust the GOVERNMENT with your financial future? I have news for you: Right now, Senator Bedfellow is sacraficing your retirement future for the sake of a federal bailout of a defunct pork proccessing plant in Mukluk, Nebraska because the lobbyist working for the Greater Mukluk Pork Board bought him a nice steak dinner and $300 worth of scotch last week.
If you are less than 45 years old, there is only one thing you need to know about Social Security. It. Ain't. Going. To. Be. There. For. YOU.
And that WON'T be because of evil Republicans, or any such thing. It will be because the on-rushing diesel locomotive of economic reality will run headlong into the chicken-in-every-pot 1930's socialistic fantasy that is Social Security, and the latter will lose. Hard.
Face it. All of the money collected for Social Security has been spent already. You S.S. "Accounts" contains nothing more than gov't I.O.U's only redeemable out of tax revenue, which ain't going to be going up, since we're on the far side of the Laffer curve as-is. As soon as the SS outlays exceed the money collected from workers paying into the system (which will happen sometime between 2012 and 2020) the whole game is up.
If yer worried about people loosing money in the stock market, here's a brilliant invention for you: It's called a SAVINGS ACCOUNT. Available at banks everywhere, and it'll get you a better interest rate than social security (whose effective interest rate is often below the rate of inflation) will.
Heh, I have noticed that New Mexico is the only state that has to put 'USA' after it's name on its licence plates.
Tho' to be pedantic, Texas was never a part of New Mexico territory (or ruled from Santa Fe) Actually the eastern half of the state of New Mexico was part of Texas at one point, as was part of Colorado. Texas was never a territory, it was an independant republic, and a state of Mexico before that.
The folks who don't realize New Mexico is in the US would be even funnier if the division of the New Mexico territory into New Mexico and Arizona had been a bit different. It was almost divided north-and-south not east-and-west, with New Mexico to the *North* of Arizona. If that had happened, New Mexico wouldn't have even been on the border!
As it happens, I work on a large enterprise app (of exactly the sort J2EE is usually used for) that is written in python. We basically had to create much of the infrastructure J2EE provides for java ourselves, but the productivity bost from using python has made it worthwhile. (the company this app is for changes VERY often, thus the code must too. We can do in an hour what would take a day of coding in Java, in many cases. )
We're slowly opensourcing soem bits of the infrastructure we've created (our Python Servlet Engine http://nick.borko.org/pse is out so far )
Slashdot Mirror
"If OpenStack isn't an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it? "
OpenStack is basically an operating system for large clusters. It exposes it's system api's as REST interfaces you can call over http.
It's components are:
Nova: handles compute resources, such as VM's (work is underway to handle bare-metal provisioning, too), These can be provided by many hypervisors, such as XenServer, KVM, HyperV and VMWare, or containers like LXC. Nova handles resource allocation across the cluster of hosts. When you ask for a VM/container of a certain compute capacity, it finds a host with available resources and sets up a VM. Think of it like Linux's process scheduler and process management functions.
Glance: handles metadata about VM images, and acts as a 'pump' to schlep images to/from storage.
Swift: object store. Someone likened it to a key/value store. Similar, but it is designed to handle large data values (whole files, including multi GB server images) in a fault tolerant fashion. (it replicates your data 3 times on separate hardware in the cluster.) ala S3.
Keystone: identity management. Handles user authentication, multi-user accounts, and information on what users can do. Think PAM/kerberos.
Cinder: Block storage. Handles allocating block (ie iSCSI) devices you can mount filesystems on.
Quantum: Handles virtualized networks between VM's. Basically sets up private tunnels between VM's
Plus web admin gui's for above (Horizon), and all of the admin tools for the operators of the cluster(s) to check who's using what, etc.
Basically, if you you need, say, 3 webheads running CentOS with 2gb of ram, a DB server with 16gb and an attached 500gb storage array, a Windows server, and a private network between those, Openstack is what lets you make a REST call (or click a few buttons in a web gui that then makes the call) and, if you have authorization to request that, and resources are available, it will give you that.
... I always thought Creationism belonged in a museum.
Actually, *any* liquid metal that wets aluminum will work. Mercury works quite well for this, as does any liquid indium alloy.
This is why mercury thermometers are prohibited on airplanes. If you destroy the oxide layer on aluminum, it will not only react with water, it will react with oxygen. You can put a few *drops* of mercury on a solid aluminum slab an inch thick, and you will have a hole through it, and a pile of white oxide, in an hour or two. The reaction is catalytic, as the mercury is not consumed, and seeps further into the al.
They are probably using gallium because it's relatively nontoxic, but still, I'm not sure how they keep an AlGal alloy from oxidizing in air.
Anyway, this tech is just the n-millionth re-invention of the battery. An aluminum-air battery would probably be more efficient, (and obviate the need for the gallium) It's also not very origional. Pretty much the same thing has been proposed for years with Zinc as the working 'fuel' metal.
If you are going to complain about logically impaired people who believe what they want to, it is wise not to commit a logical fallicy in your argument .
Specifically a strawman argument. The claim is not what you said it was.
The claim being made is not just that A (CO2) causes B (increase in surface temp), but that changes in B are necessarily caused by changes in A. Logically, that can only be true if A is the sole cause of B. If A is not the sole cause of B, then changes in B could come from changes in A or changes in other causes X, Y and Z, or some combination thereof.
The observation that B is changing absent changes in A does indeed invalidate that claim, since it proves that A is not the sole cause of B.
Also, how in the world would CO2 emmissions affect insolation?? Insolation = amount of energy being received from the sun. Insolation has increased in recent years, due to changes in solar output, but CO2 on earth dosen't make the sun shine brighter. CO2 could reduce the radiation of thermal IR from the Earth into space, but that is something different from insolation.
It's not firefox that's crashing. It's some windows Java JVM problem, looks like. Works fine on firefox 1.5 on a Mac.
Amusingly enough, when RIM was developing the device, it was infact, origionally named the 'Strawberry' ('coz of the shape of the keyboard, you see. The keys looked like seeds on a strawberry)
I think it was going to be red too. Then some marketroid decided that 'straw' sounded too much like 'slow' (?!!) and it was changed to Blackberry.
Nearly every building in downtown was flooded. The company my dad worked for was one of the (many) HVAC companies that supplied pumps and temporary HVAC gear during/after the flood. I recall being downtown during the flood, and it was very weird having such a big city downtown area be basically empty of people in the middle of the day.
It was ruddy expensive too, most of the buildings downtown had their AC gear and boilers destroyed by the flood (the boilers were ruined because they were drained, and the buoyancy tore them off their mounts), and the local power substations were in underground vaults (which flooded). As they pumped out the subbasements, they were finding *fish* in them, sucked in from the river.
Yup. The apple store in San Antonio, TX is often mobbed with Mexican folks coming up to get their Apple gear. I'm gonna suspect there's some kindof tariff involved (not to mention the freefall plummeting of the US $ (Thank YOU, Federal Reserve Bank!!))
Actually, there's an important point being missed there...
The OP says "*Institutions* aren't deserving of loyalty, because they have none." Not just businesses... All institutions. This goes for governments, social organizations, etc. too. *People* can have loyalties to each other. Institutions of any kind are just figments of the imagination of the people who make them up. They can't do/feel/be loyal to anything.
And, yes, that aught to be taught in grade school.
Actually, the UK origionaly DID use dns names in left-to-right order (uk.ac.cam.phy, for example) rather than the right-to-left order (phy.cam.ac.uk) used worldwide today. IIRC they flipped the order sometime round 1994 to be in line w/ the rest of the world.
Er, there is a bit of a historical error there.... The pre WWI business cycle was actually fairly mild by comparison to modern times. And the Great Depression had nothing to do with it. The Great Depression was *caused* by the Federal Reserve Bank. It was a classic bubble-bust (like the dot-com crash of 2000). What happened was the newly-created Fed (1913) started inflating the money supply to try to help pay for WWI. This caused a massive bubble-type boom in the 1920's (that's why it was the "roaring twenties") At the time, there was little economic understanding of what the consequences would be, and the Fed kept it up, thinking they had found a method for a permanent economic boom (2000 era "New Economy" anyone?).
Eventually, the bubble popped, as they all do, causing the Crash in 1929.
Of course, on top of that came much meddling in the economy by an economically ignorant government, in an attempt to "fix" things, and much flat out totalitarian micromanagement by FDR. That wound up turning what would have been the Really Nasty Recession of 1929-1932 into the Great Depression of 1929-1938.
Bull. Sh!te.
Many people already do pay for schools. Museums have entry fees. Many rural fire departments are supported by user fees (they'll still put out a blaze if you don't pay, but you WILL be handed a nice bill afterwards. )
Toll roads work quite well (if you don't pay, you don't drive on the road), and some are nicely designed (one of the plains states (Oklahoma?) has a nice system: You pay once to access the toll road, and you get a ticket that lets you on the road for the whole day. You can go on & off as many times as you like, and the toll boths are only at the highway entrances. Combine this with weekly/monthly/yearly toll passes and most people would hardly notice it, esp. if you nuke the gas taxes that currently fund the roads. ) Many local roads are maintained by homeowner's associations.
And, while I would be ermm... reluctant to give money to the government voluntarily, because of the utterly irresponsible way they handle money, I sure as heck will give money to all sorts of charity organizations, and so will alot of other people. And when a charity is found spending money irresponsably, people can simply support a different one. Or start a new one.
The only thing you *might* have a point on is the military/courts/law enforcement, but that is such a small cost compared to all the other crud the government gets into, that you could repeal the federal income tax, and every state income and sales tax and still not have to cut any military, police, or court budgets. (existing federal excise and state property taxes would cover it.)
People *will* pay for stuff they use. And they *will* donate to charitable organizations to help out other people. The argument that these things would not be done if the government did not force money out of people is just plain bull.
Yeh, I once had two $1000+ specialized video cards explode on me due to that.
The GPU blew right off the board.
Twice.
(These cards were "multiconsole cards", essentialy 4 video cards crammed onto one board, plus a usb-like serial bus. the card had 4 rj45 connectors, and you used cat-5 to connect 4 port expander boxes w/ standard svga, mouse, and keyboard connecters on 'em. It allowed you to put 4 extra monitor+keyboard+mouse comboes on a single computer. Usefull for POS stuff. ) The first time it happened, we didn't know what was going on. We thought it was a short or something in the board. The second time, tho, I got a nasty shock as I was plugging the cable in, and the chip exploded inches from my nose (the case was open). I recognized the feel of 120vac, and checked the outlets. Turns out that someone took a shortcut wiring the building. They only used 2 wire cable in the walls, so they wired the ground prong of the outlets to the neutral. That would have been fine, except for the fact that the cable for the outlet the computer was plugged into had it's hot & neutral flipped at the fuse box. Thus the ground of the computer was 120vac off from the ground on the monitor I was plugging in. Yikes.
Oddly enough, the computer survived both incidents just fine.
Ahhh, yeh, for many coders not well versed in security, when they discover that they have a security problem with an algorithim, they think "Well, I know how to fix this! I'll add another algorithim!"
Now they have *two* security problems.
I believe it's Star Wars cannon that there was a prototype Death Star built as a testbed before the the "first" DS seen in Ep. IV
I suspect that what was shown at the end of ep. III was the prototype.
You haven't been to south Texas much, have you?
I had to turn my AC on a month ago.
No, actually Greenland was named quite accurately at the time.
The settling of Greenland was done during a climactic period known as the Medieval Warm Period, and the Greenland coast was quite habitable (the interior has been frozen for quite a while, tho) at the time. Note that global temperatures still have not returned to the levels found during the MWP, and it will be some time before they do.
What did in the Greenland Vikings was the fact that when the MWP ended, the global climate went into a cold snap called the Little Ice Age, which was signifigantly colder than today. That lasted into the 1800's
Yes, there is actually a metric time system like that, called Astronomic time. It is used occasionally as an alternative to the Julian calendar for astronomical observations.
The units other than the second are informal, but it goes:
second = 1 SI second (same unit)
kilosecond = 1000 seconds
day = 100 kiloseconds
week = 10 days (1 megasecond)
Dates are listed in weeks since the first New Years (GMT) after the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
In Astronomic time it is currently:
1100.221
(Week 1100, day 2, time 21ks )
Sheeeeezzzz...
These kind of mistakes make me wonder. WHY does NASA *HAVE* to re-design every freakin' thing on every freakin' mission from the ground up every freakin' time?
We're flying alpha-test spacecraft.
Re-usable modules anybody?? Heard of those? Standard designs? Sure, some parts are going to be different, namely the actual scientific instruments, but fer ghodssake an accelerometer?! WhyTF do we need to redesign that (its a weight, a spring and a switch, fer the love of pete) ?!!
-sigh-
Heh. Yeh, actually things should be more focused on grass-roots efforts. I suspect that the main reason for this, however, lies with the many very restrictive ballot-access laws. In many states and local areas, a party can avoid the tedious signature requirements if they are considered a "major" party, and that is generally determined by how well their candidate for President did in the last election.
Gandhi pursued his nonviolent methods because he knew they stood a good chance of working. He knew his enemy very well. He was not, however, against the right of a people to defend themselves, with force of arms if need be.
Quoth:
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
Although the term "liberal" has been widely fudged into near-meaninglessness over the years, in it's origional meaning, it does NOT mean just "promoting change".
Liberal is from the latin Liber (same as Liberty),
and origionally refers specificly to a political philosophy promoting individual rights and freedoms, and the primacy of the individual as the founding element of society. People who hold that political philosophy today are generally called "classical liberals" or "libertarians".
It should be noted that distorting the meaning of "liberal" may have been a deliberate political tactic by american socialists in the early 1900's, done for the purpose of selling the typically classically-liberal american populace on a very nonliberal political philosophy.
Fah. You don't trust the markets, so you're going to trust the GOVERNMENT with your financial future? I have news for you: Right now, Senator Bedfellow is sacraficing your retirement future for the sake of a federal bailout of a defunct pork proccessing plant in Mukluk, Nebraska because the lobbyist working for the Greater Mukluk Pork Board bought him a nice steak dinner and $300 worth of scotch last week.
If you are less than 45 years old, there is only one thing you need to know about Social Security.
It. Ain't. Going. To. Be. There. For. YOU.
And that WON'T be because of evil Republicans, or any such thing. It will be because the on-rushing diesel locomotive of economic reality will run headlong into the chicken-in-every-pot 1930's socialistic fantasy that is Social Security, and the latter will lose. Hard.
Face it. All of the money collected for Social Security has been spent already. You S.S. "Accounts" contains nothing more than gov't I.O.U's only redeemable out of tax revenue, which ain't going to be going up, since we're on the far side of the Laffer curve as-is. As soon as the SS outlays exceed the money collected from workers paying into the system (which will happen sometime between 2012 and 2020) the whole game is up.
If yer worried about people loosing money in the stock market, here's a brilliant invention for you: It's called a SAVINGS ACCOUNT. Available at banks everywhere, and it'll get you a better interest rate than social security (whose effective interest rate is often below the rate of inflation) will.
Heh, I have noticed that New Mexico is the only state that has to put 'USA' after it's name on its licence plates.
Tho' to be pedantic, Texas was never a part of New Mexico territory (or ruled from Santa Fe)
Actually the eastern half of the state of New Mexico was part of Texas at one point, as was part of Colorado. Texas was never a territory, it was an independant republic, and a state of Mexico before that.
The folks who don't realize New Mexico is in the US would be even funnier if the division of the New Mexico territory into New Mexico and Arizona had been a bit different. It was almost divided north-and-south not east-and-west, with New Mexico to the *North* of Arizona. If that had happened, New Mexico wouldn't have even been on the border!
As it happens, I work on a large enterprise app (of exactly the sort J2EE is usually used for) that is written in python. We basically had to create much of the infrastructure J2EE provides for java ourselves, but the productivity bost from using python has made it worthwhile. (the company this app is for changes VERY often, thus the code must too. We can do in an hour what would take a day of coding in Java, in many cases. )
We're slowly opensourcing soem bits of the infrastructure we've created (our Python Servlet Engine http://nick.borko.org/pse is out so far )