The issue is not whether you have virtualized service stacks all over the place, the issue is whether or not you retain control of the whole thing. Keeping control allows you to do pretty much what you want, (almost) no restrictions, but it costs a lot and takes a lot of extra work. Letting someone else take control of part of the whole thing is cheaper (specialists tend to do a better job) but it does mean that you have to work with them.
As for Georg Greve's plea for standards, I think he underestimates how hard that is. There's a lot of different levels that a service interface can be placed at, and getting comparable service between two providers is exceptionally difficult. Georg seems to see that as a problem, but the issue is just that different things are different. Might as well ask for one standard type of road vehicle for all tasks so as to promote an interoperable market. Except that it's even harder with SaaS as there's more variation.
Not to mention better handling and improved reaction time by the driver.
You want to really deal with that? Enforce DUI laws better. Nothing screws reaction times more thoroughly than intoxication (well, except for being asleep at the wheel or other grossly negligent behavior).
Either way, that's how science works. It starts with data, and a hypothesis based on that data; but you have to continue with predictions based on your hypothesis, and experimentally verify them. And, of course, you should always verify the data as well.
Sometimes science starts with a beautiful model and then proceeds to find out whether the data agrees with it. (That's how quite a lot of particle physics operates. Cosmology too.) But in either case, there's data and a hypothesis/model involved. Without a model, you've just got a bag of odd facts. Without data, you've got a castle in the air. The end target of the scientific process is a model that fits the existing data and that predicts future data well; that model tells you something (presumably) true about the universe, at least at some level of abstraction.
Someone with an agenda to push, however, will simply ignore the new data and say "the science is settled" and then hurl insults at the source of new data - basically behaving the exact opposite of how a scientist would actually behave.
But someone with an agenda pushed by Big Oil and Big Coal will be wholly reliable and trustworthy? No possible corruption or willful distortions there.
It's dead simple. Basic physics tells us that CO2 will cause more energy from the sun to be retained in the atmosphere (and hence in the oceans as well, though they're much slower to respond for basic physical reasons). We can measure that CO2 levels have increased substantially over the past few centuries, particularly over the past 50 years, and it is a reasonable surmise that a fair chunk of that is anthropogenic; there have been a lot of people very busy building power stations, etc. all over the world. Consequently, it is expected that more energy will be retained in the atmosphere (the effect crudely known as "global warming", though reality is much more complex). The open scientific questions remaining are to what extent are non-anthropogenic sources forcing things (hard to predict based on previous data, as the current situation does not appear to have a good precedent, to within about the accuracy afforded by the geological record) and what this will actually mean in terms of the ability of various parts of the earth to support particular human activities. However, based on the Precautionary Principle it is reasonable to take steps to minimize the likelihood of large-scale disaster; no sense putting off stamping on the brakes until after you've shot off the edge of the cliff. (The real problem? We don't know exactly where the cliff really is.)
So why do people resist this very simple view? Well, big energy production companies clearly have a vested interest as the sane policy outcome above is directly opposed to their own profitability. (Duh!) In order to avert it, they would be expected use the sorts of techniques invented by the tobacco lobby to try to discredit the science, and to also fund selected fringe groups that are inclined to just ignore the policy necessity. (Because of non-linearities in the system, they would not need to fund every group; funding ones with the right sort of connection to society would be sufficient.) Do they do this sort of shenanigans? Well, from their immediate perspective they'd be foolish not to, even though it's not clear that its even in their long term interest. People don't do long term well...
In any case, if you're fighting for Big Energy's position and yet not getting any kickbacks from them for it, you might want to revise your position. At least hold out for some money for yourself!:-)
Don't we put enough crap into the world's oceans? I mean we literally have an island of garbage floating around, why add to the pollution? Why can't we, as another poster said, thrust it off into space, or, thrust it toward the sun and let the sun's gravity suck it in and destroy it?
Do you really want to pay all those extra taxes just to push all that mass into a much higher orbit? You have to push it a long way up the gravity well for it to be in an orbit that doesn't meaningfully decay, and a lot more than that to get to Earth's escape velocity. Dropping it back to Earth is much simpler and cheaper, and the Pacific's a better target than the vast majority of the land surface. (Of course, a lot will burn up on reentry anyway.)
Seems like Rupert doesn't have many friends in the house and now is apologizing for his son who really is a nut which has demonstrated not falling far from the tree.
Rupe and his minions have been terrorizing politicians and celebrities for many years. Now that he's in trouble where it looks like it's going to stick, is it any wonder at all that nobody at all is interested in stepping up to help him out? All the worms have turned; Rupe's only real hope is that an even bigger scandal or event will divert everyone's attention.
Corporate Death Penalty and Billion Dollars in Penalties, arresting all senior officers and the Board of Directors. The Buck stops THERE.
But, but, but... shareholders!
They would lose their money up to at most the value of their shareholding; that's what a limited liability corporation is, folks. Invest your money in a company that gets busted for illegal behavior and you lose it without compensation. That's the basic rules, do your homework before investing. (This is why investors tend to be excessively keen on executive officers being law-abiding, because being an ordinary investor in a corp that's being involuntarily wound up is not a good place to be; you're last in line to get money at that point.)
Of course, having lost your money like that you might wish to pursue a suit against the (former) officers of the company for screwing up so massively. That's a private matter, but a number of lawyers would be quite willing to help out (assuming there's anything left to go after; no point suing someone with no assets).
Did the federal government suspend federal law (mark to market rules) to allow them to keep operating despite being bankrupt?: YES
The problem with Mark To Market rules being that they only work well when you're not in a crisis. In a crisis, especially a large one, there's a drop in M2M valuations which causes the amount of capital that the banks have available to technically drop. That means that they have to raise more capital (through borrowing or trading) yet they have simultaneously worsened credit ratings and fewer opportunities to make profits. You get a vicious circle and the excrement truly hits the ventilator. The easiest, quickest way out of that hole is to temporarily suspend M2M rules until valuations stop freefalling and everyone can work out just how deeply in the shit they really are; then you can M2M again, as you're not in the catastrophic failure state any more.
There's very little wrong with M2M rules: the only real issue is that they assume that markets are sane, represent true value and don't tend to hit major correlated behavior. But we know that markets (and traders) aren't truly sane and logical, especially over short periods of time, and we also know that in a crash it all goes south at once. We know these facts from history, from observational studies, and from agent-based modeling. The Efficient Market hypothesis (the fundamental basis for the Rightness of the M2M rule) is a major simplification of a much more messy reality.
The "Me too, I have input!" syndrome, as you put it, is still about getting re-elected, if you ask me.
You get it any time you have a committee, no matter how people are chosen to serve. I put it down to the mammalian scent mark urge. You know how the neighbors dog insists on pissing on your gatepost just to say "I was here" to other passing dogs? It's exactly the same, and to about the same effect on the thing getting pissed on.
As far as I understand it, the data will be available also to the general public. I assume that means they will need to have a global network of caches?
Possibly. It depends on how much the general public actually wants to download the data; if it is just selected images instead of the bulk (most of which will be boring "not much happening here" stuff) then serving it from a single site will be quite practical.
Astronomers generate a tremendous amount of data, bested only by particle physicists.
Earth scientists will merrily generate far more — they're purely limited by what they can store and process, since deploying more sensors is always possible — but they're mostly industrially funded, so physicists and astronomers pretend to not notice.
Maybe even shorter [than 2-3 years] for software, which gets updated on even shorter timescales.
On the other hand, that does enable people to take open source software which is near-current and do commercial forks of it in a completely blatant fashion. Way to go with the unintended consequences.
I honestly think it was the defense contractor from last week that forced the FBI's hand.
You underestimate just how slow a bureaucracy is. It was probably the senate hack that lit the fire under the FBI. Yes, that was a while back, but it was precisely the right sort of thing to do to ensure that the FBI would take a deep interest, even if just to keep Congress off their back. Don't underestimate the vindictiveness of stupid white male congresscritters that have been made to look foolish. (Well, more so than usual.)
The big difference in Linux was that it was free - for all practical purposes - both as in "Freedom" and as in "Beer". All the other OSes aforementioned were neither.
There was also a critical period (1992-1993 IIRC) when Linux had shared libraries and BSD did not. (I don't remember if BSD had paging or just swapping, but Linux certainly did paging.) When you only have a few MB of physical memory, shared libraries make a colossal difference.
After that, there was an entrenched difference in developer mindshare. That only took nearly 20 years to pay off!
Flying car. Where are my Flying cars!!!! Non of this prototype stuff I need a real mass produced and commonly used flying car.
Two problems: 1) Energy is much more expensive than people expected. 2) Lots of people don't want pilots licenses for some reason. The combination makes flying cars hard to do right, especially as the economics of them don't make nearly as much sense in the rest of the world; it's not for nothing that flying cars are primarily a dream of the rich and relatively empty western US.
The problem with hardware random number generators is that when they go wrong (which they do, and too easily!) it's typically very hard to detect that it's happened. Moreover, there are some superb PRNGs out there (especially the ones with substantial amounts of internal state, so not the default rand() of most people's C library) so it turns out that the overall best practice is to use a hardware RNG to seed a top-notch PRNG.
The only way to do it is realistically, which is gameplay-hell. If you want a tunnel into the enemy camp, you'll run out of food and die before you get anywhere, the sounds of digging will be heard, you'll kill yourself through exhaustion and you'll have to put the soil somewhere (which will draw attention). And if you don't get caught by the enemy, it'll still take MONTHS to get there.
I find it absolutely hilarious when people debate what the 'framers' had in mind when discussing things they couldn't have wrapped their heads around even if they'd had it explained to them. Corporations in their current form didn't exist until the last century, and the idea of a nation-spanning business would have blown their minds. And on top of that, we're talking about a nation-spanning business that doesn't really have 'real world' presence in the traditional sense.
It's just a mail-order business that has a physical presence in the locations where they have their offices, warehouses, datacenters, etc. I'm sure the 'framers' would have had no problems understanding that (well, once you explain a datacenter as a kind of manufactory); it's an entirely reasonable thing to do once you've got a postal service. The details are different, the scale is definitely different, but the principle existed and the framers weren't stupid idiots. They were also aware of businesses like the Hudson's Bay Company; nation-spanning would not have surprised them at all.
a first class passenger has not finished eating is not going to be an acceptable reason to waive off a request
Unless said passenger is a senior airline executive. Or possibly the head of the ATC service. There are certain people that the pilot won't want to annoy, but you're almost certainly not one of them.
Or it could be just coincidence. It does happen. All the time.
I know someone who couldn't get a flight, and hence took a taxi from Vienna to Bratislava, capital of Slovakia. About 12 hours, he said. He and the taxi driver still correspond.
Vienna to Bratislava?? That's only 50 miles; I commute further than that every day to work. Either they were taking a horribly indirect route or they were stuck in the mother and father of all jams.
We could do space solar today too. We already have everything we need to do it. Just one more thing we lack the political will to actually make happen I guess...
We also lack large-scale heavy lift capacity. It's currently fantastically expensive to put things in space, and almost all of that cost is due to moving mass from the bottom of a gravity well to (much closer to) the top. It's simply much cheaper to just put solar cells on the ground (assuming you're somewhere with plenty of insolation and relatively cheap land) even despite the reduction in efficiency due to the atmosphere. Plus it's easier to upgrade and easier to maintain.
Measuring the size of a city is hard, especially when it runs into others. You can't use the formal governmental definition because they're all too often either too large or too small. A classic example is the City of London, which only has about 11500 inhabitants whereas the area normally called London has about 7753600 people and the whole metro area is somewhere in the region of 12-14 million (Eurostat puts it at 11917000, but that might well be an underestimate). It's very very hard to draw a boundary that makes sense.
See what they are doing to Greece? Those idiots in Greece voted to increase the debt limit and now the IMF is asking for some of the islands, their bridges and historic works of Art to be used as collateral to private foreign interests.
As opposed to letting their own megarich — the people who have been most assiduous in avoiding taxes in the first place — get those things for a pittance? While that might be the traditional way of the Greek government, nobody else was willing to let them get away with that sort of a travesty. Privatize if necessary, but get the proper price so that the debt can be paid off. A bargain-basement chummy old-money privatization helps nobody except a bunch of people who are a large part of the problem in the first place (i.e., that the Greeks don't pay enough taxes to cover the expenditures of the government).
I do not know whether it is the IMF that is stopping such shenanigans, but if it is, good for them! (It might also be the other Eurozone governments.)
It takes a certain level of delusion to believe that there is something special about the US which would prevent that from happening if we start defaulting on our debts. And unfortunately, right now US Savings bonds and the like are still the best bonds to invest in, if the GOP has its way, they're likely to not be worth the paper they were printed on.
For US investors, it's not too terrible to invest in US government debt: they'll get what they're promised, to the letter. The issue is that there might be other better investments elsewhere, and the "to the letter" could be much less than you would want if inflation gets too high. Do not trust the government (or anyone else in high finance). Foreign investors carry a lot more risk holding US government debt, as it's not just a bet on whether there will be a default (very unlikely, because of the 14th Amendment) but also a bet on whether the currency will hold its value enough for it to be worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
This.
The issue is not whether you have virtualized service stacks all over the place, the issue is whether or not you retain control of the whole thing. Keeping control allows you to do pretty much what you want, (almost) no restrictions, but it costs a lot and takes a lot of extra work. Letting someone else take control of part of the whole thing is cheaper (specialists tend to do a better job) but it does mean that you have to work with them.
As for Georg Greve's plea for standards, I think he underestimates how hard that is. There's a lot of different levels that a service interface can be placed at, and getting comparable service between two providers is exceptionally difficult. Georg seems to see that as a problem, but the issue is just that different things are different. Might as well ask for one standard type of road vehicle for all tasks so as to promote an interoperable market. Except that it's even harder with SaaS as there's more variation.
Not to mention better handling and improved reaction time by the driver.
You want to really deal with that? Enforce DUI laws better. Nothing screws reaction times more thoroughly than intoxication (well, except for being asleep at the wheel or other grossly negligent behavior).
Either way, that's how science works. It starts with data, and a hypothesis based on that data; but you have to continue with predictions based on your hypothesis, and experimentally verify them. And, of course, you should always verify the data as well.
Sometimes science starts with a beautiful model and then proceeds to find out whether the data agrees with it. (That's how quite a lot of particle physics operates. Cosmology too.) But in either case, there's data and a hypothesis/model involved. Without a model, you've just got a bag of odd facts. Without data, you've got a castle in the air. The end target of the scientific process is a model that fits the existing data and that predicts future data well; that model tells you something (presumably) true about the universe, at least at some level of abstraction.
Someone with an agenda to push, however, will simply ignore the new data and say "the science is settled" and then hurl insults at the source of new data - basically behaving the exact opposite of how a scientist would actually behave.
But someone with an agenda pushed by Big Oil and Big Coal will be wholly reliable and trustworthy? No possible corruption or willful distortions there.
It's dead simple. Basic physics tells us that CO2 will cause more energy from the sun to be retained in the atmosphere (and hence in the oceans as well, though they're much slower to respond for basic physical reasons). We can measure that CO2 levels have increased substantially over the past few centuries, particularly over the past 50 years, and it is a reasonable surmise that a fair chunk of that is anthropogenic; there have been a lot of people very busy building power stations, etc. all over the world. Consequently, it is expected that more energy will be retained in the atmosphere (the effect crudely known as "global warming", though reality is much more complex). The open scientific questions remaining are to what extent are non-anthropogenic sources forcing things (hard to predict based on previous data, as the current situation does not appear to have a good precedent, to within about the accuracy afforded by the geological record) and what this will actually mean in terms of the ability of various parts of the earth to support particular human activities. However, based on the Precautionary Principle it is reasonable to take steps to minimize the likelihood of large-scale disaster; no sense putting off stamping on the brakes until after you've shot off the edge of the cliff. (The real problem? We don't know exactly where the cliff really is.)
So why do people resist this very simple view? Well, big energy production companies clearly have a vested interest as the sane policy outcome above is directly opposed to their own profitability. (Duh!) In order to avert it, they would be expected use the sorts of techniques invented by the tobacco lobby to try to discredit the science, and to also fund selected fringe groups that are inclined to just ignore the policy necessity. (Because of non-linearities in the system, they would not need to fund every group; funding ones with the right sort of connection to society would be sufficient.) Do they do this sort of shenanigans? Well, from their immediate perspective they'd be foolish not to, even though it's not clear that its even in their long term interest. People don't do long term well...
In any case, if you're fighting for Big Energy's position and yet not getting any kickbacks from them for it, you might want to revise your position. At least hold out for some money for yourself! :-)
Don't we put enough crap into the world's oceans? I mean we literally have an island of garbage floating around, why add to the pollution? Why can't we, as another poster said, thrust it off into space, or, thrust it toward the sun and let the sun's gravity suck it in and destroy it?
Do you really want to pay all those extra taxes just to push all that mass into a much higher orbit? You have to push it a long way up the gravity well for it to be in an orbit that doesn't meaningfully decay, and a lot more than that to get to Earth's escape velocity. Dropping it back to Earth is much simpler and cheaper, and the Pacific's a better target than the vast majority of the land surface. (Of course, a lot will burn up on reentry anyway.)
Seems like Rupert doesn't have many friends in the house and now is apologizing for his son who really is a nut which has demonstrated not falling far from the tree.
Rupe and his minions have been terrorizing politicians and celebrities for many years. Now that he's in trouble where it looks like it's going to stick, is it any wonder at all that nobody at all is interested in stepping up to help him out? All the worms have turned; Rupe's only real hope is that an even bigger scandal or event will divert everyone's attention.
Corporate Death Penalty and Billion Dollars in Penalties, arresting all senior officers and the Board of Directors. The Buck stops THERE.
But, but, but... shareholders!
They would lose their money up to at most the value of their shareholding; that's what a limited liability corporation is, folks. Invest your money in a company that gets busted for illegal behavior and you lose it without compensation. That's the basic rules, do your homework before investing. (This is why investors tend to be excessively keen on executive officers being law-abiding, because being an ordinary investor in a corp that's being involuntarily wound up is not a good place to be; you're last in line to get money at that point.)
Of course, having lost your money like that you might wish to pursue a suit against the (former) officers of the company for screwing up so massively. That's a private matter, but a number of lawyers would be quite willing to help out (assuming there's anything left to go after; no point suing someone with no assets).
Did the federal government suspend federal law (mark to market rules) to allow them to keep operating despite being bankrupt?: YES
The problem with Mark To Market rules being that they only work well when you're not in a crisis. In a crisis, especially a large one, there's a drop in M2M valuations which causes the amount of capital that the banks have available to technically drop. That means that they have to raise more capital (through borrowing or trading) yet they have simultaneously worsened credit ratings and fewer opportunities to make profits. You get a vicious circle and the excrement truly hits the ventilator. The easiest, quickest way out of that hole is to temporarily suspend M2M rules until valuations stop freefalling and everyone can work out just how deeply in the shit they really are; then you can M2M again, as you're not in the catastrophic failure state any more.
There's very little wrong with M2M rules: the only real issue is that they assume that markets are sane, represent true value and don't tend to hit major correlated behavior. But we know that markets (and traders) aren't truly sane and logical, especially over short periods of time, and we also know that in a crash it all goes south at once. We know these facts from history, from observational studies, and from agent-based modeling. The Efficient Market hypothesis (the fundamental basis for the Rightness of the M2M rule) is a major simplification of a much more messy reality.
The "Me too, I have input!" syndrome, as you put it, is still about getting re-elected, if you ask me.
You get it any time you have a committee, no matter how people are chosen to serve. I put it down to the mammalian scent mark urge. You know how the neighbors dog insists on pissing on your gatepost just to say "I was here" to other passing dogs? It's exactly the same, and to about the same effect on the thing getting pissed on.
As far as I understand it, the data will be available also to the general public. I assume that means they will need to have a global network of caches?
Possibly. It depends on how much the general public actually wants to download the data; if it is just selected images instead of the bulk (most of which will be boring "not much happening here" stuff) then serving it from a single site will be quite practical.
Astronomers generate a tremendous amount of data, bested only by particle physicists.
Earth scientists will merrily generate far more — they're purely limited by what they can store and process, since deploying more sensors is always possible — but they're mostly industrially funded, so physicists and astronomers pretend to not notice.
Maybe even shorter [than 2-3 years] for software, which gets updated on even shorter timescales.
On the other hand, that does enable people to take open source software which is near-current and do commercial forks of it in a completely blatant fashion. Way to go with the unintended consequences.
I honestly think it was the defense contractor from last week that forced the FBI's hand.
You underestimate just how slow a bureaucracy is. It was probably the senate hack that lit the fire under the FBI. Yes, that was a while back, but it was precisely the right sort of thing to do to ensure that the FBI would take a deep interest, even if just to keep Congress off their back. Don't underestimate the vindictiveness of stupid white male congresscritters that have been made to look foolish. (Well, more so than usual.)
The big difference in Linux was that it was free - for all practical purposes - both as in "Freedom" and as in "Beer". All the other OSes aforementioned were neither.
There was also a critical period (1992-1993 IIRC) when Linux had shared libraries and BSD did not. (I don't remember if BSD had paging or just swapping, but Linux certainly did paging.) When you only have a few MB of physical memory, shared libraries make a colossal difference.
After that, there was an entrenched difference in developer mindshare. That only took nearly 20 years to pay off!
Flying car. Where are my Flying cars!!!!
Non of this prototype stuff I need a real mass produced and commonly used flying car.
Two problems: 1) Energy is much more expensive than people expected. 2) Lots of people don't want pilots licenses for some reason. The combination makes flying cars hard to do right, especially as the economics of them don't make nearly as much sense in the rest of the world; it's not for nothing that flying cars are primarily a dream of the rich and relatively empty western US.
The problem with hardware random number generators is that when they go wrong (which they do, and too easily!) it's typically very hard to detect that it's happened. Moreover, there are some superb PRNGs out there (especially the ones with substantial amounts of internal state, so not the default rand() of most people's C library) so it turns out that the overall best practice is to use a hardware RNG to seed a top-notch PRNG.
Can you imagine spending even $5k for a computer now? Or $2k?
Yes. How many racks does your computer fill?
The only way to do it is realistically, which is gameplay-hell. If you want a tunnel into the enemy camp, you'll run out of food and die before you get anywhere, the sounds of digging will be heard, you'll kill yourself through exhaustion and you'll have to put the soil somewhere (which will draw attention). And if you don't get caught by the enemy, it'll still take MONTHS to get there.
I'm reminded of a book by Iain M. Banks that included this concept.
I find it absolutely hilarious when people debate what the 'framers' had in mind when discussing things they couldn't have wrapped their heads around even if they'd had it explained to them. Corporations in their current form didn't exist until the last century, and the idea of a nation-spanning business would have blown their minds. And on top of that, we're talking about a nation-spanning business that doesn't really have 'real world' presence in the traditional sense.
It's just a mail-order business that has a physical presence in the locations where they have their offices, warehouses, datacenters, etc. I'm sure the 'framers' would have had no problems understanding that (well, once you explain a datacenter as a kind of manufactory); it's an entirely reasonable thing to do once you've got a postal service. The details are different, the scale is definitely different, but the principle existed and the framers weren't stupid idiots. They were also aware of businesses like the Hudson's Bay Company; nation-spanning would not have surprised them at all.
a first class passenger has not finished eating is not going to be an acceptable reason to waive off a request
Unless said passenger is a senior airline executive. Or possibly the head of the ATC service. There are certain people that the pilot won't want to annoy, but you're almost certainly not one of them.
Or it could be just coincidence. It does happen. All the time.
I know someone who couldn't get a flight, and hence took a taxi from Vienna to Bratislava, capital of Slovakia. About 12 hours, he said. He and the taxi driver still correspond.
Vienna to Bratislava?? That's only 50 miles; I commute further than that every day to work. Either they were taking a horribly indirect route or they were stuck in the mother and father of all jams.
We could do space solar today too. We already have everything we need to do it. Just one more thing we lack the political will to actually make happen I guess...
We also lack large-scale heavy lift capacity. It's currently fantastically expensive to put things in space, and almost all of that cost is due to moving mass from the bottom of a gravity well to (much closer to) the top. It's simply much cheaper to just put solar cells on the ground (assuming you're somewhere with plenty of insolation and relatively cheap land) even despite the reduction in efficiency due to the atmosphere. Plus it's easier to upgrade and easier to maintain.
Measuring the size of a city is hard, especially when it runs into others. You can't use the formal governmental definition because they're all too often either too large or too small. A classic example is the City of London, which only has about 11500 inhabitants whereas the area normally called London has about 7753600 people and the whole metro area is somewhere in the region of 12-14 million (Eurostat puts it at 11917000, but that might well be an underestimate). It's very very hard to draw a boundary that makes sense.
People, they're a problem.
See what they are doing to Greece? Those idiots in Greece voted to increase the debt limit and now the IMF is asking for some of the islands, their bridges and historic works of Art to be used as collateral to private foreign interests.
As opposed to letting their own megarich — the people who have been most assiduous in avoiding taxes in the first place — get those things for a pittance? While that might be the traditional way of the Greek government, nobody else was willing to let them get away with that sort of a travesty. Privatize if necessary, but get the proper price so that the debt can be paid off. A bargain-basement chummy old-money privatization helps nobody except a bunch of people who are a large part of the problem in the first place (i.e., that the Greeks don't pay enough taxes to cover the expenditures of the government).
I do not know whether it is the IMF that is stopping such shenanigans, but if it is, good for them! (It might also be the other Eurozone governments.)
It takes a certain level of delusion to believe that there is something special about the US which would prevent that from happening if we start defaulting on our debts. And unfortunately, right now US Savings bonds and the like are still the best bonds to invest in, if the GOP has its way, they're likely to not be worth the paper they were printed on.
For US investors, it's not too terrible to invest in US government debt: they'll get what they're promised, to the letter. The issue is that there might be other better investments elsewhere, and the "to the letter" could be much less than you would want if inflation gets too high. Do not trust the government (or anyone else in high finance). Foreign investors carry a lot more risk holding US government debt, as it's not just a bet on whether there will be a default (very unlikely, because of the 14th Amendment) but also a bet on whether the currency will hold its value enough for it to be worthwhile.