What I now imagine as a good Duke game, would probably have Crysis-size levels (and graphics) with even more emphasis on exploration and of course combat and humor similar to the old game. It sounds doable to me, but unfortunately, I don't really trust Gearbox deliver anything like this. Opposing Force was 12 years ago, and it was using HL engine and assets.
Gearbox know the value of large and reasonably non-linear levels for sure; they did Borderlands. I suspect that DNF is the way it is precisely because Gearbox didn't want to do too much to what they'd got from 3D Realms, which in turn reduced the cost/risk to them substantially. Fixing the problems with the level design... would have killed it all. And the interesting thing is just how interactive the levels tend to be; so many of the objects in the levels have things you can do with them for no reason at all, they're not just boxes to knock around or paintings on the wall. Can you name any other game where you can shove your finger in an electrical socket and get a shock "just because"? Usually if a game designer puts something in, he forces the player to use it in a look-what-I've-done-for-you moment backed up by some lunatic in-game reasoning.
Anyone just blasting through as fast as possible is missing the point.
I hope this isn't just targeted towards firefox. Thunderbird is an unwieldy beast of an email app as well. No good reason that checking my email should involve consuming 200Mb of memory.
There is a separate issue there with levels of caching of information; with some IMAP servers (notably Exchange — boo! hiss! — which I happen to be stuck with, and most of the workarounds listed out there on the 'net are outdated with recent Exchange installations as they rely on functionality that MS withdrew) there's a problem with the code that decides whether a mailbox has changed in an incompatible way and which results in a mailbox being downloaded repeatedly despite no change at all. I've seen it claimed that this is due to disagreement over the interpretation of parts of the IMAP spec, but I'm not able to really care about that side of things, and the fact that it causes memory use to bloat massively when it happens is a Bad Thing in any case.
The best workaround I've found so far is to reduce the size of the mailbox (local mailboxes don't have the problem). I don't feel that this in any way indicates that things are fixed. Just that there is a way to cut the pain down.
"While Google supports the technical content of this JSR, we are voting no because of its licensing terms"
Typical
Interesting that they view the licensing and transparency as deal-breakers, and doubly interesting that a majority of the committee members feel somewhat supportive of that position (but not enough to vote against).
Honestly the currently the US drinking laws are too restrictive. First of all, devices that make far too many assumptions about the person being tested's physical attributes and metabolism are entirely too trusted (sure maybe average is considered when designing these devices, but the variance is so large it sacrifices all its precision for determining drunkenness).
Firstly, DUI really is dangerous. The problem is that it's your judgement that gets screwed up first when you consume alcohol. Don't be a hazard to yourself and everyone else by drinking and driving. Get a sober friend to drive you instead, or take a cab or public transport or even walk.
Secondly, BAC is a really good measure of how drunk you are because it takes into account your body mass (and I'm betting you get equilibrium between the blood level of alcohol and the brain level pretty rapidly; no reason to think there's a gigantic concentration difference there) and the level of alcohol in your breath is actually quite closely tracking the level in your blood; your lungs have a large surface area and alcohol is quite volatile. Hence its reasonable for the police to use it to work out whether you're unfit to drive. (You might or might not have problems with the police, but it's still a good measure that can be used well enough in the field by officers without excessive training.)
The real way to deal with these things? As I said, not driving while drunk. It's that simple. Every time you think that the world ought to be cutting you some special slack because of your circumstances, you're (almost certainly) just being a selfish dangerous jerk. Your right to drive is not as important as everyone else's to not be hit by your car.
Another quick side note, the only other time I've been stopped, the officer drew a gun on me, for going 9MPH over the speed limit on a highway where the speed dropped down 10 MPH a half mile before (cruise control).
So you weren't paying attention when you were driving? Idiot. Jerk. I hope that if you kill anyone through your thoughtlessness and lack of attention, it's just yourself and that nobody else gets hurt.
It's a natural consequence of everyone toting around full Internet connectivity in their pocket. Client-server made sense when computing was vastly expensive, and networks were also expensive but still a cost-effective way to roll out access to centralized resources. It made no sense when networks were still expensive, but computing was cheap enough that a desktop could support common business needs. It made a lot of sense again when the network became so cheap and portable as to become pervasive, and people realized the value of having access to all their stuff while roaming around town.
And I predict that it will swing back in favor of distributed computing in some form. It might take a few decades. It might not be in a form we currently recognize. But it will happen.
And then it will eventually swing back towards centralized computing again as the relative costs shift again. (The costs will shift over time anyway, as one thing or the other being more expensive inspires more innovation, but that's a time-consuming process hence its a decades-long cycle.)
The real danger is not a random script kiddie connecting to the system to play games. Danger comes from people who have inside knowledge of the system, people who know things like network addresses, which machine does what. There's no way to be obscure here, because the enemy already knows what he needs to enter. Remember stuxnet, everyone seems to agree that it was the work of experts.
The real problem is that security by obscurity does work, but only for a little while. As soon as someone inside blows the whistle, or someone outside just stumbles over the secret, the security from the obscurity is gone. Anything just protected by just obscurity will appear to be nice and secure, but will not be secure at all, and the people who want it secured won't know the difference until its too late. Real effective security is in depth. Obscurity can be used in the mix, but may only ever be a small part of it; cryptography, key management, port monitoring, downright suspiciousness: these are all necessarily larger parts of the whole...
Marvel has no creative control over the Spider-man movies nor the X-Men movies. They are solely owned by Sony and Fox respectively. As long as Sony and Fox continue to churn out these horrible movies, they retain the rights to continue making them.
But Marvel most certainly churn out the dross themselves too. I sat through Thor, damnit, and that movie was a mess that needed... oh, where to start? Frankly only the SFX were good enough, and everyone with a server farm to spare can make those. Plot, acting, editing: all sucked. The linking into the building megafranchise sucked worst of all. Gah!
Can't we reanimate Walt Disney? OK, we don't really need large numbers of fascist undead shambling round the world, but he at least understood the importance of having a plot, telling a story well. Too many modern film makers think they can compensate for early incompetence with pyrotechnics.
What trouble and expense? TLS (SSL is obsolete) is only expensive if you need to get your certificates signed by a commercial CA i.e. if you are interacting with random people who are not affiliated with you or your organization. If you are only deploying TLS for internal purposes, just maintain your own internal CA and deploy your internal signing key to all of your organization's systems.
Actually, if you're just doing something internal and only need a single host certificate and aren't trying to run multiple domains off the same site, a CA-signed certificate's very cheap. Possibly even free, depending on what you've already got in place. (For reference, it cost nothing for me to get one set up recently under the condition that it was bound to a particular machine.)
As for why trust a CA you don't run? You don't have to really, but it's a lot of work to run a CA well even if you're not accepting submissions from the general public and you add having to distribute your CA key and get people to trust it. Plus you really want to be able to change your service certificates when (not if) you have deployment problems (such as a service compromise by insufficiently secured PHP; remember, security's not just one thing) which CA-based solutions have down pat whereas most of the others (e.g., web of trust) find difficult.
Self-signed certificates can only ever be safely trusted by the person who made them. Nobody else.
The reality is that there are three categories of data that are relevant for databases: numbers, text and spatial. Everything else, which falls under the umbrella of "binary", is very unlikely to benefit from a database engine; only the metada can be manipulated and this metadata falls under one of the other categories and is a very good target for ETL.
Actually, it depends on whether you can define relations over the data. The set of relevant relations will vary with the data type. For example, I can imagine it being possible to do searches over images, sounds or movies; there is fundamental structure there, relations are definable. That's not to say it is easy, or that we know the right set of relations, or that implementations are good yet, but to dismiss it as impossible? You jump too far.
Yes, it can make managing other parts of the system (such as the firewall of the provider) simpler. But ensure that you disable logging in with a password with it; it's otherwise just too vulnerable to distributed attacks. Also bear in mind that going from port 22 to port 2222 isn't going to help much anyway; what would be the second port that an attacker would guess? Real security is better than a miniscule amount of obscurity.
Then they reasonably ask why they even need X at all.
The answer to that is simple: there's a metric buttload of apps out there that talk X11 out the back. Many of those apps are commercial. Many of them use neither GTK nor Qt. Moving all that lot to some other protocol is really quite an enormous job (set of jobs really) and it's not at all clear that everyone has money to spend on what is largely perceived as busywork; snazzier compositing doesn't maintain a factory information system.
But that's not to say that anyone much has a particular fondness for the X11 protocol or server as such. Building a new graphics engine and having a new interface to it is fine, as long as there's also an X11 interface. Heck, I could imagine the X interface being a bit restricted (e.g., no window manager access) and that not being a problem. There's even two levels that the interface could be at: the protocol level and the library level. (If code links to libX11, it doesn't care what the protocol actually looks like.) We should bear in mind also that it's already been shown that X works just fine when layered over the top of another system: this is how it is used on OSX and Windows after all, in the former case being supplied by Apple and in the latter as a third-party program. The X server as people currently know it can change; it has no truly special place in the overall picture.
The whole point of the Bell's Theorem tests is that QM is not reducible to a local deterministic theory.
But good luck on applying that in any meaningful way to structures larger than a molecule with as much interaction with the environment as happens in a neuron.
It massively varies by manufacturer and maybe also by printer model. I've got a Canon inkjet, and its ink cartridges just contain ink; each cartridge is also monochromatic, so they can be replaced on their own schedule. It cost a bit more than the equivalent HP at the time (quite a few years ago, to be fair) but it has worked out much cheaper overall since we can easily use cheap third-party replacement inks. Theoretically the expensive inks are better, but not enough to justify the extra cost. (Using better paper makes more difference; a so-so print on cheap 80gsm paper looks hugely better on 120gsm glossy photo-quality paper/card.)
The detection of the ink levels is purely optical, in case you're wondering, depending on the difference in refractive index between ink and air (there's a tiny prism built into the base of the cartridge body). It's an elegant technical solution that's really cheap to manufacture.
Light press keyboards are not only quieter, but they are more ergonomic.
They won't be seen as more ergonomic when the zombie apocalypse comes! If you're using a Model M, you're already fully armed and ready for turning the infected brain-consuming horde into a pile of festering severed appendages. Lesser keyboards won't last past the first hundred cracked skulls before breaking, leaving you critically exposed just as things are starting to get really hairy. Go for safety, go for the Model M! You know it makes sense.
Magic doesn't follow the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any unknown advanced technology, we could identify the heat reservoir.
That's besides the point. If magic worked, we'd be able to use systematic study with it and it would become technology. It'd just be driven by fairy tears or tiny imps or something instead of electrons.
And overall the Second Law would still hold. Things get really really screwy when you don't have that. You just might not see where the heat sink and source were located.
What's up with the deserts? Are alien UFO:s prone to rust or something?
It's hard to hide secret airbases in downtown Manhattan.
More seriously, deserts are great for hiding things precisely because there's very few people around otherwise. Mountains would work too, but they're not so great for airbases due to the terrain, and it's also easy for spies to get somewhere where they can overlook the base. Farmland tends to have too many people about. A nice big forest would be quite good though, but only if its empty enough; large chunks of northern Canada are fairly well suited except that they're under major flight routes and they're not in the US. (Mind you, if Canada had a secret alien research program, that's where it would be. The north is big and very empty away from the mines.)
Don't fly on AA, avoid United as well. Delta is the least bad US carrier, but they still suck compared to foreign carriers.
It depends on the plane/route. I've flown a fair bit with Delta (especially transatlantic) and the ex-Northwest planes/routes tend to be much nicer than the "original" Delta ones. (Where I live is terrible for flying with either AA or United, but that's for reasons that are nothing to do with any US carrier.) I suspect a lot of this is linked to the age of the planes, especially in the US domestic market. Mind you, if the flight's only an hour or two it's hardly a big deal; a newspaper can cover that sort of timespan just fine.
The question is whether someone will force you to invest -- i.e. whether the taxpayers will be made to bail somebody out for $50 bn. That has nothing to do with capitalism, and is just bad government.
There are other ways in which you can end up "forced to invest". An example is where you've got a company (or sector) that is so over-valued that pension funds feel they have to invest in it, otherwise they lag the overall market index. While the fund managers might know that the company is overvalued, there's no way that they're going to say it for fear of getting hounded out of their jobs. (This was one of the engines of the credit bubble.) Do you monitor every trade that your pension fund is doing? I know I don't; I have a real job to do. But what this does mean is that things can go badly wrong with your money.
The basic premise, that things can go wrong which you can do next to nothing about, remains the same. I just don't see that the conclusion you draw from it — that government is the problem — is sustainable. Nor would I say that government is the solution either; that would be foolish. Hanging 10% of all senior financial types on Wall Street from the lampposts of Manhattan to encourage the rest... I'm having problems seeing the down-side of that idea.
Why would open source writers think using another consenting computer's resources "evil"? P2P does it all the time and no one thinks anything of it.
Because they're telco types at heart, not infosystems types. Different communities have different standards of acceptable behavior. (The interesting thing about Skype is that its developers were enough in tune with both sides of this particular debate to understand the technology of IP telephony and implement a workable solution for the show-stopper problems.)
If every company stepped out of this mindset and had a "human" verify every signup, eg calling them on the phone and verifying the signup information, much less fraud would be possible as it eliminates the anonymity.
You've got a lovely trust in the ability of people to spot liars over the phone there. And in the general Power of Bureaucracy to Do Good.
How many people are you going to employ doing this? How are you going to pay for them? (Hint: the cost of getting signups verified would be passed on to you.) And it wouldn't stop fraud, just give a bigger opportunity for bribery and corruption. Automated systems, for all their faults, are at least honest and fair in a limited sense (because it is hugely easier to write them that way). All your suggestion would do is cripple large parts of the market to no great benefit of anyone. And yes, you can see evidence of this sort of thing with excessive regulation in large parts of the world.
You don't win wars based upon strategy, you win them on logistics
Sure you win wars based on strategy! It just happens that "get the logistics right" is a great part of any working strategy. (It's not the only part though; it's quite possible to have good logistics and still lose if you're a dumbass in other ways.)
Slashdot Mirror
What I now imagine as a good Duke game, would probably have Crysis-size levels (and graphics) with even more emphasis on exploration and of course combat and humor similar to the old game. It sounds doable to me, but unfortunately, I don't really trust Gearbox deliver anything like this. Opposing Force was 12 years ago, and it was using HL engine and assets.
Gearbox know the value of large and reasonably non-linear levels for sure; they did Borderlands. I suspect that DNF is the way it is precisely because Gearbox didn't want to do too much to what they'd got from 3D Realms, which in turn reduced the cost/risk to them substantially. Fixing the problems with the level design... would have killed it all. And the interesting thing is just how interactive the levels tend to be; so many of the objects in the levels have things you can do with them for no reason at all, they're not just boxes to knock around or paintings on the wall. Can you name any other game where you can shove your finger in an electrical socket and get a shock "just because"? Usually if a game designer puts something in, he forces the player to use it in a look-what-I've-done-for-you moment backed up by some lunatic in-game reasoning.
Anyone just blasting through as fast as possible is missing the point.
I hope this isn't just targeted towards firefox. Thunderbird is an unwieldy beast of an email app as well. No good reason that checking my email should involve consuming 200Mb of memory.
There is a separate issue there with levels of caching of information; with some IMAP servers (notably Exchange — boo! hiss! — which I happen to be stuck with, and most of the workarounds listed out there on the 'net are outdated with recent Exchange installations as they rely on functionality that MS withdrew) there's a problem with the code that decides whether a mailbox has changed in an incompatible way and which results in a mailbox being downloaded repeatedly despite no change at all. I've seen it claimed that this is due to disagreement over the interpretation of parts of the IMAP spec, but I'm not able to really care about that side of things, and the fact that it causes memory use to bloat massively when it happens is a Bad Thing in any case.
The best workaround I've found so far is to reduce the size of the mailbox (local mailboxes don't have the problem). I don't feel that this in any way indicates that things are fixed. Just that there is a way to cut the pain down.
"While Google supports the technical content of this JSR, we are voting no because of its licensing terms"
Typical
Interesting that they view the licensing and transparency as deal-breakers, and doubly interesting that a majority of the committee members feel somewhat supportive of that position (but not enough to vote against).
Honestly the currently the US drinking laws are too restrictive. First of all, devices that make far too many assumptions about the person being tested's physical attributes and metabolism are entirely too trusted (sure maybe average is considered when designing these devices, but the variance is so large it sacrifices all its precision for determining drunkenness).
Firstly, DUI really is dangerous. The problem is that it's your judgement that gets screwed up first when you consume alcohol. Don't be a hazard to yourself and everyone else by drinking and driving. Get a sober friend to drive you instead, or take a cab or public transport or even walk.
Secondly, BAC is a really good measure of how drunk you are because it takes into account your body mass (and I'm betting you get equilibrium between the blood level of alcohol and the brain level pretty rapidly; no reason to think there's a gigantic concentration difference there) and the level of alcohol in your breath is actually quite closely tracking the level in your blood; your lungs have a large surface area and alcohol is quite volatile. Hence its reasonable for the police to use it to work out whether you're unfit to drive. (You might or might not have problems with the police, but it's still a good measure that can be used well enough in the field by officers without excessive training.)
The real way to deal with these things? As I said, not driving while drunk. It's that simple. Every time you think that the world ought to be cutting you some special slack because of your circumstances, you're (almost certainly) just being a selfish dangerous jerk. Your right to drive is not as important as everyone else's to not be hit by your car.
Another quick side note, the only other time I've been stopped, the officer drew a gun on me, for going 9MPH over the speed limit on a highway where the speed dropped down 10 MPH a half mile before (cruise control).
So you weren't paying attention when you were driving? Idiot. Jerk. I hope that if you kill anyone through your thoughtlessness and lack of attention, it's just yourself and that nobody else gets hurt.
It's a natural consequence of everyone toting around full Internet connectivity in their pocket. Client-server made sense when computing was vastly expensive, and networks were also expensive but still a cost-effective way to roll out access to centralized resources. It made no sense when networks were still expensive, but computing was cheap enough that a desktop could support common business needs. It made a lot of sense again when the network became so cheap and portable as to become pervasive, and people realized the value of having access to all their stuff while roaming around town.
And I predict that it will swing back in favor of distributed computing in some form. It might take a few decades. It might not be in a form we currently recognize. But it will happen.
And then it will eventually swing back towards centralized computing again as the relative costs shift again. (The costs will shift over time anyway, as one thing or the other being more expensive inspires more innovation, but that's a time-consuming process hence its a decades-long cycle.)
The real danger is not a random script kiddie connecting to the system to play games. Danger comes from people who have inside knowledge of the system, people who know things like network addresses, which machine does what. There's no way to be obscure here, because the enemy already knows what he needs to enter. Remember stuxnet, everyone seems to agree that it was the work of experts.
The real problem is that security by obscurity does work, but only for a little while. As soon as someone inside blows the whistle, or someone outside just stumbles over the secret, the security from the obscurity is gone. Anything just protected by just obscurity will appear to be nice and secure, but will not be secure at all, and the people who want it secured won't know the difference until its too late. Real effective security is in depth. Obscurity can be used in the mix, but may only ever be a small part of it; cryptography, key management, port monitoring, downright suspiciousness: these are all necessarily larger parts of the whole...
Marvel has no creative control over the Spider-man movies nor the X-Men movies. They are solely owned by Sony and Fox respectively. As long as Sony and Fox continue to churn out these horrible movies, they retain the rights to continue making them.
But Marvel most certainly churn out the dross themselves too. I sat through Thor, damnit, and that movie was a mess that needed... oh, where to start? Frankly only the SFX were good enough, and everyone with a server farm to spare can make those. Plot, acting, editing: all sucked. The linking into the building megafranchise sucked worst of all. Gah!
Can't we reanimate Walt Disney? OK, we don't really need large numbers of fascist undead shambling round the world, but he at least understood the importance of having a plot, telling a story well. Too many modern film makers think they can compensate for early incompetence with pyrotechnics.
What trouble and expense? TLS (SSL is obsolete) is only expensive if you need to get your certificates signed by a commercial CA i.e. if you are interacting with random people who are not affiliated with you or your organization. If you are only deploying TLS for internal purposes, just maintain your own internal CA and deploy your internal signing key to all of your organization's systems.
Actually, if you're just doing something internal and only need a single host certificate and aren't trying to run multiple domains off the same site, a CA-signed certificate's very cheap. Possibly even free, depending on what you've already got in place. (For reference, it cost nothing for me to get one set up recently under the condition that it was bound to a particular machine.)
As for why trust a CA you don't run? You don't have to really, but it's a lot of work to run a CA well even if you're not accepting submissions from the general public and you add having to distribute your CA key and get people to trust it. Plus you really want to be able to change your service certificates when (not if) you have deployment problems (such as a service compromise by insufficiently secured PHP; remember, security's not just one thing) which CA-based solutions have down pat whereas most of the others (e.g., web of trust) find difficult.
Self-signed certificates can only ever be safely trusted by the person who made them. Nobody else.
The reality is that there are three categories of data that are relevant for databases: numbers, text and spatial. Everything else, which falls under the umbrella of "binary", is very unlikely to benefit from a database engine; only the metada can be manipulated and this metadata falls under one of the other categories and is a very good target for ETL.
Actually, it depends on whether you can define relations over the data. The set of relevant relations will vary with the data type. For example, I can imagine it being possible to do searches over images, sounds or movies; there is fundamental structure there, relations are definable. That's not to say it is easy, or that we know the right set of relations, or that implementations are good yet, but to dismiss it as impossible? You jump too far.
Is there ever a reason to run SSH on port 22?
Yes, it can make managing other parts of the system (such as the firewall of the provider) simpler. But ensure that you disable logging in with a password with it; it's otherwise just too vulnerable to distributed attacks. Also bear in mind that going from port 22 to port 2222 isn't going to help much anyway; what would be the second port that an attacker would guess? Real security is better than a miniscule amount of obscurity.
Then they reasonably ask why they even need X at all.
The answer to that is simple: there's a metric buttload of apps out there that talk X11 out the back. Many of those apps are commercial. Many of them use neither GTK nor Qt. Moving all that lot to some other protocol is really quite an enormous job (set of jobs really) and it's not at all clear that everyone has money to spend on what is largely perceived as busywork; snazzier compositing doesn't maintain a factory information system.
But that's not to say that anyone much has a particular fondness for the X11 protocol or server as such. Building a new graphics engine and having a new interface to it is fine, as long as there's also an X11 interface. Heck, I could imagine the X interface being a bit restricted (e.g., no window manager access) and that not being a problem. There's even two levels that the interface could be at: the protocol level and the library level. (If code links to libX11, it doesn't care what the protocol actually looks like.) We should bear in mind also that it's already been shown that X works just fine when layered over the top of another system: this is how it is used on OSX and Windows after all, in the former case being supplied by Apple and in the latter as a third-party program. The X server as people currently know it can change; it has no truly special place in the overall picture.
The whole point of the Bell's Theorem tests is that QM is not reducible to a local deterministic theory.
But good luck on applying that in any meaningful way to structures larger than a molecule with as much interaction with the environment as happens in a neuron.
baggage handlers got the pejorative term "throwers"
I suppose it's better than calling them "tossers".
Are the cartridges region coded?
It massively varies by manufacturer and maybe also by printer model. I've got a Canon inkjet, and its ink cartridges just contain ink; each cartridge is also monochromatic, so they can be replaced on their own schedule. It cost a bit more than the equivalent HP at the time (quite a few years ago, to be fair) but it has worked out much cheaper overall since we can easily use cheap third-party replacement inks. Theoretically the expensive inks are better, but not enough to justify the extra cost. (Using better paper makes more difference; a so-so print on cheap 80gsm paper looks hugely better on 120gsm glossy photo-quality paper/card.)
The detection of the ink levels is purely optical, in case you're wondering, depending on the difference in refractive index between ink and air (there's a tiny prism built into the base of the cartridge body). It's an elegant technical solution that's really cheap to manufacture.
Light press keyboards are not only quieter, but they are more ergonomic.
They won't be seen as more ergonomic when the zombie apocalypse comes! If you're using a Model M, you're already fully armed and ready for turning the infected brain-consuming horde into a pile of festering severed appendages. Lesser keyboards won't last past the first hundred cracked skulls before breaking, leaving you critically exposed just as things are starting to get really hairy. Go for safety, go for the Model M! You know it makes sense.
Oh cool, you mean like BOINC has been doing for ages......
If they've got any sense, they'll use BOINC as the platform. (Remember, the story's been filtered by know-nothing journalists.)
Magic doesn't follow the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any unknown advanced technology, we could identify the heat reservoir.
That's besides the point. If magic worked, we'd be able to use systematic study with it and it would become technology. It'd just be driven by fairy tears or tiny imps or something instead of electrons.
And overall the Second Law would still hold. Things get really really screwy when you don't have that. You just might not see where the heat sink and source were located.
What's up with the deserts?
Are alien UFO:s prone to rust or something?
It's hard to hide secret airbases in downtown Manhattan.
More seriously, deserts are great for hiding things precisely because there's very few people around otherwise. Mountains would work too, but they're not so great for airbases due to the terrain, and it's also easy for spies to get somewhere where they can overlook the base. Farmland tends to have too many people about. A nice big forest would be quite good though, but only if its empty enough; large chunks of northern Canada are fairly well suited except that they're under major flight routes and they're not in the US. (Mind you, if Canada had a secret alien research program, that's where it would be. The north is big and very empty away from the mines.)
Don't fly on AA, avoid United as well. Delta is the least bad US carrier, but they still suck compared to foreign carriers.
It depends on the plane/route. I've flown a fair bit with Delta (especially transatlantic) and the ex-Northwest planes/routes tend to be much nicer than the "original" Delta ones. (Where I live is terrible for flying with either AA or United, but that's for reasons that are nothing to do with any US carrier.) I suspect a lot of this is linked to the age of the planes, especially in the US domestic market. Mind you, if the flight's only an hour or two it's hardly a big deal; a newspaper can cover that sort of timespan just fine.
That's not Digital.
That's Analog.
Of course it's digital! There's 5 digits in each fist; 1 thumb, 4 fingers.
The question is whether someone will force you to invest -- i.e. whether the taxpayers will be made to bail somebody out for $50 bn. That has nothing to do with capitalism, and is just bad government.
There are other ways in which you can end up "forced to invest". An example is where you've got a company (or sector) that is so over-valued that pension funds feel they have to invest in it, otherwise they lag the overall market index. While the fund managers might know that the company is overvalued, there's no way that they're going to say it for fear of getting hounded out of their jobs. (This was one of the engines of the credit bubble.) Do you monitor every trade that your pension fund is doing? I know I don't; I have a real job to do. But what this does mean is that things can go badly wrong with your money.
The basic premise, that things can go wrong which you can do next to nothing about, remains the same. I just don't see that the conclusion you draw from it — that government is the problem — is sustainable. Nor would I say that government is the solution either; that would be foolish. Hanging 10% of all senior financial types on Wall Street from the lampposts of Manhattan to encourage the rest... I'm having problems seeing the down-side of that idea.
Why would open source writers think using another consenting computer's resources "evil"? P2P does it all the time and no one thinks anything of it.
Because they're telco types at heart, not infosystems types. Different communities have different standards of acceptable behavior. (The interesting thing about Skype is that its developers were enough in tune with both sides of this particular debate to understand the technology of IP telephony and implement a workable solution for the show-stopper problems.)
If every company stepped out of this mindset and had a "human" verify every signup, eg calling them on the phone and verifying the signup information, much less fraud would be possible as it eliminates the anonymity.
You've got a lovely trust in the ability of people to spot liars over the phone there. And in the general Power of Bureaucracy to Do Good.
How many people are you going to employ doing this? How are you going to pay for them? (Hint: the cost of getting signups verified would be passed on to you.) And it wouldn't stop fraud, just give a bigger opportunity for bribery and corruption. Automated systems, for all their faults, are at least honest and fair in a limited sense (because it is hugely easier to write them that way). All your suggestion would do is cripple large parts of the market to no great benefit of anyone. And yes, you can see evidence of this sort of thing with excessive regulation in large parts of the world.
You don't win wars based upon strategy, you win them on logistics
Sure you win wars based on strategy! It just happens that "get the logistics right" is a great part of any working strategy. (It's not the only part though; it's quite possible to have good logistics and still lose if you're a dumbass in other ways.)
I thought the guy was a Mormon. I'm getting kind of suspicious...
Close. He's a Moron.