87% of the US manufacturing base is devoted to weapons manufacture. The US accounts for over 75% of all military expenditures, world wide, and over 50% is on our own military (not counting the costs of Iraq or Afghanistan).
Much of what is exported to other countries is then subsidised by the US treasury. Additionally military technology developed with taxpayer money is used by various US companies in their civilian products without any restrictions which makes it especially amusing when the US whines about the Europeans subsidising companies like Airbus.
It seems military spending went up by 5.7 percent in from FY08 to FY09, it was not raised to 5.7%. In that case the total military spending is just over 5% of GDP. As far as I can tell expenditures for Iraq, Afghanistan, black projects veteran affairs, military aid, Israel and other military related expenditures still pile on top this figure.
Our standing army and research and procurement programs during times of absolute peace are around 3% of GDP so it's been nothing in the grand scheme of things.
... military expenditures are a bit like unemployment figures. How high they are depends on how you do the math. It seems the actual US military/defence budget is just over 4% of GDP. For the year 2009 the figure is (According to wikipedia) $515.4 Billion which is some 5.7% of GDP. If you also count miscellaneous other military spending it gets closer to 8-9%. This only covers the US armed forces. The Iraq war comes on top of this figure since Iraq and Afghanistan aren't included in the defence budget they are funded through supplementary spending bills. If you take other military expenditures like: black projects, veterans expenditures, subsidising of military equipment to other countries including the massive aid to Israel (only a portion of this aid ever gets paid back even if it is theoretically handed out in the form of loans) and count them as military spending the total US military expenditures for the last few years will easily top 10% of GDP. Keep in mind that black projects include some very expensive gadgetry and Israel isn't exactly a cheap proposition either. To keep the peace in that region the USA has to subsidise the military acquisitions of several surrounding arab countries to ensure a reasonable degree of military parity. Plus every time the the Israelis decide to exercise their right to defend them selves with totally disproportionate bombing campaigns in Lebanon and the occupied territories it triggers another wave of bribery to keep their Arab neighbours nice and docile and that usually takes the form of new and better weapons.
20 pilots can take-off 200 UCAVs, direct them to loiter over the target, and then bring them down in groups of 20 over the target. Finally, they can land the remaining UCAVs at the base.
Rant: I'm no military expert but what happens when a group of interceptors, manned or unmanned, comes across those 200 loitering UCAVs? Can those 20 mission specialists handle evasive actions for all of those 200 UCAVs? According to it's wikipedia entry a Su-35 for example has 12 hard-points for WVR and BVR missiles plus wing-tip rails and it can track 30+ targets and engage 8 simultaneously, probably more depending on how much you want to spend on avionics. I suppose you could build some kind of auto activating AI into the UCAVs and link it to a network of onboard threat sensors but even then you'd be losing a lot of them, either to incoming A2A missiles or in-flight collisions due to the limitations of the relatively primitive nature of even state-of-the-art modern AI. Can modern AI even handle collision avoidance in a formation of 20 or 30 UCAVs as they start their automated evasion sequences and the formation degenerates into what fighter-pilots call a "furball"? Will those processes still work if your UCAVs are being subjected to heavy jamming? It has been argued that losses won't matter that much because UCAVs would be available at throw-away prices. This ignores the fact that it is one thing to send low speed UCAVs with piston, turboprop or small jet engines against Taleban guerillas who can't mount any kind of air defence to speak of beyond shoulder launched heat seeking missiles and manually aimed AA guns. It is quite another thing to set up an airforce of UCAVs to operate against a modern integrated air defence system. Particularly if it is operated by an enemy that has parity with you in technology, training, tactical and technical sophistication and resources. By the time you have produced a UCAV that stands a reasonable chance of surviving an encounter with a Su-35, F-22, Rafale or EF-2000, or modern SAM missile systems the UCAV won't cost that much less than a manned aircraft. Another interesting thing to consider is what happens if somebody infiltrates your control network and "pwns" some of your UCAVs? You might find yourself being bombed by your own UCAVs. Now that would be really interesting, at least it's one thing you can't do very easily to manned aircraft.
FAs the CEO of a small IT company in the US (mostly Midwest-focused), I'd say we hire more out of experience than education. We're consultants, though, but we have helped hire full timers for our customers who want someone there manning the stations all the time.
For those in college now, GO INTERN. It doesn't matter how much you make, but how much you can mark up that portfolio. If you're graduating and can't find work, then WORK SOMEWHERE. I can't begin to tell you how many people I've interviewed who are 5-6 months out of college but aren't working anywhere, even Starbucks. The lack of showing responsibility by not doing something is a turn-off.
I did the Internship thing. Back when I was looking for my first job I was lucky, the.com bubble was still inflating so the internship helped me get a job. In this climate I don't think it will get you very far. By the time the.com bubble burst I had over 2 years of experience as a developer. It still took me months to find a crappy new job as a system administrator since the market was flooded with developers who had much more experience than I did. Every advert for developer jobs specified at least 4-5 years of experience, specified a list of MS, Cisco, SAP etc... certificates as a must-have and half of those adverts specified that people without University degrees need not apply. Everywhere in the region companies had gone belly up, others had started massive layoffs which were aggravated by a string of mergers with the resultant extra layoffs. In an economic climate like the current one, I wouldn't want to be an engineering graduate with only a diploma and an internship; even if I had a little OSS contribution to my name. Thankfully, I now have 10 years of experience which means that my CV stands a good chance of getting me to an interview even in the current economic blood bath. I do agree with you that it is better to work at even Starbucks or McDonalds than to sit around doing nothing and collecting unemployment benefits. As for experience, it is easy to harp on about business realities, how they force one to only hire experienced people. The problem with everybody only hiring only experienced people is that graduates still have to get experience somewhere, somebody has to offer entry level jobs, that's where experience begins. It is a bit farcical that governments (at least in Europe) have begun to legislate and offer tax breaks to encourage companies to offer entry level positions for the engineering graduates that the local universities are producing.
Oh really? Is that why LM is getting really to make their first delivery for test flight? Moron.
Eh? The last time I checked Boeing had managed to torpedo the decision in favour of the USAF variant of the Northrop Grumman/EADS A330 MRTT. The bidding will be redone in 2009, it's being called an "expedited recompetition". This time it will feature the same Northrop Grumman/EADS A330 MRTT vs a revised version of the Boeing KC-767 with a lot of dirty political mud fighting and crotch kicking thrown in for our amusement. With Obama and his democrat protectionists in power there is a heavy momentum for a decision in Boeings favour even if it's aircraft doesn't seem to fit the USAF's ideas very well. The question is only how often will we have to witness the KC-X circus repeated until Boeing finally manages to not screw things up completely? Boeing has so far screwed up two chances it has been given to win the KC-135 replacement contract, first with the Druyun business and then by simply offering an inferior aircraft (according to the USAF) to compete with the Airbus A330 MRTT. The only hope Northrop Grumman/EADS have is to underbid Boeing again in which case the Dem's will have a hard time torpedoing Northrop Grumman/EADS a second time simply because of the current economic situation. The KC-X program is also likely to be reviewed and possibly considerably scaled down due to defence budget cuts, the USA will still have to replace at least some of the KC-135 fleet which is getting pretty tired.
Why? Windows 98 scared me into using Red Hat Linux. Since I knew exactly nothing about *nix at the time it took me a couple of weeks of begging for help on the Usenet just to get X working in a usable resolution but it was still worth the swap.
Uh, they posted video of mortars being fired from that school last week. Was it currently being used? We have no way of knowing, but that's how all intelligence works.
Point being the elected government of Gaza was using a UN non-military building as a base of operations to launch attacks on a civilian populace.
According to the Israelis what happened was small arms fire coming from the direction of the UN school which in their opinion made it worth firing at. In short, according to the latest news reports, it appears that two Hamas fighters are dead at the cost of some 30+ kids and their care takers being killed as well. The sad thing is that many lives could probably have been saved over the last few days if the Israelis hadn't embargoed all sorts of medical equipment which has been piling up at the border for months. If Israel shot it self in the foot with the invasion and bombardment of Lebanon back in 2006 it is now shooting it self in both feet with this latest raid on Gaza. It is an awsome manifestation of the unshakeable US/Israeli belief that conflicts like this one are best resolved with the lavish over use of firepower but in the long run it won't do anything to end Hamas' resistance efforts. Even if Hamas is "cynically using civilians as a human shield" like the Israelis are claiming it still won't help Israel's cause very much in the long run. All the world will remember is the dead kids. I am no friend of Hamas but no matter how hard you try you won't succeed in making the sheer galactic stupidity of what Israel is currently doing in Gaza sound like a good idea.
I have a lot of Apple fanboy friends, and they finally convinced me to spend the extra money for a macbook pro when it came time to buy a new laptop. So far I've been seriously underwhelmed. Contrary to the claims of virtually every Apple user I know, my new laptop with OS X doesn't appear to be any more stable than my old Windows XP laptop. It still periodically locks up for no apparent reason, which I can only solve by making it force-quit applications. It still sometimes slows down for no apparent reason (presumably because something is hogging resources). Also, a few weeks ago one of the updates killed my laptop's display somehow and I had to plug it into an external monitor to fix it - which was a huge pain in the ass, because for some inexplicable reason the macbook pro doesn't have a standard VGA port for connecting to external monitors, AND Apple didn't bother to include the necessary adapters with the laptop. Maybe the update was a ploy to see how many people they could force to buy $16 adapters?
Overall I'm still enjoying my laptop, but I'm astounded that so many people basically lied to me with claims of how perfectly stable and wonderful macs are. I find it very difficult to believe that I'm the only one who has to force-quit applications or deal with inexplicable slowdowns. Surely all these fanboys are having the same sorts of problems. So why can't they just admit it? Why do they have to insist that everything is perfect?
Firstly, you left out some interesting details. Did you get one of the the new glass screen MacBooks? In that case you should have expected crap like this from a newly released product line regardless of whether it is a Mac, a PC or anything else. Which Apps are freezing up on you? Some OS X apps much like some Windows Apps are not particlulary well written. Another point is that OS X GUI apps like those written for Windows and Linux tends to like RAM, lots of RAM and the default amount of RAM that comes with most MacBooks isn't exactly optimal this can lead to what looks like a freeze up. Particularly if you are running some memory hog like Photo Shop, MS Office or Video authoring software. I usually max out the RAM when I buy a Computer, any computer be it PC or Mac. Some people may regard that as a waste but with the prices of RAM these days I'm not really bothered.
Secondly, most every computer manufacturer manages to screw something up. IBM for example sold me a ThinkPad a few years ago that went through a number of mother board changes because the onboard network card kept dying. Finally I got tired of it and bought a slot-in network card. I have also had PC Laptop displays die on me, and not because of a software or firmware issue, the hardware crapped out. Microsoft just recently presided over the mass suicide of 30 GB Zunes.... You are in distinguished company.
Thirdly, only totally sickening Apple fanatics, and Idiot PC users, who erroneously think that all Apple users are fanatics as opposed to a small minority, regurgitate that crap about Apple hardware being superior in quality to PCs. Personally I happen to think that Apple design is usually better than that of most (but not all) PC manufacturers but that does nothing for reliability and hardware quality. Stuff that looks good can be totally unreliable. The same goes for OS X. It is not colossally more stable than Windows is, I'd say they are about equal these days. I went for Macs and OS X because I prefer *nix type OSes, because I think the OS X UI is better (Your milage my vary) and because I got tired of modding Linux until all the irritating little issues that come with that OS were gone and it ran properly on my laptop. If I still had the time to spare to deal with all the issues involved with running Linux on a Laptop I'd probably be just as likely to pick a PC Laptop as an Apple model unless I was in the market for an ultra-light laptop in which case the MBP is a nice if somewhat expensive choice. The new MBP's also offer good value but then so do Lenovo, HP, Acer, Samsung, even Dell has managed to produce a couple of compact laptops that don't make your back and shoulders feel like you have a lead coated marble slab in your backpack.
Yup - they figured out how to design a calendar system that would provoke all sorts of speculation and running around in circles in the future.. I nominate the Mayan calendar system for "best troll ever!"
For example, Microsoft's developer tools are quite decent, but did you notice that they've started giving them away in recent years? That's because they don't make any serious money on them, but if they can get people using their tools then those people are going to target their platform, and the more applications are available on their platform, preferably exclusively, the more attractive that platform is for people who might buy it.
It is amazing how long it took them to realise this. Back in the late 90s when I was at University, Microsoft lost huge numbers of student developers and student engineers to Linux simply because Linux was easier to get ahold of and it shipped with all the heavy duty developer and server software for free. It didn't hurt either that you could poke around in the Linux kernel source code, which you can't do with Windows and that made Linux a popular choice for various software development classes. It wasn't until much later that they started shoving student editions of Windows and their development tools down people's throats. At least that was the case at my school, other people's milage may have varied.
I'm sure that this was mostly for comedic effect, but if true, doesn't something like this make speed cameras completely pointless?
Of course it depends on the regulations governing their use just how 'useful' speed cameras are. In Germany for example they are a significant source of revenue for some communities. Camera operators usually make an agreement with a township or a city, the community gets the penalty fees and only has to pay for rent on the camera if the camera is generating 'profit'. The contracted company will make sure that the cameras are situated in 'profitable areas'. Examples:
You are driving off the autobahn and are rolling down the off-ramp. Just as you cross the town limit you see a 70 or 50 km/h sign. If you are lucky that is! they usually situate these signs in such a way as that they are partially obscured by a treebranch so most people don't notice them. A short distance later... Blink!!! you get caught by a speed camera. You will usually discover that the camera is located at the minimum distance from the town limit that the law allows.
You are driving through a village, the max speed is 50km/h. Like any impatient motorist you are doing c.a. 45 km/h. As you leave the village you see a 70 km/h sign. You accelerate... Blink!! Just in front of a tree at the minimum distance the law allows before you reach the 70 km/h sign is a speed camera suitably painted in tree-bark green.
People who get caught in these situations usually aren't doing more than 8-10 km/h over the limit when they get photographed but in a setup like this the camera operator can easily get dozens or even hundreds of penalty fees rolling into his coffers every day. The really annoying thing is that the places where these cameras would be really useful, since their usual effect is to cause people to radically lower their speed temporarily, places like crossings where school children walk on their way to school aren't profitable enough for these camera companies to bother with. They are to busy maximising the 'profitability' of their camera network to care about traffic safety.
N.B. I'm not against speed cameras but since the I think the traditional measure-once-and-click cameras have a limited utility when it comes to encouraging people observe speed limits. All they really do is make people to slow down for a couple of minutes. The multiple camera setups that penalise you only if your average speed is to high over a certain distance make much more sense. I have found myself escaping an accident because of some idiot exceeding the speed limit by 30, 40 or even more km/h far to often to advocate peoples freedom to drive at insane speeds but unfortunately speed cameras are often more about profit than actually persuading people to observe speed limits.
Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list, as I'm hopefully not the only (commercial) web guy trying to use Linux as a serious desktop, and getting them to run perfectly would effectively make Windows redundant for a large number of people, not just web devs. I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Warcrack, but it doesn't pay my bills.
If you can't use the Linux native alternatives to Photoshop CS3, Office 2007, MSIE 6/7 under Wine you should use Windows, or consider something like the VMware/Parallels simulators. That's what most Linux users I know do. If you simply can't stand the sight of Windows the only other alternative would be OS X where you at least get native CS 3 and MS Office. Wine is a third party implementation of the Windows API created without any help from Microsoft and even the repackaged versions like CrossOver Office don't support MISE and Office 2007 all that well. This should not surprise anybody, for most Linux users Office 2007 and MISE aren't high on the priorities list.
Maybe it is because they had other priorities. Consumer software sales depend far more on features than reliability.
I have to disagree with that. It was because of the fallacy of that argument that I stopped using MS Windows and MS Office back in 1998. I did start to use the MS Office suite again a while ago (The OS X version) after several years of avoiding MS Office like the plague. I only did that because, firstly I kept getting sent MS Office documents by co-workers that I couldn't always edit effectively using alternative Office software, and secondly because MS has has dramatically improved the reliability of its Office suite (I know, it's a controversial point of view on this forum that Microsoft is capable of making a reliable product. But in the case of MS Office for Mac that's my experience, your milage may vary). So, the fact that MS Office has hundreds of features I never use has next to nothing to do with me using it. What does, however, have a lot to do with me using MS Office is the fact that I can work with MS Office for several hours without constantly saving my work and still be reasonably sure I won't lose it because of a software crash. The same basically goes for Apple. When they released OS X 10.5 the new features were nice, but I would have traded quite a few of them in if it meant not having to be plagued with all sorts of reliability and usability related annoyances that weren't adequately fixed until the 10.5.4 release. It wasn't nearly as bad as the massive reliability problems that made me quit Windows back in 98 but it did piss me off.
And it isn't that people can't be bothered to run Macs or Linux. The majority of the software out there still is written for Windows. I find it amusing that the first thing most Mac users do is set up there box to dual boot Windows or set up some Windows VM.
Most?? In my experience Mac users that run a VM are usually either developers or enterprise users and they aren't the majority of Mac users. The VM usually doesn't get used much by developers except for testing or for running the odd Windows only app (Which are getting rarer these days). That is usually also what most enterprise users use a VM for as well. For me one of the few Windows only apps is Visio because Omnigraffle's Visio compatibility still isn't quite good enough. Dual booting is something I usually only see with gamers. The one major concession most of the Mac users I know make to Microsoft, is neither dual booting XP nor installing it on a VM. It's installing some version of Microsoft Office suite for Mac. Once they have that the basic OS X and it's software selection usually serves their need quite well.
Even if it were safe, I'd expect there would be a lawsuit no matter what. I'm sure there's a ton of other programmers out there who have similar thoughts.
It depends on where in the world the company is and where the developers are located. If both are in the US this is probably true, you can get sued for anything in the USA and if these guys do this they will get sued by their former employer in an attempt to kill off their company. If both are located in Europe that's a harder thing to do, but even in Europe they will have issues starting with things like non-compete clauses and ending with with a long, painful and expensive strategic law suit. If they are a bunch of contractors in a place like India/Russia/Ukraine/etc.. working for a US or European company it's a different matter. A number of companies have realised to their surprise, after overlying on outsourcing, that their former contractors have became competitors.
Cost nothing? Documentation is _hard_, and coder are usually chosen because they like to solve problems by coding, not documenting, so you have to hire some special people and they have to spend lots of time on this. Documentation is expensive and slows down development a lot.
Unfortunately documentation is also necessary if you want anybody to use your software. I have depressingly often found it necessary to abandoned the idea of using some API simply because I found myself spending way to much time trying to accomplish even simple tasks due to the complete inadequacy of the documentation. If figuring out how to do simple stuff requires a disproportionately large effort it often isn't worth the risk of continuing to use that API because the effort you have to put into figuring things out once you move into the API's more complex features will slow your project down unacceptably. When you are being pressed for results by your PHB and have to meet a deadline it is often preferable to use a less elegant API/Framework that may have been your second choice simply because is better documented. I don't really care if that documentation is in the form of good well written traditional API/Developer/Administrator/User guides or, alternatively, in the form of a large number of forum-posts, articles or blogs by frustrated users who painfully found out how to do things not mentioned in the scanty documentation by reverse-engineering, debugging and even painfully weeding through the source code. I do very much prefer the former but browsing through endless pages of google hits also gets me there in the end.
Not necessarily so. For one thing, Tesla Motors has a long list of pre-orders, IIRC, and I believe they started shipping cars, so there is apparently sufficient demand for their product.
In this tight credit market, lenders are reluctant to lend money to even stable, established companies. They're not even issuing commercial paper -- which are short-term loans to other banks.
How many of those pre-orders for their sports-car do you suppose will survive contact with this recession? My guess is not all that many. Of course there are new people that are making their fortune in this Bear market as we speak so perhaps it will even out for Tesla?? One thing Tesla could do in this market is to ally it self with one of the big US car makers, one of the ones that has no kind of experience in making 4-6 seat passenger cars that weigh in at below 5 metric tons and pack less than a 250 hp engine. These companies must be desperate to acquire expertise and engineering talent on how to make the kind of car that will sell in times of recession and toughening environmental legislation. That, IMHO, will be cheap and light electric or plugin-hybrid cars.
I used one for about a week before I gave up on it, gave it to my wife, and went out and bought a $10 Logitech mouse which has worked perfectly ever since. The thing simply would not register right clicks when I wanted it to. Maybe it would if I kept using it. But honestly, spending weeks training my hand to use this mouse is not worth it compared to spending $10 on one that works properly from the start.
As for scrolling, one dimension is superior to zero dimensions, which is what my Mighty Mouse ended up having after a few months of use by my wife. When the scroll clit gets dirty it ceases to function, and the thing appears to be impervious to all known cleaning methods. So now the Mighty Mouse sits in a drawer and she uses a $10 USB scroll wheel mouse.
Like somebody pointed out you have to lift your left finger when doing a right click with the Mighty Mouse I do this instinctively but I can see how it would be irritating to somebody who doesn't. One has to marvel at what lengths Steve Jobs is willing to go to provide two button functionality without having to admit that his idea for a one button mouse simply sucked. That being said early Bluetooth Mighty Mice had problems with the button sensors. My first BT Mighty mouse had to be switched off and on each time the my MBP woke from sleep-mode because right clicking ceased working. Eventually some moron stole that mouse and against my better judgement I actually went and bought a second BT Mighty Mouse which has worked perfectly so far. I agree that the form factor of the Mighty Mouse not especially comfortable but it does make it easier to stow in a hardpack. I actually used to have a Logitech wireless mouse which I dumped because once in a while it would cause a kernel panic when I unplugged the USB dongle and because the because the trackball on the Mighty Mouse is quite frankly superior to Logitec's tilting scroll wheel.
It is quite easy to clean the Mighty Mouse's trackball, it is no more complicated than it was is clean old style mice that use rubber spheres rather than diodes to detect motion. Wash your hands thoroughly. Then mix a small amount of mildly soapy water, apply it sparingly to the Mighty Mouse's trackball using your finger and scroll the trackball about for a while. Then take a lint free cloth, turn the Mighty Mouse upside down and brush the cloth over the trackball until it is dry. This usually works for my tired old BT Mighty Mouse. It helps to repeat this at regular intervals every 4-6 weeks or so to prevent to much dirt from building up. To get rid of dust and grime that collects inside the trackball chamber simply turn the Mighty Mouse up-side-down and quickly brush your finger over the trackball for a few seconds.
...yes, it is locked to a single service provider but the average user really REALLY doesn't care
I kind of doubt that. There is an enormous number of customers that Apple is not getting to either because they didn't release the iPhone in their country, because the customers don't like the 'official' carriers or because even though they could unlock the iPhone they won't put up with the hassle involved in doing so. Purely form a sales point of view Apple made a major mistake locking the iPhone to carriers.
There were plenty of alternatives proposed that were less intrusive, safer, and better targeted to unfreeze liquidity to buy us time to fix the real problem of reckless, unregulated trading in fraudulently valued housing derivatives.
All were all rounded rejected by Paulson and taken off the table without further debate. If you doubt this, do some research. The rush to pass this via fear-mongering is typical administration bullying at its worst.
The Paulson plan is a naked power grab. Stop trying to sugar-coat it. It's a last ditch effort to save investment bank cronies from getting crushed from the upcoming recession by buying their junk at prices way above market value.
Ooook... time for some ranting: This has long since become much more than an attempt to save Investment bankers and corrupt mortgage banks. This crisis is now threatening banks that are quite solid, never behaved irresponsibly, were not exposed to the sub-prime mess and that are essential to the proper functioning of the USA's, Europe's, Asia's and generally the rest of the worlds economies. The banks this 'bail out' is meant to help are the ones that provide the capital for small and medium size businesses on Main Street America to function, the ones that pay people's salaries. One can only hope that it succeeds in protecting them, and the rest of us, fro what m the screw-ups of the Investment banks, the mortgage industry, the risk assessment companies and politicians (both Dems. and Reps.) who made some very poor decisions, failed to properly monitor the investment banks and the mortgage industry and didn't pull the emergency brake in time. The reason that people like you can make comments like the one above is that you yourself haven't felt the effects of is happening... YET! It will take a while for the this infection to eat it's way through the rest of the banking community, through the businesses and eventually to you yourself (think layoffs on a hitherto unknown scale) and by the time it finally does and you finally start to get it it will be to late to stop it. I think Frederic Mishkin (via NYT reporter David Leonhardt) summed this up rather nicely with his Meyer Mishkin story. Do I think it sucks that the profits of players on Wall Street always get privatized while their mistakes always get Nationalized? Yes! Do I think it sucks that these bozos get a golden... no, these days it's more like a jewel encrusted, gold engraved, platinum parachute even if they have totally screwed up? Yes! Do I want a rerun of 1929? NO! If this is the price to pay to prevent a rerun of 1929 then I'll pay it, very, very, grudgingly. One thing is for sure, I will do my best to support anybody willing to see to it that the people responsible for this mess pay for it. That being said I have no high hopes that more than a few of them will ever be punished.
Can someone explain the logic in taking a fast speed, slowing it down to just a slightly slower but still fast speed, and making people slow down when the construction itself is over a 100 feet from the interstate, with concrete barriers blocking the interstate from the construction?
I once saw a big American made pickup that had flown over such a barrier and into the construction area behind it. I am still wondering how the guy did it. I suppose you are right that slowing down from 75 to 55 is not much protection but the idea that these concrete barriers afford much protection for construction workers is misleading. I suppose the slow-down is intended to minimize the damage in the event of a crash. Not that anybody ever seems to observe these speed limits. There is plenty of people that seem to consider them selves to be on a mission form god never to observe speed limits. A couple of months ago I drove through a construction zone on the A1 in Germany where the max speed was 80 Kph, which I tried to observe. As I left the low speed zone and accelerated to about 100kph to overtake a truck I heard the screeching of tires behind me. When I looked in the rear view mirror I saw a a Renault station wearing Dutch plates and carrying a couple of people in the front seat with an expression of sheer terror etched into their faces. The guy must have breezed through that construction zone at some 120-130 kph or more. I was lucky that this didn't end in a nasty accident but then again I wasn't the one driving like an asshat.
In years past, this kind of work was typically done on Tandem, Stratus or IBM systems which were so reliable that any unscheduled reboot merited a visit from the factory.
Hehe... tell me about it. I used to work for a software outfit who catered to banks and stock exchanges. We used to get scrambled the instant any kind of stability problem came up and didn't go home until it was solved and when I say 'stability problem' I mean incidents most sysadmins would consider mere annoyances. This happened very, very rarely. I can't remember a single time we had anything like this kind of down time.
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87% of the US manufacturing base is devoted to weapons manufacture. The US accounts for over 75% of all military expenditures, world wide, and over 50% is on our own military (not counting the costs of Iraq or Afghanistan).
Much of what is exported to other countries is then subsidised by the US treasury. Additionally military technology developed with taxpayer money is used by various US companies in their civilian products without any restrictions which makes it especially amusing when the US whines about the Europeans subsidising companies like Airbus.
It seems military spending went up by 5.7 percent in from FY08 to FY09, it was not raised to 5.7%. In that case the total military spending is just over 5% of GDP. As far as I can tell expenditures for Iraq, Afghanistan, black projects veteran affairs, military aid, Israel and other military related expenditures still pile on top this figure.
Our standing army and research and procurement programs during times of absolute peace are around 3% of GDP so it's been nothing in the grand scheme of things.
... military expenditures are a bit like unemployment figures. How high they are depends on how you do the math. It seems the actual US military/defence budget is just over 4% of GDP. For the year 2009 the figure is (According to wikipedia) $515.4 Billion which is some 5.7% of GDP. If you also count miscellaneous other military spending it gets closer to 8-9%. This only covers the US armed forces. The Iraq war comes on top of this figure since Iraq and Afghanistan aren't included in the defence budget they are funded through supplementary spending bills. If you take other military expenditures like: black projects, veterans expenditures, subsidising of military equipment to other countries including the massive aid to Israel (only a portion of this aid ever gets paid back even if it is theoretically handed out in the form of loans) and count them as military spending the total US military expenditures for the last few years will easily top 10% of GDP. Keep in mind that black projects include some very expensive gadgetry and Israel isn't exactly a cheap proposition either. To keep the peace in that region the USA has to subsidise the military acquisitions of several surrounding arab countries to ensure a reasonable degree of military parity. Plus every time the the Israelis decide to exercise their right to defend them selves with totally disproportionate bombing campaigns in Lebanon and the occupied territories it triggers another wave of bribery to keep their Arab neighbours nice and docile and that usually takes the form of new and better weapons.
20 pilots can take-off 200 UCAVs, direct them to loiter over the target, and then bring them down in groups of 20 over the target. Finally, they can land the remaining UCAVs at the base.
Rant:
I'm no military expert but what happens when a group of interceptors, manned or unmanned, comes across those 200 loitering UCAVs? Can those 20 mission specialists handle evasive actions for all of those 200 UCAVs? According to it's wikipedia entry a Su-35 for example has 12 hard-points for WVR and BVR missiles plus wing-tip rails and it can track 30+ targets and engage 8 simultaneously, probably more depending on how much you want to spend on avionics. I suppose you could build some kind of auto activating AI into the UCAVs and link it to a network of onboard threat sensors but even then you'd be losing a lot of them, either to incoming A2A missiles or in-flight collisions due to the limitations of the relatively primitive nature of even state-of-the-art modern AI. Can modern AI even handle collision avoidance in a formation of 20 or 30 UCAVs as they start their automated evasion sequences and the formation degenerates into what fighter-pilots call a "furball"? Will those processes still work if your UCAVs are being subjected to heavy jamming? It has been argued that losses won't matter that much because UCAVs would be available at throw-away prices. This ignores the fact that it is one thing to send low speed UCAVs with piston, turboprop or small jet engines against Taleban guerillas who can't mount any kind of air defence to speak of beyond shoulder launched heat seeking missiles and manually aimed AA guns. It is quite another thing to set up an airforce of UCAVs to operate against a modern integrated air defence system. Particularly if it is operated by an enemy that has parity with you in technology, training, tactical and technical sophistication and resources. By the time you have produced a UCAV that stands a reasonable chance of surviving an encounter with a Su-35, F-22, Rafale or EF-2000, or modern SAM missile systems the UCAV won't cost that much less than a manned aircraft. Another interesting thing to consider is what happens if somebody infiltrates your control network and "pwns" some of your UCAVs? You might find yourself being bombed by your own UCAVs. Now that would be really interesting, at least it's one thing you can't do very easily to manned aircraft.
FAs the CEO of a small IT company in the US (mostly Midwest-focused), I'd say we hire more out of experience than education. We're consultants, though, but we have helped hire full timers for our customers who want someone there manning the stations all the time.
For those in college now, GO INTERN. It doesn't matter how much you make, but how much you can mark up that portfolio. If you're graduating and can't find work, then WORK SOMEWHERE. I can't begin to tell you how many people I've interviewed who are 5-6 months out of college but aren't working anywhere, even Starbucks. The lack of showing responsibility by not doing something is a turn-off.
I did the Internship thing. Back when I was looking for my first job I was lucky, the .com bubble was still inflating so the internship helped me get a job. In this climate I don't think it will get you very far. By the time the .com bubble burst I had over 2 years of experience as a developer. It still took me months to find a crappy new job as a system administrator since the market was flooded with developers who had much more experience than I did. Every advert for developer jobs specified at least 4-5 years of experience, specified a list of MS, Cisco, SAP etc... certificates as a must-have and half of those adverts specified that people without University degrees need not apply. Everywhere in the region companies had gone belly up, others had started massive layoffs which were aggravated by a string of mergers with the resultant extra layoffs. In an economic climate like the current one, I wouldn't want to be an engineering graduate with only a diploma and an internship; even if I had a little OSS contribution to my name. Thankfully, I now have 10 years of experience which means that my CV stands a good chance of getting me to an interview even in the current economic blood bath. I do agree with you that it is better to work at even Starbucks or McDonalds than to sit around doing nothing and collecting unemployment benefits. As for experience, it is easy to harp on about business realities, how they force one to only hire experienced people. The problem with everybody only hiring only experienced people is that graduates still have to get experience somewhere, somebody has to offer entry level jobs, that's where experience begins. It is a bit farcical that governments (at least in Europe) have begun to legislate and offer tax breaks to encourage companies to offer entry level positions for the engineering graduates that the local universities are producing.
Oh really? Is that why LM is getting really to make their first delivery for test flight? Moron.
Eh? The last time I checked Boeing had managed to torpedo the decision in favour of the USAF variant of the Northrop Grumman/EADS A330 MRTT. The bidding will be redone in 2009, it's being called an "expedited recompetition". This time it will feature the same Northrop Grumman/EADS A330 MRTT vs a revised version of the Boeing KC-767 with a lot of dirty political mud fighting and crotch kicking thrown in for our amusement. With Obama and his democrat protectionists in power there is a heavy momentum for a decision in Boeings favour even if it's aircraft doesn't seem to fit the USAF's ideas very well. The question is only how often will we have to witness the KC-X circus repeated until Boeing finally manages to not screw things up completely? Boeing has so far screwed up two chances it has been given to win the KC-135 replacement contract, first with the Druyun business and then by simply offering an inferior aircraft (according to the USAF) to compete with the Airbus A330 MRTT. The only hope Northrop Grumman/EADS have is to underbid Boeing again in which case the Dem's will have a hard time torpedoing Northrop Grumman/EADS a second time simply because of the current economic situation. The KC-X program is also likely to be reviewed and possibly considerably scaled down due to defence budget cuts, the USA will still have to replace at least some of the KC-135 fleet which is getting pretty tired.
MS had a hard time to get people off Win9x.
Why? Windows 98 scared me into using Red Hat Linux. Since I knew exactly nothing about *nix at the time it took me a couple of weeks of begging for help on the Usenet just to get X working in a usable resolution but it was still worth the swap.
Uh, they posted video of mortars being fired from that school last week. Was it currently being used? We have no way of knowing, but that's how all intelligence works.
Point being the elected government of Gaza was using a UN non-military building as a base of operations to launch attacks on a civilian populace.
According to the Israelis what happened was small arms fire coming from the direction of the UN school which in their opinion made it worth firing at. In short, according to the latest news reports, it appears that two Hamas fighters are dead at the cost of some 30+ kids and their care takers being killed as well. The sad thing is that many lives could probably have been saved over the last few days if the Israelis hadn't embargoed all sorts of medical equipment which has been piling up at the border for months. If Israel shot it self in the foot with the invasion and bombardment of Lebanon back in 2006 it is now shooting it self in both feet with this latest raid on Gaza. It is an awsome manifestation of the unshakeable US/Israeli belief that conflicts like this one are best resolved with the lavish over use of firepower but in the long run it won't do anything to end Hamas' resistance efforts. Even if Hamas is "cynically using civilians as a human shield" like the Israelis are claiming it still won't help Israel's cause very much in the long run. All the world will remember is the dead kids. I am no friend of Hamas but no matter how hard you try you won't succeed in making the sheer galactic stupidity of what Israel is currently doing in Gaza sound like a good idea.
I have a lot of Apple fanboy friends, and they finally convinced me to spend the extra money for a macbook pro when it came time to buy a new laptop. So far I've been seriously underwhelmed. Contrary to the claims of virtually every Apple user I know, my new laptop with OS X doesn't appear to be any more stable than my old Windows XP laptop. It still periodically locks up for no apparent reason, which I can only solve by making it force-quit applications. It still sometimes slows down for no apparent reason (presumably because something is hogging resources). Also, a few weeks ago one of the updates killed my laptop's display somehow and I had to plug it into an external monitor to fix it - which was a huge pain in the ass, because for some inexplicable reason the macbook pro doesn't have a standard VGA port for connecting to external monitors, AND Apple didn't bother to include the necessary adapters with the laptop. Maybe the update was a ploy to see how many people they could force to buy $16 adapters?
Overall I'm still enjoying my laptop, but I'm astounded that so many people basically lied to me with claims of how perfectly stable and wonderful macs are. I find it very difficult to believe that I'm the only one who has to force-quit applications or deal with inexplicable slowdowns. Surely all these fanboys are having the same sorts of problems. So why can't they just admit it? Why do they have to insist that everything is perfect?
Firstly, you left out some interesting details. Did you get one of the the new glass screen MacBooks? In that case you should have expected crap like this from a newly released product line regardless of whether it is a Mac, a PC or anything else. Which Apps are freezing up on you? Some OS X apps much like some Windows Apps are not particlulary well written. Another point is that OS X GUI apps like those written for Windows and Linux tends to like RAM, lots of RAM and the default amount of RAM that comes with most MacBooks isn't exactly optimal this can lead to what looks like a freeze up. Particularly if you are running some memory hog like Photo Shop, MS Office or Video authoring software. I usually max out the RAM when I buy a Computer, any computer be it PC or Mac. Some people may regard that as a waste but with the prices of RAM these days I'm not really bothered.
Secondly, most every computer manufacturer manages to screw something up. IBM for example sold me a ThinkPad a few years ago that went through a number of mother board changes because the onboard network card kept dying. Finally I got tired of it and bought a slot-in network card. I have also had PC Laptop displays die on me, and not because of a software or firmware issue, the hardware crapped out. Microsoft just recently presided over the mass suicide of 30 GB Zunes.... You are in distinguished company.
Thirdly, only totally sickening Apple fanatics, and Idiot PC users, who erroneously think that all Apple users are fanatics as opposed to a small minority, regurgitate that crap about Apple hardware being superior in quality to PCs. Personally I happen to think that Apple design is usually better than that of most (but not all) PC manufacturers but that does nothing for reliability and hardware quality. Stuff that looks good can be totally unreliable. The same goes for OS X. It is not colossally more stable than Windows is, I'd say they are about equal these days. I went for Macs and OS X because I prefer *nix type OSes, because I think the OS X UI is better (Your milage my vary) and because I got tired of modding Linux until all the irritating little issues that come with that OS were gone and it ran properly on my laptop. If I still had the time to spare to deal with all the issues involved with running Linux on a Laptop I'd probably be just as likely to pick a PC Laptop as an Apple model unless I was in the market for an ultra-light laptop in which case the MBP is a nice if somewhat expensive choice. The new MBP's also offer good value but then so do Lenovo, HP, Acer, Samsung, even Dell has managed to produce a couple of compact laptops that don't make your back and shoulders feel like you have a lead coated marble slab in your backpack.
spinning rainbow
Spinning beach-ball of doom.
Yup - they figured out how to design a calendar system that would provoke all sorts of speculation and running around in circles in the future.. I nominate the Mayan calendar system for "best troll ever!"
I thought that was religion in general?
For example, Microsoft's developer tools are quite decent, but did you notice that they've started giving them away in recent years? That's because they don't make any serious money on them, but if they can get people using their tools then those people are going to target their platform, and the more applications are available on their platform, preferably exclusively, the more attractive that platform is for people who might buy it.
It is amazing how long it took them to realise this. Back in the late 90s when I was at University, Microsoft lost huge numbers of student developers and student engineers to Linux simply because Linux was easier to get ahold of and it shipped with all the heavy duty developer and server software for free. It didn't hurt either that you could poke around in the Linux kernel source code, which you can't do with Windows and that made Linux a popular choice for various software development classes. It wasn't until much later that they started shoving student editions of Windows and their development tools down people's throats. At least that was the case at my school, other people's milage may have varied.
I'm sure that this was mostly for comedic effect, but if true, doesn't something like this make speed cameras completely pointless?
Of course it depends on the regulations governing their use just how 'useful' speed cameras are. In Germany for example they are a significant source of revenue for some communities. Camera operators usually make an agreement with a township or a city, the community gets the penalty fees and only has to pay for rent on the camera if the camera is generating 'profit'. The contracted company will make sure that the cameras are situated in 'profitable areas'. Examples:
People who get caught in these situations usually aren't doing more than 8-10 km/h over the limit when they get photographed but in a setup like this the camera operator can easily get dozens or even hundreds of penalty fees rolling into his coffers every day. The really annoying thing is that the places where these cameras would be really useful, since their usual effect is to cause people to radically lower their speed temporarily, places like crossings where school children walk on their way to school aren't profitable enough for these camera companies to bother with. They are to busy maximising the 'profitability' of their camera network to care about traffic safety.
N.B. I'm not against speed cameras but since the I think the traditional measure-once-and-click cameras have a limited utility when it comes to encouraging people observe speed limits. All they really do is make people to slow down for a couple of minutes. The multiple camera setups that penalise you only if your average speed is to high over a certain distance make much more sense. I have found myself escaping an accident because of some idiot exceeding the speed limit by 30, 40 or even more km/h far to often to advocate peoples freedom to drive at insane speeds but unfortunately speed cameras are often more about profit than actually persuading people to observe speed limits.
Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list, as I'm hopefully not the only (commercial) web guy trying to use Linux as a serious desktop, and getting them to run perfectly would effectively make Windows redundant for a large number of people, not just web devs. I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Warcrack, but it doesn't pay my bills.
If you can't use the Linux native alternatives to Photoshop CS3, Office 2007, MSIE 6/7 under Wine you should use Windows, or consider something like the VMware/Parallels simulators. That's what most Linux users I know do. If you simply can't stand the sight of Windows the only other alternative would be OS X where you at least get native CS 3 and MS Office. Wine is a third party implementation of the Windows API created without any help from Microsoft and even the repackaged versions like CrossOver Office don't support MISE and Office 2007 all that well. This should not surprise anybody, for most Linux users Office 2007 and MISE aren't high on the priorities list.
Maybe it is because they had other priorities. Consumer software sales depend far more on features than reliability.
I have to disagree with that. It was because of the fallacy of that argument that I stopped using MS Windows and MS Office back in 1998. I did start to use the MS Office suite again a while ago (The OS X version) after several years of avoiding MS Office like the plague. I only did that because, firstly I kept getting sent MS Office documents by co-workers that I couldn't always edit effectively using alternative Office software, and secondly because MS has has dramatically improved the reliability of its Office suite (I know, it's a controversial point of view on this forum that Microsoft is capable of making a reliable product. But in the case of MS Office for Mac that's my experience, your milage may vary). So, the fact that MS Office has hundreds of features I never use has next to nothing to do with me using it. What does, however, have a lot to do with me using MS Office is the fact that I can work with MS Office for several hours without constantly saving my work and still be reasonably sure I won't lose it because of a software crash. The same basically goes for Apple. When they released OS X 10.5 the new features were nice, but I would have traded quite a few of them in if it meant not having to be plagued with all sorts of reliability and usability related annoyances that weren't adequately fixed until the 10.5.4 release. It wasn't nearly as bad as the massive reliability problems that made me quit Windows back in 98 but it did piss me off.
Just my two cents.
And it isn't that people can't be bothered to run Macs or Linux. The majority of the software out there still is written for Windows. I find it amusing that the first thing most Mac users do is set up there box to dual boot Windows or set up some Windows VM.
Most?? In my experience Mac users that run a VM are usually either developers or enterprise users and they aren't the majority of Mac users. The VM usually doesn't get used much by developers except for testing or for running the odd Windows only app (Which are getting rarer these days). That is usually also what most enterprise users use a VM for as well. For me one of the few Windows only apps is Visio because Omnigraffle's Visio compatibility still isn't quite good enough. Dual booting is something I usually only see with gamers. The one major concession most of the Mac users I know make to Microsoft, is neither dual booting XP nor installing it on a VM. It's installing some version of Microsoft Office suite for Mac. Once they have that the basic OS X and it's software selection usually serves their need quite well.
Even if it were safe, I'd expect there would be a lawsuit no matter what. I'm sure there's a ton of other programmers out there who have similar thoughts.
It depends on where in the world the company is and where the developers are located. If both are in the US this is probably true, you can get sued for anything in the USA and if these guys do this they will get sued by their former employer in an attempt to kill off their company. If both are located in Europe that's a harder thing to do, but even in Europe they will have issues starting with things like non-compete clauses and ending with with a long, painful and expensive strategic law suit. If they are a bunch of contractors in a place like India/Russia/Ukraine/etc.. working for a US or European company it's a different matter. A number of companies have realised to their surprise, after overlying on outsourcing, that their former contractors have became competitors.
Cost nothing? Documentation is _hard_, and coder are usually chosen because they like to solve problems by coding, not documenting, so you have to hire some special people and they have to spend lots of time on this. Documentation is expensive and slows down development a lot.
Unfortunately documentation is also necessary if you want anybody to use your software. I have depressingly often found it necessary to abandoned the idea of using some API simply because I found myself spending way to much time trying to accomplish even simple tasks due to the complete inadequacy of the documentation. If figuring out how to do simple stuff requires a disproportionately large effort it often isn't worth the risk of continuing to use that API because the effort you have to put into figuring things out once you move into the API's more complex features will slow your project down unacceptably. When you are being pressed for results by your PHB and have to meet a deadline it is often preferable to use a less elegant API/Framework that may have been your second choice simply because is better documented. I don't really care if that documentation is in the form of good well written traditional API/Developer/Administrator/User guides or, alternatively, in the form of a large number of forum-posts, articles or blogs by frustrated users who painfully found out how to do things not mentioned in the scanty documentation by reverse-engineering, debugging and even painfully weeding through the source code. I do very much prefer the former but browsing through endless pages of google hits also gets me there in the end.
Not necessarily so. For one thing, Tesla Motors has a long list of pre-orders, IIRC, and I believe they started shipping cars, so there is apparently sufficient demand for their product.
In this tight credit market, lenders are reluctant to lend money to even stable, established companies. They're not even issuing commercial paper -- which are short-term loans to other banks.
How many of those pre-orders for their sports-car do you suppose will survive contact with this recession? My guess is not all that many. Of course there are new people that are making their fortune in this Bear market as we speak so perhaps it will even out for Tesla?? One thing Tesla could do in this market is to ally it self with one of the big US car makers, one of the ones that has no kind of experience in making 4-6 seat passenger cars that weigh in at below 5 metric tons and pack less than a 250 hp engine. These companies must be desperate to acquire expertise and engineering talent on how to make the kind of car that will sell in times of recession and toughening environmental legislation. That, IMHO, will be cheap and light electric or plugin-hybrid cars.
I used one for about a week before I gave up on it, gave it to my wife, and went out and bought a $10 Logitech mouse which has worked perfectly ever since. The thing simply would not register right clicks when I wanted it to. Maybe it would if I kept using it. But honestly, spending weeks training my hand to use this mouse is not worth it compared to spending $10 on one that works properly from the start.
As for scrolling, one dimension is superior to zero dimensions, which is what my Mighty Mouse ended up having after a few months of use by my wife. When the scroll clit gets dirty it ceases to function, and the thing appears to be impervious to all known cleaning methods. So now the Mighty Mouse sits in a drawer and she uses a $10 USB scroll wheel mouse.
Like somebody pointed out you have to lift your left finger when doing a right click with the Mighty Mouse I do this instinctively but I can see how it would be irritating to somebody who doesn't. One has to marvel at what lengths Steve Jobs is willing to go to provide two button functionality without having to admit that his idea for a one button mouse simply sucked. That being said early Bluetooth Mighty Mice had problems with the button sensors. My first BT Mighty mouse had to be switched off and on each time the my MBP woke from sleep-mode because right clicking ceased working. Eventually some moron stole that mouse and against my better judgement I actually went and bought a second BT Mighty Mouse which has worked perfectly so far. I agree that the form factor of the Mighty Mouse not especially comfortable but it does make it easier to stow in a hardpack. I actually used to have a Logitech wireless mouse which I dumped because once in a while it would cause a kernel panic when I unplugged the USB dongle and because the because the trackball on the Mighty Mouse is quite frankly superior to Logitec's tilting scroll wheel.
It is quite easy to clean the Mighty Mouse's trackball, it is no more complicated than it was is clean old style mice that use rubber spheres rather than diodes to detect motion. Wash your hands thoroughly. Then mix a small amount of mildly soapy water, apply it sparingly to the Mighty Mouse's trackball using your finger and scroll the trackball about for a while. Then take a lint free cloth, turn the Mighty Mouse upside down and brush the cloth over the trackball until it is dry. This usually works for my tired old BT Mighty Mouse. It helps to repeat this at regular intervals every 4-6 weeks or so to prevent to much dirt from building up. To get rid of dust and grime that collects inside the trackball chamber simply turn the Mighty Mouse up-side-down and quickly brush your finger over the trackball for a few seconds.
...yes, it is locked to a single service provider but the average user really REALLY doesn't care
I kind of doubt that. There is an enormous number of customers that Apple is not getting to either because they didn't release the iPhone in their country, because the customers don't like the 'official' carriers or because even though they could unlock the iPhone they won't put up with the hassle involved in doing so. Purely form a sales point of view Apple made a major mistake locking the iPhone to carriers.
There were plenty of alternatives proposed that were less intrusive, safer, and better targeted to unfreeze liquidity to buy us time to fix the real problem of reckless, unregulated trading in fraudulently valued housing derivatives.
All were all rounded rejected by Paulson and taken off the table without further debate. If you doubt this, do some research. The rush to pass this via fear-mongering is typical administration bullying at its worst.
The Paulson plan is a naked power grab. Stop trying to sugar-coat it. It's a last ditch effort to save investment bank cronies from getting crushed from the upcoming recession by buying their junk at prices way above market value.
Ooook... time for some ranting:
This has long since become much more than an attempt to save Investment bankers and corrupt mortgage banks. This crisis is now threatening banks that are quite solid, never behaved irresponsibly, were not exposed to the sub-prime mess and that are essential to the proper functioning of the USA's, Europe's, Asia's and generally the rest of the worlds economies. The banks this 'bail out' is meant to help are the ones that provide the capital for small and medium size businesses on Main Street America to function, the ones that pay people's salaries. One can only hope that it succeeds in protecting them, and the rest of us, fro what m the screw-ups of the Investment banks, the mortgage industry, the risk assessment companies and politicians (both Dems. and Reps.) who made some very poor decisions, failed to properly monitor the investment banks and the mortgage industry and didn't pull the emergency brake in time. The reason that people like you can make comments like the one above is that you yourself haven't felt the effects of is happening... YET! It will take a while for the this infection to eat it's way through the rest of the banking community, through the businesses and eventually to you yourself (think layoffs on a hitherto unknown scale) and by the time it finally does and you finally start to get it it will be to late to stop it. I think Frederic Mishkin (via NYT reporter David Leonhardt) summed this up rather nicely with his Meyer Mishkin story. Do I think it sucks that the profits of players on Wall Street always get privatized while their mistakes always get Nationalized? Yes! Do I think it sucks that these bozos get a golden... no, these days it's more like a jewel encrusted, gold engraved, platinum parachute even if they have totally screwed up? Yes! Do I want a rerun of 1929? NO! If this is the price to pay to prevent a rerun of 1929 then I'll pay it, very, very, grudgingly. One thing is for sure, I will do my best to support anybody willing to see to it that the people responsible for this mess pay for it. That being said I have no high hopes that more than a few of them will ever be punished.
And that concludes my rant...
Can someone explain the logic in taking a fast speed, slowing it down to just a slightly slower but still fast speed, and making people slow down when the construction itself is over a 100 feet from the interstate, with concrete barriers blocking the interstate from the construction?
I once saw a big American made pickup that had flown over such a barrier and into the construction area behind it. I am still wondering how the guy did it. I suppose you are right that slowing down from 75 to 55 is not much protection but the idea that these concrete barriers afford much protection for construction workers is misleading. I suppose the slow-down is intended to minimize the damage in the event of a crash. Not that anybody ever seems to observe these speed limits. There is plenty of people that seem to consider them selves to be on a mission form god never to observe speed limits. A couple of months ago I drove through a construction zone on the A1 in Germany where the max speed was 80 Kph, which I tried to observe. As I left the low speed zone and accelerated to about 100kph to overtake a truck I heard the screeching of tires behind me. When I looked in the rear view mirror I saw a a Renault station wearing Dutch plates and carrying a couple of people in the front seat with an expression of sheer terror etched into their faces. The guy must have breezed through that construction zone at some 120-130 kph or more. I was lucky that this didn't end in a nasty accident but then again I wasn't the one driving like an asshat.
In years past, this kind of work was typically done on Tandem, Stratus or IBM systems which were so reliable that any unscheduled reboot merited a visit from the factory.
Hehe... tell me about it. I used to work for a software outfit who catered to banks and stock exchanges. We used to get scrambled the instant any kind of stability problem came up and didn't go home until it was solved and when I say 'stability problem' I mean incidents most sysadmins would consider mere annoyances. This happened very, very rarely. I can't remember a single time we had anything like this kind of down time.
The U.S. has neither the time, massive resources, or manpower to have a prayer of ever annexing Canada.
"Operation Canadian Freedom" It does have a nice ring to it...