The ones who get left out in the German system are the late-bloomers and the "diamonds-in-the-rough"
How many late-bloomer and "diamonds-in-the-rough" are overlooked every year in Germany? Here in the United States we have nearly the opposite problem; many average and advanced students do not receive adequate instruction because we spend inordinate amounts of time and other resources trying to get the bottom 10% into college. No mass education system is perfect and there are always trade-offs, but if 90+% of the students are properly educated and a few "diamonds-in-the-rough" are missed in the process then I say so be it. In the United States that occasional "diamond-in-the-rough" or late-bloomer might get noticed, whereas in Germany they probably will not, but look at the terrible price paid by the remainder of the American student body in terms of insufficient resources to fully develop their own abilities just so that an off-beat Einstein with "special" needs isn't missed every once in a while.
So why don't those suffering XP users switch to Linux? Because they aren't suffering enough to take action.
There is probably some merit to that statement, but it is not the whole reason why every current XP or even other Windows user(s) will not or cannot switch to Linux. It is my own considered opinion that one of the main things that has kept Windows and Microsoft afloat since about 2003 is the.NET Framework, MSDN, C#, and the good developer support. In fact, the developer tools market is almost certainly the smallest market in which Microsoft is directly involved, but it pays HUGE dividends for them, even if the developer tools group by itself looses money (which it probably does), because it encourages more professional developers to continue writing software for and using the Windows platform (which has huge Network Effects). This is the reason why I have not switched my primary development into Linux, the development tools available for Linux, and particularly for.NET, do not offer as much as Visual Studio does and running a primary IDE in a virtual machine is just too slow for day to day development tasks. If MonoDevelop could OR DotGNU could begin to more closely match the sort of development experience provided by Visual Studio then I would probably switch or at least more seriously consider it. Visual Studio is one of the few Microsoft products that actually doesn't suck and they know exactly what they are doing by continuing to pour money and resources into it's development (and why Microsoft will continue doing that even though Visual Studio probably earns them zero profits by itself).
You might want to give them a spin, they are actually quite fun and particularly if you were ever a fan of 4x space strategy games in the past (Master of Orion, Trade Wars, etc...) then you really owe it to yourself to give Galactic Civilizations and Sins a try. The level of effort that went into the AI in these games combined with all of the customization options AND ongoing fixes and patches really indicates a high level of respect for the gamers and a real love of the genre on the part of the developers. They are definitely among the best games that I have played in recent years.
The end result is that these companies are saying their interests are more important than the customers.
My solution to that is simple. I neither buy NOR use their product(s) again...ever. Seriously, people need to take a look at more of stuff in their lives and decide to say, "I don't need this, it really isn't important." Life has enough hassles already without having to deal with DRM.
Which is the true problem and the real reason why change, when and if it eventually comes, will be modest, limited, and mostly cosmetic. Obama will learn quickly (if he doesn't know already) that even the power of a President is limited and particularly so when he attempts to tack against the prevailing winds generated by the special interests.
compromised physical security invalidates all other security. As you have said, they could install a camera or bug your keyboard or use TEMPEST or any number of other techniques. Those of us who use these tools are seeking strong protection and we know that when individual citizens are singled out for special attention by a government there are practical limits to any sort of protection, but that does not diminish the fact that proper cryptography properly used provides substantial security or at least as good as it gets for the individual citizen.
That is why TrueCrypt includes hidden partitions and the secure OS feature (second OS installed on the hidden partition). That way, when the border guards ask you to enter your password you enter the one for the public OS, the machine boots, and the adversary, the border guard(s) in this case, remain ignorant of the secure OS installed on the hidden partition because of plausible deniability. The TrueCrypt boot loader handles all of this for you automatically depending upon which key is entered (the one for the regular or hidden partition).
they should set a minimum of 1% of revenue for first time/minor offense
1% of revenue according to whom? Corporations (and the government too, but in different ways and for different reasons) play these sorts of accounting games all of the time, reporting one figure for tax purposes and another during the shareholder conference call. It all depends upon which is more beneficial for the corporation, understating or overstating revenues, and which accounting framework they use to do it.
It would be amazing if putting such a system in place cost would more than ten or twenty million dollars. Even if it cost a hundred million, how much money would it save, even just in the first year?
It was never about saving money. You haven't worked in government before have you? What matters in government is spending every dollar every year and then increasing the budget for next year because that is what expands the bureaucracy, builds the political power base, and allows your department to survive and (hopefully) expand. If you don't spend all of your budget or try to save money then someone else will spend it anyway and your budget for next year will be cut since you can obviously get by on less and who wants to get by on less?
Could we even put a price on how much less corrupt government would be?
Obama supporters seem to have fallen victim to one of the best pieces of political salesmanship since the days of JFK with all of these promises of efficient government spending, no more unemployment, tax cuts for just about everyone, and justice and orgasms for all. Allow me then to be the first one to burst your bubble:
The problem was never technology or even a lack of knowledge of what was really going on. The problem was, is, and always will be that power corrupts those who seek it and those who eventually acquire it and no amount of hope or promise of change is going to change anything as long as those in power do not want to change the system and let me tell you, those corn farmers in Iowa will see you in hell before you cut their subsidies and they are just one special interest among thousands. There are certain spending priorities in certain states which are third rail issues and will end the career of any politician from that state who fails to protect the pork, fails to consistently increase the pork, or even mentions the possibility of ending the pork.
Republicans and Democrats like to spend money on different things, to be sure, but neither party has been willing to reduce spending (despite claims of a 'surplus' under Clinton due to magical government wishful accounting) or fix the problems because, lets face it: spending is fun and those who get their piece of the action like getting it, get used to getting it, and want more and more every year.
There are certain political realities that people like Obama, probably to their extreme frustration, will find to be as intransigent, stubborn, and powerful as any force of nature. He may be able to change what we are spending money on, but that spending will (a) always increase and (b) never become more efficient. One might divert the path of a mighty river but one cannot prevent it from flowing.
It is a nice idea in principle and even the conceptualization by the Obama administration sounds quite good, but it really is increadibly naïve to believe that this type of system will result in an accurate accounting and transparency in government spending. Here is the bottom line:
almost since the beginning of our federal government there have been special interests and powerful people, Congressmen and Senators and their backers, who wanted to use the public purse in pursuit of special agendas or expansion of their budget (to spend even more money) without the public knowing either the magnitude or even the specific items of their spending.
There have always been ways to hide via creative accounting, circuitous legislative language and cross references, and even just plain obfuscation by endless minutiae the true costs and magnitudes of government spending on any particular area or even item(s). The powerful incentive to continue these obfuscations, debates over accounting rules, and complex spending schemes will not be removed simply by making this information available on a public website (assuming that an accurate account can and even will be made available in its entirety).
Moreover, there is hardly a single member of Congress who is not somehow complicit in earmarks, porkbarrel projects, subsidies of every kind, and other forms of wasteful spending and they have very little collective interest in further demonstrating to the American people how wasteful and dishonest they all are. You could build the best tracking system in the world, but if garbage goes in then garbage is going to come out and with this much money, literally trillions of dollars, riding on the outcome the guilty in Congress are not about to let something like Obama's budget transparency website stand in the way of centuries of Congressional privileges and power over the public purse.
I remain skeptical in the extreme that any greater efficiency or even transparency of government will be acheived by creating a website which is supposed to contain information that almost nobody in Congress really wants to disclose (although they would never voice that preference publicly). I will believe that an efficient and thrifty federal government can exist when I see it with my own two eyes and I won't be holding my breath in the meantime.
On the other hand, any notes taken by an undergrad in Econ 101 are likely to be un-insightful at best and at worst full of mistakes. They *might* be useful to the individual student who took them, especially if he or she has an unusual learning style, but I can almost guarantee that nothing was taught in that Econ 101 class that wouldn't be in any decent Econ textbook or freely available on the web. In fact, there is already a well known free online textbook of Economics, Introduction to Economic Analysis, maintained and made available by R. Preston McAfee of the California Institute of Technology. If you have more than a few nickles to rub together then I would also recommend Principles of Economics (4th edition) by N. Gregory Mankiw (which I own a copy of personally and have referenced on many occasions to dispel the economic double speak of our politicians). I also read the Economist on a semi-regular basis (it is also recommended in the back of the Mankiw textbook for further up to date and more specific reading concerning economic and political issues of the moment). I didn't save most of my notes from college because, frankly, they would not have been useful in my software development job AND they probably aren't very good quality reference materials either (assuming that anyone else would even want to decipher my hand written scrawl).
The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over and that the catastrophic growth...'does not seem possible'. But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?"
They could be talking about the economy and it would still make sense...
there is an autorun feature. Is that so horrible? Probably not.
Yes, actually it probably is a horrible feature which hurts most precisely those whom it was meant to help (i.e. the barely computer literate people). Everyone that I know who knows about this feature or cares at all about security turns it off. At the very least, if an OS is going to include this type of feature then it should be tied in with a trusted source system, using public key cryptography and certificates for example, so that only trusted sources can use the autorun feature (assuming that is turned on). The implementation of autorun in windows (i.e. on by default and NO trusted source enforced or required) is just asking for trouble and really should be either re-implemented to involve trusted sources or simply removed (as Apple has done with OSX).
Bottom line: AutoRun is, from a security standpoint, implemented poorly in Windows and should be either re-visited or removed in future versions. The small benefits to novice users are simply not worth the ever growing risks (trojans, viruses, root kits (ala Sony), Copy Protection DRM crap, etc...).
but it would be surprising if one day the government contractors doing cleanup also found a more/less completed Nuclear weapon warhead buried in a trash pit too.
From the wiki article on the History of Nuclear Weapons:
"Following air accidents U.S. nuclear weapons have been lost near Atlantic City, New Jersey (1957); Savannah, Georgia (1958) (see Tybee Bomb); Goldsboro, North Carolina (1961); off the coast of Okinawa (1965); in the sea near Palomares, Spain (1966) (see 1966 Palomares B-52 crash); and near Thule, Greenland (1968) (see 1968 Thule Air Base B-52 crash). Most of the lost weapons were recovered, the Spanish device after three months' effort by the DSV Alvin and DSV Aluminaut.
The Soviet Union was less forthcoming about such incidents, but the environmental group Greenpeace believes that there are around forty non-U.S. nuclear devices that have been lost and not recovered, compared to eleven lost by America, mostly in submarine disasters. The U.S. has tried to recover Soviet devices, notably in the 1974 Operation Jennifer using the specialist salvage vessel Hughes Glomar Explorer."
One would hope that those weapons not recovered because they were not intact (i.e. they couldn't find all of the pieces), but the records of various governments around the world do nothing to assuage real concern(s) that embarassing incidents were not simply covered up and forgotten. In fact, such occurances have been fodder for a number of fictional thriller type stories over the years including a Tom Clancy novel which was made into a movie, Sum of All Fears (although they changed the bad guys in the film to Nazis because they didn't want to offend the Islamists...sheesh no backbone in Hollywood these days).
I'd buy the DVD of that subtitled movie mentioned, but then I am forced to watch previews to "coming soon" movies that are long since gone from the theaters.
You might want to give DVD Shrink a try. I agree with you that the movie studios and other content owners should drop all of the extra "junk" from their DVDs and give the previews a rest. We do not care about your coming attractions (from last year) or other crappy me-too movies that were produced by your third party no-name production company. The only people who care about production company names and the like are people in the industry and even then they will look up your movies on IMDB pro. It makes one want to Netflix their films, rip em, and shrink em them instead of buying them with all of the added junk. When the pirated product is better, then they know that they (the studios) have a problem. Disney is among the worst offenders in this regard. I cannot tell you how many happy friends I have with kids how are now using ripped and shrunk copies of those Disney films (which their kids invariably destroy given enough time) while keeping the originals in a safe place.
The problem with India is that they have banned so many things in the past for dubious reasons and the enforcement is so corrupt that people tend to view any ban or issue with the government officials as a problem to be routed around with a bribe. The Indian people are so used to working around and over government regulations that even worthwile ones tend to be ingored at convenience in India.
Atually, it is worse than that. When the fed wants to put more money into the system it can accept pieces of paper from the US Treasury promising to repay and then simply create the face value of the debt promises in new cash out of thin air *poof* now the money exists (generally as bits on a computer and not actuall bills, at least at first). All of the money in your bank accounts and in your pocket was created in the same way, out of thin air by the Fed. It isn't backed by anything but the "full faith and credit of the United States Government" to pay you back in, you guessed it, more money which they created out of thin air. The Fed does their best to obscure this from the American public so as the remain mysterious and misunderstood and prevent average citizens from becoming angry when they find out how their money system really works. There are even Senators on the banking committe, which hears testimony from the Fed chairman, who don't really seem to understand what is actually going on (or if they do, then they judiciously avoid saying it in public hearings).
It is encouraging them to make a decision that they might not otherwise have made using money which the government confiscated from other taxpayers by force. It is by definition a distortion of they decision making process and therefore the government is making the decision for them by distorting the incentives that would otherwise exist in the abscense of government interference in the marketplace (i.e. no tax credit or taxpayer funded cash rebate for buying a new car. If the auto companies want to offer rebates for new cars then let them offer them directly out of their pocket. Why should I pay for that?). This whole economic crisis is really about government interference at many levels. They intefered in the housing market with FNMA (Fannie Mae) and Freddie Mac. They interfered with botched monetary manipulations by the Fed and set up the whole credit bubble in the first place. Now they propose to paper the whole thing over, debasing the dollar with massively inflationary trillion dollar baliout spending policies (we haven't seen the inflation yet, but just wait. The hangover from these latest bailout binges will be the biggest yet to date), with MORE SPENDING...Brilliant! The left, of course, is going to take advantage of the situation to blame the market in classic bait and switch because the average American is too ignorant to recognize the hand the government had in getting the credit snowball rolling at the top of the hill, crushing everything on its way down as it ballooned ever larger.
Why is the government trying to take away every incentive to act prudently and responsibly?
I too have been asking the same question for years and it is only getting more and more pertinent as time goes on and the recessions and bailouts get larger and larger. I *really* hope that Obama doesn't "keep homeowners in their homes" by supporting sagging home values (which are still too high btw) with a price floor. Again, that would reward the spendthrifts and idiots while kicking away the ladder for all of the prudent people who didn't make a big dumb home purchase with an NINJA loan. I swear, it is like Uncle Sam takes savers and other prudent types, grabs them by the nose and then kicks them in the ass for not being spendthrift consumers like the rest of the idiots out there. It almost couldn't be worse if the government tried on purpose to enact policies which encourage people to save as little as possible, take on as much debt as possible, and push the dollar down the road to being worthless. If there are any Americans out there who still care about this country then I would urge them read The Revolution: A Manifesto by Ron Paul and then to follow it up with The Bailout Reader on mises.org. Everyone who values freedom and wants to learn the truth about our monetary system and the roots of the present crisis owes it to themselves to read these books.
What's wrong with a yearly mandatory test? Fail the test either fix it and get a certificate of compliance or your heap of junk will be taken off the road, as is the case in parts of Europe.
That is a common question from our European friends and I won't profess to give a whole answer here but the following are IMHO the main reasons why that wouldn't work here in the US.
(1) the United States of America is a very large country, more than twice as large as the European Union in total land area, and that land is more spread out.
(2) Except in the major urban areas, there are many fewer people per square mile living in the United States which remains a largely rural country compared to the heavily urbanized and populated EU countries. In fact the European union is about 60% more populated than the United States at ~490 million vs 300 million or so here in the United States.
With the exception of airplanes, which are commonly used for long distance travel here in the United States, just about everyone owns a car and drives as a matter of necessity due to the spread out suburban and rural character of vast tracts of land here in the US where larger homes, larger cars, and longer commutes are the rule rather than the exception. It takes a certain population density and size before massive investments in other forms of public transportation, like high speed trains, light rail, buses, and the like really begin to pay off and the US is a long way from getting there compared to the Europeans as much for reasons of geography as for the car culture and American dreams of suburbia.
The bill will almost certainlly end up with a provision which limits the credit towards American automobiles (i.e. GM, Ford, or Chrystler) only. Since few people want to buy the Chevy Aveo or the Ford Focus instead of the Toyota Prius or Honda Civic hybrids they probably won't get too many takers in 2009 or 2010 even if the bill is passed.
Slashdot Mirror
The ones who get left out in the German system are the late-bloomers and the "diamonds-in-the-rough"
How many late-bloomer and "diamonds-in-the-rough" are overlooked every year in Germany? Here in the United States we have nearly the opposite problem; many average and advanced students do not receive adequate instruction because we spend inordinate amounts of time and other resources trying to get the bottom 10% into college. No mass education system is perfect and there are always trade-offs, but if 90+% of the students are properly educated and a few "diamonds-in-the-rough" are missed in the process then I say so be it. In the United States that occasional "diamond-in-the-rough" or late-bloomer might get noticed, whereas in Germany they probably will not, but look at the terrible price paid by the remainder of the American student body in terms of insufficient resources to fully develop their own abilities just so that an off-beat Einstein with "special" needs isn't missed every once in a while.
I do not want to live here anymore if Nokia gets it's way
Where could you go where corporations do not run the show?
So why don't those suffering XP users switch to Linux? Because they aren't suffering enough to take action.
There is probably some merit to that statement, but it is not the whole reason why every current XP or even other Windows user(s) will not or cannot switch to Linux. It is my own considered opinion that one of the main things that has kept Windows and Microsoft afloat since about 2003 is the .NET Framework, MSDN, C#, and the good developer support. In fact, the developer tools market is almost certainly the smallest market in which Microsoft is directly involved, but it pays HUGE dividends for them, even if the developer tools group by itself looses money (which it probably does), because it encourages more professional developers to continue writing software for and using the Windows platform (which has huge Network Effects). This is the reason why I have not switched my primary development into Linux, the development tools available for Linux, and particularly for .NET, do not offer as much as Visual Studio does and running a primary IDE in a virtual machine is just too slow for day to day development tasks. If MonoDevelop could OR DotGNU could begin to more closely match the sort of development experience provided by Visual Studio then I would probably switch or at least more seriously consider it. Visual Studio is one of the few Microsoft products that actually doesn't suck and they know exactly what they are doing by continuing to pour money and resources into it's development (and why Microsoft will continue doing that even though Visual Studio probably earns them zero profits by itself).
You might want to give them a spin, they are actually quite fun and particularly if you were ever a fan of 4x space strategy games in the past (Master of Orion, Trade Wars, etc...) then you really owe it to yourself to give Galactic Civilizations and Sins a try. The level of effort that went into the AI in these games combined with all of the customization options AND ongoing fixes and patches really indicates a high level of respect for the gamers and a real love of the genre on the part of the developers. They are definitely among the best games that I have played in recent years.
The end result is that these companies are saying their interests are more important than the customers.
My solution to that is simple. I neither buy NOR use their product(s) again...ever. Seriously, people need to take a look at more of stuff in their lives and decide to say, "I don't need this, it really isn't important." Life has enough hassles already without having to deal with DRM.
on a ship the size of the Federal Government
Which is the true problem and the real reason why change, when and if it eventually comes, will be modest, limited, and mostly cosmetic. Obama will learn quickly (if he doesn't know already) that even the power of a President is limited and particularly so when he attempts to tack against the prevailing winds generated by the special interests.
compromised physical security invalidates all other security. As you have said, they could install a camera or bug your keyboard or use TEMPEST or any number of other techniques. Those of us who use these tools are seeking strong protection and we know that when individual citizens are singled out for special attention by a government there are practical limits to any sort of protection, but that does not diminish the fact that proper cryptography properly used provides substantial security or at least as good as it gets for the individual citizen.
That is why TrueCrypt includes hidden partitions and the secure OS feature (second OS installed on the hidden partition). That way, when the border guards ask you to enter your password you enter the one for the public OS, the machine boots, and the adversary, the border guard(s) in this case, remain ignorant of the secure OS installed on the hidden partition because of plausible deniability. The TrueCrypt boot loader handles all of this for you automatically depending upon which key is entered (the one for the regular or hidden partition).
but then we're not downloading porn torrents...
That must be what they mean by "time sensitive" traffic...
they should set a minimum of 1% of revenue for first time/minor offense
1% of revenue according to whom? Corporations (and the government too, but in different ways and for different reasons) play these sorts of accounting games all of the time, reporting one figure for tax purposes and another during the shareholder conference call. It all depends upon which is more beneficial for the corporation, understating or overstating revenues, and which accounting framework they use to do it.
It would be amazing if putting such a system in place cost would more than ten or twenty million dollars. Even if it cost a hundred million, how much money would it save, even just in the first year?
It was never about saving money. You haven't worked in government before have you? What matters in government is spending every dollar every year and then increasing the budget for next year because that is what expands the bureaucracy, builds the political power base, and allows your department to survive and (hopefully) expand. If you don't spend all of your budget or try to save money then someone else will spend it anyway and your budget for next year will be cut since you can obviously get by on less and who wants to get by on less?
Could we even put a price on how much less corrupt government would be?
Obama supporters seem to have fallen victim to one of the best pieces of political salesmanship since the days of JFK with all of these promises of efficient government spending, no more unemployment, tax cuts for just about everyone, and justice and orgasms for all. Allow me then to be the first one to burst your bubble:
The problem was never technology or even a lack of knowledge of what was really going on. The problem was, is, and always will be that power corrupts those who seek it and those who eventually acquire it and no amount of hope or promise of change is going to change anything as long as those in power do not want to change the system and let me tell you, those corn farmers in Iowa will see you in hell before you cut their subsidies and they are just one special interest among thousands. There are certain spending priorities in certain states which are third rail issues and will end the career of any politician from that state who fails to protect the pork, fails to consistently increase the pork, or even mentions the possibility of ending the pork.
Republicans and Democrats like to spend money on different things, to be sure, but neither party has been willing to reduce spending (despite claims of a 'surplus' under Clinton due to magical government wishful accounting) or fix the problems because, lets face it: spending is fun and those who get their piece of the action like getting it, get used to getting it, and want more and more every year.
There are certain political realities that people like Obama, probably to their extreme frustration, will find to be as intransigent, stubborn, and powerful as any force of nature. He may be able to change what we are spending money on, but that spending will (a) always increase and (b) never become more efficient. One might divert the path of a mighty river but one cannot prevent it from flowing.
It is a nice idea in principle and even the conceptualization by the Obama administration sounds quite good, but it really is increadibly naïve to believe that this type of system will result in an accurate accounting and transparency in government spending. Here is the bottom line:
almost since the beginning of our federal government there have been special interests and powerful people, Congressmen and Senators and their backers, who wanted to use the public purse in pursuit of special agendas or expansion of their budget (to spend even more money) without the public knowing either the magnitude or even the specific items of their spending.
There have always been ways to hide via creative accounting, circuitous legislative language and cross references, and even just plain obfuscation by endless minutiae the true costs and magnitudes of government spending on any particular area or even item(s). The powerful incentive to continue these obfuscations, debates over accounting rules, and complex spending schemes will not be removed simply by making this information available on a public website (assuming that an accurate account can and even will be made available in its entirety).
Moreover, there is hardly a single member of Congress who is not somehow complicit in earmarks, porkbarrel projects, subsidies of every kind, and other forms of wasteful spending and they have very little collective interest in further demonstrating to the American people how wasteful and dishonest they all are. You could build the best tracking system in the world, but if garbage goes in then garbage is going to come out and with this much money, literally trillions of dollars, riding on the outcome the guilty in Congress are not about to let something like Obama's budget transparency website stand in the way of centuries of Congressional privileges and power over the public purse.
I remain skeptical in the extreme that any greater efficiency or even transparency of government will be acheived by creating a website which is supposed to contain information that almost nobody in Congress really wants to disclose (although they would never voice that preference publicly). I will believe that an efficient and thrifty federal government can exist when I see it with my own two eyes and I won't be holding my breath in the meantime.
On the other hand, any notes taken by an undergrad in Econ 101 are likely to be un-insightful at best and at worst full of mistakes. They *might* be useful to the individual student who took them, especially if he or she has an unusual learning style, but I can almost guarantee that nothing was taught in that Econ 101 class that wouldn't be in any decent Econ textbook or freely available on the web. In fact, there is already a well known free online textbook of Economics, Introduction to Economic Analysis, maintained and made available by R. Preston McAfee of the California Institute of Technology. If you have more than a few nickles to rub together then I would also recommend Principles of Economics (4th edition) by N. Gregory Mankiw (which I own a copy of personally and have referenced on many occasions to dispel the economic double speak of our politicians). I also read the Economist on a semi-regular basis (it is also recommended in the back of the Mankiw textbook for further up to date and more specific reading concerning economic and political issues of the moment). I didn't save most of my notes from college because, frankly, they would not have been useful in my software development job AND they probably aren't very good quality reference materials either (assuming that anyone else would even want to decipher my hand written scrawl).
As compared to a $1000 fine in CA merely for littering on state highways. It's nice to know that our state lawmakers have their priorities straight...
You mean == right?
The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over and that the catastrophic growth...'does not seem possible'. But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?"
They could be talking about the economy and it would still make sense...
there is an autorun feature. Is that so horrible? Probably not.
Yes, actually it probably is a horrible feature which hurts most precisely those whom it was meant to help (i.e. the barely computer literate people). Everyone that I know who knows about this feature or cares at all about security turns it off. At the very least, if an OS is going to include this type of feature then it should be tied in with a trusted source system, using public key cryptography and certificates for example, so that only trusted sources can use the autorun feature (assuming that is turned on). The implementation of autorun in windows (i.e. on by default and NO trusted source enforced or required) is just asking for trouble and really should be either re-implemented to involve trusted sources or simply removed (as Apple has done with OSX).
Bottom line: AutoRun is, from a security standpoint, implemented poorly in Windows and should be either re-visited or removed in future versions. The small benefits to novice users are simply not worth the ever growing risks (trojans, viruses, root kits (ala Sony), Copy Protection DRM crap, etc...).
but it would be surprising if one day the government contractors doing cleanup also found a more/less completed Nuclear weapon warhead buried in a trash pit too.
From the wiki article on the History of Nuclear Weapons:
"Following air accidents U.S. nuclear weapons have been lost near Atlantic City, New Jersey (1957); Savannah, Georgia (1958) (see Tybee Bomb); Goldsboro, North Carolina (1961); off the coast of Okinawa (1965); in the sea near Palomares, Spain (1966) (see 1966 Palomares B-52 crash); and near Thule, Greenland (1968) (see 1968 Thule Air Base B-52 crash). Most of the lost weapons were recovered, the Spanish device after three months' effort by the DSV Alvin and DSV Aluminaut.
The Soviet Union was less forthcoming about such incidents, but the environmental group Greenpeace believes that there are around forty non-U.S. nuclear devices that have been lost and not recovered, compared to eleven lost by America, mostly in submarine disasters. The U.S. has tried to recover Soviet devices, notably in the 1974 Operation Jennifer using the specialist salvage vessel Hughes Glomar Explorer."
One would hope that those weapons not recovered because they were not intact (i.e. they couldn't find all of the pieces), but the records of various governments around the world do nothing to assuage real concern(s) that embarassing incidents were not simply covered up and forgotten. In fact, such occurances have been fodder for a number of fictional thriller type stories over the years including a Tom Clancy novel which was made into a movie, Sum of All Fears (although they changed the bad guys in the film to Nazis because they didn't want to offend the Islamists...sheesh no backbone in Hollywood these days).
I'd buy the DVD of that subtitled movie mentioned, but then I am forced to watch previews to "coming soon" movies that are long since gone from the theaters.
You might want to give DVD Shrink a try. I agree with you that the movie studios and other content owners should drop all of the extra "junk" from their DVDs and give the previews a rest. We do not care about your coming attractions (from last year) or other crappy me-too movies that were produced by your third party no-name production company. The only people who care about production company names and the like are people in the industry and even then they will look up your movies on IMDB pro. It makes one want to Netflix their films, rip em, and shrink em them instead of buying them with all of the added junk. When the pirated product is better, then they know that they (the studios) have a problem. Disney is among the worst offenders in this regard. I cannot tell you how many happy friends I have with kids how are now using ripped and shrunk copies of those Disney films (which their kids invariably destroy given enough time) while keeping the originals in a safe place.
The problem with India is that they have banned so many things in the past for dubious reasons and the enforcement is so corrupt that people tend to view any ban or issue with the government officials as a problem to be routed around with a bribe. The Indian people are so used to working around and over government regulations that even worthwile ones tend to be ingored at convenience in India.
The "Fed" has no money, it is our tax money.
Atually, it is worse than that. When the fed wants to put more money into the system it can accept pieces of paper from the US Treasury promising to repay and then simply create the face value of the debt promises in new cash out of thin air *poof* now the money exists (generally as bits on a computer and not actuall bills, at least at first). All of the money in your bank accounts and in your pocket was created in the same way, out of thin air by the Fed. It isn't backed by anything but the "full faith and credit of the United States Government" to pay you back in, you guessed it, more money which they created out of thin air. The Fed does their best to obscure this from the American public so as the remain mysterious and misunderstood and prevent average citizens from becoming angry when they find out how their money system really works. There are even Senators on the banking committe, which hears testimony from the Fed chairman, who don't really seem to understand what is actually going on (or if they do, then they judiciously avoid saying it in public hearings).
How is government making a decision for people?
It is encouraging them to make a decision that they might not otherwise have made using money which the government confiscated from other taxpayers by force. It is by definition a distortion of they decision making process and therefore the government is making the decision for them by distorting the incentives that would otherwise exist in the abscense of government interference in the marketplace (i.e. no tax credit or taxpayer funded cash rebate for buying a new car. If the auto companies want to offer rebates for new cars then let them offer them directly out of their pocket. Why should I pay for that?). This whole economic crisis is really about government interference at many levels. They intefered in the housing market with FNMA (Fannie Mae) and Freddie Mac. They interfered with botched monetary manipulations by the Fed and set up the whole credit bubble in the first place. Now they propose to paper the whole thing over, debasing the dollar with massively inflationary trillion dollar baliout spending policies (we haven't seen the inflation yet, but just wait. The hangover from these latest bailout binges will be the biggest yet to date), with MORE SPENDING...Brilliant! The left, of course, is going to take advantage of the situation to blame the market in classic bait and switch because the average American is too ignorant to recognize the hand the government had in getting the credit snowball rolling at the top of the hill, crushing everything on its way down as it ballooned ever larger.
Why is the government trying to take away every incentive to act prudently and responsibly?
I too have been asking the same question for years and it is only getting more and more pertinent as time goes on and the recessions and bailouts get larger and larger. I *really* hope that Obama doesn't "keep homeowners in their homes" by supporting sagging home values (which are still too high btw) with a price floor. Again, that would reward the spendthrifts and idiots while kicking away the ladder for all of the prudent people who didn't make a big dumb home purchase with an NINJA loan. I swear, it is like Uncle Sam takes savers and other prudent types, grabs them by the nose and then kicks them in the ass for not being spendthrift consumers like the rest of the idiots out there. It almost couldn't be worse if the government tried on purpose to enact policies which encourage people to save as little as possible, take on as much debt as possible, and push the dollar down the road to being worthless. If there are any Americans out there who still care about this country then I would urge them read The Revolution: A Manifesto by Ron Paul and then to follow it up with The Bailout Reader on mises.org. Everyone who values freedom and wants to learn the truth about our monetary system and the roots of the present crisis owes it to themselves to read these books.
What's wrong with a yearly mandatory test? Fail the test either fix it and get a certificate of compliance or your heap of junk will be taken off the road, as is the case in parts of Europe.
That is a common question from our European friends and I won't profess to give a whole answer here but the following are IMHO the main reasons why that wouldn't work here in the US.
(1) the United States of America is a very large country, more than twice as large as the European Union in total land area, and that land is more spread out.
(2) Except in the major urban areas, there are many fewer people per square mile living in the United States which remains a largely rural country compared to the heavily urbanized and populated EU countries. In fact the European union is about 60% more populated than the United States at ~490 million vs 300 million or so here in the United States.
With the exception of airplanes, which are commonly used for long distance travel here in the United States, just about everyone owns a car and drives as a matter of necessity due to the spread out suburban and rural character of vast tracts of land here in the US where larger homes, larger cars, and longer commutes are the rule rather than the exception. It takes a certain population density and size before massive investments in other forms of public transportation, like high speed trains, light rail, buses, and the like really begin to pay off and the US is a long way from getting there compared to the Europeans as much for reasons of geography as for the car culture and American dreams of suburbia.
I don't see this helping the Big Three very much.
The bill will almost certainlly end up with a provision which limits the credit towards American automobiles (i.e. GM, Ford, or Chrystler) only. Since few people want to buy the Chevy Aveo or the Ford Focus instead of the Toyota Prius or Honda Civic hybrids they probably won't get too many takers in 2009 or 2010 even if the bill is passed.