The code for the master event sequencer/controller used in the Space Shuttle is probably perfect or almsot perfect (no shuttle has been lost due to a software bug, the accidents have all been caused by physical/mechanical defects or damage), but probably nobody except for NASA wants to pay billions of dollars for their software and even NASA doesn't spend that much when human lives are not at stake, witness the bugs in some of their interplanetary probes which were put together for mere millions by way of comparison.
For those of you who are interested and have not already seen it, the Foreign Corrupt Practices act and international bribery by large corporations and wealthy individuals was covered in the "Black Money" episode on Frontline. Obviously the Sun case, coming to light more recently and being much smaller than the frauds discussed in the documentary, is not mentioned, but the Sun case is just another smaller instance of a much larger problem.
a new combine, those are about $200k. Don't for get grain trucks
I was under the impression that there were now independent companies offering these services on an as needed basis to farmers at competitive prices around harvest time. They come in with their combines, grain trucks, and other equipment which they pay to maintain, keep up to date, and run and in exchange for them coming in and harvesting all of your crops at harvest time they take their payment in the form of a cut of the harvest. The individual farmer does not benefit from the economies of scale and specialization enjoyed by the combine, grain truck, and equipment company which specializes in that area and servers many clients. So doesn't it make sense for the farmer to outsource certain "farm services" at competitive prices?
He can make just about as much working a regular job without the risk. Kill their subsidy, and that is one less family in the farming business.
Perhaps he should. The farm subsidies of the United States and the European Union are really at the root of a lot of pernicious problems in the world and especially the third world. The farming is mostly done by agribusiness these days anyway and for large scale non-farmers market crops that is probably as it should be. The mythical family farmer gets a lot of attention in Washington, but the continuation of farm subsidies is really quite indefensible from an economic and social policy perspective, it is purely a third-rail political issue not a practical one of ensuring that America has enough cheap food to eat (many of us are obese slobs who are eating ourselves to death on all of the cheap food anyway).
HFS was much maligned precisely because it was more complex than suffixes but it's what we really needed back in 1984.
The HFS makes sense for file storage on external media because of the data structure most often used to implement it in all modern file systems, the B-Tree (and its variants). The relational databases out there often use the B-Tree internally in their own db file structures too, but they impose additional restrictions to support relational queries and there is the problem. A general purpose file system, unlike a database, cannot endure such restrictions without losing substantial value as a generic data storage system. The problem of database + queries and efficient large scale file storage are really two separate problems and it is better to keep them separate. In fact, many of the successful search and query implementations employ this strategy. They build an indexed database file that points into the separate addressing scheme (i.e. file paths) maintained by the HFS, using the strengths of each concept to complement the other and really that is the right way to do it. Attempting to combine HFS and relational database into a single structure on the disk is unnecessary, messy, and bound to produce a worse result then simply combining the two concepts into two separate layers as described above.
Which is awarded by a liberal New York university (Columbia) with a board that skews left (with a few token exceptions). The Wall Street Journal is hands down a better paper than New York Times and the sales and circulation numbers prove it. The opinion on the Financial Times is mostly just my own, but I also read and enjoy the Economist (another British publication) and I find the British style of financial journalism to have a more international appeal than what is usually found in the WSJ which tends to present a more Americanized perspective on things (no surprise there since it is an American paper and serves a large home market as the primary audience). However, the Financial Times is not really an exact mirror image of the WSJ for the British Audience, the FT is usually a bit thinner, very technical (the WSJ is too, but FT is technical to a fault), and focuses exclusively on financial matters whereas the WSJ branches out a bit into lifestyle materials that are not generally included in FT.
Some of the same things can be said of the New York Times.
Some perhaps, but not many. The venerable grey lady is a pale shadow of her former self and doesn't really hold a candle to the WSJ which is a much meatier paper with much more information value for the money.
No, something else besides level of technicality needs to explain why people are willing to pay for the WSJ.
The Wall Street journal has good original articles on many non-technical and even non financial subjects (their political opinion page, for example, is often witty and insightful). In fact, I would argue that if one were interested in a strictly technical paper then there are even better (and more terse) papers out there that basically cater only to the financial services industry, The Financial Times for example. Also, the audience of the WSJ tends to be upper middle class and higher income which means that they have money to spend and like spending it on fine living so the WSJ attracts more and better high-end advertisers who will pay premiums for access to that upper-crust audience.
Here's a possibility: as another reader pointed out, you are allowed to access WSJ's premium content if you have been referred from another site.
This has been tried before so its not a new idea. The folks at Salon once tried "24 hour day passes" if users would view an ad from one of their advertising sponsers. This was back when Salon was trying to position itself as an "ultra-premium" online magazine that was "paying members only". They no longer do this, so it must not have been too successful.
Punishing criminal acts by politicians wouldn't be a deterrence
Oh, you misunderstand. I didn't say that it wouldn't be a deterrence, but then again that is precisely why the Constitution set forth the concept of impeachment prior to any prosecution, so that threat of litigation or prosecution would not hinder or influence the holder of an office from acting on perverse incentives or in a way that they otherwise would not absent the legal threats for doing the jobs that they were elected to do. Politicians are granted large latitude to do their jobs and even though some of them undoubtedly abuse the privilege that is still the right way to structure it.
If politicians are punished for crimes committed in office, the cons (e.g. abuse of criminal proceedings) would outweigh the pros
Unless one member of congress physically assaulted another then nobody in Washington would agree on what is criminal and what is not unless there was 100% proof positive (rare even in criminal cases) that a crime occurred. Take the Rod Blagojevich bribery incident, he maintains that it was a "politically" motivated impeachment even after the state senate voted to impeach him and even Rod Blagojevich, disgraced though he may be, is not without hard line supporters who will argue that he got a "raw deal". The problem with criminal prosecutions involving politicians is that they are always inherently political, there is just no escaping that perception so it is, for all intents and purposes, reality. As for Nixon's pardon, do I agree with it? The answer is yes, it was best for the nation at that time to avoid the national embarassment of what would have been the political trial of the century. The privilege of pardon is a power of the President as set forth in the Constitution and there is no requirement for a "good cause" or "righteous reason" for the pardon, it is solely at the discretion of the President.
No matter which government department you care to pick they are still loaded up to the gunnels with 8 years worth of previous administrations political appointees and not very competent employees.
Except that Biden, despite any number of more pressing issues like the economy, wasted no time in packing the Department of Justice full of the RIAA lawyers who brought you spamigation, flagrant contempt of court decisions, and general DMCA related nastiness. The Obama Administration: always time for those who paid to play.
I would guess it would take all of this administration first term of office to clean the out and to create a far more honest and professional government service and not the current administration of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists.
That will never happen either under Obama or any future president. I don't believe that Obama was ignorant when he made that promise which means that he knew that it would not be kept and made it anyway to score points during a campaign. Obama is beholden to Hollywood and organized labor just as Bush and Cheney were beholden to big business. The more things "change" the more they stay the same.
The reality is it will take them most of the first year to just carry out the required investigations prior to initiating prosecutions across the board for what history has demonstrated to have been a very corrupt 8 years.
If you thought that Washington was nasty before "victor's justice" then just wait until this precedent is set. What do you suppose the Republicans will do when they get power again (it will only be a matter of time because the government always has the same sorts of problems no matter who is in charge)? If people go to jail this time then you can bet that scapegoats of today will become the judges of tomorrow. If there are trials in Washington then there will definitely be "revenge" when the tides of political fortune swing again. The political game in Washington is nasty enough without the Democrats upping the ante with political prosecutions.
rather than money itself changing what were previously normal people.
Sort of like taking a collective look in the mirror and not liking what we see, but was this really that surprising? At some point every one of us is corruptible and every man (or woman) has his (or her) price. If you say, "not me" then say that again after tearing up a $2 million dollar bonus check that someone has just placed into your hands.
The only thing I could come up with is the old standby from TV and movies, the "numbered swiss bank account." Presumably your identity would be kept private, you would know when the deposit was made, end of story.
Actually, no. The Swiss banks do not deal with criminals and if you want to deposit millions of dollars then they are going to ask you where it came from and make you prove that it is legitimate before they accept the deposit. The Swiss don't like criminals and Switzerland is a really bad place to commit a crime. Also, the world banking system is basically controlled by the United States government because any bank that doesn't cooperate can be cut "out of the loop" and no bank wants to be denied access to the US foreign exchange markets. Even foreign countries get their assets frozen when the US demands (witness the frozen North Korean offshore bank accounts). The scenario might make for a good TV movie, but in real life you would definitely be busted.
Right, if he was really a professional he would have stripped the identity information (name, ssn, dob, addresses, etc) from the context (prescription drugs in Virginia) and quietly sold the IDs on some carder site(s). Now, the FBI (and probably USSS) is looking for him and the information is too "hot" to sell to anyone, or at least greatly de-valued, because everyone knows about the breach (i.e the potential targets have all been warned). If he hadn't announced it to the world, like an idiot, and instead quietly sold off the haul the break-in probably never would have been noticed AND he would have gotten some money, not $10 million but something. Note: I am not advocating criminal activity, I am simply pointing out how a real professional would have gone about the task as opposed to the amateur night antics of the hacker in question.
In terms of commercial spending, "security" has so far been an excuse to spend a bunch of money and check a lot of little boxes.
Bruce Schneier addresses this and other related security issues on his blog and in his books; among them the tendency of companies to treat security as a "product in a box" which can be purchased, turned on, and then forgotten about instead of as way of thinking and doing business so that security becomes ingrained into the corporate culture out of habit and practiced effort.
You're suggestion about reorganizing our military is intriguing, but the US has global interests now besides homeland defense that cannot be adequately addressed by a professional officer corps and militia ala Switerzland (our needs are different now). Personally, I think that they should tell recruits the truth, encourage professionalism and do more to promote the military as a lifetime career commitment, and (this is important) raise the pay so that it is in line with alternative professional careers so that career soldiers will stick around until retirement.
There is a similar requirement in Finland if I recall correctly. In fact Linus Torvalds chose to go for the extra training to become an officer, a lieutenant in the artillery I think, because he figured that if he had to do one year he might as well do two and get the full experience (that, and the other grunts had to refer to him as 'sir').
Fascist? Yeah, right, let me know what the previous President's wonderful record on the Bill of Rights was, in particular the 4th amendment
The term Fascist is frequently misued and misunderstood by those who wish to demonize their opponents; although I most often hear it being used as an epithet by those on the left against people or groups whom they don't like or disagree with in some way. In fact Facism, as the term was originally understood when Mussolini and Hitler were running their regimes, is most properly described as state control, but NOT direct ownership (which distinguishes Facism from Communism), of private means of production generally through use or threat of force in service of nationalist goals pursued by those in power within the government (the Nazis actually described themselves as nationalist socialists NOT nationalist capitalists). Facism implies authoritarianism (i.e. no Bill of Rights for you) but authoritariansim does not imply Facism. For example, the Soviet Union was authoritarian but it was not Fascist because there was no private ownership of the means of production to be coerced (the Russian state already owned everything of consequence related to production in the Soviet days).
but then the country would have a tax system that is as "fair" as taxes can be.
but not as fair as the Fair Tax. If anyone stops and takes a moment to think about all of the problems with our current tax system then it becomes clear fairly quickly that most of them relate to tracking down, classifying, and then taxing at different rates various types of income when really it would be much more efficient, much less taxing (couldn't resist the pun), and much fairer to apply tax when money is spent rather then when or where it is earned (which can be difficult to determine as the present system proves). The Fair Tax is technically quite sweet and really unasailable from an economic efficiency angle, it just makes sense. Those people who oppose it after hearing it explained usually have a special interest in the present system or else they want an unfair tax system as long as it is fairer for them and less fair for those people whom they dislike (i.e. they want to use the tax system as a means of punishment, not just for raising needed revenue).
You seem to know your whiskey. Perhaps you can offer your opinion on this particular bourbon (if you have tried it)? It is not too expensive ~35 per bottle and IMHO it is pretty good. What do you think?
The film in question was The Island where Ewan McGregor, as the clone Lincoln Six Echo, has been secretly drinking alcohol given to him by the sympathetic company man James McCord played by Steve Buscemi. The toilet was detecting the deleterious metabolites of alcohol breakdown being passed the morning after the drinking binge by Lincoln.
It's funny how certain kinds of people praise the defiance of authority like this but admonish those who defeat filters in school to access controversial information.
Indeed it is. A sword can be a useful tool whether it is wielded by a patriot, a terrorist, a hero, or a tyrant. People who advocate for censorship and I say censorship NOT reasonable restraints (i.e. no porno billboard in sight of the elementary school) are being foolish or un-American or both.
The people who scream about Iranian and Chinese injustice the loudest are also some of the worst censors at home.
It is frequently the case that those who seek most fervently to ban, censor, and demonize are often themselves guilty of the same "crimes" for which they are so quick to condemn others. This has been shown time and again (i.e. the homophobic firebrand who is himself an "in the closet" homosexual) with numerous politicians, actors, and others who live their lives in the public eye.
I don't trust the industry - been burned once too many by some of the over-hyped turds they put out
You might want to check out GameSpot; I have been using them for years and they have never steered me wrong on a game (i.e. they gave it a good score, but the game actually sucked) AND there are separate user ratings for the game which actually track the staff reviews pretty well, sometime higher and sometimes lower but generally in the ballpark with not too many degrees of separation (i.e. the staff thought the game rocks but the users all think that it sucks). They also get lots of exclusives like developer interviews, inside news and information, and special pre-release trial deals for their paying members. If you are willing to shell out a few ducats each year for really extensive game coverage (there isn't enough time in the day for you to play that many games personally and separate the wheat from the chaff), think of it like consumer reports for games, then give GameSpot a chance, I don't think that you will be disappointed.
BTW: I don't work for GameSpot or ZDNet and I don't receive any money from blogging for them or ads. I am just a satisfied customer, not a shill.
Excuse me for saying so, but I think that your employer may be a bit out of date with the technology that is currently available. The state of wireless security 10 years ago (i.e. WEP) might have might that a legitimate policy, but things have definitely changed for the more secure in recent years, even the US Military uses wireless now in war zones; would they do that if it could not be made secure? The CCMP standard (with AES encryption) is now widely supported in newer wireless networking gear (hardware upgrade costs are trivial in most cases compared to the security benefits) and provides substantial security (i.e. an attacker is more likely to enter the building in disguise and plug something into your Ethernet network or use social engineering instead of trying to brute force your wireless keys. If you are worried about the laptop(s) being lost or stolen and the key recovered from the pilfered HDD then you might want to look into TrueCrypt for full disk encryption or perhaps a commercial solution from PGP which supports central IT administration tasks and key management (for encryption naïve users).
I seem to recall that Kip Thorne of Caltech had a discussion and explanation of just such a collision (complete with hand sketched drawings!) in one of his books written for the lay audience (i.e. those of use who aren't PhD astrophysicists). If I remember correctly then such a collision will result in a significant amount of spin being carried over into the new and larger hole (in fact the new whole will actually store some its mass as spin energy in the swirling space time surrounding the hole). He also included a science fiction short story which suggested that a sufficiently advanced civilization or group of colonists might construct a ring framework around the hole and then use a magnetic field to 'extract' energy from the spin of black whole, thereby generating electricity and also slowing the spin of the whole, although it would supposedly take a very long time for the ring-world civilization to extract all of the energy stored in the spin of the hole.
Perhaps I'm letting my engineering background run away with me
I don't think so. I received my undergraduate degree in CS and I remember the ongoing feuds between the Humanities and the Sciences and especially the engineering disciplines (which includes CS at many universities) which tend to be the more pragmatic and practical ones among the scientists. The humanists would always dismiss us and our profession(s) as merely a necessary evil of modern society, considering their own bullshit musings to be the highest form of human development, the epitome of achievement, and what we would all be doing if we were somehow freed from the concerns of daily living and left with unlimited time to devote to philosophical discussion of the human condition. Scientists, and to a lesser extent engineers, tend to view the entire history of this planet and humans in general as merely temporary concerns in a temporary society and seek instead to understand the universe itself which existed before us and will probably be around long after our demise. This necessarily leads them into the study of mathematics which is really the antithesis of the humanities and causes some rather spectacular misunderstandings as the two opposite world views clash; but enough of this bullshit, I am beginning to sound like a humanist rather than an engineer.
Slashdot Mirror
The code for the master event sequencer/controller used in the Space Shuttle is probably perfect or almsot perfect (no shuttle has been lost due to a software bug, the accidents have all been caused by physical/mechanical defects or damage), but probably nobody except for NASA wants to pay billions of dollars for their software and even NASA doesn't spend that much when human lives are not at stake, witness the bugs in some of their interplanetary probes which were put together for mere millions by way of comparison.
For those of you who are interested and have not already seen it, the Foreign Corrupt Practices act and international bribery by large corporations and wealthy individuals was covered in the "Black Money" episode on Frontline. Obviously the Sun case, coming to light more recently and being much smaller than the frauds discussed in the documentary, is not mentioned, but the Sun case is just another smaller instance of a much larger problem.
a new combine, those are about $200k. Don't for get grain trucks
I was under the impression that there were now independent companies offering these services on an as needed basis to farmers at competitive prices around harvest time. They come in with their combines, grain trucks, and other equipment which they pay to maintain, keep up to date, and run and in exchange for them coming in and harvesting all of your crops at harvest time they take their payment in the form of a cut of the harvest. The individual farmer does not benefit from the economies of scale and specialization enjoyed by the combine, grain truck, and equipment company which specializes in that area and servers many clients. So doesn't it make sense for the farmer to outsource certain "farm services" at competitive prices?
He can make just about as much working a regular job without the risk. Kill their subsidy, and that is one less family in the farming business.
Perhaps he should. The farm subsidies of the United States and the European Union are really at the root of a lot of pernicious problems in the world and especially the third world. The farming is mostly done by agribusiness these days anyway and for large scale non-farmers market crops that is probably as it should be. The mythical family farmer gets a lot of attention in Washington, but the continuation of farm subsidies is really quite indefensible from an economic and social policy perspective, it is purely a third-rail political issue not a practical one of ensuring that America has enough cheap food to eat (many of us are obese slobs who are eating ourselves to death on all of the cheap food anyway).
HFS was much maligned precisely because it was more complex than suffixes but it's what we really needed back in 1984.
The HFS makes sense for file storage on external media because of the data structure most often used to implement it in all modern file systems, the B-Tree (and its variants). The relational databases out there often use the B-Tree internally in their own db file structures too, but they impose additional restrictions to support relational queries and there is the problem. A general purpose file system, unlike a database, cannot endure such restrictions without losing substantial value as a generic data storage system. The problem of database + queries and efficient large scale file storage are really two separate problems and it is better to keep them separate. In fact, many of the successful search and query implementations employ this strategy. They build an indexed database file that points into the separate addressing scheme (i.e. file paths) maintained by the HFS, using the strengths of each concept to complement the other and really that is the right way to do it. Attempting to combine HFS and relational database into a single structure on the disk is unnecessary, messy, and bound to produce a worse result then simply combining the two concepts into two separate layers as described above.
which only won 5 Pulitzer Prizes last month?
Which is awarded by a liberal New York university (Columbia) with a board that skews left (with a few token exceptions). The Wall Street Journal is hands down a better paper than New York Times and the sales and circulation numbers prove it. The opinion on the Financial Times is mostly just my own, but I also read and enjoy the Economist (another British publication) and I find the British style of financial journalism to have a more international appeal than what is usually found in the WSJ which tends to present a more Americanized perspective on things (no surprise there since it is an American paper and serves a large home market as the primary audience). However, the Financial Times is not really an exact mirror image of the WSJ for the British Audience, the FT is usually a bit thinner, very technical (the WSJ is too, but FT is technical to a fault), and focuses exclusively on financial matters whereas the WSJ branches out a bit into lifestyle materials that are not generally included in FT.
Some of the same things can be said of the New York Times.
Some perhaps, but not many. The venerable grey lady is a pale shadow of her former self and doesn't really hold a candle to the WSJ which is a much meatier paper with much more information value for the money.
No, something else besides level of technicality needs to explain why people are willing to pay for the WSJ.
The Wall Street journal has good original articles on many non-technical and even non financial subjects (their political opinion page, for example, is often witty and insightful). In fact, I would argue that if one were interested in a strictly technical paper then there are even better (and more terse) papers out there that basically cater only to the financial services industry, The Financial Times for example. Also, the audience of the WSJ tends to be upper middle class and higher income which means that they have money to spend and like spending it on fine living so the WSJ attracts more and better high-end advertisers who will pay premiums for access to that upper-crust audience.
Here's a possibility: as another reader pointed out, you are allowed to access WSJ's premium content if you have been referred from another site.
This has been tried before so its not a new idea. The folks at Salon once tried "24 hour day passes" if users would view an ad from one of their advertising sponsers. This was back when Salon was trying to position itself as an "ultra-premium" online magazine that was "paying members only". They no longer do this, so it must not have been too successful.
Punishing criminal acts by politicians wouldn't be a deterrence
Oh, you misunderstand. I didn't say that it wouldn't be a deterrence, but then again that is precisely why the Constitution set forth the concept of impeachment prior to any prosecution, so that threat of litigation or prosecution would not hinder or influence the holder of an office from acting on perverse incentives or in a way that they otherwise would not absent the legal threats for doing the jobs that they were elected to do. Politicians are granted large latitude to do their jobs and even though some of them undoubtedly abuse the privilege that is still the right way to structure it.
If politicians are punished for crimes committed in office, the cons (e.g. abuse of criminal proceedings) would outweigh the pros
In many cases, yes.
Unless one member of congress physically assaulted another then nobody in Washington would agree on what is criminal and what is not unless there was 100% proof positive (rare even in criminal cases) that a crime occurred. Take the Rod Blagojevich bribery incident, he maintains that it was a "politically" motivated impeachment even after the state senate voted to impeach him and even Rod Blagojevich, disgraced though he may be, is not without hard line supporters who will argue that he got a "raw deal". The problem with criminal prosecutions involving politicians is that they are always inherently political, there is just no escaping that perception so it is, for all intents and purposes, reality. As for Nixon's pardon, do I agree with it? The answer is yes, it was best for the nation at that time to avoid the national embarassment of what would have been the political trial of the century. The privilege of pardon is a power of the President as set forth in the Constitution and there is no requirement for a "good cause" or "righteous reason" for the pardon, it is solely at the discretion of the President.
No matter which government department you care to pick they are still loaded up to the gunnels with 8 years worth of previous administrations political appointees and not very competent employees.
Except that Biden, despite any number of more pressing issues like the economy, wasted no time in packing the Department of Justice full of the RIAA lawyers who brought you spamigation, flagrant contempt of court decisions, and general DMCA related nastiness. The Obama Administration: always time for those who paid to play.
I would guess it would take all of this administration first term of office to clean the out and to create a far more honest and professional government service and not the current administration of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists.
That will never happen either under Obama or any future president. I don't believe that Obama was ignorant when he made that promise which means that he knew that it would not be kept and made it anyway to score points during a campaign. Obama is beholden to Hollywood and organized labor just as Bush and Cheney were beholden to big business. The more things "change" the more they stay the same.
The reality is it will take them most of the first year to just carry out the required investigations prior to initiating prosecutions across the board for what history has demonstrated to have been a very corrupt 8 years.
If you thought that Washington was nasty before "victor's justice" then just wait until this precedent is set. What do you suppose the Republicans will do when they get power again (it will only be a matter of time because the government always has the same sorts of problems no matter who is in charge)? If people go to jail this time then you can bet that scapegoats of today will become the judges of tomorrow. If there are trials in Washington then there will definitely be "revenge" when the tides of political fortune swing again. The political game in Washington is nasty enough without the Democrats upping the ante with political prosecutions.
Surprising that the cult of Obama has not yet found your comment. Stand by, your down-mod (-5) is coming soon.
rather than money itself changing what were previously normal people.
Sort of like taking a collective look in the mirror and not liking what we see, but was this really that surprising? At some point every one of us is corruptible and every man (or woman) has his (or her) price. If you say, "not me" then say that again after tearing up a $2 million dollar bonus check that someone has just placed into your hands.
The only thing I could come up with is the old standby from TV and movies, the "numbered swiss bank account." Presumably your identity would be kept private, you would know when the deposit was made, end of story.
Actually, no. The Swiss banks do not deal with criminals and if you want to deposit millions of dollars then they are going to ask you where it came from and make you prove that it is legitimate before they accept the deposit. The Swiss don't like criminals and Switzerland is a really bad place to commit a crime. Also, the world banking system is basically controlled by the United States government because any bank that doesn't cooperate can be cut "out of the loop" and no bank wants to be denied access to the US foreign exchange markets. Even foreign countries get their assets frozen when the US demands (witness the frozen North Korean offshore bank accounts). The scenario might make for a good TV movie, but in real life you would definitely be busted.
Right, if he was really a professional he would have stripped the identity information (name, ssn, dob, addresses, etc) from the context (prescription drugs in Virginia) and quietly sold the IDs on some carder site(s). Now, the FBI (and probably USSS) is looking for him and the information is too "hot" to sell to anyone, or at least greatly de-valued, because everyone knows about the breach (i.e the potential targets have all been warned). If he hadn't announced it to the world, like an idiot, and instead quietly sold off the haul the break-in probably never would have been noticed AND he would have gotten some money, not $10 million but something. Note: I am not advocating criminal activity, I am simply pointing out how a real professional would have gone about the task as opposed to the amateur night antics of the hacker in question.
In terms of commercial spending, "security" has so far been an excuse to spend a bunch of money and check a lot of little boxes.
Bruce Schneier addresses this and other related security issues on his blog and in his books; among them the tendency of companies to treat security as a "product in a box" which can be purchased, turned on, and then forgotten about instead of as way of thinking and doing business so that security becomes ingrained into the corporate culture out of habit and practiced effort.
You're suggestion about reorganizing our military is intriguing, but the US has global interests now besides homeland defense that cannot be adequately addressed by a professional officer corps and militia ala Switerzland (our needs are different now). Personally, I think that they should tell recruits the truth, encourage professionalism and do more to promote the military as a lifetime career commitment, and (this is important) raise the pay so that it is in line with alternative professional careers so that career soldiers will stick around until retirement.
There is a similar requirement in Finland if I recall correctly. In fact Linus Torvalds chose to go for the extra training to become an officer, a lieutenant in the artillery I think, because he figured that if he had to do one year he might as well do two and get the full experience (that, and the other grunts had to refer to him as 'sir').
Fascist? Yeah, right, let me know what the previous President's wonderful record on the Bill of Rights was, in particular the 4th amendment
The term Fascist is frequently misued and misunderstood by those who wish to demonize their opponents; although I most often hear it being used as an epithet by those on the left against people or groups whom they don't like or disagree with in some way. In fact Facism, as the term was originally understood when Mussolini and Hitler were running their regimes, is most properly described as state control, but NOT direct ownership (which distinguishes Facism from Communism), of private means of production generally through use or threat of force in service of nationalist goals pursued by those in power within the government (the Nazis actually described themselves as nationalist socialists NOT nationalist capitalists). Facism implies authoritarianism (i.e. no Bill of Rights for you) but authoritariansim does not imply Facism. For example, the Soviet Union was authoritarian but it was not Fascist because there was no private ownership of the means of production to be coerced (the Russian state already owned everything of consequence related to production in the Soviet days).
but then the country would have a tax system that is as "fair" as taxes can be.
but not as fair as the Fair Tax. If anyone stops and takes a moment to think about all of the problems with our current tax system then it becomes clear fairly quickly that most of them relate to tracking down, classifying, and then taxing at different rates various types of income when really it would be much more efficient, much less taxing (couldn't resist the pun), and much fairer to apply tax when money is spent rather then when or where it is earned (which can be difficult to determine as the present system proves). The Fair Tax is technically quite sweet and really unasailable from an economic efficiency angle, it just makes sense. Those people who oppose it after hearing it explained usually have a special interest in the present system or else they want an unfair tax system as long as it is fairer for them and less fair for those people whom they dislike (i.e. they want to use the tax system as a means of punishment, not just for raising needed revenue).
You seem to know your whiskey. Perhaps you can offer your opinion on this particular bourbon (if you have tried it)? It is not too expensive ~35 per bottle and IMHO it is pretty good. What do you think?
Yes but Microsoft said that it'd be different this time and they've changed, they really have
That is what Obama said too. Do you believe him also? Meet the new boss same as the old boss.
The film in question was The Island where Ewan McGregor, as the clone Lincoln Six Echo, has been secretly drinking alcohol given to him by the sympathetic company man James McCord played by Steve Buscemi. The toilet was detecting the deleterious metabolites of alcohol breakdown being passed the morning after the drinking binge by Lincoln.
It's funny how certain kinds of people praise the defiance of authority like this but admonish those who defeat filters in school to access controversial information.
Indeed it is. A sword can be a useful tool whether it is wielded by a patriot, a terrorist, a hero, or a tyrant. People who advocate for censorship and I say censorship NOT reasonable restraints (i.e. no porno billboard in sight of the elementary school) are being foolish or un-American or both.
The people who scream about Iranian and Chinese injustice the loudest are also some of the worst censors at home.
It is frequently the case that those who seek most fervently to ban, censor, and demonize are often themselves guilty of the same "crimes" for which they are so quick to condemn others. This has been shown time and again (i.e. the homophobic firebrand who is himself an "in the closet" homosexual) with numerous politicians, actors, and others who live their lives in the public eye.
I don't trust the industry - been burned once too many by some of the over-hyped turds they put out
You might want to check out GameSpot; I have been using them for years and they have never steered me wrong on a game (i.e. they gave it a good score, but the game actually sucked) AND there are separate user ratings for the game which actually track the staff reviews pretty well, sometime higher and sometimes lower but generally in the ballpark with not too many degrees of separation (i.e. the staff thought the game rocks but the users all think that it sucks). They also get lots of exclusives like developer interviews, inside news and information, and special pre-release trial deals for their paying members. If you are willing to shell out a few ducats each year for really extensive game coverage (there isn't enough time in the day for you to play that many games personally and separate the wheat from the chaff), think of it like consumer reports for games, then give GameSpot a chance, I don't think that you will be disappointed.
BTW: I don't work for GameSpot or ZDNet and I don't receive any money from blogging for them or ads. I am just a satisfied customer, not a shill.
Excuse me for saying so, but I think that your employer may be a bit out of date with the technology that is currently available. The state of wireless security 10 years ago (i.e. WEP) might have might that a legitimate policy, but things have definitely changed for the more secure in recent years, even the US Military uses wireless now in war zones; would they do that if it could not be made secure? The CCMP standard (with AES encryption) is now widely supported in newer wireless networking gear (hardware upgrade costs are trivial in most cases compared to the security benefits) and provides substantial security (i.e. an attacker is more likely to enter the building in disguise and plug something into your Ethernet network or use social engineering instead of trying to brute force your wireless keys. If you are worried about the laptop(s) being lost or stolen and the key recovered from the pilfered HDD then you might want to look into TrueCrypt for full disk encryption or perhaps a commercial solution from PGP which supports central IT administration tasks and key management (for encryption naïve users).
I seem to recall that Kip Thorne of Caltech had a discussion and explanation of just such a collision (complete with hand sketched drawings!) in one of his books written for the lay audience (i.e. those of use who aren't PhD astrophysicists). If I remember correctly then such a collision will result in a significant amount of spin being carried over into the new and larger hole (in fact the new whole will actually store some its mass as spin energy in the swirling space time surrounding the hole). He also included a science fiction short story which suggested that a sufficiently advanced civilization or group of colonists might construct a ring framework around the hole and then use a magnetic field to 'extract' energy from the spin of black whole, thereby generating electricity and also slowing the spin of the whole, although it would supposedly take a very long time for the ring-world civilization to extract all of the energy stored in the spin of the hole.
Perhaps I'm letting my engineering background run away with me
I don't think so. I received my undergraduate degree in CS and I remember the ongoing feuds between the Humanities and the Sciences and especially the engineering disciplines (which includes CS at many universities) which tend to be the more pragmatic and practical ones among the scientists. The humanists would always dismiss us and our profession(s) as merely a necessary evil of modern society, considering their own bullshit musings to be the highest form of human development, the epitome of achievement, and what we would all be doing if we were somehow freed from the concerns of daily living and left with unlimited time to devote to philosophical discussion of the human condition. Scientists, and to a lesser extent engineers, tend to view the entire history of this planet and humans in general as merely temporary concerns in a temporary society and seek instead to understand the universe itself which existed before us and will probably be around long after our demise. This necessarily leads them into the study of mathematics which is really the antithesis of the humanities and causes some rather spectacular misunderstandings as the two opposite world views clash; but enough of this bullshit, I am beginning to sound like a humanist rather than an engineer.