Dont buy important technology from foreign countries, do it yourself. Especially if you ever under any way, shape or form could cross paths with said foreign country.
I think this should be a really big wakeup call to european countries that relies 100% on american tech, both on hardware and software.
I found it very upsetting to learn that the Brazilian government set up a PKI, but bought all the components for the vault with the root private key from US vendors.
I went inside that vault to install the network synchronization server that gets the time from the Brazilian National Observatory and makes sure the machines inside the vault are set to Brazilian Legal Time, and I was impressed with the security measures the Brazilian government had taken, but I was just shocked that they would buy components, for example, from a foreign company that has ties to the NSA and is called Spy-R-Us (Spyrus).
In the end, I doubt the foreign-bought components have compromised the security of the Brazilian government's root CA private key, but I was surprised that there wasn't more of a push to use Brazilian-made equipment. I apparently wasn't the only one, because Brazil created a project to develop its own open cryptographic platform. It's called the "João-de-Barro Project," named for a South American bird that builds its own house out of mud. The software parts of that project have been used to generate a new AC root keypair. I believe a Brazilian-designed HSM already exists, but I'm a little bit behind, because I stopped working actively with cryptographic hardware a couple of years ago. But I think this might be it (page in Portuguese, for obvious reasons).
Just imagine iif my dad, who turns 77 today, were to receive this kind of contraption as a present. My cranky dad controlling a mech? Run for the hills!
My dad has a master's degree in electrical engineering and likes to modify stuff (electrical and non-) to suit his needs.
Oh, did I mention my dad got a black belt in Shotokan karate back in the '80s? I swear I am not making this up.
Right, I should mention something basic about Dad: he is a collector of militaria and weapons, especially edged weapons, but he has a sizable number of firearms too.
I, for one, would not welcome our heavily armed, flak jacketed, cybernetically enhanced, grumpy old black belt overlord.
Happy birthday, Dad!
No, he won't actually read this, but it seemed appropriate to say.
I'm not wildly convinced. Obviously, like any cultural artefact, a game is going to reflect its environment to some degree(and the apparent effect of environment will be a lot stronger once you narrow your focus to commercially viable/successful titles, since only things that are resonant with the population at large will sell well); but the effects of technical limitations and the strongly derivative tendencies of the industry are huge confounding variables.
(Boldface emphasis is mine)
It's interesting the PP says that. When I saw the submission, the first thing that came to mind was this article, which claims that more zombie-based horror movies tend to come out when a Republican is president of the US and more vampire-based horrow movies tend to come out when a Democrat is president, and even speculates a little on why that might be.
As long as Sony was going to a new design, why oh why did they not add a second thumbstick? Shooters and other console games tend to use two joysticks. in the case of shooters, one stick is used to control movement, while the other is used to control the camera angle. In PSP games, because there's only one joystick, each shooter series uses its own scheme to get around the lack of a second joystick. For what it's worth, I think the best control scheme in a PSP shooter is the one used in the Syphon Filter series. But what sucks is that when you switch games, the whole control scheme changes. It's frustrating when you push just the right buttons to do what you want... in the wrong game.
They put a little depression on the face of the PSP Go in exactly the right place for the second thumbstick, but they put the START and SELECT buttons there. If they had put in another thumbstick and moved those buttons elsewhere, they might have revitalized the whole PSP playform. Ports of console games would have immediately become much easier, allowing the number of games for the platform to grow more quickly. New games could be written with more standard (read: better) control schemes. Backward compatibility would be trivial. The second joystick could simply be ignored by old games. Playing the old games would then be unchanged, while many new possibilities would be created.
I have a PSP 1000, and even that is too small for me. When I try to play with just the PSP 1000 in my hand, it feels too small and fragile. I have an acrylic case that holds the PSP and protects it, and most important for me, gives me a big sturdy thing I don't feel like I'm going to break every time I play (yes, the DS was immediately rejected in part because of how flimsy it looked). I like the video out introduced in the PSP 2000, and I figure that with a good case, the 2000 might be decent.
So to summarize, as Sony has made new versions of the PSP, they have focused on making it smaller and flimsier, a feature I do not want. They have removed the UMD drive, which does away with used game sales and price competition. But they have failed to correct the most glaring defect of the PSP platform since its inception: the lack of a second thumbstick. Well, I'm not a hardcore gamer, so Sony doesn't give a rat's ass about me or my opinion, but I'm keeping an eye on the Pandora. It's a platform that appears to have been, y'know, designed for gaming. It won't have firmware updates to block homebrew games, and no, that doesn't mean I'll only use free or pirated games. I'm perfectly happy buying PSP games, and I'll almost certainly buy some good games for the Pandora too.
As I have stated in response to circletimessquare elsewhere in this discussion, there are a few good reasons to believe magnetic monopoles might exist. I remember circletimessquare's sig, and remember him or her making good posts in the past, but it's clear that he or she does not understand electricity and magnetism very well.
Classical electric and magnetic fields vary in a coordinated way between different Lorentzian reference frames. So where one observer might only observe an electric field with no magnetic field, an observer in a different reference frame moving at a constant velocity with respect to the first observer's frame might see a combination of electric and magnetic fields. Electricity and magnetism are different aspects of a single force, believed to be one of the four "fundamental" forces. It is called, shockingly enough, the electromagnetic force. That's one reason to believe that since electric "monopoles" (charges) exist, magnetic monopoles might too.
There are electric dipoles, which are made of opposing electric "monopoles" (charges). Why couldn't magnetic dipoles also be made of opposing magnetic monopoles? That's another reason to believe magnetic monopoles might exist.
Dirac didn't just think magnetic monopoles might exist for no reason. He discovered in his calculations that the existence of magnetic monopoles would automatically lead to the quantization of electric charge. Since all electric charge observed in nature is quantized (in integer multiples of the electron charge for free particles and, we believe, in integer multiples of 1/3 of the electron charge if we include particles that are not observed "free"), we have yet another reason to believe there might be magnetic monopoles.
Very smart folks with Ph.D.s in physics have been looking for magnetic monopoles in creative ways for a very long time. In another post in this discussion, I mentioned Professor Henry Frisch of the University of Chicago. These people aren't just looking for magnetic monopoles to do something crazy. They're doing it because their deep understanding of the theory and the experimental data leads them to believe magnetic monopoles might exist.
so i must be insane, or the whole lot of you are ignorant of what a magnetic field is
I'd like you to consider the possibility that it's neither of the above. I recognize your signature and remember you making many good posts in the past. I don't think you're crazy. I just think you don't understand the theory of electricity and magnetism very well.
Electric fields also begin and end at particles. And there are electric dipoles, just like there are magnetic dipoles. Why should magnetism only have dipoles and not monopoles like electricity?
Just as electric dipoles are made from positive and negative electric monopoles (charges), there is no reason magnetic dipoles can't be made from opposing magnetic monopoles. Electric monopoles are definitely MUCH easier to observe in nature, but that doesn't mean there are no magnetic dipoles.
Did you know that observers in different reference frames will disagree about the strength of electric and magnetic fields? Electric and magnetic fields vary (in a coordinated way) under Lorentz transforms. That is, what looks like a pure electric field to one observer might look like a combination of electric and magnetic fields to an observer in a different reference frame. Putting it differently, eletricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single force called, creatively enough, the electromagnetic force. That's a reason to believe that magnetic monopoles might exist.
Additionally, electric charge is observed to be quantized in nature. All free particles observed so far have charges that are integer multiples of the electron charge. Quarks are believed to have charges that are +/- 1/3 or 2/3 of the electron charge, but free quarks have not been directly observed, and in any case, even if the basic unit of charge quantization is 1/3 of the electron charge, charge is still quantized. And in the theory, the existence of magnetic monopoles automatically leads to charge quantization. That's a big reason many very smart folks with Ph.D.s in physics have been looking for magnetic monopoles for some time.
I remember a magnetic monopole detector that was sitting in a garage-like bay at HEP, the High Energy Physics group's building, at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s. I believe it was something Henry Frisch had set up really cheaply, so the risk was low, and the potential return enormous. Think of it as a low-budget HEP nerd experiment in Chicago. If you look at Professor Frisch's CV, you'll see that he's written a bunch of papers about magnetic mnopoles and their detection.
Only tangentially related: it has been 20 years, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but seeing Frisch's hair that white was a bit of a shock. Probably because of what it implies about my own age.
If, instead of putting the "SELECT" and "START" buttons in the little round spot in the mirror-image position of where the thumbstick is on the Go, they had put in another thumbstick and put those two buttons somewhere else, they would have made ports of shooters and other PS2 and PS3 games to the PSP a lot easier. Backward compatibility with old PSP games would be trivial - the old games don't "know" about the second thumbstick, so they'd automatically ignore it.
I like my PSP quite a bit. It has served me well on long flights and on bus trips between Rio and Sao Paulo. I've watched movies and TV eps on it, and I've enjoyed some of the games, especially some of the shooters like the Syphon Filter games, which I think do the best job of working around the problem of having only one joystick, but it would be nicer if all the shooters could have the same controls, which would be the case if there were two thumbsticks plus the direction and "shape" buttons. Y'know... like EVERY console controller. And as I said, it would make ports of console games that much easier, which could greatly expand the number of games available for the PSP.
It's a huge pain in the ass to switch between different shooters on the PSP, because I end up confusing the control schemes between different games. Since the controls are only that different from game to game because the games use different workarounds for the single-joystick problem, the solution is obvious... to everyone but the geniuses at Sony.
The PSP hardware has gone through three updates in the last few years, and the most obvious change to strengthen the platform has not been part of any of them. Instead, they've focused on making it smaller and lighter, which I don't want at all. In fact, I have a case and leave the PSP in it at all times because the whole thing feels sturdier in my hands. One of the reasons I chose the PSP over the DS was because the DS felt flimsy and easy-to-break to me. So of course, when Sony updated their hardware three times, it was to make it lighter and smaller, but not to, y'know, do the one thing that would really improve the platform as a whole.
I will give them credit for the video out that they added on the 2000, though. That's the one feature of the newer models I really wish I had. Battery life is a decent one, but I just bought an extra battery (with a larger capacity than the original Sony one) and make sure both are charged before I leave on a trip. I also use the power cord when I can (in airports or bus stations, at home, etc.). I've never had to quit playing because of lack of battery power.
They didn't surrender, so the second one was deemed needed.
Have you ever seen the American casualty count just to take Iwo Jima and Okinawa?
Iwo Jima: 23, 573
Okinawa: 50, 000
Now extrapolate that to an invasion of Japan and you'll see why the US army is still using Purple Heart medals it minted for the planned invasion of Japan. They expected close to 500, 000 casualties to invade Japan and possibly more. Some planners expected it to be be between 1M - 4M American casualties.
Fact is though it was Russia's declaration of war that brought Japan to it's knees. Russian forces combined with American forces would eventually, but not easily, conquer Japan.
Citation needed. I say that because it appears the parent post has ignored the United States Army Air Forces' own Strategic Bombing Survey, which produced a report that stated, among other things, the following (boldface emphasis mine):
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion (of Japan) had been planned or contemplated.
Further, it is clear that leaders in the US had signs of this before the Strategic Bombing Survey was completed. Japanese codes had been cracked, and messages were being intercepted. The Allies knew that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow had been ordered to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had been talking about surrendering a year before that, and the Emperor himself had started suggesting in June of 1945 that alternatives to fighting to the end should be considered.
Since the parent post claims it was Russia entering the war that "brought Japan to its knees," I can't forget to mention the following interesting fact: the Russians had agreed to declare war on Japan 90 days after the end of the European war. The actual date of the end of the European war meant that the Russians were due to declare war on Japan on the 8th of August of 1945.
Oopsie! Damn facts get in the way of a good justifyin'!
I prefer to tag stories about Microsoft's iPod wannabe with "zurd"
YMMV.
It might be something someday, but as of today, I think it's a punchline.
I agree that it might be something someday. Specifically, I think it's likely to be a discontinued product. And maybe even more of a punchline, like "Edsel" was for so many years.
Because of the brilliant decision to make the initial Microsoft iPod wannabe available in... brown, I've never been able to call it or even think of it as anything but "Zurd."
The 'child' is a primordial dwarf. Her symptoms fit to the last detail.
This story has done time on Digg and Fark already, probably several other sites as well, and it seems everywhere large numbers of non-doctors can use Google to compare her symptoms to a RARE but known medical condition. The poor kid's doctors either don't know how to research or are otherwise incompetent.
Uh, yeah... specialists at hospitals and universities just don't have the knowledge and skills you do. They apparently can't use teh Google to discover that the child's symptoms fit primordial dwarfism "to the last detail." Of course, the reason they can't is because... well, because her symptoms don't fit primordial dwarfism to the last detail.
Maybe the "incompetent" doctors have read about primordial dwarfism and know that there are five or six types of primordial dwarfism. Seckel syndrome can be immediately rejected because the child does not have microcephaly. The fact that she's non-microcephalic also reduces the probability that she has MOPD1 or MOPD2 (Majewski Osteodysplastic Primordial Dwarfism types 1 and 2). Since her bone structure is not abnormal in the ways expected from MOPD1 and MOPD2 (short vertebrae, long clavicles, bowed femora ("femurs"), and hip dislocation for MOPD1; dislocations of joints in the elbows, knees and hips and scoliosis for MOPD2), those two are out the window. The fact that none of the articles say she has no corpus callosum also makes it very improbable that she has MOPD2. As for Meier-Gorlin syndrome, the fact that she has kneecaps eliminates that possibility. I've seen MOPD3 mentioned, but not described in detail; it may or may not be completely accepted as a separate category of PD.
At Primordial Dwarfism dot com, there is information about sending kids with PD to school. If you take a lot of it (y'know, doing a Google search or something, like you claimed her "incompetent" doctors can't do), it becomes really clear that their brain development is very, very different from that of Brooke Greenberg. Brooke at 16 has the mind of a toddler, and a good deal of that appears to stem largely from the fact that her brain does not appear to have aged in a way even similar to normal. Individuals with primordial dwarfism tend to have squeaky voices, among other things, but their cognitive development, even when there are problems, is a lot different from the descriptions of Brooke Greenberg's cognitive development (or total lack thereof, apart from the projection of wishes by family members, identifying her toddler-ish behavior as being that of a "rebellious teenager").
Other than short stature, Brooke's symptoms really aren't at all similar to those of any of the varieties of primordial dwarfism, and yet you claimed they fit "to the last detail." I'd like to know on what that conclusion was based.
When I was an undergrad, I worked on CASA, the Chicago Air Shower Array. It was a big array of detectors in the Utah desert, designed to identify point souces of ultra-high energy gamma ray bursts and get more information about the showers of particles they create when they hit the atmosphere.
It's nice to see a model that could conceivably give an idea of how gamma ray bursts happen. In 1988-89, there really weren't any very good candidates. The problem was interesting enough to get James Cronin, who had won a Nobel Prize with Val Fitch for their discovery of a certain kind of symmetry violation in particle physics, interested in experimental astrophysics. He was one of the principal scientists on the project. And he even did some manual labor, like helping with wrapping detectors. I remember him eating the lunch he had brought from home and talking to me about the health benefits of garlic as we worked on preparing detectors one day.
Each box had four detectors in it, each detector made of a piece of scintillator with a big photomultiplier attached, all wrapped in black to make it light-tight. In addition to an identifying number, the grad students gave each box a name. Some were named for blues musicians, for example. At some point, the undergrads working on the project started expressing creativity by using made-up names to sign the detectors we had prepared and tested. To this day I wonder if Cronin ever saw the one I had signed as "Cronan the Barbarian."
It's not easy to do this in a two-party system, but one of the major parties in the US is less popular among US citizens than legalization of cannabis is.
Earlier this year, a couple of polling organizations asked about legalization of cannabis. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in late April asked: "In general, do you favor or oppose legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use?" Of 1072 respondents, 46% were in favor, 52% opposed, and 2% unsure. A CBS News poll (see at the same link) of 1142 adults in January asked "Do you think that the use of marijuana should be made legal or not?" It found similar support at 41% in favor, 52% opposed, and 7% unsure. But in March, when the question was repeated, the support was lower at 31%-63%-6%, down in the same territory as Republicans (we'll get to their numbers in a minute). In February, Rasmussen polled 100 adults, asking them "Should Marijuana be legalized?" 40% answered yes, 46% no, and 14% unsure. Crosstabs aren't available to the non-subscribing public, but Rasmussen does let us know that 48% of US men are in favor of legalization, but only 34% of US women agree. It also said that voters under 40 years of age support legalization much more strongly.
So we see legalization of cannabis with support just above 40% on average. It's looking tough for my claim in the subject line, right? How are the Republicans doing?
Dick Cheney was around 30% in his last job approval numbers, and his personal favorability numbers in May varied between different polls, with a range of 18% to 37%.
George W. Bush had final job ratings from different polls between 24% and 33%. His latest favorability numbers vary, depending on the poll, between 25% and 41%, with 41% looking like a bit of an outlier.
Rush Limbaugh generally gets positive marks from about a quarter of the population, with results varying between 20% and 30%.
John Boehner gets marks of (favorable-unfavorable-don't know)15-64-21.
So in fact we see that legalization of reefer madness is currently more popular than prominent Republicans, about three times as popular as Congressional Republicans as a group, and about twice as popular as the Republican party as a whole.
Uhh, you realize that all April Fool's Jokes are meant to be done by 12PM on April 1?
By noon? Why? Where is that written? I could see everyone agreeing that April Fool's jokes should end by 23:59:59 on April 1 (or let's say before 00:00 or 12:00 AM on April 2) without it being written somewhere, but I think it would be very hard to make people do their April foolin' before lunch on April Fool's Day.
The other thing is that I'm in Brazil, an hour ahead of any US time zone, and as I'm typing this, I've still got 5 minutes on the 1st of April, so people in the US are still quite safely on the right day. And as the Slashdot FAQ says, Slashdot is "U.S.-centric."
I find that when a Windows machine, from Windows 2000 on up, when taken care not to install too many programs and/or immature or junk-ware, then Windows remains quite stable and usable.
So basically, Windows is great and stable as long as you don't try to, y'know, run programs on it? So then why would it ever be considered useful or, going a step further, worth half the cost of a peecee with Windows installed? You can get the same hardware as parts and assemble the machine yourself, or buy the whole thing from a store that will put it together for you, save the Windows Tax, and install Ubuntu on it for free. On a simple PC, which these days has 1 GB of memory and a pretty fast processor, that's a huge discount on the price, plus you get a more stable system than you would get by paying a lot more to clog up the machine with Windows.
I had some awful experiences running just Microsoft Access on Windows NT and 2000, and I generally had to switch off the power due to a serious crash at least once a day. Due to the ridiculous instability, I closed everything except Access, and the install was pretty clean, because I've never liked the various additional toolbars and launchers and stuff. So is Microsoft's own Office "too many programs and/or immature or junk-ware"?
There is a lot of software misbehavior in Windows-world. (To be fair, there is software misbehavior in MacOS and Linux as well, but I see it far less often.)
I see crappy software for Linux and OSX all the time. The difference is that I don't see the crappy software for those platforms bringing down the whole OS.
In addition to those dark Windows-and-Access days, I also have some experience writing programs to solve systems of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations representing models of certain polymer systems. Those programs were written in C on Sun and SGI workstations (and on some dumb terminals talking to those workstations). In those programs, I had to do a lot of big matrix calculations, which involved me allocating and deallocating memory quite a bit. My understanding is that those are "dangerous" operations if you do them wrong, and I know I am not a great programmer. Even so, I can only remember two problems, neither one of which came close to a BSOD or a crash requiring a hard restart.
One was that I would occasionally make a small mistake and the program (my own program, which I don't mind calling immature or junk-ware) would crash, giving me something like "Segmentation fault. Core dumped." That problem was more common when my programs were new, in about 1993-1995. When I went back in 2000 to finish my Ph.D. after having left and worked at two different companies for a while, many of the old workstations had been replaced by beige box peecees running I-don't-remember-which distro of Linux. I still modified my programs some for different situations, but I got very few segmentation faults (I don't remember any from that time, but I wouldn't be shocked if there were one or a few that I had forgotten). I do remember one occasion when the UI died on a machine I was using. I went to another and managed to determine that the machine on which I had been working was still OK and my processes were still running there. I went to the computing services guy responsible for that computer lab. He verified what I'd told him, reset the X Server on the machine I'd been using, and showed me how to do the same thing in case it happened again. After that one time, I never even had UI problems again, in stark contrast to the unpleasant experiences I've had dealing with Windows.
In stability and security (another big subject) terms, there is still a huge difference between the 40 year old UNIX model on which OSX and Linux are based and the Windows "this time for sure" advertising gimmick of the year. Remember when Vista was going to be better than OSX and Linux? Great days. Now even Microsoft itself is talking about what an utter piece of crap Vista is, and trying to get y'all to hang on for Windows 7. You gonna fall for that again?
And a not-that-old award-winning short story. (PDF)
It's entertaining and worth the read for fans of Gaiman, Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft pastiche, and especially Lovecraft pastiche mixed with Sherlock Holmes "fan fiction" written by somebody who happens to be a professional author. OK, if you're a fan of that last one, you've probably already read the story, because as far as I know, it's the only one that falls into that category.
The story is entertaining and short. It apparently won a Hugo Award. It's only 9 pages, but the PDF is 5.1 MB because it's visually entertaining too - it's not just text in the PDF.
The "she's not a human being" reference is on page 3. Read the story. It's fun.
And yes, it's weird to me that songs by the Sex Pistols qualify as "old," but all Sex Pistols songs are now significantly OLDER than the songs "oldies" stations played on the radio were when I heard them on those "oldies" stations in the 1970s. No, I'm not going to tell you to get off my lawn.
You got real stuff and propaganda stuff all mixed up, dude. Brazil is only independent in the production of heavy oil; we still import more than half the oil used for gasoline, diesel and querosene.
I'm honestly not sure if this is the case. It doesn't contradict what Petrobras says (in Portuguese) on its site: that average daily production is higher than average daily consumption of petroleum products in Brazil. Meanwhile, new platforms are coming online and huge new reserves have been discovered, so petroleum production in Brazil is expected to grow faster than consumption.
Those ethanol and natural gas cars, plus the hydroelectric power, make this possible. The Angra nuclear reactors are a joke, at least as far as energy production in concerned. I suspect they may exist solely so Brazil can have a nuclear weapons program. Officially, it doesn't, but why the insistence on continuing a program that has been so spectacularly unsuccessful?
Anyway, in the near future, we can expect average daily petroleum production in Brazil to grow significantly more than average daily petroleum consumption, and Brazil can become a major petroleum exporter.
Health care sucks. You can get AIDS medicine, but if you are in an emergency and depend on the SUS (sistema unico de saude, unified health system) you're pretty much toast. that's why health plans sell like water around here.
There's another reason. Health plans are significantly more affordable in Brazil than in the US. And before you go badmouthing Brazilian health care, I'll point out that there is still "medical tourism" in Brazil, where people from the US and other uncivilized countries (it's a joke - I'm from the US) find that even adding in the cost of international travel, private health care providers, and private accomodations, it's still significantly less expensive to fly to Brazil and have the surgery done there. Why Brazil? Because obviously price is not the only consideration, and Brazil has an excellent cost-benefit: quality health care provided much less expensively than in the US. I'm paying a lot less for my (Unimed Paulistana) health plan here than I would pay for a plan in the US, and I've found the quality of care to be pretty good.
Are you aware that there are about 50 million US citizens that can't afford any kind of health plan, and that the latest ex-president of the US once argued that really people without insurance are fine, because they can go to emergency rooms?
Our financial system broke down several times in the last 70 years; the american and european broke twice.
Oh, of course. Brazil has dealt with major economic instability. What I'm saying is that Brazil's banking system is better-regulated and therefore, at this point, more secure than its counterpart in the US.
There's a mini-version of what happened in the recent US housing bubble going on in Brazil now with cars. Just like unethical lenders did in the US with mortgages, unethical lenders in Brazil have been pushing people to take loans they probably can't pay to buy new cars. There are many people around who have cars they realistically cannot afford, but like their home-buying counterparts in the States, they have gone ahead and bought the cars anyway. In a year or so, I expect relatively new used cars to be really cheap, because there will be so many forfeitures, seizures, and auctions. The tightening of credit due to the US-born worldwide financial crisis has already started to reduce the demand for some cars in Brazil. But in the environment of relatively cheap and easy credit that obtained in recent years, lots and lots of people, including many who probably should not have, bought new cars. Since people don't pay enough attention to the total of what they're paying on l
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Dont buy important technology from foreign countries, do it yourself. Especially if you ever under any way, shape or form could cross paths with said foreign country.
I think this should be a really big wakeup call to european countries that relies 100% on american tech, both on hardware and software.
I found it very upsetting to learn that the Brazilian government set up a PKI, but bought all the components for the vault with the root private key from US vendors.
I went inside that vault to install the network synchronization server that gets the time from the Brazilian National Observatory and makes sure the machines inside the vault are set to Brazilian Legal Time, and I was impressed with the security measures the Brazilian government had taken, but I was just shocked that they would buy components, for example, from a foreign company that has ties to the NSA and is called Spy-R-Us (Spyrus).
In the end, I doubt the foreign-bought components have compromised the security of the Brazilian government's root CA private key, but I was surprised that there wasn't more of a push to use Brazilian-made equipment. I apparently wasn't the only one, because Brazil created a project to develop its own open cryptographic platform. It's called the "João-de-Barro Project," named for a South American bird that builds its own house out of mud. The software parts of that project have been used to generate a new AC root keypair. I believe a Brazilian-designed HSM already exists, but I'm a little bit behind, because I stopped working actively with cryptographic hardware a couple of years ago. But I think this might be it (page in Portuguese, for obvious reasons).
Just imagine iif my dad, who turns 77 today, were to receive this kind of contraption as a present. My cranky dad controlling a mech? Run for the hills!
My dad has a master's degree in electrical engineering and likes to modify stuff (electrical and non-) to suit his needs.
Oh, did I mention my dad got a black belt in Shotokan karate back in the '80s? I swear I am not making this up.
Right, I should mention something basic about Dad: he is a collector of militaria and weapons, especially edged weapons, but he has a sizable number of firearms too.
I, for one, would not welcome our heavily armed, flak jacketed, cybernetically enhanced, grumpy old black belt overlord.
Happy birthday, Dad!
No, he won't actually read this, but it seemed appropriate to say.
Government parties against neutrality
Who would have ever thought.
Yes and no. The Obama Administration's official policy is strongly in favor of net neutrality.
I'm not wildly convinced. Obviously, like any cultural artefact, a game is going to reflect its environment to some degree(and the apparent effect of environment will be a lot stronger once you narrow your focus to commercially viable/successful titles, since only things that are resonant with the population at large will sell well); but the effects of technical limitations and the strongly derivative tendencies of the industry are huge confounding variables.
(Boldface emphasis is mine)
It's interesting the PP says that. When I saw the submission, the first thing that came to mind was this article, which claims that more zombie-based horror movies tend to come out when a Republican is president of the US and more vampire-based horrow movies tend to come out when a Democrat is president, and even speculates a little on why that might be.
As long as Sony was going to a new design, why oh why did they not add a second thumbstick? Shooters and other console games tend to use two joysticks. in the case of shooters, one stick is used to control movement, while the other is used to control the camera angle. In PSP games, because there's only one joystick, each shooter series uses its own scheme to get around the lack of a second joystick. For what it's worth, I think the best control scheme in a PSP shooter is the one used in the Syphon Filter series. But what sucks is that when you switch games, the whole control scheme changes. It's frustrating when you push just the right buttons to do what you want... in the wrong game.
They put a little depression on the face of the PSP Go in exactly the right place for the second thumbstick, but they put the START and SELECT buttons there. If they had put in another thumbstick and moved those buttons elsewhere, they might have revitalized the whole PSP playform. Ports of console games would have immediately become much easier, allowing the number of games for the platform to grow more quickly. New games could be written with more standard (read: better) control schemes. Backward compatibility would be trivial. The second joystick could simply be ignored by old games. Playing the old games would then be unchanged, while many new possibilities would be created.
I have a PSP 1000, and even that is too small for me. When I try to play with just the PSP 1000 in my hand, it feels too small and fragile. I have an acrylic case that holds the PSP and protects it, and most important for me, gives me a big sturdy thing I don't feel like I'm going to break every time I play (yes, the DS was immediately rejected in part because of how flimsy it looked). I like the video out introduced in the PSP 2000, and I figure that with a good case, the 2000 might be decent.
So to summarize, as Sony has made new versions of the PSP, they have focused on making it smaller and flimsier, a feature I do not want. They have removed the UMD drive, which does away with used game sales and price competition. But they have failed to correct the most glaring defect of the PSP platform since its inception: the lack of a second thumbstick. Well, I'm not a hardcore gamer, so Sony doesn't give a rat's ass about me or my opinion, but I'm keeping an eye on the Pandora. It's a platform that appears to have been, y'know, designed for gaming. It won't have firmware updates to block homebrew games, and no, that doesn't mean I'll only use free or pirated games. I'm perfectly happy buying PSP games, and I'll almost certainly buy some good games for the Pandora too.
So which one is it? Europe? North America? Both? (note the article is from the BBC == Europe)
I don't know that!
Possibly. Kid has done a commercial selling suits. Check it out.
As I have stated in response to circletimessquare elsewhere in this discussion, there are a few good reasons to believe magnetic monopoles might exist. I remember circletimessquare's sig, and remember him or her making good posts in the past, but it's clear that he or she does not understand electricity and magnetism very well.
Classical electric and magnetic fields vary in a coordinated way between different Lorentzian reference frames. So where one observer might only observe an electric field with no magnetic field, an observer in a different reference frame moving at a constant velocity with respect to the first observer's frame might see a combination of electric and magnetic fields. Electricity and magnetism are different aspects of a single force, believed to be one of the four "fundamental" forces. It is called, shockingly enough, the electromagnetic force. That's one reason to believe that since electric "monopoles" (charges) exist, magnetic monopoles might too.
There are electric dipoles, which are made of opposing electric "monopoles" (charges). Why couldn't magnetic dipoles also be made of opposing magnetic monopoles? That's another reason to believe magnetic monopoles might exist.
Dirac didn't just think magnetic monopoles might exist for no reason. He discovered in his calculations that the existence of magnetic monopoles would automatically lead to the quantization of electric charge. Since all electric charge observed in nature is quantized (in integer multiples of the electron charge for free particles and, we believe, in integer multiples of 1/3 of the electron charge if we include particles that are not observed "free"), we have yet another reason to believe there might be magnetic monopoles.
Very smart folks with Ph.D.s in physics have been looking for magnetic monopoles in creative ways for a very long time. In another post in this discussion, I mentioned Professor Henry Frisch of the University of Chicago. These people aren't just looking for magnetic monopoles to do something crazy. They're doing it because their deep understanding of the theory and the experimental data leads them to believe magnetic monopoles might exist.
so i must be insane, or the whole lot of you are ignorant of what a magnetic field is
I'd like you to consider the possibility that it's neither of the above. I recognize your signature and remember you making many good posts in the past. I don't think you're crazy. I just think you don't understand the theory of electricity and magnetism very well.
Electric fields also begin and end at particles. And there are electric dipoles, just like there are magnetic dipoles. Why should magnetism only have dipoles and not monopoles like electricity?
Just as electric dipoles are made from positive and negative electric monopoles (charges), there is no reason magnetic dipoles can't be made from opposing magnetic monopoles. Electric monopoles are definitely MUCH easier to observe in nature, but that doesn't mean there are no magnetic dipoles.
Did you know that observers in different reference frames will disagree about the strength of electric and magnetic fields? Electric and magnetic fields vary (in a coordinated way) under Lorentz transforms. That is, what looks like a pure electric field to one observer might look like a combination of electric and magnetic fields to an observer in a different reference frame. Putting it differently, eletricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single force called, creatively enough, the electromagnetic force. That's a reason to believe that magnetic monopoles might exist.
Additionally, electric charge is observed to be quantized in nature. All free particles observed so far have charges that are integer multiples of the electron charge. Quarks are believed to have charges that are +/- 1/3 or 2/3 of the electron charge, but free quarks have not been directly observed, and in any case, even if the basic unit of charge quantization is 1/3 of the electron charge, charge is still quantized. And in the theory, the existence of magnetic monopoles automatically leads to charge quantization. That's a big reason many very smart folks with Ph.D.s in physics have been looking for magnetic monopoles for some time.
I remember a magnetic monopole detector that was sitting in a garage-like bay at HEP, the High Energy Physics group's building, at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s. I believe it was something Henry Frisch had set up really cheaply, so the risk was low, and the potential return enormous. Think of it as a low-budget HEP nerd experiment in Chicago. If you look at Professor Frisch's CV, you'll see that he's written a bunch of papers about magnetic mnopoles and their detection.
Only tangentially related: it has been 20 years, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but seeing Frisch's hair that white was a bit of a shock. Probably because of what it implies about my own age.
If, instead of putting the "SELECT" and "START" buttons in the little round spot in the mirror-image position of where the thumbstick is on the Go, they had put in another thumbstick and put those two buttons somewhere else, they would have made ports of shooters and other PS2 and PS3 games to the PSP a lot easier. Backward compatibility with old PSP games would be trivial - the old games don't "know" about the second thumbstick, so they'd automatically ignore it.
I like my PSP quite a bit. It has served me well on long flights and on bus trips between Rio and Sao Paulo. I've watched movies and TV eps on it, and I've enjoyed some of the games, especially some of the shooters like the Syphon Filter games, which I think do the best job of working around the problem of having only one joystick, but it would be nicer if all the shooters could have the same controls, which would be the case if there were two thumbsticks plus the direction and "shape" buttons. Y'know... like EVERY console controller. And as I said, it would make ports of console games that much easier, which could greatly expand the number of games available for the PSP.
It's a huge pain in the ass to switch between different shooters on the PSP, because I end up confusing the control schemes between different games. Since the controls are only that different from game to game because the games use different workarounds for the single-joystick problem, the solution is obvious... to everyone but the geniuses at Sony.
The PSP hardware has gone through three updates in the last few years, and the most obvious change to strengthen the platform has not been part of any of them. Instead, they've focused on making it smaller and lighter, which I don't want at all. In fact, I have a case and leave the PSP in it at all times because the whole thing feels sturdier in my hands. One of the reasons I chose the PSP over the DS was because the DS felt flimsy and easy-to-break to me. So of course, when Sony updated their hardware three times, it was to make it lighter and smaller, but not to, y'know, do the one thing that would really improve the platform as a whole.
I will give them credit for the video out that they added on the 2000, though. That's the one feature of the newer models I really wish I had. Battery life is a decent one, but I just bought an extra battery (with a larger capacity than the original Sony one) and make sure both are charged before I leave on a trip. I also use the power cord when I can (in airports or bus stations, at home, etc.). I've never had to quit playing because of lack of battery power.
This makes me feel all warm and toasty inside.
My electric heating pad, which helps me with little muscular issues, is 50 watts, but that dissipation is spread out over a 30 cm x 65 cm surface.
They didn't surrender, so the second one was deemed needed.
Have you ever seen the American casualty count just to take Iwo Jima and Okinawa?
Iwo Jima: 23, 573 Okinawa: 50, 000
Now extrapolate that to an invasion of Japan and you'll see why the US army is still using Purple Heart medals it minted for the planned invasion of Japan. They expected close to 500, 000 casualties to invade Japan and possibly more. Some planners expected it to be be between 1M - 4M American casualties.
Fact is though it was Russia's declaration of war that brought Japan to it's knees. Russian forces combined with American forces would eventually, but not easily, conquer Japan.
Citation needed. I say that because it appears the parent post has ignored the United States Army Air Forces' own Strategic Bombing Survey, which produced a report that stated, among other things, the following (boldface emphasis mine):
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion (of Japan) had been planned or contemplated.
Further, it is clear that leaders in the US had signs of this before the Strategic Bombing Survey was completed. Japanese codes had been cracked, and messages were being intercepted. The Allies knew that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow had been ordered to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had been talking about surrendering a year before that, and the Emperor himself had started suggesting in June of 1945 that alternatives to fighting to the end should be considered.
Since the parent post claims it was Russia entering the war that "brought Japan to its knees," I can't forget to mention the following interesting fact: the Russians had agreed to declare war on Japan 90 days after the end of the European war. The actual date of the end of the European war meant that the Russians were due to declare war on Japan on the 8th of August of 1945.
Oopsie! Damn facts get in the way of a good justifyin'!
New tag: lolzune
I prefer to tag stories about Microsoft's iPod wannabe with "zurd"
YMMV.
It might be something someday, but as of today, I think it's a punchline.
I agree that it might be something someday. Specifically, I think it's likely to be a discontinued product. And maybe even more of a punchline, like "Edsel" was for so many years.
Because of the brilliant decision to make the initial Microsoft iPod wannabe available in... brown, I've never been able to call it or even think of it as anything but "Zurd."
The 'child' is a primordial dwarf. Her symptoms fit to the last detail.
This story has done time on Digg and Fark already, probably several other sites as well, and it seems everywhere large numbers of non-doctors can use Google to compare her symptoms to a RARE but known medical condition. The poor kid's doctors either don't know how to research or are otherwise incompetent.
Uh, yeah... specialists at hospitals and universities just don't have the knowledge and skills you do. They apparently can't use teh Google to discover that the child's symptoms fit primordial dwarfism "to the last detail." Of course, the reason they can't is because... well, because her symptoms don't fit primordial dwarfism to the last detail.
Maybe the "incompetent" doctors have read about primordial dwarfism and know that there are five or six types of primordial dwarfism. Seckel syndrome can be immediately rejected because the child does not have microcephaly. The fact that she's non-microcephalic also reduces the probability that she has MOPD1 or MOPD2 (Majewski Osteodysplastic Primordial Dwarfism types 1 and 2). Since her bone structure is not abnormal in the ways expected from MOPD1 and MOPD2 (short vertebrae, long clavicles, bowed femora ("femurs"), and hip dislocation for MOPD1; dislocations of joints in the elbows, knees and hips and scoliosis for MOPD2), those two are out the window. The fact that none of the articles say she has no corpus callosum also makes it very improbable that she has MOPD2. As for Meier-Gorlin syndrome, the fact that she has kneecaps eliminates that possibility. I've seen MOPD3 mentioned, but not described in detail; it may or may not be completely accepted as a separate category of PD.
At Primordial Dwarfism dot com, there is information about sending kids with PD to school. If you take a lot of it (y'know, doing a Google search or something, like you claimed her "incompetent" doctors can't do), it becomes really clear that their brain development is very, very different from that of Brooke Greenberg. Brooke at 16 has the mind of a toddler, and a good deal of that appears to stem largely from the fact that her brain does not appear to have aged in a way even similar to normal. Individuals with primordial dwarfism tend to have squeaky voices, among other things, but their cognitive development, even when there are problems, is a lot different from the descriptions of Brooke Greenberg's cognitive development (or total lack thereof, apart from the projection of wishes by family members, identifying her toddler-ish behavior as being that of a "rebellious teenager").
Other than short stature, Brooke's symptoms really aren't at all similar to those of any of the varieties of primordial dwarfism, and yet you claimed they fit "to the last detail." I'd like to know on what that conclusion was based.
Let's just say I'm pretty sure this video game wouldn't get a tax break...
Does anyone else remember the commercial for Hedley & Wyche from Saturday Night Live?
When I was an undergrad, I worked on CASA, the Chicago Air Shower Array. It was a big array of detectors in the Utah desert, designed to identify point souces of ultra-high energy gamma ray bursts and get more information about the showers of particles they create when they hit the atmosphere.
It's nice to see a model that could conceivably give an idea of how gamma ray bursts happen. In 1988-89, there really weren't any very good candidates. The problem was interesting enough to get James Cronin, who had won a Nobel Prize with Val Fitch for their discovery of a certain kind of symmetry violation in particle physics, interested in experimental astrophysics. He was one of the principal scientists on the project. And he even did some manual labor, like helping with wrapping detectors. I remember him eating the lunch he had brought from home and talking to me about the health benefits of garlic as we worked on preparing detectors one day.
Each box had four detectors in it, each detector made of a piece of scintillator with a big photomultiplier attached, all wrapped in black to make it light-tight. In addition to an identifying number, the grad students gave each box a name. Some were named for blues musicians, for example. At some point, the undergrads working on the project started expressing creativity by using made-up names to sign the detectors we had prepared and tested. To this day I wonder if Cronin ever saw the one I had signed as "Cronan the Barbarian."
It's not easy to do this in a two-party system, but one of the major parties in the US is less popular among US citizens than legalization of cannabis is.
Earlier this year, a couple of polling organizations asked about legalization of cannabis. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in late April asked: "In general, do you favor or oppose legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use?" Of 1072 respondents, 46% were in favor, 52% opposed, and 2% unsure. A CBS News poll (see at the same link) of 1142 adults in January asked "Do you think that the use of marijuana should be made legal or not?" It found similar support at 41% in favor, 52% opposed, and 7% unsure. But in March, when the question was repeated, the support was lower at 31%-63%-6%, down in the same territory as Republicans (we'll get to their numbers in a minute). In February, Rasmussen polled 100 adults, asking them "Should Marijuana be legalized?" 40% answered yes, 46% no, and 14% unsure. Crosstabs aren't available to the non-subscribing public, but Rasmussen does let us know that 48% of US men are in favor of legalization, but only 34% of US women agree. It also said that voters under 40 years of age support legalization much more strongly.
So we see legalization of cannabis with support just above 40% on average. It's looking tough for my claim in the subject line, right? How are the Republicans doing?
Dick Cheney was around 30% in his last job approval numbers, and his personal favorability numbers in May varied between different polls, with a range of 18% to 37%.
George W. Bush had final job ratings from different polls between 24% and 33%. His latest favorability numbers vary, depending on the poll, between 25% and 41%, with 41% looking like a bit of an outlier.
Rush Limbaugh generally gets positive marks from about a quarter of the population, with results varying between 20% and 30%.
John Boehner gets marks of (favorable-unfavorable-don't know)15-64-21.
Mitch McConnell is at 22-60-18.
Congressional Republicans get favorability numbers of 12-72-16.
The Republican Party as a whole gets marks of 21-71-8.
So in fact we see that legalization of reefer madness is currently more popular than prominent Republicans, about three times as popular as Congressional Republicans as a group, and about twice as popular as the Republican party as a whole.
I wonder if Microsoft and some of the organizations it has hired to produce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reports take things like this into account.
If we're betting, I'll take "no."
I can already sense many EM waves, from deep infrared to bright purple.
Parent:
I can sense shorter wavelengths than that.
There's an experiment you can do to show you can sense longer wavelengths than infrared too, but it would void the warranty on your microwave oven.
What ridiculous mythical everpresent promise are we going to look forward to now?
I've heard the next version of Windows will be a lot more secure.
Uhh, you realize that all April Fool's Jokes are meant to be done by 12PM on April 1?
By noon? Why? Where is that written? I could see everyone agreeing that April Fool's jokes should end by 23:59:59 on April 1 (or let's say before 00:00 or 12:00 AM on April 2) without it being written somewhere, but I think it would be very hard to make people do their April foolin' before lunch on April Fool's Day.
The other thing is that I'm in Brazil, an hour ahead of any US time zone, and as I'm typing this, I've still got 5 minutes on the 1st of April, so people in the US are still quite safely on the right day. And as the Slashdot FAQ says, Slashdot is "U.S.-centric."
I find that when a Windows machine, from Windows 2000 on up, when taken care not to install too many programs and/or immature or junk-ware, then Windows remains quite stable and usable.
So basically, Windows is great and stable as long as you don't try to, y'know, run programs on it? So then why would it ever be considered useful or, going a step further, worth half the cost of a peecee with Windows installed? You can get the same hardware as parts and assemble the machine yourself, or buy the whole thing from a store that will put it together for you, save the Windows Tax, and install Ubuntu on it for free. On a simple PC, which these days has 1 GB of memory and a pretty fast processor, that's a huge discount on the price, plus you get a more stable system than you would get by paying a lot more to clog up the machine with Windows.
I had some awful experiences running just Microsoft Access on Windows NT and 2000, and I generally had to switch off the power due to a serious crash at least once a day. Due to the ridiculous instability, I closed everything except Access, and the install was pretty clean, because I've never liked the various additional toolbars and launchers and stuff. So is Microsoft's own Office "too many programs and/or immature or junk-ware"?
There is a lot of software misbehavior in Windows-world. (To be fair, there is software misbehavior in MacOS and Linux as well, but I see it far less often.)
I see crappy software for Linux and OSX all the time. The difference is that I don't see the crappy software for those platforms bringing down the whole OS.
In addition to those dark Windows-and-Access days, I also have some experience writing programs to solve systems of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations representing models of certain polymer systems. Those programs were written in C on Sun and SGI workstations (and on some dumb terminals talking to those workstations). In those programs, I had to do a lot of big matrix calculations, which involved me allocating and deallocating memory quite a bit. My understanding is that those are "dangerous" operations if you do them wrong, and I know I am not a great programmer. Even so, I can only remember two problems, neither one of which came close to a BSOD or a crash requiring a hard restart.
One was that I would occasionally make a small mistake and the program (my own program, which I don't mind calling immature or junk-ware) would crash, giving me something like "Segmentation fault. Core dumped." That problem was more common when my programs were new, in about 1993-1995. When I went back in 2000 to finish my Ph.D. after having left and worked at two different companies for a while, many of the old workstations had been replaced by beige box peecees running I-don't-remember-which distro of Linux. I still modified my programs some for different situations, but I got very few segmentation faults (I don't remember any from that time, but I wouldn't be shocked if there were one or a few that I had forgotten). I do remember one occasion when the UI died on a machine I was using. I went to another and managed to determine that the machine on which I had been working was still OK and my processes were still running there. I went to the computing services guy responsible for that computer lab. He verified what I'd told him, reset the X Server on the machine I'd been using, and showed me how to do the same thing in case it happened again. After that one time, I never even had UI problems again, in stark contrast to the unpleasant experiences I've had dealing with Windows.
In stability and security (another big subject) terms, there is still a huge difference between the 40 year old UNIX model on which OSX and Linux are based and the Windows "this time for sure" advertising gimmick of the year. Remember when Vista was going to be better than OSX and Linux? Great days. Now even Microsoft itself is talking about what an utter piece of crap Vista is, and trying to get y'all to hang on for Windows 7. You gonna fall for that again?
She's not a human being!!!
(Old song...)
And a not-that-old award-winning short story. (PDF)
It's entertaining and worth the read for fans of Gaiman, Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft pastiche, and especially Lovecraft pastiche mixed with Sherlock Holmes "fan fiction" written by somebody who happens to be a professional author. OK, if you're a fan of that last one, you've probably already read the story, because as far as I know, it's the only one that falls into that category.
The story is entertaining and short. It apparently won a Hugo Award. It's only 9 pages, but the PDF is 5.1 MB because it's visually entertaining too - it's not just text in the PDF.
The "she's not a human being" reference is on page 3. Read the story. It's fun.
And yes, it's weird to me that songs by the Sex Pistols qualify as "old," but all Sex Pistols songs are now significantly OLDER than the songs "oldies" stations played on the radio were when I heard them on those "oldies" stations in the 1970s. No, I'm not going to tell you to get off my lawn.
I'm honestly not sure if this is the case. It doesn't contradict what Petrobras says (in Portuguese) on its site: that average daily production is higher than average daily consumption of petroleum products in Brazil. Meanwhile, new platforms are coming online and huge new reserves have been discovered, so petroleum production in Brazil is expected to grow faster than consumption.
Those ethanol and natural gas cars, plus the hydroelectric power, make this possible. The Angra nuclear reactors are a joke, at least as far as energy production in concerned. I suspect they may exist solely so Brazil can have a nuclear weapons program. Officially, it doesn't, but why the insistence on continuing a program that has been so spectacularly unsuccessful?
Anyway, in the near future, we can expect average daily petroleum production in Brazil to grow significantly more than average daily petroleum consumption, and Brazil can become a major petroleum exporter.
There's another reason. Health plans are significantly more affordable in Brazil than in the US. And before you go badmouthing Brazilian health care, I'll point out that there is still "medical tourism" in Brazil, where people from the US and other uncivilized countries (it's a joke - I'm from the US) find that even adding in the cost of international travel, private health care providers, and private accomodations, it's still significantly less expensive to fly to Brazil and have the surgery done there. Why Brazil? Because obviously price is not the only consideration, and Brazil has an excellent cost-benefit: quality health care provided much less expensively than in the US. I'm paying a lot less for my (Unimed Paulistana) health plan here than I would pay for a plan in the US, and I've found the quality of care to be pretty good.
Are you aware that there are about 50 million US citizens that can't afford any kind of health plan, and that the latest ex-president of the US once argued that really people without insurance are fine, because they can go to emergency rooms?
Oh, of course. Brazil has dealt with major economic instability. What I'm saying is that Brazil's banking system is better-regulated and therefore, at this point, more secure than its counterpart in the US.
There's a mini-version of what happened in the recent US housing bubble going on in Brazil now with cars. Just like unethical lenders did in the US with mortgages, unethical lenders in Brazil have been pushing people to take loans they probably can't pay to buy new cars. There are many people around who have cars they realistically cannot afford, but like their home-buying counterparts in the States, they have gone ahead and bought the cars anyway. In a year or so, I expect relatively new used cars to be really cheap, because there will be so many forfeitures, seizures, and auctions. The tightening of credit due to the US-born worldwide financial crisis has already started to reduce the demand for some cars in Brazil. But in the environment of relatively cheap and easy credit that obtained in recent years, lots and lots of people, including many who probably should not have, bought new cars. Since people don't pay enough attention to the total of what they're paying on l