That's because the US is full of guidance counselors who steer everybody into college, and parents who feel some kind of obligation to save up from birth to 20 to be able to pay for college. All of this creates huge inflationary pressure on prices, and yet in the end not everybody is cut out for it.
Most of my kids friends don't have any idea what they want to do - they go undeclared, and openly talk about taking 5-6 years to graduate. So, now you're taking what is already a very expensive investment with questionable return in many cases and making it even more expensive.
If a kid doesn't know what they want to do with their life at 18, why do we think they'll know when they're 20? People say, well, they can try things out and figure it out. I say, well that's a great idea, but why can't they start doing that when they're 14? I'd never pay for somebody to go to college if they haven't already done some kind of work in that field already. There are lots of ways for kids to dabble in careers during high school. I certainly don't expect them to get paid anything decent for it, but they can at least learn if it is something they're interested in.
I also know families whose kids went to college for four years, didn't like what they majored in, then went back and learned a trade and are now doing that. These kids now are carrying a full load of student loans, for something they could have just studied for a year or two, or apprenticed, or whatever.
$100k is way too much money to spend to "figure things out." Even a house doesn't cost nearly that much when you factor in the fact that if you change your mind you can sell it a week after you buy it and lose a lot less than that.
You could do a lot better than what you propose. The merchant should send an "invoice" to the payment device. The payment device displays the invoice and gets the user to approve it. The payment device adds a timestamp and unique transaction ID to the invoice, signs it, and returns it to the merchant. The merchant presents that to the bank and gets the approve. If the payment device uses secure hardware (probably not happening in this case) then your entire transaction is secure end-to-end and immune to replay attacks, cloning, etc.
Credit cards are simply obsolete. It isn't a shared "secret" if you share that secret with every store you visit...
Yup. And for me the biggest benefit of switching to laser was that I NEVER get support calls from home when I'm at work now. It used to be that it seemed like every three days somebody was asking me for help cleaning the nozzles or whatever - you'd just never get really good clean printouts. Maybe we have a lot of dust in our house or something, but inkjets have always been a pain to maintain. And every time you clean those nozzles you're wasting liquid gold.
The laser just sits there until you hit print, then it prints, and the page just comes out looking exactly like it should every time. Once every 6-12 months it asks for more toner (color model), and I feed it a little. The toner isn't even that expensive - probably costs me $35 to fill one cartridge, and I'm still on the original drum kit.
There is a reason every big office in America uses laser printers - they're a LOT less fuss to maintain, so your employees are printing documents and not waiting for the help desk or pretending to be printer repair technicians.
In our society, 18 year olds are still children because that is what we train them to be. They spend 7 hours a day in rooms with 25 other 18-year-olds and one adult, and then they get home and spend all their time socializing with other 18-year olds. Why should it surprise us that they don't learn to act like the few adults in their lives?
The fact that people consider it strange to expect an 18-year-old to have some idea of responsible adulthood shows how far we've come. College in most cases is just a way for parents to feel good about prolonging their children's childhood - it does little to benefit kids in the long term in many if not most cases. I'd never cosign a student loan or fill out a financial aid form unless my kid could provide a very strong argument as to why that education will have a positive return on investment. I don't expect MBA-level analysis - just a measure of common sense.
Uh, the food industry would see all of that money. More people would become farmers, and fewer people would do things like build computers, do research, and so on. Clearly people will still eat. Once upon a time we were able to feed all of society without a single machine or fertilizer. The problem was that half of the entire population was employed as farmers to do it.
They do measure it in bytes - you just want them to divide it by a number divisible by 2 only, and the marketers divide it by a number divisible by 10. Frankly I could care less as long as they label the units clearly - if I care I can figure it out.
The battery life issue is a bit different, since they aren't measured in any kind of standard units that lets me compare claims easily. I'd be happy if they just declared how many joules the battery contains, what the steady-state wattage is when powered on, and the number of Joules consumed per page turn, etc.:)
Well, yes and no. The farmers should be able to label their meat as salmonella-free, if it is in fact so. Of course, as you say farmers don't sell to consumers - they sell to packagers. The packagers could only label the meat sold to consumers as salmonella-free if they can also guarantee this. If a packager only accepted salmonella-free meat and had decent controls on their process, it seems likely that they could prevent the introduction of salmonella during handling.
I do agree that the final product is clean only if the entire chain is.
Sure, if a majority of voters are willing to accept not eating meat most of the time. I doubt they'll go for that. I'm sure we'd save money on electricity if we banned air conditioning - good luck with that.
Also, I don't think anybody has shown that a substantial shift of diet towards grains is going to not have negative health impacts.
I have no doubts that we spend huge fortunes on hospitals currently. Do you really think that a dollar spent on giving cattle more space will translate into more than a dollar saved on hospital expenses? I don't think anybody has proven any difference between factory-raised and open-range meat, or any impact from preservatives/etc either.
Look, if your goal is to ban infant formula, why don't you just write your local congresman and ask them to submit a bill? Maybe they can find a few guys who are looking to retire to co-sponsor it. Then watch it die on the vine...
Well, my feeling is that these are experiments that won't work out as well as some of the proponents of ending patents/etc think they will. However, I also feel that this is an experiment that has never been tried, and is worth trying. Without up-ending the entire pharmaceutical industry it would be easy to try it a few times, and see how it actually works. If we find that the NIH model provides net-benefit then we should put more and more money into it until nobody even buys patented drugs since the public ones are sufficient. If we find that the NIH model costs far more than it is worth then we should either halt it or tweak it until it works.
There is far too much rhetoric in this debate on both sides. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, or throw up our hands and merely accept the status quo. We can preserve the current system while building a new one - and then make policy decisions on the basis of actual data.
Somehow I think that returning to the days with one in two Americans was a farmer is the right solution. Why have so many farms been turned into suburban housing developments? Simple: modern farming techniques have made the land unnecessary - we produce huge surpluses. Now, idiotic policy like corn-based ethanol in gas has helped diminish that, but the solution isn't to return to every town dedicating 80% of its land to fields.
Frankly, as a citizen in the US I'd like to see a general ban on doctors selling products of ANY kind, or receiving payments of any kind from the manufacturer of ANY product.
You have vets in the US recommending some kind of food for your pet, and guess what, you can only buy it in vets and only from the vet who cares for your pet. I asked my vet about pet insurance, and they only knew about one kind of insurance, but they said that they had reps from some other company visiting them and they were checking them out so there might be other options in the future. A little online research shows that there are probably a dozen reputable options, but I'm sure that not all of them give kickbacks to the local vet.
It is a conflict of interest for a doctor to make a profit off of a product they are recommending for your care, and that is all there is to it. I don't mind it so much for barbershops or the 47 other places where this happens, but when health care is at stake the doctor's incentives have to be aligned to the health outcome of the patient, not how many procedures the patient gets or what products they buy.
Pharmaceuticals do their own research. They also leverage public basic research results, and they also license compounds from all kinds of places including universities.
So, universities do have a big role in drug discovery. However, universities almost never pay the costs of clinical trials, which is where you spend $50M to find out that the cure for cancer in mice doesn't work in people. Once in a while you spend $100M and figure out that a drug is good. So, even if it is mundane Pharma companies do spend a ton of money on development, and they aren't going to do this without some kind of return.
I'm generally in favor of experimenting with other models. The NIH could fund a royalty free drug start-to-finish - perhaps even outsourcing the work to a pharma company (but retaining patent rights). The NIH could announce bounties for treatments for particular conditions. However, I'm under no illusions that any of this will be cheap.
Well, gist of what you say is true with some major caveats:
1. The bribes are under a lot of scrutiny and are down a bit (along with Pharma profits). 2. I'm not aware of any older drug that you can't buy - in fact most branded companies still sell it even after it is off patent. They just don't market it. 3. No university figures out if a drug is useful. They figure out if some molecule has some activity in some assay, or maybe in animals. To be useful it needs to have good safety and efficacy in humans. 4. Step #3 in your list costs probably around $100M, and most of the time the drug is dropped, even if sometimes the ones that aren't have some issues.
So, even if a university comes up with the perfect antibiotic (in some professor's mind), you need to convince a company to spend $100M to test it, when most likely it won't work out, and if it does it will only be prescribed if the other 30 antibiotics on the market all don't work, which is only for a very small number of cases per year. Oh, and medicare will fight over the price by the time you get it on the market.
I'll agree that universities have a big part in drug discovery. It might even be the hardest and most creative part. However, it all comes before any of the real money gets spent. The expensive part of drug development is the clinical trials. Those are easy to design and boring, but they are VERY expensive and usually result in failure.
Not necessarily. Let's assume that what you say is true. $30 for chicken is probably 6x the normal price. So, what would happen if food costs were 6x across the board?
Some US Census data: Population estimate for 2009 is 307M Per capita income $21.5k in 1999 Total household income = $6.6T
Recent survey showed about 10% of that is spent on food = $660B. Impact to economy of 6x higher prices is about $3T.
I doubt the US spends $3T annually on cases of hemorrhagic e. coli.
Now, of course that chicken won't really be $30, but the impact to the economy of even a modest food price increase is enormous. So, safety at any cost is a foolish policy. When that infant formula costs more maybe those little babies will get a little less of it - and what is the health impact of that?
I have no issues with truth in advertising, as long as they don't go nuts with it the way they have with "organic" - whatever that means.
I have similar objections to the USDA prohibiting farmers for doing 100% screening and labeling their meat as salmonella free. Apparently that would make other farms look bad and since all the meat is safe it isn't necessary so why should consumers have that choice?
The USDA is a very good example of regulatory capture. And, I tend to be somebody who is normally moderately pro-industry.
Ok, that all sounds nice in theory, but I don't exactly see people keeling over from soybean allergies.
I'm all for a reasonable level of proper regulation, but I wouldn't really consider that to be Japan. In any case, Japan doesn't really regulate more than anybody else - they just tend to do everything in a particular way so that all your money spent gaining certification in any other first-world nation gets you nowhere in Japan. Most companies then just work with a local Japanese company to navigate the red tape, and since that is all the local authorities care about that usually works out well.
Monsanto's problem is just that they didn't buy 49% or whatever of some Japanese company like everybody else does and issued the product under their name.
I still have no idea why RSA of all places would implement their tokens in this manner. If they just used an asymmetric cipher (like RSA!) it would be immune to this kind of attack.
There is no reason that any device other than the keyfob itself needs to be able to generate the numbers. Other devices merely need to authenticate if a number is correct - which can be done separately just as with any other asymetric system.
However, I do see a weakness in this - the PINs that are generated need to be much longer, or the system has to be so heavily salted that it takes a very long time to verify a single PIN. With a six-digit PIN you just need to ask "Is 000001 the right PIN for 5:30:00PM tomorrow?" and repeat a million times until you can generate a PIN for any arbitrary time using only the authentication checking info. You can't do that with any sane system because the challenge/response is MUCH longer. VERY heavy salting would also work, but you probably don't want it to take 20 minutes of 100% CPU to verify a PIN on some loaded server.
The other thing is that nobody gets a PhD for confirming somebody else's work. You could get one for refuting it and learning something new, or by extending work.
So, I doubt a lot of effort is going into merely reproducing the experiments unless it is just a precursor to more.
Well, I think the parent was right - increasing speed does help. The problem was the nose up bit - pulling up on the nose is never the right response to a stall (at least as far as I'm aware). You can do it on an Airbus in normal law, since the plane will just ignore you and put the nose down anyway. It doesn't work in alternate law from what I understand, since the plane listens to you and you're doing something dumb.
More speed always lowers AOA, as AoA is a function of pitch and velocity - and speed always moves the velocity vector closer to the nose (which is usually where you want it in a stall - I'd have to think about the inverted situation a little but I suspect it would be the same - though in the inverted situation you would want to pull back - not that you'd be flying inverted in an airliner by choice).
I don't believe that overspeed will cause a stall so much as that it will rip the wings off the plane, but you are right that pilots need to avoid it. There are a few good posts already on some likely reasons for why it was improperly handled. Being a non-pilot who flies simulators my gut feeling would be to get out of the really narrow area of the performance envelope - do a gentle descent at moderate power. Overspeed that gets out of hand should cause vibrations/etc, and a stall should be pretty noticeable when your stomach ends up in your throat. I would think that doing a controlled descent at maybe 1000 ft/min shouldn't be too hard to manage, and every minute the plane will become more controllable as the air gets thicker and the speed tolerance increases. With so many issues I'd be headed for the closest airport anyway.
Doubt it. Engines don't stall at high AoA - the wing stalls (completely different thing). And at that angle of attack I doubt they'd be turning much at all from air rushing in - let alone 55%.
In the Nova special one of the things discussed is that if the crew didn't move the handles the actual power would be whatever the autopilot last had it at, and that would likely be nowhere near 100%. To get it to 100% they crew would have to push it forward (I think offhand) past the autothrottle stop into manual and all the way up to 100%. In the autothrottle range a setting of "100%" means that the computer has discretion to deliver up to 100% to the engines. The computer wasn't doing anything to fly the plane without airspeed data.
Well, the problem isn't jets so much as airliners. The difference is probably analogous to driving a smart car vs driving a truck pulling tandem tanker trailers that are half full. It isn't so much that it takes a rocket scientist so much as it takes careful planning ahead and in a crisis knowing EXACTLY what to do to resolve it. If you're in a fighter jet with a 1:1 thrust:weight ratio then getting out of trouble is a whole lot easier.
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That's because the US is full of guidance counselors who steer everybody into college, and parents who feel some kind of obligation to save up from birth to 20 to be able to pay for college. All of this creates huge inflationary pressure on prices, and yet in the end not everybody is cut out for it.
Most of my kids friends don't have any idea what they want to do - they go undeclared, and openly talk about taking 5-6 years to graduate. So, now you're taking what is already a very expensive investment with questionable return in many cases and making it even more expensive.
If a kid doesn't know what they want to do with their life at 18, why do we think they'll know when they're 20? People say, well, they can try things out and figure it out. I say, well that's a great idea, but why can't they start doing that when they're 14? I'd never pay for somebody to go to college if they haven't already done some kind of work in that field already. There are lots of ways for kids to dabble in careers during high school. I certainly don't expect them to get paid anything decent for it, but they can at least learn if it is something they're interested in.
I also know families whose kids went to college for four years, didn't like what they majored in, then went back and learned a trade and are now doing that. These kids now are carrying a full load of student loans, for something they could have just studied for a year or two, or apprenticed, or whatever.
$100k is way too much money to spend to "figure things out." Even a house doesn't cost nearly that much when you factor in the fact that if you change your mind you can sell it a week after you buy it and lose a lot less than that.
You could do a lot better than what you propose. The merchant should send an "invoice" to the payment device. The payment device displays the invoice and gets the user to approve it. The payment device adds a timestamp and unique transaction ID to the invoice, signs it, and returns it to the merchant. The merchant presents that to the bank and gets the approve. If the payment device uses secure hardware (probably not happening in this case) then your entire transaction is secure end-to-end and immune to replay attacks, cloning, etc.
Credit cards are simply obsolete. It isn't a shared "secret" if you share that secret with every store you visit...
Yup. And for me the biggest benefit of switching to laser was that I NEVER get support calls from home when I'm at work now. It used to be that it seemed like every three days somebody was asking me for help cleaning the nozzles or whatever - you'd just never get really good clean printouts. Maybe we have a lot of dust in our house or something, but inkjets have always been a pain to maintain. And every time you clean those nozzles you're wasting liquid gold.
The laser just sits there until you hit print, then it prints, and the page just comes out looking exactly like it should every time. Once every 6-12 months it asks for more toner (color model), and I feed it a little. The toner isn't even that expensive - probably costs me $35 to fill one cartridge, and I'm still on the original drum kit.
There is a reason every big office in America uses laser printers - they're a LOT less fuss to maintain, so your employees are printing documents and not waiting for the help desk or pretending to be printer repair technicians.
In our society, 18 year olds are still children because that is what we train them to be. They spend 7 hours a day in rooms with 25 other 18-year-olds and one adult, and then they get home and spend all their time socializing with other 18-year olds. Why should it surprise us that they don't learn to act like the few adults in their lives?
The fact that people consider it strange to expect an 18-year-old to have some idea of responsible adulthood shows how far we've come. College in most cases is just a way for parents to feel good about prolonging their children's childhood - it does little to benefit kids in the long term in many if not most cases. I'd never cosign a student loan or fill out a financial aid form unless my kid could provide a very strong argument as to why that education will have a positive return on investment. I don't expect MBA-level analysis - just a measure of common sense.
Uh, the food industry would see all of that money. More people would become farmers, and fewer people would do things like build computers, do research, and so on. Clearly people will still eat. Once upon a time we were able to feed all of society without a single machine or fertilizer. The problem was that half of the entire population was employed as farmers to do it.
They do measure it in bytes - you just want them to divide it by a number divisible by 2 only, and the marketers divide it by a number divisible by 10. Frankly I could care less as long as they label the units clearly - if I care I can figure it out.
The battery life issue is a bit different, since they aren't measured in any kind of standard units that lets me compare claims easily. I'd be happy if they just declared how many joules the battery contains, what the steady-state wattage is when powered on, and the number of Joules consumed per page turn, etc. :)
Well, yes and no. The farmers should be able to label their meat as salmonella-free, if it is in fact so. Of course, as you say farmers don't sell to consumers - they sell to packagers. The packagers could only label the meat sold to consumers as salmonella-free if they can also guarantee this. If a packager only accepted salmonella-free meat and had decent controls on their process, it seems likely that they could prevent the introduction of salmonella during handling.
I do agree that the final product is clean only if the entire chain is.
Sure, if a majority of voters are willing to accept not eating meat most of the time. I doubt they'll go for that. I'm sure we'd save money on electricity if we banned air conditioning - good luck with that.
Also, I don't think anybody has shown that a substantial shift of diet towards grains is going to not have negative health impacts.
I have no doubts that we spend huge fortunes on hospitals currently. Do you really think that a dollar spent on giving cattle more space will translate into more than a dollar saved on hospital expenses? I don't think anybody has proven any difference between factory-raised and open-range meat, or any impact from preservatives/etc either.
If you live in the US I doubt you'd have to prove anything. Line up at the gravy train and collect...
Look, if your goal is to ban infant formula, why don't you just write your local congresman and ask them to submit a bill? Maybe they can find a few guys who are looking to retire to co-sponsor it. Then watch it die on the vine...
Well, my feeling is that these are experiments that won't work out as well as some of the proponents of ending patents/etc think they will. However, I also feel that this is an experiment that has never been tried, and is worth trying. Without up-ending the entire pharmaceutical industry it would be easy to try it a few times, and see how it actually works. If we find that the NIH model provides net-benefit then we should put more and more money into it until nobody even buys patented drugs since the public ones are sufficient. If we find that the NIH model costs far more than it is worth then we should either halt it or tweak it until it works.
There is far too much rhetoric in this debate on both sides. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, or throw up our hands and merely accept the status quo. We can preserve the current system while building a new one - and then make policy decisions on the basis of actual data.
Somehow I think that returning to the days with one in two Americans was a farmer is the right solution. Why have so many farms been turned into suburban housing developments? Simple: modern farming techniques have made the land unnecessary - we produce huge surpluses. Now, idiotic policy like corn-based ethanol in gas has helped diminish that, but the solution isn't to return to every town dedicating 80% of its land to fields.
Frankly, as a citizen in the US I'd like to see a general ban on doctors selling products of ANY kind, or receiving payments of any kind from the manufacturer of ANY product.
You have vets in the US recommending some kind of food for your pet, and guess what, you can only buy it in vets and only from the vet who cares for your pet. I asked my vet about pet insurance, and they only knew about one kind of insurance, but they said that they had reps from some other company visiting them and they were checking them out so there might be other options in the future. A little online research shows that there are probably a dozen reputable options, but I'm sure that not all of them give kickbacks to the local vet.
It is a conflict of interest for a doctor to make a profit off of a product they are recommending for your care, and that is all there is to it. I don't mind it so much for barbershops or the 47 other places where this happens, but when health care is at stake the doctor's incentives have to be aligned to the health outcome of the patient, not how many procedures the patient gets or what products they buy.
Pharmaceuticals do their own research. They also leverage public basic research results, and they also license compounds from all kinds of places including universities.
So, universities do have a big role in drug discovery. However, universities almost never pay the costs of clinical trials, which is where you spend $50M to find out that the cure for cancer in mice doesn't work in people. Once in a while you spend $100M and figure out that a drug is good. So, even if it is mundane Pharma companies do spend a ton of money on development, and they aren't going to do this without some kind of return.
I'm generally in favor of experimenting with other models. The NIH could fund a royalty free drug start-to-finish - perhaps even outsourcing the work to a pharma company (but retaining patent rights). The NIH could announce bounties for treatments for particular conditions. However, I'm under no illusions that any of this will be cheap.
Well, gist of what you say is true with some major caveats:
1. The bribes are under a lot of scrutiny and are down a bit (along with Pharma profits).
2. I'm not aware of any older drug that you can't buy - in fact most branded companies still sell it even after it is off patent. They just don't market it.
3. No university figures out if a drug is useful. They figure out if some molecule has some activity in some assay, or maybe in animals. To be useful it needs to have good safety and efficacy in humans.
4. Step #3 in your list costs probably around $100M, and most of the time the drug is dropped, even if sometimes the ones that aren't have some issues.
So, even if a university comes up with the perfect antibiotic (in some professor's mind), you need to convince a company to spend $100M to test it, when most likely it won't work out, and if it does it will only be prescribed if the other 30 antibiotics on the market all don't work, which is only for a very small number of cases per year. Oh, and medicare will fight over the price by the time you get it on the market.
I'll agree that universities have a big part in drug discovery. It might even be the hardest and most creative part. However, it all comes before any of the real money gets spent. The expensive part of drug development is the clinical trials. Those are easy to design and boring, but they are VERY expensive and usually result in failure.
Not necessarily. Let's assume that what you say is true. $30 for chicken is probably 6x the normal price. So, what would happen if food costs were 6x across the board?
Some US Census data:
Population estimate for 2009 is 307M
Per capita income $21.5k in 1999
Total household income = $6.6T
Recent survey showed about 10% of that is spent on food = $660B. Impact to economy of 6x higher prices is about $3T.
I doubt the US spends $3T annually on cases of hemorrhagic e. coli.
Now, of course that chicken won't really be $30, but the impact to the economy of even a modest food price increase is enormous. So, safety at any cost is a foolish policy. When that infant formula costs more maybe those little babies will get a little less of it - and what is the health impact of that?
I have no issues with truth in advertising, as long as they don't go nuts with it the way they have with "organic" - whatever that means.
I have similar objections to the USDA prohibiting farmers for doing 100% screening and labeling their meat as salmonella free. Apparently that would make other farms look bad and since all the meat is safe it isn't necessary so why should consumers have that choice?
The USDA is a very good example of regulatory capture. And, I tend to be somebody who is normally moderately pro-industry.
Ok, that all sounds nice in theory, but I don't exactly see people keeling over from soybean allergies.
I'm all for a reasonable level of proper regulation, but I wouldn't really consider that to be Japan. In any case, Japan doesn't really regulate more than anybody else - they just tend to do everything in a particular way so that all your money spent gaining certification in any other first-world nation gets you nowhere in Japan. Most companies then just work with a local Japanese company to navigate the red tape, and since that is all the local authorities care about that usually works out well.
Monsanto's problem is just that they didn't buy 49% or whatever of some Japanese company like everybody else does and issued the product under their name.
I still have no idea why RSA of all places would implement their tokens in this manner. If they just used an asymmetric cipher (like RSA!) it would be immune to this kind of attack.
There is no reason that any device other than the keyfob itself needs to be able to generate the numbers. Other devices merely need to authenticate if a number is correct - which can be done separately just as with any other asymetric system.
However, I do see a weakness in this - the PINs that are generated need to be much longer, or the system has to be so heavily salted that it takes a very long time to verify a single PIN. With a six-digit PIN you just need to ask "Is 000001 the right PIN for 5:30:00PM tomorrow?" and repeat a million times until you can generate a PIN for any arbitrary time using only the authentication checking info. You can't do that with any sane system because the challenge/response is MUCH longer. VERY heavy salting would also work, but you probably don't want it to take 20 minutes of 100% CPU to verify a PIN on some loaded server.
The other thing is that nobody gets a PhD for confirming somebody else's work. You could get one for refuting it and learning something new, or by extending work.
So, I doubt a lot of effort is going into merely reproducing the experiments unless it is just a precursor to more.
Well, I think the parent was right - increasing speed does help. The problem was the nose up bit - pulling up on the nose is never the right response to a stall (at least as far as I'm aware). You can do it on an Airbus in normal law, since the plane will just ignore you and put the nose down anyway. It doesn't work in alternate law from what I understand, since the plane listens to you and you're doing something dumb.
More speed always lowers AOA, as AoA is a function of pitch and velocity - and speed always moves the velocity vector closer to the nose (which is usually where you want it in a stall - I'd have to think about the inverted situation a little but I suspect it would be the same - though in the inverted situation you would want to pull back - not that you'd be flying inverted in an airliner by choice).
I don't believe that overspeed will cause a stall so much as that it will rip the wings off the plane, but you are right that pilots need to avoid it. There are a few good posts already on some likely reasons for why it was improperly handled. Being a non-pilot who flies simulators my gut feeling would be to get out of the really narrow area of the performance envelope - do a gentle descent at moderate power. Overspeed that gets out of hand should cause vibrations/etc, and a stall should be pretty noticeable when your stomach ends up in your throat. I would think that doing a controlled descent at maybe 1000 ft/min shouldn't be too hard to manage, and every minute the plane will become more controllable as the air gets thicker and the speed tolerance increases. With so many issues I'd be headed for the closest airport anyway.
Doubt it. Engines don't stall at high AoA - the wing stalls (completely different thing). And at that angle of attack I doubt they'd be turning much at all from air rushing in - let alone 55%.
In the Nova special one of the things discussed is that if the crew didn't move the handles the actual power would be whatever the autopilot last had it at, and that would likely be nowhere near 100%. To get it to 100% they crew would have to push it forward (I think offhand) past the autothrottle stop into manual and all the way up to 100%. In the autothrottle range a setting of "100%" means that the computer has discretion to deliver up to 100% to the engines. The computer wasn't doing anything to fly the plane without airspeed data.
Well, the problem isn't jets so much as airliners. The difference is probably analogous to driving a smart car vs driving a truck pulling tandem tanker trailers that are half full. It isn't so much that it takes a rocket scientist so much as it takes careful planning ahead and in a crisis knowing EXACTLY what to do to resolve it. If you're in a fighter jet with a 1:1 thrust:weight ratio then getting out of trouble is a whole lot easier.