> I don't like Karzai's corruption. But the simple fact is he's > improving his country at a speed which boggles the mind, > and everyone else in his region is a) stagnating or b) China.
Afghanistan could continue improving at that mind-boggling rate for another fifteen years, and China would still be a better place to live (assuming China doesn't get any worse, meanwhile). China has basic societal order, effective nationwide rule of law, a functioning economy (not quite a first-world economy at this point, but a functioning economy nonetheless), overall pretty decent infrastructure (for things like transportation and electrical power and whatnot), and a meaningful national identity.
China also has some unfortunate limitations on political speech, a bit of a smog issue, and some exploitation of the labor force, but these things are small potatoes compared to Afghanistan's problems.
> Do I need to mention that Afghanistan is in the middle of > a civil war provoked by the ongoing US and Nato invasion?
There has been ongoing civil war there, continuously, since well before the US existed. There have been changes now and again as to exactly who is fighting on each side and even how many sides there are (the Soviet Union was even involved for a while -- and the soviet puppets were one of the better governments Afghanistan has ever had), but the last time there was anything resembling peace in the part of the world was... I'm not even sure how long. It's been a really long time.
I'm not saying everything the US has done in Afghanistan has been entirely good. No. But I am saying it's not reasonable to blame us for the bare fact that Afghanistan has civil war. They already had it before we were involved. They had it in spades. All we've done is meddle in their affairs and (predictably) failed to really fix anything.
It's not difficult to get a list of IP ranges corresponding to China. Allow connections only from those addresses, and now only people in China (or people who have an account on a computer in China) can use your VPN to look at child porn through your connection.
If that's not good enough, you can do your own content filtering. If you only filter things that are illegal in your country, people in China can still use your VPN to look at things that are completely legal in most of the world but which the Great Firewall filters -- e.g., political speech. Content filtering is, of course, never going to be perfect. It's going to both have false positives and yet also occasionally let things through that it shouldn't, no matter what you do. But making the effort to have content filtering puts you on better ground, legally speaking, than if you didn't.
I don't have a problem with traffic cameras, if they're run in an appropriate manner.
I have two distinct and very serious problems with a setup wherein the private entity that runs the cameras receives a percentage of the ticket revenue.
First, it creates a conflict of interests, by giving the company a direct financial incentive to rig things to cause an unnaturally large number of tickets. I'm not saying that this had happened in the case in question, but I'm saying the _incentive_ was there, and it shouldn't be. The incentive should be "If we convince them that the system reduces speeding, they'll renew our contract," not "If a lot of people get tickets, we'll get rich."
Second, it's just plain severely improper handling of public funds. Disbursement of public moneys to private entities is supposed to follow a rather strict set of rules, and this setup violated those rules six ways to Sunday. Among other things, a public entity is not supposed to be paying public funds to a private entity without going through proper appropriations and encumbering the funds (which requires a specific dollar figure known in advance). Also, there is a bid process that is supposed to be observed any time the dollar figure is over a certain amount, which this almost certainly was, and again the bids are required to indicate a specific dollar figure. You can't just agree to give a private contractor a percentage of ticket revenue. That's... you can't DO that. Just... no.
> So 40% of all fines aren't actually fines, but revenue for the camera company.
As far as I'm concerned, that is the whole problem here.
Well, it's actually two entirely different whole problems (conflict of interest and improper handling of public funds), but you know what I mean.
I don't have a problem with using cameras to enforce speed limits, as long as it's done in a proper way. But I have a VERY big problem with the operator of the equipment having a direct financial incentive to rig things so that a different number of tickets are issued than would naturally be the case.
I also have a big problem with public funds (in the form of traffic ticket revenue) being disbursed without going through the correct procedures. The correct procedures involve, among other things, receiving bids for the job from all interested contractors, bids that *specify* the amount of money to be paid. All bids must be reviewed before a contract can be signed. The money must all be properly appropriated and encumbered -- again with a specific dollar figure -- before any of it can be disbursed. You can't just agree to pay a commercial entity a *percentage* of the public revenue received from a particular source. That violates the everliving daylights out of the rules for handling public funds.
> professional drinkers will show you how to drive, on > a closed speedway, at top speed, with half a bottle > of a single malt in your stomach
Will the closed speedway be narrow and elevated without guard rails and have a lot of unbanked tight curves and a couple of places where you have to hit a ramp at more than 75mph to make the jump (otherwise you crash into lava or fall down a bottomless chasm)? Can there be hazards on the course, like turtle shells and banana peels and oil slicks and ice patches?
Will other drivers be participating as well, and you have to beat them across the finish line in order to pass? Will the other drivers be able to run you off the course (into the lava or bottomless chasms), shoot at you from behind, drop additional hazards on the course when they're in front of you, and cause your vehicle to be hit with lightning and shrunk to a fraction of its size? Will there be powerups the other drivers can get that let them breeze quickly past you like a speeding bullet, or squish you flat and reduce your speed to half?
Because, I think I know some people who would pay money to be allowed to watch the drunks kill themselves and/or each other.
Also, half a bottle? Pffft. Make them drink the whole bottle, on an empty stomach, half an hour before the race. Right after giving a pint of blood.
> only awaiting a bit of political stability in Mama Africa
One wonders how long that wait may be. A large portion of Africa is effectively governed by what essentially amounts to Jacksonian law. (Err, if you Google that, be aware that I'm talking about Jacksonian law as it pertains to Jackson's Whole, not anything to do with Andrew Jackson.)
> if we had funded NASA like we funded them in the 1960's and > early 1970's we'd be at Alpha Centauri or Barnard's Star by now
I'm pretty sure you are underestimating how far it is to those places. Without a *major* breakthrough in propulsion techniques (or quantum physics), we could fund NASA with 10% of the entire world's budget and still not get to Alpha Centauri for another five hundred years.
> When Windows 95 came out, it was like god himself > opened up the skies while everyone yelled, "it is good".
I distinctly recall complaints about how ridiculously high its system requirements were, compared to Windows 3, and the fact that it did not perform well even if they were met. There were also jokes about how office workers worldwide had finally just about figured out how to use their computers, so of course Microsoft had to completely change the whole interface again so that everyone could revert to spending eight hours a day accidentally deleting one another's files.
Yes, but if after going through the gate you'd handed off the M16 to another passenger who was not authorized to board with it, this would have been noticed and traced back to you.
(I'm not saying the shoe scanning makes sense. It doesn't. I'm just saying the M16 is irrelevant.)
Not that I've become a huge fan, or anything. I'm just saying, I remember when it was excruciatingly horrible, and these days it's closer to mediocre. I suspect part of the reason is that today's hardware can handle a few more CPU cycles and a somewhat larger memory footprint than a typical 486 SX was really comfortably up to.
I'm speaking here from purely a user's perspective. What Java is like for programmers is a separate question.
You missed the point of the parent post. What he was saying was that if it doesn't use the Skype network (or, in more phenomenological terms, if you can't use it to make calls to and receive calls from people who use Skype), its chances of ever being a practical replacement for Skype are zero.
I'm not sure if I entirely agree, but I'm pretty sure that's what he was trying to say.
> I've had a triple monitor setup for years, > but I've never actually gamed on it.
I game on my dual-monitor setup all the time.
I put the terminal window with NetHack on the first monitor, and a web browser window for reference material (lists of armor weights or potion prices or whatever I need to check at the moment) on the second monitor.
What? What do you mean, that's not the kind of gaming you're talking about? You can't fool me. This is Slashdot. Everyone here plays NetHack. Everyone knows that.
If your friend had only had issues with drug addiction "in the past" and was genuinely no longer abusing them, he is very much the exception rather than the rule.
Granted, obvious physical trauma injuries are somewhat less likely to be faked than vague agnogenic pain. Nonetheless, constant exposure to inexcusable nonsense does make ER doctors rather cynical about "former" druggies asking for pain meds. Call it an occupational hazard.
Medical professionals, in order to do their job, absolutely have to be able to make comments in their notes freely, for themselves later or for other medical professionals, without worrying that it might offend the patient or the patient's family, or that someone who is not a medical professional might badly misunderstand what it means.
Patients routinely misrepresent their symptoms (in some cases to a quite ridiculous degree), hide information from medical professionals, deny things that are objectively provable (e.g., about what drugs they've been taking), make up symptoms that do not in fact exist, make up their own diagnoses based on crackpot notions they picked up from senile relatives, refuse to comply with medical recommendations, misrepresent to family and friends the medical advice they've been given, and just generally behave as if the medical professionals are the enemy. In order to actually be of any use in helping people, medical professionals have to try to figure out what is *actually* going on, and this means extensive notes about the sorts of things patients don't tell you and won't admit even under torture and would be *deeply* offended if confronted with it.
"Patient was prescribed six units of Lantis per day and claims to take the prescribed amount faithfully, but 150 units lasts a month and a half."
"Patient indicated pain was a twenty on scale of one to ten, but patient was chatting amicably on cellphone with friend while saying this. No evidence of actual pain was observed."
"Schedule all appointments after noon. Patient is irascible and sometimes physically violent in the mornings."
"Patient is inconsistent when reporting which knee has severe pain that makes it hard to walk. Limp is also inconsistent about which side it favors."
"Avoid use of words like 'injection' around this patient. Use the name of the medication instead, and administer while patient is chatting with nurse."
If patients can get full access to all records, these notes cannot be made, at which point medical professionals can't really do their jobs. Might as well just prescribe tonic for everyone.
Usually, UN sanctions are economic in nature. We'll all agree not to buy your products as much and so forth. Of course, in the case of North Korea, that's *particularly* meaningless, since North Korea's economy consists pretty much entirely of the household finances of the Kim family and their employees, financed mostly out of Chinese aid. (There are also allegations that they may also make significant income from counterfeiting and similar endeavors, but, again, that's also not something that would be curtailed significantly by economic sanctions. Nothing they do would be, because they don't *have* any normal economic activity, unless you count subsistence farming. Well, there's Kaesong, but that would probably be exempt from sanctions on the grounds that it's all under the auspices of South Korean companies.)
However, the fact that China is in agreement with the sanctions is meaningful. North Korea continues to exist as an independent country because they have Chinese support. If they upset China too much, they are looking at the prospect of imminent "accelerated government reform", if you get my drift. If China ever decides to depose the Kim family, nobody is going to object. (Well, the government of North Korea would object, but without Chinese support they wouldn't get to vote.)
They can continue rattling their saber at the US, as long as it doesn't upset China too badly... but China isn't dumb. (A bit odd, from a Western perspective, maybe even eccentric -- aren't we all -- but that's not the same as dumb.) If they see North Korea doing something that they think will lead to problems for China, they're going to get upset. Starting a nuclear war -- or getting *close* to starting a nuclear war -- would certainly qualify.
> I'd like to set up the system so that her account is not an Administrator
Well, yes, duh. That's *mandatory*. Anybody who doesn't have deep knowledge about computers should NOT logging in as Administrator on a daily basis. The account she uses on a daily basis should definitely be Limited. If she wants to log in as Administrator every day, then you tell her she's on her own then. If she wants support, she needs to follow basic minimal safety practices, and NOT logging in as Administrator all the time is top of the list -- more even than keeping up to date in Windows Updates, and WAY more important than having anti-virus software.
Some users can handle being given the Administrator password also (so they can do things like Windows Updates on their own), and others cannot. You know your mom better than we do, so I won't try to advise you on this issue.
> and that I can easily (and securely) remotely connect
The best option for Windows, that I know about, is probably VNC. There's also rdesktop (which I think is maybe more efficient with bandwidth), but I'm significantly less confident about its security when routing the connection over the public internet. (It does use encryption, but I'm not entirely confident that it implements it in a totally secure way.)
Symantec also has a product in this space, but I don't know much about it. I'm sure there are others.
> If anything is going to prevent a US invasion, it's nukes.
s/prevent/provoke/;
Nobody would even be *talking* about invading Iran if they didn't appear to be developing nuclear weapons. As it stands, at least three countries are seriously thinking about it. (Israel is probably the most likely to actually do it, and while they don't have the same level of military power as the US, they have enough to deal with Iran, provided countries from outside the Middle East don't become involved.)
> Why would a country that is awash in oil go to these lengths
The US produces significantly more oil than Iran, and we have a number of nuclear power plants.
What has everyone's hackles up, however, is that Iran does not appear to be doing what it would make rational sense to do if you were mainly interested in nuclear power generation. There are three logical explanations:
1. They want to make nuclear weapons.
2. They want people to *think* they can make nuclear weapons.
3. They aren't entirely rational.
The third one is almost certainly an issue (when are humans ever *entirely* rational?), but it's possible that more than one reason applies, and the other two possibilities are difficult to rule out. The second one would be rather less worrisome than the first, but it's not easy to distinguish between them.
Incidentally, similar reasoning applies to North Korea, except that in their case I'm pretty sure it's mostly 2 and 3 and not so much of 1. It's harder to tell with Iran.
> Come on, has everybody already forgotten that > we invaded Iraq because of "bulletproof evidence" > that Saddam had an advanced WMD program?
That was, at least partially, his own stupid fault. He went far out of his way to make sure everybody thought he had such weapons.
Okay, yeah, *arguably*, we should have seen through it, because we knew he was an insane Middle-Eastern dictator, and they frequently brag about having significantly more military capability than is actually the case. It's part of the culture over there. (Compare with Nasser in '67. To hear his state radio stations tell it, he was going to obliterate the enemy with one hand tied behind his back. When it actually came to blows, however, he got his clock very rapidly and very decisively cleaned.) So yeah, it's arguable that we should have realized Iraq was blowing smoke, or at least contemplated the possibility.
But I have no sympathy at all for Saddam (or anyone in his government). He very much brought what happened on himself.
Maybe in California it is. In the Midwest, solar is at least twice as unreliable as wind. Realistically, solar power will not be practical here (for anything energy intensive -- it's fine for scientific calculators and whatnot) until batter technology improves by a couple more orders of magnitude, and even then it's going to be a LONG time before it's practical to get *most* of our power from solar.
In the short-to-medium term, nuclear power is really the only option that can scale to meet demand, unless we want to keep burning lots of hydrocarbons. We can get *some* of our energy from alternate sources (wind, solar, geothermal, natural gas, etc.), but the majority is going to have to come from mainstream sources, i.e., ones that can actually produce enough to meet demand. Currently that means coal, oil, fissile metals, and possibly combustible plant derivatives (e.g., alcohols can be used as vehicle fuel and can be produced from agricultural sources in a more or less renewable fashion; this is more expensive than pumping oil out of the ground, but it would be practical to do if petroleum became significantly more expensive or were otherwise proscribed).
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't like Karzai's corruption. But the simple fact is he's
> improving his country at a speed which boggles the mind,
> and everyone else in his region is a) stagnating or b) China.
Afghanistan could continue improving at that mind-boggling rate for another fifteen years, and China would still be a better place to live (assuming China doesn't get any worse, meanwhile). China has basic societal order, effective nationwide rule of law, a functioning economy (not quite a first-world economy at this point, but a functioning economy nonetheless), overall pretty decent infrastructure (for things like transportation and electrical power and whatnot), and a meaningful national identity.
China also has some unfortunate limitations on political speech, a bit of a smog issue, and some exploitation of the labor force, but these things are small potatoes compared to Afghanistan's problems.
> Do I need to mention that Afghanistan is in the middle of
> a civil war provoked by the ongoing US and Nato invasion?
There has been ongoing civil war there, continuously, since well before the US existed. There have been changes now and again as to exactly who is fighting on each side and even how many sides there are (the Soviet Union was even involved for a while -- and the soviet puppets were one of the better governments Afghanistan has ever had), but the last time there was anything resembling peace in the part of the world was... I'm not even sure how long. It's been a really long time.
I'm not saying everything the US has done in Afghanistan has been entirely good. No. But I am saying it's not reasonable to blame us for the bare fact that Afghanistan has civil war. They already had it before we were involved. They had it in spades. All we've done is meddle in their affairs and (predictably) failed to really fix anything.
It's not difficult to get a list of IP ranges corresponding to China. Allow connections only from those addresses, and now only people in China (or people who have an account on a computer in China) can use your VPN to look at child porn through your connection.
If that's not good enough, you can do your own content filtering. If you only filter things that are illegal in your country, people in China can still use your VPN to look at things that are completely legal in most of the world but which the Great Firewall filters -- e.g., political speech. Content filtering is, of course, never going to be perfect. It's going to both have false positives and yet also occasionally let things through that it shouldn't, no matter what you do. But making the effort to have content filtering puts you on better ground, legally speaking, than if you didn't.
I don't have a problem with traffic cameras, if they're run in an appropriate manner.
I have two distinct and very serious problems with a setup wherein the private entity that runs the cameras receives a percentage of the ticket revenue.
First, it creates a conflict of interests, by giving the company a direct financial incentive to rig things to cause an unnaturally large number of tickets. I'm not saying that this had happened in the case in question, but I'm saying the _incentive_ was there, and it shouldn't be. The incentive should be "If we convince them that the system reduces speeding, they'll renew our contract," not "If a lot of people get tickets, we'll get rich."
Second, it's just plain severely improper handling of public funds. Disbursement of public moneys to private entities is supposed to follow a rather strict set of rules, and this setup violated those rules six ways to Sunday. Among other things, a public entity is not supposed to be paying public funds to a private entity without going through proper appropriations and encumbering the funds (which requires a specific dollar figure known in advance). Also, there is a bid process that is supposed to be observed any time the dollar figure is over a certain amount, which this almost certainly was, and again the bids are required to indicate a specific dollar figure. You can't just agree to give a private contractor a percentage of ticket revenue. That's... you can't DO that. Just... no.
> So 40% of all fines aren't actually fines, but revenue for the camera company.
As far as I'm concerned, that is the whole problem here.
Well, it's actually two entirely different whole problems (conflict of interest and improper handling of public funds), but you know what I mean.
I don't have a problem with using cameras to enforce speed limits, as long as it's done in a proper way. But I have a VERY big problem with the operator of the equipment having a direct financial incentive to rig things so that a different number of tickets are issued than would naturally be the case.
I also have a big problem with public funds (in the form of traffic ticket revenue) being disbursed without going through the correct procedures. The correct procedures involve, among other things, receiving bids for the job from all interested contractors, bids that *specify* the amount of money to be paid. All bids must be reviewed before a contract can be signed. The money must all be properly appropriated and encumbered -- again with a specific dollar figure -- before any of it can be disbursed. You can't just agree to pay a commercial entity a *percentage* of the public revenue received from a particular source. That violates the everliving daylights out of the rules for handling public funds.
> professional drinkers will show you how to drive, on
> a closed speedway, at top speed, with half a bottle
> of a single malt in your stomach
Will the closed speedway be narrow and elevated without guard rails and have a lot of unbanked tight curves and a couple of places where you have to hit a ramp at more than 75mph to make the jump (otherwise you crash into lava or fall down a bottomless chasm)? Can there be hazards on the course, like turtle shells and banana peels and oil slicks and ice patches?
Will other drivers be participating as well, and you have to beat them across the finish line in order to pass? Will the other drivers be able to run you off the course (into the lava or bottomless chasms), shoot at you from behind, drop additional hazards on the course when they're in front of you, and cause your vehicle to be hit with lightning and shrunk to a fraction of its size? Will there be powerups the other drivers can get that let them breeze quickly past you like a speeding bullet, or squish you flat and reduce your speed to half?
Because, I think I know some people who would pay money to be allowed to watch the drunks kill themselves and/or each other.
Also, half a bottle? Pffft. Make them drink the whole bottle, on an empty stomach, half an hour before the race. Right after giving a pint of blood.
> only awaiting a bit of political stability in Mama Africa
One wonders how long that wait may be. A large portion of Africa is effectively governed by what essentially amounts to Jacksonian law. (Err, if you Google that, be aware that I'm talking about Jacksonian law as it pertains to Jackson's Whole, not anything to do with Andrew Jackson.)
> if we had funded NASA like we funded them in the 1960's and
> early 1970's we'd be at Alpha Centauri or Barnard's Star by now
I'm pretty sure you are underestimating how far it is to those places. Without a *major* breakthrough in propulsion techniques (or quantum physics), we could fund NASA with 10% of the entire world's budget and still not get to Alpha Centauri for another five hundred years.
This is North Korea we're talking about.
If the country were suddenly taken over and run by the government of, say, China, for instance, that would be a huge improvement. Really.
> When Windows 95 came out, it was like god himself
> opened up the skies while everyone yelled, "it is good".
I distinctly recall complaints about how ridiculously high its system requirements were, compared to Windows 3, and the fact that it did not perform well even if they were met. There were also jokes about how office workers worldwide had finally just about figured out how to use their computers, so of course Microsoft had to completely change the whole interface again so that everyone could revert to spending eight hours a day accidentally deleting one another's files.
Yes, but if after going through the gate you'd handed off the M16 to another passenger who was not authorized to board with it, this would have been noticed and traced back to you.
(I'm not saying the shoe scanning makes sense. It doesn't. I'm just saying the M16 is irrelevant.)
Java doesn't suck nearly as bad as it used to.
Not that I've become a huge fan, or anything. I'm just saying, I remember when it was excruciatingly horrible, and these days it's closer to mediocre. I suspect part of the reason is that today's hardware can handle a few more CPU cycles and a somewhat larger memory footprint than a typical 486 SX was really comfortably up to.
I'm speaking here from purely a user's perspective. What Java is like for programmers is a separate question.
You missed the point of the parent post. What he was saying was that if it doesn't use the Skype network (or, in more phenomenological terms, if you can't use it to make calls to and receive calls from people who use Skype), its chances of ever being a practical replacement for Skype are zero.
I'm not sure if I entirely agree, but I'm pretty sure that's what he was trying to say.
> I've had a triple monitor setup for years,
> but I've never actually gamed on it.
I game on my dual-monitor setup all the time.
I put the terminal window with NetHack on the first monitor, and a web browser window for reference material (lists of armor weights or potion prices or whatever I need to check at the moment) on the second monitor.
What? What do you mean, that's not the kind of gaming you're talking about? You can't fool me. This is Slashdot. Everyone here plays NetHack. Everyone knows that.
There's a reason they were skeptical.
If your friend had only had issues with drug addiction "in the past" and was genuinely no longer abusing them, he is very much the exception rather than the rule.
Granted, obvious physical trauma injuries are somewhat less likely to be faked than vague agnogenic pain. Nonetheless, constant exposure to inexcusable nonsense does make ER doctors rather cynical about "former" druggies asking for pain meds. Call it an occupational hazard.
Medical professionals, in order to do their job, absolutely have to be able to make comments in their notes freely, for themselves later or for other medical professionals, without worrying that it might offend the patient or the patient's family, or that someone who is not a medical professional might badly misunderstand what it means.
Patients routinely misrepresent their symptoms (in some cases to a quite ridiculous degree), hide information from medical professionals, deny things that are objectively provable (e.g., about what drugs they've been taking), make up symptoms that do not in fact exist, make up their own diagnoses based on crackpot notions they picked up from senile relatives, refuse to comply with medical recommendations, misrepresent to family and friends the medical advice they've been given, and just generally behave as if the medical professionals are the enemy. In order to actually be of any use in helping people, medical professionals have to try to figure out what is *actually* going on, and this means extensive notes about the sorts of things patients don't tell you and won't admit even under torture and would be *deeply* offended if confronted with it.
"Patient was prescribed six units of Lantis per day and claims to take the prescribed amount faithfully, but 150 units lasts a month and a half."
"Patient indicated pain was a twenty on scale of one to ten, but patient was chatting amicably on cellphone with friend while saying this. No evidence of actual pain was observed."
"Schedule all appointments after noon. Patient is irascible and sometimes physically violent in the mornings."
"Patient is inconsistent when reporting which knee has severe pain that makes it hard to walk. Limp is also inconsistent about which side it favors."
"Avoid use of words like 'injection' around this patient. Use the name of the medication instead, and administer while patient is chatting with nurse."
If patients can get full access to all records, these notes cannot be made, at which point medical professionals can't really do their jobs. Might as well just prescribe tonic for everyone.
Usually, UN sanctions are economic in nature. We'll all agree not to buy your products as much and so forth. Of course, in the case of North Korea, that's *particularly* meaningless, since North Korea's economy consists pretty much entirely of the household finances of the Kim family and their employees, financed mostly out of Chinese aid. (There are also allegations that they may also make significant income from counterfeiting and similar endeavors, but, again, that's also not something that would be curtailed significantly by economic sanctions. Nothing they do would be, because they don't *have* any normal economic activity, unless you count subsistence farming. Well, there's Kaesong, but that would probably be exempt from sanctions on the grounds that it's all under the auspices of South Korean companies.)
However, the fact that China is in agreement with the sanctions is meaningful. North Korea continues to exist as an independent country because they have Chinese support. If they upset China too much, they are looking at the prospect of imminent "accelerated government reform", if you get my drift. If China ever decides to depose the Kim family, nobody is going to object. (Well, the government of North Korea would object, but without Chinese support they wouldn't get to vote.)
They can continue rattling their saber at the US, as long as it doesn't upset China too badly... but China isn't dumb. (A bit odd, from a Western perspective, maybe even eccentric -- aren't we all -- but that's not the same as dumb.) If they see North Korea doing something that they think will lead to problems for China, they're going to get upset. Starting a nuclear war -- or getting *close* to starting a nuclear war -- would certainly qualify.
> I'd like to set up the system so that her account is not an Administrator
Well, yes, duh. That's *mandatory*. Anybody who doesn't have deep knowledge about computers should NOT logging in as Administrator on a daily basis. The account she uses on a daily basis should definitely be Limited. If she wants to log in as Administrator every day, then you tell her she's on her own then. If she wants support, she needs to follow basic minimal safety practices, and NOT logging in as Administrator all the time is top of the list -- more even than keeping up to date in Windows Updates, and WAY more important than having anti-virus software.
Some users can handle being given the Administrator password also (so they can do things like Windows Updates on their own), and others cannot. You know your mom better than we do, so I won't try to advise you on this issue.
> and that I can easily (and securely) remotely connect
The best option for Windows, that I know about, is probably VNC. There's also rdesktop (which I think is maybe more efficient with bandwidth), but I'm significantly less confident about its security when routing the connection over the public internet. (It does use encryption, but I'm not entirely confident that it implements it in a totally secure way.)
Symantec also has a product in this space, but I don't know much about it. I'm sure there are others.
> "Do you really, really want to add keys for this new OS you are installing?"
There could even be a jumper you have to set on the motherboard. Then it can't be done without physical access.
> If anything is going to prevent a US invasion, it's nukes.
s/prevent/provoke/;
Nobody would even be *talking* about invading Iran if they didn't appear to be developing nuclear weapons. As it stands, at least three countries are seriously thinking about it. (Israel is probably the most likely to actually do it, and while they don't have the same level of military power as the US, they have enough to deal with Iran, provided countries from outside the Middle East don't become involved.)
> Is it so inconceivable that Iran might want to
> go to a less polluting form of power generation?
This is the government of Iran we're talking about.
> Why would a country that is awash in oil go to these lengths
The US produces significantly more oil than Iran, and we have a number of nuclear power plants.
What has everyone's hackles up, however, is that Iran does not appear to be doing what it would make rational sense to do if you were mainly interested in nuclear power generation. There are three logical explanations:
1. They want to make nuclear weapons.
2. They want people to *think* they can make nuclear weapons.
3. They aren't entirely rational.
The third one is almost certainly an issue (when are humans ever *entirely* rational?), but it's possible that more than one reason applies, and the other two possibilities are difficult to rule out. The second one would be rather less worrisome than the first, but it's not easy to distinguish between them.
Incidentally, similar reasoning applies to North Korea, except that in their case I'm pretty sure it's mostly 2 and 3 and not so much of 1. It's harder to tell with Iran.
> Come on, has everybody already forgotten that
> we invaded Iraq because of "bulletproof evidence"
> that Saddam had an advanced WMD program?
That was, at least partially, his own stupid fault. He went far out of his way to make sure everybody thought he had such weapons.
Okay, yeah, *arguably*, we should have seen through it, because we knew he was an insane Middle-Eastern dictator, and they frequently brag about having significantly more military capability than is actually the case. It's part of the culture over there. (Compare with Nasser in '67. To hear his state radio stations tell it, he was going to obliterate the enemy with one hand tied behind his back. When it actually came to blows, however, he got his clock very rapidly and very decisively cleaned.) So yeah, it's arguable that we should have realized Iraq was blowing smoke, or at least contemplated the possibility.
But I have no sympathy at all for Saddam (or anyone in his government). He very much brought what happened on himself.
> Solar is more predictable.
Maybe in California it is. In the Midwest, solar is at least twice as unreliable as wind. Realistically, solar power will not be practical here (for anything energy intensive -- it's fine for scientific calculators and whatnot) until batter technology improves by a couple more orders of magnitude, and even then it's going to be a LONG time before it's practical to get *most* of our power from solar.
In the short-to-medium term, nuclear power is really the only option that can scale to meet demand, unless we want to keep burning lots of hydrocarbons. We can get *some* of our energy from alternate sources (wind, solar, geothermal, natural gas, etc.), but the majority is going to have to come from mainstream sources, i.e., ones that can actually produce enough to meet demand. Currently that means coal, oil, fissile metals, and possibly combustible plant derivatives (e.g., alcohols can be used as vehicle fuel and can be produced from agricultural sources in a more or less renewable fashion; this is more expensive than pumping oil out of the ground, but it would be practical to do if petroleum became significantly more expensive or were otherwise proscribed).
> And I'm sure there is far worse stuff. Plutonium?
Pure liquid HF? Tellurium polyazides? Chlorine trifluoride? Cyanogen azide? Selenophenol?
1-diazidocarbamoyl-5-azidotetrazole?