Actually, Microsoft knows cloud computing will be a joke. They just see this as an opportunity for large-scale security testing. By tying Office into the web, they'll quickly find most of it's security flaws just like they did with IE.
I think being in school really is an advantage. Every time I consider how I might go about "hacking" something (hypothetically, of course), I always feel like the first thing I'd need would be admin access to some system with Internet access that can't be traced to me. Home is obviously out, as is work. I could bring my laptop to some free wifi network, but then I risk someone looking over my shoulder or catching me on video surveillance. The free terminals at the library or Starbucks are possibilities, but if they were easily exploitable from the Internet, I'm sure someone would have beat me to it, so I'd have to physically go there to exploit them and that brings me to the same problem as the open wifi.
But kids have access to computers at school. There's probably no surveillance, and no one would ask many questions about a student sitting in front of a computer for a long while in the library or classroom, and he's probably not the only one to do so either. Even if the sysadmin bothers recording DHCP records, MAC addresses are easily faked. This potential for anonymity really does give students an advantage in hacking.
Would keeping my passport in an anti-static bag that computer parts come with prevent it from being read? And does anyone know where I can get an RFID reader cheap? (cuz I don't trust the/. crowd to really know the answer to the first question.)
Also, what anti-copying technology could they possibly be talking about. It seems to me that unless the RFID chips have evolved into active things that actually read some transmitted data, decrypt it (proving you have the secret key without revealing the secret key) and send it back, RFID couldn't possibly be anything more than a bar code that doesn't require line-of-sight. 'splain it to me, Lucy.
I don't touch rackmount because I don't want to spend the money on a proper datacenter to cool it. I use Shuttles. Physical space it cheap if you can use whatever you've got. It's power that's the killer. And as for the backplane, it depends on your problem. Is Cray's solution actually 64 cores that SHARE memory? I doubt it. You probably get 8 nodes with 8 cores/node. For communication-intensive problems, you're right, my solutions doesn't touch a shared memory solution or even one with a fast interconnect. But every time I look into such machines, none of the researchers actually need to run algorithms that require much communication. Possibly it's a matter of build it and they will come, but until I get someone who actually needs the interconnect, I'll stick with my COTS.
The take-away: Know your problem before you buy your hardware (if possible). If you can't, then Cray's box probably isn't a bad deal.
...in an economy where there are plenty of people willing to pay big bucks for anyone who can find the Control Panel on BOTH XP and Vista?
On the other hand, in an economy where even reasonably intelligent people are out of work and can't build their resume on someone else's dollar, what do you suppose they'll do with all that free time? Take up watching Days Of Our Lives and waiting for the economy to start demanding people with year-long empty spaces on their resumes? Or maybe they'll start working on the open source projects they never had time to work on when they were employed and put THAT on their resumes. And maybe, once Geek Ingenuity (i.e. Linux and PHP as opposed to CDS and mortgage backed securities) has started to put real value back into the world economy, those with money will start to invest again because they'll have something to invest in that seems like it might actually make the world a better places, which can be done for a mutually beneficial profit (i.e. both buyer and seller are better off, as opposed to the zero-sum game on Wall Street).
Has anyone else noticed that a large number of the Seagate 1T drives fail on you in 30 days. The same is true for samsung and WD. Even with the Hitachis I get 1/5 failed out of the box. I still buy all Hitachis though, because the ones that do work keep working. Why are we moving to 1.5T when the 1T are too buggy to be useful. (BTW, my epxerience is based on buying 100+ drives).
I just configured a few at their site and I got: Cheapest: $12K for - 1x 2.5Ghz quad-core - 2G memory - 80G 7200RPM SATA
Most Expensive: $82k for - 16x 3.0GHz quad-core (64 cores) - 256G memory (4G/core) - 80G 7200RPM SATA (I do CPU-bound HPC, so I don't care about the HD)
The cheap one is obviously a joke, but the expensive one is twice the memory/core that the latest stable machines I've been building have. Of course, $82K is about twice what I'm paying for a 64 core/128G ram COTS cluster, so I could still just buy myself a 128 core/256G ram COTS cluster for that price and just use half the CPUs when I needed more memory/core.
The do, of course, have a advantage on physical space (my 64/128 cluster is 16 8"x8"x12" boxes), but our real bottleneck is power, not physical space. It looks like they have a 1600W power supply and you need 2 for the non-redundant configuration. They're rated at 92% efficiency, so that 1600*2/.92/64cores = about 54 watts per core. My cluster has a measured power draw of 38W/core when all cores are running at full throttle. I'm guessing their box probably doesn't draw the full 3200W at full load, so we're about the same. My solution still wins.
They actually use an army of low-wage Chinese and Indian workers to scan all that data. It's cost effective, but the side effect is that in a few years millions of Asians, who might otherwise have become normal, productive, law-abiding citizens of their respective countries, will instead have become deranged pedophiles.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: At least they're honest about it. If you don't think the US government already does the same thing, you're deluding yourself. They just don't tell us about it.
I work at a university and we (my department) give everyone public IPs simply because that's the way they've always done it. I've pointed out that maybe we could switch to 10.'s for all but a select few and even get some added security from the effort (you can't hack it if you can't address it), but my boss is firmly on the leave-well-enough-alone page. And he's probably right. Unless we grow quite a bit unexpectedly, we've got plenty of IPs (/23) for our needs and our firewall has served us well so far. It would just be unnecessary work to fix something that ain't broken.
Furthermore, I wish my job was to sit around all day and learn only new stuff each day../
I used to have that job, writing for a magazine. I was really excited about it at first, but I quickly realized that to write intelligently about a technology you have to get to know it by using it in the real world, which simply takes time. I found that I simply couldn't get to know some new piece of hardware of software well enough to write anything decent about it before my article deadlines, and I felt I was getting dumber every day. So I went back into the programming and sysadmin world and now I feel like I know what I'm doing again (at least with the technologies I use regularly).
I think Lynn Greiner may be in the same boat. She asks:
CIO.com: What effect has the growing prevalence of Ajax had on the adoption of the various languages? Are people adapting the techniques to languages other than JavaScript?
The question doesn't really make sense. If you know what Ajax is, you know it's specific to the web browser/web server model. It solves the problem of the web server not knowing the full state of the browser. Rather than having the server regenerate an entire page and try to preserve client-side changes to that page, Ajax is simply a standard to let the browser get data from the server without reloading the entire page. Maybe it sort of makes sense if you use a client/server model with some other language (like tcl/tk), but then you have access to TCP/IP libraries and the command line. Ajax is only necessary because browsers can't just let a client open arbitrary TCP streams and run arbitrary commands. If it could, there would be a million different ways to do the same thing easily (think wget | grep | cut | sed |...).
The people she interviewed seemed to agree with me:
Boyd:... The techniques of Ajax are really only applicable inside the browser.
Dice: Ajax is entirely a JavaScript phenomenon
Holden: Since Ajax is simply asynchronous network calls, it is not affecting the adoption of any specific language beyond more JavaScript usage in webpages.
Lam: Ajax is popular because browsers are popular. JavaScript's popularity is directly tied to the fact that it's deployed on virtually all browsers today.
Pall: Ajax is a very specific technology that allows webpages to rise above mediocre user-interfaces and become true applications using JavaScript.
I think Lam's comments are the most interesting. JavaScript isn't a horrible language, and it should get credit for helping people realize that useful things could be done in interpreted languages, but aren't we all really itching for a better language on the browser. Too bad the W3C moves at a sails pace and Microsoft and Mozilla disagree on things simply to disagree with each other half the time.
This is great news, but the plant union will never let this stand. And don't think you can just vote McCain and let government union busters take care of it. Imagine all the trees refusing to photosynthesize until this competing technology is kept from humanity. I say we fight back! I'm having a salad for dinner, how about you?
Maybe it varies from field to field, but in Atmospheric Science, you pay the magazine to have your article publishes. Graphics are extra. Color graphics are a lot extra. Publishing=prestige, but since it's a small group of magazine editors who decides what gets published, I don't understand why.
Everyone just needs to post their papers online for free, and then google needs to modify it's search engine to give extra points when some respected scientific web site links to a paper.
Don't be fooled people. I've seen the movies. I know these things come in groups. If there's one, there's more, and a bigger one is surely on it's way. First the Tsunami, then Katrina and Ike, then the Economy, now this. Those of you who haven't been saved are doomed.
Your Palm's processor simply isn't fast enough. They use massive neural-nets, which they actually run on Google's own cloud-computing platform. Now if only we could connect your palm to the cloud.:)
Intel's experiment was useful, but not surprising to the vast majority of IT people who frequently put racks in closets, their offices, etc. because that's the only place we have for them. Intel is just giving us ammo for tell the datacenter guys that we don't really need them if they're charging too much.
Microsoft's experiment is simply ludicrous. For many obvious reasons, theft being the most obvious, no one would ever actually run a server on a tent unless you're on some scientific expedition to some place where there are no buildings and you're not staying long enough to build one and there's no bandwidth available, even by satellite.
While Intel is addressing the problem of physical space costing far more than the computers we can store in it, Microsoft is almost making light of it. Stupid Redmond bastards.
I don't have a newsletter, but I do have a ranch in the boonies. If you turn over all of your worldly possessions to the common good of my commune, you can live with us in peace and harmony. I know that seems like a high price to you right now, but remember, the massive inflation that we're likely to experience will surely render everything you own near worthless in the near future. However, my divine status will ensure your safety in the soon-to-come apocalypse. Oh, but on your way here, could you pick up about 10,000 packets of cool-aid and some rat poison. Thx.
Fool! Lyndon is one of them. In fact, he's likely one of their leaders. It's like those vampire movies when they think they kill the head vampire and then at the very end, the person you least suspect, the one you though was helpless, the one that escaped the vampires at the last second only by the daring heroics of the protagonist, turns out to be the real head vampire and, visible only to the audience, not the main characters, escapes, ensuring fertile ground for a sequel.
...Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself.
Maybe they missed the day in CS101 when we learned that the OS SHOULD use fewer resources so that programs working directly for the user have more RAM and CPU available. (And, yes, I know some consider XP a pig too, but I think Visa has proven that XP is pretty lean and mean by comparison.) As long as I don't have to upgrade until my hardware can handle it, I'm all for ultra-fast web browsing. After all, the web browser is probably the program I spend the most time with (and not just because it's slow).
Actually, my tinfoil hat is much, much bigger than yours. The Powers That Be [PTB] (the queen, the rothchilds' the Colonel, etc.) control both the conservatives and liberals at the highest levels. They play us off each other and maintain their own power my ensuring the general public is clearly divided against each other, ignoring the rich and powerful who are the real problem.
Here's how it works: The 'PTB' have recently given a lot of money and power to the libs to promote the global warming idea base on "science". This is a check on the conservatives, whom they slowly put in power over the last few decades in order to check the liberals they let in in the 60s and 70s, and so on. The dems will continue to gain power in congress and win the presidency this year, but the failure of Global Warming models, which all assume a constant input from the sun, and failed policies based on the incorrect global warming/evil CO2/oil shortage assumption, will give the 'PTB' the opening they need to put the conservatives back in power, thereby checking the soon-to-be-powerful dems. What's more, the failure of "science" will foster a mistrust of real science in the general public, keeping us ignorant and controllable.
Some of you might point out that even if the top 1% have a greater portion of the wealth now than they did 50 years ago, our standard of living has steadily improved (at least in Europe and America). This is true in many respects, such as the portion of our income we spend on food, access to communication, healthcare technology, etc. It's false in many others, however, such as quality of food (tasted a tomato lately?) and quality of communication (TV, blogs, and underfunded print media narrowly focused on national issues, vs. community clubs like the Elks and Lions and well funded print media focused on local issues). Plus, you have to take into account opportunity cost. How much more could our lives have improved had government made better decisions.
What's more, we've become dependent on a system controlled by a select few. Healthcare is better, but you'd better keep working or you won't be able to see a doctor when you need to. Home 'ownership' is up when you ignore mortgages, but real debt-free ownership is way down. Water and Mineral rights are independent of land, so even those who think they own land can have it effectively taken away at any time. They're handing out plenty of fish but jealously guarding the poles and nets.
Remember, it's not the guy with the thin black mustache you've got to watch out for. If he were evil, he'd be a complete failure because he looks it. The truly successful evil person is the ones that convinces his victims that he's not good. As I said, my tinfoil hat is the 10-gallon kind.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I pay for everything by credit card (though sometimes I leave tips in cash at restaurants since the change in that law altered they playing field for waiters a bit too quickly). Why don't they just work with credit card companies and banks to perform audits when necessary. Think about it. People have been paying in cash for hundreds of years and the government found ways to collect taxes. With credit cards gaining an increasing slice of the payment pie, transactions are simply becoming more verifiable, so the effective tax rate should be increasing, no?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and imagine how fast a beowulf cluster of these things will update all that critical company data that you only keep in excel spreadsheets.
Actually, Microsoft knows cloud computing will be a joke. They just see this as an opportunity for large-scale security testing. By tying Office into the web, they'll quickly find most of it's security flaws just like they did with IE.
Do the FF/Safari versions lack all but the bare bones features like OWA for FF/Safari?
I think being in school really is an advantage. Every time I consider how I might go about "hacking" something (hypothetically, of course), I always feel like the first thing I'd need would be admin access to some system with Internet access that can't be traced to me. Home is obviously out, as is work. I could bring my laptop to some free wifi network, but then I risk someone looking over my shoulder or catching me on video surveillance. The free terminals at the library or Starbucks are possibilities, but if they were easily exploitable from the Internet, I'm sure someone would have beat me to it, so I'd have to physically go there to exploit them and that brings me to the same problem as the open wifi.
But kids have access to computers at school. There's probably no surveillance, and no one would ask many questions about a student sitting in front of a computer for a long while in the library or classroom, and he's probably not the only one to do so either. Even if the sysadmin bothers recording DHCP records, MAC addresses are easily faked. This potential for anonymity really does give students an advantage in hacking.
Maybe so, but I'm still planning on increasing my intake of bacon, fried chicken and greasy burgers, you know, just in case.
Would keeping my passport in an anti-static bag that computer parts come with prevent it from being read? And does anyone know where I can get an RFID reader cheap? (cuz I don't trust the /. crowd to really know the answer to the first question.)
Also, what anti-copying technology could they possibly be talking about. It seems to me that unless the RFID chips have evolved into active things that actually read some transmitted data, decrypt it (proving you have the secret key without revealing the secret key) and send it back, RFID couldn't possibly be anything more than a bar code that doesn't require line-of-sight. 'splain it to me, Lucy.
I don't touch rackmount because I don't want to spend the money on a proper datacenter to cool it. I use Shuttles. Physical space it cheap if you can use whatever you've got. It's power that's the killer. And as for the backplane, it depends on your problem. Is Cray's solution actually 64 cores that SHARE memory? I doubt it. You probably get 8 nodes with 8 cores/node. For communication-intensive problems, you're right, my solutions doesn't touch a shared memory solution or even one with a fast interconnect. But every time I look into such machines, none of the researchers actually need to run algorithms that require much communication. Possibly it's a matter of build it and they will come, but until I get someone who actually needs the interconnect, I'll stick with my COTS.
The take-away: Know your problem before you buy your hardware (if possible). If you can't, then Cray's box probably isn't a bad deal.
...in an economy where there are plenty of people willing to pay big bucks for anyone who can find the Control Panel on BOTH XP and Vista?
On the other hand, in an economy where even reasonably intelligent people are out of work and can't build their resume on someone else's dollar, what do you suppose they'll do with all that free time? Take up watching Days Of Our Lives and waiting for the economy to start demanding people with year-long empty spaces on their resumes? Or maybe they'll start working on the open source projects they never had time to work on when they were employed and put THAT on their resumes. And maybe, once Geek Ingenuity (i.e. Linux and PHP as opposed to CDS and mortgage backed securities) has started to put real value back into the world economy, those with money will start to invest again because they'll have something to invest in that seems like it might actually make the world a better places, which can be done for a mutually beneficial profit (i.e. both buyer and seller are better off, as opposed to the zero-sum game on Wall Street).
Has anyone else noticed that a large number of the Seagate 1T drives fail on you in 30 days. The same is true for samsung and WD. Even with the Hitachis I get 1/5 failed out of the box. I still buy all Hitachis though, because the ones that do work keep working. Why are we moving to 1.5T when the 1T are too buggy to be useful. (BTW, my epxerience is based on buying 100+ drives).
I just configured a few at their site and I got:
Cheapest: $12K for
- 1x 2.5Ghz quad-core
- 2G memory
- 80G 7200RPM SATA
Most Expensive: $82k for
- 16x 3.0GHz quad-core (64 cores)
- 256G memory (4G/core)
- 80G 7200RPM SATA (I do CPU-bound HPC, so I don't care about the HD)
The cheap one is obviously a joke, but the expensive one is twice the memory/core that the latest stable machines I've been building have. Of course, $82K is about twice what I'm paying for a 64 core/128G ram COTS cluster, so I could still just buy myself a 128 core/256G ram COTS cluster for that price and just use half the CPUs when I needed more memory/core.
The do, of course, have a advantage on physical space (my 64/128 cluster is 16 8"x8"x12" boxes), but our real bottleneck is power, not physical space. It looks like they have a 1600W power supply and you need 2 for the non-redundant configuration. They're rated at 92% efficiency, so that 1600*2/.92/64cores = about 54 watts per core. My cluster has a measured power draw of 38W/core when all cores are running at full throttle. I'm guessing their box probably doesn't draw the full 3200W at full load, so we're about the same. My solution still wins.
They actually use an army of low-wage Chinese and Indian workers to scan all that data. It's cost effective, but the side effect is that in a few years millions of Asians, who might otherwise have become normal, productive, law-abiding citizens of their respective countries, will instead have become deranged pedophiles.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: At least they're honest about it. If you don't think the US government already does the same thing, you're deluding yourself. They just don't tell us about it.
I work at a university and we (my department) give everyone public IPs simply because that's the way they've always done it. I've pointed out that maybe we could switch to 10.'s for all but a select few and even get some added security from the effort (you can't hack it if you can't address it), but my boss is firmly on the leave-well-enough-alone page. And he's probably right. Unless we grow quite a bit unexpectedly, we've got plenty of IPs (/23) for our needs and our firewall has served us well so far. It would just be unnecessary work to fix something that ain't broken.
You may hate me now.
Furthermore, I wish my job was to sit around all day and learn only new stuff each day../
I used to have that job, writing for a magazine. I was really excited about it at first, but I quickly realized that to write intelligently about a technology you have to get to know it by using it in the real world, which simply takes time. I found that I simply couldn't get to know some new piece of hardware of software well enough to write anything decent about it before my article deadlines, and I felt I was getting dumber every day. So I went back into the programming and sysadmin world and now I feel like I know what I'm doing again (at least with the technologies I use regularly).
I think Lynn Greiner may be in the same boat. She asks:
CIO.com: What effect has the growing prevalence of Ajax had on the adoption of the various languages? Are people adapting the techniques to languages other than JavaScript?
The question doesn't really make sense. If you know what Ajax is, you know it's specific to the web browser/web server model. It solves the problem of the web server not knowing the full state of the browser. Rather than having the server regenerate an entire page and try to preserve client-side changes to that page, Ajax is simply a standard to let the browser get data from the server without reloading the entire page. Maybe it sort of makes sense if you use a client/server model with some other language (like tcl/tk), but then you have access to TCP/IP libraries and the command line. Ajax is only necessary because browsers can't just let a client open arbitrary TCP streams and run arbitrary commands. If it could, there would be a million different ways to do the same thing easily (think wget | grep | cut | sed | ...).
The people she interviewed seemed to agree with me:
Boyd:... The techniques of Ajax are really only applicable inside the browser.
Dice: Ajax is entirely a JavaScript phenomenon
Holden: Since Ajax is simply asynchronous network calls, it is not affecting the adoption of any specific language beyond more JavaScript usage in webpages.
Lam: Ajax is popular because browsers are popular. JavaScript's popularity is directly tied to the fact that it's deployed on virtually all browsers today.
Pall: Ajax is a very specific technology that allows webpages to rise above mediocre user-interfaces and become true applications using JavaScript.
I think Lam's comments are the most interesting. JavaScript isn't a horrible language, and it should get credit for helping people realize that useful things could be done in interpreted languages, but aren't we all really itching for a better language on the browser. Too bad the W3C moves at a sails pace and Microsoft and Mozilla disagree on things simply to disagree with each other half the time.
This is great news, but the plant union will never let this stand. And don't think you can just vote McCain and let government union busters take care of it. Imagine all the trees refusing to photosynthesize until this competing technology is kept from humanity. I say we fight back! I'm having a salad for dinner, how about you?
Maybe it varies from field to field, but in Atmospheric Science, you pay the magazine to have your article publishes. Graphics are extra. Color graphics are a lot extra. Publishing=prestige, but since it's a small group of magazine editors who decides what gets published, I don't understand why.
Everyone just needs to post their papers online for free, and then google needs to modify it's search engine to give extra points when some respected scientific web site links to a paper.
Don't be fooled people. I've seen the movies. I know these things come in groups. If there's one, there's more, and a bigger one is surely on it's way. First the Tsunami, then Katrina and Ike, then the Economy, now this. Those of you who haven't been saved are doomed.
BTW, anyone want to buy a copy of my newsletter?
Your Palm's processor simply isn't fast enough. They use massive neural-nets, which they actually run on Google's own cloud-computing platform. Now if only we could connect your palm to the cloud. :)
Intel's experiment was useful, but not surprising to the vast majority of IT people who frequently put racks in closets, their offices, etc. because that's the only place we have for them. Intel is just giving us ammo for tell the datacenter guys that we don't really need them if they're charging too much.
Microsoft's experiment is simply ludicrous. For many obvious reasons, theft being the most obvious, no one would ever actually run a server on a tent unless you're on some scientific expedition to some place where there are no buildings and you're not staying long enough to build one and there's no bandwidth available, even by satellite.
While Intel is addressing the problem of physical space costing far more than the computers we can store in it, Microsoft is almost making light of it. Stupid Redmond bastards.
I don't have a newsletter, but I do have a ranch in the boonies. If you turn over all of your worldly possessions to the common good of my commune, you can live with us in peace and harmony. I know that seems like a high price to you right now, but remember, the massive inflation that we're likely to experience will surely render everything you own near worthless in the near future. However, my divine status will ensure your safety in the soon-to-come apocalypse. Oh, but on your way here, could you pick up about 10,000 packets of cool-aid and some rat poison. Thx.
Fool! Lyndon is one of them. In fact, he's likely one of their leaders. It's like those vampire movies when they think they kill the head vampire and then at the very end, the person you least suspect, the one you though was helpless, the one that escaped the vampires at the last second only by the daring heroics of the protagonist, turns out to be the real head vampire and, visible only to the audience, not the main characters, escapes, ensuring fertile ground for a sequel.
I'd reply with the following:
From: You
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 4:56 AM
To: Mr. N. de Robles
Subject: buy your trademark ?
Dear Mr. Robles,
For my personal use I need the trademark --- .
Is it possible for me to buy your trademark so I can have it tattooed on my arse?
Best Regards
You
...Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself.
Maybe they missed the day in CS101 when we learned that the OS SHOULD use fewer resources so that programs working directly for the user have more RAM and CPU available. (And, yes, I know some consider XP a pig too, but I think Visa has proven that XP is pretty lean and mean by comparison.) As long as I don't have to upgrade until my hardware can handle it, I'm all for ultra-fast web browsing. After all, the web browser is probably the program I spend the most time with (and not just because it's slow).
Actually, my tinfoil hat is much, much bigger than yours. The Powers That Be [PTB] (the queen, the rothchilds' the Colonel, etc.) control both the conservatives and liberals at the highest levels. They play us off each other and maintain their own power my ensuring the general public is clearly divided against each other, ignoring the rich and powerful who are the real problem.
Here's how it works:
The 'PTB' have recently given a lot of money and power to the libs to promote the global warming idea base on "science". This is a check on the conservatives, whom they slowly put in power over the last few decades in order to check the liberals they let in in the 60s and 70s, and so on. The dems will continue to gain power in congress and win the presidency this year, but the failure of Global Warming models, which all assume a constant input from the sun, and failed policies based on the incorrect global warming/evil CO2/oil shortage assumption, will give the 'PTB' the opening they need to put the conservatives back in power, thereby checking the soon-to-be-powerful dems. What's more, the failure of "science" will foster a mistrust of real science in the general public, keeping us ignorant and controllable.
Some of you might point out that even if the top 1% have a greater portion of the wealth now than they did 50 years ago, our standard of living has steadily improved (at least in Europe and America). This is true in many respects, such as the portion of our income we spend on food, access to communication, healthcare technology, etc. It's false in many others, however, such as quality of food (tasted a tomato lately?) and quality of communication (TV, blogs, and underfunded print media narrowly focused on national issues, vs. community clubs like the Elks and Lions and well funded print media focused on local issues). Plus, you have to take into account opportunity cost. How much more could our lives have improved had government made better decisions.
What's more, we've become dependent on a system controlled by a select few. Healthcare is better, but you'd better keep working or you won't be able to see a doctor when you need to. Home 'ownership' is up when you ignore mortgages, but real debt-free ownership is way down. Water and Mineral rights are independent of land, so even those who think they own land can have it effectively taken away at any time. They're handing out plenty of fish but jealously guarding the poles and nets.
Remember, it's not the guy with the thin black mustache you've got to watch out for. If he were evil, he'd be a complete failure because he looks it. The truly successful evil person is the ones that convinces his victims that he's not good. As I said, my tinfoil hat is the 10-gallon kind.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I pay for everything by credit card (though sometimes I leave tips in cash at restaurants since the change in that law altered they playing field for waiters a bit too quickly). Why don't they just work with credit card companies and banks to perform audits when necessary. Think about it. People have been paying in cash for hundreds of years and the government found ways to collect taxes. With credit cards gaining an increasing slice of the payment pie, transactions are simply becoming more verifiable, so the effective tax rate should be increasing, no?