I suspect that if the client was easy enough to use, and someone with a suitably authoritative stature told them it was reasonably safe, that would be enough for most people
"someone with a suitably authoritative stature" such as TV news readers, daytime talk show/tabloid hosts, and especially virtually everyone involved however tangentially with brick and mortar stores screamed at the general population as loud and repetitively as they could in the 90s that the internet is a horribly dangerous place and you should never use your credit card for anything involving the evil internet. And look how that turned out.
"Roll the entire network back"? No, I managed to take your bitcoin off you by using a quantum computer to predict your crypto, and I refuse to roll back my bitcoins to you. There is no central bank that tracks who owns which bitcoins.
Doesn't work like that. There is a de-centralized hash tree of transactions where as long as 50.000001% of the participants agree, that is the dominant hash. If you convinced 51% of BTC users/miners to roll back, then "your" BTC are disappeared. Its like a shared transaction log rather than individual account logs, and good players only follow the majority dominant hash "tree-thingy", and as long as good players make up more than 51% of the team, its all good.
There is an interesting area of vulnerability where the market is big enough for bot net owners to F with it, and small enough that the participants can't defend against them. I think we're pretty close to that point now, if not at it.
Another interesting area of vulnerability would be to cut off an entire countries inet access "for a long time" and see how the hash trees diverge on each island. The folks on the small island are going to be pissed when they reconnect to the world and it all rolls back.
Perhaps you can store your BitCoins inside a safe deposit box of a real bank.
There is absolutely no theoretical reason your wallet file cannot be printed out using crude uuencode/uudecode or something more modern like par2 or SSSS and converted into QR codes or whatever and stashed in a safe deposit box.
My wallet file with 95 BTC in it is about 112K right now. Not megs, not gigs, just K. I'm thinking, 80 characters per line, 60 lines per page, results in ten or so double sided pages of data. Since you can't realistically print out more than alphanumerics in the text, you have to turn it into QR codes or uuencoded or something like that.
The summary is my wallet.dat file, printed out, would be "thinner than my house insurance policy, but thicker than my (birth/marriage/etc) certificate collection"
In summary, its quite possible to "backup" BTC in a file folder in a safe deposit box. Its several orders of magnitude easier than backing up.mp3s which are several orders of magnitude easier than backing up video files.
Break out ye olde wikipedia and be enlightened. Basically a Ponzi scheme involves one individual taking in periodic money deposits from many people and spending that income on overhead or paying out as faked interest/income. See Bernie Madoff.
Since there is no one individual, no regular periodic deposits/investments, no statements with made up balances, no interest payouts... I guess it fails to meet all criteria of a Ponzi scheme.
It may in fact be a massive investment "bubble" much like.com stocks / homes / social media / higher education. But its not a Ponzi.
I will give you credit that in modern American English, Ponzi has become null. Kind of like prefixing a question with "but that begs the question", when it means nothing in context, or at least certainly not what actually begging the question means. Similar to illiterate youngsters saying the word "like" every other word as a placeholder or time-filler.
It's probably already too late to get in, and it may be too late to get out.
As an investment scheme, yeah. For mining-for-profit, yeah. However, I "get in" by mining about 200 BTC back when the "difficulty" parameter was about two digits. I think I can "get out", if I please, with no loss.
Basic rule of investing is you bake your return in when you select your "buy" price. Mine was installing and compiling some software and having an enjoyable time reading the code and math behind it. Its pretty interesting. No downside means I have an excellent rate of return regardless of whatever market manipulations are going on.
One thing that concerns me is the fixed maximum number of bitcoins. Lets say people acquire bitcoins, but the amount isn't enough to worry about, so they never use them, or perhaps their computer crashes and they don't have a backup. My understanding is that these bitcoins are permanently lost from the economy of bitcoins. Over time, the total supply would begin to dwindle, presumably pushing up the value of those that remain, until people become frustrated at the small supply and are motivated to move to a new system, then bitcoin is abandoned. In the real world this happens with dollar bills, but the government can compensate for this by creating more. Is this issue addressed in some fashion.
Floating point BTC, essentially. Technically its actually fixed point with lots -o- decimal places.
At an instantaneous level, the whole "economy", at least as a trade good, could function using a billion nano-BTC. or 10 ** 12 picoBTC.
At a long term level, its a bigger problem because all of our modern financial systems are organized around eternal debt-based growth and massive generational-scale central bank inflation. BTC inherently has an entirely different financial system, not just a way to toss virtual pennies around the net. THATs the problem you need to think about.
If we eventually use Bitcoin in everyday life, say, in the supermarket, how will we deal with prices in fractions of a Bitcoin? What terminology might we use for something priced at 0.00000005 Bitcoins?
A twentieth of a microBTC or uBTC (looks better in UTF-8)? More likely you'd call that "fifty nanoBTC"
being compared to Y2K as an IT project that is nearly impossible to complete on time.
That sounds like good copy to a lowly journalist, but as someone "who was there" during Y2K, what was "nearly impossible"? We knew it was coming, we planned, the bosses mostly used it as an excuse to semi-fraudulently ram upgrades thru and as a powerful weapon to grab more budget money. It was way, big time, trivial.
Besides, just think about it. The entire world's IT department, all those guys who can't close open relays, blah blah blah all somehow 100% successfully did the nearly impossible... yeah uh huh.
I can easily imagine an example of someone with a Samsung tablet visiting a museum and being able to download a 'guide' application, despite the fact that the museum doesn't actually offer one.
City of Firenze (Florence for you fellow US people), Pisa, Bologna and Matera, museum of Canossa and other cultural institutions purchased it
What the original poster means, is anywhere the masses would expect to be able to download a 'guide' application, they'll actually be getting owned by a guy with a laptop in a duffel bag, and as the word of stolen identities and ruined financial lives gets out, eventually only the dumbest of the masses will continue to try and download 'guide' applications and the only providers of 'guide' applications will be the previously mentioned creepy guys with laptops in their duffel bags. The well will be poisoned into uselessness.
That's the point of an IDE... to edit hundreds of pages at once, in a consistent manner. (although if you have hundreds of pages you should use a CMS... Back to text editing)
For real? If I needed to change something on hundreds of pages, I'd fire up vi and edit a single css file or edit a single perl (or whatever) script. Or use the magic of server side includes, etc. Do people really do stuff like have one individual css file for each html page?
That's the point of an IDE... to edit hundreds of pages at once, in a consistent manner. (although if you have hundreds of pages you should use a CMS... Back to text editing)
For real? If I needed to change something on hundreds of pages, I'd fire up vi and edit a single css file or edit a single perl (or whatever) script. Or use the magic of server side includes, etc. Do people really do stuff like have one individual css file for each html page?
If you're thinking of threads that block, from what I remember misterhouse was always more of a "poll, then sleep awhile, repeat" kinda architecture.
Even in ye-olden-days PCs are just so darn fast compared to the X-10 or modern insteon commands that fancy RTOS and threaded designs just aren't necessary. A rather brutal and simplistic polling loop is the "best" way.
I suppose if every individual lightbulb on my future christmas tree gets its own ipv6 address, that architecture is going to have to change..
If you're thinking of what an EE would call dealing with edge vs level triggered events, or maybe handling interrupt signals while inside the interrupt handler, internally misterhouse has got code to deal with it, I level trigger on sunrise/sunset and edge trigger on doors and stuff, if you squint at it and look crosseyed, sorta.
You can turn off home heating when you are at work, then turn it on half an hour before going home. You can fill your bathtub up with hot water that you can jump right in after work. I am sure some bright minds out there will think of more interesting ideas.
Hmmm... Much more likely... Turn off someones heating system during the blizzard until they email their CC number to a.ru address, and the local water company now refuses to "permit" me to turn my bathtub valve off if they need to meet their quarterly profit numbers.
Your grocery store loyalty card detects you visited a competitor's store? I wonder what alternative settings will be uploaded to your remotely controlled refrigerator to "encourage you" to buy better tasting food at the loyalty card store? Odd that ground beef from XYZ store goes rotten in a day but ABC store food stays nice and cool...
Forget to pay your house insurance premium? Ins co shuts down all electrical appliances (wouldn't want an electrical fire at an uninsured building)...
The assumption seems to be that the end user will be in control. Not so.
I do not want them to be automatic because I want to go into the bathroom and then turn on the light so I do not wake up my wife.
You can automate this with misterhouse using 90s technology. The 00s technology insteon is just like the ancient X10 stuff except its reliable, the address space is huge, and its about twice the cost. I found the upgrade from X10 to insteon some years ago to be worth it, your mileage may vary.
I don' t have the perl code handy but it boils down to when you get the trigger for door closing, turn the light up at 25% illumination if during "sleep hours" or 100% during the day. Also the fan. The door opening trigger is simpler, just turn off the light and the fan gets an off timer set to shut off the fan in a minute or whatever.. Depending on your definition of "lines of code" and your style, its about 4 to maybe 8 lines of code total and takes about 5 minutes to write and test. A wifi laptop is the ideal misterhouse development system...
This is a slight adaptation of the code I use on my front and back doors and garage door to auto-illuminate my lights at night. Open either the side door or the garage door and the path lights up. Easy easy easy.
allowing developers to create an interface in which a smartphone app could control or collect data from a thermostat, a lawn irrigation system or a group of lighting fixtures.
Welcome to misterhouse from the 90s? Everything old is new again!
I have set this up, I can control my lights and stuff from my ipod touch web browser, and it is in fact a completely useless cool hack.
I DO use misterhouse to automate the heck out of timing and some simple virtual timers (outside light shuts off X minutes after I turn it on) and also some virtual relay logic (basement stairs light controlled by position of basement door using the most hardware and software possible instead of a simple relay). Useful as that has been, "control the lights using the ipod" has been quite useless.
This was the dream of Java back in the day, to have everything from the OS right up to the applications all running under Java VMs.
This was the dream of Java back in the day, to have everything from the OS right up to the applications all running under different mandatory Java VMs, from openjdk to mandatory conflicting version numbers. Everyone is used to the MS idea of one application = one server, due to poor interoperability. It got to the point at one job were we were considering multiple desktop machines due to the need for conflicting java runtimes. The new paradigm of one application = one enduser machine. Which I'm sure would be very profitable for MS and the hardware mfgrs...
What sort of public transit do you propose for people who are legally unable to drive, due to age (old or young), disease, or blindness?
The taxi companies that donated to the election campaign of the politician suggesting the government spend money on taxis?
Its funny watching people try to rationalize simple shakedowns.
Bringing it back to the story, why did the same governor go after certain public servant unions and not others? No deep philosophical reasons, just look at the donation records. The folks who didn't cough up enough dough have had it made perfectly clear what'll happen if they don't.
A permanently declining economy inevitably means permanently declining bribes... That's why this is all boiling up in recent years. Some politicians believed that "a rising tide lifts all boats". Some didn't. Doesn't particularly matter. But ALL politicians seem to think that a falling tide should not affect their bribes... Thus the drama.
I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior... Sometimes the "Would never vote for" column is just as important as the "Would vote for" column in polling
His idea of "winning" probably does not match ours.
From a purely drama-queenie, attention grabbing point of view, Palin, Hlllary, and their male equivalent Walker, ARE and have been incredibly successful. They live for the Oprah interview and the press fawning all over them, and if they don't have to bother with the responsibilities of governing, well that's great, more time to stir up controversy...
You have to realize that both the Ds and Rs are incredibly weak here, with the exception of Feingold who was a black sheep in his own party of sheeple. The reason there's no one but 3rd rate B-grade hacks on both sides, is because that's unfortunately the best both sides have... Its very much like the end of "atlas shrugged" where have all the real leaders gone?
Why try to attract/retain kids in any major? Some jobs are just not for some people. Something tells me a different coding language/piece of hardware isn't going to retain kids that decide they don't like IT.
You can smell a top down management solution a mile away. some exec-VP has a goal of increasing enrollment in his empire, and the easiest way for his minions to help is to scavenge out of other majors at that organization. Select the "cool looking hardware" for the photo op, then figure out what to do with it, then figure out if anyone can get employed afterwards.
Bottom up solution would look a little different...
The university hopes this gadget-based approach will encourage fewer students to give up on their studies.
Being able to get a job after graduation is too hard. Lets give out gadgets instead!
What I don't understand is why an IT curriculum has this "theory of programming" and "computer science-y" stuff. I understand its in the UK, but over here in the US, CS = theory and programming, and IT = working for da man in the IT department doing database design and rebooting windows machines, at most hitting a little legacy cobol. If the little gadget had a postgresql or mysql install on it, or maybe 4 or 5 virtual routers with little virtual LANs connecting them, or a MCSE cheatsheet lab, then it would be a useful in a IT curriculum. It sounds like the ideal gadget for a computer engineering curriculm, or even straight up EE if it had a DSP unit inside it.
And if they wanted to get fancy, they could always put a small generator on site that runs on waste heat in the cooling system capable of generating local power in emergencies.
Grats on re-inventing / summarizing something very close to the deployed RCIC system, and almost exactly describing the IC system in a ESBWR, except instead of passing thru a turbine to generate power, the IC works like a slow cooker, boil at the bottom, condense at the top, drip back down. For those that know what one is, a IC is basically a heat pipe.
The hard part is making something this big, completely tsunami proof... Its probably a heck of a lot easier to make something tiny like a diesel generator and its fuel tanks and its electrical wiring completely tsunami proof...
The killer problem is only new BWR plants can have a IC system. And after this the drooling morons will not allow new plants. So we have to watch all the existing old dangerous BWRs melt down, since they can't be replaced with safe ones for PR reasons.
We as a species need to learn to evaluate risk better
That would ruin the ability to control us thru fear in the mass media... Taking a wild guess, TPTB are not going to support this goal, in fact they support the opposite.
Now if you eliminated control of the masses thru fear, perhaps by ridicule or sarcasm (fact never works) then there would not be the reason to prevent intelligent risk evaluation...
Your best course of action to reach your goal is probably to read Schnier and friends while making fun of the DHS as much as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that if the client was easy enough to use, and someone with a suitably authoritative stature told them it was reasonably safe, that would be enough for most people
"someone with a suitably authoritative stature" such as TV news readers, daytime talk show/tabloid hosts, and especially virtually everyone involved however tangentially with brick and mortar stores screamed at the general population as loud and repetitively as they could in the 90s that the internet is a horribly dangerous place and you should never use your credit card for anything involving the evil internet. And look how that turned out.
"Roll the entire network back"? No, I managed to take your bitcoin off you by using a quantum computer to predict your crypto, and I refuse to roll back my bitcoins to you. There is no central bank that tracks who owns which bitcoins.
Doesn't work like that. There is a de-centralized hash tree of transactions where as long as 50.000001% of the participants agree, that is the dominant hash. If you convinced 51% of BTC users/miners to roll back, then "your" BTC are disappeared. Its like a shared transaction log rather than individual account logs, and good players only follow the majority dominant hash "tree-thingy", and as long as good players make up more than 51% of the team, its all good.
There is an interesting area of vulnerability where the market is big enough for bot net owners to F with it, and small enough that the participants can't defend against them. I think we're pretty close to that point now, if not at it.
Another interesting area of vulnerability would be to cut off an entire countries inet access "for a long time" and see how the hash trees diverge on each island. The folks on the small island are going to be pissed when they reconnect to the world and it all rolls back.
Are there plans to deal with quantum computing, or with any of the algorithms used being compromised?
During the mining phase, which is probably rapidly drawing to a close, that scenario would suck.
Post-mining phase, when they've all been discovered and its just trading-time, at least superficially I don't think it would really matter...
Perhaps you can store your BitCoins inside a safe deposit box of a real bank.
There is absolutely no theoretical reason your wallet file cannot be printed out using crude uuencode/uudecode or something more modern like par2 or SSSS and converted into QR codes or whatever and stashed in a safe deposit box.
My wallet file with 95 BTC in it is about 112K right now. Not megs, not gigs, just K. I'm thinking, 80 characters per line, 60 lines per page, results in ten or so double sided pages of data. Since you can't realistically print out more than alphanumerics in the text, you have to turn it into QR codes or uuencoded or something like that.
The summary is my wallet.dat file, printed out, would be "thinner than my house insurance policy, but thicker than my (birth/marriage/etc) certificate collection"
In summary, its quite possible to "backup" BTC in a file folder in a safe deposit box. Its several orders of magnitude easier than backing up .mp3s which are several orders of magnitude easier than backing up video files.
Convince me it's not a Ponzi scheme.
Break out ye olde wikipedia and be enlightened. Basically a Ponzi scheme involves one individual taking in periodic money deposits from many people and spending that income on overhead or paying out as faked interest/income. See Bernie Madoff.
Since there is no one individual, no regular periodic deposits/investments, no statements with made up balances, no interest payouts... I guess it fails to meet all criteria of a Ponzi scheme.
It may in fact be a massive investment "bubble" much like .com stocks / homes / social media / higher education. But its not a Ponzi.
I will give you credit that in modern American English, Ponzi has become null. Kind of like prefixing a question with "but that begs the question", when it means nothing in context, or at least certainly not what actually begging the question means. Similar to illiterate youngsters saying the word "like" every other word as a placeholder or time-filler.
It's probably already too late to get in, and it may be too late to get out.
As an investment scheme, yeah. For mining-for-profit, yeah. However, I "get in" by mining about 200 BTC back when the "difficulty" parameter was about two digits. I think I can "get out", if I please, with no loss.
Basic rule of investing is you bake your return in when you select your "buy" price. Mine was installing and compiling some software and having an enjoyable time reading the code and math behind it. Its pretty interesting. No downside means I have an excellent rate of return regardless of whatever market manipulations are going on.
One thing that concerns me is the fixed maximum number of bitcoins. Lets say people acquire bitcoins, but the amount isn't enough to worry about, so they never use them, or perhaps their computer crashes and they don't have a backup. My understanding is that these bitcoins are permanently lost from the economy of bitcoins. Over time, the total supply would begin to dwindle, presumably pushing up the value of those that remain, until people become frustrated at the small supply and are motivated to move to a new system, then bitcoin is abandoned. In the real world this happens with dollar bills, but the government can compensate for this by creating more. Is this issue addressed in some fashion.
Floating point BTC, essentially. Technically its actually fixed point with lots -o- decimal places.
At an instantaneous level, the whole "economy", at least as a trade good, could function using a billion nano-BTC. or 10 ** 12 picoBTC.
At a long term level, its a bigger problem because all of our modern financial systems are organized around eternal debt-based growth and massive generational-scale central bank inflation. BTC inherently has an entirely different financial system, not just a way to toss virtual pennies around the net. THATs the problem you need to think about.
If we eventually use Bitcoin in everyday life, say, in the supermarket, how will we deal with prices in fractions of a Bitcoin? What terminology might we use for something priced at 0.00000005 Bitcoins?
A twentieth of a microBTC or uBTC (looks better in UTF-8)? More likely you'd call that "fifty nanoBTC"
being compared to Y2K as an IT project that is nearly impossible to complete on time.
That sounds like good copy to a lowly journalist, but as someone "who was there" during Y2K, what was "nearly impossible"? We knew it was coming, we planned, the bosses mostly used it as an excuse to semi-fraudulently ram upgrades thru and as a powerful weapon to grab more budget money. It was way, big time, trivial.
Besides, just think about it. The entire world's IT department, all those guys who can't close open relays, blah blah blah all somehow 100% successfully did the nearly impossible... yeah uh huh.
I can easily imagine an example of someone with a Samsung tablet visiting a museum and being able to download a 'guide' application, despite the fact that the museum doesn't actually offer one.
well, the company I formerly worked for (Econoetica) did offer that, as Arianna mobile:
http://www.ariannamobile.com/en.html
City of Firenze (Florence for you fellow US people), Pisa, Bologna and Matera, museum of Canossa and other cultural institutions purchased it
What the original poster means, is anywhere the masses would expect to be able to download a 'guide' application, they'll actually be getting owned by a guy with a laptop in a duffel bag, and as the word of stolen identities and ruined financial lives gets out, eventually only the dumbest of the masses will continue to try and download 'guide' applications and the only providers of 'guide' applications will be the previously mentioned creepy guys with laptops in their duffel bags. The well will be poisoned into uselessness.
That's the point of an IDE... to edit hundreds of pages at once, in a consistent manner. (although if you have hundreds of pages you should use a CMS ... Back to text editing)
For real? If I needed to change something on hundreds of pages, I'd fire up vi and edit a single css file or edit a single perl (or whatever) script. Or use the magic of server side includes, etc. Do people really do stuff like have one individual css file for each html page?
That's the point of an IDE... to edit hundreds of pages at once, in a consistent manner. (although if you have hundreds of pages you should use a CMS ... Back to text editing)
For real? If I needed to change something on hundreds of pages, I'd fire up vi and edit a single css file or edit a single perl (or whatever) script. Or use the magic of server side includes, etc. Do people really do stuff like have one individual css file for each html page?
My new car (not a Ford) came with Microsoft software ... As you would expect, it doesn't work very well or reliably.
When is crashes, do you collect under "comprehensive" or "collision" car insurance?
Are your doors Self-Satisfied?
If you're thinking of threads that block, from what I remember misterhouse was always more of a "poll, then sleep awhile, repeat" kinda architecture.
Even in ye-olden-days PCs are just so darn fast compared to the X-10 or modern insteon commands that fancy RTOS and threaded designs just aren't necessary. A rather brutal and simplistic polling loop is the "best" way.
I suppose if every individual lightbulb on my future christmas tree gets its own ipv6 address, that architecture is going to have to change..
If you're thinking of what an EE would call dealing with edge vs level triggered events, or maybe handling interrupt signals while inside the interrupt handler, internally misterhouse has got code to deal with it, I level trigger on sunrise/sunset and edge trigger on doors and stuff, if you squint at it and look crosseyed, sorta.
You can turn off home heating when you are at work, then turn it on half an hour before going home. You can fill your bathtub up with hot water that you can jump right in after work. I am sure some bright minds out there will think of more interesting ideas.
Hmmm... Much more likely... Turn off someones heating system during the blizzard until they email their CC number to a .ru address, and the local water company now refuses to "permit" me to turn my bathtub valve off if they need to meet their quarterly profit numbers.
Your grocery store loyalty card detects you visited a competitor's store? I wonder what alternative settings will be uploaded to your remotely controlled refrigerator to "encourage you" to buy better tasting food at the loyalty card store? Odd that ground beef from XYZ store goes rotten in a day but ABC store food stays nice and cool...
Forget to pay your house insurance premium? Ins co shuts down all electrical appliances (wouldn't want an electrical fire at an uninsured building)...
The assumption seems to be that the end user will be in control. Not so.
So if I forget my phone at work, I can't turn the lights on in my apartment? Brilliant!
Even worse, dead battery means you can't turn on the lights to find the charger.
I do not want them to be automatic because I want to go into the bathroom and then turn on the light so I do not wake up my wife.
You can automate this with misterhouse using 90s technology. The 00s technology insteon is just like the ancient X10 stuff except its reliable, the address space is huge, and its about twice the cost. I found the upgrade from X10 to insteon some years ago to be worth it, your mileage may vary.
I don' t have the perl code handy but it boils down to when you get the trigger for door closing, turn the light up at 25% illumination if during "sleep hours" or 100% during the day. Also the fan. The door opening trigger is simpler, just turn off the light and the fan gets an off timer set to shut off the fan in a minute or whatever.. Depending on your definition of "lines of code" and your style, its about 4 to maybe 8 lines of code total and takes about 5 minutes to write and test. A wifi laptop is the ideal misterhouse development system...
This is a slight adaptation of the code I use on my front and back doors and garage door to auto-illuminate my lights at night. Open either the side door or the garage door and the path lights up. Easy easy easy.
allowing developers to create an interface in which a smartphone app could control or collect data from a thermostat, a lawn irrigation system or a group of lighting fixtures.
Welcome to misterhouse from the 90s? Everything old is new again!
http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/
I have set this up, I can control my lights and stuff from my ipod touch web browser, and it is in fact a completely useless cool hack.
I DO use misterhouse to automate the heck out of timing and some simple virtual timers (outside light shuts off X minutes after I turn it on) and also some virtual relay logic (basement stairs light controlled by position of basement door using the most hardware and software possible instead of a simple relay). Useful as that has been, "control the lights using the ipod" has been quite useless.
This was the dream of Java back in the day, to have everything from the OS right up to the applications all running under Java VMs.
This was the dream of Java back in the day, to have everything from the OS right up to the applications all running under different mandatory Java VMs, from openjdk to mandatory conflicting version numbers. Everyone is used to the MS idea of one application = one server, due to poor interoperability. It got to the point at one job were we were considering multiple desktop machines due to the need for conflicting java runtimes. The new paradigm of one application = one enduser machine. Which I'm sure would be very profitable for MS and the hardware mfgrs...
What sort of public transit do you propose for people who are legally unable to drive, due to age (old or young), disease, or blindness?
The taxi companies that donated to the election campaign of the politician suggesting the government spend money on taxis?
Its funny watching people try to rationalize simple shakedowns.
Bringing it back to the story, why did the same governor go after certain public servant unions and not others? No deep philosophical reasons, just look at the donation records. The folks who didn't cough up enough dough have had it made perfectly clear what'll happen if they don't.
A permanently declining economy inevitably means permanently declining bribes... That's why this is all boiling up in recent years. Some politicians believed that "a rising tide lifts all boats". Some didn't. Doesn't particularly matter. But ALL politicians seem to think that a falling tide should not affect their bribes... Thus the drama.
I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior ... Sometimes the "Would never vote for" column is just as important as the "Would vote for" column in polling
His idea of "winning" probably does not match ours.
From a purely drama-queenie, attention grabbing point of view, Palin, Hlllary, and their male equivalent Walker, ARE and have been incredibly successful. They live for the Oprah interview and the press fawning all over them, and if they don't have to bother with the responsibilities of governing, well that's great, more time to stir up controversy...
You have to realize that both the Ds and Rs are incredibly weak here, with the exception of Feingold who was a black sheep in his own party of sheeple. The reason there's no one but 3rd rate B-grade hacks on both sides, is because that's unfortunately the best both sides have... Its very much like the end of "atlas shrugged" where have all the real leaders gone?
Why try to attract/retain kids in any major? Some jobs are just not for some people. Something tells me a different coding language/piece of hardware isn't going to retain kids that decide they don't like IT.
You can smell a top down management solution a mile away. some exec-VP has a goal of increasing enrollment in his empire, and the easiest way for his minions to help is to scavenge out of other majors at that organization. Select the "cool looking hardware" for the photo op, then figure out what to do with it, then figure out if anyone can get employed afterwards.
Bottom up solution would look a little different...
The university hopes this gadget-based approach will encourage fewer students to give up on their studies.
Being able to get a job after graduation is too hard. Lets give out gadgets instead!
What I don't understand is why an IT curriculum has this "theory of programming" and "computer science-y" stuff. I understand its in the UK, but over here in the US, CS = theory and programming, and IT = working for da man in the IT department doing database design and rebooting windows machines, at most hitting a little legacy cobol. If the little gadget had a postgresql or mysql install on it, or maybe 4 or 5 virtual routers with little virtual LANs connecting them, or a MCSE cheatsheet lab, then it would be a useful in a IT curriculum. It sounds like the ideal gadget for a computer engineering curriculm, or even straight up EE if it had a DSP unit inside it.
they can practically write a check for the whole thing
From finance.google.com, financials, balance sheet
"Cash & Equivalents 15,978.00" "In Millions of USD"
Hmm. A building that costs more than 15 billion dollars?
And if they wanted to get fancy, they could always put a small generator on site that runs on waste heat in the cooling system capable of generating local power in emergencies.
Grats on re-inventing / summarizing something very close to the deployed RCIC system, and almost exactly describing the IC system in a ESBWR, except instead of passing thru a turbine to generate power, the IC works like a slow cooker, boil at the bottom, condense at the top, drip back down. For those that know what one is, a IC is basically a heat pipe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_water_reactor_safety_systems#Reactor_core_isolation_cooling_system
The hard part is making something this big, completely tsunami proof... Its probably a heck of a lot easier to make something tiny like a diesel generator and its fuel tanks and its electrical wiring completely tsunami proof...
The killer problem is only new BWR plants can have a IC system. And after this the drooling morons will not allow new plants. So we have to watch all the existing old dangerous BWRs melt down, since they can't be replaced with safe ones for PR reasons.
We as a species need to learn to evaluate risk better
That would ruin the ability to control us thru fear in the mass media... Taking a wild guess, TPTB are not going to support this goal, in fact they support the opposite.
Now if you eliminated control of the masses thru fear, perhaps by ridicule or sarcasm (fact never works) then there would not be the reason to prevent intelligent risk evaluation...
Your best course of action to reach your goal is probably to read Schnier and friends while making fun of the DHS as much as possible.