I'm holding out for the app to help me avoid huge ships.

They'd need to be careful. A female playing the Doctor would risk being objectified. Then it would be Doctor Whom.

I saw the Lady Gaga quip and Scott's fondness for effective ancient map-reducey techniques on unusual hardware platforms. It reminded me about things like discovering America. Did the Vikings discover it years before any other Europeans? Certainly. Did the Chinese discover it as well? There's some scholarly thought that maybe they did. But you know whose discovery actually effected change in the world? Lame old Christopher Columbus.

Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here from people who want to actually change the world with software and if we spent less time ranting about mmap-vs-scanf-in-Hive we could learn it.

Ha! As if. I suppose you're blaming house Republicans, but if those guys were making budgetary threats, they'd be pretty hollow. Or have you been asleep for the past year and a half of gridlock? :P

And you're not doing much yourself to provide a counterexample to the notion that climate-change is a left-wing conspiracy. So I have an idea for you. How about we talk science for a bit instead of political smears?

For the manufacturer, it's also a political maneuver. They can say "we made smart guns!" and maybe get some politicians off their back for a little while.

And it's obvious why people don't actually buy them. Pay $$$ extra for finicky biometrics which are at least as likely to impede you as they are to assist you? I'll get right on that.

This solves the problem of getting to LEO cheaply enough by using a miniature, lightweight tank. That's why it's a big deal. (Or at least a medium deal.)

And forget the interstellar-space angle for a moment, too: anyone for a decent picture of Pluto?

The main thing that the USA today piece gets at is this:

But his crime devastated the Vatican, shattering the confidentiality that typically governs correspondence with the pope.

Let's consider a similar privilege in the US: attorney-client privilege. It's really important that people can trust their communications with their lawyers are confidential, at least if there is any hope to maintain a semblance of justice in the justice system instead of federal prosecutors running roughshod over everyone. Likewise, it's really important for the Vatican that people trust their priests enough to actually go to confession for forgiveness of sins (important to Catholics, you may have heard) and to receive moral guidance - at least so long as people remain imperfect, which means more or less 'forever'.

There have been some big scandals recently which have compromised that sort of trust.

"I think the GPs point was that it does not have to be a all or none - that you can have SSL of a self signed cert without the error message and without giving any "expectation of [high] security" (to quote GP "no full secure icon")"

Can you, really? I mean, we have a big enough problem with training users to type credentials in a login box served by http://www.myfavoritebank.com/ all insecure-like. This area where security intersects user interaction design is a tricksy one.

More regulatory uncertainty! Yay!

You must be taking the slow bus. Metro North can do ~23 miles in ~25 minutes (White Plains to Grand Central).

Upper management allowed equity investors it jack up the debt load.

Yeah... part of the plan to to return money to the shareholders. That's why companies do things: to make money for the shareholders. (The debtors, rather than getting totally screwed, are first in line for the bankruptcy proceeds.) Not necessarily a nice thing but, when the financial incentive put the two sides in conflict over millions (nearly billions!) of dollars, guess what happens?

Based on the debt load, the bakers union did not think a percentage of the company had enough value.

Yeah, because the company's worthless when they've got work rules saying that you can't put Twinkies and Wonder-bread on the same truck. Word on the street has it that normal distribution channels would have easily freed up $80-$120 million a year to go straight to the bottom line; maybe the bakers' percentage would have been worth something under those circumstances.

And now that they're out of union-contract-land, they're actually thinking about making new snacky-things. Because they might actually be able to make money off of them. Perish the thought.

Not quite.

The Teamsters union always had a variety of rules, e.g. "the guy who unloads the truck has to drive in a separate car from the guy who drives the truck" and other stuff like that. Hostess, realizing the costs that this imposed on them, didn't really invest in the brand very much over the next several decades, because they realized that they couldn't turn the investment into a big profit and they're not in the business of giving away money if they can help it - instead, they returned such money as there was to shareholders. (And to themselves as management. The shareholders and bankruptcy courts are free to look into that, certainly.) Hostess slowly declined into marginal profitability, then unprofitability, and limped around in bankruptcy for 11 years, until at a critical juncture the baker's union went on strike because they felt that they could do better for their members in any takeover than if Hostess were otherwise restructured with a Teamsters contract.

No, because there were (possibly-surprisingly) very few actual crimes associated with the financial crisis. Even civil suits with lower burdens of proof than criminal cases, such as the ones filed by the SEC versus the likes of Edward Steffelin (JPMorgan Chase, with regards to Squared CDO 2007-1) and Brian Stoker (Citigroup, similar). There just haven't been any substantial number of laws broken. We'll see how the suits against Fabrice Tourre (Goldman Sachs) and Credit Suisse (as an abstract entity) go.

You want to know why the meltdown happened? Your first thought will be "greed". I'd be more abstract and call it "pursuit of money", but tomato/tomahto. Anyway. GREED! Right, but! It's not enough. Greed happens all the time in the corporate world without causing meltdowns. All businesses are out to pursue money all the time, doubly so in the financial sector, and it doesn't cause meltdowns all the time. The difference here? The reason that the meltdown happened? The system was giving them money for doing the wrong thing. And it started when the Washington, DC establishment combined negative real interest rates (subsidizing the housing bubble) with federal homeownership programs that paid the banks top dollar to make shaky mortgages -- and when federal rules gave ratings from a few firms with clear conflict-of-interest problems special preference in the regulatory system, and thus encouraged all banks to buy AAA-rated mortgage junk to maintain their regulatory capital requirements.

Of course banks caused the crisis. They were paid to do so, and paid handsomely, and chased into doing so by regulators when they weren't overtly paid. But don't worry!!! We've solved the failures with Dodd-Frank and it'll never happen again!!!11 *coughcoughcough asif cough*

Fun fact: There was once a plan to connect the Staten Island Railroad to Brooklyn. They even started construction on the tunnel.

Of course, if you ran it into town express on the Fourth Avenue line, you'd have to kick off the existing express trains (D and N) and make them run local or something. Then once the new express got to downtown Brooklyn, you'd need to decide which line has to run local through Brooklyn and on to lower Manhattan through the Montague Tube (as opposed to the more northerly route via the Manhattan Bridge) and where it would go from there (the Nassau Street line has capacity as far north as Chambers/City Hall, easily)

That's a very good point. There are more IT workers than just me. There is, in fact, a great level of diversity in tech workers, tech companies, and their goals in life and business. It's great for city-oriented tech workers that NYC is becoming a place that lots of tech workers like to live and work, and that doesn't need to undercut anyone else's tech work (except insofar as it's a better deal for the employee, which is just fair competition).