Obama was for the bailouts even when he was a presidential candidate. He actively campaigned for it in the senate and helped Bush pass the TARP bill. There was no shift in his policy once he assumed office because from day one he had said that while it was evil, it was a necessary evil.

I think you have a very limited view of what kind of programming folks do. Only a small percentage of folks do programming at the level where they need to know how a processor works. The vast majority of programmers out there work in high level languages like Java or SQL or XSLT where the nature of the processors capabilities, whether it is RISC or CISC or whether it is a multi-processor or uni-processor systerm doesn't matter a bit to what they are delivering. A lot of times you have assembler bigots on /. spouting things like "...you can write fast / efficient code if you don't understand how the processor works" or if you haven't programmed in assembler. I don't believe this. In the real world out there, what matters most in a huge percentage of projects speed of delivery of function points. If one has to compromise between a 30% efficiency improvement by using a lower level language, vs a 50% improvement delivery time by using a higher level programming language, then that 50% improvement will be the deciding factor in your company making a profit and therefore keeping you employed.

I have done programming in assembler. I have done programming C, C++, COBOL, VisualBasic, Lisp, and a whole bunch more languages for over 20 years. And my experience is that knowing how the processor works or a stack works, isn't helpful in 99% of cases..

I don't deny that in the embedded space, or to system programmers, that these details aren't important. But those programming spaces are a small portion of the programming market.

Did you read the Foundation series? His "seeing-the-future" was based on large groups of people having a predictable history - never the individual. In fact, when the "Mule" appears, that event completely throws off the predictions of psychohistory. The "seeing-the-future" in the Minority Report is specifically about the future history of individuals. Azimov gave a plausible explanation of how psychohistory might work. The Minority Report gives an explanation, but believing in it requires the suspension of a scientific mind. And thats my point - the film may be entertaining, but based on solid science isn't something one can say about it.

Aw...come on. Seriously - the "Minority Report"? The ability of people to see the future is based on solid science? This must be some new definition of the word "science" that I wasn't aware of.

There are other science glitches in the other movies too. For example, in "The Abyss", the underwater creatures miraculously rewire human physiology to not require decompression chambers when the entire diving platform is lifted up to the surface. But I'll let those slide in the name of dramatic license. But the ability of those three "precogs" to see the future is central to the plot of the story and its hard to ignore that gaping scientific hole in the plot of the Minority Report.

When I used "Katrina" as a comparison point, my intention wasn't to compare the physical damage (and you're probably right - the physical damage is probably more than Katrina) but the complete mismanagement of the problem.

As reported in the NY Times - it looks like this is Japan's Katrina. From reading the article, I get a sense that this is worse than what happened with Katrina in the US. Any readers from Japan care to comment? It seems like, even if there are very dedicated and smart people working the problem, this wouldn't be something that can be handled simply by nuclear experts. Effective management of this as a crisis is needed, and the people in charge need to work together as a team to solve a national crisis. Neither of which seem to be happening.

Debian would be the most important if the most number of users depended on it. If the 63% of distributions that depended on Debian had a total base of 5%, then it would be ridiculous to claim that Debian is the most important. This number is missing. Maybe the user base for Debian and its derived distributions is a lot higher and Debian is indeed the most important distro out there. This article certainly doesn't make its case for that statement.

No - you are missing the point. I am not preaching security through obscurity. What I am saying though, is that if a security hole is discovered, obscurity, not open-ness is the right course of action until the problem is fixed. To expose a security hole as soon as it is identified is foolish.

I don't subscribe to the general /. view that exposure of problems is a good thing - if only to force the hand of the person who should be fixing things. And as you can tell from my uid, I've been around on /. for a while. Lives can be ruined / terminated by this course of action, and only the naive can fool themselves into thinking that such actions are always moral or justified.

You are missing the point. Its not that Mo-99 is produced in Canada, but that its production requires weapons grade uranium, and that its produced in civillian facilities that is the salient piece of information. The combination of those two pieces are not widely known. Or rather, was not widely known.

Most likely true. But this isn't a justification for leaking the list. There is immense value in a consolidated list of security vulnerabilities because the effort and expertiese needed to build this list (which is not inconsiderable) no longer needs to be spent by a terrorist. In an organization that breeds suicide bombers, the people who can build such a list are a going to be a rarity. And even if there are one or two people like this in the organization, they are very unlikely to have the wide range of knowledge that could produce the entirety of such a list. Not to mention that going through such a list, and examining the reasons why an item on the list is a part of it, can help identify more vulnerabilities that perhaps aren't on the list.

I don't want to give the impression that the Molybdenum-99 story is one of the wikileaks leaks. It may be, but I don't know. The story I head on the radio had to do with the fact that some team in South Africa invented a way to produce Molybdenum-99 without needing to use highly-enriched uranium.

Security through obscurity doesn't work in the long-term. In the meantime, in the real world, if someone has made a mistake and introduced a security hole, the hole needs to be obscured until a fix is in place. The nature of this fix can range from the easy to the excruciatingly painful, and isn't always feasible in a short amount of time. Exposing such weaknesses helps nobody. All that has been done is to expose a set of targets now.

To quote from the reporting over at CNN on this story:

Isn't it naive to assume that exposing this information is better than keeping it secret? I don't know where this list is, but if some of these targets are owned by allies, the United States won't control the timeframe in which a fix for this security hole is implemented. Take for instance, a story I heard this morning on the radio where they mentioned that medical imaging for oncology tests are heavily dependant on Molybdenum-99 - the production of which requires highly enriched uranium - weapons grade in fact. The source of all the Molybdenum-99 in the US comes from two civillian facilities - one in Canada and one in the Netherlands. Exposing security vulnerabilities at these installations would be highly irresponsible.

...and that is an assertion of your own. Where is your reasoning / evidence to show that this assertion is true?

What you are perhaps not seeing is that the embarassment might not be that of the US government. Take for instance the case of the Yemen president (prime minister?) saying that he would tell his countrymen that the missiles that were used on the attack in Yemen were Yemeni missiles, not American. Is the US the embarassed party here? No - its the Yemeni government. But now that this is out there, the US - Yemeni relationship will have cool, and this hurts American interests.

As an American, I think Wikileaks screwed my country. I applaud Amazon's action on this - whether they did it on moral or business principles.

Thats not the way the justice system is supposed to work: the punishment must fit the crime. For example, one could mandate the death penalty for something like littering in order to deter even the rich from littering. This would certainly meeting the criteria of being equally unfair to everyone, but it isn't justice. Justice is about being fair to everyone - not the opposite.