I had a mean substitute once, but she was not very tasty at all.

You placed the rich people and the politicians into separate categories. The whole mess is easier to understand once you realize the politicians at the top are a subset of the rich people, not a different group. Congress isn't even subtle anymore about how they structure insider trading to get rich, take a look at how the STOCK act was gutted to see them at work.

"If you do not work you do not eat"? Spoken as a true corporate tool. Who defines what "work" is then? Guess what: the people with money do, as they always have. Ask a rich CEO why they deserve the highest compensation multiple of workers ever today, and they'll tell you all about how their work adds value!

There's only place this road has ever led toward: rich people get so much negotiating power over poor ones they force them into inhumane working conditions, knowing they have to accept that or starve. You don't get a wonderful world--instead you'll just keep reinventing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire for modern workers. Gotta lock the doors, can't have people in the factory stealing our precious iThings to sell them for food!

People report on topics that draw attention. That alone is enough to explain why the perception of crime is higher than the reality. "Lots of kids went to school and nothing bad happened", zero clicks. "Think of the children!" story, parents furiously re-share with their half-baked "this has to change!" commentary, every reporter tries to cover it, pundits have material for their shows, and politicians get something to lecture on so they sound relevant. Everybody hears about it.

Don't confuse that news spectacle with government scare-mongering. They're both real, but the government one is a slower and subtler game. Also very real: the heavily entrenched biases about race in the US. Why does LeVar Burton teach his kids how not be shot by police? Hint: it's not because of media sensationalism.

"Traditionally" 40%? That's a citation needed claim. Companies like MGIC have let people shift around the downpayment risk to where it makes sense since 1957, and the standard LMI/PMI rate has been 20% for as long as I've been alive.

All three of down payment, mortgage length, and interest rate interact to determine what's been acceptable. The best example of how that can play out dramatically in modern US history were the high interest rates and "stagflation" of the 1970's. Unusual things happened to typical mortgage lengths when the rate jumped up, and the risk/reward on downpayments moved with all that.

The idea that you can always move to somewhere cheap to live is just silly. A major reason real estate prices inflate in an area is because it's where the jobs are. You can't just move away from real estate spikes without a strong assurance you'll get work in the new area that nets you more. That this will always be possible is one of those things you mainly hear from entitled young people. Good luck with that.

The one thing you can sell into a stagnant economy are consumable and necessity products that cost less. Stare at the things that are still selling--food, basic clothing, etc.--put resources into making a cheaper version. It's easy to show there's a huge volume of such opportunities, just look at the growth of Walmart on the back of such work.

But that just circles back to the same problem again. Products where the innovation is improved efficiency and/or lower costs take you right back to less spending.

infamous adjective: well-known for being bad.

They could put a picture of the 2600 ET cartridge on that dictionary entry.

And then after Spielberg replaced all the guns in the movie with walkie-talkies, it ruined that one good scene where Elliott shot his eye out.

The hype around the movie was pretty bad, but I don't remember this as the most overhyped Atari 2600 game. I'd give that honor to the 2600 Pac-Man. The first commercial in heavy rotation for that one didn't even show the real gameplay. They kinda ripped off the music to "Pac-Man Fever" there too.

Well, first they tried to get the cartridges to levitate themselves out, but they kept falling back to the bottom of the landfill.

Self-organization is a perfectly reasonable way to run a project. It has several properties that are useful for geographically distributed open source projects, like how it avoids a single point of failure. You can't extrapolate global leadership maxims from the dysfunction of local groups you've been involved in. I'd argue that an open source program that requires "strong leadership" from a small group to survive is actually being led badly. That can easily breed these troublesome monocultures where everyone does the same wrong thing.

I think the way Mark Shuttleworth organizes Canonical is like the traditional business role of a "strong leader". That's led to all sorts of pissed off volunteers in the self-organizing Debian community. Compare that against the leadership style of Linus Torvalds, who aggressively pushes responsibility downward toward layers of maintainers. The examples of Debian and Linux show volunteers can organize themselves if that's one of the goals of the project.

Security by obscurity means that the product is secure only when you don't have the source code. The idea is that parts of the security mechanism would be simple to break if only you could see how they are implemented. A simple example is a hardcoded backdoor password in the code. Very hard to just stumble on, trivial to find with source access. Ideally security mechanisms should work equally well whether or not you have their source code, which is security by design.

This is a completely different concept from security by low market share.

No, it can't, by definition. If it's not available to everyone, then it's not "open" in this context. To quote the OSI, "Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone". The essential missing part here is that sharing must be allowed, and the sort of commercial arrangements that get you source to proprietary code don't allow that.

Proprietary software that makes source available to customers has some of the properties of free software. But since it can't satisfy all of the GNU project's four freedoms, it's not appropriate to refer to those products as free software either.

My understanding from conversations with a friend in this field is that the big money is around the oil industry positions, you go wherever they're active at. The data collected by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics rates underwater welders as making a good bit more than regular ones, but it's hard to get a firm number because they lump divers in with them. The summary at waterwelders matches a few other sources I checked.

I'm amused by how you're critical of stereotyping humanities students, then move onto stereotyping business students.

You're right that a subset of humanities students would also be successful in a tech field. But there are plenty of tech people who could happily pursue humanities too. There is solid data that STEM majors are more difficult to complete than other fields. A good example is the UCLA Bachelor's Degree study, with figure 3 there being a particularly telling one. If parts of the humanities stepped up their critical thinking difficulty level to where many more students struggle to even absorb it and complete the degree in four years, then you could make a stronger case for the degree teaching those skills. There surely are humanities programs that emphasize that, but you can't really take having a degree as proof that happened.

That's not quite right either. The open-source releases of OpenSSL certainly do not ship with any implied FIPS certification. OpenSSL does offer FIPS validation for a specific build as part of their commercial support program. They say "Support for the FIPS Object Module, including assistance with building a validated module for a specific platform (if possible) is available with the Premium plan". It is not correct that these versions are exactly the same code as the ones first certified long ago.

There was an interesting post to the openssl annoucement mailing list about Flaws in Dual EC DRBG that sheds some more light on this area. It says: "The OpenSSL FIPS module is commonly used as the basis for rebranded proprietary validations (we call these 'private label' validations)", "FIPS 140-2 validations are expensive and difficult, taking on average a year to complete and we have to wait years between validations", and "Even if we wanted to fix it our options are severely constrained by the fact that the CMVP process forbids modifications of any kind (even to address severe vulnerabilities) without the substantial time and expense of formal retesting and review."

All this implies there absolutely are later versions of OpenSSL with FIPS certification out there. You just can't get one without significant input from the commercial end of the OpenSSL Foundation.