I agree that the crowd idea won't work until there is the political will to actually enforce these rules. Even in the best of times you have too many regulators looking for a way into the industry they're regulating (like the oil rig inspectors at the MMS) but when you combine that with leadership that doesn't believe in government regulation then things are so much worse.

When the Madoff matter started to look fishy message from the leadership in Washington was that lax enforcement was the way to achieve the deregulation they were looking for and that makes perfect sense from a political point of view. You don't get money for reelection from people you hound with regulators and people who don't believe in government, or at least believes that government regulation generally does more harm than good, shouldn't be expected to run one well.

"Comparatively large" in this case meaning just shy of the rest of the world's defense budgets combined. Last year it was also bigger than Social Security or Medicare & Medicaid. link

and still the doctor never gets any credit.

Americans don't know what Le Mans is. It has "Le" which means French in American and "Mans" which is more than 1 man. Without actually knowing what it is many Americans would suspect that it was a gay thing and that would set diesel adoption back several years.

If you asked most Americans to describe a diesel car you'll hear that they are: noisy, stinky, expensive to buy and repair, perform poorly in cold weather, and are slow. I think this comes from experience with crappy diesel cars from the gas crisis in the late 70's and commercial transportation like buses, 18 wheelers, trains, etc.

As a group, we don't know about the much cleaner diesel we use today or modern diesel engines so it's going to take some time to make diesel trendy in the US.

In theory a Microsoft tablet could run most windows apps but in practice most of those don't work well on a tablet as every one of their previous tablet projects have shown so a tablet running strait Windows 7 is a bad idea. Maybe their Windows 7 Mobile will work better but what apps are they going to have for it? As for their other effort to build something that works well for a mobile platform, does anyone want a Zune app? You can pick from 24 and several of those are ad supported games no one cares about.

It's really something to see how times have changed. 10 years ago the Mac user's lament was that the software options for their computers were too limited and now Microsoft is trying to launch hardware or OSs for new hardware into markets where Apple and Google have the mindshare nearly cornered between iTunes and the Android Marketplace.

This is why Microsoft is becoming the stuff you use at work and Apple is slowly becoming the stuff you use everywhere else.

That's true until it snows in their neighborhood and then we're back to global warming being a myth.

Intelligent and rational aren't the same thing and a lot of important people don't want to believe that global warming is a problem so they use any excuse, including long discredited FUD, they can to dismiss it. This winter as soon as some urban center hits a cold snap some jackasses on TV will help some reasonably intelligent people convince themselves that global warming is a conspiracy to sell carbon offsets or sabotage the oil industry because that's what plenty of intelligent people want to believe.

This is a lot like the birthers or 9/11 conspiracy nuts except this feeds more than an anti-Obama or anti-government bias. This is ignoring an expensive, change-our-way-of-life kind of problem in the hopes that it will go away and reality is going to have a hard time getting through to those people.

Perhaps they were testing it in winter. Given the choice between riding around Afghanistan in an poorly insulated Humvee in the Afghan winter waiting to get blown up or ambushed or laying out in an weaponized outdoor tanning bed I think I'd put on some trunks and catch up on some light reading.

At one point in his career the Christian god was a carpenter who could turn water into wine at will. If he's like any of the carpenters I know that's a terrible combination. I'm thinking that there's a reason that the bible didn't mention his skill as a craftsman. Combine that with a slight grudge toward humanity over that whole brutally tortured to death thing and a difficultly with holding things like small screws and such and I might grab the next flight if he'd worked on it.

Step 1: Wipe my hand on pants discreetly so as to verify dryness. A sweaty hand is a gross hand.
Step 2: Make a quick glance to verify that the person you'll be shaking with has a standard 5 fingered hand. I'll shake a stump, hook, plastic hand, or sub-5 finger hand, flipper what-have-you but you want to know about this going into the shake and not in the middle of the first pump.
Step 3: Grasp their hand or hand-like appendage firmly, shake about twice, and release whatever they've stuck out at you.

They're being compared against Apple and that comparison is not going well for Microsoft. That isn't 100% fair as Microsoft's history of being primarily a software producer doesn't match up well with Apple's history of producing quite a lot of hardware but they're the 2 platform giants of personal computing and Microsoft has been throwing it's hat in the hardware arena lately.

Right now they seem intent on making poor copies of Apple's previous generation of products (Zune/iPod, Zune HD/iPod Touch, Zune Market Place/iTunes, Vista/OS X) and there's every sign that their Windows 7 phone software will follow the same pattern against the iPhone.

What they do have is business buy-in as the OS that runs all of their niche business apps on cheapish hardware but if cloud computing takes off and web apps become the norm for business then the winner will be Google because they're already pretty good at it and Microsoft is again playing catch-up.

Microsoft doesn't need more developers, it needs designers focused on the user experience and the next generation of personal computing. That's tough to do when your best customers are business who don't want the cost of teaching their users a new UI but if Microsoft doesn't do something they are in for the same slow, steady decline.

The Jungle is electronic now.

The Zune HD UI isn't bad but it isn't better than the iPhone OS and that's the problem. Microsoft comes out a year or two later with an inferior product to Apples and acts stunned when no one cares. Ultimately, they come out looking as cool as grandma's orthopedic shoe. They've did it with Vista (see: OS X), the original Zune (the iPod at the time was far better than the 1st Gen Zune brick), the Zune HD and their pointless app store (which came out around the same time as the iPhone), and their new phones are about as popular as polio.

They don't seem to understand that while the business consumers, who have been their best customers, tend to see computers as another sort of boxy appliance for workers to use, the public treats computing as a recreational experience outside the office. To satisfy the car analogy meme, Microsoft makes dump trucks and tractors while Apple makes zippy little roadsters. The public doesn't want a smaller dump truck when they get off of work. If they want to be a player in the mobile space then they should get some of the XBox team (sans the hardware folk) to work on this because their mobile division just isn't working out because they don't realize that it's about entertainment.

Yes, but the bridge, while long, is underwater. Money contractors may work for bananas but the quality of the work still isn't there especially on maritime projects.

somehow it seems really important to know which of my house's orifices my toilet is connected to.