government sponsors the basic research, then they kill it, then they prevent industry from commercializing it when it would threaten extant corporate profits, especially in energy, and by extension military spending and petrodollar advantage. Google 'integral fast reactor', Branson, etc.

We've known how to make all the clean energy we need and clean up our nuclear waste problem at the same time for the past 20 years. We have a government problem, not a technical one.

Only 50k to sell my soul for having them spy on more people... including myself?
Nope.

Of course not you - but the kinds of people who will submit are going to get job offers from the NRO. They are willing to make that deal, they're not bright enough to run off to industry, and they might have a glimmer of talent that cannot be cultivated in the university system. Plus, $50k isn't enough to quit and start a company, so it's a well-considered recruiting effort.

There's ways to MAKE more, and improve nuclear power at the same time. But nobody wants to talk about it.

You mean like France, which has lots of nuclear power, active plutonium extraction and reprocessing capability? I don't want to get the ESA all tangled up with France or anything, but if they asked nicely...

Jefferson used to complain about the long line of people at the White House who were there to see him - most of them looking for a job hand-out, but some with legitimate issues for him to deal with.

Perhaps Congress could start by dissolving the enivronment that has caused so many people to want to do antisocial things like harming a President, who is mostly supposed to be a CEO of the government, and occasionally lead a defensive war against the country.

Oh, nm, that's just crazy-talk. Might as well fill the moat with hunter-killer boats from Lockheed.

No, they can't and it shows.

A STRANGE GAME ... THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

anti-lameness: qq ww ee rr tt yy uu ii oo pp aa ss dd ff gg hh jj kk ll zz xx cc vv bb nn mm

When you already have a defined program (and machine in this case) in front of you for review, then you can determine whether or not it will halt

except when you cant

For any computer program with a finite number of states (finite memory) you can determine whether it halts by running it long enough that it must be looping.

For a computer with 16384 states (An 8 state turing machine with an 8 position binary tape. 8 states * 8 positions * 2^8 values that can be on the tape) you can tell if any arbitrary program terminates by running it for 16385 steps. Any program that doesn't terminate in 16385 steps will run forever.

people are interested in benefiting from this

Come to the dark side, we have untold riches and unlimited power.

And cookies!

Does it make me a crony capitalist or a welfare queen when I decide I'd rather the power go to those I can vote out of office than those I can't?

If you think voting significantly changes the government, that just makes you naive. The bureaucrats run most things and are unaccountable.

If the entire government became Libertarian today, it would take less than 10 years for corporations to take total control of governance

Do you mean they'd have private armies in the streets? Like in the US from 1776-1870, before permanent corporations were legal?

I already pay a small fortune in school tax. Let them find the money for it from there.

Last I checked, my local government school has a 3 meg connection because that's what Comcast gives them for free. They have a three million dollar budget but can't find $3000 a year to upgrade that to a hundred meg.

It could be that after all the teachers' salaries and benefits are paid for they don't have any money left (and considering the reams of copy paper we get home...) or it could be that high-speed internet allows remote teaching which is seen as a threat to union jobs.

I do work for one private school (area towns tuition their kids there) and they paid a lot of money to get fiber brought to their facility.

The incentives are aligned differently.

I fail to understand the reasoning for choice as well.

I think I get this.

One example: I have a handful of shell and perl scripts that I use to manage virtual machine interdependencies at startup time - this vm needs to be listening on this port before I can think about starting this other vm, etc. and I express that in a JSON tree for configuration.

I've recently been noticing that the dependency "engine" is a bit buggy and also duplicates much of what systemd already provides (pre-dating it by some years), so I'm going to look at making it work with systemd instead and cutting out a bunch of the code. That also gets me pretty easy dependency tracking on various filesystem mounts, network status, etc., so it could be better than 'sleep 20' in some spots.

Now, if I wanted to offer that up to the community, somebody could choose to package that into Debian. Assuming my experiment works, systemd would be a hard requirement to use this particular system.

Somebody in the Debian community proposed that for this package to be accepted I would also have to [re]write another dependency engine and support that. I can't see doing that if the systemd approach works.

Does it make sense that people who don't want to run systemd (which is fine) also can't impose additional work on developers who do want to use systemd?

Web Browsers DID used to accept self-signed certificates (and certificates signed without a known CA - or cert-chain.) People just clicked through and accepted them willy-nilly. That was a poor security model.

The poor security model was browsers asking for confirmation for self signed certificates.

What browsers should have done is:

self signed certificates or unknown CA - how the "unencrypted web" works today.
No encryption at all - popup "are you sure you want to connect"
Signed certificate - tick (check) mark (instead of padlock) to show that the site is verified.

Now that browers are hiding the "http/https" bit from most people anyway it makes even less sense to treat self signed certificates as less safe/require more warning than a normal http connection.

In the Tipping Point you advance the argument that it was better policing against minor infractions that reduced crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Economist Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New York City's crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police department and "Fixing Broken Windows" (as claimed in The Tipping Point). In Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease in crime to two primary factors: 1) a drastic increase in the number of police officers trained and deployed on the streets and hiring Raymond W. Kelly as police commissioner (thanks to the efforts of former mayor David Dinkins) and 2) a decrease in the number of unwanted children made possible by Roe v. Wade, causing crime to drop nationally in all major cities -- "[e]ven in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing"."

However, it looks like the drop in crime is most closely correlated with the fall in environmental lead (mostly from reducing the used of leaded gasoline). Since other places have seen their crime rate fall without drastic changes in policing, what do you think of the lead and crime connection? See also:
"America's Real Criminal Element: Lead; New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. "
http://www.motherjones.com/env...

especially since storing the bitcoin keys can't really be seen as presenting any sort of hardship to them

I would have just guessed that Lockheed Services is charging them $400K/mo to store them.

I was going to say $40K/mo, but you know, the first rule of government contracting.

in a nice posh fortune 500 org where such resources are available to HIM

In many cases this can be true, but consider a case where there's a zero-day in the MS TLS implementation. The only possible thing that can be done here is to have a pre-existing TLS interception mechanism deployed (local CA root on workstations with on-the-fly cert regeneration on the proxy) and have that be on a non-MS platform.

Even if that's a good idea, many F500 companies won't have that deployed, much less the F50000.

There are some situations where not only is extensive testing not possible, it's the stupid decision. I realize many corp-o-drones have CYA policies to hide behind while they make bad decisions, but I still would not want to be the guy who followed policy and got his internal network completely infested.

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (Critical)

Since XP and 2003 usually go together. I didn't find a technical discussion link on the advisory but if this is the buffer overflow in the TLS library that has been making the rounds recently, this could be the one that finally kills the XP machines on the 'net.

Unless Microsoft backpedals again and enables the XP holdouts for a while longer.