But for this term, you should act for the people who elected you. That's the principle of representative democracy.

He seems to believe that he is doing exactly that. As he points out, some 200k people who elected him have already switched to the other party. And some people seem to be of the opinion that what you vote for (or against) is more important than what party label you claim. He claims that this will remain unchanged, although I guess time will be the judge of that.

That is, he says 200k registered republicans switched parties in the last election in pennsylvania.

Mostly so they could vote for Hillary or Obama in the presidential primary. But yes, there was a huge shift, and his strongest supporters were among the deserters. He only narrowly won the Republican primary last time he was reelected. Despite the fact that his voting record hasn't changed much since then, he's currently trailing the same challenger by double digits in most current polls.

I agree with your premise, but the banking deregulation that (at least partially) led to the current situation was done under Clinton.

it is essentially less difficult to write exploits for Mac OS/Linux than it is for Windows, given the many anti-exploitation mechanisms Microsoft has embedded in the last years

This is a terrible non-sequitur. Microsoft has made enormous gains in recent years, but only because they were so far behind to start with. It's like saying "Person A ran the 10th mile of the Boston marathon 2 minutes faster then Person B". It's problematic for two reasons. First, it doesn't actually tell you who was ahead at the end of mile 10 unless you knew where the runners were at the beginning of mile 10. Second, it doesn't tell you anything about where the runners will be relative to each other after mile 15.

People should choose a platform based on their productivity requirements instead of purely security.

People should choose a platform based on all of their requirements. Often compromises do need to be made, because there is never a system that does exactly what you need. It's important to be able to identify which needs you are willing to compromise on, and which you are not. If your users can accomplish their work at all, that is a problem. If their work becomes a little more difficult because of the extra security measures, you have to decide whether that's an acceptable trade off, and at one point the line should be drawn.

Furthermore, most of the web servers broken into during these attacks (to be used as command and control servers) were not Windows, but Linux.

Have you determined how the machines were compromised? Generally speaking, Linux web servers are most likely to be compromised through attacks on third party software such as phpBB. If you switch to Windows and keep using the same third party software, you haven't really improved your situation. This, by the way, is where people often get into trouble when assessing requirements. Many people will say "I need an OS that will allow me to run software X", rather than saying "I need a platform that will allow me to perform task Y". By improperly assessing their requirements in the first place, they limit their options in the long run, and in the worst case, they may have restricted themselves to a platform with inherent flaws.

If you're really looking for the most secure software, look around and see what other people who demand security are using. The NSA uses and has contributed heavily to SELinux. I believe that OpenBSD has similar high profile users/contributers although I don't remember any off the top of my head.

Above all, though, it's important to remember that security is a process. Any system can be made secure with enough work. Any secure system will not remain so without continued work. And finally, the most difficult part is also the most important: The user is almost always the weakest link.

I used to have 2, but the KVM switch and half of the computers connected to it only support one monitor. After a while I gave the second to my wife's work. Now I only have one, and I've realized that I don't really miss the second monitor that much. My desk wasn't nearly big enough for it anyway. Of course, the one monitor that I have is a 24" widescreen, so I can already fit multiple code and documentation windows side by side anyway.

The benefit of multiple monitors is additional screen real estate, so if you can get that from one larger monitor, then that's just as good. And I have a hard time figuring out what the software you pointed out could do to give me that benefit without actually having a second monitor.

I'm not taking sides on AS2 vs. AS3, and I'm not saying AS3 is necessarily a bad language. I'm just suggesting that it seems to me that AS2 could have been improved upon substantially without throwing out the entire language. Personally, I have relatively limited experience programming either version of Flash, and I wouldn't mind keeping it that way.

On the other hand, I have many years of experience with JavaScript, which I consider to be a wonderfully powerful and expressive language. I would hate to see all of that thrown out because some Java programmers can't (or aren't willing to) wrap their head around an OO model that doesn't have classes. Yet for a while, it was starting to look like that was exactly what was about to happen.

Just because it is not appropriate for your notebook, does not mean it wouldn't be appropriate for some notebooks. When she's not at work (which unfortunately is most of the time lately), my wife would probably be perfectly happy using a computer that had Firefox, Excel, and iTunes as the only installed applications. You are probably a more atypical user than she is, and as such, you would be expected to pay the higher price for the "full" version of Windows.

You can argue against Microsoft's artificial segmentation of the market if you like, and I think you would have a perfectly valid complaint. But saying that this wouldn't be useful for anyone because it isn't useful for you is rather narrow minded.

Personally, the biggest problem I see with this is that it is ripe for abuse. What counts as an application? I would hope that my AntiVirus software running in the background doesn't count against the limit. But if that doesn't count, then there must be some way to run background applications that don't count against your limit. Do my IM and Music Player count as applications or are they the same as my AntiVirus? If they do count, I suspect it wouldn't take long for some enterprising developer to rewrite them in such a way that they don't. Windows won't let me run Firefox and Thunderbird at the same time? Perhaps we'll see a resurrection of the SeaMonkey project. (And while we're at it, let's through Songbird and Chatzilla in there, too...)

Whether it's more income tax, more sales tax, or more value added tax, I think any of them would be an improvement over the current system. Honestly, I don't take much issue with how much I pay in taxes every year. (How they're spent is a different matter, but I'll leave that complaint for another time.) My biggest complaint is that the system has become so convoluted that there exists an entire industry of professionals whose sole purpose is to help ordinary people figure it all out. I like the idea of a sales tax of VAT because it frees me from having to do any work to figure it out. But if we're going to stick with the income tax, for {$DEITY}'s sake, can we please streamline the process? The government already has a good idea of how much money I make, so let's strip out the majority of the credits and incentives and make the tax forms optional. The IRS can just send me a bill every year on April 15th, and I'll send them back a check if I still owe money. The only time I would have to fill out a form would be if I want to claim a credit or deduction for something that I think the government may not have on record, e.g. charitable giving to my church. And since we've stripped away the majority of the deductions, (for example, encouraging people to go into debt) even those instances should be a much simpler process than what we have to deal with now.

It sounds like they decided to go with shoring up the language as it is currently used rather than make sweeping new changes. Good for them. I'm not sure if it was Adobe's doing or Macromedia's, but they really threw out the baby with the bathwater with the "transition" from ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3. Rather than fixing up the obvious problems with AS2, like silently swallowing errors and gaping holes in the functionality of core objects, they abandoned it entirely and replaced it with some bizarre mutant language from a parallel dimension. I still have to wonder why, if they were willing to completely abandon both backward compatibility and developer familiarity, they didn't just decide to switch to an existing language. As far as I can tell, the only thing that AS3 really accomplished was to reimplement Java, and poorly.

For a while, it looked like the next version of JavaScript was following down a similar path. Glad to see that's not going to be the case.

Unless there is the willingness of the local communities to rezone around transit, invest in dense public transit, increase the cost of flying and decrease the flexibility of driving then high speed rail will only work where it works now.

I think even without large changes in city planning, intercity rail could be cost effective if the government supported it on the same scale that they support highways and airlines (or conversely supported highways and airlines in the same way that they support the railroads...)

Many (most?) of the US airlines receive huge federal subsidies. While Amtrak is also subsidized, it doesn't seem to be nearly to the same extent. When you consider how long it takes to get through an airport these days, and how far out many airports are from the cities they serve, just about any flight under two hours should be just as fast on a train, even without high speed rail. The reason it isn't is because Amtrak is stuck using the same tracks as the rail freight companies (which actually make money) and is stuck always playing second place in routing roulette. There is no practical reason that traveling, let's say, 500 miles by train should cost more than flying by plane and take (at least) an hour longer than driving, considering that the train is vastly more efficient than either alternative. (I picked 500 miles because so long as you are traveling along Interstate Highways, I consider that to be about the cutoff where flying becomes significantly faster than driving.) But who would take a train between cities when they can fly for the same price, and they can drive in less time for a fraction of the price? And of course, as others have pointed out, the only reason driving costs so much less than taking a train is because the government pours such huge amounts of money into highway maintenance.

If rail was were playing on equal footing with highways - either by increasing government rail funding or by making highway funding more dependent on fuel taxes - I can think of a lot of places in this country where train service is currently marginal or non existent that would suddenly become competitive. If that happened first, you may start to see some of the urban planning changes you mention start to come about on their own. But even if they don't, we'd still see some benefits.

Soon? OK, introducing the confusion to top level domains will be new, but there are already millions of opportunities for abuse due to many people's fundamental inability to grasp the idea of a hierarchical domain name. It probably took a year for my wife to be able to remember the difference between google.gmail.com and gmail.google.com. Fortunately, that's a relatively benign example - Google owns both domains, so even though one works and one doesn't, the potential for actual abuse is limited. But I have no doubt that there are scammers out there preying on that very weakness with other domains.

I guess it depends what you consider a flagrant tax cheat. Tom Daschle was definitely an exceptional case, and I'm glad he got pulled from consideration. (Although it does make you wonder, with all the talk about "deliberate haste" how that wasn't caught sooner...) The other two I'm not so sure about. I haven't followed the most recent flap too closely, but $7000 over 3 years is certainly in the range that seems like it could have been an honest mistake. As for Geithner... Well, it was a fair amount of money, but have you ever filed self employment taxes? The last time I did, I made a mistake that was bigger (relative to my actual income) than that. Eventually the mistake was discovered, and it was corrected. We move on...

Of course, in the last administration, the big deal was Cabinet nominees who employed illegal immigrants, and in the Administration before that it was... I don't even remember any more. I'm torn between wondering why it's so hard to find a dozen or so people in Washington D.C. that actually follow the law, and wondering whether the laws have become so Byzantine that they could dig up dirt on anybody.

Wait, you're saying that Stevens was convicted because of Republican political ideology?

Oh, wait, I get it. Because they were Republicans, they deliberately screwed up the case so that Stevens could get off. OK, that makes perfect sense.

Interesting. I've never looked for a job on Craigslist, so I wouldn't know about that aspect of it, but every single item I've bought or sold on Craigslist was paid for in cash. I thought that was the whole draw of Craigslist - by dealing with people face to face and exchanging cash, you don't have to worry about any of the crap.

Your points are valid - I once lived a few blocks a away from a brand new police center plopped into the heart of the Chicago projects (I lived on a college campus; the projects were across the street). However, the article specifically mentions that any time the computer couldn't identify the address - about 4% of the crimes entered into the system - it used a default location in the center of the region being mapped. I've had MapQuest do the same to me on more than one occasion.

Now, that area may still have a larger crime rate than some of the surrounding areas, but not nearly so much as their online map would suggest.