Sure, the government makes mistakes but they've also helped bring us cleaner and safer food, cleaner and safer water, and cleaner and safer air. They had to did these things because unregulated private industry was all too comfortable poisoning people to save a little money and they'd still be doing it if they could get away with it.

It's fair to argue over the details behind the new regulation but the financial services industry earned these modest restrictions because they've proven that they are, as an industry, completely unable to reign in the sorts of behavior that led to this crisis.

We've reformed the tax code before to simplify it and it bloats back up. The reason it bloats back up has to do with getting those last few votes on a close bill. One of the things the voting public tends to measure the success of representatives and senators by is not only how much federal money they can bring home but by how much money they can keep from going to the feds by adding a few more special provisions to the tax code. You can't just reform the tax code without reforming how changes are made to the tax code later or we'll be right back where we started.

As for the IT angle, the managers at the IRS are scared of automating a decade’s long process because computers can greatly improve the efficiency of many things like screwing up a couple million tax returns on a bad afternoon. It doesn't help much that the tax code has significant changes every year and the IRS is almost universally demonized so getting resources and good support is probably difficult.

I think it's so much worse than that. With the Zune/HD and and it's new phone offerings Microsoft is trying to out-Apple Apple and they are terrible at it. Not only do they come out with hardware that is a generation behind what Apple has out in the market:
- big old iPod (a few years later) big old Zune
- skinny iPod (a few years later) skinny Zune
- iPod touch (a couple of years later) Zune HD
- iPhone (a couple of years later) this thing

Not only are they late to market copycats but they don't execute nearly as well as Apple. While the hardware is arguely a bit better in the Zune HD compared to an iPod touch there aren't many apps for it because they've made it nearly as hard, if not harder, for third parties to release apps for the Zune HD and they don't have the marketshare to pull off that kind of douchebaggery. The postion they should have taken is what Google did with the Nexus 1 and make it easier to develop and release software for it. One of Microsoft/PC strengths in the early days was that it was a more open development platform than what Apple had to offer.

I don't think there is real hope of Microsoft's new phone really competing with the iPhone or Nexus 1 but if they really want to make a go of it get then they need mindshare. To do that they start with the Zune HD if that's the platform they're going to build on by adding a microphone, adding speech to text, sponsoring a Skype client, adding a camera, and give developers something more interesting to do than make yet another twitter client.

'morphed from valued, responsible executives into insubordinate and self-serving schemers

Apparently these lawyers don't think judges and juries know what executives are.

I don't care if my print job caused it. I am not cleaning that disgusting vein jam out of the printer!

From what I've seen with these kinds of projects we tend to start off with a very complicated yet somehow vague mandate. Hospitals spin their wheels trying to become compliant and generally do a poor rush job at the last minute. When this becomes painfully obvious the deadline is extended and everyone eventually does a somewhat adequate job at becoming more or less compliant most of the time.

In sort it works like every other giant IT project and we're still in phase 1.

We do seem to be in a period of diminishing returns with the top-of-the-line consumer PC hardware. Argueably we're at a point where it's difficult to add more performance to a single core and from the benchmarks I've seen suggest that we're getting to a point where adding more cores isn't helping that much for most consumer PC use.

The biggest challenges we have today are getting more processing performance from less electricity because we're running more things on batteries and quiet computers for the home theater (which tends to mean fanless which tends to mean less heat which tends to mean less electricity) and I don't see that going away. The prime motivator for high-end PC hardware is high-quality gaming and that is a shrinking market as publishers focus on console development because of piracy.

Western children today are inheriting a legacy of squandered resources, environmental destruction, and increased global competition. Their futures have been mortgaged time and again by their predecessors. I'd like to think that these are things they could work through enlightened cooperation but in a time of shortage a generation of more aggressive, less warm and fuzzy kids might fare better.

Schools don't generally punish students for breaking laws, they punish students for breaking rules so if they were thinking detention, suspension, or expulsion then they can generally expect to get away with violating the rights of a student as long as they don't push it too far or descriminate too blatently. If they try to hand iffy evidence over to the police for use in a criminal complaint against a kid then the prosecutor might have some issues with being able to use it but there is very little chance of a school getting in trouble for that kind of thing.

As for the other point this seems to be final act in a string of monumentally stupid decisions on the part of everyone involved at the school.
- In theory giving them laptops might save money by requiring fewer expensive text books and it could help out with a couple of classes but in practice it's probably a pretty bad idea because of porn, warez, vandalism, and apparently the terrible judgment of the administrators etc.
- Getting them laptops with webcams is a terrible idea because kids are dumb enough to take pictures of themselves nude on a school computer without help of the administrators. It's a damn good idea to keep yourself out of the equasion when it comes to pictures and videos of nude children.
- Setting those laptops up with spying software is beyond stupid unless it was intended to help track down stolen laptops and even then they should have exceptionally tight controls on the use of something like that. I'd say that the bare minimum for using this kind of thing would be a police report filed by the student stating the laptop was stolen and having a police officer present when the software is used.
- Using the software to track down students skipping school, drinking, looking at porn, doing drugs, having sex, etc. is a horrible idea that is almost certainly criminal.

In much the same way the aliens in War of the Worlds were destroyed by simple micro-organisms they were ill equipt to deal with, the Superbowl has a simple yet fatal weakness when it comes to the common human nipple. If the NFL gives you any guff about your party just lift your shirt and flash your nipples in a manner similar to the Care Bear Stare until they flee in terror.

I think we're moving away from high cost fighters and into fleets of low cost drones. The google tells me that an F22 runs about $150+ million each and a predator drone runs about $4.5 million. The training/maintenance/and other support costs are much lower for drones and the costs should go down since you'll make many, many more drones than larger aircraft.

I know our drones now aren't air to air fighters yet but a squadron of drone fighters would probably run a lot cheaper and be nearly as effective as a couple of big expensive planes. I'd also expect that it might be a little easier to stealth up a drone than something that has to carry a person and a drone could perform manuvers that a plane couldn't do safely with a human pilot inside. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, and PC game makers have also been training a generation of drone pilots for free.

Sick people don't have money because they spend it all on hospitals and medicine but horny old fat people have tons of money. If Dr. Jack wants some serious grant money he'd better try to turn fat cells in boner cells. He can use some of that cash to help him make Michael J. Fox less shaky and hell, why not give him a giant wang while he's at it.

He'd be great in a commercial, "Hi, I'm Michael J. Fox. You may have noticed that I'm a lot less shaky these days and I also have a giant wang now. I owe it all to Dr. Jack." Boom! Instant Nobel Prize.

If the little iPod is the nano (1 billionth) then this new big one should be: iPod Giga.

I say they use the Indian rope trick to setup a space elevator. Between the weaving needed for the cable and the hundreds of millions of people with those flute things to lift it, I think they have the technology to make this happen.

The next space race should be about who can take the largest, most unweildly animal to the moon, let it run around, and bring it back safely. I say we try to a gorilla or a buffalo or a bear in a space suit that fits them and let them run around the moon a little bit and then the animal returns a hero. If that works we start with marine life. Let's put an enclosed dolphin tank on the moon and do a little show and then bring it all back home.

If we're doing this for science we can send probes cheaper and safer. If we're doing this for glory then send a giraffe or hippo.