I only vaguely recognized the name Bernie Sanders until just recently when someone pointed me to this congressional hearing where he rips Greenspan a new one. Great Stuff!

This absurd idea that we can sell our amazing business and financial management services to the rest of the world forever is going to kill us just as soon they realize that we aren't especially good at it.

The rest of the world did realize exactly this last year, when all their AAA rated bonds became worthless. The Fed was able to smooth things over by paying them back with a huge amount of tax payer money (to be realized as soon as their books, which they're fighting tooth and nail to keep closed, are finally opened). Or did you think there was another reason the US dollar has been heading straight down the last few months and foreign investors are tapering off their purchases of US assets.

This would make perfect sense if each product team at Microsoft had complete freedom to design their application without consideration for how their app must further the goal of absolute lock-in of the user to the Windows OS and the rest of Office - the true cash cows.

But obviously this is not the case. Otherwise, you'd see things like Asp.Net run well on a Apache stack (without extra mods), a version of SQL Server native to Linux, XBoxes that share media via a standard network interface, Zunes that sync using standard USB mass storage, MSN Messenger for Macs, etc etc.

Well, you make profits here in America? Pay taxes in America. Take the factories anywhere you want. But pay tariff when you bring your goodies here.

That's still too easy. How about this: the execs that move all their factories, jobs, and capital out of America get to move their plush headquarters and themselves to the same place. I mean it is good enough for us peasants, it should be good enough for them too.

You had me going until this:

Many Libertarians are stuck in the world is black or white mode of thought. It is not, and in the case of Comcast and internet access itself, the issue is very gray. Comcast (and its counterparts in all other municipalities) made deals with each community for a monopoly and other subsidies in exchange for agreeing to be more regulated than other industries.

They (and you) have no right to argue that they should not be bound by any 'special' regulation until they give up their monopolies and huge amounts of their infrastructure, which was heavily subsidized by the taxpayers.

I thought exactly the same as did you... until I got a new job where software like RedHat, Oracle, and VMware are used extensively, along with an IT department that is awful about keeping the test machines running and providing developers with their own 'valid' licenses of said software in order to do testing and dev work.

At first, I did what any geek would do: tried to 'mimic' the production environment with my favorites, including my distro-of-the-month (currently Arch Linux). After spending way too much time realizing that things like VMware tools, Oracle, and our own software (designed for RedHat) needed a lot of tweaking to get working, I decided to try CentOS. Let's just say things have been much more smooth with CentOs.

Or is that Americans just don't give a shit about science and engineering any more?

I agree 100%. Americans don't give a shit about science and engineering any more. Why the fuck would they when they know they can major in something like general business, work half as hard as their peers in the engineering department, and make just as much or more, all without the constant worry of being replaced by the team in Hyderabad (or worse - the H1B's from from Hyderabad)?

I say cut our military spending...

icall I used to say this exact same thing. Until I realized I'd been wasting the last few years of my life in the private sector, as a decent and ambitious developer, learning nothing and stagnating. I don't know if it was just the positions I was in, or that all the interesting work has been offshored to Bangalore, but putting up web sites so insurance companies can automate billing was not helping me learn much new technology.

All that changed when I got a job in the military industrial complex. Now I'm doing interesting stuff (mostly geospatial) and actually earning the same as my less intelligent peers who chose to go into insurance sales and law. I'd have to say that the military spending, a huge proportion of which goes to contractors, is basically the only industry allowing US citizens to stay in the forefront, as our universities and other private industries have essentially decided to offshore/import foreigners for all their science and technology needs.

After my university account expired, I went with Fastmail after deciding I did not want my non-throwaway email account to be sold to spammers, open for 'harvesting', or at the whims of some company's profit motives. I went with Fastmail's $20/year account and have been a happy customer now going on 4 years. Features I like best:

• Aliases - instead of having to keep a bunch of throwaway accounts with Yahoo, MSN, etc - I just set up a few aliases. Every so often they're purged, thus the spammers rarely get a hold of my address.
• Secure Imap (and POP3) access on non-standard ports. Corporations have this nasty habit of blocking access to the standard mail ports. I can access my account using my client of choice from pretty much anywhere
• Online storage space (in addition to the mailbox space). This allows me to store things like my resume, some ebooks, and other docs online, and even share it as the files are able to URL accessible. I believe the files are accessible over Webdav, but the web interface is good enough.

They've increased storage space over the years, but this is still one thing I wish they'd improve upon. I don't expect them to offer gigs and gigs of space, nor do I intend to basically store my music collection on their servers, but the 600MB mailbox quota and 100MB file storage limit might be increased a little bit. SFTP access to files would also be cool! Another thing that is bothersome is that my main account uses the .fm. This is non-standard, and I wonder how often it looks a little shady to some people who expect all emails to be of the com, edu, or org variety. Might be nice if they'd register another domain under .com that could be aliased to my main accounts.

Another feature that'd be worth the $20/year itself would be the ability to create aliases under the .edu domain in order to get cheap versions of software! I'm sure this is more difficult than it sounds, though.

I have 7 Internet-connected personal machines at the house (7 Linux boxes, 1 Wintendo).... We've come a long way, baby.

We've come a very long way, but completely skipped past the place where 99% wanted to go. The article actually mentions this specifically - Pulse does neat stuff like Network streaming, but still completely misses the point: A single API for low latency, high quality sound on a single Linux box.

In other words, before we worry about streaming audio to your seven boxes, we first need to get J6P's single laptop able to play an Mp3, while watching a Flash video in the browser, and not crash both when he shuts the lid to suspend.

I've just contacted the Montana ACLU Here

The article links to a video interview with Greg Sullivan Bozeman City Attorney here (right side of page), who defends the policy.

His Contact info:

City Attorney Greg Sullivan gsullivan@bozeman.net 406-582-2309

What I just emailed off to Mr. Sullivan

Greg Sullivan

Your city's requirement for job applicants to provide a list of all personal internet memberships, logins, and passwords has recently come to my attention. I have just requested that the Montana ACLU investigate this policy as it seems a severe invasion of privacy. I have always appreciated the state of Montana's noble defense of the Constitution, exemplified with recent decisions by the state to support 2nd amendment rights. Your city's applicant policy is the exact opposite of what I'd expect from the state of Montana, and I would urge you to seriously reconsider this requirement.

I wish someone in Congress actually served their constituents

We have no one to blame but ourselves. Congress has the lowest approval rating in decades. It's estimated that 'the people' were against the first bank bailouts by a ratio of approximately 300 to 1, though Congress ignored us and overwhelmingly approved it without delay.

And every few years at election time, something like 95% of incumbents are reelected back to Congress. Either We the People are so stupid that we deserve what we get, or our votes are simply being ignored (sometimes I wonder).

My suggestion would be, let's limit it to, say, 20 years and see if people stop creating content. My money is on "they won't stop".

If copyright laws are really intended to 'promote innovation' then I'd even say that 20 years is far too long for most copyrights. I've always argued that music doesn't need more than a year or two, if any, copyright protection. Can you imagine the millions of young people nowadays that aspire to be 'rock stars' losing interest because copyright laws have been shortened. Fame, chicks, and the lifestyle are more than enough incentive to keep talented people pursuing careers in music.

On the other hand, this probably wouldn't work in other fields, such as book publishing, software, etc.

It's amazing to me how the legal system can be just so narrow sighted in some cases.

Simply put, instructors are not paid to develop courses and assess work in any manner that can be considered pedagogically sound.

Maybe that is the problem. I wasn't an undergrad too long ago, and I agree that many of the professors had more 'important' things to do (grad student research, obtaining funding, writing papers, conferences, journals, etc) than worry about their 500 student Comp Sci I course.

This was what really ticked me off. My tuition basically doubled in the 5 years I was in school, and in the end, it was obvious that undergrad students were essentially just subsidizing the research and professional schools of the university.

I've been back and forth between Windows and Linux for the last decade. Then, like now, QT and GTK were the main two competing GUI kits, Gnome and KDE were the two competing desktops. At the time, OSS was the standard audio API, though ALSA was the new kid on the block that was supposed to standardize Linux audio. There were multiple apps for organizing my music, watching videos, writings docs and spreadsheets, browsing the web, etc. None of the apps was as good as its best counterpart on Windows/Mac.

We all knew there were problems with having multiple GUI kits, desktops, audio APIs, and applications that provided the same functionality. This was acceptable, at the time, because we believed that evolution would eventually win, the strong would survive, the weak would die, and Linux would eventually have one standard GUI toolkit, one top-notch desktop manager, one audio API, and at least one great app for each needed function. At the time, we ignored all the complaints and deficiencies because we knew that this process would not happen overnight; we were sure that, in the end, all the competing apps and apis would innovate until a clear winner became dominant. Then, we assured ourselves, Linux would finally take over the desktop.

We believed the same economic BS the neo-cons have been chanting since the 80's. Leave the market alone, and economic prosperity will take care of itself.

Now, same as the neo-cons facing the reality of their collapsed businesses, we see that Linux has failed to standardize. Ubuntu has been forked into at least three semi-popular versions, one for each of the far-from-perfect desktops/GUI kits, contains yet another Audio api, and has a huge repository that allows one to download dozens of audio managers, video players, browsers, word processors, etc - none of which is as good as its best counterpart on Windows/Mac OSX. Ten years of waiting for evolution to fix Linux on its own, both Microsoft and Mac OSX have made major improvements, such that OSX and Windows XP (both pushing many years old, now) are unarguably more polished and stable than the comparable Linux desktop distros.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is time for us (along with the major vendors - RH, Suse, Ubuntu), to start making the tough choices. One desktop/GUI kit, one audio api, one good app for each needed function. That software that depends on the other toolkits, apis, etc. is deprecated. Period.