Whoosh much? I was referring to the strawman kleptocrat government badguys in the book as the source of Obama's inspiration.

Still a dumb idea, no matter where it came from.

You are correct. A fair tax code will tax all types of income and transactions at the same rate so that there is no incentive to hide, dodge, and evade at the expense of investing in your organization and paying dividends to your shareholders. A smart and far tax code will set the tax rate to be about the same as those of foreign jurisdictions to avoid pushing capital offshore.

If there were a flat (say 15 or 20 pct) tax on income, capital gains, and foreign purchases sold to americans, etc, there would be no way to dodge and no incentive to go offshore, because the tax rates elsewhere are the same, and there's no way to structure a payment or income source in a way that avoids taxation at some point along the money's route. The only way it escapes taxation is if it is flat-out transfered abroad and stays there, at which point it gets taxed abroad at a comparable rate.

But then the tax lawyers would be out of work, and guess who tends to run for Congress?

Look deep enough and the company is either a bank (which despite private sector propaganda is very much an arm of the federal government) or is a government contractor staying afloat on no-bid contracts, subsidies, and other sweetheart deals. If there's no bailout mechanism, organizations like that shrivle up and die.

What? They're afraid MIT is full of Pats fans?

Does Obama huddle up with a flashlight and a copy of Atlas Shrugged under the covers every night thinking that it's some kind of instruction manual? Every time I start to warm up to the guy a little, he pulls this kind of nonsense to remind me why I voted against him.

Correct, and the ionosphere is not where the weather all is.

OK, my bad. Somebody who's an RF type: Remind me again if the two GPS bands (civil and military) are chosen for their immunity to or responsivity to atmospheric parameters.

Several 757s are configured for use as Air Force One when the President is going somewhere too small to handle a 747. Honestly, I think risk-averseness is driving the decision to stay with the 747 more than anything else. The president's plane has always been the biggest 4-engined Boeing built, and what's the point of changing that when you don't have to. Will it cost more than some other option? Maybe, but all things POTUS bleed cash anyway, so is it worth modifying a design that fits into a 747 now and having to debug it later for at best a marginal cost savings?

is missing in this notion. Meaningful Earth observation from space is done with cameras that take up more physical space than a cubesat. Yeah, you can squeeze several high definition cameras into a cubesat, but the moment you realize that you need something other than visible band, temperture control on the ccds, and the power-aperture to beam that stuff down to earth in a meaningful timeframe, you've built 1500lb worth of overhead around your tiny little cubesat and you're back in GOES and NPP land.

Exactly. You need to control the hardware with physical security, or none of your fancy software solutions are valid. And yeah, then you have to worry about vendors, and where the factories are, and do you pay your security guards enough.

Here's the problem: if you care about security to the point where screen locks are serious business, you've gotten yourself into a contradictory set of requirements: both trusted and untrusted users have physical access to and execution priveleges on a terminal. If you really suspect that your users are untrustworthy enough to steal credentials in this way, the answer is to not have a screenlock at all but to push the security barrier further into the system. The terminal is dumb and has no security model, but to access and/or interact with your proprietary information, the user types credentials into your own custom coded application or web form through a browser and it logs him out after N minutes and requires reentry of the credentials. He's not allowed to run any code on your system, and all the directories, executables and shell scripts that are run in the course of interactring with the terminal are marked 755 or 744 as appropriate so that he can't modify them, and the tmp dir resides in a ramdisk that gets wiped between sessions. Then it doesn't matter if everything is permitted over the X11 protocol, because there is no way to spoof anything from that untrusted terminal. Physical security goes a long way in obviating risks from software vulnerabilities, where practical. And if the data being guarded is sufficiently important, it will be made to be perceived as practical.

Speaking of... how do they intend to control stray sunhlight reflecting off of this giant disk?

And if memory serves, as recently as the 1860's, the Brits were supplying arms to the Confederacy, so in the late 19th century, it wasn't all smiles and sunshine the way it has been since WW2.

Someone with a biology degree, quick! at what cooking temperature does DNA break up?