Another issue is that US forign aid often comes with the stipulation that the aid money can only be spent on US manufactured products. So, in many cases it's as much industrial subsidy as it is aid.

You could put it that way. Or you could say that the government has been taxing half as much as it needs to pay for the wars, military, and pork that the general population keeps asking for.

To be fair, Windows is the dominant platform and the hardware vendors do a lot of work to make sure that everything runs well on that OS. Linux isn't so dominant, so there's no guarentee the hardware will work. Same is true for any alternative OS, even windows... You can't always rely on your old hardware to work with the latest Windows OS, nor can you expect your newest hardware to work on older OS... Try installing Windows 2K on an modern laptop if you don't believe me.

With that said, my last few Linux installs have been absolutely flawless, with no driver or install issues. Insert CD, press a button everything works. Better than windows actually, because most of my important tools come either pre-installed or are just an apt-get or yum away.

The only issue I encounter these days involves installing closed source drivers and applications, and those usually just involve adding an extra repository. Even then, the whole process is usually simpler than downloading and installing a binary blob.

TL;DR version: Use supported hardware and everything will work like a charm.

How much is a "decent wage?" I hear people all the time talk about a "living wage" on here, but nobody puts a dollar figure on it. Give me something concrete. What should the high-school drop-out ditch digger (or whatever) who has learned no marketable skills make? What kinds of things should someone making a "living" wage be able to buy? What things are over the line? For example, how new a car, what kinds of food, cell phones, cable TV, how big of house or apartment? Should this "living wage" increase because people live in a certain area, or should we pay them more because they have a bunch of kids? I want to know what a "living wage" really means.

Won't bother responding to the rest of your comment, but did want to address this. There isn't a fixed dollar amount for a living wage, because a living wage is strongly corrolated to the area in which one lives. A living wage in Cambodia is much lower than a living wage in Tokoyo.

Here's a starting point to understand what a living wage means:

http://finances.msn.com/saving-money-advice/6952105

Pointing out that the wealthiest americans are becoming a huge drain on society isn't class warfare, it's a reality. These are the people who will do what they can to cut jobs and reduce expenses. Jobs are created by demand for goods and services. Since the US has become a service oriented economy, employment is driven primarily by consumerism. Consumerism is driven by the middle and lower classes. If you want to strengthen our economy, focus on those classes. The rich will benefit from it as well.

Your business could be built on IBM and RedHat products. Doesn't change the fact that Facebook, Google, and Amazon are now the biggest players in the online services & marketing market.

I for see two classes of tickets... fix-ot tickets for errors caused by mechanical failure, and rules of the road tickets for issues with the instructions given to the automated driver, such as instructing the automated driver to speed.

Under law, fix-it tickets are the responsibility of the vehicle owner, and rule of the road violations are the responsibility of the operator. Seems to map fine to an automated vehicle.

Only real changes I for see to the law are new licensing rules, regulations requiring ways for the police to inspect the driving plan of the vehicle, and possibly rules requiring a way to make bug reports available to the vehicle manufacturers.

It's up to you to determine which CA's you trust. I don't consider that part of the infrastructure to be terribly broken. Certificate revision on the other hand, is an area where we need to improve significantly. I'd like to see compromised root certificates revoked, and infrastructure for for distributing those revocation lists more widely available.

I trust self signed certificates for my own purposes. For internal websites, it makes a lot of sense to maintain my own CA, and sign my own certificates, and distribute my own public keys. This provides additional flexibility internally, and helps keep costs down. It's also handy if I want to proxy SSL encrypted sessions.

When dealing with 3rd parties, I still want a certificate signed by a major CA. It might not be perfect, but if you don't go to the efforts to complete the process, I'm going to assume you haven't bothered with a lot of other security measures as well.

This misses the point that trusting self signed certificates significantly reduces the security of CA signed certificates.

In order to protect against Man in the Middle and other identity based attacks, Google needs a way of certifying that the remote machine is who they say they are. If the service trusts an self-signed certificate, there's nothing preventing a 3rd party from performing a MITM attack by intercepting your traffic and re-signing it with their own key. The only workaround would be to use a known_hosts based system, similar to SSH. This however increases the costs of administration, and still provides avenues of attack.

I generally agree with Google's move. I think it's a bad thing to compromise the security of CA certs in order to support self-signed certs.

How is this different than any other environmental disaster? Are you aware that huge swaths of land have been rendered uninhabitable by mining and other industrial operations? That spills caused by oil drilling have residual environmental impacts decades after cleanup? If an uninhabitable zone is your concern, what about the huge swaths of land consumed by hydro-electric, solar, and wind power?

http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/
http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org/Issues/AlaskaCoal/CoalMineReclamation.html

...do it on a motorcycle.

Personally, I'd like to explore forbidden or deadly places. Islands that are restricted to humans, old military missle silos... The inside of the Chernobyl reactor.

Seriously guys, are we complaining that wages are back up to .com levels? Am I the only one who remembers that as a few years of obscenely wasteful spending? Hell, I was a 16 year old making $40K a year back then.

Could you imagine a banker complaining that they aren't back up to 2006 level salaries?

* Bangs head against desk *

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographical_considerations

Yes, duh. I don't know about your school, but in mine they taught us that Columbus showed the world was round. In fact, the Spanish had a pretty clear idea that the world was round at the time, and even had a pretty good estimate of it's size. The reason Columbus had such a hard time financing his voyage to circumnavigate the earth is that the Spaniards rightly knew that there was no way he'd make around the world with the supplies he could carry.

This is a great example of wrong information being taught in school. I can list many others, such as Science teachers explaining that Gyroscopic forces balance a bicycle, that Pluto is a planet, etc.

We teach the best of our science, and we teach the scientific process so that children will understand how to handle new information. Kids should know what a scientific theory actually is, and understand that the knowledge changes over time, and is not set in stone.

You mean, like teachng kids that Pluto is a planet or that the Spanish thought the world was flat?

This is not true in all cases anymore. The US recently passed laws banning 'sex tourism' which is the act of hiring certain classes of prostitutes while traveling abroad, even when engaging in those acts is legal in other states. The purpose of the law is to prevent US citizens from engaging in sexual acts with young children in foreign countries, even when such acts are legal in the country where the act occurred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_tourism#Child_sex_tourism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003

It's no longer a one time pad, if you use it twice.

You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.

You're also being pedantic and confusing in that sort of way that detracts from a conversation rather than adding to it.