No. Look, there are a lot of annoying things about the USPS, but it has only one real problem: it has to deliver to EVERY PLACE IN THE US. When you compare to FedEx or UPS, you miss the point. They go hub to hub, and they don't deliver to low population areas, more less support offices there.

If they cut back to more profitable services, they'd be well in the black, but their "mission" (which is dictated by the govt) precludes this, so there are problems.

Eh. Encryption is hard. Doing it right takes a decent amount of work, and a ton of discipline. There will be more mistakes.

Mines almost 200 years old..I'll be impressed if it makes it to its bicentennial though.

This is based on the idea that everyone wants to run services from home, and that's just not the case for the world outside Slashdot. The vast majority of people would have zero use for that functionality.

The reason people haven't leapt on IPv6 is because it's a pain in the ass. Organizationally, it's probably the worst transition you can imagine. We did a IPv4->IPv4 (public range to private range) transition company wide a few years back, and it was godawful, and that's just for a piddly ass /16 block that already *had* some LANs in the private range, where all sites were WAN'd with high-end routers that were all interconnected in tight BGP circuits that *theoretically* should have just picked up the routing changes.

And it went well. Reasonably. No catastrophic failures. Manageable scheduled downtime. But shifting 10,000+ plus unique addresses is a nightmare, and every time a site moved, we had to spend hours checking servers, and babying the goddamn DCs. I can't think anyone would want to do it if they didn't absolutely have to.

Printed money is like shares in the country...Like, if Apple split its stock today, and doubled the amount of stock it offered, the stock wouldn't be worth zero dollars. It'd be worth less, sure, but Apple is the shiznit, and people would believe that they're still worth it. The same is true with the country, regarding printing more money...You can print as much as you like, but it's worth less and less. "The dollar today fell against the yen, the euro, and blah blah." It's a measure of how strong our economy is that we can print a lot of extra cash, and that cash is still valuable.

Right now inflation is spiking a bit: that's what happens when there is too much money in supply, and the Fed is probably going to raise rates (effectively shrinking the money supply (unprinting money)) soon. If inflation *isn't* controlled, then you can have a massive inflationary spike, and our money becomes effectively worthless: this is the same thing that would happen if we filed national bankruptcy and told all our creditors to fuck themselves.

Besides the fact that it would piss off the entire world, make our currency worthless for items not produced in this country, shut down all foreign investment, and basically destroy our countries economy for 20-30 years? No.

Really, we could just fuck the social security people for a year, and pay the whole thing off with enough left over to have a big fucking party. That's got it's own problems though (roving gangs of pissed off octogenarians, riots at the bingo halls).

It seems like a huge deal right now because the economy is still kinda fragile. Once we're humming along, however, it can be meaningfully reduced. Still think we need to tax the rich fuckers though.

Suck. My. Cock.

Pretentious fucking math weenies OOOooo look, nothing we do has a practical application, look how fucking special we are! NEWSFLASH ASSHOLE, NOBODY GIVES A SHIT. 99% of the world *doesn't* learn that way, and forcing the whole education system to fit that crappy mold is why no one can fucking do math. They don't know what it's FOR.

But of *course* it's not because you're fuckups who can't come up with a decent curriculum. It's because everyone else is stupid. Way to solve the goddamn problem. Oh wait, it's a *practical* problem. Are there any physicists in the house? Chemists? Anyone who uses math for something besides masturbation?

Math education was terrible when I was in school. I am a practical person: without real world problems, I can't get a real handle on anything. When I took Calculus I hated derivatives...It was never explained what they were *for*...It just seemed like masturbation. The next semester I took physics and the prof made some offhanded remark about the equations of motion, and the whole thing became perfectly fucking clear! I had goddamn twitching foaming epiphany right in the middle of fucking class! I wanted to take my heavy ass book and beat the shit out of my calc prof!

The whole idea that math should be taught as if it is completely divorced from the physical world is why everyone hates math.

True. But in this case, it's quite easy to get them unofficially, so the price burden needs to be pretty low.

Read that from the link on PA the other day. Bioware's point was obvious: these male characters have the potential to have developed love interests, so why not allow heroes of either sex to take 'em up on it? They've already done the code on it. Out of the 4 possible romance plots in DA1, two were hetero-only and 2 were bisexual. So what's the problem?

Haven't bothered to play DA2 yet, but I tend to play female characters, and I don't see how any homosexual advance would be more creepy than getting hit on by Alistair. Blech.

If demand is below the price set by the seller, the buyer will acquire the item through alternate channels where available.

Piracy dropped like a stone when cheap downloads became available. If you want to kill it off entirely, stop charging the same price for media that are new and media that are 20 years old.

Yea. The thing I loved about the books was this sense of awakening. Shit hits the fan, the world is falling into darkness, and all these people, forgotten, fallen in glory, old and weakened by time, they all stand up, shake off the cobwebs and ride out to death and glory. Theoden is one of the exemplars of that, lost in depression and despair, and he gets up and rides out like a king, and once he makes that decision, he never turns aside...There is always the sense that he's thinking about it, but every time he chooses the noble course.

Aragorn the same...How much of the second movie has him pulling this emo "I don't know if I'm worthy" crap? They play him like he's 25, but, chronologically, he's almost 100. He knows damn well what's expected of him, and while he kicks himself for bad decisions, he doesn't falter in his course.

I'd forgotten about the bit with Faramir...Blocked it out, because, you're right, they totally screwed him. Same with Eomer: changed from a noble hero who'll do the honorable thing even if it lands him in jail, to some spoiled princeling who absconds with the army and leaves his nation to be destroyed.

I try to pretend in my head that the whole second movie is about Gollum. Otherwise I have to come to terms with Eomer wandering off with the entire army, Treebeard who somehow misses that half his forest is gone until the hobbits point it out, and Théoden's excellent King Lear impersonation while beneath him the entire population of Rohan cradles their children...repeatedly.

Well, since they're imprisoned in the home of the forest elves for a good while, that's not much of a stretch, even.

Except frodo wasn't born until Bilbo was 88 years old...Some 30 years after he came *back* from his adventures.

Given the amount of rewriting he did the first time around, nothing would surprise me.