The NSA was _able_ put in back doors. According to the report, the build environments were not safe enough and well enough controlled, or verified, to _prevent_ back doors. Given the NSA's strong interest in having one, and their level of skill, I'm afraid I'd have to assume that they did, indeed, create one. Whether a system that is at risk of such a back door is good enough for personal or even business is something you'd have to decide on a personal basis.

It does seem a good step in the right direction for open source tools to _get_ a thorough security audit, rather than merely relying on "many eyes" to ensure security.

I'm afraid I've seen some very dangerous maneuvers of people pulling off to take a phone call. I'm afraid I've even done them when I was on call and on my way to an urgent job site, and had to reset my priorities for taking such calls.

Zipcars are actually a problem this way. I've used them occasionally while traveling, and they've been quite useful. But as is inevitable when borrowing someone else's car, the controls are "intuitively" re-arranged into inconsistent confusion on most of the cars I've used. As a simple safety measure, I try to schedule the first 10 or 15 minutes of any car rental to just find all the controls: lights, emergency blinkers, parking brake, heat and air conditioning, emergency brake, getting the trunk and hood open, cigarette lighter sockets for power connections, radio controls, adjusting the seats, fuel and water and oil nozzles, console displays for fuel and temperature and speed, etc.

We need cars to have safe places to hold the cell phone, possibly tied to the car's audio. While many modern cars have a USB connection to the car stereo and for recharging a cell phone, there is no safe place to deposit your cell phone so it can continue to give directions or be voice controlled. The result is a mad scramble to put your phone down somewhere in the right orientation so it will continue to give good directions. Or worse, flailing around to run your finger across the "accept this call" slider without crashing the car. That part is not helped by voice->text systems, or an ear bud.

Oh, I'd want the rednecks on _my_ team. Like these guys:

          http://channel.nationalgeograp...

For an example on the "speed and effectiveness" of corporate standard setting, you need look no further than the Microsoft designed "OOXML" standard. It's greased rails acceptance over the loud protests of competent engineers, and the political process abuse that led to its acceptance, led to Microsoft tools being labeled as "standards compliant" when they clearly did not even follow the OOXML standards that were railroaded through ISO acceptance.

That event led a lot of people to _resign_ from ISO, because the "corporate speed" led to a badly fractured standard which not even its own sponsoring compoany followed or could hope to follow.

I'm glad it's improved for your laptop: I agree that it's gotten better especially for laptops and SSD drives. I also agree that UEFI is helping. Unfortunately, I've tended to deal with servers, where it is _not_ a solved problem.

That is a good point. It's still a limitation for restarts.

I think that not many have permanent _magnets_ in them. Just plain metal, such as pins in the leg, or even a hip implant, are apparently nowhere near so risky.

Iraq does not have a democracy. It has a foreign mandated puppet government. that government is frightened of losing its foreign support, funding, and the weaponry they've come to rely on to protect themselves from the most radical, anti-American movements in Iraq. The racial and religious discrepancies between Kurd, Shiite, Sunni, and Arab remain a source of homicidal guerrilla warfare against the very American supported government that is supposed to resolve their differences.

There's a fairly good analysis, if excessively optimistic, at http://www.google.com/url?sa=t...

Please relax. I'm not discrediting the existing research. I'm saying that doing "pure science" is not a protection against failure to gain tenure. Granting tenure, like other promotions, is often far more a social and political decision than a scientific one. And yes, "failure to get certain results" can be one of those social and political grounds. To ignore the human element of tenure and to believe that it's a purely "scientific" decision is to ignore a tremendous number of lawsuits involving tenure.

Or a 1U server full of SSD drives, or from a decade ago full of laptop hard drives?

There are quite a few things that slow booting systems. Systemd is _supposed_ to take a lot of the slow, sequential starup out of the actual system daemons: it will be a while before it's really working well for critical, production systems, but that can take minutes off of startup time in a large environment. Note, also, that much of its "startup advantage" is illusory. Daemons are told to start up, and systemd keeps them starting up, but they're not necessarily available for quite some time after startup. This especially applies to databases and bulky Java applications.

The kernel startup is another big factor. Scanning for, assessing, and activating drivers for all the potentially available hardware is a slow and painful process because the upstream specifications are poorly documented, and even violated by many vendors. Many of them are legacy drivers and could in theory be discarded in most production kernels, but doing so can be quite tricky and hard to test for enough strange configuration cases.

The third big software factor is the BIOS. "coreboot", formerly "LinuxBIOS", is blazingly fast compared to most proprietary BIOS's. It has made some inroads but is still not available for any commercial systems I can find. So no matter what is done in the other two factors, the BIOS is still a limiting factor of suspend and restore delays.

> Agreed, and 500 years is not really a large enough sample on a planet that is billions of years old either

Yes, it is. Given that it has strong annual cycles, solar fluctuations with sun spots, and measurable cycles of _much_ shorter than 500 years that have already demonstrated their success in agricultural and urban planning, the existing record has already demonstrated its usefulness and effectiveness. Extending it _in detailed prediction_ is not feasible for such a chaotic system. Even biological changes, such as the advent of chlorophyl, have profoundly modified climate worldwide. Add in the occassional meteor impact, such as the dinosaur, and precise prediction over such long periods becomes nonsensical.

But measuring and analyzing short term changes? It's already well established that weather prediction for events like annual rainfall _work_.

> Tenure track positions don't disappear if they don't get certain results.

The tenure track position won't disappear, no. The tenure candidate will simply not _get_ tenure, it will go to someone else: Getting tenure is a very, very competitive business.