"the unions" - I love how this is where people go right away. Yes some unions have over-reached no one will deny that. But funny how no one points fingers at the big fucking huge corporations and their management who are making money hand over fist by using what amounts to near-slave labor overseas.

Let me tell you this - if you abolished every union in the US, every single regulation, and cut taxes to ZERO we still would not be able to compete with the labor costs over there. They have people that work 60 hours a week for as little as 300 a month in some Asian countries. Hell 300 dollars a month in the US would not even get you a room in most inner city ghettos.

The global free marketers and the moronic, short-sighted conservative and libertarians among you who support them will be what kills the US not any union or liberal group.

Yes because the President legislates...

A president is in the executive branch - he signs or vetoes laws passed by congress aka the legislative branch.

A president is only as effective as the congress passing (or not) bills for him to sign.

The "Necessary and Proper" Clause in Article One, section 8, clause 18 was implemented to give the federal govt the ability to assume ANY powers not necessarily enumerated in the Constitution.

"The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."

The intent of this was spelled out in the federalist papers - basically they understood things would come up they would not foresee and they did not want to tie down the federal govt from doing what it felt was necessary.

Another thing I was thinking about - the trigger on a gun like that would NOT be easy for a 3 year old child to pull. Something does not seem right.

I use RAID6 for several high-volume machines at work. Having double parity plus a hot spare means rebuild time is no worry.

But if you are not a fan you can always throw something together with ZFS's RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 which is also distributed parity but the ZFS filesystem checksums and keeps multiple (distributed) copies of every block to detect and fix data corruption before it becomes a bigger problem.

People using ZFS have been able to detect silent data corruption from a faulty power supply that other solutions would never have found just because of the checksumming process.

Yeah from some of the stories I have been following on this, it seems some firms even co-locate their machines in the same room with the NYSE trade systems. I imagine that could be quite an advantage over other traders, especially when coupled with some extremely high performance program trade code like Goldman Sachs has been using.

http://www.reuters.com/article/fundsFundsNews/idUSN0518022220090705

The Raptors are already irrelevant. According to this article in the LA Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-f-22-plane22-2009jul22,0,750816.story) they have NOT been used in Iraq or Afghanistan.

All the fighter jets in the world won't win a guerilla war against insurgent enemies.

What is going on now is our military is finally realizing this - the big obstacle to a more nimble military is not the military itself, but the massive multi-billion dollar military industrial complex that refuses to get weened off the teet.

I use a service called everyone.net - allows me to have my own domain name, they support both IMAP (my preference) as well as POP.

They also support secure IMAP/POP/etc. over SSL.

Good service overall and have not had any problems over the last 2.5 years or so that I have been using them.