The "crisis" is entirely manufactured by Congress. Yes, Congress. They (and by "they," I mean mostly Republicans who seem to want to drive the post office into bankruptcy) required that the Post Office prepay pensions to the extent that no other business is required to do.

This is exactly their modus operandi for pretty much every government agency these days. Cut funding where possible, demand crazy requirements on spending, saving, oversight, personnel, etc., and then when a cash-strapped agency burdened with the bureaucracy necessary to follow those requirements and things like pre-paying pensions 75 years in advance fails to perform, decry the inefficiency and waste of the government and demand that the function the agency performs be privatized.

It's called "starve the beast."

I meant to include this link - the USPS has a 13 billion dollar surplus sitting in its retirement accounts.

The USPS doesn't run on taxes, they are self-sufficient. That's why they're not asking for a bailout, but for an end to Saturday mail delivery and other USPS cost saving measures. At the same time, the USPS is generally hobbled by Congressional requirements that they do this or that and overfund their retirement obligations and all sorts of other things.

I'm not totally clear in how that's different from Windows 7/Windows 8. You can press the start button and begin typing the name of your program or document and it looks like it does the exact same thing - although Windows 8 does annoyingly cover your entire screen to do so.

For example, to open Firefox, I don't have to do anything but Win + F + Enter. Almost everything I use is no more than five key presses away.

Puttering along at near-light-speed in a universe 14 billion light years across would only remind you of how isolated we really are.

Not if you were on the ship. There's this fancy thing called "relativity" that would make time fly by if you were traveling at 0.999999999c. If you can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light, you can get anywhere in the universe in seconds.

Dang Slashdot without an edit button. I meant to include this link:
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/US-Economy/PublishingImages/20120229_EssentialEcon9.jpg

It shows the sources of the current budget deficits. Keep in mind Paul Ryan, famed serious "fiscal conservative," voted for every single thing in green.

Obama promised a surge into Afghanistan. He promised an eventual pullout from Iraq, and it looks like he's following through - on Bush's schedule.

Congress shut down Obama's attempts to close Gitmo and forbade him from using any federal funds to do just about anything with it. While I wish he'd tried harder, he did attempt it. I'd be more concerned about the continued NSA wiretapping.

The President is not a dictator. People tend to radically overestimate how much the President can really do.

And yes, the same is true for Bush. Bush couldn't have gone to war without Congress. He couldn't have passed the Patriot Act without Congress. He couldn't have passed No Child Left Behind without Congress. He couldn't have racked up massive deficits without Congress. Heck, even today, virtually our entire deficit (that comes from government policy and not the recession) comes from the Bush tax cuts Congress (including Paul Ryan) passed and the wars.

In history? I don't know. I imagine the South Sea Company or the East India Company are among the contenders. Companies like Standard Oil would also crush Apple. General Electric, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco both hit, in modern times, higher market caps than Apple.

Here's what I got from a quick Google.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/08/22/a-history-of-ridiculously-big-companies.aspx

Point taken, but Apple is not the most valuable corporation "in the history of the world." Even assuming market cap is an accurate representation of value, that's only true for Apple if you don't adjust for inflation.

Thanks. I had not seen that. I have actually seen that notification in IE9 before, actually.

A hash doesn't identify an executable unless you have a list of the hashes of every executable rather than just a blacklist of malware hashes.

And again, this applies only to files downloaded with IE.

And again, the logs are wiped on a regular basis.

Even ignoring all this, you've yet to explain why it is the common man understands perfectly the ramifications of downloaded from an app store, but not that of SmartScreen. Especially when SmartScreen's potential problems are explained.

OK. Care to show me what about that statement is untrue?

What? Can you cite a source that says it works via reputation and not by a simple black list?

What difference does that make from a privacy perspective? How do I legitimately install apps on my (imaginary) iPhone outside of Apple's install channel?

Again, Microsoft is not reporting what you install. It is sending a filename and hash of executables you download via IE to Microsoft to compare against a blacklist.

This is on top of the regular SmartScreen filter, which reports URLs to Microsoft to compare against a blacklist and which has been pretty uncontroversial for years, same as Chrome. (I still disagree with it.)

So you don't like it? Well, there's a big notice explaining what it does giving you the option to disable it. Or you could use Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or whatever and it gets reported to Google instead of Microsoft.

So much users are too dumb to understand the simple description of SmartScreen, but bright enough to think through the implications of downloading apps through the Microsoft Store?