How do you spend 1/3 a billion $ and get Firefox?

I mean, seriously, help me out here?

He answered this question on August 6, 2008 in Elkhart, Indiana during the 2008 campaign, when he was asked the question by a 7 year old girl, and couldn't deflect her into talking about oil prices. He said: “America is , uh, is no longer, uh what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.”

He failed to indicate what date "what it once was" applied to.

Here's the youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I would say that he's been about as successful at this as he has been in keeping his campaign promises to get us out of the two foreign wars, start no new foreign wars, and close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which he promised to do in the first 90 days of his presidency. In other words, not very successful.

Not that anyone is actually keeping score, but...

Other campaign promises not kept:

- end tax deductions for companies that offshore
- Introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill in my first year in office
- No signing statements to nullify instructions from Congress
- No family making less than $250K will see "any form of tax increase" (ACA, we're looking at you...)
- term limit the DNI (Director National Intelligence)
- call for and support a human mission to the moon by 2020
- tax deduction for artists
- tax incentive for new farmers
- windfall profits tax on oil comanies (we could use this one about right now...)
- limit subsidies for agribusiness
- antimonopoly laws strengthened to favor independent farmers
- Scholarships to recruit new teachers
- Restrict warrantless wiretaps
- public option for the National Health Insurance Exchange
- Restore superfund so polluters have to pay to clean up their messes
- Same sex adoption equality (still state by state, and not in most states)
- require companies to disclose personal information breaches
- ban racial profiling by federal agencies
- roll back earmarks to 1994 levels
- national catastrophe insurance reserve for things like a future Katrina
- allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms (sister is losing her house over this one)
- work with Russia to step down nuclear defense postures (har har - that's working out)
- double federal funding for cancer research
- strengthen ADEA (Age Discrimination in Employment Act)
- low carbon fuel standard
- require 25% reneable by 2025 (guess it was based on Solyndra not being a scam)
- reinstate special envoy for the Americas
- global fissile materials production for weapons treaty
- global education fund to offer alternatives to jihadi schools
- international group to aid Iraqi refugees, including providing $2B in funding
- help resolve the Cyprus situation
- Sign Freedom Of Choice Act
- penalty free "hardship withdrawls" from retirement accounts
- annual "State of the Word" address
- all new vehicles to support flex-fuels by 2012
- health care reform to be negotiated in public, on CSPAN
- cap and trade system for carbon emissions to reduce global warming
- use revenue from above to support clean energy, environmental restoration (hard to do if there's no system, isn't it?)
- call for congressional leader consulting group on national security, and consult with them prior to major military action
- reduce the number of federal middle managers
- increase supply of affordable housing (Hi, San Francisco! Allow buildings over 4 stories without a zoning variance yet?)
- UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
- pay for national service plan without increasing deficit
- Increase federal minimum wage to $9.50/hour
- reduce veterans benefits claims backlog
- allow import of prescription drugs from e.g. Canada
- double IAEA budget so it's no longer understaffed
- double spending on foreign aid
- double the Peace Corps
- create Federal Autism Spectrum Disorder czar position
- require "plug-in" fleet at White House within one year of being elected
- half of all federal fleet purchases plug-in hybrids or all electric by 2012
- ratify the CTBT (comprehensive test ban treaty)
- double federal funding for Charter School Program (guess this was before the Atlanta scandal?)
- double funding for after school programs
- forbid bonuses to executives of companies declaring bankruptcy
- expand FMLA to cover domestic violence and sexual assault
- White house Privacy and Civil Liberties Board to get subpoena power
- end income tax for seniors earning $25K (healthcare.gov, anyone?)
- require employers to give 7 paid sick days per year
- cut typical family health insurance premium by up to $2.5K/year

Predicting the weather is interesting, it's just substantially less interesting than it used to be back when all we had was The Farmer's Almanac. The incremental value in funding a much larger supercomputer *now*, rather than having you slowly expand an existing one over time, and as budget allows, is fairly negligible.

Can you point to a paper where a new, much faster system (one that requires putting the U.S. back in the "#1 super computer" position) is needed?

How about you find out who the top 5 systems are, and run that model on their systems instead, to see whether it's going to be sufficiently better than the current system to merit investing in the equipment in a U.S. facility, because it will have that much value to have a U.S. facility dedicated to the task?

Does it calculate the Fibbonaci sequence faster?

If not, then who the hell cares who has the most hardware to throw at a "throw hardware at it problem"?

Most of the interesting problems are no longer "embarrassingly parallel". All the rest of them, if we care about getting them solved faster, we'll throw hardware at them to the degree we care about getting the result faster.

If you put in some amount of hardware, and then putting in 10x that much hardware doesn't solve the problem faster, then you computer is not "more super".

Still subject to traffic analysis.

Most of the information they want in the first place is "who is talking to who when and for how long", which is still in the clear, even if there is end to end encryption. So most of the important data, what government agencies in the news have called "Just Metadata", is still capable of being intercepted (and is).

Once they have an associative pattern that they think indicates a crony in an illegal activity, *THEN* they target the content of the conversation. In this particular case, it should be possible to MITM the conversation as well, with a combined order for keys and gag order, the same as is done to compromise SSL conversations right now, by forcing the CA to sign new certs for the requesting agency, and using them to proxy the conversation.

In other words, this is not a magic "big win" for privacy.

Even millions of stoves are nothing, compared to this: http://rsta.royalsocietypublis...

Yes. It does.

It means all they care about is collecting registration fees, and they smog test fees, and while they are generally named "The Department of Public Safety", they really don't give a crap about public safety, if they let you drive around with worn-out brakes, misaligned headlights, cracked windshields within the drivers field of view, and all the other things they wouldn't let you get away with in 17 U.S. states.

In point of fact, they are doing the minimum necessary work to be able to collect the maximum amount of fees,

Here's the Utah version of the Vehicle inspection manual for "PASSENGER VEHICLE AND LIGHT DUTY TRUCK"; notice that you must pass a 78 point inspection (minimum; some vehicles require more points of inspection). Inspections can take several hours, as they examine your gearbox and motor mounts, and run alignment leveling tests, rocker arm tests, and so on:

http://publicsafety.utah.gov/s...

The point of this is to make sure that your vehicle is safe to be on the road, and you aren't going to kill someone due to an equipment failure.

-

Personally, I don't see *why*, if an inspection *should* be required in Toronto for someone to operate their private vehicle on behalf of Uber, that some dumb-ass felt that as long as Uber wasn't involved, it's perfectly fine for you to pack your grandmother and three kids into a car that *wasn't* inspected.

This dual standard for "passengers" vs. "passengers" speaks volumes about them not actually giving a damn about actual safety as they do about revenue collection.

17 states require annual or biennial inspections

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

I was mistaken; it's been a long time since I was up there. It appears that the laws have been relaxed in most Canadian provinces, other than New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which still have hard requirements on safety inspections because they care about their citizens safety. I'm sorry your government in Ontario no longer cares.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Inspections?

"increased risk to passenger safety – no mechanical vehicle inspections, lack of driver training"

This claim is at least specious.

Yearly vehicle safety inspections are required in Ontario for regular cars, just like in Utah. Pretty much every snow state has similar requirements (except California, because what they care about is revenue, not actual public safety).

Buy the kid a used Commodore64

http://popular.ebay.com/comput...

After. Yes, it includes the subsidies being renewed.

The Deutsche Bank's projection assumes that there will be three things happening, which are unlikely:

(1) It assumes that the door-to-door sales model of whatever solar technology happens to be cheapest on the Thursday they ring your doorbell will result in substantial cost savings which can then be kept back from the consumer as additional profit

(2) It assumes that the utility companies aren't installing all those "smart meters" so that they can tariff at differential metering rates - in other words, pay you less for the electricity than what they sell it to you at - as they are already doing in some markets (i.e. they pay you the wholesale spot market price, but charge you the retail peak price already in some markets

(3) It assumes the ITC (Investment Tax Credit), which is set to phase from 30% to 10% by the end of 2016, will be renewed so that you are paying a subsidized price for the hardware (actually, that money would go to Vivint, not the home owner, since Vivint continues to own the solar system themselves, and merely sells the electricity to the customer on a monthly basis; as soon as the phase out hits, look for a price hike)

So Deutsche Bank gave them a buy rating, but Citigroup gave them a neutral rating, and while the stock at IPO opened at $17.01 on initial trading on October first, it's now mid-November, and they're down to $11.25 a share, which is a drop in investment value of just under 34%; call it losing a third of its value.

I think I'm with Citigroup on this one; I think Deutsche Bank is overly optimistic in assuming that the ITC won't sunset on schedule, and I think they are optimistic about people being OK effectively just switching power companies, and not owning - or getting the tax benefits from - the solar themselves.

Are you kidding?!? It was specifically a claim that Google broke a law - 15 U.S.C. 1–7 by not ranking using the same criteria as Bing and Yahoo (which is ridiculous anyway, since Yahoo is "powered by Bing!" so of course it has the same rankings).

You can read more about the Sherman Antitrust Act here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

And yet, where do people want to be treated when they contract Ebola? What nations have active R&D for an Ebola vaccine? A Malaria vaccine? And in India, who actually uses the state run healthcare when private is an option? And in the U.K., how do you skip the NHS wait queue for something like hernia surgery? And in Canada, where do you go when the government health care system refuses to fix your knee because you're a computer programmer, and having a working knee is not necessary to your job function?

I guess there is room for a *little* privatization...

I'll consider filing bug reports for them, although I feel that it's probably more of a job for a QA person being paid by Google to do the work, rather than my job, seeing as I am not currently with Google. At present, none of the projects where I had considered using Go have used Go because of these deficiencies, so I have no real incentive to do the legwork for free, if it's going to take me away from other work.

Here's a partial list of interfaces that are implemented in the Libc portion of Libsystem, rather than directly as system calls, and are therefore unavailable to call from Go:

bsd_signal, confstr, creat, crypt, encrypt, ftw, gethostid, gettimeofday, getwd, killpg, nftw, semctl, setpgrp, setregid, setreuid, shmctl, sigsetmask, sigblock, sigpause, sighold, sigrelse, sigignore, statvfs, tcgetsid, uname, utmpx
etc., including all 32 POSIX1e ACL related commands, almost all pty related code, much of termios.

Here's a partial list of system calls which use an additional parameter/error checking/descriptors at the user/kernel boundary, and therefore randomly exhibit POSIX non-compliant behaviour when called from Go programs:

posix_spawn, posix_spawnp, pthread_create, pthread_mutex_lock, pthread_mutex_unlock, fork, kill, sigaction, sigvec, etc. ...like I said, a job for a QA person to identify them all.

Ideally, what would happen, is that The Open Group VSU, VSX, VSTH, and VSRT tests, at a minimum, would be converted to Go, and verified that they get the same results as their C language counterparts when run against any UNIX or UNIX-like platform. Barring that (due to licensing expense), the Open Source LSB-FHS, LSB-VSX, and LSB-OS tests would be used instead.