(1) Paper *DOES* "grow on trees"...

(2) There's no problem farming quick-growth trees to supply the pulp, even if you needed to, which you typically don't

(3) Paper recycles into methanol relatively easily, if you aren't interested in recycling it into paper. Yes, I know, this makes ADM sad, since they want us all using ethanol instead of methanol, so they can sell more corn

(4) Making ADM sad should be a long term goal anyway

Yes, that was a big factor; 90% of the USVI fuel came out of HOVENSA, which was the 10th largest crude oil refinery in the world, and most of the energy production is still diesel. So is most of the desalination infrastructure, from which the USVI derives most of its potable and non-potable fresh water (the rest is from rain from the cisterns, which occasionally have to be refilled).

Not to mention they lost most of their higher paying jobs, and $100M in tax revenue in the closure.

Part of the problem is the sunsetting on the Federal Economic Development District status, making it much harder to get an EDC registration, which bumped the tax rate in the area considerably. This mostly has to do with the necessity of working in the context of the university in order to obtain status these days, since the federal government is really wanting to get their hands on Ocwen (William C. Erby's company) and other companies monies, despite previous federal approval.

Practically speaking, I don't know how to reasonably deal with the corruption there (or , any more than I do with the corruption present in Mexico), short of them electing statehood. I think that would only help some, look at the education system in California, and the parks department hiding money trying to pretend it needed more or would shut down the parks, etc., for examples where states have similar problems, despite being under the statehood umbrella.

It changes the user space sufficiently that the historical text configuration files for logging and other facilities no longer function compatibly with the VSC test suite. If those were changed back, or the test suite was somehow made independent of configuration variances for the purposes of testing, I might agree with you, but as it is, there is no way a systemd based system would pass VSC, and would also likely fail VSX, and the parts of the VSTH and VSRT testing, based on the posix_spawn implementation and XPG/4 compliance.

Yes. Legally, all AT&T derived systems are grandfathered in as part of the License agreement which exclusively licensed the trademark to The Open Group for relicensing to third parties. For example, the transferrable SVR3 and SVR4 source licenses I own as a result of being sold surplus Class C computing equipment by Weber State University under their blanket source licenses mean my port of SVR3 to the Amiga I did for giggles, is legally UNIX.

Only if they subsequently license the trademark. If so, then it's UNIX. If they don't license the trademark, even if it passes the tests (which must also be licensed from The Open Group), or if they fail to register a compliance statement, and have it certified, it's not UNIX. Mac OS X, for example, is UNIX. iOS on the iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone isn't UNIX -- and can't be; certain required interfaces are conditionally compiled out, as a space saving measure, and additional user space commands are not compiled for the publicly released versions.

No. A system with a Unix-compatible API can pass the VSX, VSTH, and VSRT test suites, but unless the user space is there, it can't pass the VSC test suite, nor can it pass the compilation environment test suite, which include ISO C certification of the compiler and libraries, as well as passing negative assertion tests for namespace pollution on the header files (Linux/glibc/glibc2 have serious header file problems; so do the *BSDs). Android can't pass because it fails on threading API compliance with the VSTH test, partly because of the "Bionic" libc implementation having deficiencies (it would take a small amount of work to pass the VSX tests in that regard, but threads are the biggie).

In the U.S. Virgin Islands, every hurricane season, the U.S. federal government provides funds to bury the power lines that were knocked down, so it doesn't happen again. And every year, the local government official put 7/8 of the $ in their pockets, and balance the wires back up on the poles again in preparation for the same payday the next year. Locally it's a really well known scam.

Practically speaking, we should have utility tunnels under the roadways, to solve the problem, once and for all. The major cost in burying is digging and repair, which you can deal with exactly once, and not have to dig ever again, if you have room in the tunnels for the next water main, gas main, or sewer line you want to run, and an access in the tunnel side through a shunt to get longer replacement/new pipes down there. That's just a big hole adjacent to a small section of the tunnel, with access doors up top. The costs for burying then drastically drop.

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.

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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).