The wars were a big deal initially, and I think they were probably the top reason McCain lost. That and because the Republicans became demographically completely out of touch. So, there have been other big topics that would move the ball. I'm not saying Obamacare wasn't one of them, but I get the feeling that people were less interested in Obamacare itself, and more interested in general Health Care reform to begin with. I'm not sure that Obama would have won if he hadn't already sown up the demographics he needed to win, so I tend to view him as more of a mandate to avoid "old, rich, white man" priorities.

Let's not be purposely dense here. The Republicans are perfectly capable of funding the government. They don't want to because they are using it as a bludgeon. Debate the ethics of that all you want, but don't make the mistake of misunderstanding that the ability to become an obstacle is a critical power of a real minority.

That's why they haven't gotten rid of the filibuster. If you let a majority completely override the minority, you can shut out a lot of voices.

I don't have a problem with the Republicans taking an obstructive action, assuming that they believe that this is important enough to truly warrant it. Obamacare, should it be allowed to continue, is going to be with us forever, for better or worse. It's an entitlement, and no one repeals entitlements. In fact, it may already be too late. That means you have to front load your criticism and your opposition or you can forget about it ever going away. Once entrenched enough, even Republicans will be falling all over each other to not say anything bad about Obamacare, just like no one dares to reform Social Security now.

The problem I have is that I don't feel this is the right thing to be obstructive on. They're being heavy handed, which to me looks like they have no real smart politicians who know how to get things done without setting off the big guns.

I'd be careful about what the election gives Obama a "mandate" to do.

My options were Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. If Barack Obama was slightly better than Mitt, I'd vote for Obama. That does not mean that I approve of everything that Barack Obama does. And it certainly doesn't translate into a mandate for him to execute a particular policy item.

I can understand it if he feels, based on polling and studies, that most people wanted him because of Obamacare, but the fact of his election only translates into electing him President. Just because it was a cornerstone for his campaign doesn't mean that is why he was elected. If we are honest with ourselves, a great deal of support for Obama is based on a whole spectrum of policies, and the very important fact that Obama was neither Bush, nor was he Romney.

There are probably people who hate Obamacare who voted for Obama because they were more afraid of the Republicans in office. That doesn't mean they aren't at least a little afraid of what Obama might do too.

Troll or not, electricity and the light bulb and such did not suffer the possibility of completely being made unprofitable and undeployable by Edison or Westinghouse. In the sense that they may not have practiced personally, you may have a point.

However, it is important to differentiate between the patent "trolls" of yesteryear, who were actual semi-inventors running shops that did research and generated inventions (even if they claimed all the credit for other's work), and the patent trolls of today, who are almost all strictly law firms with a different name who simply buy the rights off someone else and do their best to make that patent into a robber baron's toll bridge regardless of the damage that the use of the patent will do to the very market that the invention is trying to contribute to.

I don't think Assad ever fully controlled his military, in the same way I don't think the Kims ever fully control theirs in NK. As long as those dictators have enough key generals in their pocket, they're in control.

However, if like this civil war, the Syrian high command has lost some leaders, and is now made up of individuals afraid for their own lives, they might take some actions that Assad cannot stop them from taking. And if he tries to stop them, he could end up overthrown. Since I doubt if he cares if these people are getting gassed, he's probably most upset with the PR aspect of it and if someone is taking matters into their own hands.

Although there is always money to be made, I do believe that Obama and those who want to do this are doing it more idealistically than due to being puppets of moneyed interests, per se. Of course, the moneyed interests will be doing their best to profit from this idealism as best they can.

The problem is... what the heck is launching a few hundred cruise missiles into a civil war going to do? Not much, other than blowing up people. I'm quite sure that Syria could make a substantial portion of their chemical weapons safe with not too much effort. Blowing up their factories for the stuff might slow them down in the future, but that's not going to help now.

I'm not big on war, but if you're going to do it, have an achievable goal and exert all possible force to get it done. This is just us making sure that the world "takes us seriously" when we draw lines in the sand. I get that too, but it was a stupid line to draw and this enforcement action is just going to muddy the issue even more.

They were the death-knell for the American car industry, until they were bailed out...

You want to maintain an American business, with American sensibilities about labor and other things, going commodity is going to hurt you. Not always, of course, but in the long run, it is working counter to Apple's strengths.

That's just the thing. Jobs did not want to be involved in the race to the bottom in terms of price. If they are going to cut expenses, they are not going to want to drop the price with it.

Jobs wanted to make expensive phones that people would expect to pay a premium for. He left the problem of making it affordable to the cell companies who stepped in and subsidized it with contracts.

Jobs wanted people to pay good money for his stuff. Part of that is *not* wanting to be compared to the latest effort from some other phone at the same price point. It starts becoming a real brutal game if you join the rest that way. If the 5C is priced with a larger field of phones, there is a higher chance that those other phones might happen upon a feature or design that can beat the 5C. If Apple stays with the high priced market, there are fewer competitors, AND they have more money from sales to keep pushing the envelope. To sell, they market features and an image, they do not market on price.

I think his model, if you can do it, works. Becoming a commodity is the death knell for your company because relentlessly cutting costs creates a cost-cutting atmosphere. That sort of atmosphere inhibits creativity by both providing a lesser product, but also by making the company less inclined to spend more on talent and research. And in this day and age, that leads to not only your manufacturing going to China, but also your whole corporate model eventually being duplicated by overseas competitors. Cheap is something they can do a lot better than those of us who give our workers a better standard of living.

I'm not going to say the 5C is a good or a bad idea, but I think that dropping price in and of itself, is not going to be as positive for a company as you might think. It can be a very short term sort of success.

What you say is true, although if you air-gapped this network from the Internet, you'd need to gain access to a node that is on that network in order to compromise it or physical access to the lines themselves. The network nodes will likely be in controlled locations, and even if they aren't, they're at least going to be local to the country running them.

Obviously, gaining physical access to the network cables would be much simpler than that, but you'd have to get resources on the ground locally to tap that cable. Not impossible, but if you can do that, you almost might as well just start blowing up transmission towers yourself.

If it is running over the Internet, you could (theoretically) gain access from anywhere including overseas without special effort.

There may well be a better cloud provider than AWS... maybe... but it sure the fuck isn't IBM. As much as AWS getting in the door might have been BS, I don't think anything good is going to come of letting IBM get their crappy product in the door. If they actually win that, I'll be looking for the trail of bribe money and kickbacks they used to "persuade" people. Having spent time working to determine a good IaaS partner, nothing even came close to AWS for what I would expect from a decent cloud provider.

Now lest I seem like I am an AWS fanboy, I need to point out that even if AWS was the best, being the best of a bad bunch doesn't make you good. I personally have no major complaints about AWS, although there are some headscratchers. For instance, it would make me feel a lot better if they could figure out how to not lose power in a datacenter. It shouldn't be all that hard, datacenters with UPSes and gen sets aren't exactly bleeding edge technology. So, as you might expect, I am a nervous reader of when there are AWS outages, but generally they manage to only take out one AZ at a time, so they're technically still delivering.

While, yes, the investigation makes it obvious that this person might get a clearance and work on top secret stuff, there's really no way around that. And frankly, it isn't going to do too much harm, it's not like the TS/SCI holders are this tiny segment of the population. There must be tens of thousands of people with that level, just being investigated to get one isn't really making you much more useful to foreign intelligence agencies alone. They usually need to know what you are working on, and so they have spies inside the government who give them that information directly instead of bothering with something as scattershot as a list of people undergoing a check.

Since outsourcing the NSA seems to be what got them in trouble to begin with, I am not sure they are liable to outsource it further.

Of course contractors are going nowhere at the NSA. Actual government employees are a pain in the ass to hire, pay, and deal with. Not to mention that once they are in place, they're pretty much able to sit there for life, even with poor performance. Contractors are easier to hire, easier to pay, and while they still could be low quality losers, it is a lot easier to get rid of them by just either not renewing the contract, or telling their consulting firm that you want them off your project (and then the firm takes care of the bother of either moving them or firing them).

Many projects are understood to happen over a certain timeline, in that timeline you would spend a lot of time architecting the solution as well as negotiating what detailed features are in scope with the government, getting extra facility space, etc. There is also the understanding that you may need to hire more staff in the timeline. In either case, you probably don't need those 100 jobs until later in the project anyway, so you hire them after you have a contract.

As for in-housing... they could, but one might suggest that a company that already has a cloud solution in place would be able to use their wealth of experience in the area, as well some of their existing supply chains, to produce a better quality cloud faster than the government having to do it from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel when all you need is a cloud with some extra security and reporting features?

It probably is... but then you need to get your hands on their private email communications, which are not archived, to prove that they are doing that. See how that might be problematic for the prosecution?

Not quite the same thing. They're still public property, they're just public property that you're not allowed to look at until they are declassified. In fifty years. But you will technically be allowed to eventually look at them. You or your grandchildren anyway.