why not pull a hostile takeover on the somali pirates and make a real enterprise out of it? startup costs are not prohibitive assuming you can find some willing participants to join you in the endeavor. insurance and legal costs are minimal. the world is awash in small arms and un/underemployed. there is a lot of profit there for someone.

I see a lot of people claim things like this. The question I ask every one of them, especially if they run XP (an outdated OS missing a number of modern security features, like application sandboxing and ASLR), is whether they run as Administrator or not. 95% still say Yes (beats the approximately 99.9% otherwise, but... still too high). Running as Admin is a *terrible* idea - you might as well be running Windows ME, in terms of security - yet far too many people do so anyhow.

I'll grant you that running as a non-admin on XP or older is a pain - it was that pain which drove me to Linux in the first place. Now I dual-boot Win7 and Linux (Vista and Linux on my older machine) and things have worked out very well. I don't have any continuous monitoring AV running (I keep a copy of ClamAV for on-demand scans), I don't disable UAC or Protected Mode (in fact, I tweak the UAC settings and remove FlashPlayer's exemption regarding Protect Mode). A few UAC or sudo prompts a month is easily worth the extra protection that not running as Admin provides. Security is all about defense in depth, and relying solely on anti-intrusion methods is stupid.

Yes, there's still a lot of harm that can be done with standard user permissions. However, most malware authors, especially for Windows, assume that their code will run as Admin/root, and therefore it would fail on my system anyhow. Furthermore, without Admin, malware can't make itself un-removable. It might send spam or DDOS attempts, but it couldn't edit my firewall settings, hide itself from task manager, install kernel-mode code, or prevent me from deleting it.

Avira rates consistently high on the AV-Comparatives.org site and even with high heuristics set, the overhead on the system is far lower than AVG or Avast. I use Iobit 360 with Advanced System Care to take care of threats other than virii, Peerblock and Windows Firewall behind a NAT router to keep things away and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, a Kaspersky and Avira BootCD to clean anything if anything gets past the other layers. Just like when it gets cold outside, nothing protects better than layering.

Agreed. Yet another reason that the insurance model does not apply well to health care.

It isn't all it's cracked up to be. For instance, I have pet insurance to cover vet bills for my dog. Vet bills can get expensive, you know. The company I got the policy from publishes their benefit schedule online for the world to see.

I'm glad that they do it, but I have to say it wasn't very useful for comparison-shopping or even for determining if the policy was worth purchasing in the first place. For instance, the benefit for Arrhythmia is $95 for treatment, and $132 for diagnostic testing. I don't know about you, but I have no earthly clue if that is a reasonable payout for Arrhythmia--I don't even know what Arrhythmia is. I don't want to know, either. I'm not googling each and every thing that can go wrong with my dog (4 pages, 2 columns each, small print) just to get a feel for if the policy is worth it.

In the end, I bought the policy because it wasn't too much money, and I figured it would help a bit when my dog got sick, and it has. If she got cancer or something and I couldn't afford tens of thousands of dollars in treatments, I can always put her to sleep. I love her; but she is, in the end, just a dog. Obviously that's not an option with one of my kids, so I'd have to take a decision on human health insurance more seriously.

For me or a family member, I know I'm going to treat whatever they have, so I need a little more protection than "Well, you can have $95+132 for Arrhythmia". I need, "If your family member gets sick, you're not going to lose your house, your car, your savings."

It's a tough problem, but nobody in Washington is serious about solving it. They are only going to make it worse.

Wow. Did you really just champion Opera - king of bloat, with built-in email, web server, P2P, and quite possibly a kitchen sink - as a "lightweight alternative"?

Yes, it is. Opera might have more features, but it's still smaller and snappier than Firefox by far. It isn't bloat unless those features make it big and slow. They are in fact completely out of your way by default.

Splitting hairs I know, but freedom is more equated to liberty rather than democracy, and do as we say or get shot is more akin to tyranny rather than communism. Democracy is more about everyone getting a say. Communism is more about sharing.

It's not too hard to imagine a glut of really bad homemade porn with this new camera, but maybe someone will make something interesting out if it.

Does it/Do they look bigger in 3D?

"Coders are like writers", haha, yeah right. Why don't you "writers" use some of that inspiration of yours to comment your code when you do spend 20 minutes of your day, between eating bagels and drinking coffee, to actually write a few lines of exploit-infested, non-sanitized-SQL-input-riddled "code"... so that us IT guys don't have to spend 3 days digging through your scribbles, trying to find that memory leak or unchecked loop that's hanging that particular w3wp.exe process on a server shared by 120 of you guys, all blaming IT for it while chatting in the hallway with each-other. Thanks.

Thank you. Words of a wise one are always appreciated!

The problem is that the geography of my state means that it is much more difficult to produce oranges here. Let's say it is easier to produce apples here. Doesn't it make more sense to produce 1000 tons of apples here and trade 500 tons to FL for 500 tons of oranges. Sure we would have the same amount of food but we would gain diversity.

We could do away with all unemployment by doing away with all modern farming technology. 95% of the population could spend 12 hours a day 7 days a week doing manual labor in order to provide food for all. Then every one would be employed, but less happy. I would rather be unemployed for a time then know I would spend the bulk of my life doing mindless manual labor.

I have no problem with innovation or efficiency doing away with jobs. New jobs will be created by those unemployed people. That is progress. Look at all the jobs people are free to do today because they no longer need to farm.

Will you please suggest some geographical areas where that ratio is significantly better? Preferably with programmer jobs available. I might consider relocating.

Also, what would you think is a reasonable house cost / income ratio, and where do you get that figure?

Please don't read any sarcasm into these questions, I'm asking out of sheer practical interest.

> As X approaches 0 in 1/x, the output approaches
> BOTH positive and negative infinity. As such, it
> is impossible to define the output - it would need
> to have two values at once, which is illogical.

You're assuming that positive and negative infinity are necessarily unequal. I have yet to see a convincing argument that this is the case. The usual arguments rely on real-number assumptions that don't necessarily hold for infinite values. (I've seen quite robust proofs that multiple positive infinite values are unequal to one another, such as the cardinality of the set of all integers versus the cardinality of the set of all real numbers versus the cardinality of the set of all possible permutations of the real numbers, but that's not the same thing as proving that each of them is unequal to the corresponding "negative" infinity.)

However, it is also possible to construct functions wherein the limit is either infinity or zero, depending on the direction of approach, and I am quite *thoroughly* convinced that infinity is not equal to zero in a traditional ordered abelian field. (By "traditional" here I mean set up in the usual way so that addition and multiplication and comparison work more or less intuitively for people accustomed to real numbers. Obviously it would be possible to construct an abstract mathematical system wherein "zero" and "infinity" would be equal, but such a system would not likely be applicable to any practical situation. The only practical value I can imagine for such a system involves teaching math students to think abstractly.)

MW2 will be different again because no doubt there will be DLC that will be a required purchase lest the servers refuse you access based on an unmatched version.

The Nexus One certainly is a beautifully designed phone, nice color choice and lines. First phone I've seen that surpasses the iPhone in looks, as subjective a statement that is to say. A nice thing is the ability to buy the phone straight up and not get locked into a 2 year prison term with a carrier.

imagine how many starving children could be fed with a Beowulf cluster of these