Well, there are reasons why NASA pushed the shuttle for so long that have nothing to do with incompetency. The whole "Gee whiz! Look kids! It's reusable!" approach was a way to save money in the face of budget cuts. Why were budgets being cut, do you ask? Well, there is no shortage of Americans who say "Why are we throwing away money on NASA for nothing when we have too many problems at home to fix?" It took a long time and 2 spectacular fatal events before the message got driven home so clearly that even a government bureaucrat couldn't miss it that bolting the shuttle to giant launch rockets was always going to have a small but always present chance of a fatal accident that was unacceptably high. Putting a capsule on top of a rocket isn't sexy, but it works. Russia hasn't had even one fatality related to their launch system. NASA's ongoing Orion project is using the old school capsule approach because it just works. I fully commend Musk for getting Space X to where it is as he's going to basically save the space station, but NASA does now understand that right now the whole reusable shuttle idea is a bad one. Columbia drove it home that the shuttle could never be as safe as it needed to be because the whole idea was fatally flawed, so the only way to quickly get things done was to turn to private industry. Orion is going OK as far as I know, but the pace is pretty slow and it won't be passenger ready until probably a few years after Space X is already taking people to the space station.

As bad as politicians are at the federal level, they're even worse at state and local levels. The state where I live has a problem that all the neighboring states have too so I can only assume that it's like this everywhere in the USA. Basically our state Senators and Representatives are grossly incompetent and spend most of their time debating things and passing bills that have little use to the average citizen. The only reason that anything useful gets done at all is because we've had a tradition of (mostly) strong and competent governors who force through the really meaningful stuff. I don't believe for a minute that moving the authority away from the federal level and down to the state level would make things better.

The article in the 2nd link (1st link only says "abstract" in the link) is a joke. Well, the people who wrote it are serious, but it's a joke. They honestly cited The Onion as a source for one of their points without mentioning that The Onion is a satirical site. Do they even know that? They offer no alternative. They only say that the whole drone strike idea isn't working.

I think this is another situation on Slashdot like talking about electric cars where some people don't understand what the real reason for them is. Slashdot talks about electric cars and then someone inevitably says "The manufacturing isn't carbon neutral. It spews tons of pollutants into the air. And the electricity that powers the cars isn't carbon neutral either. It doesn't reduce greenhouse gases to have electric cars." and so on. The point of electric cars is not at all to reduce greenhouse gases or that they are supposedly made in environment beneficial ways. The point is to reduce dependance on foreign oil, which just happens to mostly belong to countries that are US hostile and Western hostile.

The US government may claim that the strikes are to cripple Al Queda, but that's not the real point. The real point is to kill bad guys. Anwar al-Awlaki was a constant thorn in the US government's side, managing to even recruit US born terrorists to his cause. He's dead now. He can't personally recruit any other Americans or work to destabilize Yemen any more. Dead terrorists may be replaced by less competent terrorists. That's a win for the US. Younger people may not know, but the US and Western Europe have both tried the "let's do nothing" approach in the 70s and 80s and all that accomplished was that terrorists got emboldened to do even deadlier things because they believed that they'd never be held accountable. Killing some of them may convince some people who haven't joined that joining them may be a really bad idea. There's value in that.

No, the difference is that nobody got killed by the Boston Tea Party. Also American society mostly backed the Boston Tea Party and its goals. You can't really make that claim that the majority of Americans were sympathetic to the other 3 cited cases. When society says "You're wrong and crazy" that is a difference.

Yes it has. Yes it does . Examples:
1) BluRay DRM took years to crack. Even the anti-DRM geniuses were baffled by it and especially the BD+ stuff. If I remember correctly it basically took someone to dump computer memory while playback was going on to get cracking working. Some of the experts were concerned in the early days that BD+ might not ever be cracked.
2) Cinavia is an audio watermark used on some BluRay discs. It can also be used on DVDs although the DVD specification does not require that a DVD player recognize it, so the number of DVDs that use it is very small. Currently Sony is about the only studio paranoid enough to pay the licensing cost for using it. Other Hollywood studios either don't use it at all or barely use it (1 or 2 releases to date out of their entire catalog) for the most part. Nobody uses it as much as Sony. Workarounds have been found to enable software BluRay players to play copied discs, but Cinavia itself cannot be removed without damaging the audio track in a way that many people could notice. There are no workarounds for stand alone BluRay players - if they have firmware that recognizes Cinavia, they will recognize copied discs that contain it and stop playback at some point (anywhere from immediately to approximately 10 minutes after the movie has started).
3) Apple's DRM on iTunes video still hasn't been cracked and the only way around it is to play the video and record it in real time using a streaming media recorder program.
4) I don't really keep up, but I think Windows current Windows Media DRM hasn't been cracked at all. Older versions were cracked though.
5) Netflix and some other video streaming sources use DRM that hasn't been cracked yet. Real time recording via a streaming media recorder is the only way to copy such videos.

The response against Russia has been so weak that I am completely shocked that today Putin gave the order to pull back from the Ukrainian border. I am baffled about what this is supposed to accomplish in regards to China unless the real reason is to make the accused afraid to travel to the USA or possibly certain US friendly countries that might extradite them. Since the high ups in China love their foreign trips to "decadent" Western democracies, just stopping certain people from traveling and severely annoying them may be the real purpose here. I wouldn't worry about WWIII.

Neither does the EU or probably most if not all other countries in the world. Did you know that France makes Ebay restrict certain listings on every Ebay site in the world, not just the French Ebay site, so that French citizens are theoretically prevented (by IP address) from (gasp!) seeing them? Italy has also tried to enforce its law beyond its national borders. Spain went so far as to try people from crimes committed in Latin America that had nothing to do with Spanish citizens. Austria put a Holocaust denier in jail for a while for statements he made in the UK, not Austria. Once he came to Austria they simply nabbed him and charged them under their anti-Nazi laws for something that didn't even happen on Austrian soil. So spare me the usual US bashing.

Crap. They changed the headline now. But yeah, even by Slashdot standards this was pretty bad. We're all used to the posts where some industry guy will say something like "Not X. I can give you complete 100% assurance that it is not X and never will be X. Totally not X." and some guy will post the article claiming "He said X! X is coming! They swear X is coming!" Reading comprehension is a lost skill around here. Changing words to give a completely different meaning? That seems to be a disturbing new one for Slashdot.

I want to mention something with regards to Exact Audio Copy that some/many people here may not know. EAC has a longstanding bug that has never (as far I know) been fixed, despite being known for years. If you try to rip from a BluRay drive, the ripping slows down to a crawl and can take an hour or more to rip a single CD. Notice that I said "or more". This problem does not exist on drives that can't read BluRay discs. Ripping on those drives happens at reasonable speeds.

Good post, but you're wrong about the shuttle. It's gone - forever. It's been proven to be a non-starter. I doubt that anybody anywhere will ever try it again and here is why. The shuttle requires massive booster rockets to be strapped to it to get it into orbit. This is its truly fatal flaw. The shuttle Columbia disaster was caused when part of the foam that attached the boosters to the shuttle fell off and fatally damaged the shuttle so that it burned up on re-entry. There is no way to prevent this from happening again with a shuttle. The risk may be low, but it's not zero, as the Columbia proved. The current Orion technology that is NASA's future has nothing to do with the shuttle and is what I would call a "back to the future" design that's inspired by the old Apollo modules. Orion and the old school Russian rockets may not be sexy, but the astronauts don't have to worry about burning up on re-entry because foam fell away and struck the vehicle.

I'm an American. That's important to this reply. Some people here actually do worry about such scenarios all the time. Roughly a couple of months ago a guy I used to work with in another city on another job posted on Facebook about how he brought his gun to WalMart. While he and his wife were in the parking lot, a bum came up to them. The wife freaked out, the guy showed his gun, and the bum quickly walked away. I wasn't there so I can't really judge, but the account as posted hardly seemed like the guy's life was in danger, yet it's not hard to imagine this going horribly wrong and a guy being shot just for panhandling. I worked with another guy on a different job and he used to take his gun with him everywhere he went, including places like McDonald's, because he never felt safe anywhere. One of my friends who works for a defense contractor told me about how he and a another guy got sent to a US military base in a different state then where they were employed. "Other guy" refused to travel anywhere without his guns, so he checked them into his baggage and put them in his rental car. Only problem was that somehow his rental car got examined by base security. Outsiders aren't allowed to bring guns onto the base without permission and he didn't have it. He got fired from the job as a result of the problem it caused. So yes. Some people here really do feel that they can't go anywhere without their guns.

The copyright problem is actually easy to fix. The president needs to tell Congress that if copyrights are so valuable they need to be extended, then why is this being done for free? Pitch it to the Republicans as a way for the government to avoid raising taxes by having copyright owners start to pay their fair share and call it something like having the government give a guy a free barn because he paid for a horse. Let copyrights at first go for whatever they cost now. Change the law so that after 25 years they can be renewed to go to the current limits (roughly 75 years) by paying, say, $100000 per copyright. After that, allow 15 year renewals, but each renewal goes up by orders of magnitude. The first renewal is $1 million. The next one is $100 million. The one after that is $1 billion. After that, set it to $100 billion and no more renewals after that.

The H1B problem is something that can't easily be fixed. Businesses use these to hire workers at rates under what US workers would get. I learned a long time ago that rich people, including companies, are really good at protecting their money. H1B will only grow.

This is quite right. I'm an American and I've spent a grand total of several months in Ukraine in the first half of the decade of the 2000s. I can speak Russian well. I was by pure luck, not by plan, on the ground in Ukraine while the Orange Revolution of 2004 was happening and I saw if first hand. What was just amazing at the time is how insanely bad the Russians and their Ukrainian lackeys are at cheating in elections. In 2004 some of the oblasts (this is something like a state or region) reported vote totals approaching 100% for the entire state for Yanukovich. I had no doubt that Yanukovich easily won his home oblast, but the 98% in favor of him reported in the first (later thrown out) voting was just absurd. Other regions came out with equally absurd totals, such as Odessa with something like 90%. I believe that Yanukovich truly won every oblast he was said to have won in the original 2004 elections, but none of them were won with the vote totals reported. The Russians and their Ukrainian lackeys like to report huge super majorities in their favor and no sane person believes the vote totals reported.

Some years ago I worked for a company almost nobody here would have ever heard of. We struggled quite a bit in North America, but sales in other parts of the world were fairly good. Microsoft was one of our customers. In fact, I used to have to go to our data center from time to time and we had equipment for them in a special rack. We put out a paper exactly like the one discussed here, where my company "proved" that open source software had all these "secret" costs that made Microsoft a better deal. It was quite amusing because actually a rather significant chunk of our business depended on Linux and the services we actually ran under Windows were unreliable. To those of us who worked there, it was a pretty transparent attempt to keep the small business Microsoft sent our way and to maybe try to get them to send us more. The industry completely ignored our paper and I left the company some months later. I have no idea what the end result was, but I would be really surprised if Microsoft still uses my former employer for anything.

Don't know if you're an ignorant American or an EU pacifist, but we tried doing nothing before (see Jimmy Carter presidency). Didn't work so well. In fact it made the terrorists even more emboldened because they knew that nobody would ever come to get them. At least this way people know that they may have to pay for fighting America.