Hughes' legacy is enormous, too. As a philanthropic institute, it's endowment is second only to Gates.

I can personally attest that going by that list the US does not meet the definition of a free country either. Surprise!

But the anthem still says "the land of the free and the home of the brave." More like the land of the we can't compete in this global economy against people who don't have EPA, OSHA, housing cost, healthcare costs, or even insurance, taxes, utility or car related costs, like car payments, car insurance, gasoline, and car repair. And welcome to this list is Obamacare! Now we're even better fit to compete, with even more standard costs dragging us down by raising our minimum wage sky high.

I wonder how long til we change anthems. A lot of countries regularly change anthems.

You know how to tell if someone is a spy, if you're a slashdotter, and she's trying to talk to you?

She's fucking hot, very smart, and loves adventure.

X86 went away fifteen years ago. Every "x86" COU built since the last 1990s runs an x86 layer, but underneath is a very different bear.

At the time, the closest the DOS world had to multitasking was TSRs. Beside my first PC was my CoCo 3 with OS/9 level 2 with 512k of RAM with a true preemptive multitasking kernel running on an 8 but 6809 CPU. Microsoft's dominance at the time meant in many ways the most common 16 bit opposing system in the world was only marginally better than a CPM machine from 1980.

Said someone about every president since WW2. You guys elected him twice, collectively you fucking love the guy.

Hey, don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!!

:)

But seriously, I used to think Carter was the worst, and I wasn't terribly happy with Bush Jr., but Obama, ugh.

I used to think it was just his agenda, but I'm starting to think it is more fully explained by incompetence. I used to joke and ask my friends that voted for him "How's that Hope and Change" working out for you.

Not anymore, I'm frankly a bit scared about the US and the world. He has no answer and seems to really not even care about:

Problems in Libya, Syria (draws imaginary line in sand when not going to back it up), ISIS coming in from Syria, Our southern US border currently being overrun by illegals, when he actually COULD with a swipe of his pen, fix the problem there, or at least send national guard and militarize the damned thing, economy still in the toilet, etc.

He's a great speaker with a teleprompter and good politician (for getting elected), but I think as far as presidency, he's in way over his head and I'm frankly worried about the state of the world under his last 2x years.

Hmm.

But none of those DACs, nor the SoundBlaster seem to have an offering with good old fashioned Vacuum Tubes?!!?

Stereos that glow are cool, and sound OH so good, especially through a pair of Klipschorns.

I would have thought that Obama would have told his spooks to lay off for a while. But instead, it seems that he has racketed up the spying on Germany.

Can someone tell me what Obama is trying to achieve by this? I mean, there must be some purpose behind all this. I just can't figure it out.

Have you stopped to think that it might just be that he's a fucking idiot?

I mean, so far, in the polls, he's already being rated as the worst president since WW2. And he had some serious "talent" to beat out in that contest, you know?

*sigh*

Is this soccer thing still going on? Once the US was out of it, I lost interest and figured this would have been done and over with by now.

Its like what, 4 years or something before soccer starts up again when this one is done?

:)

I think that is a myth. Can you name any elections in which the number of voters later determined to be dead was greater than the margin of victory? (A very low hurdle if they are "often pivotal.")

That's a cop-out, though. Yes, there is always an element of trust in whatever you do. That's unavoidable, though it's smart to minimize the amount of trust you must put in others. Taken to the extreme it's ludicrous, as you've pointed out. But, that doesn't mean that there's no merit in limiting the amount of trust you put in third parties. Just because you can't completely trust your OS or compiler, doesn't mean that you should throw the entire concept of limiting trust out the window. It's dishonest to suggest that the risk is the same between trusting (your compiler), (your compiler + your OS), and (your compiler + your OS + the CA system).

The CA system is truly an honor system by design. It requires you to put your complete trust in a large, and growing, list of opaque and unfamiliar third parties and the decision to trust them is made by others though an opaque and unaccountable process. It's putatively a "security system", but is insecure by design. It depends entirely on unaccountable, secretive, and self-selected "authorities" to determine who should trust who.

Look at your OS's list of trusted CAs sometime. Any of these organizations, or anyone delegated by any single one of them, are implicitly trusted by your system. Completely trusting Microsoft, Apple, or various Linux devs is naive, but completely trusting everyone in the root CA list is absolutely insane!

Spam-filtering is google's core capability... google broke into internet search with the page rank algorithm whose essential purpose is to combat "search engine optimization."

Really? So, who do you consider the defenders of global freedom and privacy? Russia and China?

"Ulysses you old rat bastard, I'm not fallin' for that trick again. Let 'em secede."

But with the usual mess in government records, quite a number of dead souls.

The dead are often a pivotal election demographic.