According to recent outbursts in the Australian political scene, you're at greater risk from nameless men in blue ties.

Your math is off. The $1B was for a replacement system which failed to deploy, the 7M lines of code were probably written for well less than $1B. There is a high probability that the new system had a smaller number of lines of code - therefore a higher cost per line.

Other views of the corporate ethics of running a nuclear facility. (Yes, I know this account if fictional.)

According to a piece of trivia I read yesterday, where lightning strikes a person, it has a greater than 80% chance of hitting a man over a woman. It extrapolated that it may be due to men being more likely to indulge in risk-taking behaviour than women.

Well personally I ran screaming in horror after the first two hours of flailing around trying to regain something approaching my old workflow. To each his own I suppose.

No. Likely there'd be a complete fork from a clean workbase to start over again, a complete distrust of code from day one, and a complete overhaul of all existing systems.

Or the NSA could just rig our cars to explode and burn us alive before we do so, or whatever.

I'm not traditionally in the tin foil hat brigade, but at this point, having SELinux installed on your machine is the height of stupidity. The NSA has comprehensively proved itself to be an untrustworthy, duplicitous, and ruthless organisation. I don't care how many people reviewed the code; I want my computer to be associated as little as possibly with anything written or developed by those people. I regard this as somewhere between reiserfs and apartheid pears.

It's a question of trust and risk. I don't trust the NSA enough to risk keeping SELinux.

P.S.
SELinux is not installed on my machine by default, but libSElinux is. It's interesting how many programs would also have to be removed if the library was.

What I'd like to see - but don't think it likely - is that 'superstar' salaries in sports and entertainment come down to something a bit more reasonable making some of these properties less expensive to make, and may encourage publishers to take on new artists from time to time. It could potentially also have the effect of making it cheaper to consume these entertainment products, meaning people are more likely to consume them via legitimate means - assuming simple methods of sourcing and using said media.

While I'm spinning candyfloss unicorns, how about CEO and Board salaries coming down to something which is no more than 10 times that of the lowest paid worker at their organisation like is done in some Scandinavian countries.[1]

[1] No I don't have a citation for this, I remember hearing about it are some point in the past 20 years *waves hands vaguely in 'that' direction* but couldn't find a relevant link after a quick google search.

I beg to differ, there are less Australians in prison as a percentage of our total population than there are Americans in prison relative to their total population. If any country was going to have the accusation of being full of criminals thrown at them, the good ole' USA will be near the top of the list.

While several of the early white settlements were penal colonies, the vast majority of people who have emigrated to Australia have done so for economic reasons - in search of a better life for themselves and their children.

Add to that that the whole problem with gangs will be never ending so long as there is this prohibition on some drugs. Take out the profit and most gangs would dissipate. Worked for Portugal.

http://vimeo.com/32110912

Legalization eliminates the need to go full on KGB, Stasi, Pol Pot, or what have you, and besides, bringing in military solutions will not solve anything. It will just exacerbate the arms race and make the violence worse. Plus, every encroachment on civil liberties we're experiencing, has its roots in the drug war. Prohibition is destroying America.

Ummm ... second link in TFS. This one here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23233573

Look at the caption under the "Post Office" picture. It reads:

The Post Office previously said it had "absolute confidence" in its branch accounting

also this from the body:

"The review underlines our cause for confidence in the overall system."

I suggest you try ctrl-f or cmd-f (looks like a clover on a mac keyboard) before doing the citation rant.

Tuttle or Buttle?

Why worry about bugs? The government will give you a refund!

The contraposition of this story with the fate of John Corzine deserves to be highlighted.

Here we have the a US intelligence agency, saying it needs to snoop on millions in a supposed effort to protect them from threats. And yet John Corzine, who openly stole customers money, is not being prosecuted, despite the reams and reams of records and evidence against him and MFGlobal.

What we see here is that information does not correllate with prosecutions, or effectiveness at protecting people from harm.

Comments like this aren't actually cynical anymore. The rule of law is breaking down all over the Western world as connected people are increasingly allowed to live outside it.

Again Mossad is not the problem. In fact, the NSA or Mossad developing a virus to sabotage Iranian centrifuges or what have you is also not the problem. This is what spy agencies are for. The problem is when the NSA develops viruses which affect, or engages in espionage on, the US public. The NSA is not supposed to do that.

Again, I raise the analogy of the US military dropping bombs on US citizens; they don't do it because they're not supposed to. The same rules should apply to the NSA and its espionage bag of tricks.

As a 45 year old I remember going to Billy Joel concerts in my late teens, early 20s. IT was an awesome show.

On that front I also saw Eurythmics, Dire Straits, Peter Gabriel and INXS around this time - give or take a few years.