Comment Re:Tax from oil goes in government fund (Score 2, Insightful) 565
Yes. This very low cap of the liability is a prime example of successful lobbying in DC.
Comment Re:Tax from oil goes in government fund (Score 1) 565
If a much smaller company was to be at fault it would have never been able to cover the cost of the cleanup. Then an industry funded insurance, managed by the government, will cover these needs.
Cost of this will not be passed to us. We are past the point where the price of the product is cost+fixed_small_profit=price. The price is demand driven, the profits are exorbitant, there is room for insurance there.
Comment Tax from oil goes in government fund (Score 1) 565
Turns out that the government already has a rainy day fund to deal with industry disasters. At present it holds $1.5 billion, it is not adequate but I think this is the way to go. The impact of this accident is going to be felt by the entire industry, it is only logical for funds to be collected from all oil companies to help with recovery efforts.
Tax on Oil May Help Pay for Cleanup
Curiously BP is not carrying insurance, it is having self-insurance -- they apportion an amount of almost a billion a year into a fund on the island of Gernesey (the offshore UK tax haven).
Comment Re:EU is #1, Euro zone is #2 (Score 1) 3
I think they won't be able to offer anything more than the usual claptrap of "solidarity", "holding the ranks", "strong support", etc., etc.
Things are not that bad yet. Even if they would have agreed on a bail-out behind the scenes, it would be foolish to announce it. It is an enormous moral hazard. And it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, the Greeks are already on strike, even a whiff of of a bail-out will destroy any will to face the challenges of austerity imposed from outside. They will simply strike on until they get the bail-out money, provided they know there will be such a thing.
Comment EU is #1, Euro zone is #2 (Score 1) 3
The European Union taken as a whole is #1, but the part of the European Union which adopted the euro as a single currency (the euro zone) is behind US.
Comment passwords from memory? (Score 1) 6
Very interesting report!
From your story one thing is very intriguing: You mention that it acquired all the passwords from memory once CuteFTP was started, what lead you to believe that?
In light of your missfortunate experience, is there any practice one might adhere to in the future to possibly avoid such attacks?
More interestingly, how can one create a program which would scan memory for passwords? What patterns would such scan look for?
Comment Kindle is both a savier and a new threat (Score 1) 453
Newspaper publishers don't stand a chance to charge for their content on the internet, but they can charge for the convenience of it being made available on Kindle.
Now, Amazon is offering them a new sales channel but the pricing is not controlled by the publishers. At least this is the major problem about which the wsj.com complained -- wsj.com: Publishers Nurture Rivals to Kindle
Presently Kindle is not an independent distribution platform. You can't distribute your newspaper on it if you don't sign a deal with Amazon first. While newspapers will be happy to sale content via Kindle, they wouldn't wish to substitute the crummy revenues from internet with the possibility of extortion by Amazon. On top of that there is no room for ads on Kindle, so the content is entirely unsubsidized.
Comment General sections are free, Financial aren't (Score 1) 453
The sections regarding global news, national news, and everything else that competes with the free stuff on internet are free for all readers of wsj.com. The perceived purpose they serve is to eventually bring paying customers.
The financial, business, and market news sections are accessible only to subscribers.
Also, all content is accessible for free if referenced by google search or google news. There is even a toolbar add-on for Firefox which will permit you to read the entire wsj.com by spuffing the reference url for you.
People who are dismissive of the paying model of wsj.com are usually not the target audience of the newspaper. I personally, think it is admirable that they are so confident in their product that they can afford to charge money for accessing it. I love to read newspapers and and I'm willing to pay for it.
Comment Surpluses during Clinton years (Score 1) 4
There were budget surpluses during a period at the end of Clinton's term as president. While at that time government continued sucking in the Social Security surplus, it didn't have to issue any new bonds.
The Social Security debt will probably never be fully paid back -- retirement age will be increased or benefits decreased or some combination of the two.
The rest of the debt
Comment Re:Should have used PHP. (Score 3, Interesting) 324
I agree, but wish to add a comment about vertical and horizontal scaling.
Ruby and Python have poor multi-threading. They don't scale well on multi-CPU platforms.
from the interview:
Robey Pointer: Green threads don't use the actual operating systemâ(TM)s kernel threads.
So, a Ruby application can't scale well vertically -- one can't just upgrade the machine with more CPUs for example.
At the same time, no language is inherently prohibiting horizontal scaling, if application design provides for it -- adding more machines onto which the application can run in parallel.
Twitter could've been designed to permit horizontal scaling. Regrettably the article didn't say much about this approach. They are improving the vertical scalability of the application by switching to first-class threads (via the JVM), but are they not eventually going to hit the limits for vertical scaling?!
Comment Re:Economic sense for tomorrow ? (Score 1) 769
I agree.
Short term no company can pinpoint how economically beneficial a car could be to its owners by the time actual mass production begins. Long term there is no doubt oil will be a problem, should research wait for oil prices of $200?!
If one considers that lead research time takes 4 years and oil prices fluctuated between 40 to 160 and back to 40 in the span of 2 years, when should a company seriously undertake the task of designing a vehicle like the Vault?! Bold decisions like the one to design the electrical car should be commended and possibly financially (tax credits, direct investment) encouraged by the government.
Comment good jazz is offered on emusic (Score 1) 3
emusic is known to sell music produced by independent labels who wouldn't put out big pop or rock blockbusters. But for jazz even the best musicians work mostly under such small labels.
I purchased a few good albums of Chick Corea, for example.
A First Look At Internet Explorer 8 RC1 271
bogaboga writes "TG Daily reports that Microsoft quietly released the first update to its IE8 beta 2 to its closest partners last week. This new version only scores a dismal 12/100 on the Acid 3 test, though the score improves significantly if one leaves the [browser] window open for at least a minute. It is marked as 'Release Candidate 1.'"
Galaxy Clusters' Stunted Growth Confirms Dark Energy 167
A new study of 86 galaxy clusters in the early universe has provided independent confirmation of the existence of dark energy. In its absence, gravity's pull should have caused the number of clusters to increase by a factor of 50 over the last 5.5 billion years. What is observed is a factor of 10 increase. "Together with earlier observations... the new data strengthen the suspicion — but do not prove — that dark energy is a weird antigravity called the cosmological constant that was hypothesized and then abandoned by Albert Einstein as a 'blunder' almost a century ago. If that is true, the universe is fated to empty itself out eventually, and all but the Milky Way's closest neighbors will eventually be out of sight. ... Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, said: 'If this was a fox hunt and dark energy was the fox, I think they have closed off another escape route. But there is still a lot of terrain left for the fox, and we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur.'"
Court Nixes National Security Letter Gag Provision 128
2phar sends news that on Monday a federal appeals court ruled unconstitutional the gag provision of the Patriot Act's National Security Letters. Until the ruling, recipients of NSLs were legally forbidden from speaking out. "The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients. The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders — provisions that required the courts to treat the government's claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch." Update: 12/16 22:26 GMT by KD : Julian Sanchez, Washington Editor for Ars Technica, sent this cautionary note: "Both the item on yesterday's National Security Letter ruling and the RawStory article to which it links are somewhat misleading. It remains the case that ISPs served with an NSL are forbidden from speaking out; the difference is that under the ruling it will be somewhat easier for the ISPs to challenge that gag order, and the government will have to do a little bit more to persuade a court to maintain the gag when it is challenged. But despite what the ACLU's press releases imply, this is really not a 'victory' for them, or at least only a very minor one. Relative to the decision the government was appealing, it would make at least as much sense to call it a victory for the government. The lower court had struck down the NSL provisions of the PATRIOT Act entirely. This ruling left both the NSL statute and the gag order in place, but made oversight slightly stricter. If you look back at the hearings from this summer, you'll see that most of the new ruling involves the court making all the minor adjustments that the government had urged them to make, and which the ACLU had urged them to reject as inadequate."
