Woah slow down there, I am a "boomer" (but not of the US variety), today's government is staffed by boomer's but until very recently it WAS staffed by WW2' war babies and before that WW2 veterns. Mandatory superannuation contributions (paid directly to the fund by your employer) started here in Oz in the late 80's, the funds are invested in approved managed funds and basically ride along with the ups and downs of the economy, however the funds offer all sorts of options as to where to invest your money (eg: gold, stocks, green tech, bricks and mortar, etc) you can even set up your own fund if you are into that sort of thing. The government doesn't owe me a penny, but it has forced me to save for my retirement in a way that I can't get at it until I'm 55 and penalizes me with double the tax for taking a lump sum and blowing it all before I'm 60. I just turned 54, mine is staying where it is for at least another 10yrs, then I probably sell up and move to the country closer to my three grandkids (where I can buy a house outright with the equity I have in my current home). Another good feature is that you can't lose an account due to job hoping, homelessness, ect. The government tracks inactive accounts via tax file numbers and "parks" them in a default (low yield, high security) fund until they are reclaimed/returned.

At the end of the day this sort of enforced saving regime makes my own 80yr old parents a lot less expensive for society to maintain in a humane manner, they faithfully invested in super every month without being forced to by the government and currently receive a pension of $0.00 from the government and have just returned from a holiday to the grand canyon. The reason that we have things like taxpayer funded pensions is that humans don't want to see grandma (or her friends) tossed on the scrap heap after doing their bit to build and maintain our civilization. It's also key to reducing the number of offspring a society produces to ensure they are looked after in their old age, and finally the funds themselves play an important role in building the infrastructure that keeps us all from starving to death.

Anyway, believe me when I say it really won't be long before you are thinking to yourself where did the last 30yrs go and how the hell am I going to afford to enjoy retirement.

At some point the popular uprising in Syria morphed to a civil war, then Israel dropped some bombs on it and it started to look like it was morphing into an old fashioned proxy war between East and West. If I'm not mistaken Obama has yet to send arms to anyone, but he recently signed a UN backed agreement with Putin to work together toward creating a "caretaker" government formed by the waring parties themselves. However before any of that can happen they need to negotiate a cease fire on the ground which is much easier said than done. Secondary goals are distributing aid, and sending in UN inspectors to investigate the reported use of nerve gas. They have also agreed that the day to day public service should not be dismantled (which was what threw Iraq into an orgy of looting on the 3rd day of the war).

If stopping the bloodshed and restoring order is your aim then you should be applauding an agreement that aims to stop the violence and reboot the politics, while at the same time asking WTF did it take them 2yrs to publicly agree (through gritted teeth)?

We Aussies took that route and the end result was pretty much the same. The closest we came to a revolution was a handful of gold miners getting shot at by some cops. The evolution of society is far more complex than portrayed in HS history class, the Boston Tea Party is seen as a significant event but it would have been futile if the existing society was not already intellectually primed for it. These singular momentous events are often more symbolic than anything else and are nearly always selected in hindsight. Australia's Eureka stockade is a fine example of a small group of revolutionaries with a valid (and popular) complaint against the crown who failed miserably to inspire those around them to join in, a more modern example would be the OWS crowd.

Umm, East Germany wanted the wall to come down, W Germany, France and the UK all tried to stop it from happening by (quietly) pleading with the E Germans to do something to stop it. As to Rome, Roman citizens were entitled to 1kg of grain per day from the emperor via their local bakery, needless to say many Europeans didn't require conquering, they simply chose to be roman and started demanding their "bread and circuses".

Same thing happens with windows compilers. Assuming the people involved trust each other, the simplest method is to always build from a tag and embed the tag into the binary. Use something like the unix "strings" command to find the tag when comparing two binaries.

In the dark ages, Putin (ex: KGB 'commando') would have sailed to the US on a Viking boat, personally kicked the crap out of Bush/Obama, and told Americans they would all have to get used to being paid in vodka.

Obama has always portrayed himself as MLK's "dream" and JFK's ghost all rolled into one. Not dissimilar to how Jesus portrayed himself as the "lamb" that was prophesied in the old testament. He certainly has the eloquence of the civil rights leaders but it will be a couple of generations before anyone can tell if he has had as much significance.

The recent UN compromise between Putin & Obama to work towards a caretaker government in Syria looks promising from a humanitarian and civil rights POV, but it's to the great shame of both nations that it's taken them 2yrs of bloodshed to get that far.

Doesn't matter, they have 300 million pin numbers to choose from?

Bank offer is $100K, do you take it or risk losing it to someone else while you figure out a "defensive technique" and collect the extra $50K?

Ummm, the North sea has huge storms that create exactly the same tidal surges. There was a major disaster from one such storm in the fifties that flooded Holland and London. The Dutch "manage" so well because Western Europe learned it's lessons from that 1950's catastrophe, ever heard of the Thames barrier?

Suggesting that people simply move displays remarkable ignorance about the scale of the problem. Half of all the people who live in coastal US cities now live below sea level. The problems with coastal cities are numerous, adding millions of tons of concrete to the surface and sucking up underground water from bores makes the ground subside, taming the river stops it dumping silt out of the mouth allowing the sea to erode the existing (protective) delta, and of course rising sea levels. Some places in NY are now 30ft lower than they were in 1900, some parts of Mexico city have sunk nearly 100ft in the same timespan!

If nothing else, what comparing Amsterdam to New Orleans proves beyond all reasonable doubt is that spending billions of tax dollars building and maintain seawalls is by far the cheapest and most humane solution.

There were 3B people on the planet when I was born, now there are 7B. Malthusians are just extrapolating the mathematics of unrestrained growth to it's inevitable conclusion, they're not wrong, they're inaccurate. People also extrapolate to predict the sun will rise in the west the next day, but nature offers no guarantees it will cooperate.

Don't know about other types of plastic but the nylon factory I worked at in the 80's routinely added antibiotics to the nylon to stop it from rotting.

So you're saying antibiotic resistant bacteria existed before antibiotics?

Making it more difficult means someone has to put more (recorded and archived for 2yrs by your ISP) effort into "accidentally" finding the same "abused kid of the week" site every Saturday night for the last 18 months. Good luck explaining "an evil hacker did it" to a judge and jury.

I was on the internet before it was the internet. My opinion is that the internet has actually become a powerful weapon against pedophiles. Denmark in the early 90's was the "tipping point" but since then many other western nations have started flushing some of these predators out of their own churches and state institutions. I don't know what the answer is since people who enjoy watching or participating in the act of dehumanizing and torturing a child, are by any definition 'sick'.