Every nation manipulates their money against the dollar. Preventing that wouldn't work. Some do it blatantly, revaluing their currency every few years; some throw some whitewash on it and let it float in a narrow band; and some pretend it's purely market-driven. But taxes, duties, and currency purchases and sales can and do alter exchange rates, sometimes dramatically.

But yeah, the visa system needs an overhaul, like more documentation that there are no credible candidates stateside. I think it should include holding over the resumes of all who apply for a given period of time and notes on why they weren't qualified, with random audits. Failing an audit would automatically nullify all visas obtained by the company and block them from applying for new visas for a period of ten years.

I'm not opposed to there being visas, just them being abused.

I didn't negate the point. I corrected the intermediary. The FBI is under the DoJ, but is a part of the Intelligence Community. It interfaces with DNI but is not subservient to the office. The FBI is first and foremost a law enforcement agency with a substantial intelligence mission.

Check the bottom of the FBI website: "FBI.gov is an official site of the U.S. government, U.S. Department of Justice"

You can also check Wikipedia, etc., for confirmation.

I was looking for a job in another state for a couple of years, but had a job that I generally enjoyed and paid well so I could afford to bide my time looking for the job I really wanted. It was the first time in about 7 or so years that I had done so, but I had to quickly relearn how to sift out the bad recruiters, which turned out to be most of them. A couple of them that managed to get my updated resume wanted to "update" it, changing terms to things that didn't reflect my experience at all (major example: I'm not a programmer and one guy wanted to make it look like I had more than a decade of C experience because I took a semester of it in the 1990s).

What I discovered is that the majority of the contacts came from resume mills, and further delving suggested that many of them simply collect resumes to dump on clients en masse, with or without editing. Some of them take qualified resumes and change the contact information to others as part of a further hiring scam.

In the last three years, I've worked with maybe four good recruiters who took the time to figure out what I wanted and to try to match me up with a company where everyone would be happy. Unfortunately, all of them have since moved on to different companies.

Mueller's boss is the Attorney General, not the DNI. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice. The FBI works closely with the DNI, but is not run by it.

There is one man between Mueller and the President, and that's Holder. But the head of the FBI briefs the president directly on a fairly common basis.

If Amazon isn't selling it, it says right below the price, "Sold by " but may also have "and fulfilled by Amazon" if Amazon shipping options are available.

You should check your facts before you post. Back in the dim and distant past, as you call it, airlines took mostly from the military, just as they did up through the end of the 20th century. Testifying before Congress in 2001, then-FAA Director of Flight Standards Service Nicholas Lacey said, "From World War II through the mid-90s, approximately 80 percent of major airline new hires were military trained. Today, civilian pilots make up approximately 60 percent of all pilots hired. Today, civilian pilots make up approximately 60 percent of all pilots hired." Maybe it was different before World War II, but back then, flight was a luxury and safety standards few and far between.

Those "from the ground up" training costs that you mention have to come from somewhere, and with airlines running precariously thin profit margins, they'll come from The military subsidized the cost of training the overwhelming majority of those who would be airline pilots. The current costs of learning to fly on one's own are exorbitant largely due to the regulatory, court, and insurance costs borne by small aircraft manufacturers. A Cessna 172P in 1981 started at about $34,000, about 5-6 times the cost of the average new car. Now, the cost of a new 172S is about $300,000, more than 10 times the cost of the average new car. Add increased fuel prices and you get far fewer people going for the initial outlay of $12K to $16K to get their private pilot's license, the next place that airlines start looking for candidates.

If airlines are to train them from the ground up, as you say, they're looking at outlays just in pilot training on the order of $175K, not including what it takes to set up all of the intermediate operations to get them up to Air Transport Pilot and the required 1500 hours. The end result is going to be either higher costs for the passengers, lower pay for the pilots, or both.

It may be better for safety, but it might not be so good for the industry.

An increase is good and bad. More experience is usually a good thing from a safety perspective, but it does mean it's harder and more expensive to get someone to the point where they can be on the flight deck. That expense drives up airline costs, though it might push air cargo and charter flight costs in small planes down a bit as more pilots compete for limited flight hours there.

The number of pilots in training in all paths (military and private) is declining, so the pool of pilots qualified to make base entry for commercial flight is similarly declining. The decline is because the military is getting along with fewer pilots and private flight is too expensive for most people. I'm hoping that the latter changes with a review of FAA regulations happening this year that should dramatically cut the cost of aircraft development and production, but the dearth of pilots probably won't change in the next decade.

BTW, the FAA changed the requirements for copilots (actually requiring an ATP instead of just a commercial rating, which technically isn't a flight hours requirement) at the direction of Congress. It had resisted for a long time making such changes.

Warning shots exist for law enforcement at sea. The Coast Guard uses them routinely when interdicting speedboats suspected of carrying drugs, sending a few machine gun shots across the path to make it clear that they're prepared to use force. I don't know if police with maritime forces do the same thing.

But for civilians, the concept of a warning shot is iffy at best. You get leeway if you shoot through your intended target and hit someone on the other side; if you intentionally miss someone and hit someone else accidentally, you've just committed a felony. (And in more immediate terms, you now have one or more fewer bullets in case you actually do need to shoot to kill.)

It's not remotely close to revoking citizenship. It's removing your permission to travel through other countries pursuant to treaties to recognize passports as official documents for specific purposes. It's used all the time when fugitives go abroad to trap them in a situation where they can be brought back for trial, usually after being detained for not having a valid passport. It does nothing on its own to remove your rights to vote, hold office, or anything else that citizens can do, and a nation can choose to ignore the lack of a passport if it so chooses. And in case you're thinking it limits the right to travel, nations have long held sovereignty over who crosses their border, whether entering or leaving, and that can include blocking its own citizens from leaving the country for any or no reason.

Stateless means something very specific, and this isn't it. Passports are revoked for fugitives on a fairly regular basis, and have to be turned over to prevent people who have been indicted from leaving the country. Neither case revokes citizenship. Much as I agree with what Snowden did, he's playing up hist current circumstances. The US is simply narrowing his options, just as they would any other fugitive. Odds are that he's going to come back to face trial, because as much as Russia is enjoying tweaking the US, it's not going to do that forever as Snowden will become a sticking point in unrelated negotiations.

Well, really my only Sid Meier encounter, if you don't count sitting in an audience.

So, I'm at . . . COMDEX? CES? One of those big-ass electronics trade shows. Might have been Chicago, might have been Las Vegas.

I got away from my booth for an hour, and I head for the area where computer games are being shown. I'm totally jazzed to see a dummy box and demo of Colonization. I look over the material about it, and to another totally jazzed gamer next to me say something like "Cool, it's like someone did a decent remake of Seven Cities of Gold!"

A voice at my shoulder says "Good, that's what I had in mind."

SQUEEE!

Microsoft does a fairly good job at maintaining a generally usable driver set available through Windows Update. It's usually not the latest version (and often is a generic driver from a few years ago), but it works. They have an additional problem if it comes from their servers, they get blamed if something goes wrong. Hence the testing and stability requirements before it goes into the repository, because if they break a million systems with a bad driver update, it hits the news even if it is a comparatively rare impact.

I tend to agree with your other points, though if Linux actually reached a critical level of use, its security practices would start getting tested, too. Attackers love to see Linux systems because they're trusted to be secure, a trust which is often violated. You seem to know what you're doing, but the corporate Linux uses that I've seen have relied on poor understanding of how they should be maintained, often based on arrogant declarations from the sysadmins who do things like boast of not having rebooted the web server in two years.

On the contrary. Harm to society can trump freedom, and it does regularly. It's why people go to prison for rape, murder, etc. Their freedom is abridged because of the risk of them causing further harm to society both directly (raping and killing more people) and indirectly (causing people to shelter in place, lash out, start vigilante groups).

However, harm to society should not be the only factor involved in determining whether and to what degree a freedom should be abridged.

Divorce was less common before the 1950s, but by no means was it unheard of. There were nearly 200,000 divorces in 1930 and a bit over 1.1 million marriages. That makes divorce fairly well-known.

Fascism combines elements of both the right and the left while being moderate on few, if any, aspects.