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Comment Re:Survivable crashes are now rare (Score 2) 63

Crashes are now rare in general. When I was a kid, it seemed like there was a major air crash in the US almost annually. I may be wrong, but I don't remember a full-sized airliner (bigger than a regional jet) having a catastrophic crash in the US since shortly after 9/11 when that Airbus lost its tail and crashed in NYC. (Being a natural pessimist, I find this outcome hard to believe and would have lost a good deal of money if I had bet on it.)

However, there still continue to be a large number of hard landings, runway slideoffs, engine fires, cabin fires and other emergency situations where the passengers still need to evacuate quickly because their lives are at risk. (Not to mention the "Miracle on the Hudson".) The safety briefings are still relevant in all those situations.

Comment Re:Can I pay him not to post? (Score 2) 215

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Comment Re:Zero day already in the wild? (Score 4, Informative) 76

The summary says: "Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild. "

(scratches head) How can a flaw be called zero-day and already be exploited in the wild?

Because a zero-day is any flaw made public before the developer knows about it. One of the main ways this happens is by noticing that hackers are breaking into systems using a heretofore unknown exploit.

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