jcl

Social Security is supported by several dedicated trust funds. I don't know about Medicare and Medicaid. It hasn't mattered since people realized that you can't win economics by hoarding money.

*headdesk* The USPS is part of the government. The government is funded by taxes.

The USPS is not a for-profit business.

The USPS is fantastic. The bits about the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 and Cash for Clunkers are hilarious.

As I recall, the vaccine still killed more people than the flu. It was probably as safe as it could have been but it was still a bit embarrassing.

Actually, Mozilla disabled it, after consulting with Microsoft, because of a vulnerability. MS fixed the vulnerability before Mozilla updated the block list, but oh well. Anyway, since the vulnerability is in the plugin (or the .NET Framework) Chrome should be affected. Either install the update from Microsoft or disable the plugin in Chrome.

Yeah. As I understand the situation it was entirely was Danger's fault. T-Mobile sold the handsets and the network service but Danger was responsible for the data. It's probably too much to hope that this will lead to people to reconsider trusting the cloud with their data.

T-Mobile gave me unlimited data for $6/month. If they sent a customer service rep to stab me I'd still rate them "excellent". Really, though, I like T-Mobile. They're relatively inexpensive, reliable, honest, a bit boring, a bit anachronistic, occasionally brilliant. In a word, German.

I think the AP is correct: the Nobel committee does occasionally award the prize to encourage people and organizations who've accomplished little or nothing but whose efforts the committee supports. One outstanding example is Aung San Suu Kyi.

On the other hand, he's managed to offend the leaders of Afghanistan, France, and half of Eastern Europe. ISTR that Merkel sounded a bit unhappy toward the end of the G-20 too. Edit: And Honduras. Oh God, Honduras....

But... but... he hasn't done anything! sudden left turn Fun discussion at the Volokh Conspiracy about the constitutionality of the Obama accepting the prize. Obama seems to have angered the gods of obscure constitutional provisions. First there was the possible Emoluments Clause violation and now a possible Title of Nobility Clause violation. How many non-lawyers even know that those clauses exist?

Just thought I'd mention it. Now I'm off to slam my head against a wall until I forget.

This is almost as retarded as the AMD magical multithreading rumor a couple years ago.

You might want to see if the drivers can be downloaded and look over the instructions. IIRC HP had at least one product that required Windows to install the Mac software. Seriously. (Edit: Found it.)

Urge to kill... rising. Twitter is a personal microblogging service. Personal blogs are supposed to be self-focused. That's the whole point. Twitter's focus on SMS arguably makes it (or made it) even more personal than typical personal blogs. We need someone to conduct a study to determine the exact moment when (semi-)professional bloggers ruined blogging.

We're in a recession. Germany and Italy are moving to the right. This will end well.

Maybe not. The population in the mid-'30s was around 130 million and the unemployment rate at the peak of the Depression was around 25%. The population now is bit over 300 million and the unemployment rate is a bit under 10%. If the potential workforce as a fraction of population is the same, there would have been more people out of work in the '30s (32.5x million vs 30x million). That's crazy talk.

The national unemployment rate is still less than half of the peak in the '30s. (Or thereabouts. I gather that the way the unemployment rate is calculated has changed over the years.) Like nearly every other state. The Constitution explicitly permits executive appointments to fill Senate vacancies. The taxpayers already provide those people with health coverage through the prison system. And the taxpayers pay for that through higher insurance premiums. So far this seems to be a wash.

There's a media campaign? In other news, the current health care reform plan was crafted by an insurance industry executive turned Baucus aide. [Edit: Gah, what happened with that link? Fixed, I hope] No one saw that coming.

Someone should compile a list of all of the times Clinton and Bush were booed and jeered and accused of lying by members of Congress.

Click icon. If you get a UAC prompt, read the damn prompt and then take the appropriate action. I wouldn't expect the number of viruses to be proportional to operating system market share. Related, but not proportional.

Right, it's privilege management that's the problem. Unfortunately, the problem doesn't seem to have solution. UAC was a good effort but I think Microsoft overestimated people's willingness to be slightly inconvenienced. Aggressive virtualization, something like IBM VM's 'every account is a virtual machine', might work but if it knocked even 1% off D3D performance it would be DOA. Anyway, the problem is applications that need administrator privileges. The good news is that if don't use those applications it's not a problem. You can use a limited account and UAC or runas when necessary and ever

Oh come on. ASLR doesn't provide protection because it can circumvented if you have administrator privileges‽

The underlying issue is application compatibility. The need to maintain application compatibility is driven largely by the size of the installed base. Not a very good argument. <snark>Unless you're referring to Leopard's implementation.</snark> I think the goal there is to disable SMB2 without disabling the service. If you wanted to disable SMB completely I assume you could just turn off the sharing service(s). AFAIK ASLR is enabled-but-opt-in by default in Win7, just like Vista.

Bit over 8%. I think the BBC story is wrong, BTW. Microsoft's board approved shareholder review of executive pay, not the other way around.