Immigration Reform; Green cards for veterans

One small step for US. The attraction of America is so strong that we have non citizens enlisting in the US armed forces. Any one of these who gives honorable service to the United States ought receive at least a green card, if not actually citizenship. We owe these brave people something and legal entry to the US is the least we can do to square that debt.
In the same vein, Iraqi's and others, who serve our armed forces overseas as interpreters, informants, and as agents ought to get a fast track toward a green card.

Democrracy is not the natural state of man, (NPR)

Listening to NPR this morning. Actually my clock radio comes on at 0630 playing the local NPR station. Somewhere they dredged up a leftist to give the old "Democracy is not natural, we should not intervene to establish democracy, let the natives do their own thing" mantra. This clueless speaker then proceeded to tell us that democracy was not established in America until the 20th century.
This guy had managed to be both racist and disloyal to the United States, all within 2 minutes. It is racist to suggest that other peoples (say Iraqi's) are incapable of operating a democracy. It is equally racist to suggest that only people from "Northwest Europe" (his phrase) are capable of running one. Either way you say it (and the speaker said it both ways) you are saying some people are better than other people. I don't buy that.
I stand with Jefferson. All men are created equal. That includes Iraqis, Iranians, and all the other manifold peoples on this earth. That means they can all operate a democracy. I also stand with Churchill who said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
As for the other slam, "America did not become a democracy until the 20th century" the speaker demonstrates near total ignorance of US history and the English language. I wonder shere he went to school. The constitution written by the founding fathers is a true democracy, the first in the world, at a time when all the other nations of the earth were ruled by kings. Since 1789 the US has continuously broaden the freedom's of the constitution, some times at enormous cost.
This speaker totally discredits NPR.

Recycling at the town transfer station, aka dump

It's not a dump, it's a transfer station. Just ask the folk who work there. They charge $1.50 a bag for plain old trash. Recyclables are free. That's bottles, cans and paper. They have a humunguous pile of glass bottles. Mostly beer bottles, with a good leavening of liquor bottles. If we just gave up on drinking that would solve the glass recycling problem.

The many panes of Windows, Pt 2

Windows is a server operating system, which is a big contributing factor to Windows' fatness. 99 out of 100 Windows systems are client, not servers. Being a client is simpler than than being a server. Client operating systems support just one owner/operator. They keep our hard disk in order, launch our programs off our hard disk, work our I/O devices and the internet. We own the whole computer, so we own all the files on it. Clients don't do work for other computers. Servers on the other hand spend their life sharing stuff, printers, hard disk, internet connections with other computers. At the office, when you click "print" and your stuff pours out of the central printer, a server makes that happen. Your client machine sends a message to the server machine connected to the printer saying "Print this as soon as possible". The key difference between clients and servers, is servers have to the smart enough to accept requests for services over a comm link (LAN, dialup modem, or other links), and accomplish them. Servers have to serve a number of clients, and so must keep various clients separate. Servers allow clients to store files on the server's hard drive. For this to work, the server must remember which client owns which file and only allow the owner access to his files. It won't do to have Joe reading and writing Sally's files.
So, servers must remember who owns what files, and each time a file is opened, it must check to be sure the opener of the file is the owner of that file. Both providing services upon request and keeping files private make a server substantially more complicated, bigger and buggier than a pure client.
Servers are inherently more vulnerable to malware. "Load this program and run it" is a basic service provided by Windows. This is how malware spreads across the internet, a virus running in an infected computer asks another computer to load the virus and run it. Windows calls this feature "Remote Procedure Call", or "RPC" for short. "Telnet" is another such feature. There are more such features in Windows, too many more to count. What's worse, in Windows you cannot turn RPC off. If you do, Windows won't boot.
Since Windows ships with the RPC "kick me" sign prominently displayed, Windows needs a "firewall" program to protect it against RPC spreading viruses. A "firewall" intercepts all incoming traffic and blocks the dangerous stuff. It is said that an unfirewalled Windows system will be infected by malware within ten minutes of going onto the internet.
So, for being a server, something no one wants, Windows is burdened with all the code to respond to client requests, and then more code to block those requests. A pure client, which doesn't offer services, would be leaner, faster, and more robust.

Bye Bye Etrade

Seems like discount stock brokerage house Etrade is hosed. Not content with running a fairly decent business as an on-line ultra low cost broker, the Etrade suits decided to play the sub prime mortgage market and got burned. According to the WSJ, a hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, has "loaned" Etrade $1.75 billion AT 12.5% interest.
Wow. Nothing, but nothing makes 12.5%. For the loan to be real, Etrade would need to make MORE than 12.5% in order to pay the loan back. That's not going to happen, no legal activity makes 12.5%. Citadel will own Etrade outright, and this "loan" is merely a paper device for moving what's left of Etrade's money into Citadel's coffers.

Scary, weapons grade uranium for sale

Fox news is reporting the seizure of three pounds of enriched uranium, in powder form, from a sting operation in Eastern Europe. The TV claims it is enriched to weapons grade, better than 90% U-235. Critical mass for a U-235 fission bomb is supposed to be a kilogram (2.2 pounds) so three pounds is enough to make a real Hiroshima size fission bomb, rather than just a dirty bomb, at least if you know what you are doing. The Hiroshima bomb was "only" 20 Kilotons of yield, a mere firecracker compared to the yield of up-to-date nukes.
Even scarier thought. The Russians still have a lot of nukes. These are sitting in ammunition magazines scattered about Russia. Each magazine has a crew of technicians, bomb loaders, guards, and whoever. These guys are under the command of some Russian officer, a colonel at a guess. How many of those colonels are worried about layoffs, retirement savings, college educations for their children? Would one or two of them accept a million Euro's to let a couple a nukes out? A real Red Army nuke that has been tested and is highly likely to go bang? As opposed to a terrorist home made job that might well fizzle? The North Koreans demonstrated a fizzle not too long ago.

Why is Windows so Paneful?

Windows, the nearly universal operating system, has earned itself a host of bitter enemies. Nobody likes it. Windows is buggy, expensive, slow to boot, slow to launch programs, slow to run programs, wide open to malware, and infuriating to program for. Users need to buy, install, and futz with anti virus , anti spyware, and firewalls. Despite the add-on defensive software, viruses (virii?) have taken control of millions of PC's and use them to sent spam, launch distributed denial of service attacks across the web, or perform identity theft on behalf of criminal gangs. Writing Windows drivers for plug-into-the-PC products consumes more engineering effort than creating the product in the first place. Each new release of Windows is slower and consumes more RAM, disk space, and run time than the last. And requires a time consuming rewrite of all those painfully written drivers.
And yet, Windows is the only game in town for those of us in the software business. Nearly every PC runs Windows, so your product has to run under Windows if you expect to sell it. For every Linux or Apple machine, there are a hundred Windows machines. No one will buy a product that doesn't run under Windows. Windows is a fact of life and we are stuck with it until some company offers something better. I'm not holding my breath. IBM tried with OS2 years ago and ancient Windows 3.1 totally destroyed them. The Linux folk have yet to convince ordinary customers to give up Word and Excel for Star Office.
What makes Windows so bad?
It's too damn big. Windows is humungous. It's so big no one understands it any more. The number of bugs is proportional to the number of lines of code, and the number of lines of code in Windows is millions, billions, who knows really. But it's the biggest program in captivity. Which makes it the buggiest. The only way to reduce the bugs and speed it up is to make it smaller.