Oh, I'm not EXCUSING it, I'm merely suggesting that the Oatmeal strategy may fail when there's other forces pushing people to misspelling. IDENTIFYING those additional reasons may ALSO help stop people from misspelling it.

loose choose moose

The loose lose misspelling, much as it irritates me, is understandable because of pronounciation. Consider

chose - choose
lose - loose.

Of the above, choose rhymes with lose, so I can certainly appreciate why people think choose rhymes with loose.

Perhaps if we had more moose around people would spell this correctly (moose rhymes with loose, but not choose)

That should motivate change.

To paraphrase Monty Python, this improvement of infrastructure is trickier than I thought.

I'm all for better, faster, cheaper, more efficient everything, BUT infrastructure spending is tricky to compare to STIMULUS spending. If we had more high speed rail transport, for example, wouldn't that be nearly a zero-sum game with airline travel today? I fail to see the stimulative effect of adding high speed rail to the US much as I'd personally like to see it (especially if it's one of those I can drive my car onto).

At this point I gotta say I'm more in favor of infrastructure spending that's also stimulative than on merely maintaining status-quo.

really? At one time I knew how to calculate square and cube roots by hand in a manner similar to long division, but no more. Are you claiming you remember how to do that?

Outside of that, yea the math part is more tedious than challenging. And even that's not challenging, more like a lost art.

If you believe this article the powers that be should force all porn providers to use IPv6 addresses too. If porn helps push technology forward then this should help IPv6 rollout.

I absolutely agree to start with the modern ones. The older ones are good (I got hooked with Tom Baker) but looking at them now the 70s/80s directing style shows through and they appear much slower paced to a modern audience.

I firmly believe you gotta love it before getting steeped in the older lore. I'd suggest just going straight to Tennant. I'm not convinced you should cherry pick among the fan-rated best (for example "Blink") mainly because some of the coolness of that will be lost on you first time through and besides if you start with the best... it's down hill from there.

After (if?) you're hooked, you may want to watch older ones involving the Master (for example) or any episodes set on Galifrey. (My fav is the episode right after Sarah Jane Smith left.) Or any of the villians who are repeat characters (cybermen, daleks, sontarans, etc)

One thing the new series is leaving out is how vast the interior of the tardis is/can be. One T.Baker episode showed it as huge, with rooms for each companion as well as a garden, pools, etc. Kinda wish they'd do that here.

While this is on point, generally, it's off topic from TFA.

Market forces are market forces, no arguing that and if you get left behind then so be it. What's insidious though, and what's discussed in TFA is how short-sighted many companies are. The big boss sees the cool new technology and opts to pay market rates that blow out the current internal rates to get it. What both he and his immediate underling (the PM here) failed to realize is that there's at least TWO key components to their new project (A) the hot new technology and (B) the deep-core knowledge of their current systems. (A) can be evaluated in the open market (B) can not be and if it wasn't for the senior programmer complaining, the company wouldn't have bothered to make an adjustment for him.

Now, programmers have choices... keep current with market skills and spend time doing this at the expense of not diving too deeply in the core guts of your current system OR maintain current skills and spend time learning the core system really well. Thing is, if you chose the latter your marketability is shot, you only know your original skills (but perhaps a bit better), but by the same token your value to the company (as long as that core system remains central to their success) also goes up. In a fair world you'd be paid based on your value to the company, cool-new-skills are generally valuable while deep knowledge of systems is only valuable to YOUR company, but still valuable. However, this rarely happens. Managers up the line tend to discount the latter and programmers specializing in the latter backed themselves into a poor position as the knowledge they learned doesn't translate into marketability in the wider market place and so WILL get a pay-hit if they leave (but the company would be hurt too).

And if you think the ideal programmer would do both, new skills and deep knowledge of current system, IMHO that's not feasible, if I had time to do both I'd still prefer to do more of the former as that is the more generally marketable skill and the one that's easier to convince management is the more valuable.

I think the company in question is a cut above average. They DID realize their mistake and took steps to correct it, but unfortunately they still made that mistake.

EXACTLY. I wonder if this is a counter example to the speed reading claims.

When I first read this I though some officer had the unfortunate last name of "Bubbles" and that the protestor was blowing bubbles as a mockery of his name. I was all set to have a smidgeon of sympathy for the officer. But then I saw the video. Nope... "Bubbles" was not his surname, he was just a dick.

This is actually an interesting perspective. The general question is ... in content vs technology, who should be in charge of *any* form of cybersecurity... the content guys or the tech guys? Extending the metaphor, should bankers or geeks be in charge of financial cyber security?

And using power tools makes us weaker.

74 years ago when they made that policy? I'd say probably all of them.

While I agree with you 100% you and the other poster are arguing different points. IMHO the other poster is complaining about MS's lack of vision. He would rather see a MS that was visionary enough to see a future where companies like MS and OpenSource could co-exist side by side and would actively move to make that vision a reality. Instead we see MS doing what most companies do, assess market need and move to fill that need.

Taking the visionary path is hard for a mature company. Blocking the visionary path (as MS perhaps did yesterday in your words) is short sighted, but also something most companies do while they wrestle with the visionary change that's before them. MS is large enough to do both... specifically put up the blocking strategy while they formulate a co-exist strategy and perhaps that is what they are doing as we speak.