This 100 times. I am amazed again and again that big government projects are almost guaranteed to be over budget and late, and I don't mean 10% in either case. After having this 5000 times, which idiots write the contracts that still don't contain massive penalties for those cases? Grab them by the balls when they promise you the heavens and tell them to deliver or shut up.

Nothing short of corruption can explain this, because I refuse to believe that someone can be this stupid and at the same time still remember how breathing works.

First first of all it's mandatory, otherwise they couldn't fly at all. It actually took them some time to get FAA/UASF approval. And when you have tanks full of LOX/RP-1, it's not exactly like they need C4 to blow it up, a glorified radio controlled lighter spark should do it.

That's not a two way street. Just because all the speech that needs protecting offends someone doesn't mean all offensive speech should have protection. Threats, libel, slander, fraud and perjury are all forms of speech. Playing loud music at 3AM is arguably a form of expression. The "freedom of speech" card is not absolute in any country on earth, even the US.

You really think this is solely an engineering decision? I'm guessing this is just as much if not more a business decision. We could have real world testing which is expensive where unexpected quirks and flaws could be revealed or we could have simulations which are cheap and quite confined to whatever it is the scenario is testing. Everyone in suits would go with simulations, while engineers know that models are abstractions and simplifications of reality.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they do a ton of simulation and regression testing and as a design tool it's invaluable. To use a car analogy I really doubt cars come rolling off the assembly line without some prototyping and real world tests first though. Remember that those affected by regulations tend to have really deep economic interests in skirting those regulations as much as possible.

If it's a big shop with tons of review it won't prevent this particular product from being a lemon. I recently had that happen to me on eBay, 99.5% approval rating and >100k feedback score but product was real bad. They delisted it after I complained. At any rate, I wish Amazon would split it into "Product reviews" and "Vendor reviews", because a lot of the feedback is about bad customer service that's entirely irrelevant if you buy from a different seller.

It's the same attitude you may have noticed that come from people who defend libertarianism but when confronted with the flaws of Somalia will claim that those were, nor are, not under real libertarianism, but something else (anarchy, in the case of Somalia).

The truth is, people game any system. They want that cushy job, that fat pay check, the easy life. Any form of organization whether it's corporate, government, non-profit or otherwise end up serving at least three distinct interests. The one they're supposed to serve, sure. The actual people working in that system, they all want theirs. And finally the system itself, the government wants to expand the government's powers.

Incentives are flawed. Checks and balances are flawed. But perfect is the enemy of good, because the alternative to not keeping those forces at bay is exploitation. Inevitably, when there's no power structures they create themselves, anything from gangs to warlords to conglomerates to oligarchies. The idea of an egalitarian society where everyone is equal and power doesn't concentrate is like a world with gravity where matter won't clump together.

There's a reason why Churchill said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." I think the same can be said of capitalism, there's hardly any problem finding faults with it. The problem is finding a better system that works in the real world with real people and not some idealized form for an idealized people. Ideology is always clean and academic, the actual implementation is always messy.

Work is still work even if the result isn't property, if somebody wants software to do X which doesn't exist they have to either pay someone to write it or write it themselves. My current job would still exist if copyright disappeared tomorrow. As would any other system built for internal use or one particular client, all the consulting services around making it work and so on. Or that are centered around controlled services like an MMORPG. Yes, COTS software as we know it would basically implode but I'm guessing that in its absence we'd see Kickstarter or "hostage" funding, basically it's already written but we want a sum to give it away, probably with a lot of smaller and more incremental improvements. After all, the world won't stop needing software and it won't write itself.

That's the way other markets work, the electrician is paid for the work not the kilowatts, the plumber as well not by the cubic meter. Being able to shamelessly copy each other has its benefits too, it might curb innovation but it also lets everyone use the best, most popular and easy to use solutions rather than worrying about patent lawsuits and seeking out inferior alternatives to work around them. Actually being the first to sell something tends to give you a pretty good edge even if you have cloners who'll copy your magic, particularly if you're thinking hardware/software combinations. It would be different, but I think we'd be okay. In the vacuum left companies would probably be more willing to spend money on tweaking OSS tools to their uses too.

Shouldn't that be "Beware of geeks bearing gifts...." in this case?

Bingo. Deleting pages is not only evil by itself, it also fundamentally breaks the "wiki" part of "Wikipedia".

Deletion in the Wikimedia software is intended for vandalism and mistakes. But hey, you and me we are among a large crowd who have decided to not contribute to WP until the idiots in charge understand some of the basic concepts of their own system. This is just one of the most blatantly obvious.

addendum: /. -

WTF? It used to be 1 minute. Are we now pandering to people whose mental processes and typing skills don't allow to post more than one comment every 3, 5, 30 minutes?

Notability never made any sense whatsoever. The exact topics that are "not notable" are the ones that people are most likely to search desparately for. If I want to read something about Michael Jackson, or the city of Paris, there are 20 million pages on the Internet. Finding them is trivial.

If I want to read about Nimrod or any other "not notable" topic, that's exactly where Wikipedia could shine. It could give me a short summary and some links to read more. It could, in other words, do exactly what an encyclopedia is supposed to do.

For some reason, the idiots managing WP have decided to gut exactly the part of their project that would make it the most useful, while having pages about individual porn stars and manga characters is somehow really important.

Chances are this has nothing to do with Agile and everything to do with the people, company and culture.

If your culture sucks, Agile won't save you, or magically improve it. Managers love this "magic bullet you can buy and it'll solve all your problems" which is largely why they constantly re-organize something, completely ignoring 10, 20 or sometimes 100 years of re-organization experience that prove that nothing whatsoever changed after any of them.

Tackling the culture of a company or department is a lot more difficult, less flashy and less likely to give you short-term quantifiable results, which is why so few do it.

There's no such thing as "Agile Done Right". There is such thing as a right culture in which Agile (or, frankly speaking, any other methodology) will work and make everyone happy. If you live in a wrong culture, there's nothing Agile or anything else could do right to fix it.

Assuming you know you're going on a long trip and start out with full battery you should have a 250 mile range starting out. Top it off with 150 extra and you can go 400 miles with half an hour of downtime, I don't know about you but I wouldn't drive that far in one stretch anyway, so it would be taking up a parking spot while I eat anyway. Sure, technically it's more tanking and less parking but the car takes up the same space anyway.

Also most of the time most people (who consider getting an EV anyway) will have a gas station in their garage/parking spot, which happens to be where it was going to stand anyway so it consumes zero extra space. Despite the efficiency difference there'd probably be less space spent on gas stations in inner cities. It'd probably become an add-on service for malls and parking garage top off your car while you're shopping.

change.gov and change.org are two completely different sites. The .gov site is the official petition website for the US government. The .org site is like wordpress for petitions. Anyone can go an create a petition for any reason, and it has about as much weight as a wordpress blog does, which is to say most are completely meaningless, but on occasion once actually gets some momentum, and it is that momentum (not the petition itself) that matters.

I don't write mediocre code, I write smart code which is something else entirely than being "clever". With a certain amount of hubris I'll say that I don't think I've ever written really bad code at the micro-level. However, I used to write a lot more code which disregarded encapsulation, separation of concerns, side effects, poor function and variable naming, anti-patterns and so on. And if I wrote enough of it then it resembled spaghetti code, it lacked the structure, abstractions and layers to make it clean and easy to maintain. I still suck at writing high level documentation but at least when people jump into my code they usually praise it for being easy to follow. That's much harder than it looks.

Let's for the sake of argument assume that every site has subscription/micro-payment options and that they don't care where the money comes from so the ad free cost equals their ad revenue. And that it's so convenient and secure it's basically transparent, you pay $230/year and all your ads go away. And let's forget that we'd essentially be competing with the ad industry, probably causing a price spike. The underlying issue at least according to this survey is that no matter what, people don't want to pay that much.

I'm not surprised, a lot of people become extremely stingy online. I remember all the bitching that iTunes charged you 99c for a hit track, when the other legal alternatives were much, much worse. A lot of people swore to downloading MP3s to save money. I think a lot of it is that on the Internet, nobody can see that you're poor or a cheapskate. Nobody knows that your water cooler talk came from something you downloaded from TPB rather than premium cable. I just checked /. subscription options and I could pay $5 for 1000 ad free pages, do I? Nope. If I extrapolate then $230 should be 46000 web pages, no doubt I could pay my way to an ad free web.