> BTW, this is emblematic of the Obama administration

It's emblematic of EVERY administration going back thousands of years. Right wing present that this is something new but their world view seems to be completely uninfluenced by an appreciation of human nature or history.

For example:

Augustus was a shrewd and effective manager of his own public image. Itâ(TM)s now easy to take for granted that images of political leaders decorate our currency â" Augustus was among the first rulers to widely disseminate images of his own face on coins.

Itâ(TM)s hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books...

> Some critics do say that Alibaba's share price will plummet from its current value of $93.60 in the same way that Facebook's and Twitter's plummeted

The vast majority of IPOs are lower in price 6 months after the issue date. Usually what happens is that company owners have some restrictions on when they can start selling stock - and those are typically 6 months or so. So on the day of initial sale supply is very constrained. Later a lot more shares flood onto the market.

For example Facebook went from $38 to $19.

Purchasing IPOs on day of issuance is a sucker move.

For my always-on machines I have a couple of Atom 525's with perhaps 30 TB of data storage. The OS for those is Scientific Linus 5.x (someday to be Centos 6.x).

These are plenty powerful enough for the services I use them for - files storage, light duty web serving, personal IMAP, DNS caching etc. and sip at the electrical supply.

They are good enough for light duty web browsing as well.

For more challenging applications (like games, photo editing etc) I have a couple of machines running 4 and 6 core I7s with 24GB of RAM. These only get turned on when I need them.

Killing most projects early is considered a good thing in some circles because it weeds out the garbage and makes more resources available to the more worthwhile projects.

Often you can tell how good a company is at managing R&D by how quickly it kills bad projects.

When I was working in R&D portfolio management we found that a bunch of small projects was much less likely to return something worthwhile than a more limited number of big projects.

It really boiled down to the idea that there is a non-linear relationship between resources devoted to a project and the likelihood of success.

Conflicts between sects is not unknown in other religions too.

For example look at the European wars between Christian sects just prior to the Enlightenment.

I think the key thing here is that Islamic countries for one reason or another never went through a similar transition towards rationalism and individualism. They are still ruled by a way of thought that western culture started abandoning 350 years ago.

I hope we don't get dragged back that way. Fundamentalism is ultimately I think the greatest enemy of human progress.

It isn't people at the bank. It's users of the bank.

Coming from a warehouse near you at Mach 8.

Really this isn't so dissimilar to the racket now being perpetrated by colleges and universities in the US in conjunction with employers looking for cheap skilled labor.

The end result is generation saddled with crushing debt and wages that are failing to keep up with inflation. Assuming they are employed.

Either that or the most susceptible people were killed in previous outbreaks.

Thinning the herd etc.

The two are fundamentally incompatible. You can do both if you ignore this problem, but in the end that simply makes you a hypocrite.

ISIS is fighting in an area already under Muslim rule. It has nothing to do with Islamic expansion and everything to do with war between sects.

Obviously not the Abbasid Caliphate that funded the Baghdad House of Wisdom, home of Muhammed ibn musa al Kwarizmi.

(the words algorithm and algebra are taken from his name and the titles of books he wrote).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's sickening to see these nutters rejecting the thought and culture that once lead the civilizations of the middle east to a true Golden Age.

Now all we can do is hope that there will somehow be an Islamic Enlightenment. Perhaps in reaction to ISIS? It's hard to see it happening though.

Unfortunately for you, your well-being is not dependent on just your own efforts and choices. It's also the result of the collective efforts of the society of people around you. Otherwise you could live better in Somalia than you do here.

But you can't. So you are stuck with the distasteful (to you anyway) idea that your welfare depends on having a healthy society to live in. To get that you are going to have to contribute.

Sorry.

The government-it industrial complex is controlled by the same sort of corrupt relationships that the military-industrial complex. Come in to that situation with new ideas and you will get slapped down by entrenched interests intent on making use of networks of people moving back and forth between government and industry in order to create personal wealth. New ideas and new technologies only rock the boat.

The classic example is the PPACA web site. Hundreds of millions spent on something that would be a 5-10 million dollar project in a sane world.

Actually in terms of volume both are shrinking.