There's a need for and room for a certain number of large-scale companies in this country and in the world. There's also a need for and room for countless smaller and medium-sized companies. They're all integral parts of a functioning society and economy. Most small/medium companies will never be big and shouldn't be. When you fully understand business scaling, you realize that both in theory and practice it's *impossible* to scale a company without changing the product or service being delivered to your consumer.

Think about the quality difference between say, Famous Restaurant Chain and that long-running Small Family-Owned Restaurant near you that makes incredible-tasting food. If you think the difference between the two is that the big tasteless one always sucked at making food but had a brilliant business guy at the reigns, and the small one, while tasty, simply lacks the business sense to scale up their operations and make real money on their talent, you've completely misunderstood how businesses scale.

Most of those famous large-chain restaurants and fast-food joints actually started out as a single family-owned restaurant that was doing very well financially because customers loved the place. They genuinely loved the food, the service and price. The low-quality form they exist in today is the direct result of scaling; there's simply no other way to do it. Quality of the goods and services *always* falls when you scale up, but you make more money. Many of those successful small family restaurants that stay that way are constantly under pressure from peers and partners to expand and are perfectly capable of handling the business process of expansion, but they relentlessly resist because they don't want to ruin a good thing.

At a small scale, each employee really matters. You do need some people who are brilliant at their respective jobs to be successful. Moving from there to the large scale is all about commoditization. It's about building a self-sustaining organization that delivers a consistent product or service regardless of which employees come and go over time. It means trading out the special people that make great things for the ability to turn out consistently mediocre things cheaply using random sets of mediocre employees. It's a hard transition to make, and it's a constant process as you grow rather than a one-time thing. If you want to grow, you have to hire people that can work with that process. People that can take themselves out of the picture personally. People who can instead design and operate an ever-expanding system where employees are just cogs in a machine which always runs smoothly even if some of the cogs are a little warped and misshapen, and even if there's a regular pace of cogs just leaving the machine and randomly-different ones replacing them sometime later.

So if you're a businessperson, or business owner, or investor, this sort of scaling and growth is what excites you. You're not excited by making the best fajitas this side of the Mississippi, you're not excited by making the best firewall software man has ever seen, etc. You're excited by creating systems out of human cogs that scale up infinitely and keep giving back ever-increasing monetary rewards. But so many business people in the world want to scale their small-to-medium company into the next behemoth and most of them will fail. Scaling is hard, and there's only so much room, and your already-larger competitors already have a big leg up on you. Most of them shouldn't even try to scale. It's perfectly ok to stick to your smaller size, not frustrate everyone with scaling attempts, and simply keep re-investing profits into making it the best damn small company anyone ever did business with.

The "brilliant jerk" isn't necessarily the problem. Maybe he's perfect for that small company, and the problem is your unnatural desire to scale things at the cost of quality, destroying a beautiful and functional small cog in the economy by trying to make it too big.

Really, the Middle East wasn't too bad in the early part of the 20th century, either. They were joining the modern world at a decent pace, women's rights were strong, they had universities with open-minded debates, female students, and even female politicians and leaders. They had open discourse on politics and religion, and generally everyone in the region was reasonably tolerant of others' religions.

It's the *modern* Middle East that's the problem. The *modern* Islamist rule in the region turned everything upside down with a new interpretation of "fundamentalist" Islam and started enforcing it on their societies. There are still living (old) people in the Middle East who remember how it was before all of this, and they're ashamed of what their countries have become. Religion evolves, and it's fair to say that the plurality of the modern practitioners of Islam in the Middle East represent a very different religion than the more peaceful and progressive variant that preceded it.

There may be an interpretation of Islam that's peaceful, but there are clearly also interpretations that are not. As with Christianity, the important thing in the moment is: which side is winning Islam's internal debate and controlling the majority of its political actions on the world stage?

Go back to the URL that got you here: http://slashdot.org/anniversary.pl , click on the radio button next to the party you're going to, scroll to the bottom of the screen for the Attend Party button.

Maybe you're in the wrong part of Texas? I've been eating good sushi in Houston for years. Quantifying "good" is hard I guess. I've never been to Japan, but I do make quarterly trips to the SF Bay area, and "good" sushi there is rarely better than good sushi here in Houston.

But again, there's a larger problem which you illustrate perfectly. AT&T and Verizon operate on completely different technology stacks (AT&T uses the global GSM standard, Verizon uses the "Asshat Americans want to be different and incompatible" CDMA standard). "3G" is a weak term that means different things in these two technology stacks. AT&T's 3G is a much better 3G than Verizon's 3G, and thus also much more expensive to roll out. If the "XG" terminology actually had real meaning (as in, you could compare the number X and accurately tell the difference in network capabilities, even when comparing CDMA and GSM), the ad would have to be modified to say something like "Verizon's 3G network is much larger than AT&T's 4G network".

Patents are not part of the libertarian ideal, therefore your logic fails.

Unfortunately your father in law is misinformed. It's common for even people with a great deal of field experience to be misinformed about these things. Ask a qualified ballistics expert and you'll find the diameter of the entrance wound is a relatively small factor. Proper bullet design, and proper consideration of the correct weight to use for the platform in question, are much bigger factors. A 147gr Winchester RA-9T ("LE" ammo, but civilians can legally buy it if they find nice dealers) out of any full-sized 9mm handgun will vastly outperform a standard "chunk-o-lead" target-shooting round out of a .45, for example. Using that level of ammo in both, the difference between the wounds from the two is negligible.

Mostly they did it for stupid reasons, if you really read up the informed sources on these things.

The truth is 9mm is every bit as capable across a broad range of handgun scenarios that LE are likely to face as any other reasonable semi-auto cartridge (.40, .45, .357Sig), assuming one makes the correct ammo choices (on that point I'll concede: correct ammo choices matter more in 9mm than they do in .45, but not by a huge amount). Add to that the 9mm's lower perceived recoil, faster followup shots, and larger round counts in the same physical magazine size, and the 9mm looks quite good. That's why most of the world's militaries, including the US, and all NATO and UN types, have standardized on 9mm. Operator skill and unpredictable situational factors will make far more difference than any you can find between the calibers in any case, so the whole argument is really just a religious debate.

Back to the point about the fed branches though. The FBI originally tested the 10mm Auto to replace 9mm. The 10mm Auto actually *is* arguably a superior round to everything mentioned above in terms of "incapacitate in as few shots as possible". That is, of course, if you're willing to make the tradeoffs in mag capacity, ammo/gun weight, and extreme recoil. Once they had mostly settled on 10mm Auto, they did some testing with agents, and found that many (mostly females - it's in the reports, I'm not trying to be sexist here) simply could not handle the 10mm recoil and would not use it. So S&W came up with a "10mm short", which became the .40 we know today, as a compromise package that would be "like the 10mm (at least in diameter)" but lower recoil. It's basically a 10mm Auto that's been cut down with a lot less powder behind it.

And like all irrational "compromise" solutions of that sort, it's a complete practical failure. All objective testing indicates at best it's on par with its 9mm and .45 cousins (certainly nothing like the original 10mm), and arguably you're better off with one of those two. It just takes generations for people to admit those kinds of mistakes and move past them when you've got industry giants and federal government branches involved.

Even more fail, back in TFA, is that there's absolutely no bases for comparing the energy (in J) of conventional small arms fire to the energy of a 1-second laser pulse. Even when comparing two conventional cartridges, J is a weak comparator, as there are many other more important standard measurements in gelatin that raw J does not infer (such as penetration depth, the profile of the wound channel, and in rifle calibers hydrostatic shock effects). The J's of energy dumped by a laser of the course of 1 second will have a completely different type of effect on the human body than the Js from a conventional bullet.

Unless the tiny effects measured on Pioneer are frame-dragging at a much larger scale. Pioneer may not be "near" enough to any of our "big" planets to see those local frame drag effects, but don't forget about the larger context of the movements within, and of, our galaxy as a whole. It may be that Pioneer was the first object we've thrown out there that was in an isolated enough state from local solar system effects to see that.

Actually, IIRC (IANA Electrician though), 240v is going to more easily shock you than 110v (meaning slight bits of insulation that might save you from feeling 110 won't save you on 240), and the shock is going to feel more painful, but it's actually safer health-wise because it's a lower current shock than you'd receive in the same situation with 110v.

In a couple of short sentences, I've decoded your political biases too. You do understand that the whole political liberalism vs conservatism argument actually has merit and is worth debate, once you throw out the extreme religious and communist (and other) wingnuts, right? To characterize that most people's political beliefs (at least, those that oppose you) are based on something false because you fail to see the merit of their ideas is silly. Liberal views have merit: there are obvious benefits to both society and the individual if we take care of each other through a public system. Conservative views also have merit: there are obvious benefits to both society and the individual by rewarding those who are the most productive to our economy, and not allowing large percentages of the population to sleepwalk through life on welfare sucking the life out of the country. Finding the right balance is what the political process is all about. Claiming your political "foes" only hold their beliefs due to primitive fears is counter-productive.

Part of the problem with DNS these days, which your post exemplifies, is that from very early on "BIND's implementation of DNS", and "DNS The Protocol" have been mashed together and confused by the RFC authors (who were involved with the BIND implementation and had motive to encourage the world to think only in BIND terms) and basically everyone who ever used DNS in any capacity. Zonefiles are not implicit in DNS address resolution (neither for authoritative servers or recursive caches). They really aren't any part of the wire DNS protocol for resolving names. They *are* part of a wire protocol for secondary servers that slave zonefiles from primary servers, but even in that case it's really more a "BIND convention" than a necessity. Ultimately how you transfer a zone's records from a master server to a slave server is up to however those two servers and their administrators agree to do so. You can skip the AXFR protocol that uses zonefiles and instead do something else that works for both of you. Inventing a new method of slaving zone data is easy and doesn't involved much complicated rollout. Some people just rsync zonefiles for instance instead of using AXFR today.

It's really frustrating (believe me, I've done it) when you try to implement a new DNS server daemon from scratch from the RFCs, and you have to wade through this mess of "what's a BIND convention that doesn't matter and what's important to the actual DNS protocol for resolving names on the wire".

Much like in the (somewhat) open stock markets of the world, immediate value is not the only backing for a currency or stock. The largest thing "backing" the value of US currency (and the reason it doesn't collapse like simple analysis would indicate) is the value of American innovation and industry. I know that sounds corny, but it's true. The world puts a lot of value on our future ability to continue being a dominant power in the world through innovation and bleeding-edge industry.

Iran has never attacked a foreign country -- That statement is absurdly false, even using a definition of "attack" that only includes traditional hot wars. If you extend the definition of "attack" to include clandestine operations, supplying arms and money to terrorists and self-acknowledged terror-sponsoring states, which I think is reasonable, the statement is even more absurd.
Iran is not ruled by mad suicidal clerics -- This statement has been false in the past, and could be false in the future.