As someone with a fairly libertarian outlook, I'd like to chime in with my agreement. There is a whole raft of cuts that I'd like to make to the IRS and the tax code generally, but I'm not silly enough to think that de-funding their IT budget is going to help accomplish my goals.

It sounds like the services described in the summary are still insurance agencies, just with lower (and less visible) costs and more technological awareness:

Now, that's fine as far as it goes; traditional insurance agents are an unnecessary, costly, and often unsavory gatekeeper if you're just looking to buy a vanilla personal insurance policy. If Google et al. can finally get people to cut out traditional agents, that's great - banging on about the evils of old-fashioned financial gatekeepers like stockbrokers and insurance agents is a pet hobby of mine. Still, I guess I'm missing what's so revolutionary here - I've been able to comparison shop directly from company websites like GEICO or Esurance for over a decade, with no intermediary at all.

Sorry, the last bit implies that nursing is having a hard time attracting women, when of course I meant the opposite.

If the answer to that question is "no," then so be it. But that leads to a new question of, "why isn't IT experiencing the same relative gender parity that other professions are?" Admittedly, that question would probably be more suited for a sociologist or psychologist to answer than an employer that's just trying to fill a job vacancy, but it would still be a worthwhile question.

Personally, I am an actuary, and I find this issue to be interesting because my profession has had little trouble attracting qualified females once it started trying. Somewhere around 40%-45% of actuaries in the U.S. are female, up from 7%-8% in the 1970s. That number will presumably get pretty close to parity as the oldest, all-male generation finishes retiring.

Being an actuary is generally technically demanding - it usually requires the ability to perform complex statistical simulations, a knowledge of SQL (or at least enough SQL to be dangerous), an understanding of the finer points of applicable state insurance regulations, and passing a long series of reasonably difficult examinations on probability, finance, general insurance knowledge, and specialty topics. As far as I can tell, getting into the actuarial profession is every bit as difficult as getting into the IT profession, at least in terms of the amount of intelligence, adaptability, and perseverance needed to acquire the necessary technical skills and domain knowledge.

Yet, the actuarial professions has almost achieved achieved gender parity, without really even trying - it just stopped deliberately excluding women in the '70s, and the problem solved itself. And I would point out, my profession is not unique in this respect - it's almost an identical story in the medical profession. There's another post in this thread somewhere claiming that the legal profession is seeing the same pattern. So I do think it's fair to ask why all these other fields that require a high amount of technical skill, not to mention perseverance, can attract women, but IT (and nursing) can't. What makes IT (or nursing) different?

Well, the nursing profession is, in fact, making a push to attract more male nurses, although they're not throwing a "hissy fit" about it. The American Assembly for Men in Nursing is the organization spearheading this push in the U.S.

As of September 2014:

-AMD's available cash: $950 million
-AMD's market capitalization: $2.6 billion
-AMD's credit rating: Absolute garbage
-Cost of a new Intel/TSMC style fab: $7 billion - $10 billion

It's a nice thought, but the reason that so many companies, including huge companies like Apple, IBM, and Qualcomm, have gone fabless is that fabs are astonishingly, mind-blowingly, expensive.

Considering the astonishing rate that AMD was losing money on its fabs, and the fact that upgrading a single fab to a new process node would cost more than AMD's entire market capitalization, I'm going to have to side with the bean counters here.

AMD coundn't even keep its production facilities running. How could they possibly have kept up with TSMC - the world's premier foundry operator?

Hah - $2B would be an optimistic number just for upgrading an existing fab. A brand new fab would be somewhere in the $5B to $10B range, judging by what Intel and TSMC are spending.

If you want a more industry standard source for the relative danger of different jobs, the National Council of Compensation Insurers is a good source to look at. They are the source of information on occupational hazard for workers compensation insurers, so they have an extremely strong incentive to rate work related hazards correctly.

NCCI rates occupations by their Expected Loss Rate - the average number of dollars that an employee will receive in workers compensation payments in a year, per $100 of salary. This tends to be a pretty good indicator of relative occupational hazard for just about everyone except clergy and active duty military, because of the extreme uniformity of claims handling procedures within each state.

Looking at Maryland, where the police in question live, law enforcement officers have an ELR of $1.28. That's compared to, say, rock excavators and stone crushers, who have an ELR of $7.20. So, by that metric, the guys you see on the side of the road in the front wheeled rock crusher have a job that's about 5 and a half times as dangerous as law enforcement work, at least in terms of economic harm.

Most people who object to vaccination are either 1) wealthy and well educated or 2) members of certain non-mainstream cults/religions. Let's just say that Mississippi is not particularly well known for having a high concentration of people in either of those groups.

Bad example - modern evidence suggests that the Great Pyramids were built by salaried employees, possibly as a public works program to make up for the seasonal "unemployment" that would have occurred in sync with the Nile's flooding.

The Western notion that the Egyptians had vast hordes of slaves building the pyramids comes from incorrect speculation by the Ancient Greek historians, who didn't know what they were talking about - not really their fault, since the age of pyramids ended 1500 years before the Greek historians began writing.

I believe that the suit is claiming that Apple was improperly forcing users to perform a factory reset, rather than claiming that the reset process itself was malicious.

Under the ACA, everyone in the United States is required to have health insurance, and health insurance plans are required to provide female contraceptives for free (however, men usually must pay full cost for male contraception). Every women in the United States already has access to free birth control, unless either they are either not complying with the ACA mandate or their employer is one of the very few that have an exemption. Even without insurance, female contraception is around $4-$5 per 28 days at the local pharmacy. What more am I supposed be advocating for?

Interestingly, many pro-lifers actually cite the ubiquitous availability of birth control as one of the reasons they oppose abortion.

The smallest possible deduction for a U.S. taxpayer in 2014 is $3,950 for the personal exemption + $6,200 for the standard deduction. That works out to $845.83 per month, which is certainly enough money for reasonable if sparse two bedroom apartment in my city. And, as I say, that's the theoretical minimum - if you are married, have children, are over 65, are blind, have a high amount of deductible expenses (including but not limited to certain business expenses that you pay for yourself), or earn more than $400 in employment income but less than $37,870, your deduction will be larger - often much larger.

In most tournaments that have a significant prize pool, there is usually an online qualifying followed by an in-person elimination round. This gives the best of both worlds: the tournament is able to invite a larger number of teams than logistics would allow if all games were in-person. But the actual prize money is won at the 2-3 day "main event," where the tournament is able to closely supervise the players.

For example, in Dota 2 the Starladder tournament that is going on right now, based in Kiev, invites 44 teams, and has round-robin group play lasting from Nov. 14 to Jan. 18. Obviously, it wouldn't be possible to make 44 different 5 person teams from all over the world stay in Kiev for two months, so they have to have online play for these group stage games. This means that the fans of just about every major Dota team on Earth will want to watch part of the tournament - great for Starladder's viewership. Theoretically, a team could cheat through the group stages since they're using their own computers, but cheating is fairly unlikely because a) even if the team made it to the finals in Kiev by cheating, they'd just get crushed by the legitimate teams and b) most of the cheats that you can use in Dota are very obvious to observers.

My understanding is that this hack was noteworthy because the creator managed to get it flagged as a legitimate configuration file edit, which means that it was able to be used on tournament computers as well as their own. I could be wrong though; I don't follow CS:GO.