Nobody teaches you how to handle 100,000,000 simultaneous user requests. Throwing more and more hardware at it is what you cannot escape when dealing with tens of millions of users a second. At least Google is not a bank, where things really need to be synchronized across accounts and be perfectly transactional. It doesn't matter to Google that there are no transactions. A piece of data presented to a user in the USA may be different than the one presented to a user in Japan, but it isaybe an answer to the same question, but the data did not propagate all the way everywhere yet. Even so, it is quite a challenge to deal with hundreds of millions of users daily and tens or hindreds of millions concurrent user requests a second. They are doing it really well too. I can only imagine the massive problems that need to be solved. It is jarring. Good stuff.

So I read that this problem dates back to 1988 (so they say). Reminds me of a two envelope joke. A president steps down due to scandals, gives his replacement 2 envelopes. Tells him to open the first one when there is the first serious problem he cannot handle and the second one in case of another problem.

The replacement starts on the job, eventually there is a serious political problem he cannot solve. He opens the first envelope and it says: blame everything on the previous guy. So he does and the problem goes away. Later there is another problem that cannot be solved, the guy opens the second envelope and in says: prepare 2 envelopes.

I think somebody opened the first envelope.

Odd that Wakefield's co-author, accused of the same things, had his indictment reversed on appeal. Wakefield did not have malpractice insurance, and his appeal was denied.

And, of course, the oft-quoted Danish study was conducted by a researcher now under indictment for fraud: Paul Thorsen.

Ummm... no, he didn't. There were a couple of issues with the study, the primary one being that a temporal association between the administration of the vaccine and the onset of autistic enterocolitis should never have implied causality. The study was important because it identified the colon symptoms present in a subset of patients with ASD as a distinct disorder. But it was misinterpreted in the press, especially for a study where the primary findings involved only 12 patients.

The main author never signed on to the minor retraction. There was nothing close to a confession of "making the whole thing up", but some (questionable) researchers from other institutions have made that accusation.

Well that's a pretty useless statistic without also knowing how many iOS users switched to Android - isn't it? And I was not able to find any surveys that provided those numbers.

Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

So, just another systemd rant.

RedHat has contributed a lot of very cool things to Linux. They have acquired software and opensourced it (e.g. Sistina, Qumranet, Sun/iPlanet LDAP server). They work not only to make a good distro, but also try to solve the bigger problems. For example, they have put together an awesome set of tools that brings Active Directory-like functions to Linux (easy to deploy Kerberos, LDAP, certificate server). They are working on OpenLMI which provides Linux with WBEM management functions. Their Atomic host project is also very interesting. Again, all opensource.

As far as systemd goes. So far I like it. It hasn't burned me at all. Quite the opposite, it has made it easier to write init scripts for our in-house software.

Oh, and BTW, you did hear that the FreeBSD is considering replacing their init system, right? Maybe even something like systemd or launchd (see http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/jordan-hubbard-free-bsd-the-next-10-years

Thank you both for putting some actual discussion in this otherwise really noisy pile of ... comments. Not sure where the moderators are.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

The past is the future. Seriously, doesn't this somewhat remind us of the one room school house?

I know things are different but I think the younger kids will have an easier go with beimg somewhat exposed to more complicated concepts and likely see how or why completely alien in appearance processes come together.

And another systemd distro falls...

- I see, so the reasons to use PowerPoint are exactly the same reasons as the ones to ban PowerPoint.

Just about everyone? No one likes the complexity of the tax system, but very very few people support the flat tax when they understand the ramifications.

What ramifications? Are you assuming that the only possible flat-tax that could pass is a vanilla regressive tax with no prebate? FairTax (which I believe is the most widely supported flat tax proposal) accounts for the regressive nature of flat taxes in its model.

Paul's belief in creationism I believe is also tied to his views on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. If he is president when a bill comes across his desk to legislate things like that, I don't think he's going to represent my views.

Except that he already proved otherwise. In votes. For 30 years. He's going to leave it to the states, where it belongs, his own opinions on the issue be damned. Doesn't it mean anything to you that despite being staunchly pro-life and likely anti-same-sex-marriage as well, he won't actually support federal legislation to try to force those beliefs upon voters? That means a great deal to me and makes me respect him as a politician. I'm tired of people that try to legislate based on their view of what the world should be rather than based on what our system of governance is + what their constituents want.

Damn you, Trident!