Wow...

Just because it's been cooler at your house for the last two years, does not mean the earth, as a whole, is not getting warmer in general.

It's perfectly plausible that the average temperature on the planet could rise significantly while a region, like Europe, gets colder. For instance, general warming could result in polar warming diminishing the northern ice caps (as we're seeing). Should those ice caps melt enough, the iceberg melting in the north atlantic would dramatically lesson since no glaciers would spawn them. The atlantic currents would be disrupted, lessening the gulf stream. Winds flowing over those warm waters would no longer carry that extra heat to Europe and slowly the weather in Paris starts to resemble Winnepeg (about the same latitude). The good news for Winnepeg is that it's likely to warm up a little.

That's climate change in a nutshell. General warming. Local cooling. Some areas get dryer. Others wetter. Very, very complicated interplay between systems makes predicting winners and losers extremely difficult.

And I swear, the next time there's a snowstorm and people use that as evidence that there isn't global warming, I'm going to punch someone in the face.

Or... our jobs are such that we visit our clients across the country. So I could spend every weekend driving and only be able to cover 20% of the country, or I can take a 10 minute pass through a security line twice a week. I'll take a ten minute inconveinance and let someone fly me somewhere in 4 hours rather than do a four day drive across the country - which would cost more money anyway.

Now, if you live on the East Coast, you might be able to travel to lots of people in a few hours. You might also be enough of a pretentious ass to think the whole country is on the east coast. For the rest of us, flying can be needed. For some of us, it's a regular thing that lets pay for things like food.

At the same time, the states compete with eachother by lowering their tax rates - so they're (almost all) broke. IF moving towards more renewable energy is a national goal, then this is perfectly appropriate. Energy can be moved (at cost) so parts of California may benifit as well and nationally we would benifit from this being a success that other plants could be modelled on. Likewise, if the east coast wants less air pollution, it may be equally effective for it to fund renewable energy upwind in the West where things like solar are viable than to try to build something like this in a much more cloudy area.

While built regionally, the benefits of this being a solar plant (rather than a coal one) could be national.

True enough from a developer's perspective. But I was trying to keep it simple for the lay person.

I firmly disagree. Passion is key. People who don't give a damn and people who don't enjoy coding tend to write crap. We try to hire for passion and smarts (knowing both are hard to interview for).

Passionate people given good processes and tools are ideal.

This is really the key insight of most Agile methodologies. Development should own the process and change it to suit their needs during regular retrospectives. The team (not the whining individual) should be able to say, "You know what, I think we're not getting bang for our buck out of this many unit tests, let's shift to 50% coverage." As long as that same team is taking ownership of the regression failures and making an informed trade-off their comfortable with, all is well.

If you get a good team together, you're going to get good code. You'll get better code if you empower them. Experienced and good teams will usually have a lot of these processes and tools in place because noticing things like high code complexity automagically alerts them to "bad smells" that can be examined and either accepted as necessary or invested in to address or test more thouroughly.

Generally, I think development is most fun when you're on a new project and don't give a damn about breaking things. Then it's pure creation. But once an app is older and there's some weird code you're staring at you have to decide, "is this probably a bug, or is this a bug fix for some weird situation or platform?" That's when you wish that the guy having fun three years ago had written some damn tests.

70% Unit Coverage:
        -- You've written code level tests that flex 70% of your code checking for regression failures.

CCN:
        -- Technical term you can look up, but basically it's a measure of how many decision points are in a block of code. Less decision points is simpler. Too many and you may have something difficult to test and difficult for a programmer to understand. Higher complexity generally means more risk and a higher need for testing of various types.

Presprint grooming:
        -- A "sprint" is a time block set aside for development. Usually 2-8 weeks. The goal is declare what you're going to get done in that time and not change the requirements during that time. Between sprints, you can change your processes, "groom" stories (tasks that describe things in a user experience way generally).

Test driven dev:
        -- When writing a new feature, right a test for that feature first and you're close to done when the test passes and you haven't broken other tests.

I love competing in the job market against people who can't write well.

Now... where's the grammar / spelling error in that sentence? You're going to get me for that slash, aren't you? Contractions in aren't? Sentence fragment? again?

Many (all?) states have streamlined ways for people with Math / Science degrees to become math / science teachers without having to get an education degree. There is training and a certificate, but not another 4 year degree.

Grad students are trained to work extremely hard for little or no pay and even less credit. Perfect hire for this kind of work.

Generally, I agree.

But when should you invest extra in infrastructure? During a recession.

Because:
  - The price is lower than normal (even factoring interest on borrowing, labor and equipment are idle and should therefore be cheaper than normal)
  - It's better to pay salaries of construction workers than pay them unemployment for not working
  - Whatever stimulative benefits you may or may not get

When the government is rich tends to be when the economy is booming and infrastructure projects are extra expensive. If you're looking at a decades long ROI, you might as well start with a lower "I" and at a time it could be particularly helpful to the economy.

In fairness to the TSA, they should get some credit for the remarkable lack of success in underwear bombings and shoe bombings. By scanning for more obvious methods of attack, they've been quite effective at raising the level of difficulty to a degree where several attempts resulted in no damage to airplane, and one terrorist lighting his nuts on fire - a massive embarrassment for Team Assholes.

Turns out an underwear bomb is harder to pull off than a backpack bomb.

If the TSA was REALLY useless, the bombs aimed at us would be less useless. At the same time, things get through and no system is perfect. At some point, we need to be happy with pretty good and stop with the strip searching. The Israelis have a much better system.

That said, I travel most weeks and really don't find the security situation a burden. It's just a mild annoyance with the biggest problems being a distinct lack of consistency in the rules airport to airport. Can I have things in my pants pockets or not and why the hell would a foam knee brace need special attention if I'm wearing shorts, when everyone agrees they'd have no idea it was there if I was wearing slacks? Just say'n.

Hey we're busy. We really don't necessarily all want to struggle with games. We want something fun, that's a little challenging that we can get through. 12 hours of content for 60 bucks? That's about even with a movie.

Personally, I gravitate to the games I can play over and over again, rather than big story games, but I get it.

And the games we do play a lot are usually more social these days. The author complains about a short story in Halo or Modern Warfare. Well duh. Most people are paying for the multiplayer experience which infinitely re playable. The single player parts are a sideline. Is a 5 hour single player worth the money there? No. But that's not what people are buying anyway. It's like complaining about hugely expensive veg and potatoes while ignoring the steak that came alongside.

It's definitely not cost.

In Corporate IT budget terms, Confluence is free. A manager can purchase a couple hundred users worth of licenses on the corporate credit card. And it's supported. Hell, that's pretty much the Atlassian model. Stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap, and make 'em pretty.

I think the parent is dead on. If you have your heart set on plone (I've used it, it's acceptable - won't bring many tears of sorrow or joy) the parent is right. Just do it. If asked to compare to confluence, you want to find some practical reason Confluence is worse - some security thing would be ideal - but end up with a "look, this is easy, it's done, and it's free" kind of play. "We could do Confluence, but it does cost some money and it's pretty much the same thing. I don't see a compelling reason to pay for it."

However, if your boss really values support (a "throat to choke") you'll want to know what it'll cost to pay someone to provide you a Plone support contract. Plone.net has some providers listed. In the US, I'd start with http://www.enfoldsystems.com/ .