Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?

Yes, 5 Monty Python.

Actually, the impression I get from web developers is that IE6 is a witch. Maybe we should build a bridge out of it?

A live code base and a retired code base have the same number of lines.

I'm still fairly inexperienced, but here's my two cents. Whenever confronted with a collaboration project, I ask myself: Will it solve a problem or create one? A common fallacy I've seen assumed is; local optimizations will directly translate into global gains in efficiency. This result is often not the case unless you affect a bottleneck in production. This is called the theory of constraints (proposed by Goldratt; see "The Goal"). My post is no substitute for the actual material, so go and read the book.

If your new tool doesn't affect a bottleneck, it is more likely that you will make production worse. Here's an example of how this effect works in manufacturing. Assume part X and Y are required to make a final product. Product Y is currently produced at the same rate as X. It is very easy to make part Y twice as fast as X, but X's rate can't change. Should you make Y faster? If you do, you will end up continuously building up piles of inventories of Y that won't yield actual sales. Building inventory costs you a lot more money, so optimizing Y is a bad idea.

Here's how it works in service industries (this is a contrived example). As a sales manager you decide, since CRM optimizations are making your competitors money, you need a CRM solution. Your company makes widgets that are top of the line and require three times as much time to complete as your competitor. You deploy CRM, expecting to increase customer satisfaction, but your end of year reports indicate a decrease. What happened? It might be that the CRM tool made your sales force operate twice as fast. Taking more orders means that you now have twice as many people waiting on a production line that was barely meeting demand to begin with. So by using CRM, you have twice as many people breathing down your neck :(

Back to my question. If your solution doesn't address a bottleneck one of two things could happen. The best case is, it won't be used because people can meet demand with the tools they have; the cost of switching will prevent change. The worst case is, the solution gets adopted and you start building unwanted inventory or tickets in your system increasing your cost. In either case, you should adopt the empirical method; start with a hypothesis and prove it with measured data. That's really the only way of determining if your tool is a solution or a problem.

How do you Rickroll this video?

In Soviet Russia, system administrates you.

From what I understand (and I am not too well informed on the subject), the counter argument is; the cost is too great to justify the benefits. The priority now is to restore the economy so that long term investments like these become possible once again. Increasing the demand by supporting the economy and funding private companies to make manned space travel economically viable will likely get you into space faster than waiting for NASA to do it.

I never claimed that the insights were totally invaluable; you get gems from time to time.

While, I agree that fedspeak is hard to unravel and intentionally so, they do publish very thorough statistical analysis of the economy. Moreover, their conclusions are often based on these statistics and very rarely influenced by political expediency (the Fed was designed this way); take a look at the history around the end of George H.W. Bush's term in office and his re-election if you don't believe me.

You occasionally get opponents like Senator Henry B. Gonzalez, who wanted FOMC meetings televised to increase their transparency. The intention is good but the effect would be bad in my opinion; either you have a market that reacts violently to the meetings or a set of very tight lipped federal bankers. Neither is good for the economy.

You're right; there is no holy grail and a lot of the reporting and economic forecasts are biased. However, in my experience real economic data and interpretation from economists I trust is often a more valuable use of my reading time.

Or you can just subscribe to the blogs of your favorite analysts :)

Unfortunately, a lot of the traditional news I've read in the past (National Post, The Economist) is very alarmist and often irrational, without much actual content. I've had to resort to publications from the federal reserve, blogs from economists, and my own education for anything descent.

I'd also still rank Slashdot as a source for fairly reliable content; a lot of the fluff gets filtered out.

With a minimum, they'd have to price at least at cost. That being said, I'm disappointed because the FCC doesn't realize that their proposal will likely achieve the opposite of their stated goal. I'm annoyed because this sort of thing (backwards legislation) happens very often and is well documented. I'm concerned because the existing large telcos will likely push to have this bill enacted into law in order to kill competitors meaning worse service.

They seem to be content with doing the opposite. A minimum speed will likely mean that only a select few telcos would be able to support the infrastructure and fewer people would be able to afford the service.

I've been told that by professors as well, particularly after asking them early in the term for help with my team. Unfortunately, most of the people that I've worked with in teams learned by rote and forgot all of their knowledge after exams; when it came to applying the knowledge, they just couldn't do it :( My alternative to doing the project myself was to teach them several semesters worth of electronics and software engineering. The only exception was for our large scale projects where we had the liberty of picking teams. I was not only able to pick people who could do the work but also wanted to do the work and it was very rewarding; that's a really hard thing to find.

Tried that and was hit wit the whole "you should have managed your group better". Unfortunately firing my team members for gross incompetence wasn't an option :(