True. The minimum wage impacts people up to 2.5x minimum wage due to exempt/non-exempt classifications. That is currently around $38k federal, and going to over $50k in California.

It is more like you need a TOR styled VPN, routing your traffic over different paths and aggregating/dis-aggregating so there is never a single point that all your traffic flows through. Not especially efficient.

It isn't legislation or litigation that changed things, it is the fundamental workforce demographics. For most families, being a "stay at home mom" isn't an option. Early legislation may have ensured that hostile workplace factors were taken out of the equation, which would have made a meaningful difference, but the balance is largely time.

As for the resulting pay gap factors, it is pretty hard for anyone who works from 22-30, takes 6 years off, works again from 36-48 half time, and then works full time for the remainder of their career to make as much as someone that works 7 years, one six month stretch off, and them for the rest of their career.

Mitigating factors to this trend are better sharing between husband and wife of the responsibilities of picking up and dropping off the kids, and the current generation that limits their work to just under 40 hours a week to ensure they have a good work/life balance.

New EITs for us are at the same rate, but we actually see women accelerate faster. Unfortunately, they seem to catch on to the whole live/work balance faster than men which makes retention harder and flattens wages. On a case-by-case basis, it comes down to work output.

Right now though, we could pay a 40% premium for an exceptional female mechanical PE with 15-20 years of experience, but that is definately an outlier.

But there are plenty of other systems the engineers maintain-- pumps, hydraulics, etc.

Engine issues can be helped with smaller, redundant units-- but that defeats the benefits of efficiency and ends up taking more space.

The most likely scenario is to migrate from 3-shift staffing to 1.5-2 shifts. Unfortunately the marginal gains are so limited that it is hard to imagine it working. If there was a need for smaller point-to-point cargo routes rather than hub-spoke distribution there might be a better case for it.

We happen to be in a building with 5 (last count) OC-192s for another tenant from multiple providers. (Video game testing/development or something.) Their incremental cost of service is pretty attractive, and we have a long term contract.

$60-70 for ATT DSL, $400 for 10Mbit fiber (and I think $600 for 100Mbit).

To me the value of the fiber wins hands-down; we get about 10x performance for 7x cost, or 100x performance for 10x cost of DSL. Service is more reliable, lower latency, symmetric, and managed. The symmetric starts to matter a lot for things like the Microcells, VOIP, and video conferencing.

At our office we have fiber from XO, TWTelecom, Abovenet, and a few other smaller players. Time Warner is spending ungodly sums to bring fiber down the corridor to serve ~5MM square feet of offices.

But, ATT only offers "up to 6mbit" DSL. Pricing is comparable for value, but the offering is simply not up to snuff.

The devices you mention have a 1:100 chance of needing to operate in a 25-year timeframe for a single instance, roughly. They each add less than 1% to the cost of doing business.

The TSA installation for a single checkpoint process on average 30,000 passengers per year, and has an annual operating cost of (roughly) $600,000, or say $40/round-trip ticket. That is closer to 10% average airfare. It's probability of detecting a "terrorist" (let's go ahead and take a liberal interpretation of the term to include anyone intending to do harm with a weapon on a plane that cannot be detected by a simple metal detector) is about 1:400,000,000,000. (The pre 9/11 checkpoints would have had an annual operating cost closer to $150,000 in fairness.). There is also significant economic cost due to the silly restrictions they create, but not sure how to capture that.

So, you have a substantial cost for no significant improvement in security delivered. Sounds like security theater to me.

Not really. The DJI Phantom-2 is famous for thinking the battery is dead and splashing straight down.

Waypoints make these things pretty cool, but you really need to keep the size down before they get "too big", and that is hard when you need better dampening on the gimbal, better low light performance, better endurance, and wider control radius.

...oh the irony.

I have a couple of the Asus routers, and I love them. One runs as an openvpn server, the other runs a few services to simplify remote administration of an offsite location. Good little boxes.

But, it has really opened my eyes as to how bad security can be. These systems are at least slightly more secure than the WD drives. Third party firmware adds some levels of complexity, but a whole lot of functionality.

Redundancy can be nice, but I agree that the best solution to the consolidation is municipal fiber. It won't be cost competitive for underground utilities, but it seems like the only solution at this point. Co-op's are nice, but they could still be bought out or compromised.

The US decided it is a commodity rather than a currency. That simplifies things pretty much and more accurately reflects what it is. Maybe a derivative of a commodity is more reasonable, but that is more of a detail.

Personally, I have a few gold coins, because the portability is nice. I'm not really worried about the inherent value of the coins when gold eventually comes back down to reality pricing, because it is still an easy way to be able to move money around. Much of the downside of bitcoins also relate pretty well to gold, only the redemption network is much more limited.

If/when Mt Gox crashes, Bitcoins will go back down to a more stable pricing. Eventually, expect the entrenched financial firms to get into the race, which will ultimately be the downfall. Bitcoin ETF... coming to a stock exchange near you...

A very low percentage of IT people understand security issues to a sufficient degree to be able to act on them in the abstract. Talking to the director of IT at a very large defense contractor a few years back about a new proposed SCADA network, I showed him the plan for our isolated network, and the proxy/firewall connection to his corporate network, and asked him how they wanted to treat it. He was prompt to ask who needed access, how much throughput would it need, and if we needed more than one IP address.

I then went into my laundry list of bigger issues, so he suggested they just get a dedicated DSL line for it so it didn't need to be connected to the corporate network, and just make the SCADA vendor responsible for security!

People want to put security issues into buckets. The problem is that issues today are substantially more complicated than that.

Just look at slashdot beta... That is what "news for nerds" is trying to be now. Lowest common denominator only, please.