Over a certain size, pretty much everything becomes some kind of star. Technically, even a blackhole is a star.

More relevant than ebola?

This is why we can't have nice things. The NIH is like a student that blows their student loans on spring break in Cancun, and then complains that they don't have enough money to pay tuition.

Cook county's corruption is legendary. Every tombstone in Chicago should have an 'I voted' sticker.

I'd never heard of this controversy... but after looking it up, there's no proof rPI had anything to do with that... and even if they did, they kind of had a point. rPI is Not an open hardware project and never claimed to be. All the hacking people are using it for is welcome, but wasn't what they were going after in the beginning. You can't just copy other peoples closed source hardware.

That is a great idea.
But, I used to handle 911 outages. Most 911 outages are due to cable cuts, which would often leave those facilities unreachable as well.

I'd say that if your phone works, and you can't call 911 or the local hospital, you should assume the trunk leading to those services (foolishly all usually located next to each other) is cut or damaged. So your next best bet would be to call a NON-LOCAL ER. i.e. Call the next town over. Just because downtown is broken doesn't mean the trunk leading to the next exchange is as well. We'd often route that way ourselves until it was fixed. So if you can call there, then they can radio to your local EMTs.

Also, a lot of times the local network is made up of all of these trunks, but your internet connection heads strait out of town. You might have better luck making a voip call or sending an email. A relative may be able to reach someone when you can't, etc... Text messages might be a good route as well, they are handled entirely different (though I've never dealt with that tech myself so take that with a grain of salt.)

I used to work in the NOC for a large Telco and we'd handle 911 outages. Usually 911 goes down because the entire networks down. Like the switch failed, or the trunk from one area that leads to the area the 911 center is in would get cut. Most of this stuff is in a ring so there's usually an alternate route, but in some areas that's not physically possible. For example a remote mountain town with a single road in, would likely have its only trunk running along that same road and it'd get cut all the time as the road constantly needed repair. Chose where you live wisely.

We'd handle this in different ways depending on the situation. For example, if we had 4 trunks that could handle 4X number of calls, and 3 got cut so it could only handle 1X, we could actually prioritize certain numbers so 911 and emergency services would get priority. If the trunk leading to the 911 center failed, we could do something like re-route the calls to the local police dispatcher who literally had no warning and would suddenly have their phone ringing off the hook. You may say "you should warn them!" but our policy was "Get it done" because who's dieing while you're arguing with the dispatcher about how her days going to suck?

The most important skill you can have in any NOC is your ability to triage problems. That term comes from the medical world but it's just networking equipment... until you get into the situation I was in. And you're making triage decisions that could actually result in death. These were real engineers that really cared and did what they could. But when you have an area ravaged by hurricane and you tell the tech to put gas in generator 1 instead of 2, because you've been up for 30hrs strait... and a remote goes down so they can't call 911? I just couldn't detach myself from that. I took a pay cut to leave. A lot of people floated through that job, it wasn't just me. It takes a special kind of person that can detach themselves from the consequences of their decisions.

Of course, they still had plenty of cash ($39.6 million in fact) to study fat lesbians, feces throwing primates and origami condoms among other things.

Stage 1 was confiscation of private pensions. No nation can not tax or confiscate its way out of political incompetence and corruption. This road leads to anarchy or war.

Oh wow... it's like you spend your whole life understanding your childhood.

When I saw that image of the Sol-20, it immediately took me back to being 6yrs old. I'd go with my father to work in a manufacturing plant. He ran "The lab" and up until the late 70s, they'd program their machines with an infrared laser onto a chip... and it was a nightmare because it took hours and if anyone turned on a light it would ruin the etch. Then these computers started showing up with floppy drives and the first one I remember seeing looked exactly like that Sol-20. I'm assuming that's what it was. I got to type on it for fun a couple of times. Later they swapped to Commador's, apple IIs, IBM clones, etc... whatever was cheap.

This was probably the first computer I ever touched. Wow!

yes, this is a solution in search of a problem.

...and me without mod points...
+10 hilarious

It would go a long way if the US refused direct commercial flights to and from the countries with outbreaks, and refused entry to anyone that has been in one of those countries in the past 3 weeks. The exception would be for US citizens and they should go through quarantine.

Yes ... and I'd like to point out a few key phrases in your statement that prove why I'd do this...
 

Booting up my computer and logging into all my various apps would take longer than that so...

Entry level people can't debug code. They make bugs, they don't fix them. You want someone to create new accounts for you? That's what this person can do. Debug a production website while the president of the company is on the phone screaming in your ear that they'll eat your children for breakfast if this isn't up NOW I charge a lot for that.

It would meet their needs at the time of release. that would be in the contract. In 6 months, when they install their new single signon app that wasn't in the original design specs and it breaks... I should fix that for free? You have to keep in mind, I have to be available now to fix it. They aren't going to be ok with calling me, saying its broken in the middle of their peak signup time, and have me say "Well, I'm at my real job... you know the one that pays the bills, I'll get to this next Saturday" No, they wont. So if I'm going to drop my life to fix this, I need money to cover that.

and the amount a webpage is used is relevant how? and how do you know it's used that much? I'd be willing to charge for support per month. $10k/month. How's that?

Congratulations. Just so you know how that works, that place already has the site built. They change a few things here and there... likely have widgets or whatever depending on what they use. Great. So your $10k quote was to modify an existing codebase that they already have a team of people intimately familiar with. But this clients already flat out rejected that. They want volunteers to write a webapp from the ground up that they own and maintain. That's an entirely different ballgame. That's a Major, enterprise level effort. The sort of thing companies like Google, IBM, Apple pull off over periods of months or years. A team of 4 volunteers in a basement? Good luck.

I'm sorry, but you clearly have no idea how enterprise projects work. I once saw a company pay $22,000 for a single line of code. This included 1yr of support and it was considered a steal. This was years ago, my managers and said "I cold write that in 10min!!!" My boss laughed at me and asked me the following:
1. In 6 months from now, will you still be here? You can't leave for a year... period, and have to sign a contract stating as such. Even if we fire you, you still have to fix it.
2. Are you insured? You need a minimum of a $1million liability policy in case we need to sue you.
3. Do you have a track record of completed work? We need this done, and should you fail and I have to go to shareholders to tell them we took this key project to "some guy" to save $22k, and he screwed up so we lost $100k in sales... what do you think is going to happen to me? In other words, we're not paying $20k for the code, we're paying $20k for peace of mind. We wont have to worry about this. We would have to worry about you.

Now, I know your arguments going to be "Well, it's not that big of a site" or "They wont be that harsh"
B.S.
Their existing site is worthless to an incoming developer. It would take you longer to parse and understand his code than it would to start from scratch. And their expectations? Everyone's expectations change once they've written a check. It's all smiles and hugs until the sites down. You paid some random local guy $10k to throw up a Joomla site for you? That's nice... I'm happy that's worked out for you so far. But when that site goes down 2 days before Christmas, the guys on vacation in italy with your $10k and doesn't answer the phone... you lose so much business you're on the verge of bankruptcy and find out he's been working out of his moms basement, and you can't even sue him? You might start to see what I'm talking about.

Or, it could be, that this is complete nonsense:
http://www.computerworld.com/a...

The entire field had the same bump. It wasn't just women. The percentage of women in the field has never risen above about 35%
I'd argue that's when the field was new and exciting. Then it tapered off and remained stable until the internet bubble... and tapered off again.

I think that, if anything, this shows women are savvy. They saw a new tech, took advantage of it. After the industry became less flashy, and the best jobs were harder to get they moved on. Then when the realities of the industry started to sink in and the industry collapsed they again left.