I'm thinking that there should be some mechanism for funding X scholarships in STEM for X visas of the H1B1 type.

Corporations receive 100 H1B1 visas this year, then 100 STEM scholarships are also provided this year. Funding via taxes on those corporations.

At least it would make it easier to graduate in a STEM field without the massive debt.

Oh, you've missed the calls to fix the income inequality gap by just taxing men an extra 25% and giving it to women? You've missed the continuous refrain of every SJW ever that what offends women is all-important, but what offends just men is irrelevant? You've missed the suggestion that the best plan is to just kill 95% of men and jail the rest on an island somewhere so they can't cause any harm to real people? I see that kind of shit all the time.

But this says it all, really. (That's Jessica Valenti, of course, but the attitude expressed is common enough.)

Any evidence that there's actually a problem once women graduate? (Women being dissuaded from technical interests in middle and high school is a real and studied problem, of course.) All the companies I've worked for actually did favor women in the recruiting (but not interview) process. I've done plenty of "new college grad" interview days that the field of candidates that were flown in were 40-50% female, which sure as heck isn't the ratio of grads. We interview everyone the same of course, but every place I've been for the past decade has made a special effort to try to recruit women at the start of the process.

Sure, by your definition accusations by a feminist have no possible defense, I guess? OTOH, painting the vast and diverse world of "gamers" with a stereotype that's only relevant to the few games that are predominately teenage boys is bigoted and unfair. (If your argument is "14-year-olds are rude and should behave better", you're preaching to the quire, also they should get off my lawn!)

... they say, and then go on to vigorously attack "gamers", starting a culture war that won't soon end.

I could do that. Of course I already have both Firefox and Chrome installed anyway, but there is no "install a separate browser for one plugin".

In this particular case, either way is probably fine. For security I tend to think in terms of principles, though. Which is a better principle
a) Open a hole, and put a bandaid over the hole
b) Don't open a hole

Hint - Windows does a lot of choice a).

I see how you got there. That's the address of your _name_server_. It just so happens that your router (gateway) can also serve as a DNS server. You could have put 8.8.8.8 as your name server, or better yet the name servers of your ISP, and it would work fine.

The gateway is set elsewhere, and needs to be the IP of your router. You'd never go to resolv.conf to set the _gateway_.

It seems you forgot to quote the later part of that post, where I did acknowledge the problem of content that comes malware-laden... Personally, I don't buy AAA games any more (nor do I pirate them instead). I got bored of the generally poor quality and accompanying malware breaking things a few years ago. Given the comments I see every time gamers' enjoyment of a big new title is spoiled because someone's DRM screwed up again, I suspect my life is still better that way. However, I do miss and would gladly pay for the kind of experience I used to enjoy from the top end games of yesteryear, before everything went downhill when the Internet became an excuse for shipping software that wasn't finished yet (we'll just patch it later, or not) and using ever more obnoxious DRM schemes (of course we can expect gamers to be online with a perfect connection any time they're playing our game).

> You need to find where the bottleneck is, then widen that.

Abso-friggin-lutely. Customers frequently come to me wanting to switch to a new processor (which means new motherboard and RAM) when their CPU is practically idle - they need faster storage.

At the same time, if 10% more money buys 25% more _anything_ it's probably a good deal, for a server. Server operating systems will make use of as much RAM as you can give them. Also the fundamental tradeoff in comp sci in speed vs size. If you have a system using 1GB of RAM and it responds in 200 ms, there's a very good chance you can adjust it to use 2 GB and respond in half the time. ("Can adjust it" meaning you'd have to _do_ something to have it make best use of the extra RAM).

An example is a geolocation server I wrote, which can answer hundreds of thousands of queries per second. It's incredibly fast by using twice as much disk space than competing systems use, and then even faster by having that disk space cached in plentiful RAM. It does store 16 million entries in memory at all times, which seems silly. Fortunately, each entry is just two bytes, so that's 33 MB. :)

You are that old, you just probably don't remember. It was way back when MTV played music videos.

Why would anyone think that People answering to Corporations answering to the Government would work?

Didn't Japan do something like that after WWII with the zaibatsu system? Seemed to work quite well for them...

Government answers to the people.

It does. It's giving people exactly what they demand, whether that's getting tough on crime (and ignoring "technicalities" like actual evidence), tryijng to stamp out drugs with maximum prejudice, ensuring no one gets anything they haven't earned, etc. Every single policy pushed by either Democrats or Republicans is trying to pander to some block of voters. The problem is, those voters haven't quite internalized the idea that a nuclear-armed de facto demigod is treating every single one of their angry online rants and under-the-breath mutters as a heartfelt prayer, and doing its best to please.

The government answers to the people, just like genies responded to whoever held their lamp in old tales. But that also means that a master who won't think through the consequences of their wishes has only themselves to blame.

Prior to his crucifixion, Jesus told the disciples:

And I have other sheep that are not of this flock. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.
John 10:16

The Biblical authors knew only what they saw and heard. In fact, the Bible says dozens (hundreds?) of times that the disciples and other authors didn't even understand what they WERE told. That's why the books are called "The Gospel According to John, Gospel According to Luke, etc. Speaking of himself and his fellow disciples, Luke (2:50) writes "But they did not understand what he told them." Later, at Easter, the disciples did not understand the written scripture.

Anyone who has actually read the Bible, therefore, knows that a) what the authors write is not all there is, b) they do not fully understand what is written, and c) Jesus left to be with other people somewhere else.

Of course they are. But the fact is that when the law says things are required to work a certain way, and everyone knows the deal up-front, breaking that law is a different issue to just not doing something entirely voluntary that someone else would have preferred you to do.

Laws may not perfectly follow morals and ethics, but the intent is that they do at least reflect them reasonably well and provide a common standard for acceptable behaviour that everyone knows.

So far, I don't see a lot of that happening. Occasionally I see sites begging you to turn your ad-blocker off, and if they're sites I like then I do have some sympathy.

Unfortunately, from bitter personal experience, ad networks are a threat. There is currently no way to reliably distinguish which parts are dangerous soon enough, so the default safest option is to block the lot.

Very occasionally, I do find a site that doesn't work properly because of the things I block, and then I just go somewhere else instead. Exactly zero sites I need to use have this problem, or rely on ads at all for that matter. It would be sad if all those ad-funded sites went away, but frankly it wouldn't break the Internet and whatever replaced them would probably be a better model for all concerned (except middle-man ad networks).

UPS: $100

Battery: $35

That's more like $65 less, or 35% of the cost. The battery costs about 1/3 as much as the UPS. So your UPS cost $38 and your batteries cost $12?

Which is why I roll my eyes at the people proclaiming their UPS goes on their cable modem and firewall, not their computer.

Actually, this is all stuff known to project managers.

When a project is initiated, the Project Manager first creates a Project Charter. This is done by identifying stakeholders (people doing the work, people affected by the work, people receiving deliverables... any individual or group who affects, is affected by, or perceives itself to be affected by any activity or outcome of the project) and gathering preliminary project requirements. Essentially, the project manager talks to the stakeholders to roughly determine what we're trying to accomplish, how we're going to accomplish it, how much we want to spend, and how much time we're willing to take. That's written up as the charter.

After this, real requirements are gathered. Work is broken down in a Work Breakdown Structure, a hierarchical decomposition of deliverables in which each level is fully broken out into lower levels. The entire project is level 1; level 2 is the major deliverables (Including project management itself, as well as phases or components, testing, validation, documentation, hand-off, and final project closing); and those are broken out into the deliverables which make them up. The final level of deliverables is the Work Package, a complete unit of work which can be understood and managed. Work Packages are broken out into Tasks and Activities--things to do which can be assigned, and which are required to produce the Work Package.

To do all of this, the Project Manager must consult the Project Team. The Project Team will know what components go into building the deliverable output as requested. The project team will be able to estimate their competency and experience with the various components. The Project Manager will use historical information to come up with rough scheduling and budget numbers for each Work Package and Task; but the Project Team will raise issues such as that the historical information was in a wildly different context, that the people who did the work are not on this project, and so on, which means that the work may take more or less time. These factor into the baseline schedule and into the management and contingency reserves (the extra time allotted based on how likely a task should take--in theory, a programmer can write a decompression module in 4 hours, but it's 90% likely to take less than 5 hours, and a 90% success rate is targeted, so we budget 4h with a contingency reserve of 1h).

In the end, the engineers will inform the project manager of what can and can't be done, what effort goes into it, how long it may take, and so on. The Project Manager will have stakeholders prioritize deliverables, and then have them select which deliverables to cut from the project if they can't make time or budget. If the engineers tell you they simply can't build this in 5 months, you either give them 7 months or you give up enough requirements to shave 2 months off the project. You could also identify underutilization of resources in non-critical paths, and crash or fast-track the schedule by assigning more people to those tasks which may be done in parallel rather than in serial.

That's what managers are for.

I may be literally worthless to such sites. I just don't think they ever had a reasonable expectation that I would be any more than that, any more than someone paying for an ad on a billboard has a reasonable expectation that every driver will stop and read it, or any TV advertiser has a reasonable expectation that no-one is going to go take a leak during the ad break.

There is no law requiring someone to give their time to the ads just because they are there, and there never has been, making this a fundamentally different situation to copyright infringement, fraud, or whatever other bad analogies people are throwing around in today's discussion.

Ultimately, if someone wants a promise to be paid in return for their work, there are a number of options available to them, starting with charging for it just like every other industry in the world that produces value. And if the work has some modest value to a lot of people but the overheads of formally charging are too great, there are plenty of other ways to accumulate minor contributions without spamming disreputable ad networks all over your site.