To bring it back on topic:

DiSKiLLeR: Maybe it means he is against killing?

Blimps would be so sweet. Like steampunk on Venus.

Thought he 200mph winds might be a problem. Though are they not as fast at very high altitudes?

I don't think you have ever looked at what Venus' atmosphere is made of. It is hot, not because of how close tot he Sun it is, but because of how thick the atmosphere is. More than 100x denser than on Earth. 200mph winds blow across the planet constantly. The average temperature is hot enough to melt lead. The only probe to ever attempt to land on Venus melted in a short amount of time. A day is actually longer than a year on Venus, which just compounds the problems.

Mars is a picnic compared to Venus.

Correction, we have not suspected for many years... I was confusing Ganymede with Europa. Doh!

Anyhow, I am just pissed off that when NASA says "Might", everyone jumps up and down and says "Confirmed for Truth!"

No wonder so many people mistrust scientists. They should mistrust lazy and corrupt journalists instead.

Nasa's report says "Suggets". The evidence is good as we have suspected for many years, but can these popsci article writers can't even be bothered to check the sources and just make up stuff.

I am sure when IFLS picks this up, they will report that not only is there an ocean but life is confirmed too.

Free and Open Source... unless you make money, then fuck you.

If it is not broke, fix it until it is.

Is this what keeps projects alive?

At least unit tests are easy on non-functional programs.

They use mainly Windows and have iPads. I don't like web-based tools...

Well, why not? If you want to cover that kind of diversity in platforms, you are going to be using a web tool...

Also, an SSD is several orders of magnitude cheaper than RAM, and makes regular disk access much faster. So for cost-benefit analysis, upgrade to SSD before trying to get a huge amount of RAM.

Well, it is a totally separate mistake to simply promote a programmer to management. Worked at a company in the 90s that seemed to think that "lead developer = manager". So they tried promoting the best programmer on the team to management. You can guess how horribly that went.

But when they demoted him (at his request) back to a programmer, the guy the brought in to be manager was a complete moron that had to be the lead programmer. He was a shitty manager too, if they had just taken our advice and hired an actual manager and left the programming decisions to the lead programmers, it might have worked out.

At a later job I had a manager that moved up from being a programmer (by his choice). He gave me explicit instructions not to give him access to the source repository, because "I haven't been a programmer in 5 years, and it would go horribly if I tried to jump in now." This was before the days of git-style code review and repositories, where things can be lax on non production branches, but the theory remains true. And he was a fantastic manager too.

The two skillsets are entirely different. Yeah, you might someone that can transfer from one to the other, but even then you can't have the same person do both jobs at once.

The company I once worked for got bought up by a bigger company that tried to pull this stunt in their new employee contract. I and most of the other developers simply refused to sign the contract. I suppose they could have fired us, but that would have sank the company fast. So they continued to pay us and we continued to work for them.

Years later they tried to sue some former employees that went to work for a competitor. The company lost badly.

Also, the remaining 50% will simply quit once they are overworked with the busywork that the bottom 50% used to do.

The issue is that the bottom 50% needs to be heavily managed so they can produce useful output. Sure, some of them are probably complete crap and need to be let go, but there is plenty of trained-monkey work to be done in a large organization.

Granted, it really depends on the org and situation. If the bottom 50% are made up of people that wield unusually large power (Such as, a company that has seniority rules based on age and years with the company.). Or the 50% are actively doing work to hurt the good 50%.

But in reality, if a company has a large number of useless employees, it is probably the management that needs to be fired.

Ghostery sells data to advertisers and was bought by an ad network some time ago.

Use Disconnect instead.