How so? I can't think of anything I could point to as social upheaval from the advent of penicillin. Without a doubt the global population is some chunk (maybe +1 billion?) larger because of it.

Penicillin was as revolutionary, but the social upheaval doesn't seem to have been that great even though its impact was enormous.

Like the fact that AC is scored 0, but someone like me (with Excellent karma) gets 2 automatically? :-)

As we say in the RF world: Lightning goes where it wants to.

Interesting. So does that mean it is impossible to make something lightening strike proof? What I mean is that in any lighting protection system, there will always be some weird or unexpected failure mode that is not humanly possible to protect against?

Thus my follow up: Why didn't the second train brake? Not enough lead time? Communication breakdown? Will we ever be allowed to know?

I don't know if it is necessarily corner cutting, but one would have thought lightning protection would have been one of the obvious things they would have engineered. From the articles, the lightning strike disabled the train and the train behind slammed into it. Also, if a train is stalled on the track, one would think there would be someway of knowing; either through telemetry or the driver radioing "Help! My train's stuck!". So if so, why didn't the other train stop? Lots of questions... I wonder if we will ever truly learn the answers or will this become another of China's "let's sweep it under the carpet" moments?

The mom-and-pop book stores you long for were dying out harder and faster than Borders did, and the ones that survive do so because they've found things beyond the collections of books you mention to sell ...

The mom & pops were dying out because Borders undercut them on best sellers and the more popular specialized books. They would come to town, hoover (vacuum, for our American friends) up the customer base with "20% off all best sellers!" and also offering a wider selection of specialized books in knitting, cooking, history, science, etc. Very often, a best selling computer book would suddenly get "30% off!".

But I noticed once their competition disappeared, the discounts disappeared too. The prices on their non best sellers went up, and even best sellers, you needed a Chapters membership card (which you pay for) to get the 20% discount.

Here in Vancouver, our local Big Box book retailer, Chapters, eviscerated Duthie's Books, Black Bond books and several other home grown chains. Once they were gone, the stores became crap. I could never find any GOOD books there:

"Oh, we only had one copy of that and it sold out. Don't know when we'll get more."
"Can you check?"
"Tcha..." *shrugs shoulders* and walks off

So, with poetic justice, Amazon beat Borders et al. at their own game, but at least I find Amazon better to deal with.

For the record, I shopped at Duthie's, Black Bond etc. whenever I could. They left me. :'(

That's the story I read from the post-mortem articles for FBI Virtual Case File system. I work for a global IT consulting company, and yeah, they're all about doing whatever the customer wants. No push back, please. :-) So SAIC isn't bad, per se, it's just that hiring SAIC is not a sufficient condition for project success. The clients still need their heads in the clear, open air instead of rammed upside their... posteriors. :-)

Last time I heard of them, it was with the failed FBI casebook system. Does SAIC have a generally good delivery rate on projects otherwise?

Zombieland, FTW.

Quit taking that quote out of context! The man was referring to home automation--computers running everything in the home. The idea of a computer in the home for normal people to use quite appealed to him, and in fact, used to promote the idea.

You need some eye bleach (NSFW)

Dear Cloud entrepreneurs and VC's:

If you are wondering why businesses aren't trampling themselves to go to a public cloud, here is half your answer. The other half was the Amazon outage. A CIO does not like depending on an outside company for his uptime metric. He wants total control. If there is an outage, he wants HIS people on it reporting to HIM. He doesn't want to go back to the CEO, "the cloud provider is working on it and there is nothing I can do to make it go faster."

If clouds happen, it will mostly be private clouds under the company's control. Sure it may not have as high uptime or be more expensive, but at least it's under their control. You surrender control going to an external cloud.