There will never be anything other than a politically-motivated, secret back-room solution to any problem. Solutions will be chosen based upon who benefits, not upon whether they are actual solutions.

This is the world we live in where the incompetent shitbags float to the top and ends up in Washington while the competent people remain trying to do competent things in the face of an endless stream of policy waste from those same shitbags.

Our local nuclear station has three enormous batteries that hold GWh of electricity for peak times. They are called Lakes Jocassee, Keowee, and Bad Creek.

During the night when the nuclear station generates excess power, water is pumped uphill through the succession of lakes. During the day, when peak demand hits, water flows downhill to generate extra power. It's efficient and relatively cheap to maintain over time.

The surfaces of Bad Creek (at the top) and Jocassee (in the middle) can fall tens of feet over the course of a few hours. Keowee (at the bottom) is maintained level as it is also the source of cooling water for the reactors.

It's a pretty cool system, and having the manmade lakes has generated billions in economic activity for the area in real estate, recreation, and tourism.

The reason there are fewer women than men in engineering is not because of some grand societal mechanism of oppression. It is because men and women are not the same. This goes back millennia. Our predisposed gender roles are baked into our DNA.

I have a much better idea. Why don't we stop obsessing over making everyone on the planet exactly the same, and let people do for a living that which they like and enjoy doing? Women who want to become engineers will become engineers.

They need to put that on the can, too!

Even being a native is no guarantee of safety. Even if you are a native, there is bound to be some asshat from another tribe who wants to see you dead because they disagree with your interpretation of what some deranged child molester said 1400 years ago.

MOD PARENT UP.

Seriously.

Parent is the most correct post ever posted in the history of posting on slashdot.

Since when do most people think?

Whether or not it is a "piece of shit" does not depend on what O/S it is running. It depends on whether it meets all of the customer requirements.

Agreed. NewsMax is laughably awful. My pre-teen can pick out dozens of fallacies and examples of bias in any given NewsMax article (I often give my kids critical thinking exercises, like taking a media story and locating logical fallacies and instances of bias).

The fact that the vendor did not use a strong password does not make the system a "piece of shit." It just means that the vendor did not use a strong default password.

They weren't doing anything of the sort. They were consumers of yet another corporate pre-packaged culture. Fighting the establishment, as you call it, only supports the establishment that created a profit-center around it.

Taxing a religious entity is not discrimination. In fact giving a religious corporation a tax exemption is tantamount to state sponsorship of a religious establishment, which is expressly prohibited by the Constitution.

"After 9-11, government created TSA, supposedly to protect us all."

The real reason was to create yet another welfare/jobs program.

"Google promises the users have to first grant explicit permission before they receive such a message."

So you'll get a notification that a site wants to send you a notification. Either way, you're going to be interrupted, either by chrome, or by some website.

No, thanks.

"Escalating and unanticipated requirements, especially without added budget to meet those requirements, can have devastating effects on both a project and the larger software company."

No, this is not it at all. What this should say is:

"The customer (Microsoft) will always demand more than is agreed to, while simultaneously refusing to pay for it, and expect the vendor (Dark Side) to foot all of the expenses to meet the additional demands."

Big companies will dangle a huge carrot (or suitcase full of money) in front of a bunch of 20-somethings and their startup company to get them salivating, and almost every time those 20-somethings will chomp at it without questioning motives, analyzing risk, or even having a lawyer look at the proposed contract.

It wasn't mission creep. Mission creep is when the mission changes unexpectedly. Microsoft knew damn well what they were doing, and intended to exploit Dark Side for free work product. Maybe MS didn't anticipate them imploding like they did, but it likely didn't matter to them since they no doubt retained ownership of all of the work product anyway, which they could hand off to another firm to finish, or implode trying.

Honestly I don't see why anyone would do business with Microsoft, or any other huge, publicly-traded bureaucracy for that matter.