A guy named Anil Kumar charged with insider trading ... I, I just don't know where to start with this one.

Oh, you forgot two critical steps ...

• ???
• Profit

Now take a nap or somesing.

"It states a resolution is expected within the next 1.2 hours ..." Why the surprise at this? All estimates include their Google 20% one way or another, right?

The post you were responding to was recommending the detailed bill not as a financial measure, but instead as an accountability measure. You give little Sammy the expectation that s/he not use the phone after 10 PM, then check the bill every month to see if there are text messages or call after that hour. Yes, s/he will get away with it for a month if they choose to break the rules, but the parents will be able to correct that behavior (and fix the sleep schedule issue that you raised). Responsible parenting isn't just about sheltering kids from their own (possible) behaviors, but about giving freedom within boundaries and ensuring that both are respected. Let Sammy know what is expected, let Sammy know how you will keep track of accountability, actually follow through with the accountability and any promised consequences.

I was hoping that your "Jesus, I could probably code their whole damned site in a day" was sarcasm, but you are getting modded as insightful so I am thinking that perhaps you were being serious. I have met a depressingly low number of developers who don't think that they can do something "in a day" without thinking about how large the actual problem is. You could write an application that is a) highly accessible, b) useable, c) clean (talking about the data here ... lots of numbers and whatnot that are coming from various sources), d) secure, e) stable, with the ability to handle a high number of simultaneous connections (including folks who will likely be using automation to mine the datasets) and an uptime in the upper 99th percentile while dealing with the requirements shifting in a largely bureaucratic environment? In one day?

Atwood wrote a blog about this same thing the other day ... you should check it out. I could be wrong, and you could be a total ninja programmer, but I have a strange feeling that the hyperbole is strong in this one. Everything is trivial to those who don't have to do the work.

All that being said, $9.5 million in six months does seem to be a lot of cash. I am curious how much of it will be spent on hardware / connectivity / data-cleansing, etc, and how much of it is going to programmers and dba folks, and how much is going to project managers (is everyone in their company's management stack getting billed out as a "consultant" or PM?) ...

where you sit around dealing with heavy petting all day? And don't you just think that a lighter version of it would just be annoying? Maybe even leading to the infamous BBOD? Or maybe I am just reading this wrong ...

Having enjoyed the efficiency of their transit system on both local and cross-country travel while in Japan, I must say that it is a little amusing to have their methods criticized (or at least criticized without any supporting arguments). It is commonly accepted knowledge that smiling while talking on the phone is an effective way to improve how you are received while talking (Google it, or check out this short phone-etiquette article). Smiling also is seen as being, well ... friendly. Approachable. Nice, even. That is a huge thing when dealing with confused, angry, or impatient customers. While traveling around the Eastern seaboard on Amtrak, I had the train break down twice. On the first ride, the staff was frowning, short tempered, and not very gracious. I was a little less than thrilled, even though the delay was only 15 minutes. On the second ride I found the staff to generally be smiling and talkative, though unable to provide any more useful information than the first staff. An hour later and I was still stuck, but definitely happier with the service of the staff. While the tinfoil hat crowd can certainly point to issues that might arise if smiling is mandatory / frowning becomes punishable, this serves the very practical purpose of improving customer service by providing metrics and feedback to staff in a timely manner (preemptive seeming to be fairly timely to me).

I had the pleasure (and I do say this with complete sincerity) of dating a girl back in college who was suffering from bipolar disorder. She was a photographer and a "crafter" by nature, and her manic periods were full of photography, knitting, etc. Unfortunately, she was not all that able to capture her depressive states (which I feel that you incorrectly overgeneralize as being suicidal), and so did not have the chance to funnel her sadness into new art. She had the low days quite a bit (made worse by medication that was targeted at depression instead of bipolar disorder, which cause rapid cycling of her emotional state). I have met other people who were a little better at channeling their depressed states and made some really beautiful art. A lot of creative drive can come from reflecting upon the sad times (why is so much music made around breaking up, loss, death, sadness, etc?), and those who can experience the wider rage of emotions more constantly can better capture them. One of the problems, though, is that many people in the depressive state are upset by very small things - a song about how "my roommate left a damp towel on the bathroom floor and a dish in the sink and then the bus was five minutes late and I didn't want it to be five minutes late" might not be as gripping to the listener as it was to the person who happened to be depressed that day. Oh yeah, and the above was an actual exchange that was made over the phone on one of her bad mornings.

Perhaps we could do as he says in TFA:

That said, I have a lot of issues with what he has said in the past, or at least in his implementations of some of his recommendations. This example is no exception - I take some issue with the fact that he states this to be the more secure option, as it will make people use more complex passwords so as to combat over-the-shoulder attacks. I would assert that most users are lazy and will not choose extremely complex passwords. At best, they may throw in a few more caps and non-alpha characters i.e.iloveFluffy1, but all in all I imagine that few of these users (whom he claims are currently the types to use simple or copy-paste passwords) will decide to make things harder. I feel that he has some good points (sometimes security should win), but that this does not seem like a great idea overall. And yes, I am aware that I am providing no more empirical data than he is, and I am aware that I lack the infamy (stand-in for security credentials) that he possesses. But I have been getting decent /. mods lately, so maybe that counteracts his standing as the usability guru?

Wow. A few bits of information. Consider them fact or call them a lie, but they kind of contradict your post and back up the parent. Almost 30 years of intervention in Iraq, leading up to the first Gulf War. Citation

1963 -
"To pave the way for the new regime, the CIA is claimed to have provided to the Baathists lists of suspected Communists and other leftists. The new regime is claimed to have used these lists to orchestrate a bloodbath, systematically murdering untold numbers of Iraq's educated eliteâ"killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. The victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.[28][31][32] According to an article in the New York Times, the U.S. sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the U.S. supported against Kassem and then abandoned. American and U.K. oil and other interests, including Mobil, British Petroleum and Bechtel, were once again conducting business in Iraq."

1968 -
"Roger Morris in the Asia Times writes that the CIA deputy for the Middle East Archibald Roosevelt (grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and cousin of Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.) stated, referring to Iraqi Ba'ath Party officers on his payroll in the 1963 and 1968 coups, "They're our boys, bought and paid for, but you always gotta remember that these people can't be trusted."[20] General Ahmed Bakr was installed as president. Saddam Hussein was appointed the number two man."

1980 -
"Investigative journalist Robert Parry reports that in a secret 1981 memo summing up a trip to the Middle East, then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig wrote: "It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Prince Fahd" of Jordan." "

1980s to '92 -
"A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former U.S. policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in arming Iraq. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous dual use items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague. Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction. "Fundamentally, the policy was justified," argues David Newton, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Hussein radio station in Prague. "We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein's government would become less repressive and more responsible."
[...]
"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. "Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."

According to reports of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, the U.S., under the successive presidential administrations sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992. The chairman of the Senate committee, Don Riegle, said: "The executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licences for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think its a devastating record."
[...]
"U.S. officials publicly condemned Iraq's employment of mustard gas, sarin, VX and other poisonous agents, but sixty Defense Intelligence Agency officers were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq."

www.afhcan.org - fatfingered something in the href tag above, so it stripped out the link in my previous post.

Alaska is actually a pretty great place to work, and Anchorage isn't too bad. If you are keen on doing contract work, there are more than enough big-oil and government gigs to keep local shops hopping (and hiring). If you like something perhaps a little more noble than working at an hourly rate for the oil man, there are some interesting shops up here doing software development. Want to work for a 10-year-old internationally-known telehealth company? We are hiring .NET ninjas at present. Nature is accessible ... or, more accurately, unavoidable. There are five moose that frequent the lake near our campus throughout the winter months. I can ski five miles from my house to the backdoor of my office and only cross two small side roads due to our extensive trail system. My boss takes about a month off each fall to shoot large animals to provide winter food. Fridays are good days to take off early so that you can get some fishing in. We have a growing (but still young) downtown scene. First Friday artwalks, bike co-ops, art studios, some great microbreweries, a decent hockey team (Brabham Cup and Kelly Cup winners), a horrible arena football team, rollerderby. Winters can drag on a little long (but, as the article mentions, we get less snow than upstate New York), but the summers are phenomenal. Everyone should come work in Alaska (or at least two more senior developers).

Hey, we all know that it's cold in the D ... so cold in the D.

Grand plan! It isn't like we have meddled with regime change in Iran in the past (1953, 1980, in some views 2001-present) ... or changes in Iraqi regimes (1963, 1968, 1992-1995, 2003) ... or even toyed with political forces in Afghanistan, for that matter (1973-1974, 1978-1980s, continuing today). Oh, almost forgot about those little places in Southeast Asia, Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Citation You are right, this is a novel and new concept that we should definitely pursue! USA-backed regime change FTW! #WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong

FTFA: "Several technologies have been proposed to harvest these high altitude winds, including tethered, kite-like turbines that would be floated to the altitude of the jet streams at an altitude of 20,000-50,000 feet and transmit up to 40 megawatts of electricity to the ground via the tether."

It sounds a little like they are talking about creating "kite-like turbines that would be floated to the altitude of the jet streams" ... and then they would "transmit up to 40 megawatts of electricity to the ground via the tether". I am not sure where you are getting the ground-based power generation from. It isn't mentioned anywhere in the article.