When will people learn that measures like this promote discrimination.

As soon as you force schools to have more girls in the classes, one of two things will happen: (1) They will forbid interested boys from taking the classes, or (2) they will put uninterested girls into the classes, which will screw up the classes for those who really do want to learn.

Reminds me of the (entirely unofficial, but entirely real) quota systems I have seen in certain schools and companies. Because some women were admitted/hired despite being unqualified, all women in the program were regarded with suspicion. This was utterly unfair to those women who were, in fact, qualified. It encourages discrimination, because everyone assumes that all girls/women are there due to the quota rather than their personal capabilities.

The right approach: Encourage anyone interested to take the classes; ensure that the instructors and administrators are not discouraging anyone because of their gender.

The thing is: The money this tax is aimed at is not in the US and - by international law - was not earned in the US. To impose such a tax, the US must do some combination of violating signed treaties and forcing foreign jurisdictions to subject themselves to US domestic law. The US might have been able to pull something like that off, say, during the Cold War. Now? After the 2008 banking crisis? After the total muck the US has made of the Middle East? After Snowdon and the NSA revelations? Forget it, the US has lost too much credibility for such a naked power/cash grab to ever work.

Option a: The current US administration really is this clueless. Sadly, a real possibility, given the other idiocies they have shown.

Option b: This is a distraction. Just like a magician - attracts your attention with one hand, while, the other hand...someone is getting his pocket picked.

The US is bloody bankrupt, with current debt approaching $20 trillion and unfunded liabilities of around ten times that amount. It's all about cash, to keep paying for the bread and circuses, so that the political elite can put off the inevitable reckoning just a little bit longer.

I expect than anyone looking at the complete article, with all of the various tables and breakdowns will find at least one item that shocks them. In my case, two examples:

- 45% of Americans view the IRS positively, vs. 48% negatively. To me, this is shocking, because I know that the IRS is a power unto itself. If someone in the IRS decides they want to nail you, you are nailed. Appeal to a court? Sure, but only a court run by the IRS. They can empty your bank accounts, repossess your house, all without any review by any external party. Why anyone would trust an agency with this much power, or view it in a positive light is beyond me.

- More Democrats than Republicans view the DoD positively. Huh?

For me, many of the results are pretty surprising. The point of my comment here: I'll bet that's true for you too. We all live in echo chambers, mostly reading articles that reinforce our beliefs and talking with people who think much the same as we do. Really kind of scary, if you think about it...

"The money will be used to fund FirstNet, the government agency tasked with creating the nation's first interoperable broadband network..."

You could just as well put the money in a pile and burn it. Heck, given the inevitable follow-on costs, burning it would be cheaper...

"...contribute over $20 billion to deficit reduction". Meaning it's going into the general fund, where it will be promptly spent three or four times over, each time with the justification that the expenditure has already been paid for by the wireless auction.

Never let a crisis go to waste. Everything that can be used to drive fear, which makes the populace accept higher taxes, which funds more bureaucrats and politicians, who drive the next fear cycle.

Is there any way off this merry-go-round?

I don't use Calc or Excel much, but I ran into two such limitations just recently. So, for anyone looking for concrete examples, here are two:

- Column limitation. A student of mine wrote a Java program that exported data into a spreadsheet, using some library or other (don't remember which). Now, I was impressed that this automatically started up Calc, when my student had clearly used Excel. However, as an initial step, the program created a zillion columns. Crash - max columns exceeded. Why should there be any sort of limit, other than exhausting all memory in the computer?

- Macros. I have a small spreadsheet that counts up the students' points and curves them into final course grades. The actual curving is done by a function I defined and attached to the spreadsheet. In Calc, if I alter the points, the sheet doesn't recalculate - I have to save and reload the sheet. No idea why - everything ought to work (and does in Excel).

There are similar irritations in all of the applications. Writer and Impress are the ones I use the most, and sometimes it's damned frustrating. I obviously haven't tried version 4.4 yet - here's hoping that they did more than fiddle with the UI.

Yes, TFS should have defined it's acronym. Failing that, the editors could have caught it - typically, they didn't. Irritating.

On to the actual content: 1 in 5 developers are developing software for devices with embedded software that are likely to wind up with their own internet addresses. Given the high quality, secure software we are accustomed to seeing in routers, PCs, servers, etc.. Given the high level of security awareness we see in the developers in this area. I just gave a remedial lesson in SQL injection, damn it, isn't this stuff taught in primary school?

Given all of this, just think what we have to look forward to: more mediocre developers hard-coding security holes into every device with an embedded processor. Big companies like Verizon with their supercookies will soon be tracking your toilet flushes. The marketeers and the surveillance state will be vacuuming this up - the marketeers to sell you toilet paper, big brother so that the SWAT team can kick down your door while your pants are around your ankles.

O frabjous joy. Is it too late to strangle the Internet of Things in its crib?

Would it be too much to ask for them to explicitly discuss cost/benefit of something like this?

Example: Our car has some "smart" routine for detecting glare ice on the road. I don't know if it has ever been right - but there have been literally hundreds of false posltives over the years. Thankfully, it doesn't do anything but beep annoyingly.

Imagine if your car foes into full emergency braking, whenever it thinks an accident is imminent. What level of false positives is acceptable? What level of false negatives? How many accidents are statistlcally likely to be prevented? How many will be caused. Assuming a positive balance, what are the financial costs of building this system into all vehicles - and what is the resultant cost in dollars/life? These are the kinds of information that the Traffic Safety Administration ought to be publishing with their proposal.

If you look at the detailed report, they break the system into three parts. All together, they expect the system to prevent about 100 deaths per year (plus a larger number of injuries. There is a very brief discussion of false positives that arose in their test scenarios (e.g., in section 4.8.1.4), but absolutely no attempt to estimate the number of accidents caused by the system.

Consider how many rear-end accidents the average person has, over how many years and miles. Then figure the reliability - the number of false positives - that can be tolerated - the number is essentially zero. Achieving this will require extraordinarily reliable sensors and software, which willwill be technically difficult and financially costly. None of this is addresses in the report.

..."we're connecting community colleges with local employers to train workers to fill high-paying jobs..."

This is what community colleges do. Just exactly how is intervention by the federal government supposed to help? The only change is going to be an increase in the number of administrators the colleges hire to deal with the federal bureaucrats. The next step will be to offer the schools money. Then they'll hire even more administrators in order to suck properly at the federal teat. Finally, the federal government will use their dependence on federal money to impose ridiculous rules and regulations, that require even more administrators.

We've already seen how federal "help" has screwed up the American university system. Tuitions have increased by 200% to 300% in the past 20 years (that being the first example I pulled out of Google).

You know the line: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you". Time to run screaming in the opposite direction.

I'm no expert in the area by any means, However, in TFA, Lennart says:

there’s very little in Systemd that’s actually required. Systemd requires Journald, because every single service that runs on the system is connected to Journald, and we need some way to log things during early boot. So Journald is a requirement, and Udev is a requirement. But pretty much all other components are completely optional.

So there's your stripped down version. Your stuck with the logging, and I'll be the first to agree that binary logs are a dumb idea. However, apparently you can drop almost everything else. The trick will be finding a distribution that does this, since few sysadmins really want to roll their own...

Part of the problem is that Lollipop offers little new, but does destroy existing functionality. Google Calendar is much less usable than before. Personal and business email is now handled by the same application, making it much more difficult to keep private and business separate. Etc..

In return, we now have fancy animations when you touch the screen, gee, golly, wow. Oh, and existing, well-known icons have been redesigned; just as an example, to go to your home screen you no longer press the house icon, now you press a circle. I'm sure some designer is real proud of that, but they must have forgotten the user-testing.

Lollipop is Google's version of Windows Vista. I'm sure they'll fix it, but in the meantime I wish I could do a rollback to KitKat...

It's worth doing some reading, to understand the differences between the switch types. Here's a good description of three of the switches. You likely don't want the really loud ones - I recently bought a keyboard using Cherry Brown, which are tactile, but a bit quieter - it's still loud enough that my officemates had to get used to it, but at least they didn't kill me.

On a related note, he notes that the cat litter sticks to his cats paws, and he really dislikes finding cat litter particles on his kitchen counters, tables, chopping boards, etc.

Ewww... Why don't people train their cats properly. It's not hard. My cats do not enter the kitchen, and all tables are also off limits. Teach them the rules when they are kittens. Afterwards, maybe once every year or two, you'll need to remind them that the rules haven't changed.

How to train? You just let them understand that there is a really odd law of nature: going in the kitchen or hopping on a table causes them to get wet. Squirt gun, pans of water set back from the table edge, whatever. Don't yell or anything - you don't want them to associate the water with you, but with the location they tried to go. Easy, and well worth it...

The stupid thing is: it may well work. The federal government regularly twists the Commerce Clause beyond all recognition. The most egregious case, the one that really set the ball rolling, was the one where the federal government claimed the right to regulate farmers feeding their own grain to their own livestock. Why? Because that meant that they bought less grain from elsewhere, some of which might, potentially come from out of state. Hence, the Commerce Clause allowed the regulation.

Given that sort of precedent, the federal government can justify essentially any regulation that it wants. Certainly including telling Colorado that it's state-wide laws are invalid, because they happen to indirectly affect neighboring states.

...because it's hard to see any other reason for an official investigation of a bunch of twits throwing virtual cow patties at each other.