I agree post secondary can be a waste for many maybe most people. There is a reason why people say I'm crazy smart for example, and pretty much by definition if I'm doing it that means the majority of people probably can't. The assumption that everyone has a right to go to university and that that will magically roll back the clock to the 60's when only a couple countries mattered is silly. That said there are a lot of skilled(ish) jobs that require some education to do (mechanics, plumbing, electrical, etc). Good trade schools and apprenticeships could go a long way. Instead you end up with "job creators" that only create jobs for their kids (we should ban any company from having the name "and sons" in its title) rather than a meritocracy where apprenticeships/entry into the industry is based on talent.

That's just it. Local government pays for things like schools, police, fire etc things that clearly a company needs to attract and protect people. Companies lobby like hell to allow them to build an office, get property tax exceptions, discounted power etc etc but ask them to pay for some of the infrastructure and services that their existence cause and they'll fight like hell.

external drive: permanently attached. It is where my "acquired" media lives. Store shelf: it is a matter of magnitude. Likely HDD at store is turned over at least once a year. Typical retail you need to turn your inventory over 3-4 times a year at least. But long term archival storage for enterprise: 10yr +. With that long of a duration you need something like LTO that really, really tries for backwards compatibility. Try to get an IDE (or earlier) connection on your new server.

Not only that: HDDs spindles seeze up after a while if not spinning from what I've heard (lubricant drying out in the barings?). Tape: designed to sit idle for 99.99% of their life.

The cost of the tape drive is the killer. You need to have enough data that you can amortize the cost over many tapes, but given the fairly limited drive slots available on very expensive disk arrays + the cost of the FC ports on the network switches etc etc life becomes much easier quickly having a robot and 4 tape drives attached to the file server vs 2000 disks in say 100 disk arrays (meaning probably 4 network switches, 200 gbics at about $100-500 a pop etc).

I'm pretty sure VS must be using a real tab character when you are using tabs not spaces. When I turn show white space on it shows tabs with the -> symbol and spaces with a dot: the editor knows when I added two spaces and when I added a tab (which may or may not be set to = 2 spaces). It also knows this when opening up a diff of someone elses files so it isn't that it is remembering keystroke history magically or anything. Anyways, at least for VS it isn't "magically doing multiple backspaces for me" it actually knows that the character pressed was a tab not a space in the first place.

My suspicion is the earlier commentor is using an editor developed in the 70's and assuming that that is how all of them work.

Not a citation but a bit of an explanation why the earlier authors comment on the Big Mac index deserves consideration. Differential pricing. For example: I live in Canada, we pay more for pretty much every good then the US even for goods made in Canada. In economics one of the factors is called price elasticity of demand. It varies with product (luxury, stable), availablity of substitutes but also by culture/country. Canada and europe generally have fairly low price elasticities (a comparable change in price has a smaller effect on demand than in the US) so that means companies gouge us because the optimal price/demand tradeoff lands at a higher price. A Toyota Camry made in Cambridge Ontario will sell for more there than if you buy it across the border in Detriot, even before taxes. Why: because they can.

The problem holds for the Big Mac index. Sure a Ukrainian developer can buy a lot of Big Macs with their salary but is that because they earn more, or McDonalds is taking a smaller margin to try to gain market share, government subsidizes of favorable exchange rates are lowering the cost of ingredients, or culturally Ukrainians aren't as big on fast food or have better substitutes? Who knows. But just having a single number you can't account for other factors.

Might be with your editor but this isn't a universal truth.

Depends on the environment I suppose. At my work we all use VS (C# web services). Still our standard is spaces. Tabs in a uniform environment are a bit more flexible actually: you can set your IDE to have tabs = a different size indent. Some people like the stock ~5 char indent, some like 1-2, with a tab character they are free to chose. With a mandated 2 spaces or whatever everyone is forced to look at the code with the same indent even if it doesn't change what others see/the file itself if they were to use tabs with different indent preferences on the editor. If different people are using different editors or you insist on being able to see things the way you are used to even when looking over another devs shoulder then yeah spaces are the way to go.

I thought a long time ago that a prime target would be a stadium. Say load up the Goodyear blimp with grenades and drop a couple dozen into the crowd at the Superbowl. Probably more casualties in the stampede than the explosion. 5lb bomb might get a stampede going though I suppose especially if the skies are already filled with other (non-armed) drones. People won't know that the other 100 in the air overhead have cameras or bombs.

Anyways, terrorism has an asymmetrical effect. For example 9/11 while tragic resulted in more US deaths in the resulting wars and the money spent could have prevented far more deaths than the attack caused (ex: I bet $6T in spending would yield a crapload of cancer and heart disease treatments). Did the resulting paranoia/military actions prevent further problems? Perhaps. But hard to prove a negative I guess. But (estimates are around 5000-20000 Taliban fighters) $6T is a lot to spend on a very few number of shitheads.

Kind of odd you compare one of the lowest population states but then compare it to the largest city in the US, though I guess 1/2 Alaska and only 7 times the population wouldn't work well ;)

BC has better roads that Alaska. Plus over half the provinces population is in the Vancouver metropolitan area. The thing is for the out of the way places: unless we have serious advances in battery/engines drones are a really bad idea they either are doing long flights from a more populated area or an expensive piece of equipment is being tied up for a small number of people (effectively the same thing they either spend a lot of time flying between deliveries or spend it waiting on something to deliver). Either way drones make more sense in dense areas but dense areas are likely the place where people aren't going to want them because of lack of landing space/hazards.

I think drones are the modern day helicopter useful for a very few things and for the masses we'll use something else.

Better they swarm the bastards in cars that toss the junk out in the first place.

Flying is way less energy efficient than ground transport. Probably cheaper for small packages. But I don't think drones will ever replace restocking the grocery store, bars etc.

The latest broadwells coming out that it seems like HP has replaced their whole consumer laptop line are at most (with a ~350 upgrade to the i7 version) still 20% slower than my late 2009 iMac. Yeah I know desktop vs laptop but still 6 years later and still slower. Pathetic. Anyways a lot of people are fine with it I guess as long as it can decode 1080p fast enough for smooth playback. Not me but probably the mass of the market :(

I was hoping for a pro version of the Surface pro :( maybe in 6 months. I'd like 16GB ram, 512GB SSD and a i7 CPU (and not a crappy two core U version broadwell)). 8 GB just won't cut it for me as a desktop/laptop replacement. I already have an iPad so ... little reason to buy the MS product.

Brought to you by the guys that sold you scratch tickets in exchange for your welfare checque.