I don't think it was ever intended to be a weapon. It's just an expensive jobs program and a way to bring money to some legislators' districts.
There's also the tendency to throw good money after bad rather than give up.

The military is also too involved with all aspects of designs. That adds tremendously to the costs. The customer should stand at arms length away from the designers and not try to micromanage it.

Lighten up, it's rude to make fun of the incompetent. Dice is the home for people who don't have the skills to work anywhere else.

You have to make sure that 2 or 4 young/cheap programmers can not replace you. It's not like programming is the only skill for programmers. You have to understand the product you're making, how the team works together, how the different parts work together, etc. Become indispensable. Work for a company that doesn't do the latest and greatest fad (getting involved with fads is a short road to a short career). If all you do is know how to tie together different libraries and understand the syntax, then yes, you'll lose your job to the cheapest one out there.

There are more types of things to be in the career other than just junior grunt and elite manager.

The good jobs are the ones with actual job requirements listed, things other than "$x years with $new language". Experience is highly valuable. You can't take a recent grad willing to work for beer and hot dogs and have them design the next system. Chances are they're going to be hunting down your experienced staff for help on how to debug something simple.

Because if they're going to toss away a good programmer in order to replace with cheaper workers, then believe me they will also toss away the good managers too and replace them with cheaper ones. If you can't find a job as a 50 year old programmer then chances are you're going to have much difficulty finding that 50 year old management position (especially when all the CEOs are 20 something Harvard dropouts who don't think old people are relevant anymore).

You have to avoid discussing this anyway. This is not the 70s where you hung around the water cooler talking about yesterdays shows. The rise of the DVR meant that people did not watch shows at the same time, except maybe some sports. A few times of people shouting and beating on you with sticks means you learn to not give out spoilers the next morning.

But then the BBC and many other outlets gave massive spoilers for Game of Thrones (I think, I don't watch it) within a week of the season finale. I also saw massive spoiler for the Sixth Sense in a newspaper before it was even out on DVD. Hopefully such idiots learn not to continue do this and have gotten the appropriate set of beatings.

Now the trick is not just to go without spoilers until after the weekend (which a lot of people get caught up on stuff), but to go without spoilers for a few months or a year. For me I find it's not friends I avoid, since we don't watch the same shows, but stuff on social media. But I've stopped googling stuff about Walking Dead and Doctor who so they're now showing up on Google+ anymore in their "stuff you don't want to see but that we think is hot" entries.

I was going to subscribe also to Hulu+. But it did not have the shows I wanted and were delaying them just as long as Netflix would. Maybe it's current for broadcast TV instead of cable, but there's not much there worth watching anymore.

This is just a matter of changing your expectations. Netflix users with DVD service have several years of experience learning to wait a year for the current season of shows. It works the same with streaming. Most people are switching not because they want tons of television, but because they're learning to wean themselvers off of television's teat. Doesn't always work though, especially when streaming has so much content that you'll never be caught up on it all.

Advertisers are like any other corporation; they greatly and illogically overinflate the worth of their own product. If the advertisements really are worth as much as they think, then they should be paying me to watch them.

No ads on Netflix and chaper than Hulu+. Yes, they very rarely have a pre-post blurb for their own programming, which is still less than how HBO and Showtime do things.

But if there were a choice of $70 for my old satellite with all its ads or better programming for $20 with no ads, I'll take it.

Free? Netflix and Hulu+ require subscriptions. Apple TV requires paying for shows. Amazon whatever-its-called requires a subscription. Yes, smaller than the ridiculous $50-150 cable/satellite fees that come with poor service, but still not free. That's the point - hulu basic has ads, but if you subscribe for hulu+ you *still* get the stupid ads.

They key thing to adapt to Windows 8 is to utterly and completely ignore the Modern/Metro stuff. Go straight to desktop and don't leave. Those desktop apps do have improvements over Windows 7 which won't be noticed if the users run away screaming when they see the horrific modern UI with its primitive applets.

But Skyrim had mods to fix this. Can we mod Windows 10?

The included mail program in Windows 8 was useless. Literally impossible to use if you refused to get a Microsoft account as well. None of the "modern" apps are even remotely designed to be easy to use with a mouse; they're designed to look like executive PowerPoint summaries: dumb down the information and use pretty pictures to distract the viewer.

Hard to tell. That link was to a site in English but all the screen shots were in Chinese, and without any explanatory text or organization into cateogories even if you did know Chinese. There's just no useful stuff there to make any opinion for or against Windows 10. A very bad bit of marketing there.

If true, that's a bad thing in a way. It means the bitcoin is NOT independent of politics and emotions, and that it's highly volatile rather than having stability that its advocate claim.

Few currencies are backed by force. Most currencies are backed by common trust in them, when the trust wanes then their value becomes unstable. A few countries try to tie their currencies to either assets or mandate particular prices, but these often create black markets as a side effect, and it's easy to recognize these currencies because their countries have very restricted freedoms.