These countries were under the thumb of Soviet Russia not all that long ago. It's pretty common to find people that are still a bit bitter about Russians. They usually like the Germans much more than Russians. One of my Czech friends put it like this, if someone came up to them in the street and asked them for directions in Russian they'd talk to them in English instead.

The biggest issue is even if you had footage showing Russia firing an shell and it landing across the border it doesn't matter. Putin clearly doesn't care. NATO states aren't going to risk blood and treasure on Ukraine. They need Russian energy for the Winter. The French are still going to complete the sale of some Warships to Russia.

Meanwhile, back in America we've launched a bunch of sanctions. What Russian imports will disappear off the shelves? Guns and Vodka. I think they'll survive.

The FTC needs to set up Honey pots with actual SS7 ANI feeds. Real time query the calling number and provider. The dirty secret here is the telemarketers need VOIP providers to work. Usually ones that are willing to turn a blind eye and willing to let them advertise the outgoing number as anything they want. The FTC needs to put the pressure on them and their upstream connection into the phone system (most likely a CLEC of some sort).

I think you are putting too much value in Russia actually caring what the rest of the world thinks. The EU and US have zero treaty obligations to the Ukraine. It was never going to be a Military altercation with the West. It was always going to be a series of trade and diplomatic sanctions. All Russia has to do is weather the sanctions until the Winter and then bend over Western Europe who needs Russian Natural Gas to survive.

Worst case, 5 years down the road North American liquified Nat gas might be able to replace Russian pipeline shipments... Maybe.

I would recommend R. It's the language college grads are getting trained in. The reason for that is simple. There's no licensing costs for a simple R dev environment. However, I wouldn't use the free stuff for anything that ad hoc. If you have a production big data job I would look at something like Vertica (purchases by HP a couple years ago.) Extremely fast big data DB engine. Not only will it run R, but it has the ability to break the R up into smaller chunks at execution time and distribute the execution across the DB cluster.

Stuff like that just isn't possible in SAS yet. SAS is built upon some very old skool constructs that make it very brittle and very difficult to meet the performance expectations of todays big data world. SAS may end up there, they are privately held and have a very large R&D budget, but I think they would have to do a total rewrite for it to compete. Not that SAS is going away, there's just so much of it in the business world. Be that as it may, in 15-20 years SAS could be a Foxpro of it's age.

I'm going to second Groovy on Rails. AKA Grails. It's very mature and is one of the languages that compiles down to Java Opt code. You have a large eco-system of production apps that run in the container. The language is fairly approachable (saying this as someone who came originally from a Perl Web App background in the late 90s). You can also use Java Libraries if there's something you want to get out of box such as one of the many Open Source Apache Libraries or Google Guava Libraries.

Before making such bold statements I'd do a little more research on the hopper and how it functions. There's no cloud storage here. All the functionality is on the customers DVR and iPad.

For the most reasonable rates I'd go with Straight Talk (WalMart) for GSM or Ting for CDMA service. Not sure if you can get away with not giving a name, but neither need any form of contract. I would skip the airport Kiosk and go right to a WalMart of Target for the pre-paid cards.

I have a different tact. I typically am brought in with a Coterie of other senior developers at mid-cap companies. Ten of us will usually replace a mix of 30+ onshore H1-B and offshore developers. Basically on-shoring work for companies that have gotten sick of sub-par code that can't perform under load. At my current contract 18 months ago their problem was a back log of issues and enhancements with a 2 year wait time and a web site that crashed under peek loads. Performance is radically better, bugs and defects are a fraction of what they were and the back log is empty.

We work with the customer on better development processes as well as the importance of having a hiring pipeline.

This became possible because most of the H1-Bs are contractors and their corporate sponsors have steadily increased rates. Basic supply and demand. With those kinds of rates there's no reason to put up with sub-par deliverables.

What it's done is placed a carrot out there to bring on H1-B programmers instead of college hires.

With an H1-B the employer has a lot of power over the employee. They can't move jobs with out sponsorship. It's very easy to knock them out of the country. You can easily classify them in a lower pay band because they have very little recourse. These employees usually get little to know employee development (i.e. money).

With a college hire the employee can change jobs at will. You as the employer are expected to put money into employee development. And in the end they are likely to leave after a couple years to seek greener pastures.

So yes, the H1-B program has done tremendous harm to our country. I consult with many large companies and I haven't seen a intern in a programming department in half a decade. College hires are few and far between. It's a radical change from how things were when I started in the 90s. Simply put business have put their money into short term H1-B and Offshore workers. They stopped putting money into college hires. Now they whine they can't find qualifies workers because they stopped investing in Junior programmers a decade ago.

AWS has one of the best security systems out there. IF you decide to enable the features. The production AWS configs I've used have mandated multi factor auth (using the number generator on the phone) as well as network source network restrictions. You can also setup a large number of ACLs to restrict things like the ability to create additional accounts.

It's hard for me to feel bad for these guys.

Local governments rarely own many utilities poles. They are usually owned by the incumbent telco and the electrical providers. Cable companies pay a good chunk of change to the telcos and power companies, though who knows if that's included in the basic rate or the franchise fee.

Cities often own right of ways for main boulevards and a good chunk of the so-called franchise fee is comprised of those right of way fees. Though a good chunk of fee really just offsets the ongoing maintenance the city is on the hook for as the cable co is ripping of the roads and sidewalks. Also buried in the franchise fees are public access costs. In a handful of very large markets the franchise fee works out well for the city, but for the vast majority of the US it just offsets some expenses.

Most documentaries have a particular point of view and editing can really define how someone comes off. Most people would agree you did not come off particularly well in the documentary. Would you ever consider doing another documentary?

Patents aren't nearly as bad when the holders of said patents actually make things. Most of the time the end result is cross-licensing agreements. Things went down the tubes when Lawyers figured out they could buy some vague patents and PO Box in East Texas.

Outside of Airline Tickets we have no laws requiring prices for goods and services to includes taxes and fees. Comcast's prices are always exclusive of taxes and fees. They simply tack on franchise fees to the bill as a pass through to the consumer.

What does cost real money is right of way leases. In most places the vast majority of utility poles are owned by the local power and phone providers. They demand a price per month per pole. That ads up when it's thousands or tens of thousands of utility poles. Going below ground is no cheaper. That involves right of way easements for both public and private property, in addition to repair of roads and sod. Assuming that the land holder even wants to deal with you.

Education is abysmal. Some of the highest drop out rates in the nation, some of the lowest graduation and SAT rates in the country. Contrary to popular belief the blue states don't just throw money away. They spend it on education, worker training and things that increase the living conditions. What does that mean? Where I live unemployement is a full two points lower than TX.