Politics makes for strange bedfellows, indeed.

You see, your problem is that you understand economics and human action. We can't have that here.

If you consider engineering a process rather than results, it's only a joke to call it engineering in 80% of companies. I do engineering every day when I use an existing proven process to get a result, or use known solutions for security features, etc.

It's the people who ignore the known body of work who cause much of the trouble. And they seem to be in the majority. But it doesn't mean there is no software engineering being done.

That's how it should work. But it is always up to management at some level to take responsibility to make sure someone competent is holding whoever is below accountable. This does not happen when there is a disconnect between the business team and the software team. And in most companies, there is a disconnect.

To answer my own question, definitely not. But realizing that there's a bit of variability in the data set, this certainly qualifies as an inflammatory description of expected data. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/...

Agreed. The text is this:

You would expect records to be broken by small margins from time to time. I wonder if there was a record cold month in the past 15 or 20 years?

That might be part of the confusion for me. We have Comcast and Verizon here as top tier carriers, and in the previous town I lived in lot of the immigrants used DirecTV for cable and used wireless internet. Maybe because I'm not really a big streaming fan this is just a problem that doesn't particularly affect me, or the internet scenarios I'm familiar with.

How did Apple manage to win out against the wireless carriers? The biggest contribution they made, in my opinion, to the world of wireless internet was not the iPhone, but breaking out of the walled garden of "the content the carrier wanted you to see". I'm finding the situation with ISPs and online content analogous, and I'm wondering why the dynamic is so different. Perhaps the balkanization of paid content by distributors creates enough of a walled garden to begin with (compared to simple web access) that there are other issues preventing carriers from being forced by the market to be more open?

Fair enough; I doubt many people here would have known him on his own. Did not mean to belittle him in any way. Met him once, briefly.

I played in a band with a guy who sold some significant patents to Unisys for their mainframes and worked in the CTO office. Smart guy, actually worked as a pro musician for a while in the 70s with David Bromberg (session player for the hippie giants like Joan Baez). 6 or 7 years ago, I was interviewing a guy applying to be my manager. He also worked at Unisys, and so I asked him if he knew the guy with the IP, and he got a funny look on his face - he did know him, and said there was antagonism in that relationship. Apparently there was a longstanding feud between the older big iron guys and the newer architecture team. It's interesting to me to see that play out.

I thought your comment was going to be offensively stupid, but it's not. In fact, turn it around and look at men in sales vs. men in tech. No one would dispute what you're saying if you applied it to that population. I don't know if there's anything to it, but...interesting.

Sounds like you have a pretty good grasp on it. I'm not really sure what you're asking, though. I'm talking basic stuff here, like "contribute to the child'd financial support", "stay out of jail", "don't expose the child to drugs in-utero or ex-utero", "don't beat the child", "don't let my SO beat or molest the child", "feed the child", and so on.

If the question is whether it's better to send the child to piano lessons or karate class, that's at a much finer level of optimization.

In fairness, part of the extraordinarily high young adult unemployment is due to labor laws that punish the crap out of any business that hires a crappy worker. They can't fire them.

I don't disagree completely. Probably a combination of me not knowing the right terminology and having a spouse who has dealt with specific cultures in an underperforming school district.

At the same time, there ARE cultures that start at a low SES and move up. Cultural traits play into that: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01...

Your parents either make good choices, or fail to. It's a dynamic situation, and being poor is no excuse for doing drugs or beating your kid, or letting your boyfriend of the week molest him or her. But it seems that actually holding people accountable for their choices isn't politically correct. At least if they are poor or a minority or something. America needs to wake up and realize that the education problem one is a cultural one, and it's about the decisions PARENTS make with regards to how they raise their children.