What's tapping, paying someone outside the IT department market rates to administer the highly specialized, complex software different parts of the business need that the IT department typically doesn't want to give up headcount for because they have a broader mission?

The software regular IT people deal with is, as a rule, more complex than it needs to be, and specialized business software that can really make a difference to the bottom line requires knowledge of the respective business function and is LUDICROUSLY more complex than it needs to be.

These digital demands, we're talking about stuff your brightest guys in IT don't even want to touch. So sure, if you think you all can pool your collective PC skills to supplant some overpaid contractors, nobody from your CIO down is stopping you, it just does't work.

Just for the record, the "Obamaphone" program has a name. It's called the "Lifeline Assistance Program" and was started in the 1980s by...Ronald Reagan. It has nothing to do with Obama.

https://www.fcc.gov/guides/lif...

http://www.snopes.com/politics...

http://gawker.com/5947133/the-...

I'm all for those guv'mint subsidized chastity belts.

Yeah, but the trick is figuring out a way to get the Duggars to wear them.

When people talk about "we haven't returned to the moon" [bfy.tw], it refers to the end of the Apollo program.

So, the trips we've made to the moon SINCE the Apollo program (the most recent was in 2013), just don't count? Why is that?

Further, you apparently posted that "Let Me Google That For You" link without looking at any of the search results that Google provided you. The first link is to a Quora discussion about manned space travel, the second is a CNN article about whether we still need to have men on the moon.

So are you suggesting that only manned missions count as space exploration?

But then... your somewhat hastily provided Google resultsreally start to get interesting:

We get a YouTube video about extraterristrials, two pages from "Above Top Secret" and a website that suggests, "NASA is hiding a very dark secret from us" and that's why we haven't been to the moon. Then there's a link to a young adult Transformers novel on Google books and then a site called "Educating Humanity" which tells us the reason we haven't sent men to the moon is...aliens.

The next time you think to post a "Let Me Google That For You" page, you might want to actually check the links it provides to make sure they don't make you look like a complete schmuck.

I reallize the a person is going to take what the market will pay them, but it is seriously difficult to imagine that they are worth that much.

Then you really won't want to read about David M. Zaslav, from the Discovery Network and The Learning Channel (former home of the Duggar family and Honey Boo Boo) who's total compensation in 2014 was...$156 million!

http://www.cnbc.com/id/1026872...

It is good to be an oligarch.

The fact that we went to the moon in "fucking 1969" is exactly the problem: it was a colossal waste of money. And the reason we haven't returned is the same reason: it still would be a colossal waste of money.

Um, we DID return, and multiple times.

Do you have any of your facts straight or do you just type with the seat of your pants?

First, you believed Columbus' voyages were "privately financed" and then you think we only went to the moon once. Give us a reason why anything else you say should be taken seriously if you can't get basic facts right.

For example, Columbus' Voyage was privately financed

And where do you think Queen Isabella got that money? She wasn't a tech billionaire. The funding came from the Spanish Royal Treasury. That means Spanish peasants paid for it and spoils of war paid for it and outright theft paid for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You think that solid gold throne Queen Elizabeth sits on when she's wearing her Imperial Crown that contains 2,868 diamonds, 273 pearls, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, and 5 rubies was paid for by the money that the House of Windsor made through honest labor?

danger is that the US government is going to interfere with private space exploration through ridiculous regulations and restrictions.

That US government you speak of derisively got us to the moon and back in fucking 1969. While the mighty private sector is barely replicating what the Mercury Program did over half a century ago. It appears John Galt is not only unoriginal, but he's kind of a fuck-up too.

I guess it's a question of word choice.

  I think post-apocalyptic means after an apocalyptic event, usually a singular catastrophe like a nuclear war or other major event that has a massive scale and results in multiple and total systemic failures. TRW, MM3, MMFR are all literal post-apocalyptic because they imply or are directly the result of a war.

I think MM1 was "pre-apocalyptic" because there hadn't been a specific singular event yet there was something of a social, political and economic crisis happening concurrent with the storyline. Police service hadn't completely ended, just shrunk in scope and effectiveness. Fuel and other economic goods had become more scarce but not wholly unavailable and the social order was threatened but not totally broken down.

Probably not the greatest terminology, but it kind of seemed to fit better than "critical decline" or something similar, at least in comparison to films that mostly claimed to be sequels which took place after an apocalyptic crisis brought on by the declines seen in the first film.

There are a lot of fake liberals there.

Having dealt with the Chicago "limousine liberal", I think I know what to expect.

It doesn't really worry me. I can find decent people anywhere. Thanks for the heads up.

As a person who spends a significant amount of their time planning my fantasy boat, it looks like in terms of equipment selection, 12v and 24v seem to be kings with much less choice once you get to 48vdc.

Now this is mostly for recreational boats up to about 50'. The larger vessels seem to be more inclined to support 24v because they have the space for larger battery arrays and more flexibility to support 12v runs for the many accessories that only run on 12v.

The more run of the mill boats seem to be exclusively 12v because they have less space for battery arrays, their engines are default setup for 12v alternators.

But even when you get into larger trawler-type cruisers, they may have 24v or even 48v arrays, but that mostly seems to be because almost every appliance they have is 115vac and they're just looking for power efficiency when they're not running off the generator anyway.

No, I don't see it as in issue for anybody.

Every iPhone I buy has been used *hard* for two years by two busy professionals working as consultants, and then used continuously as a home telephone (we kept our landline number and ported it to a cell number because it was actually cheaper than the monthly taxfest that is a landline) and then used pretty hard by a 10 year old boy after that.

I may buy a new iPhone every year, but every one of those iPhones gets used for four years and by then it's not even a question of battery that's an issue, but of software and processor obsolescence for any kind of a serious tasks, and I don't think that's really all that different for Android users, either. The only hardware issue I've ever had was a volume up button on a 4S that crapped out six months in, and it was swapped out in store for a replacement phone in 10 minutes.

I really don't understand guys like you that are so angry about people who do buy a phone every year. Admittedly the biggest "feature" add on year on year is mostly CPU/RAM, although the screen size bump with the iPhone 6 Plus has been the main thing this year. It's a fucking tax writeoff for us and even if we bought 2-3 phones individually we'd be looking at upgrades every 18 months or so anyway, so one every 12-14 months doesn't seem outrageous.

I sometimes think the hostility is because you're too broke, too cheap or just flat-out jealous.

I don't know that I totally buy into that, but I guess far enough to see "Mad Max" as a character concept that George Miller keeps making a series of seemingly related movies about.

What seems unfortunate, though, is that there's never been any real narrative or story developed after Mad Max I. RW and FR are highly entertaining movies, but they're just chase movies with outlandish costuming. Fast and Furious has more character development.

I'll be slightly less abrasive than above, but my experience with the "non replaceable" battery in every iPhone since 3GS is that battery failure has been a non-issue.

I buy a new iPhone every year, pass my old one to my wife, and her now "old" phone becomes our house phone, and the "old" house phone becomes an iPod for my son on trips.

So by the time it gets to iPod status it has been used as a daily phone with frequent charging (me), abusive charging (my wife lets hers get down to 10-20% constantly and doesn't charge in the car, etc), sitting in a charging dock, on, for a solid year as the house phone and then getting used intermittently by my son. It still seems to hold a reasonable charge -- he uses it constantly during a 3 hour plane ride and then more still after we get off the plane without any complaints of short battery life.

I don't really see the "non replaceable" battery as an issue. Even when I had a replaceable battery phone, I only just swapped batteries at home. The few times I decided to haul a battery around with me, I use it so infrequently that it was half discharged by the time I needed it.

If you suck down so much battery during normal use and can't charge off a computer or socket, any of the LiO USB chargers would be fine or even one of the battery cases.

I don't think Apple wants to be in the car manufacturing business with a car of their own anymore than they want to be in the PC and smartphone manufacturing business. With consumer electronics, though, you only have to be in the design business (and only partially, since they buy a lot of technology from someone else -- AFAIK, they don't design display panels, radio chipsets, flash memory, RAM, etc).

With cars, though, there's not really a contract manufacturer who does the assembly, you have to do that yourself although you can buy a lot of parts from OEMs like Bosch and others.

I think Apple sees a way to become a marquis branded supplier to other car makers. Building an "Apple Car" is a design exercise, a way to see how what they do can be applied to electric cars and I'm sure it has a lot to do with dashboard electronics and "user interface" as much as it does with anything else. There may also be less sexy opportunities in terms of what they know about battery management.

Mad Max 1 wasn't "post-apocalyptic" but I think it was more interesting than that -- it was *pre* apocalyptic. It was set in an era of severe social and economic decline. Petroleum was becoming very scarce. Government services were basically in tatters, law enforcement was marginal at best -- they had basically lost control of the countryside and rural areas -- there was basically no law enforcement in the small town where the biker gang picked up the Nightrider's coffin and terrorized the townspeople.

And of all four of the films, it has the most plot and narrative. It's characters were much more representative of real people and situations. It's true the social breakdown/decline weren't well fleshed out, though.

IMHO, this setting is actually more interesting than the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Road Warrior. Road Warrior was a fun film, but it was really nothing more than an action film with an S&M wardrobe that recycled the character and car from Mad Max but made no coherent effort to conceptually link the two films.

I haven't seen Thunderdome in years, but in retrospect it was kind of a joke although I seem to remember being entertained by it. Fury Road was basically a reboot of Road Warrior -- highly enjoyable, but other than a name and a leather jacket it really had no connection with the other films.

Personally, I'd like to see a prequel to Mad Max 1 that traces the origin of the MFP, the rise of Max Rockatansky and does more to flesh out the decline of civilization. I think that setting is more interesting than the bizarre mythos of The Humongous from Road Warrior or the cartoon world of Fury Road.

There was a recent film with Guy Pearce called "The Rover" which was set in a modern, post-economic collapse Australia that would serve as a good inspiration for a Mad Max prequel. I think Guy Pearce would make a good Max Rockatansky, too.