Many of the cities in the Bay Area were originally agricultural. Retirees moved there for the sun, peace and quiet and cheap rents. Then the tech industry started to grow. For every 100,000 square foot office block built, that's 1000 employees who want 4000 square foot lots for their homes. All the land got used up rapidly for roads, homes, offices, schools, hospitals and clinics. And those came at a cost. Retirees suddenly saw their property taxes go up and up to pay for all these services that they didn't use. The cities then get round this by granting permission for a company to build a new campus on the edge of their city, leaving the housing, schools and transportation access to their neighbors. The same retirees opposed high-rise apartment blocks because they lost their sunlight, and MVA (market-value assessment) meant their home was assessed the same value as the six unit triplex block next door. So they brought in a tax Proposition to grandfather in property taxes and block the construction of high rise concrete apartment blocks (also due to earthquake risks).

Thousands of cores means a web service that can scale up infinitely and is invulnerable to a DOS attack or whole group of slashdot readers arriving like a horde of barbarians on a horseback raid.

A 2005 GPU based laptop with 2.8GHz dual-core CPU can still edit 500,000 triangle meshes.

It's called a "reality tunnel". Working for a startup involves writing new software. And you have to believe that the software is going to be useful to other people in order to have motivation to keep working on it. So there is that kind of belief.

Maybe there are radioactive elements underground as well.

For me, the best the sleeps I had were in a hotel room which had air filtering, blackout curtains and was on the end of the top floor, well away from all the other guests banging and clattering their suitcases through the corridors.

But move to the same kind of room right next to the main hallway, and it was impossible to get a deep sleep, because there was always someone every hour who figured the best way to open a door that opened inwards was to hit it with a large suitcase. The same thing happens if the hotel room has emergency lights that come on whenever the main lights are switched off.

Air flow could be another problem. Even on Earth, sleeping under a lie-in (sloping part of a roof) always gives me a sore head due to the lack of air flow. The CO2 seems to build up. The only way I could stop that, was to sleep directly underneath the skylight window and keep it open. Maybe the shape of the sleeping pods leads to CO2 build up.

You are doing bug tracking by hand??? We used to that back in the 1990's. I was given a three day task to sort, reorder, prioirtize about 200 open tickets in a single text file. Wrote a script in six hours to do this automatically, and had the report completed in minutes. Today, we would just use bug-tracking software like Jira

https://www.atlassian.com/soft...

The first things we'd expect to find or see from satellite photographs are bits of wing and tail. The shock of a crash-landing would fracture them off. Then if the fuel tanks were ruptured, those would create oil slicks even if they were underwater. Live vests and seat cushions should also float, as well as bits of trimming from the passenger cabin. Then all sorts of passenger belongings should also float.

So the chances are the pilot aimed for a controlled landing in the ocean. There were witnesses who claimed to see a burning aircraft (from an oil-ring), and another who said they saw an aircraft flying low towards Garcia Diego.

The "rotten corpses" is more likely to be due to the 1300kg of Lithium batteries that were on board that flight. Interestingly both flights were carrying lithium batteries and travelling towards the Far East.

Their idea would be that you would use biometrics, SIM cards or ID cards to get access to any internet terminal (smartphone, desktop PC, laptop, netbook or tablet). Anything with a SIM card would have a registered user.

That has been the plan all along. They absolutely hated desktop PC's and laptops because home owners could always "uninstall" whatever spyware they tried putting on the systems. Netbooks, smartphones and tablets are better because they are single chip systems and it's impossible to modify components like storage and batteries even if you have a Torx toolkit. Stick on automatic updates of firmware and applications by wireless access, cameras, microphones and fingerprint readers, and the government basically p0wns these systems.

My smartphone (Samsung Galaxy II) started running slowly. Even after I removed all the unused apps that I had downloaded, movies and photos, it was still running slow. Then I started looking through every single folder. It seems that the trash-cah wasn't actually emptying, and that there was a directory called ".faces" which seemed to archive every single picture that the AI software thought was a face. After those files were removed, my phone regained it's original speed.

Bullcrap? The application developers there deserve to have every ounce of bullcrap that is lying on the field thrown at them before being given a hot jacuzzi in pig swill. Punching a hole in someone's system network firewall, then putting a steel cage and door around that hole so it can't be closed?

I have enough grief with various Linux packages that create their own VPN's, offer "built-in" ftp and email functionality as a "feature". Every time I install something, I have to check to to see whether any new servers listening on network sockets have been set up immediately, as well as see whether there are any daily or weekly crontab settings which do the same.

There's just an opportunity in Siberia - just opened up this week. Current theories are giant sandworms, graboids, pingo's, ufo's or an alien missile base:

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/myst...

I guess some people don't forget what Microsoft was doing 20 years ago. They were literally bashing everything and anything. They were bashing UNIX with slogans like "UNIX is legacy, NT is the future". They were doing the same with DirectX vs. OpenGL. Even now they still claim OpenGL is legacy. Then there was the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer war where Microsoft was pre-installing Explorer onto their systems and nothing else. If you wanted to read Email from a server, you needed to have Windows, even it is was a hardware board inside a workstation. If Microsoft announced they were entering a particular niche market, venture capitalists wouldn't fund anyone to enter that market.

I hate that word "dead wood". Anyone who did have a degree, pass the informal interview, the technical tests, and team interview for a company, as well as continue to work in an Agile/Scrum environment isn't a piece of dead wood.

If a company discovers they have extra employees, then it is is usually because two or more products have been merged together, or all the development for one large project has been completed. Maybe they now share the same core libraries or features of one application duplicate another. But what to do then? Nobody is going to stay long at a company if they have relocated 1000+ miles for their dream job (say designing new applications) and then suddenly a month later, a PHB decides they want the most qualified engineer to move onto repairing broken widgets, and optionally advertise the original vacancy several months later because they realize they really do need someone to write new applications. So you need to keep people hanging around until you are sure all the problems have been fixed.

Some companies have internal vacancy lists where a job is advertised internally first. This gave employees a chance to move around if they saw something more interesting. Other companies just keep staff "frozen in place" where the only option is to leave.

The problem for Microsoft is that retraining isn't possible because they want workers who can bring in new ideas. If they had someone to train up someone for that vacancy, the trainer would be the person they are looking for.

Given that negative mass atoms repel each other, a negative mass planet would never form. Even if one did form, it would disintegrate rather violently within seconds. Probably be fun too watch.

So, negative mass atoms could only form thin gas clouds.

There are ways of measuring the speed of flowing water through the small magnetic fields created from dissolved metal ions in the water. These are enough to distort the local magnetic field and allow readings to be made.