As time goes on, old business models lose their justification to exist. When cable modems first showed up, AOL became an artifact - and I was blown away that they were trying to change the law to make themselves relevant and were actually managing to confuse people enough to make it a debate. Car dealerships seem to me to be the same sort of thing. Even as a kid, before the internet was prevalent, I wondered why we needed these glorified middlemen. Everyone buys cars - if you know what you want, why should you have to pay a fee to a middleman instead of ordering direct from the factory? The fact that a good percentage of commercials on TV are produced by car dealerships tells me that they're big business. So I ask again, why do we need people between me and my product taking a LARGE amount of money just to facilitate a transaction? So... They're going to try to change the rules to keep themselves relevant. I think this is a serious miscarriage of justice. Go Tesla Motors. Shame on any politician that supports this nonsense.

Where does a gravity wave theoretically come from? All I can imagine is that they would come from a mass increasing or decreasing in magnitude, and I don't know of any way that happens.

I had a hard time explaining to my wife and kids how the plane is missing. We live in an age where our physical locations are stored in a database and can be looked up at any time. After Aaron Hernandez was suspected of murdering someone, they used his cell phone data to tell us exactly where he was and when. So I don't understand how it can cost anything to know where this plane, or any of it's cellphone carrying occupants were at any time. My point is that it seems to me that the technology exists and is accessible. If we can find out where I stopped on my way to work and exactly what time - why can't we find out where this plane was using similar technology?

The question was, "Is there a place you'd rather be but forgo because of the cost of living, or a place you'd consider simply because it would amplify your salary? ". It's not fair that I continue to get bad karma because some assholes don't read or comprehend the questions.

I live in MA and have been in software for 20+ years. I've had a lot of good job offers from CA, but was never able to take them... THe salary isn't that much more than it is in Boston, but there's a pretty decent bump in real estate. If you've got kids and need to move into a higher rent town, it just never seems feasible (for a guy who mostly lives paycheck to paycheck anyway).

I dunno. I think engineering has less of a value placed on it on the East coast (Boston/New York) - as there's a more sales driven mindset. I don't have any data or evidence, but I suspect they hire a lot of foreigners in NYC who come from a place where their standard of living wasn't so great. Then the sales people can pay them barely enough money to survive, and expect them to live stacked one on top of the other in a studio apartment.

Current wisdom has us do high input (eat lots of good foods) and high output (lots of exercise) which in turn gives us a high metabolism, and if done right - we can stay in good shape. I've always thought that it also has us burn through our mileage faster too. I think the key to longevity is low metabolism. Of course, I don't pay much attention to it, because the likelihood of dying from something else prevents me from worrying about running out of road.

Can someone comment on this? I'd like to hear an opinion on whether it's as good an idea as I think it is...

I feel strongly that the next step to our advancement is to build an artificial ring around the Earth. It would serve multiple purposes: First, build a thin ring - like the thickness of a pipe that extends around the equator of the planet somewhere up in orbit. Then you can make 'nodes' at points around the ring - space stations, satellites, etc - the advantage being that they're held in place by the ring itself. Then you can pave the exterior of the ring with solar panels for the constant generation of power. Then you can drop these space elevators from the nodes. Spacecraft would no longer be designed to have to escape the gravity of the earth - they'd begin their flights from the ring, and you could easily hoist supplies/fuel up to the spacecraft via the space elevators. This could completely revolutionize the way we design and build our spacecraft - spacecraft would stay in space, and never deal with escaping gravity wells. I feel that this would be a significant game changer.

I get what you're saying, but educate me - because I don't completely understand. You open up the NetBIOS ports and then everything is controlled by Windows NT authentication - which is a highly reliable and secure system. Where it breaks down is when people use weak passwords, or don't set the proper administrative privileges on resources. Joe domain user can't just modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE on the domain server unless he's specifically given the rights to do so. File shares are the same way - the shares themselves are protected, as well as the underlying filesystem (assuming NTFS), right down to each individual file or folder.

IMO, most of the problems people have with windows are self inflicted. A firewall (unpopular opinion coming) is a useless piece of garbage. We design IP to have "ports", and then we use a firewall to block all of these ports. So then we run software on the firewalled machine and either open the ports allowing the software to function or we don't. When we open the ports, the machine is only as vulnerable as the faulty software that we're running on it that communicate on these ports. As for blocking the DCOM ports, Microsoft is fairly good at patching security holes in their packaged products as they're discovered. As long as a machine is "windows updated" every Tuesday, I don't see the point in crippling it's functionality. Don't even get me started on Antivirus software.

Well, not necessarily. There are a couple of options. First, you can use remote debugging. Second, you can easily install the free version of the IDE on the target machine. Third, you can use command line tools to compile (the stuff in the bin directory - you don't really NEED the IDE to compile/link). I know that remote debugging is sort of a pain, but it's effective once you set it up. Also, it's generally simple to set up visual studio express on any machine. I know the problem, because my most recent job was developing software that ran on VMs... I did the development on my desktop, but then would run on the VM. Most commonly, I'd just set up express on the VM. Though, I wish I was more familiar with the remote debugging client, because it's probably the 'right' way to do it.

Seems like people are hung up on autocomplete and the intellisense... The greatest part of an IDE is the built in debugger (IMO, of course)... It's much less time consuming and error prone to have all things configured in one place - compile, run, debug, repeat.

I was thinking they should build a ring around the earth. It could serve multiple purposes... The outside of it could be covered in solar panels, and there could be nodes along the ring where space stations are built - they could be launching points for interplanetary missions. The ring could also contain attachment points for space elevators - to facilitate getting cargo/fuel out of earth's gravity.

I can't help but see this as a horrible injustice that should be treated as such, and should land those responsible in jail. If someone taught me in school that Santa Claus created the world, and somehow I became smart enough to snap out of it someday, I would be furious that my education involved any sort of nonsense like religion. This is the problem. You stand back and give people their space, instead of telling them how stupid they are and this is what happens eventually. I've had enough. God and religion are truly for the stupid and ignorant.