I know it's broad, as are the definitions of combat zones. However, I think that's more reflective of America's extreme involvement across the globe, and doesn't necessarily diminish the value of a legitimate medal.

Now, the paperpushers who get bronze stars for their heroic hiring of contractors and writing of contracts...

I'd expect you to at least know the meaning of the first medal you got. Everyone currently in the military has it, yes, but that's not automatic or even upon enlisting. It's only during a time of war. I think that should be recognized.

No, but do you know how many (minor, major, and fatal) collisions there are per mile driven?

I know there are around 2 fatalities per 100m miles driven, but I can't find rates for minor and major accidents. I suspect the vast majority of collisions are non-fatal, so a human driver probably has good odds of being in a collision by 700k.

Do you have any evidence that self-driving cars are unsafe, or that human intervention has been necessary?

Afraid I'll get a woosh for this, but I'll respond...

As I understand it, they already are safer. Thus far, no moving violations and no accidents (to my knowledge). Google's car was in an accident while it was being manually driven. Google is touting 700,000+ accident-free miles now.

I'm sure they do, but seriously... fuck the cabbies. Their lobbying is the reason most Californians can't take the train all the way to the airport. Stops just far enough way that you have to call a taxi.

It would be great to see somebody take that from them.

That may be true for philosophy and ethics, but not as much for political science. There's a decent-sized job market in campaign work, government (esp. urban planning), and security. Security isn't academia per se, but it is borderline since a lot of the work is at think tanks and similar institutions. I'd also argue it's a useful background for business, and multinationals seem to recognize that value.

I believe these are the main reasons Political Science tends to be at the top of the salary rankings for social sciences, along with Urban Planning and International Relations, which often fall under the P.S. department or major.

Damnit. That's what I get for posting within 30 minutes of waking up.

In my defense, I do hear people seriously arguing that position.

... you really think China isn't doing the same with Huawei? As an added bonus, we know China will pass trade secrets to Chinese corporations.

I know this is Slashdot and all, but the OP was talking about rape. Are you really equating the two?

True in theory, but... honestly, how often are directors held accountable? At best, it's usually just a company-paid settlement with no admission of guilt.

I'm willing to bet some money that no CxO or board member will serve jail time or be fined more than 50% of their net worth, despite direct knowledge that their negligence caused deaths.

There is no contradiction, just nuance that I perhaps did not effectively convey. To get to 51%, you can either boost support for a candidate or reduce support for their rival.

Romney's campaign likely knew all of the following to be true:
- With 100% turnout, Romney would never be able to achieve 51%
- Effective negative ads increase turnout among the GOP base ("more important to vote so we can get that evil commie out of there!")
- Effective negative ads may decrease overall turnout ("they both suck, why vote?")
- Effective negative ads against an incumbent leader of a political party trickle down the ballot (you can turn Congressional elections by running against the President)
- Romney had a non-zero chance of winning (despite my hyperbole)

Sure, Romney could have won. Possibly. But his loss does not mean those who donated to the cause got nothing out of donating. They improved their relationship with the GOP, gained key Congressional seats, reduced support for Obama, reduced Obama's success rate in implementing his policies, probably moved Obama to the right, and so forth.

As for ~$1B, sure, it's a WAG. But I was talking about total negative ad spending on that election from the right, not just the Romney campaign. I haven't seen a good source on the data, and it is a reasonable estimate.

And yes, Democrats use negative ads for most of the same reasons. Though Democrats tend to benefit from increased turnout and suffer from decreased confidence in government, so their calculus is slightly different.

This happened to a colleague, who most certainly followed all the instructions and made a dozen calls to Apple. Two weeks ago. Still can't get texts from iPhone users. This is squarely on Apple.

Let me guess, you're one of those admins who requires a 16+ character password with at least 2 lower, upper, special and numerics, changed every 30 days, and you get mad about "lusers" forgetting their passwords?

That's a nice logical-sounding rant and all, but at the end of the day you're telling me unions, corporations, and some very informed people spend billions of dollars every year without getting any return on their investment? Even though there is a giant mountain of evidence showing that lobbying has higher ROI than any other investment?

No amount of money could have convinced people to vote for Romney. He was a terrible, terrible candidate. But with ~$1B of negative ads, they probably dissuaded a lot of people from voting for Obama and many other Democrats (or made them less eager to do so). And you're ignoring the fact that Romney wouldn't have even been a contender if he didn't have vast financial support.

You're right to wonder that. Unfortunately, I can't exactly share my data, but I do have a pretty large [non-random] sample size. Companies that are too small to have dedicated, competent storage and mail server admins have far higher uptime with reputable cloud providers. So far around an order of magnitude.

For every "omg, AWS region was down for an hour!" slashdot story, I've seen at least two businesses lose data on poorly architected storage that was not properly backed up or maintained.

For every "omg, Gmail/Office365 was down for an hour!" story, I've seen a company down for a week because their in-house Exchange server died or suffer constant outages because they used a cheap hosted Exchange solution.

If you can't afford to do it right, with a DR site, on- and off-site backups, and physically redundant systems, managed by competent admins, you are probably better off with a major cloud service.

Most of the small businesses I have worked with have an "IT guy" who knows how to troubleshoot Windows and do a few other things. I haven't been in a sub-100 person shop that had qualified storage, networking, and system admins.

SMBs need to outsource for specialized IT expertise, whether to consultants or cloud providers.