The word you are looking for is "preventive".

No, it's not. The usage you're complaining about is perfectly valid.

"Preventative" has been in use since 1666 as an alternate pronunciation and spelling for "preventive".

In some regions (including where I grew up - almost in the center of the region natively speaking the "radio accent", which has been the de facto standard speech for the U.S. since the advent of commercial broadcasting) it is the preferred form.

If you want to be a spelling NAZI, you should avoid being provincial about it. Check the online dictionaries before correcting others, to distinguish between being helpful and imposing your local speech on others.

Unlike French ("a dead language spoken by millions"), American English does not have a regulatory body prescribing an official standard (though some educators have tried, since at least Daniel Webster). It grows and changes by usage. Dictionaries play a game of catch up and try to document how it's realy used.

(Yes, I know how it grates on your nerves when someone uses a different spelling or pronunciation than you're used to. I feel the same way when my wife pronounces "legacy" as if she was talking about a ledge. But apparently that's actually the first pronunciation listed in The Oxford.)

(Slashdot timed out on me and I lost the start of my post.)

As built the skywalk was so overloaded that eventual collapse was possible even without any load. Naturally when it did fail it would be at a time when both the upper and lower skywalks were heavily loaded with people, and the floor crowded below. 114 died, 216 were injured - many seriously.

Of course loads on things like bridges and skyways vary a lot. You can expect them to go in times of high load, which happens to be when there are a lot of people around to be injured or killed.

n this case it failed when there was a celebration in progress. The ground floor level was crammed with dancing people and the crowd had overflowed onto the skywalks. Pogo dancing was current at the time, and apparently the failure occurred when people on the bridges, synchronized by the live music, were jumping up and down in unison. (It's the inverse of the way soldiers are required NOT to march in step when crossing a bridge.)

Thus you can expect such structures to go when there are a lot of people around to get hurt.

(Interestingly, a crowd of people is MUCH more of a load, even without synchronized jumping, than vehicular traffic. San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was reported to have had its greatest load ever during its anneversary, a few years back. The bridge was closed to vehicular traffic and the public invited to hike over it. Normally the bridge span has a substantial arc. This stretched the springy cables and broght the span down until it was flat.

During the planning the load on the bridge had been anticipated and computed to be safe. But there were plenty of boats standing by to try to save people if the deck DID collapse, and the people had been warned of the possibility and asked not to dance or walk in step.

Yes, because conservative views have turned the tech industry off from flocking to Texas for jobs. There's a sarcasm tag embedded there.

Texas is a purple state, projected to go Blue in a few more years. Texas leans a little bit to the right, but California doesn't lean very heavily left, itself.

The obvious benefit is that the cost of living is much lower than California or similar.

That's an idiotic thing to say. California is a huge state. You might as well say the cost of living in "North America" or "On Earth" is too high.

I couldn't believe last time I was in CA to visit a friend that they had just paid almost a million dollars for a 3-bedroom house with no property.

I'm in CA, and I bought a 3br house on half an acre for $45k. I was paying $500/mo rent before that, for a 2br apartment.

Unlike rust-belt states, I pay almost nothing for heating and cooling. My electric bill goes up maybe $10/month in the summer, and my natural gas bill goes up maybe $10/month in the winter (water heater, mostly). The insane home heating costs in the rust-belt will eventually trump the lower property prices.

So your list of benefits is all imaginary.

" Under no circumstances should any Utility in the US be allowed to Off-Shore IT operations"

They aren't. I know this from first-hand experience as a Sr Engineer for a major phone company, that is to remain nameless. I was responsible for the audit, after the DoJ specifically told us we needed to ensure anybody who wan't *physically* in the US at the time, would not have access to ANY production data.

Despite the idiotic headline, this has to be about H1Bs who reside in the US, NOT off-shoring. The Fed wouldn't allow a list of 5 power pole locations to leave the country.

Distance isn't relevant... Could be near by but low power, or far away and high power. I'd need a lot more info to give you a specific reason. I already listed a number of possible causes.

Either way, you can't argue with physics.

"According to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S.-based software developers, 56 percent expect to become millionaires in their lifetime.

That's not difficult if you're earning 6-fixgures, aren't staying in a very expensive area, and are just good with money.
<Insert joke about nerds being single>

66 percent also said they expect to get raises in the next year, despite the current state of the economy.

I personally expect to get a raise every-single-year. Inflation stays around 3% every year. If my company doesn't give me AT-LEAST a 3% increase in salary each year, I consider it a slap-in-the-face. A pay cut by another name. And worse, a pay cut after a sterling annual review, and a year of hard work.

Inflation/cost-of-living year-over-year was only at zero for ONE year, during the depths of the recession. It's not an ongoing excuse to withhold annual raises.

There's little that pisses me off more than hearing that "company policy" limits raises to no more than 3% (or 2%, or 1%). That's institutionalizing yearly pay-cuts for all employees, including top-performers. Even when I make a stink and get more than that, it makes me look at that company with utter disgust, as they show how much they HATE and want to be at war with their (good, long-term reliable) employees. Nothing makes a company better than the few long-timers, who have everything about the company and all the systems in their head. "Company policy" that punishes them for staying instead of job-hopping is the most utterly moronic thing I could imagine... But this rant is getting off the rails, quickly...

84 percent said they believe they are paid what they're worth, 95 percent report they feel they are 'one of the most valued employees at their organization,'

Well, obviously people don't stay at a company where they feel ignored and undervalued (see above). And when your work will determine whether the company hits or misses a deadline, you speak to CxOs on a regular basis, or you're responsible for many millions of dollars of equipment, it's easy to feel highly valued, even if perhaps you are not.

I know I've occasionally been the highest paid person in some medium-sized companies. With the higher contractor rates, and overhead of contracting firms, it's not too difficult to end up costing the company more than the CEO's salary, even if not all of it goes into your pocket, and some of it is government taxes/fees/programs that get stuffed into salary for contractors but not regular staff.

I should have enough by mid 60s, assuming Congress doesn't raid my 401K, Social Security still exists, and the entire economy hasn't collapsed. Hmm, now I'm depressed. :(

Hell, my retirement plan DEPENDS on the world economy collapsing!

I'm stocking up on shotgun shells, shiny bits of metal, and cans of pork & beans.

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

Nope, others and I were able to watch and hear unclear pictures OTA on TV compared to digital.

This misconception comes from broadcasters making changes to their transmissions at the same time they switched to digital. Broadcasters on VHF channels 2-6 switched to UHF channel, which obviously aren't received by VHF antennas. Some chose to cut their broadcast power to save power, and more. It even goes as far as some HDTV manufactures including weak and noisy POS tuners. I've seen this with lesser-known brands all the time.

Side-by-side, digital is FAR better. I can get digital stations with no breakup from 130mi away, with regular consumer level antennas... The low-power analog stations from 10 miles away look like crap.

You don't need to take my word for it. Look at something like tvfool.com, and see how they sort DIGITAL stations higher than ANALOG stations, even when they have up to 10dBm lower signal levels than the analog versions. I've been watching OTA on the fringes in various cities since long before the switchover, and I've seen first-hand how things have vastly improved.

*indistinguishable*

Stupid autocorrect.

That's BS. You can get a perfect digital picture, when analog signals would have been so weak as to be incorrigible from static. Seen it first hand.

The previous spectrum auction made sense.. Cut of channels 52-69 and sell them off. Broadcasters were required to have two channels during the DTV transition, so if one of them was on a terminated frequency, they'd just have to use the other on a permanent basis.

But this one is psychotic... Everybody, everywhere, has to put their entire operation up for bids. The FCC gets to evaluate on a massive scale how to build a contiguous and nation-wide band out of the cheapest broadcasters on offer, with the real possibility they will end up with a patchwork of frequencies in different areas used for cell phone traffic, but still TV (and radio) in others.

This is the most complex mess I've ever seen, and worse, it reeks of devaluing, and largely throwing away nearly a century of public infrastructure, in exchange for some short-term cash, from companies who are simply doing a piss-poor job of spectrum-reuse because old TV frequencies are going for *cheap*. Honestly, this is blatant big-money lobbying against public interest, almost as bad as LightSquared, trying to leagalize their misuse of frequencies that would knock out GPS, and later trying to trade their frequencies for military channels that have never been on offer for any companies to use.

You're quite wrong about broadcast television. With the switch to digital, it has gotten vastly more useful and practical.

Now, putting-up an antenna is the best picture quality you can get. Most stations have 2+ subchannels, so instead of 7 channels, you get 21+, and hence a proliferation of minor networks... "AntennaTV" "THIS" "MeTV" and more come to mind. And they have a far greater signal-to-noise ratio than cable channels, due to limited space and the demands of a massive broadcast audience. In some secondary (ie. old UHF-only) markets, major networks were entirely missing, due to limited space, but are now able to be carried as sub-channels on competitor's broadcast towers.

OTA broadcast viewership is increasing, mainly with young households opting for an antenna rather than cable/satellite, ssince those have lost their technical edge, and the price is hard to justify. And OTA is critical for TV-related companies... Those TV-tuners for computers wouldn't have a. big enough market without it, and no reason to exist. DVR companies also probably wouldn't be able to make it without the OTA crowd. Startups like Aereo would be gone, with no possibly legal source of content.

And tell me this... Where can you find daily national/world news with the same quality as the approx. 4am newscasts on CBS/NBC/ABC? BBC World Service looks like crap by comparison, though easily better than CNN/MSNBC/FauxNews of course. How about educational content like the broadcast networks are required to air for children? We absolutely do get a hell of a lot from broadcast OTA TV.