Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.

Hahaha - if the contracts were designed to produce on-time, on-budget they would be written that way (fixed price, fixed requirements, penalties for late delivery). Their intended purpose is quite the opposite of that. If something useful happens to be generated in the process of funneling money from taxpayers to the MIC, so much the better excuse for the next contract.

Most of the claims aren't listed so it's hard to draw a conclusion.

And don't hold your breath waiting for them to be listed publicly, either.

If this is over trade secrets, the alleged trade secrets, if legitimate, will still be secret. So unless/until Facebook gets a judgement that the claims are bogus, the proceedings will be under seal.

Even if they ARE bogus it may not be in Facebook's interest to publish them, either. They might be little-known enough that exposing them to their competition might make the competitive environent tougher for Facebook.

So don't be surprised if the "secrets" and the details of the verdict or settlement remain under wraps.

We're darn close to it anyways. We have a freaky huge moon for the size of our planet, far out of proportion from the rest of the planets.

I've actually theorized that it might be factor in life forming.

CANDU is the only plant design that I'm aware of that doesn't require enrichment. I should have said 'No idea if they're using one', IE a design that doesn't require enrichment.

They should, of course, avoid the problematic RBMK design.

Going by the AC's picture, I guess I'd have to amend my statement to 'center of mass spends at least some time in one of the orbital bodies', if Jupiter and Saturn are enough to yank it outside on occasion.

Such agreements actually exist in the USA, it's just that there are exemptions like 'only if it's 300 ft or less, in which case the person requesting service has to pay for the extra distance'. Generally said distance is 'around' double the average necessary hookup distance, and the extra install is at the marginal cost - IE the extra labor & materials. If it costs $1k just to show up on location and start pushing pipe, but only $1/ft after that, a 100 foot install would cost $1100, the maximum 300 foot one $1300, and the homeowner that's 400 feet away would be charged only $100 for being hooked up.

I said 'for example', and that they need to be 'broken'. That can mean either removing their monopolistic protections, or breaking them through regulations. I suggested examples of both paths.

If service in an area is so broken that a community decides to replace them by issuing municipal bonds to form a cooperative, that's their business.

Find the centerpoint of the rotation. Plop a line through it perpendicular to the motion. The line is your axis.

None of those even comes close to two heads of state declaring that sovereign Ukrainian land belongs to Russia.

No one needs to. They've already taken what they wanted. Fait accompli.

You're really letting this stuff fly right over your head. Odd. Russia -- and the US -- are the 800 lb (~363 kg for you victims of the metric system) gorilla of international "we did it, you can suck it" politics. Approval from others is not something that changes the course of much in particular, although it's typical when some kind of externally facing benefit is desired from them.

Germany, on the other hand, was a small, massively industrial country between the size of the 4th and 5th largest US states (Montana and New Mexico) and smaller than Severo-Kavkazsky federalny okrug, the second smallest of the nine federal districts of Russia. Germany was very busy trying to consolidate a starting foothold for a major, vicious, multi-country land grab. The remainder of Europe as a whole was terrified. Initially, they did what they thought they had to do, true enough, but in the end it was nothing but deterrent-free conciliation, just as many actions aimed at Russia today are. The specifics of the act mean very little; it's the nature of it that guides future action.

'5, Interesting' is a high score for bullshit.
I know you leftists hope and pray that every new mass murder is a right-wing terrorist attack. You must be constantly disappointed that nut jobs with leftist sympathies and Islamists are doing the actual killing.

"$7,000" ... "The assumption it takes a year"

The point I was making rather explicitly, which went right over your head, is that 7k is a good return for a short bit of work. 47k is excellent. The complaint about 7k of income as made in the GP is only valid if the development takes a long time. If it takes a week to put together an app, a not unreasonable amount of time for something of moderate complexity (assuming, again, that one is competent, and continuing not being the least bit concerned about those who are not), 7k is a thousand bucks a day, assuming you work all seven days.

Another thing is that if a dev spends a whole lot of time on a poor idea, then perhaps the message isn't so much that "this work produces a poor return" as it is "you suck at this work and/or you suck at figuring out what people will buy", and in either (or both) cases, this is simply the market's way of telling you to consider a more remunerative line of effort.

I highly recommend that you talk to HR about your compensation.

Retired, my home is what amounts to a small castle (ex-church), multiple vehicles, 200" home theater, no mortgage, no loans, investments a-plenty, two wholly owned, profitable businesses that run themselves, and the software that put me here now available for free to anyone...

Yeah, sorry, no time for your HR person. What was it they wanted from you? Ten years experience in rehabilitating sentient AI bartenders, a no-compete / no-disclosure / no harassment / must-wear-panties contract, daily drug tests and cavity searches, you provide your own insurance, move to India and obtain Indian citizenship, be paid in rupees+curry, and no pets in the office?

I'm sorry, I'm just a bit cranky today. Was thinking one lousy assumption deserved another, albeit with a little humor thrown in. :)

And the US has plenty of those, as well as accidents with less dire consequences.

Yeah, actually it is 9/11 stupidity.

Solution would have been armored cockpits rejiggered to include food service, bunks and restroom sufficient for cockpit crew, separate, external door (doesn't open to the passenger section) into the aircraft for the pilots. An expensive 1-time cost. Instead of half-assed conversions and the open-ended expense, inconvenience, and dignity trampling of the TSA and associated rules and strangulations.

The current situation is a band-aid, and a pretty poor one at that. It does no good; it offers great potential for harm. As we have seen here.

And inasmuch as it is extremely unlikely that any load of passengers will ever again let a terrorist take control of an aircraft, knowing that doing so could lead straight to their death without passing go, so action is now always the better choice -- and terrorists know it -- the whole thing is basically wrongheaded from start to finish.

The most serious problem was commercial aircraft being used as guided kinetic weapons. That will likely never happen again unless the aircraft is transporting several terrorists and no one else but a load of first-year brownies. Perhaps not even then.

Personally a beautiful woman tastefully dressed is more of a turn on than the slutty look anyway.

I guess it's different because I pay for conferences out of my own pocket, but I'm not going to go to all the hassle and expense of attending an Expo to waste my time at a vendor booth which spends its marketing dollars on objectifying women. The women may be there of their own free will and the whole arrangement may be perfectly morally straight (for the sake of argument), but the vendor is clearly disrespecting its customers' intelligence, and that itself makes me feel uncomfortable and want to avoid their booth.

Each time I've experienced the 'booth babe' phenomenon, never once did any of them know what an ARP reply was or how many key exchanges TLS modes use. This isn't a matter of nerd-quiz, it's that talking to them serves no purpose for why I go to an expo.

While several I've encountered have been both nice and pretty, I never once imagined that I was going to scurry off to a corner to make out with one or that they might suddenly provide useful product information, so a polite smile, the briefest of small-talk to let them know that I value them as a human being, and a thank-you and I was on to the next booth to talk to a sales engineer. Did the booth-babe vendor have something useful to sell me? Maybe, but I only have so much time, and this wasn't why I was there. I don't care if the sales engineer has a spare tire and a scraggly mustache, because I'm not there to make out with him (or her) either.

That booth babes is a thing tells me a few things: 1) target customers don't get to talk to pretty women much unless they're being paid (Jesus people, try being kind and friendly for a change) 2) target customers are mostly there blowing their employers' budgets on a half-assed vacation and don't really care about the cost or value, and 3) they probably play the Lottery and go to strip clubs too, for all their investment is worth (but I guess they have nothing better to do).

There would be no booth babes if they didn't provide value, and that they do is an indictment of the crowd attending. RSA might be putting up a roadblock, but the industry only needs to look itself in the mirror if it wants to find someone to blame. Stop being creepy and get a girlfriend, people.

A secret, or not so secret I guess, part of me hopes that it went down like that or in some other spectacular way. He does seem to type to not let a good crisis go to waste and HOPEFULLY took full advantage of the opportunity to really tee off on some of the things that he was unhappy with besides catering. Hopefully stories about dead hookers, rampant drug use, and pictures of the producer in VERY non-politically correct and VERY compromising are also released.

It would not only make my day, it would make my month. And, more importantly, I don't care what Clarkson did - it is catering and certainly petty, it will make things even on the scale of true human justice. The only reason you get fired for something to do with catering (unless you are raping them or something) is because they are looking for an opportunity to get rid of you. That's the only reason I can think of at any rate.