There's an old story (and a song, as I recall) about an old woman who finds a sick snake and takes it home to nurse it to health. After the snake is healthy, it bites her and when she complains tells her to stop complaining because she knew what it was when she took it in. Same goes for Apple devs in the current situation. This is SOP for Apple and has been for years. If you're going to develop apps for Apple machines you gotta be ready with your snake-bit kit at all times.

He is the spouse (husband, I assume) of Congressperson Karen DelBene (D-WA), also an ex-MS person.

Seattle has a similar situation and has a bike-friendly mayor who's pushed the issue and is likely to lose his upcoming bid for re-election (not solely because of bike issues, but he's known as Mayor McSchwinn and it's one of several things that voters are unhappy about). I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and bicycled from near Culver City to the UCLA campus in Westwood the entire time. I feel very fortunate to have avoided an accident during that time and had many near-misses. US cities are not set up for bicycles, and making them so is an expensive proposition. (OK, so Boulder is an exception, but they've a lot of money to spend in stuff like this). Yes, bicycling is better for you than sitting on your ass in a car, but spending a lot of scarce tax dollars catering to the biking minority is a very inefficient use of transportation money.

Assuming TFA's numbers are correct, I'd bet that much of the problem is that no agency, be it government or commercial (and particularly commercial) wants to spend it's money seeing if published results are reproducible. Additionally, no one ever won a Noble Prize for excellence in reproducing others' results. Verification of results is key to science, but this is one of several aspects of doing science right that the funding agencies either don't want to, or can't (as in Congress looking over the shoulders of managers at the NSF), pay for. Everyone wants "everything, all the time" without paying for it, and this is the sort of thing that happens when decisions are driven by the money people (who may be scientists, to be fair) and not the people who know what the hell is going on.

Yeah, yeah - code clean, test-test-test, document-document-document, have separate test/run machines that are configured the same, yada yada. This is all well and good, and any halfway-decent developer knows all this. However, software development is not done in a vacuum and each and damn near everything mentioned is involved in cost/time benefit analyses when crunch-time comes (which it always does). With some exceptions, when I see a company that's saddled with horrible old legacy codes that nobody can understand, often a large measure of this is paybacks (for not adequate funding and poor schedule planning) being the bitch that they are. How to do things the best way are well known, it's just that the best way is more expensive (in the short term, which is the only term business understands these days) and takes more time than the average business will wait. If the bottom line is get something done that sorta-kinda works as fast/cheap as possible, you get spaghetti code that even the guy/gal who developed it can't follow.

The Washington State's exchange website, for which the state paid $54 million to Delloite LLC, hasn't been a rollicking success either. I'm trying to wrap my head around why it costs $54 million to set up a pretty straight-forward website (costs evidently do not include hardware, just people/time/software). I believe that cost was over half what the state received from the feds to set up the exchange. Details here (such as they are).

Because, as we all know, "It's Coming"

(Sound of pooch being screwed.) This is how real science works, particularly with highly complex issues like the earth's climate. We learn new things as we go along, and when new knowledge means we need to adjust our undestanding, that's what is done. The next update by the IPCC (if it gets funded, that is) may well show that what we learn in the interim indicates that the current estimates of climate change were too small. Unfortunately, the polarization of politics will take this latest IPCC report (if it indeed says what the article states) as an indication that these science types have been lying to us all along and they should now be ignored and driven from the temple. Efforts to deal with the effects of the upcoming changes will be killed off and nothing will be done until it's too late to do much of anything other than hope to cope.

Does this sort of thing cover both the aging of the body and the brain? What's the gain in living to be 150 if your brain stops functioning at any sort of useful level at age 70? Yeah, "lots of people" are still firing on all mental cylinders at age 70, but most are not. If everyone is alive up to age 150 but is a non-productive consumer of stuff starting at age 70 this whole "live long and prosper" thing will be a total nightmare. Even if brain aging is held in check, do we have the resources to support that many human beings on this planet?

My working Macs (at the office) are still on Snow Leopard, but my home systems are newly bought and are stuck on (now) Mountain Lion. The two Lions are broken in many ways. The two that I dislike most are the "looks just like your paper calendar" craziness that was overflowing the whole UI and whatever it is that they've done with memory management that causes 4GB to be too little to really work on. This last one gripes me because I bought a 4GB MacBook Air because (silly me) 4GB had been more than plenty for my Snow Leopard systems. I had to bump the wife's MacBook Pro up to 16GB so she wouldn't keep running into the spinning beachball after a day's work, something I never run into with 4GB Snow Leopard systems after weeks of heavy lifting. I will be switching to Mavericks at the .1 release point hoping that both of these will be improved if not fixed.

My company is located very near Microsoft's Redmond campus, and the situation is the same here. MS runs a large fleet of various people-carrying vehicles that pick up Microsofties all around the area. All the while the mass transit that serves the rest of us is going downhill fast. Every time I turn around MS is working hard to avoid paying more taxes. Gotta love those guys.

See this take on the problem from Aviation Week:

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_07_22_2013_p25-597816.xml

Pilots are like anyone else, if they lean on a crutch long enough they forget how to walk. Then if the crutch turns out to have a fault, boom!

I see a few mentions of FORTRAN, but they're all modded low. I've been working as a researchers/roll-your-own-code programmers for 40 years now. I've written so much FORTRAN code over that period that I pretty much dream in FORTRAN. Yeah, I'm a dinosaur. Anyway, if you want to do serious research support work you should learn FORTRAN in general and HPF (High-Performance FORTRAN) in particular. If you're any kind of a decent programmer you should be able to pick this up fairly easily, but for street cred in the scientific research computer-support business you'd better get some FORTRAN chops.

A year in prison for the crime of fixing a vote while not being a professional political operative. At least the kid knows he's got a shot at a good job when he gets out. Better prospects than if he had finished his program at Cal State San Marcos.

More like 2048 times. Get with the program!