Seriously don't these people know any history? The main problem with the stamp tax is that it is imposed on newspapermen and lawyers, who are the last folks you want to get riled up against you.

This is simply another imposition on the primary means of communication in the world today. And predictably news channels are already getting their panties in a twist over it.

They should immediately recognize the improved value to the customer that an open bug database provides, and present this as a strong reason for the customer to prefer your product over a closed product offered by your competitors.

It's been a while since I used bugzilla but from what I remember the UI is crap. Maybe that's part of the reason you are getting blowback from your sales and marketing team - they see the crude UI that's being exposed and view it is something they want to hide. Perhaps a slicker bug database could be more acceptable to sales.

Per cubic story.

FTFYFTFYFTFY

Really it's a matter of who you know not what you know. I lost my job as a PhD chemist when I turned 50. Since I liked programming I spent a couple of weeks learning SQL and HTML and started looking for jobs. Any kind of software dev job. I found something at a crummy little web shop for poor pay. I was there for a couple of years. Worked like a dog learning wed related technologies. When the shop folded up I had a number of good contacts and people were calling looking to hire me for much better positions. In a couple of more years I was a lead with several folks working for me.

Employers LOVE hiring someone that somebody in their shop can vouch for. It makes sense too. You can[t tell squat from a resume.

Are we secure from the Putins though? He seems to have fun with the idea his nukes let him do whatever he wants.

It seems to me the use of strategies like this assume that the people involved are relatively rational.

In our current world this doesn't seem to be that good an assumption.

And it doesn't help places like the Ukraine at all. Russia just says we has nukes so neener neener.

It wouldn't cost much. All you would have to do is kill yourself.

Ronald Reagan would not be the first President to be deified.

Look at the monuments in Washington DC to various Presidents. Washington (Obelisk), Jefferson (Pantheon), Lincoln (Parthenon).

All of these are designs used by previous cultures in the worship of their Gods.

We just don't call it that because most of our citizens are nominally monotheistic.

Governments can accomplish a lot.

That's not the point here. It's a fact that governments always do their best to cover up their mistakes and self-aggrandize.

Holding up whatever public administration is in place at the current time in scorn for doing that is political gamesmanship at best, and demagoguery at worst.

It's inherent in the system (cf Monty Python).

> BTW, this is emblematic of the Obama administration

It's emblematic of EVERY administration going back thousands of years. Right wing present that this is something new but their world view seems to be completely uninfluenced by an appreciation of human nature or history.

For example:

Augustus was a shrewd and effective manager of his own public image. Itâ(TM)s now easy to take for granted that images of political leaders decorate our currency â" Augustus was among the first rulers to widely disseminate images of his own face on coins.

Itâ(TM)s hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books...

> Some critics do say that Alibaba's share price will plummet from its current value of $93.60 in the same way that Facebook's and Twitter's plummeted

The vast majority of IPOs are lower in price 6 months after the issue date. Usually what happens is that company owners have some restrictions on when they can start selling stock - and those are typically 6 months or so. So on the day of initial sale supply is very constrained. Later a lot more shares flood onto the market.

For example Facebook went from $38 to $19.

Purchasing IPOs on day of issuance is a sucker move.

For my always-on machines I have a couple of Atom 525's with perhaps 30 TB of data storage. The OS for those is Scientific Linus 5.x (someday to be Centos 6.x).

These are plenty powerful enough for the services I use them for - files storage, light duty web serving, personal IMAP, DNS caching etc. and sip at the electrical supply.

They are good enough for light duty web browsing as well.

For more challenging applications (like games, photo editing etc) I have a couple of machines running 4 and 6 core I7s with 24GB of RAM. These only get turned on when I need them.

Killing most projects early is considered a good thing in some circles because it weeds out the garbage and makes more resources available to the more worthwhile projects.

Often you can tell how good a company is at managing R&D by how quickly it kills bad projects.

When I was working in R&D portfolio management we found that a bunch of small projects was much less likely to return something worthwhile than a more limited number of big projects.

It really boiled down to the idea that there is a non-linear relationship between resources devoted to a project and the likelihood of success.

Conflicts between sects is not unknown in other religions too.

For example look at the European wars between Christian sects just prior to the Enlightenment.

I think the key thing here is that Islamic countries for one reason or another never went through a similar transition towards rationalism and individualism. They are still ruled by a way of thought that western culture started abandoning 350 years ago.

I hope we don't get dragged back that way. Fundamentalism is ultimately I think the greatest enemy of human progress.

It isn't people at the bank. It's users of the bank.