Technological marvel and portent of things to come or not, it's really quite sad that Argentina's is so messed up that it makes Bitcoin look good.

Don't cry for me, Argentina, cry for yourselves.

I'm curious where you heard that, because my understanding had been that those upper-atmosphere particulates mitigated against global warming (mildly), much like the volcanic eruptions which periodically cause cold winters.

NASDAQ will halt trading any time your stock suddenly starts doing badly enough (in terms of percentage drop during an individual trading session) but it won't do you much good if people have fundamentally lost faith in your business. All it does in that case is postpone the inevitable by a couple hours at best.

The problem with agile is that it's a brand that has no owner. You can see this as a tragedy-of-the-commons or as an extension of Gresham's Law (when people can't tell the difference, bad "agile" firms will drive out the good)... and assessing the quality of the efforts by which people have actually attempted to pursue principles associated with agile like "incremental delivery" or "extensive test suites to support refactoring efforts", as opposed to mere devotion to superficial components of the formula, is very difficult given the closed-door nature of most corporate development shops, especially as regards their failures.

While this is not an indictment of any "true Scotsman" agile, it does point out a real risk associated with the actual pursuit of the quality of your Scotsman when adopting agile processes, which will be the first risk that a company will face in the process.

Do you have a better and more reliable tablet system in mind, or are you suggesting that they should have stuck with the 35-pound suitcases full of printed material?

If that's really the nature of the obstacle, why aren't you buying it from Amazon? I mean, the quality of Amazon's music app UI is pathetic, but you can browse for the stuff on the website and you'll get mp3s right out of it.

The vectors are shiny but the user interface looks like it was designed by a team of managers more concerned about slickness than usability. Moreover it's only fractionally as powerful as the old system. (Among other things, I bet several people in places like San Francisco are really going to miss the combination bicycle/terrain maps.)

For those, there's the real police department. They can do things the campus police department can't do -- like "send someone to jail", or "be responsible for applying the due process guarantees that our constitution insists we provide to everyone (including accused and/or actual rapists)".

I would flip the problem around and ask why proportionally more males seem to be sticklers for punishment and waste their talents going to work in a difficult field with little job security and low pay (relatively) when they could go do almost anything else and be much more successful?

Meh. I'm 30, I have half a million in the bank and I'm making over $10,000 in a month. As for security, my LinkedIn profile explicitly says not to email me with opportunities, but I still get at least one a week. A little of that is good timing, but still: software or the win.

The chemical engineers and geologists are going to work for oil fields, which are high-pay but have elevated sector-specific risk. You've got me on the rest of them, I guess.

Since you ask, I recommend @pontifex_ln.

(Seems @pontifex_tr doesn't exist. Makes some sense: that's not exactly Latin-rite territory, more Byzantines and Orthodox and Syriac churches that don't go for the filoque or the Immaculate Conception. Do any of the eastern patriarchs have Twitter accounts?)

Oh, look -- another post full of the economic-policy voodoo "logic" that suggests we can prosper better as a nation by isolating ourselves from trade, contrary not only to theory but to every single example in recorded history. You'd think that this would be frowned upon as much as climate-change denial these days, but apparently not.

As long as we have millions more people in the US who consume computer-powered services than earn their living producing them, the population as a whole will prosper better by having those services done at a lower cost. The same goes for importing manufactured goods at reduced prices. Sure, owners of the corporation (including many rich assholes, not just individuals or retirement funds) will earn more money for themselves, but it's a fraction of the total economic benefit, most of which goes straight back into consumers' pockets in anything resembling a competitive marketplace.

But since the benefits of are spread among millions and the costs are concentrated, it's a textbook case where it's profitable to go rent-seeking and mandate that people are forced to consume American programmers' programming, or American laborers' manufacturing. This is an insidious form of wealth transfer that is very regressive in nature (it hits the poor a lot harder than it hits the CEOs).

Finally: of all people, computer programmers in this country are hardly the tragically underpaid class which can't AFFORD to buy toys.

I had a 486DX2 for a while. The 486 ran at 33Mhz and came in SX and DX versions (the DX's had floating-point coprocessors). The DX2 ran at double the speed (66Mhz) and so did a mean job of running Fractint. You could expect to see them running something like MS-DOS 5 or 6, and maybe Windows 3.1.

I think they were about a generation after the Turbo Button fad (the ones I saw usually toggled 8/33Mhz or so).

Actually, in the past 10 years America's oil production has ramped up substantially. If it came down to it we could be self-sufficient pretty quickly. The main barriers to that right now are regulatory (our current administration being of the opinion that fossil fuels are bad for the Earth). But the oil's there, we can drill it if we feel like it, but stored oil capacity is at an all time high... the biggest short-term question would be refinery capacity, whether it's prepared to deal with shale oil instead of imports. Oh, and also available: Canadian tar sands.

All the recent geopolitical analysis I've seen has suggested that the United States doesn't care about oil over there and is quite willing to let the Middle East go to pot: ISIS and Iranian nukes and what-have-you.

Whoa, dude. Tenured professor? I dunno, maybe you should aim for something more achievable -- like, an astronaut, or a world-famous basketball star.

I'm only exaggerating a little. :b

Is it an allegory about what happens to packets which don't ever make it back across the Internets, then? "We shall cook him with rice at sunset tonight!"