Two quotes that I try to remember, and wished that everyone else would remember as well...

Believe those who are seeking the truth ; doubt those who find it.

The second is in my signature...

I think "worse" is debatable... a trillion dollar / hundreds-of-thousands-lives-lost nonsense occupation of Iraq, Guantanamo (which he didn't close), and failing economy is hard to fix. Did he fix the economy? Well, not really. Do we know that he prevented another depression? No. Is this something that CAN be fixed in a couple of years? Probably not. Was it something that was created in only a couple of years? Probably not.

While that is not a good situation, it is a far far cry from the Iraq war. I agree with that Bush did with Afganistan. Iraq? No explanation, no reason has ever come close to justifying it. There will always likely be military actions that will be questionable. They know things we will never know, and will have to make the most difficult decisions. Look at the big picture, and who had a positive message and who tried (and succeeded) to keep us afraid with a "war on terror".

Sadly, the president can't fix the system that he's elected into, so as much as people want to complain about president A or B, the entire system is fucked, and even if someone wanted to un-fuck it there is no easy or simple way to do that.

Funny, in your response you didn't say what that reason was. Wikipedia is not the be-all-end-all of information, but I didn't see a reason listed there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War. And wouldn't you think that if you are going to overthrow a country, and not even declare war, and kill thousands upon thousands of your own people - let alone many many others around the world, and spend well over a trillion dollars, that there would have to be a pretty good reason? And that everyone would know what that reason was?

I'm not going to say that we will ever know the reasons behind all of our military actions, there's lots of things that go on that we don't know or probably need to know. Those are big decisions even if one person dies. This President has to make those calls, so will the next one... and all the ones before them. Bush had to deal with 9/11, and he went after them in Afganistan. He set the course for catching Bin Laden, which ended up happening in the Obama administration. To many, that was what needed to happen.

I'm not saying Obama's administration hasn't done this. But let's not just tell part of the story here... from the link you provided "George W. Bush vastly-accelerated the drone strikes the final year of his presidency. A list of the high-ranking victims of the drones was provided to Pakistan in 2009.[22] Obama has broadened these attacks to include targets seeking to destabilize Pakistani civilian government and the attacks of 14 and 16 February 2009 were against training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud"

Look - military stuff happens, CIA stuff happens, etc etc. I don't think that we fully understand it all or that we are in a position to analyze these things. Obama said that he would close Guantanamo (which, he inherited). It's still open. I honestly think that the President learns things when they get in office that not too many people know. That can certainly change their atitude on things. We don't know what he knows.

HOWEVER - you have to consider the scale of the military actions they've undertaken. Do I really need to point to the wiki article that shows the Iraq war and the number of deaths? There has never even been a reasonable explanation for that one, at least not one that would authorize it. Vendettas don't count.

Obama is standing on the shoulders of giants. Funny that you say "expansion" and not creation. See, he is expanding what is already there. I'm not saying it's right, but that's fact. Our entire legal system is built on this principle.

REAL abuse of executive power is invading a soverign nation and overthrowing its government with no just cause, and in the process fabricating evidence to try and gain support for your actions. To this DAY there has never been a reasonable explanation for our invasion and occupation of Iraq. While Obama hasn't fixed the mess he inherited in our country, and may have made some things worse, what we do know is that the intent of his efforts were to try and improve things, and more importantly his policies have not directly led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and others around the world. That is where I see a massive difference between this and the former president.

I think we would be getting smarter because there's a greater wealth of knowledge for us to draw on.
We stand on the shoulders that have come before us. We don't have to do as much trial and error when we know some things to be fact... which means we can figure out new things.

Since a century is but a blip of time, it might be hard to really get a solid measurement on it. The real question is, 100 years ago did they ask the question about whether or not they were smarter than the people from 100 years before that? :)

Because someone else will clean it up.
Sounds pretty smart to me. And if they're lucky, they get a boob in their mouth when they cry.

In Texas it is seen as a sign of weakness if you have to get closer than 100 feet to cast your vote.
That's because Texans vote by shooting at their ballots. "If you have to get closer than 100 feet, you need to practice your shooting more. YEE-HAW!" *bang* *bang* *bang*

Or sometimes it is the SMART thing to do if IT doesn't want to create extra work for themselves. I work for a very large company, and I still use XP. There is a program in place to migrate to Win7, but it's been going on for over a year now. It takes time. And when I say large, I mean LARGE... think 250k+ employees around the world. If you want to migrate that many people away from WinXP to Win7, and still have internal support, you'd better have a good plan and it will take lots of time.

I suppose Slashdot should pay someone for bringing us this story then?

I used to run Kubuntu, until some runaway process kept bringing my quad processor to its knees on occasion. So for over a year I've been running XFCE on top of Kubuntu. Why haven't I switched to Xubuntu? Because I don't want to do a fresh install. Upgrading has been pretty great so far.
I may eventually go back to KDE, but for now XFCE is fitting the bill.

I will, however, learn this time around and not upgrade right away. Last time I upgraded the day after it came out, and it took about 18 hours to download all the updates. That just makes me nervous. I would like to find a faster approach this time around.

No president does anything single-handedly? How about getting us INTO a war that never ever should have happened? Now, you could argue that it wasn't just GWB who did it, he had all his advisors, etc. But he was the guy. He made the call. He had no evidence of weapons, anything close to it has been falsified, and it had nothing to do with his "war on terror". There has never ever been any reasonable explanation for invading and overthrowing the government of a sovereign nation.

Obama may not have been able to live up to his promises, and he hasn't fixed everything he inherited. He inherited a deficet that GWB built, and made it even bigger. He made some promises he didn't keep. But here's the thing - his mistakes had the INTENT to fix things, and didn't cost thousands of lives. THAT is the difference between Obama and his predecessor.

I understand what he meant by that, and I don't think it is as bad as it reads. I think he just meant that those things are the key components, they are just part of the process, if you want to do it right.

I spent the last 3 years managing a testing teams on an Agile project. And it was at a very very large company that is most certainly concerned with money. What I saw Agile do was amazing... and yet, we had to compromise it somewhat. We didn't do pair programming. Our TDD wasn't as good as it could have been. We faced challenges with it, but we had contraints that we had to deal with, especially after our first release. But I will say that the quality and volume of what we put out was far and above anything else around us.

IMO, Agile isn't for every software project, and there are some that I think it simply just wouldn't work for... but it is very very useful when it fits. BUT - you have to really adopt it. It really is a team effort, and if it's not, or if you ignore or sabotage some of the key components of it, you will fail. To one of your points, calling velocity a "nonsense construct" tells me immediately that you've never done Agile, at least not successfully. I'll take a moment to explain....

You actually aren't far off... it kind of is a nonsense construct. What?! Yeah. It is a unit of effort. Here is how we did it. Each story is written to describe the functionality desired. It should follow good story principles of INVEST (look it up). Once you have that, the development and test team review it, and quickly put an estimate on it. We used a point scale. 1,2,4,8,16,32. You have to pick one of those values, there is no 12 for example. This forces a decision on it. If you had a 1 to 10 scale, there's really no differentiating factor between a 7 and an 8. You get the idea.

So what we did was the dev team came up with their estimate for each story, and test did the same. Then the story was assigned the larger of the two numbers. Since you have to dev and test it during the iteration, larger number wins. Then as a team you commit to X number of points for an iteration (we used 2 weeks). At the end of the iteration, whatever stories are accepted as delivered are counted up, and that is your velocity for the iteration. The NEXT iteration, you can only commit to doing that number or less. You can certainly deliver more, but you can only commit up to that. Over time, your velocity will fluctuate, and then STABILIZE. That is the point where you know as a team how many points you can deliver in a 2 week period, in theory indefinitely. Now some people want to know how accurate your estimates were - i.e. we said this story was 16 points.. how many was it actually? Don't do that. That is exactly why we didn't use hours. It's irrelevant. What is relevant is how many points you delivered. By making the points a non-quantifiable number you can't do that. It let's you focus on what is really important, and that is determining the team's sustainable velocity.

It is a foreign concept. But we did it for 3 years. Actually the project is still going, I just left and took on a different positon in the company. Yeah, we had challenges, funding and otherwise, but we were able to deal with them. We had to cut about 1/2 our team at one point, and our velocity suffered. But we got to the point where when we said we could deliver something by a certain date, we could. I really don't see that very often, and it wasn't the case with all of the projects around us struggling with Waterfall. Again, it's not a panacea, but it can work and to discount something just because you don't understand it or have never actually done it is foolish.

Use an algorithm.
Use real answers, but replace vowels with the letter Q. (for example)
Mother's maiden name: Smith => SmQth
First pet: Spot => SpQt

Just make up a general rule. This is what I do with my passwords. They are based on a rule that I can remember. Then you can apply that rule to any password.
Like switch the first and last letters. Smith = hmitS, Spot = tpoS. Or use numbers. Or a combination. It quickly looks like nonsense, but if you use a rule then you can apply it. Or change it. If you have to change a password, then switch from using Q to W, then E, then R, then T, etc.

You can even write down your rule in plain site. If I wrote down "flip Q" as a reminder, it would remind me to flip the first and last letters, then replace vowels with Q.

And I just came up with this one for this post. The one I actually used is based on something nobody could guess, and has been altered over the years so that I am the only one that knows it. And it works! I still remember an intern at my first job left to go back to school in 1994, and he told me his unix password in case I needed to get into his account. It was CIrpotb, (Clearly I remember picking on the boy,) from Pearl Jam's song Jeremy.

I used to think Mormons were crazy.
Then I got to know a few of them (I live in AZ). They seemed like really nice, decent people.
Then I got to know them much better... and realized they are very good at hiding their craziness. They have a system and a program in place on how to show you and convince you they aren't crazy. They get points for bringing people into their faith. Their religion is very organized, and a lot of what they do is under a veil of "community". They are staunch conservative Republicans. And the ones I know talk out of one side of their mouth about how horrible liberals are, how Obama is the worst thing to happen to this country - while at the same time leeching off of the system they abhor. Unemployed, collecting public aid and welfare (sometimes from two states at once), and being very shady in general. There is a creepy sense of "entitlement". And I know people who are no longer in the Mormon church... and getting out is not a simple thing. That should tell you something.

I can't generalize all Mormons of course, but I have seen these things on more than one occasion. Knowing what I know first-hand about Mormons, there is no way I want one in the White House. And you are probably thinking that Christians aren't much better.. but I can tell you that in general I agree, but it's not always about choosing the best person it's about choosing the one that is less dangerous. Look up Prop 8, there's tons of info out there.