.... or the Vikings who colonized Greenland.

I'd like to ask the Mayans, Anastazi, Minoans, and the Harappans, about surviving and thriving regardless of climate.

I'm glad there is someone referenced _Peopleware_. Honestly, it is ironic to me that between that book and _The Mythical Man-Month_ everything you need to know about managing software development from a personnel standpoint was written before most code grunts, indeed most managers, were born. Yet the good advice is universally ignored.

Makes me glad that I am retired, honestly.

I think the Soviet Union was afraid of more than Star Wars. I remember in the late 1980's there was an article (I think in _Foreign Affairs_) hypothesizing that a very small number of conventional cruise missiles, launched from submarines in the Barents, Baltic, and Black seas, could completely disable the command and control network for a nuclear launch as well as the early warning systems used to activate the ABMs around Moscow. All while causing very few casualties. The article was probably quite a ways out there, but I am sure the same ideas occurred to American and NATO planners.

Or a merge sort to Aaron Copland's "Fanfare of the Common Man".

I wonder sometimes.

NASA has sent spaceprobes to every planet in the solar system. And turned those places from lights in the sky into worlds.

NASA has discovered volcanism on Io, Enceladus, Triton and probably Venus.

NASA has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets with the Kepler probe.

The various CMB probes have mapped out the very early history of the universe.

All of this in less than fifty years.

You could argue that NASA has mapped more land area than all of the explorers in history, combined. Until we visit other stars no one will beat that record.

Really, has NASA done that badly?

Yeah, because suspending habeus corpus indefinitely is so constitutional. And reading everyone's email doesn't violate the fourth amendment. I'm also pretty sure that torture violates the fourth and fifth amendments.

Please.

There are lots of examples of this in action. Many states have laws against adultery, cohabitation, and consensual oral sex. Yet when was the last time someone got a felony rap for carpet munching?

On a even less serious note, many states have ridiculous laws which were put on the books back during the Jurassic period of American jurisprudence. So, as an example, in Washington state it is illegal to sell bedding or meat on a Sunday. You will recall the wave of busts against Bed Bath and Beyond, Pottery Barn, and Safeway. Yeah, right...

Back in the 90's Montana didn't have a speed limit on the Interstates. "Reasonable and prudent" speed for the conditions was the rule. I do remember there being a night-time speed limit of 65 or 70, though.

Someone has already implemented a pretty good algorithm for generating congressional districts.

http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR...

While it does ignore geographic features, the algorithm has the virtue of extreme simplicity and does seem to produce quite reasonable results in all but a few cases.

It is more like 10000x rather than 10x.

First off, we humans are just barely intelligent enough to write nontrivial computer programs in the first place. I believe strongly if humans were on average ten percent less intelligent we would still be stuck on the towers of hanoi and bubblesorts. Of course, what "intelligence" means in the context of computer programming is highly idiosyncratic and not very well understood. Finding those people with the right cognitive toolkit for solving a particular set of coding problems can make a huge difference in the success or failure of a company. Or at least a product.

Second, I've lost count of the number of times where I've ran into someone (or some enormous team of people) who labored on some project for years and then ran into some dude (nearly always a dude, sorry ladies) who solved exactly the same problem in a few weeks. Or less. For an infamous example consider the history of the Xanadu project versus the early http servers and Mosaic. Yes, yes, I know Xanadu was trying to do something totally different than the WWW did. Of course, WWW worked and Xanadu never did.

Third, a lot of the real value add is the "Aha!" type of insights that translate large, intractable problems into easily solvable ones (see again Xanadu/WWW). The people who can provide those kinds of insights are rare and precious. The whole purpose of the enterprise is to solve problems, and if you aren't finding and taking vicious shortcuts to solve those problems you aren't doing your job.

In the end I absolutely agree in the sense that writing software is largely a creative enterprise, not an engineering one. And the people who write software need to be managed and compensated as creative people are, not like they are replaceable parts. Because that is the other point where software authoring is so different from other enterprises -- coders are often extremely specialized, to the point where managing coders, especially talented, productive coders, becomes largely a problem of matching tasks to appropriate talent.

I'd recommend two or three bottles of MacAllan's. If you try to buy local you will end up with Bagpiper or Old Collie, which are as aesthetically pleasing as they sound. Also a single shot and you will make instant friends for life.

If you have ever worked on software that stored data hourly, having one day of the year have twenty three hours and one day of the year have twenty five hours is enough to make you weep in frustration.

I don't think either Iran or North Korea has the launch capacity to put the 1000+kg that they would need to put a nuke into orbit.

Agreed that a nuke in LEO would play merry hell with GPS and lots of other satellites. But I can't really see North Korea or Iran being crazy or stupid enough to piss off their remaining allies (or sort-of-allies) like China or Russia. Of course, we are talking about North Korea and Iran...

The GPS satellites are in pretty high orbits (around 20000km if memory serves). I don't know if anybody has an anti-satellite weapon that can target a satellite that high. For that matter, the WAAS satellites are in geosynchronous orbit and even harder to shoot down.

You would also have to shoot down several GPS satellites in quick succession to produce a significant gap in coverage. Since the Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons are based on orbital launchers (for obvious reasons) the countries in question would have to do five or six satellite launches in a relatively short time window.

It would probably be far, far cheaper to jam GPS signals than to shoot down the satellites.