IT/Software Development is one of the rare, if not unique, fields where people can be very paid well, the job market is currently hot, and one can learn everything from inexpensive books(or even free online courses) combined with motivation. It's positively egalitarian. If the premise had to do with medicine and law, where there's required expensive schooling and potential for a "good ol' boys" club atmosphere, then I'd find it more believable.

When I've interviewed for development positions where the person went to school was of little importance. In fact, our CTO(who has his BS and MS in CS from Stanford) even jokes that it's the people straight from academia that sometimes seem the most incompetent. The only things we care about are if you know your stuff and have some body of previous work you can point to and talk about. But then I work in Silicon Valley where a competent developer can pretty much write his own ticket right now.

My experience in commercial development the last 13 years had me working with females. They were almost always foreign born, often with English as a second language. Yes, it's mostly males, but a large part of them are East Asians and Indians, not all white males.

In short, the bar of entry in my experience is low as long as you're motivated and competent. Why aren't there more women? Look at practically every engineering and scientific accomplishment in human history. Are you going to tell it's just culture that has kept those accomplishments relegated almost entirely to men?

At that point one might as well go with RPC.

Seems obvious to me. I, like many others, live in an apartment. My parking spot doesn't have an electrical outlet anywhere nearby, and neither does my office parking lot.

Mine is, "bring beer to #217 for password"

Nobody has taken me up on it yet. :(

On the surface these comparisons are interesting but when you understand how these systems were designed you'll see it's not accurate. Curiosity is an example of an embedded system. The code that runs on it is only meant to operate the rover and its instruments. Comparing its hardware to a general purpose computer meant to run various applications is flawed. And because their purposes are different so are their operating systems.

The last time I read about VxWorks and a Mars rover had to do with Pathfinder. They had some problems with the rover randomly rebooting once it was on Mars and had to debug it. The problem turned out to be a classic example of priority inversion.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/raj/www/mars.html
 

How so? Any issues with cache consistency have to do with each core having their own L1/L2 caches but sharing the same memory. This is what hardware based cache coherence protocols like MESI were invented for and have nothing to with running multiple processes vs. multiple threads. Are you're referring to the fact that threads in the same process share the same address space? There has to be care taken to serialize access to critical sections(such as using a lock based on a mutex), and while blocking threads at critical sections can be detrimental to performance by reducing parallelism, the OS scheduler can just as effectively schedule multiple threads in one process to run on multiple cores as it can schedule a single thread in multiple processes. Multiple processes require the same sort of serialization for accessing shared memory between them. The difference between the two is how the MMU is used to configure address spaces, not scheduling.

You obviously never spent time with a recent Lumia. The 800 and 900 phones have the sturdiest build quality of any recent smart phone, including the iPhone.

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/blog/1385835/video_shows_nokia_lumia_900_will_survive_pretty_much_anything.html

It's hard to have sympathy for the state's plight. When the state announced they were going to close 70 state parks private individuals donated money in an attempt to keep some of those parks open.

Then it turned out that up to $54 million was squirrelled away, for still murky reasons, that should of gone to funding the parks.

If CA finances are this much of a mess how can Californians in good conscious be asked to pay yet more in tax hikes?

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/politics&id=8750455

And for renewables that are driven by sun or wind, that cost is surface area.

I don't see where it's refuted by the same qualitative source as a published scientific paper. And cellulosic ethanol? That's been attempted for over 100 years and nobody has been able to scale it up to get a positive energy return on it for the reason I mentioned. It simply takes too much energy to remove the water.

A paper by a professor named Jeff Dukes back in 1997 calculated that in that year we burned 400 years worth of biomass using fossil fuels.

http://plus.maths.org/content/burning-buried-sunshine

The idea we can consume the same amount of energy by growing biomass is a pipe dream. Many of the processes that produce liquid fuels via biological processes end requiring more input energy that can be extracted, usually because water has to be removed from the final product which requires heat. That is why so many companies have been able to succeed building pilot projects but can never scale up to anything sustainable.

Just to be clear, uranium hexafluoride is used in the process of enriching uranium via gaseous diffusion, and as the article states there have been some accidents involving trucks carrying canisters of it. But by the time it's in a warhead it's back in metal form.

"For instance, a 2004 rule that gives oil and other companies a special deduction for their U.S. operations could save the oil industry $18.2 billion over 10 years. "

What are you talking about? That "2004 rule" is Section 199. It's not limited to just oil companies.

You don't know much about the petroleum business if you think oil companies don't need to reinvest heavily to keep production up. That's the why often a nationalized oil company(say Venezuela's PDVSA) will show a sharp drop in production numbers as time goes. The profits are used for social welfare programs instead of reinvestment.

In 2010 Exxon reinvested $28 billion

Not true. The biggest "subsidy" given to Exxon is the Section 199 deduction. Apple(and other tech companies) take the same deduction. Apple even gets a bigger deduction from it - 9% vs. 6%.