I've always thought NPR was about as unbiased as you get. I've heard all sorts of stories there, although they do have a lot of human-interest stuff. And sometimes that's immediately labeled liberal. But I've heard things on NPR that are downright evangelical in nature (usually around holidays).

Undoing Moderation - Posted Redundant.

It's not the Theory of Gravity, you dolt. It's called "Intelligent Falling."

Is it *that* hard to make those drugs?

I agree it isn't a deterrent to crime. That being said, who is eliminating the death penalty going to save money? The alternative would be life in prison. The average age of a person subjected to the death penalty is 42 years old (as of 1/1/2005.. Please let me know if someone has better numbers). If the average of someone dying in prison is, say, 50 (which I'd bet is rather low), you have 8 years of paying for the prisoner.


I think it would be much more of a deterrent if sentences were carried out quickly and very very publically (the proverbial town square). I know punishing a child for something they did 3 weeks ago isn't a deterrent to them. Why would a 10 year delay from sentencing to execution be different?

Vic20, you insensitive clod!!!!

On paper - I'd agree with you. If you have a good, experienced teacher, they won't reuse the *majority* of their materials. Also, IEPs (which are becoming more and more common) require individual tailoring of a curriculum to an individual by law. Let's not forget that most (don't want to say all, but all the ones I know) have to pay for the bulk of room supplies out of their pocket, with a minimal amount of it available for a tax credit / write-off. If you have any teacher friends, I'd recommend you ask them whether their overworked or not and see what their response is.

Re: salary-wise idealism

Yes, you'd be right. But, like most jobs, their salary is based upon importance of a job times replace-ability, with revenue generation thrown in with many jobs. Sports stars can't be easily replaced and they bring in tons of money to a franchise, hence their large salaries. Teachers can (keyword: can) provide an invaluable service, but they're pretty replacable (en masse, not a specific awesome teacher). Something needs to be changed, and I think unions play a role. However, parents and a lack of respect for education play even bigger roles.

We are in an advertising bubble, but it will only burst if people point out the illusion.

Just like gold: there's no reason for gold to have the value that it has, except people think it's worth a lot of money. It's usage as an industrial has been waning for years. Gold really doesn't do anything except look pretty and feel really cool. Just like if everyone sees the advertisers for what they are, if everyone sees that gold really doesn't do anything, the price will bottom out. But, this could be a while: Gold has been in a bubble for thousands of years and doesn't look to burst anytime soon.

Why is storing SOX or customer data r/t SOX on Box or DropBox illegal? Is it an auditing / Access Control issue? Or is it the fact that it's merely kept on an owned server?

First - I agree with your comments. But one thing to note is that Technology Muggles don't know much (if anything) about the previous devices and thus see Apple as revolutionary. Where you and I know differently. I eventually tired of telling my friends that no, my iMate JasJar from 2005 could do more than their iPhone 3G, four years before the iPhone 3G was released. The perceived "revolutionary" iPhone compared to the realistic "evolutionary" iPhone and the ignorance in others not acknowledging that is what infuriates me.

Yes, but most of the secession threats are from people outside of Texas. We'd be happy for them to leave.

(Can't believe I'm replying to an AC).

This sounds great and all that, but that's a very unreasonable statement. Consider C. I don't know a single person who would say that C is secure or that security wasn't built in from the get-go. The same can be said of C++. But those languages offer different benefits (speed and control both come to mind). It's a trade off, to be sure. But sometimes, you have to use a language that isn't secure "from the get-go" to build an application that needs security. We don't always have the luxury of doing the perfect (or near perfect) thing.

Yes, but it's far easier to say, ".NET is .NET", or, more accurately, "Microsoft is Microsoft". i.e. Proprietary.. i.e. bad. While I don't have numbers, I'd wager that Classic ASP (which runs on the .NET framework) is vastly more unsecure than ASP.NET MVC.

Don't mistake my comment for blind support for Microsoft. But, when a study fails simply acknowledge this very basic fact about the Microsoft ecosystem, it's numbers really don't mean much.

Don't forget the other savings you get for using AWS (or other cloud providers). Facilities (and associated maintenance), power costs (cloud centers are almost always more efficient), and hardware administration. Obviously, you have to run the numbers yourself, but remember it isn't JUST hardware costs that are saved by moving to a cloud.