TFS mentions that the contractor is trying to replace hundreds of different incompatible, overlapping study systems that the government has built or ordered. Does having hundreds of different systems with overlapping functionality trying to talk to ready other sound like proper engineering practice to you? That's what the government decision makers have come up with.

From my experience, government systems are designed for two primary goals. First, give each fiefdom it's piece and second, compliance. Compliance generally means complying with a crap load of old documents written by bureaucrats and lawyers. Actually functioning properly is a distant third on the priority list. Engineered design? Rarely is that mentioned.

Unlike Texas, where the state government employs thousands of programmers because they are so liberal. I just got out of a meeting with a bunch of government programmers from Texas. They'll all tell you the same thing - getting stuff done within red tape of a government agency takes them twice as long as long as it took them in the private sector jobs - unless there is a federal grant or contract involved, in which case it takes twenty times as long.

One project they did last year was for a federal government contract, for OSHA. They spent a year and a half developing the system, then during the beta test OSHA cancelled the project. This is after the feds had them write a system where it would print all the database records on paper, to be sent to the feds, who would manually enter it into a computer file, then send that file back to Texas, right back to the same agency who had sent it to them in the first place. That's about typical for the federal government. Government is one thing - it's supposed to be fair and deliberate, not far and efficient. The FEDERAL government is something else entirely.

These government agencies need to hire some developers for whom a few million hits is just another day. Something like girlsgonewild.com gets more traffic than healthcare.gov, and handles it with two well-configured commodity servers.

You're talking about regular phishing. Phishing is not spear-phishing. Phishing, like fishing, involves casting out a bait and hoping that someone (anyone) takes the bait.

Spear-phishing, like spear-fishing, is DEFINED as identifying a specific target and launching your weapon against that target specifically.

Here's the third edition standard for ECMA script. Please point out any way that ActionScript 2.0 doesn't comply with the standard aside from the comparison operator.

http://www.ecma-international....

Are you perhaps confusing ActionScript version numbers vs Flash Player version numbers? ActionScript was introduced in Flash 5. Adobe says they based ActionScript 1.0 on Emacscript. Of course, the first version wasn't complete. It was based on Emacscript, though, according to the people who wrote the friggin language.

Okay so your idea is to take a Superfund site that has already contaminated 100 miles downstream due to natural runoff, and pump 3 trillion gallons of water into it? Into a hole where there have been six earthquakes in nine years, and a major collapse just last year?

What do you think is going to happen next year, with the next quake hits and the collapse releases 3 trillion gallons of very contaminated water? You might want to read up on Banquiao, because you're proposing the same thing, only much larger.

I think you missed a few points in your theoretical calculation. Let's look at an actual pumped storage reservoir, one conveniently linked from the Wikipedia page you linked to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The upper reservoir has a capacity of 27 billion gallons, and peak output requires 33 million gallons per minute, so it can run for 13 hours with 1872 MW output. (To be more than fair, I'm ignoring the fact that you can't REALLY drain the lake completely dry each day, and that power is reduced as the level goes down. Actual power capacity may be half of what I'm charitably calculating). Giving pumped storage the benefit of the doubt, we'll say Ludington could do 1872 MW X 13 hours = 23,765 MWh.
That's 8 * 10^10 BTU

So we need 120 * 10^15 BTU and we've got 8 * 10^10 BTU. Hmm, 15 facilities the size of Ludington would be 120 * 10^10.
But we need 10^15, not 10^10, so we need 1,500,000 facilities the size of Ludington.

The upper reservoir of Ludington is 2.5 square miles. 2.5 miles X 1,500,000 facilities = 3,750,000 square miles. The continental US is 3,119,884 square miles. So, looking at actual performance of actual pumped storage, covering the entire US with pumped storage reservoirs still wouldn't be enough - even for the UPPER reservoir. Typically, the lower reservoir is quite a bit larger than the upper.

Thanks for the reminder. I've only seen that 150,000 times in someone's signature here.

>I think that getting Ogg support into the browser and other open codecs will help us transition away from the Flash over time,

Also, Flash Cc, the authoring tool, can now output HTML5 rather than SWF, so all the existing Flash projects can be recompiled to no longer require the plugin. Support isn't 100% yet, but that's the direction Adobe is going. The programming language within Flash has always been a dialect of JavaScript/Emacscript, so it is pretty simple for Adobe to start using the browser's JavaScript engine instead of one provided by Flash. Other than a cross-browser JavaScript engine, the other thing provided by the plugin is a graphics API. Now that the canvas element, there's no need for the plugin.

Virtually all of the popular file formats for video are essentially containers that have mpeg4 video inside. Therefore, essentially any player can play mpeg4. The difference is which package files they can open, so just use a plain .mpg file rather than a proprietary package like .wmv.

If you want to embed the video that's fine, but also provide a link to the mpeg file itself. A plain link to a mpg file is like a plain link to an html page - it will work for anyone.

I wish I got that ad you keep getting. It sounds like it might be worth a look. If by "plastic" you mean Valplast, that's a very good value.

WIkipedia has a list of a dozen open-source phones with operating systems such as OpenMoko and Firefox OS, which includes parts of Android:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Nokia makes Android phones without the Google apps, and Google gives away the base operating system that allows them to do so.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Cyanogenmod lets you run Android with no Google apps, some Google apps, or all Google apps - whatever you want.
http://www.cyanogenmod.org/

Ubuntu Touch may appeal to you:
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

> When Google has your data, Google's business partners have it too (part or parcel),

All evidence I've seen, and common sense, indicates that the data is very valuable to Google and they don't want anyone else to have it. They'll sell ads to other companies, which Google displays based on the data, but they don't sell the data. That would be giving the other company the goose that lays the golden eggs. Google prefers to sell the eggs, over and over again. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please cite it.

Of course the NSA illegally acquires data from most all email providers, ISPs, etc. Even the services that are explicitly based in privacy get NSLs, so to avoid that I could avoid using the internet at all. I'm going to use the internet, so the NSA will be able to snoop until that problem is handled using the three boxes - soap box, ballot box, and if absolutely necessary ammo box.

Technology nerds, especially those who frequent sites like Slashdot where discussions of privacy are frequent and nary a day passes without mention of Snowden, know the trade-off of Google services*. I wonder how well non-technical people understand it. Google Now kind if shoves it in your face, making it very clear that Google knows when you're at work, when you're at home, what TV shows you like, etc. I wonder what percent of average people who don't use Google Now really understand what the cost of Google services is. It would be interesting to see a survey.

* I make no value judgement about the privacy cost. Some customers are okay with the privacy cost of using these excellent free services, other people choose not to. Personally, I choose to make that trade only with Google. One company has my profile, and in exchange I get many services.