We should encourage the investment that leads to Silicon Valley and its elites. Tax the crap out of the investment until it goes away, like go the hell to Texas, let them deal with the side effects. I applauded when Ellon Musk picked Nevada for Tesla's Battery Factory. We don't want the risk of pollution that would create and that means 6500 people who don't live in California. In fact, I'd like to see people leave California, and discouraging investment and job growth is one way to do that. So, encourage lots of people who don't have roots here to leave. Make it a deeper reason than just some flash-in-the-pan job to be here. We could, as a state, choose to be a no-growth, no investment, place, and that fact is that a 200 year drought might just be the ticket for that!

So, how many of the 6 Million odd people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area could actually compete with you for a job? And if they could, are there enough positions to go around? The first answer is that very few of the people who live here could compete with you because for lots of reason YOU are a member of an elite. The second answer is that there really are FEWER positions available than the lying sacks of shit who run many of the companies here want to admit. The positions are so specialized because there are far more people pestering the HR departments of their companies for those few positions, AND, they are taking advantage of the law to hire off-shore "talent" whether or not those people are creative or productive. The demand exceeds the supply and for some segments of the industry hiring an idiot who does what he is told is cheaper than wading through all the supply to find a better match.

Where this matters is that more and more you work in an ivory tower with the great unwashed baying at the gate and resenting you more and more because you say smug things like we hear here that belie the reality out there. I have been on both sides of the divide. I know what it is like to work on the inside and I know what it is like to be "out" like I am now. The reason I am out has to do with external factors that make me uncompetative, such as mounting physical disability. I was excluded during the dot.gone "recovery" which really wasn't. There is a big lie that Silicon Valley was like it was before 2004 or that it is pulling its weight, that it deserves to be revered any more as a job creator, even if it is a wealth creator; the number of people employed by the best capitalized companies is really quite small in number. I would like to see SV discouraged and the companies move away, like to Texas, as its impact on this area has turned largely negative. Only 1-percent'ers are benefiting and the rest of us are having to pay in higher property values and rents, and we pay more taxes because of the property pressures. I'd like to see many of the companies move out. The Party's Over!

Go do your own research. Investigate the origins of PC-DOS and the BASIC interpeter and the relationship Gates had with people in the early days around 1977. You will see that he "borrowed" from people and did not invent major parts of what he later called his own.

But the biggest case against Gates is the misinformation he spread, that the design of Windows was an answer to the complexity of the UNIX shell and that his proprietory approach was just a business ploy to create a captive market and to deny consumers the knowledge that they could have used to get more powerful and reliable tools. Microsoft practiced monopolistic and preditory strategies on its customers, the OEM agreement with hardware vendors; it kept them in the dark deliberately so that they would believe that Windows was magical and mysterious, under Gates, when it was just inferior and lacking in use. Remember that Microsoft had Xenix, a UNIX for X86, and deliberately dumbed down MS-DOS so it could keep its users in the dark. It wasn't until Vista that Windows had decent logging so that a user could actually have a clue to diagnose problems. That was intended and the market for Windows was captive enough so that ignorant users would still go buy an inferior product, even today, The answer to Microsoft is not Linux it is OS X. If Apple wanted to kill Microsoft it would be to embrace Hackintosh and cut the cost of the hardware by half.

An additional thought on this topic. One thing that is interesting about knowledge in our era is that the rate at which it changes is so fast that by the time we reach middle age and beyond that what we learned in school has become significantly out of date. When I took Physics in college there was no Standard Model for QM and no unification of forces. There was still this bewildering zoo of resonances whose underlying unity was not understood yet. The Feynman Lectures in Physics are now available on line. They are clearly still relevant but they show well the state of particle physics as it was in 1961. Someone ought to write the addendum that brings that up to date. In astronomy the identity of quaesars was still a hot topic and no one had confirmed the existence of black holes, whereas today they may be the drivers of the evolution of the Universe, and Dark Matter and Dark Energy were not recognized at all and today they are universally accepted as major players.

I took my degrees in Geology and when I was an undergrad Plate Tectonics was just coming into acceptance. Its ramifications developed during the early years of my career. The high trophic activity of the dinosaurs was a concept that was developed after I completed my degrees, as was the affinities of birds with therapsids. One must keep reviewing after one has finished school even if one is not in a profession. Things you learned in school are bound to be changed.

The first programming language I learned was FORTRAN. My experience has carried me through procedural languages like FORTRAN and Pascal to C and to scripting languages like perl, but then to OO enhancements the result in Java and Python and finally to functional languages like lisp. Most of this I didn't know out of college but am still learning on my own, one has to do that and to be motivated to pursue new topics on your own. It is quite amusing to me how programming goes full circle and what is old becomes new again, the relevance of lisp to new trends in programming that are more functional and try to reduce side effects, like Haskell. But the ideas were developed before I existed in the 1930's and yet they are finding expression in new languages like Clojure.

I am almost 70 and I don't have a problem with topics I may have been exposed to in high school or college. I have found that sooner of later you will revisit topics from earlier in your experience. The only issue is flexibility of your mind. A secondary issue is where to begin. I think that one must develop a sense of where topics fit together and then one's own curiosity propels one forward. And it is wise to sip at the font of knowledge and not try to gulp it all down at one sitting. Gluttony will defeat you. You must be patient.

Also, individuals have different abilities to make sense of different kinds of knowledge, so for example, I know that I will never be able to work at a graduate level in mathematics. I only recently realized that poor vision was a big impediment for me in reading mathematical expressions and understanding them; so I have had some recent success in re-reading math, but I will never be expert in it. On the other hand I have had an acute memory for music and have been able to remember large chunks of the classical literature for which it is easy to get and use the printed music and study it. I have been able to contribute at the upper division and graduate level because of this ability.

But what is more important about the OP is the tacit question of why you want to revisit these topics? Is it to earn a professional level of expertise? And the next obvious question is do you intend to pursue an advanced degree in the topics? You are free to do that. If for example, you wouldn't have enough years in a career with an PhD in physics to pay off the tuition needed to get the degree, then maybe you need to be content to enjoy the topic and keep your day job. Maybe, you want to consider getting a teaching degree so you can teach Physics in high school or a community college. There is nothing to stop you from enjoying any topic that passes your attention.

Have you looked at most of the Debian packages, for example? 75% of them are crap for the one reason that developers get a head of steam, no pun intended, write 70% of what would be a complete project and lose interest, and what is left off is the most important part, decent docs. There ARE good projects with decent docs in Debian, but most are poorly documented. That is because developers do the worst job of writing in any clear language what their packages do. So, open source dies not because source goes away, but because not enough effort was spent on explaining what the software does or how it was intended to be used, and so it dies because no one wants to invest the effort needed to figure it out. Very few people can read others' source and intelligently figure out what the code does, and if they can they usually can't string together words in a spoken language to describe it. I think that poor linguistic expression is revealed in another way that obstructs usage in a big way. This is feature bloat, software that attempts to do everything and ends up doing nothing very well because it is too poorly designed to be used by human beings. Open source repositories like Debian are full of this kind of stuff. It isn't that they are not powerful, it is that they are not useful.

Look at the package recordmydesktop and try to make sense of its documentation. Its man page is very complex and its controls are low-level, requiring use of signal.h interrupts. not something you want a novice to have to deal with. It is as though some guy wrote it as an afternoon hack of low-level tools and didn't bother to learn enough GTK to write a few buttons for the GUI it comes with. Far worse than that is trying to figure out the interactions with the system.

Object Oriented Development is not a solution to this problem because refactoring further obscures user logic. Good OOD is not the same as clear user logic, in fact they often work against one another. With OOD documentation is even more important because of this. So FOSS projects really die because the documentation does not support their use so that others can come along and use them without direct community help.

I had to read some COBOL about 30 years ago as part of migrating a database. I had done my first programming in FORTRAN which is almost as old. I suspect that the call for COBOL is that there is need for people to read old code that still needs to be maintained, but my impression of the language is that it was really just about 80% boiler plate and 20% executable. So, couldn't a metalanguage be invented that reads COBOL source and produces some source code that reflects something widely used today, even something much newer?

True enough, for now. The radicals are going to wake the giant, who doesn't want to put boots on the ground against them, maybe the other Arab states will see the threat as too close to home and go in and clean the radicals out. If not, the U.S. has engineering not according to the fundie Islam which can easily decimate ISIL.. And we can make life very hard for them without putting our people on the ground. We could do a Putin on them and mention that we could use nuclear weapons on them, and even if we don't do that we could theoretically make large parts of Eastern Syria and Western Iraq uninhabital for decades. We should have done this in Eastern Afghanistan to the Pashtoon homeland where most of the Taliban insurgants who have fought us there come from. So, we have placed ourselves at a temporary disadvantage because of poor leadership from Obama; he had failed on the international stage too, but we don't have to continue in that vein and because we allow for creative solutions to problems that religious fundies don't use, we can defeat them. After all it could be said that Hitler lost his war because he didn't believe in science, especially Jewish science, and we developed the bomb because of the threat that he might get it; he didn't, and it was because of his racist and religious beliefs. In similar fashion if it came to direct conflict with ISIL we could clobber them with a engineering hammer, either a high energy or particle beam or just unloading our nuclear waste in the middle of the Syrian dessert. We could cook them man by man or en-mass if we have to. We are playing nice-nice trying to pick off individual terrorists with drones and avoiding taking out innocents with them, we don't have to continue with that restraint. So these guys in their Islamic state are going to under estimate us, and we in turn are going to learn how to be leaders and why sometimes it takes a hammer to drive a nail home.

By the way this mess started when American and European businessmen set out to steal the wealth of the Middle East by dividing the factions that exist there. Evey nation that was devised by the Western Powers after WWI in 1921 at the end of the Ottoman Empire was conceived by Brittan and France and later the U.S. as a way to allow for Western businesses to steal from the region or to set up puppet states, the Monarchies of the modern states, including Iraq and Egypt, that allow for foreign companies to garner resources at minimal benefit to the population. we did this by splitting religious sects and ethnicities that have considerable hatred for one another. That is how WE created bin Lauden, who was radicalized by contact with Western businessmen. We sowed dragon's teeth for profits, and we pay the price in terrorism. It looks like Crusades to Islam and even though moderates don't blame us as much, it is rich soil for anyone with a grudge. The point is that if you do not forget history, you can see why these threats arrise, and now it is out of hand and we have to get nasty to address it. We are paying for bad leadership in the past. We are paying for the two Bushes and Clinton using Oil politics to drive our policy in the area. We are paying for how we were set up for 9-11 by ignoring the hatred we had come to invite, because we placed corporation profits and our oil supply above human dignity. About the best thing that could happen in the post-peak-oil era is to find an energy source, invent fusion, that depreciates the value of the oil reserves in the world, but especially those under Iran and Iraq. Then we can gracefully back out of the region. Until then, our options become increasingly distasteful.

So, how many of you have downloaded an open source package, or even read the description posted by the developer and been unable to figure out what is does? How many of you have installed such a package and found that the documentation doesn't help you to use it, or is so complex that it is difficult to figure out where to begin to use it? I think this is a common problem. Either you are forced to read source code if it is available and quite often the source is inscrutable because the code has been refactored to run efficiently as an OOD implementation but the user logic for the package is lost or obscured because the developer either cannot write or didn't make an effort?

I would love to work for LA people who can write and where my challenge is to show that I understand some package by explaining it to them so that they could write the documentation. There is quite a bit of software out there that requires developer skills to figure out and use. The LA types could help developers communicate what their work does. I try to write as well as I can, I think that being able to write is as important as any coding task I have ever faced.

I am quite interested in Literate Programming and Reproducible Results tools that are beginning to become important, for example emacs org-tool and the iPython notebook. There are liberal arts people who can do more than edit MS Word and some of them actually use emacs, although not many, but tools that mix code and markdown could be an area where writers can really help.

This is quite a separate problem from business administration or business politics. I grant you that shit floats and some of the smoozers rise to positions they don't deserve for not being competent technically when the product is technical and engineered. I have worked for a couple of these types and it is no fun.

Don't hold your breath, the U.S. in an Entrapanocracy; business interests have huge power in the U.S. Congress so it is unlikely that the monopoly Microsoft has with its OEM arrangement with PC Makers would result in a rebate if you refuse to Install Windows or scrub it with Linux or something else.

The case with Macs is a little different. Apple doesn't allow you to run OS X on other platforms and it makes no claim that non XS X will run on its systems or is supported on its systems. That is fair. PC Makers have no such claims which is why Microsoft's agreement is anti-competative unless they allow for a rebate for a customer who does not want to run Windows.

I live in California where Hg occurs in nature and was used in extraction of gold from ores and has a latency in sediments shed from mining in the Mother Lode. USGS has been looking for the signature of Hg in sediments and it may be delayed by the mobilization process. More was applied to ores than has yet appeared in sediments. My source for the path of Hg in sediments comes from a video I saw authored by USGS in about 2000. I am sure that there are links to papers on the subject. Part of the problem of Hg in the environment in California is that its ores are found in the Coast Range and so it is a natural constituant of the environment. Most of the time it is pretty insoluable.

I mention this because that is what the chart in the link from the article seems to indicate. The spike in total Hg at 1970 and its elevated concentration is due in part to landfills, but the more recent uptick seems to be due to its mobilization in the atmosphere. This would coincide with the concern from USGS about its path in sediments. The metal is pretty insoluable, but conversion to its salts and organic versions are more volitile and take time, decades, to appear in the environment.

Yeah, Mac OS X is sounding better and better all the time. Apple controls the platform but everything installs and the package management is stable, which is more than I can say for most Linux, and there isn't a zoo of filesystem types and partitions to deal with. To really upbrade Ubuntu I have to create space for a new partition to move /home to and then scrub the boot partition and reinstall. What if I have a 1 TB drive? Why should I have to partiton a 5 GB partition each time I want to use a different Linux? Why not use a simple filesystem and boot from any of a choice of images and don't let RedHat or Connonical control the filesystem?

Ha, Ha, Ha, by then he will be revealed as a rip-off artist, a business man who stole from and took advantage of people much more creative than he, and someone whose company stole from its consumers. He might have the reputation of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, but will be only a foot note to the people who really made digital technology. By then, John McCarthy will be more famous for inventing lisp than some third rate hack who ripped off a BASIC interpreter, and existing operating system and created a captive market, and maybe by then that kind of exploitation might really be disliked, so it may be Gates that gets revised out of history.

UMM, this is an historical artifact of a system or organization that did not exist until the 18th century, and doesn't yet exist in many parts of the world, yet. So history tells you where your proverbial values come from, how the value of finding a job and contributing in a secular organization that does not use kinship and religion to establish its trusts. Go look at other parts of the world, you seem ignorant of the different ways relationships come about. We live in a ruthless mertiocracy, some guy you have never met gets to decide if you are suitable for his job description after talking to you for five minutes, and he uses information of a sort that wouldn't make any sense in most other places in the world. Everybody has to find a role in their society; has to find a way to get what they need, to earn their way. but the details of that very so much from place to place and over time. That is something that history tells you something about.

As an example, one might find a stronger connection in the mind set of Islamist Jehadists in Africa and the Middle East today and Protestant reformers in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, or the Catholics that opposed them, and that may help us understand if it is a good idea for us to be involved as we are in the Middle East today, it isn't. and what is clear is that the poor knowledge of history at the very highest echelons of our government shows in the projection of our values on people in other nations and our vulnerability to pitfalls of history long gone, greed, racism, religious intolerance, ignoring the differences between them and us. It is appauling.

I wouldn't trust Bill Gates to teach me anything, and not his chance to use his wealth to be revisionist on History; but on the other hand, America has such a poor grasp of world history that it may not make all that much difference which liar is in the mix. We already have been feed a load of lies, much of it by omision, so in spite of what Gates is about, the answer is, as it is with many other abuses, the full light of research and disclosure. People tell lies all the time, but careful research eventually catches up with them. So, lets have the careful work undaunted by powerful people throwing their weight around, whether that if Vladimir Putin, Iraq Obama or Dick Chainey of Command.