"The United States loves to use statistical metrics and audit procedures to decide which teachers and principals at public schools should be fired or retained"

Which "United States" is he talking about, the other one that doesn't have teacher's unions?

For Mac users, time machine is a complete no-brainer. RAID won't protect you against data corruption...but time machine will. Stick it on a NAS and you'll be fine. Then use BackBlaze or CrashPlan to back that NAS up offsite. Heck, there are crashplan clients for synology systems, so there's no excuse. And it's cheap! Would you rather rebuild your whole music library from scratch, or pay $60/year for some insurance? Hello!

Note that you probably don't want to back up your TM folder.

$9m is cheap, and it might have been paid by EDS or whomever their IT contractor is now. The navy spends that much on ketchup every day.

It's the process, not the tool.

Why did I click on this dumb article?

This article shows that there's a major problem, because: how do you find the fiber to cut? And how do you cut it?

It's not like a backhoe, that cuts the fiber "by accident." You have to go into a manhole, find the line you're looking for, then cut it. That takes work, planning, and intelligence. You can't just wander around in a manhole, looking for stuff...can you?

College professor without specific skills says you don't need to know specific skills while standing on the backs of adjunct professors with no skills.

Obama will take your money, and he'll do what the security agencies want.

Gnustep? It's 2015, not 1993. If you want gnustep support write it yourself.

When you measure in centimeters, the numbers get bigger!

A vote for metric is a vote for a bigger penis, numerically speaking!

From what I understand, any form of structuring is illegal.

Structuring is manipulating the amount of cash to evade detection by authorities. $10k USD requires a mandatory report by FinCen, but that's on deposits. I'm not sure there's any mandatory reporting on withdrawals, so I'm not sure why the FBI would be interested. It's not money laundering if you're withdrawing money from your bank account.

It sounds like he got caught lying about a crime he didn't commit, which is one of the more ridiculous aspects of the US judicial system.

Just to warn you, networking is ultra-boring. Do you think software engineering is bad? Networking is worse. You don't really make everything - you spend most of your time trying to get configurations to work, working around bugs in firmware, or figuring out how some numbskull screwed up the various configs.

It is, basically, plumbing.

That's not to say it isn't important, but if you're actually good at software engineering you'll probably find networking ultra-tedious. Do you really want to learn the ins and outs of the OSI stack? All the weird things about hooking Cisco gear to other gear? Troubleshooting connectivity issues due to someone plugging a switch into itself?

Just writing about it makes me want to lobotomize myself.

These days you'd set a waypoint, send your drone off, and drive away. There's no RF to speak of, unless you're live-streaming it over LTE.

The biggest skill in C++ is how to read code that's got templates, generics, overloaded operators, and custom keywords.

"What do you mean they overloaded '+' to merge objects?"

"This doesn't look like C++, it looks like some foreign language."

"Oh, we reversed the meaning of + and - because the senior guy thought that the original semantics were incorrect. But only for some objects."

On a treadmill using an oculus!

Really, the main mental skills you need in tech are pretty simple: understanding the goal/problem, breaking a problem down into steps, then putting everything together at the end.

If someone can figure out how to take a meal, make a recipe that makes the meal, then follow the recipe to make a meal, they'll be mostly fine.