I think I would likely keep a car at the parking plaza where the bus ends up sitting. Probably one with a pink mustache.

As far as the Google busses, they basically round trip all day, every day, or when they cycle out, they park at shoreline Amphitheater. The drivers definitely do not "hang out" with the busses, which you can verify just by walking down there. Typically they dead-head back up to wherever by catching a ride on one of the less populated intermediate busses. I know at least one of them has a day job at the Great Mall, and only drives the bus to make some extra cash.

Apple is similar to Google with regard to their busses, but they tend to take charters in the mean time to keep busy.

As far as Facebook is concerned... I haven't worked there, like I have at Apple and Google, so yeah, they might be screwing over the bus drivers, but I think they are likely in exactly the same position that the Apple and Google drivers are in.

I once took over 30,000 lines of code that had been written by a subcontractor and trimmed it to around 4000 LOC. And you better believe it ran faster! Not because refactoring is magic, but because once all the mind-numbing almost-repetition was mucked out you could actually see what the code was doing and notice that a lot of it wasn't really necessary. Ever since then I have always maintained that coders should never ever copy and paste code. I've had people disagree, saying that a little bit of copying and pasting won't hurt, but I say if it's really such a little bit then you shouldn't mind re-typing it. Of course if you do that very soon you start putting more effort into devising ways to stop repeating yourself, which is exactly the point. Repeating yourself should be painful.

That's I think a reliable litmus test for whether you should refactor a piece of software. If it's an area of code that's been receiving a lot of maintenance, and you think you can reduce the size significantly (say by 1/3 or more) without loss of features or generality you should do it. If it's an area of code that's not taking up any maintenance time, or if you're adding speculative features nobody is asked for and the code will get larger or remain the same size, then you should leave it alone. It's almost common sense.

I don't see why anyone would think that refactoring for its own sake would necessarily improve anything. If an automotive engineer on a lark decided to redesign a transmission you wouldn't expect it to get magically better just because he fiddled with it. But if he had a specific and reasonable objective in the redesign that's a different situation. If you have a specific and sensible objective for reorganizing a piece of code, then it's reasonable to consider doing it.

The biggest reason for user optimised search is because of commercial disputes over who gets on the first page and in what order. When you make it user optimised,everyone ends up having to suck it up because the search engine and the owners of the search data are not directly controlling placement, many end users are. Can you augment the user selection with some refinement algorithms, sure but at the core you still want to be able to say oh well it is the way users rate it and it would glaring and extreme over the top censorship to limit user choices.

Google is going to keep getting attacked for this and corporations will corruptly seek to gain commercial search advantage through corrupt lobbyists and biased legislation. Google has a real problem that will only continue to get worse unless is can push some of that responsibility onto others, many, many others. Cheaply recruiting all those trusted others and keeping them going, of course will not be that easy.

Past reputation for the US. They only keep deals if it advantages them to do so, once the advantage ceases so does the deal, just ask Native Americans and all the treaties they signed with the Yankees. I can not see how Edward Snowden can possibly expect to return to the US, ever. The nature of the country and it's government makes that impossible. Why the negotiations, likely an immigration step, simple proof of the impossibility of returning and the legal justification for the certainties of Russian citizen status. Russian moves with RT http://rt.com/ would be an indication that is reaching out to the rest of the world. They are now more likely to create say a multi-national technological development enclave within Russia to attract people from all over the globe to develop Russian commercial technology. That kind of cerebral melting pot is far more effective that a monocultural one and it helps to create an economic climate for other commercial developments in that enclave, tourism, content development etc..

The biggest problem with the study is it seems to miss the whole point of refactoring code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.... It is not about one project, it is all about a coding company and the code it produces over the life time of it's existence, about all of it's projects, past present and future. Is refactoring a technical waste for one project, depends upon the qualities of the initial code produced. Is refactoring a waste over 100 different projects over ten years, of course not and often because far less refactoring effort will be required for latter projects than earlier projects and those latter projects will be far more efficient.

It is much like the principles of TQM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.... Does Total Quality management work for one project, rarely the administrative costs will readily out weigh the benefits because there is little or no opportunity to apply the improvements provided by TQM. Will TQM provide benefits for hundred projects over ten years, of course because. As there is plenty of opportunity to apply the benefits gained from the administrative efforts expended on TQM.

Gees bloody easy to go bankrupt from 5% of revenue. Say you built a commercial building and you bought 10 million dollars worth of material and paid 10 million dollars for labour to put in up and the land cost you a further 10 million dollars. Now your plane to sell that building for fifty million dollars and make 20 million dollars profit didn't pan out. You are following me, I hope I didn't make it to complex for you so far? Now people think you building sucks and only want to pay you thirty million dollars for it. You got that part ie no matter what you are asking or what you hoped for you will only break even. You got it, are your sure, I mean by now you should be able to guess exactly where there is going with out me finishing it but I suppose if your silly enough to ask the question, than an answer must follow, well, not always. So you thought no harm no foul, you are going to break even but wait, the person that designed the building wanted 5% of revenue for the design and 5% of thirty million dollars is 1.4 million dollars and you don't have the money but they are demanding it. You not what happens now, yep that last 5% sends you 'BANKRUPT', I mean like duhh, homer. Yep 1% can send you bankrupt if that 1% is more than you have to pay your debts, especially when it is 1% of revenue and not profit. 5% of profits of course is very unlikely to send you bankrupt but 5% of revenue most certainly can do it every time, especially when margins end up being tight or as sometimes is the case in gaming non-existent.

You see, they do not in fiscal reality want 5% of revenue, they want to apply a 5% tax on all investments costs of development and publishing. They want a 5% tax on all project expenditures. Now I know that will also go over your head, so I will explain it. The whole idea for the producer is that revenue will pay the full cost of development and of course generate some profit on the side, so the development cost is a wash in revenue, with profit being the focus but the game engine people want to charge a 5% tax on development costs not on profits.

Now how exactly do you decide what is fair and not fair if you never have investigations? "Is it fair to have investigation" sounds exactly like the kind of questions a very guilty party asks, hmmm. A reasonable just person would only ask about the nature of the investigation and how it was carried out, not whether it occurred or not. Yes, upon suspicion of criminal activities police investigations must always occur. The nature of the investigation logically becomes far more invasive as further incriminating evidence is uncovered or stops are relatively minor levels of invasiveness if no evidence is uncovered that warrants further investigation. Now that is totally straight up logical.

The number of grammatical cases is irrelevant. Question: What's the difference between a grammatical case without stem changes and a postposition (opposite of a preposition? Answer: A space.

  That which is challenging, apart from stem changes, is the same thing that is challenging with helper words in general: when to use what with what. Picture a person learning English and trying to remember what to use with what. "I was scolding her.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" "We were unhappy.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" "She was dedicated.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" And so forth. It's the same for people trying to learn which declension case to use in which context. But if the declensions are just suffixes without stem changes, then they're no different from postpositions. And often stem changes where they occur follow pretty predictable rules, often for pronunciation reasons.

I misread the the article's title as "Douche Telecom Call for Google and Facebook to be Regulated like Tacos." I'd misplaced my computer glasses.

Well, this is the thing about civil disobedience. The classic formula is to keep up awareness of your issue by forcing the government to go through the embarrassing and drawn-out process of prosecuting and punishing you. I'll bet they had to drag Thoreau kicking and screaming out of that Concord jail cell when some joker finally came along and paid his poll tax for him. Holding court for his admirers in the town pokey no doubt suited his purposes nicely.

In that spirit, this announcement is very effective. When was the last headline you read about Edward Snowden? If he comes back for a long and drawn out trial that'll show he's pretty hard core about this civil disobedience thing -- if leaving a cushy, high paying job in Hawaii with his pole-dancing girlfriend to go to fricken' Russia wasn't enough.

It occurs to me, though, that this situation is a lot like what I always say about data management systems: the good ones are easier to replace than the bad ones. Likewise the better governments, the ones with at least some commitment to things like due process, are much easier to face down with civil disobedience than ones where being a political threat gets you a bullet in the head, like Ninoy Aquino or Boris Nemtzov. If Snowden *does* come back, and if he ends up "detained" in limbo somewhere, then it'll be time for everyone to go into the streets and bring the government down.

Everyone likes getting paid. And all things being equal, everyone likes getting paid *more*.

But one thing I've noticed is that the people who are most dissatisfied with their current pay also happen to be the most dissatisfied with their working conditions overall, particularly how they feel treated. The feeling seems to be that if they ought to get more pay to put up with this shit.

Now I wouldn't suggest to any employer, particularly in tech, to economize by offering low salaries. You want to attract and retain the best people you can. But this suggests to me that many employers would do themselves a favor by paying a little more attention to worker happiness. If you're paying people approaching (or even more than) $100,000, there's bound to be a lot more cost effective ways to goose worker morale than handing out raises they'll perceive as significant.

But oddly many employers seem to think paying someone's salary is a license for handing out indignities. This doesn't even qualify as penny wise pound foolish.

What is gasoline if not a liquid? And what is liquid but a fluid? Therefore I should be able to run my car on hot air. So not all fair use is parody, nor is everything an author has to put up with fair use.

Fan fiction falls into that last category. Some authors encourage it, which is gracious; others are paranoid about it, which is understandable. But ultimately no matter how they feel about fan fiction they're going to have to put up with it. A successful work of fiction fires peoples' imaginations, and in the Internet era that means they're going to share their imaginings with like-minded people. Trying to police fan-fiction in a world where anyone can set up a blog or social media account to share it is like spitting into a hurricane force wind.

But even though a successful author pretty much has to put up with fan fiction whether he likes it or not, it's ridiculous to think that any author is somehow obligated to promote it. That just a fan-fiction author's fantasy. Authors have lives too, and there is not enough hours in the day for an author to police the stuff, much less to negotiate business deals for the people who write it. It's considered bad manners to even ask an author for the name of his literary agent, because an agent is supposed to work for an author, which he won't be able to do if he's swamped with requests from wannabes.

It would be my pleasure to see the whole lot of them have the actual text of the law applied to them as though they were a tattooed black guy with multiple priors.

We often have suitable laws; but they just mysteriously never even get brought up, much less by people in a position to do something about them.

Well, it's an open question of who's living in a fantasy world. I'm actually old enough to remember these people. Show me a Republican today who'd be as aggressive as Nixon on regulation. Who would sign the Clean Water Act, or the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or appoint someone like Elliot Richardson the head of HEW. Nixon also took the single most intrusive act of economic intervention ever by an American president (including FDR): the wage-price freeze. It's fair to say that there's nobody in national politics anywhere on the spectrum that would undertake a step like that. For one thing it was hopeless; there is no way to stop incipient runaway inflation without restricting the money supply and reducing government deficit spending so as to induce a temporary contraction of the economy.

A generation ago, Paul Wolfowitz was on the left fringe of the Democratic party. People change.

Nelson Rockefeller was to the left of Hillary. So was Richard Nixon.