If you are not doing active improvements, planning for failover, and using good configuration management techniques then your slow time is adding to the number of hurry-up-and-fix-all-the-things times. There are always external matters like heartbleed that will come along, as a sysadmin's job is not to review the memory allocator in the SSL library regularly. However, if your web services or mail services are down because a single system went offline then you're to be blaming yourself.

The companies that offer the energy now are in many cases (but not all) the best positioned to invest in future energy sources. They have distribution networks with rights of way for oil, gas, and electric. Deep geothermal needs drills just like gas and oil does. The gasoline sellers have the convenience stores for quick charging stations, battery swaps, or refills of hydrogen or methanol for fuel cells.

If you cut investment in energy companies that plan on being at the forefront of investment of any viable new energy model, all you're doing is making it harder for them to invest in those new models. The worst case is that by cutting investment in the energy giants this way you start a long, protracted battle between new energy companies and old ones rather than getting the old ones excited about new ways to sell energy.

GnuTLS, which recently people were being told to avoid in favor of OpenSSL. You see, there was this bug...

That's all true and correct. When you do that, though, you need to do at least as good a job as what you're circumventing. In this case OpenSSL didn't.

Hydrogen _is_ both fuel and air. So is methane (sort of). Oxygen is not fuel. Oxygen is oxidizer. Hence the "oxi" in "oxidizer".

Visual Studio Express is Microsoft's zero-cash programming environment. Why do you want a high-cost office suite with a lousy macro engine to be discounted to free when they already offer their actual development suite pro bono. It's upgradeable to more complete Visual Studio versions later. This will encourage Microsoft-centric code, but that can be avoided and it's less specific of a tie-in than VBA. C#, C, C++, and more are included.

If you don't want to be tied to Microsoft-specific tools even on Windows there are other options. Those include other office suites and other actual development tools.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice have OOBasic and can be scripted with Python and Java if you really want. These things are zero-cash and open source.

You can use Lazarus and FreePascal (Wikipedia article about FreePascal) or Eclipse and Java/C/C++ if you'd rather. Or you could use Eric and Python. Or Padre and Strawberry Perl, complete with MinGW. Some of the IDEs are more or less general and language agnostic, while others are mainly narrowly targeted.

Don't forget MsysGit (git for Windows) if you're not using Cygwin and haven't already chosen a version control system.

Really, you could be teaching with a good programmer's editor rather than specifically with IDEs too. vim, Emacs, jEdit, Gedit, and others are applicable. Some of them are powerful enough to make that line between editors and IDEs very fuzzy.

What, exactly, would a free copy of Word get you that isn't already available?

Hell, you can get a decent non-enthusiast desktop with the new operating system for under $400 now. What people should be bitching about is how much hassle it still is for the average non-geek to get the applications from the old XP machine to the new shiny 7 or 8 machine with settings intact.

Actually OS X is free now if you own the hardware. The hardware is expensive, though.

In the US there's a good chance that medical office software mentioned needs to be upgraded by October to deal with ICD-10 anyway. Anyone who does that large of a code change and still won't support a newer operating system than XP needs to not be writing software that stores medical data.

P is things known to be solvable in polynomial time on a classical computer. NP is things that may be solvable on a classical computer in polynomial time given some discovery we've not yet made. Therefore NP may be (but probably isn't) a subset of P.

See the subject.

NP-Hard is not the same thing as NP-Complete the last time I checked. Neither is NP yet known to be non-P nor P. That's why it's NP (nondeterministic polynomial). P would never be equal to NP. NP may be a subset of P. There are problems that are both NP-hard and NP-complete, but not all NP-hard problems are NP-complete. That means that solving one NP-hard problem is not necessarily equivalent to solving the NP-complete problem set.

Houston, for one, so long as you're one of the first few cars at the light.

It would also make higher-alcohol distiller's beer available so less energy has to go into distilling for hard liquor or for fuel alcohol.

In your dream world you'd involve two huge government bureaucracies when one accomplished the recall without the other? I can see handing off from one to the other if they were still causing the problem and the first agency was unable to change the behavior. Maybe we should think a bit before pulling in all the coordination costs up front though when they may not be necessary.

No, the government doesn't decide how many car dealerships for a manufacturer there are in a region. That's between the manufacturer and the dealers.

"The widespread franchise rules giving car dealers virtual monopolies in their territories epitomize the government-controlled marketplace Republicans purportedly despise". No. The regulation we're talking about here is whether or not car dealers can ban direct manufacturer-to-consumer sales. There is no government regulation of which I'm aware on geographical monopoly areas for dealerships.

In states that ban direct sales of cars to consumers there's an enforced oligopoly of dealers for new cars. It is nothing close to a monopoly. There is a distinct difference.