Code monkeys are, and that's the way that managers who hire code monkeys like it.

There are plenty of programmers out there creating interesting and useful new software, and plenty of customers/clients willing to pay serious money for the value that software offers them without all the unnecessary bureaucratic overheads and middle management crap.

If you are a good programmer and professional in your general conduct, you owe it to yourself not to be a code monkey for anyone, IMHO. You have to be really, really unlucky with the time and place when your current gig(s) run out not to have better options in 2014.

If you're developing on a platform as developer-hostile as that and you're locked into it so your business can't port to other platforms if necessary, I would submit that you have bigger strategic problems and long-term risks than merely being a small company. An arrangement like that is an axe hanging over the head of almost any size of company and you have absolutely no control over when it might fall.

(No, I don't develop iOS apps or write console games, despite occasionally getting enquiries in those fields, and this is why.)

Don't disregard manufacturing and management savings. Space-X seems determined to be the least expensive way to put stuff in LEO by far, and if we can put lots more stuff in LEO we can do a whole lot of things with spacecraft. As Stalin said about the Red Army in WWII, "Quantity has a quality all its own."

Do they do a test before they get elected to ensure that no one with an IQ of over 60 can be elected? It seems statistically unlikely that we've developed such an awesome collection of concentrated dumbass in one place on earth without actually trying to do so.

If there's a general perception that a stock is undervalued, people try to invest money by buying stock. This raises the price until people in general don't think it's undervalued any more.

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.

A polygraph can be good at determining if somebody's nervous, which is not a good indicator of truthfulness. It might be useful in questioning or interrogation by telling the interrogator when to press and when to let slide. This assumes that the guy being interrogated can't manipulate the machine into inaccurate readings, such as showing nervousness when being asked about something basically innocuous.

Hmm, let's see:

- technologically savvy? Check.

- Interested in/knowledgeable about cryptography/biology/chemistry? Check.

- Generally Libertarian (pro-individual-freedom) mentality? Big ol' check.

- NOT large donors to political campaigns? Good chance of another check here.

Sounds like yes, we as a group do indeed meet the Fascist, er Federal Government's definitions of "terrorist."

Any attributes I failed to list, that makes our community a target for clandestine government agencies?

I'm kinda surprised you chose C# as:

A. Radically different from java
and
B. "Fine for small projects"

I code for work in C#, and for fun in either python or whatever is topical to the project.

I used to code for work in python, and for fun in C#, and before that any mixture of java, C, assembly, and scripty-fu-fu suited my professors.

Republic comes from the Latin "res publica", and normally means a government or country not headed by a hereditary monarch. That leaves a lot of room for all sorts of governing systems. The US is a republic and a democracy (or at least used to be, and can be again). The UK is a democracy but not a republic. Nazi Germany was a republic but not a democracy. North Korea is not a republic (with three Kims in a row, I'm calling it a monarchy) and not a democracy.

My observation is that, the more democratic-sounding adjectives (other than a people or place name) are tacked on to "Republic", the less likely it is to be a democracy. You do not want to live in a Democratic People's Republic.

Because they care not? :(

You don't think you do, today, but that doesn't mean you don't, nor does it mean you won't at some point in the future.

The fact that governance is dynamic and contingent solely on the whims of a handful of powerful people are precisely why everyone, yourself included, should actually care about the government snooping on private information.

Oh, that and fetish sex. Because there's nothing wrong with fetish sex, but I'd bet most people who are into that sort of thing want to keep it hidden regardless.

No, but the first one will turn out to be a cheap knockoff with out of date hardware that only gets a tenth of the advertised resolution and fails to work when it's cloudy outside.

Also the user manual will be so bad, they won't figure out how to use it until 2045.

If there is a god, they wanted to take a good look inside whether the stuff is still in there.

1914? Are you high?

Businesses are so intertwined internationally that it is virtually impossible to start a war with anyone without offending at least half the businesses in your country. And that's something no government on this planet can afford.