It's pretty hard to blame a private company that made a movie about killing a current head of state?

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

Take advantage of the system

(1) Find the best college or community college that'll have you as an English teacher
(2) Teach English for small $
(3) Take advantage of the perquisite that you get to take some amount of free classes because you are faculty
(4) Finish an associates in a STEM field. An associates is transferrable, even if credits are not (I suggest microbiology)
(5) Either transfer as a student, or, if it's a good college, finish your bachelors degree there
(6) ...While still teaching, if you can; 1-2 years experience teaching at a college level puts you higher on the hire list

NB: "Good college" is relative; you will generally get out of any program what you put into it.

People without CS degrees tend to lack the vocabulary necessary to communicate efficiently with their peers about CS topics in situations where they are required to work on a team. Big "O" notation, names of algorithms, breadth of algorithmic knowledge, etc..

If you are not going to be working on a team (and it's the rare company who does not believe they will become larger in the future), then a portfolio of previous work is generally acceptable.

Because companies believe they will grow, you are most suited to being a consultant, or, alternately, working for a consulting firm.

I've frequently considered creating a "vocabulary test", along the lines of those multiple choice test games passed around on Facebook; the problem with doing that, however, is people would "learn to the test"; and while it would be a form of education for them, as a result they would successfully get their foot inside the door of place where they would ultimately not be successful. This would not be a service to either them, or the places which hire them. To be effective, it would have to end up growing to the point that it might as well be a certification exam. And still, people would learn to the test, instead of having any depth of knowledge necessary to communicate with those who do.

he idea of moving the population to local cities where they can use public transportation especially in less dense areas like the United States, just won't happen. If you tell the population that they need to move from their houses which they have put a lot of money in, and live in an area the matches how they want to live and go to a crowed loud crime ridden city, will cause a lot of people to put a gun to your face, whether or not it is legal to have guns.

bah. Worked out well for Stalin, didn't it?

Told kid about nano-cam dust today. He's only 4 years old, so he didn't know about them yet, and I'm trying to teach him basic hygiene. I explained for that for nearly a a hundred years we have all lived in an environment where other peoples' cameras are always in our homes. We track them in, on our shoes. The AC intake blows them in. The servers the cameras send video too, aren't owned by people who are practicing subterfuge. It's not like they snuck "spy" dust onto our porches in the hopes we'd track them in. It just happens; it's an inevitable consequence of the stuff blowing around everywhere.

My great grandparents complained about it. They thought they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes, because nanotech was new. They didn't see the dust, so they didn't know it was there. In the absence of sensual confirmation, the default expectation (at least to the layman) was that it wasn't there. That was naive, but my grandparents didn't work with nanotech or even use consumer models themselves, so perhaps their ignorance could be forgiven. (Just as my own ignorance of hyperspace can perhaps be forgiven, since I'm not a miner.)

My grandparents, though, grew up with the stuff, though it was still a bit expensive, so it wasn't totally ubiquitous yet. By their time, almost everyone at least knew about it, and if in a gathering of any five people you were to say "nobody sees me inside my home," chances were there would have been a few guffaws and someone would likely point out that the statement was likely incorrect. Sometimes the stuff got innocently tracked into your house, and sometimes it was manipulated into getting there, through subterfuge. The law and social norms lagged, though, and people debated privacy a lot.

By the time their children (my parents) grew up, though, it was all over. Everyone knew about nano-cam dust, and unless you did a rad-flash a few minutes earlier, fucking in your own bed was just as public as doing it in Times Square.

And now my kid knows too. It's just something everyone is expected to know about and deal with. If I were to write a story about it, I think I would set the story in the time of my grandparents, back when society was truly conflicted and in the midst of change. I bet those were interesting times.

Linking Drought and Los Angeles: Easy To Do

Northern California sends most of their water south to Los Angeles so that they can grow water intensive crops like walnuts, rice, avocados, etc., when other crops would take hugely less water (but not be as profitable). Sadly, agribusiness pays a deeply discounted price than the rest of us, so we're effectively subsidizing their shrinking water bills with our ballooning ones.

If Los Angeles would just *catch* their run-off, instead of dumping it into the ocean using their huge drainage system you tend to see in Terminator movie car chases, and walked down at the end of Buckaroo Banzai, they wouldn't need to take all the water from Northern California, or most of the water from the Colorado river.

How much of the recent torrential rains in California that happened to land in the Los Angeles area do you think ended up in storage systems, vs. the ocean? I'll give you a hint: not a lot.

The human don't have to bother with smashed jars of pickles...

"Smithers! Release the Roomba!" "Yes, Mr. Burns head."

This is a brilliant idea!

More webcasts should have funerals, so we can bury them and move on, and there will be one less webcast!

People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast

Why are there only jobs on the coast?

I think this is the real root of the problem. Everybody wants to cram into (for example) Silicon Valley - because it's where the best paying, most stable jobs are. Why can't these employers employ workers elsewhere. I've actually worked for a company that tried that tactic. Guess what? During hard times, (or mergers), they tend to shut remote sites down, and the workers are laid off or uprooted.

But yeah - a lot of problems would be resolved if employment were more distributed.

If you were going to ask a "someone" how they meant to define "derived work", you would ask Congress, not the author(s) of one out of a million contracts which happen to make use of that term.

You're right that it's upsetting that (mostly) people who don't really work with copyright would end up answering it, but that's the nature of law, or at least until you start electing[/appointing/etc] authors. (Cynic: or until those people start funding election campaigns.)

It's only after you have determined that something is a derived work, that you go study licenses. Until that point, licenses are irrelevant.

I think the relevant points got left out... the summary missed the most interesting parts:

1G L2 - all of graphics memory now fits in the L2 cache

14nm design - someone needs to update Wikipedia; they can probably clock it faster than the op speed listed there

Quad core - this thing may be in the next MacBook Air

Memory bus - Apple's memory bus is still faster than everyone else's by a mile; pays to have the Alpha->NetScaler->PA Semi guys on the payroll

This things is probably going to beat the pants off every other ARM chip in a while. Oh yeah, forgot: they're already sampling.

Then don't expect things which depend on cookies to work, or bitch about them when they don't. You expect them to do a geolocation by IP address each time you make a request? How is your IP address any less identification than a non-cross-site cookie? And it's not all that accurate (e.g. if you use onion routing, it's random, and if you use a VPN, it's constant for the VPN location), so you're screwed if you browse that way.

You mean like the Spanish people pulling out of the country?