Mixture of things:

1. In many states, the community-college system is still heavily subsidized, while the flagship schools have been moving towards a "user-pays" model. For example, the state of California has cut its per-student subsidy to the University of California system by about 60% in real terms over the past 30 years, but has cut their per-student subsidy to the community-college system by only about 20%.

2. Community colleges typically are looser in who they'll hire to teach classes: no PhD required, can teach part-time, no research expectations, etc. Like with any field, if you have lower requirements, you can get staff for lower salaries, e.g. hiring C++ programmers vs. web designers.

3. Prestigious universities have suffered more administrative bloat, I guess because it's where the prestige is, so attracts empire-builders. Community colleges don't pay their President $500k/yr, or have an army of Assistant Vice Chancellors.

4. To be a "top school" there are higher expectations of the other resources provided besides the actual classes. A community college typically has a small or no library, while UC Berkeley is expected to have a full-coverage research library. UC Berkeley is also expected to provide good laboratory and computing facilities, dorms, security and healthcare for an on-campus resident population, etc.

Also, the pained facial expressions might be related to the lack of tacos and/or tequila drinks.

Let's not be unfair now: Comrade Dice has clearly indicated that the people's wishes are being fully consulted, and the New Slashdot will only be rolled out in such a manner as to benefit us all.

Often it is done in HTML5 too, by the same people. I've uninstalled several websites' apps because the apps were actually less featureful, slower, and buggier than just using the website in a mobile browser. A common organizational reason for this is when the mobile app was contracted out to a third party dev shop as a one-off. When it first came out, it might've been on par or better than the mobile site. But then it never gets updated, because it was just an outside contract job, while the website is actually maintained and quickly surpasses the bitrotting mobile app.

There's always the idea the U.S. Founding Fathers had: citizens should join a defensive militia, but not a standing army.

If they want to use other services, then they can damned well build their own.

That seems to be kind of what Angela Merkel is proposing? The whole proposal is: Europe should build their own online services and stop using America's.

They do actually have the cables and backbone. Despite the weird wording she doesn't seem to be talking about an actual European network, since that already exists: if you ping from Sweden to Italy it goes through Germany, Austria, etc., like you'd expect. The problem is that many of the successful hosted services are in the USA, so while the ping stays within Europe, when you email from Sweden to Italy, it probably hits up Gmail in the USA.

Well yeah, Merkel isn't really worried about the German police reading email. If she were, she could do something about that problem more easily...

However I think in addition to being worried about US snooping, this is also a convenient opportunity for promoting local technology firms. If a bunch of people move from Gmail to European email providers, that's good for the European tech industry regardless of whether it actually hampers spying.

I don't see why failing to return material goods should be worse than failing to return money. If someone didn't return a $50 DVD, just turn it into a $50 defaulted loan and send it to collections.

It's not theft if someone actually lent it to you in the first place.

If I take $1000 from you without your permission, that's theft. If you lend me $1000 for a week and I fail to repay it after a week, that's nonpayment of debt, not theft.

To be fair to the Marines, the CG render in Lockheed's pitch video really made the V/STOL capability seem like a must-have.

Pretty much all these quantitative sociology studies turn out to be questionable. Between populations of convenience and these hokey numerical personality tests, the results don't inspire that much confidence.

Even though in my day job I do statistics, when it comes to social science I often find qualitative anthropology/ethnography-style research, where researchers actually get out there in communities, try to understand them, and talk to people, quite a bit more informative. Especially for preliminary understanding where it's not often even clear what a phenomenon's broad characteristics are, and therefore difficult to design an intelligent quantitative study with useful metrics.

Alas, this kind of stuff gets more citations and press, because sampling 5000 people and rating them on a 0.0 to 10.0 personality scale using a questionnaire seems superficially more scientific... 'cause it's got numbers.

Works pretty well in Norway! Its nationalized oil sector sends the majority of oil profits to the state-run National Oil Fund, which has accumulated nearly $800 billion in assets to be used for the benefit of future generations of Norwegians.

My guess is it's a takeoff on the classic sysctl.

Ah yes, the other reason there are no good engineering managers: someone who is actually focused on managing their team well, rather than playing corporate-politics games in the higher echelons, might well get fired.