"Wesley Wark"

Wow, I really misread that name...

Completes? makes official?

Although apparently some US Professor once said "any noun can be verbed"... ... not on this side of the pond matey!

What strange units are these? You must use "widths of a human hair", "x football fields", "y Olympic sized swimming pools", etc.

It's more like ranching or fishing. The cattle and fish are not customers, they are your feedstock or raw materials. Treat them badly, over-fish, poison them and you have no feedstock and hence no revenue. Google gets this fairly well, they actively farm their users giving them plenty to feed on, and doing their best not to pollute the food supply (i.e. search results in google's case) they also add in cool stuff, new toys, etc. and hence Google's customers are happy fat cows who keep coming back for more - I know, I am one!

The chances of dying are 100%. We all do it, it is just a case of when and how. As a society we are well into looking for very marginal returns - eat brocolli all your life to put off the chance of getting bowel cancer when you are 87 - and it is impossible to do valid experiments that show if measured take to mitgate one risk cause others.

I work on a large industrial site and management have voer the last few years been on a major safety push. One result of this is that they have been round and "risk assessed" all the walk ways and put barriers all over the place. The outcome is that walking from the car park to the office is now so convoluted that people just walk down the road ways. There never was any evidence that anyone was acutally injured in the areas where barriers were put up.

Documentation should be tested. You test your code (I hope) so why not test your documentation??? Like all testing the very act of thinking about how to test it will make you improve it. Then developing documentation tests will help you improve it further. Testing the documentation will further test your application (sometimes what si written in the docs is right but the app doesn't do it).

Give the applicaiton and the documentation to someone with suitable skills but no knowledge of the application and give them some tasks to do. If they can complete the task with the documenation only then great. If they ask you a question, fix the docs. EVEN if the answer to the question is in the docs, if someone asked you then it's not obvious so fix it.Find out what steps they took to find the information and put it in the logical path.

So as a Perl developer i guess he is not big on rich user interfaces? How does he propose to sucessfully convert say a Windows Forms UI to PHP?

Oh! I get it, that's out-of-scope, who needs UIs? We can all just run a bunch of command line scripts and applications.

But wait, didn't we do that already .. I seem to remember it being called Unix.

I for one welcome this bright new future!

No, religion just provides the labels. The cause of wars, and much other fighting (gangs, football hooligans, etc.) is TRIBALISM. In Northern Ireland Catholics and Protestants are fighting again, but those are just convenient labels for "native" Irish and people descended from English invaders. Much of the fighting in in the middle east is between people with different tribal allegiances, the media just finds it easier to say Sunni and Shi'a.

Just to be clear, I am an atheist and know that a lot of terrible things have been done in the name of religion but I think if we took religion away altogether, certain groups of people will still see "them" and "us" and start fighting.

Not just studies but it's been working for decades -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

Owning the Fab is a big capital cost and means the beast has to be fed but allows for more late-stage tweaking. Not owning that Fab means potentially more flexibility in choosing a process for the design. Of course ARM ahs to work with it's partners, that doesn't mean it's partners are in-flexible and far from cutting edge.

Seems like no great news, just the same old in-house vs. out-sourced debate...

Or compared to the carrying capacity of an African Swallow

Fact is if he has got a module with bugs in it and he has paid the contractor then HE HAS PAID FOR BUGS. His issue seems to be that he now lost his leverage to get the bugs fixed. He ought to insist that all code comes with a complete set of tests that ensures the code complies fully with the spec. He can then verify/validate the tests, run them and only pay when the the code is "bug free". But that would bump up the price.

It may be better to pay 50% on delivery and 50% on UAT with the proviso that if the original contractor can't/won't fix it the second 50% will go to someone else who can.

It's the other way round. Mathematics is just an abstract representation of the real world. No amount of physics, maths or theories of "everything" will cure cancer or invent the next IPhone. Patents are about (or at least should be about) the inventive step - i.e. the coming together of several elements to create something new.

Because the people at DARPA haven't heard of, or seen any of that!

See there's the thing - "a certain result" - Javascript brings about uncertain results!