At the same time it is also true that Microsoft is famously tolerant and encouraging of software professionals. Offering software at cost (like offering me Office 2000 for a hundred bucks, way back when), providing dev tools and beta products for free or close to it, and tolerating staggering levels of out-and-out piracy...in the interest of having their products used by a truly large sample size.

If it wasn't for Microsoft, we would still be on mainframes and mini-computers. Paying jacked up prices. For crap, frankly.

The only part of the Microsoft game I don't care for is trying to ship old wine in new bottles (i.e. every version of MSOffice since 2000) and especially the force-marching of us to a worse product (the downward progression away from XP). With XP, Microsoft could have created a decent 64-bit version. They could have given us (essentially) unlimited RAM usage on 64-bit XP. And they could have left it to us to decide when to move on to a product...IFF we thought that product was better. But then they would have had to make a real effort at making future Windows products truly better.

Ohio -- more payday loan vendors than McDonald's, Burger King & Wendy's...combined.

In Oklahoma, more borrowers use at least 17 loans in a year than use just one.

In 2006 the Pentagon found that payday loans were "becoming a threat to readiness" and tightened up the rules on loans...to military personnel.

- all three from yesterday's NYTimes weekend magazine

That process works better for fungible young talent who might be plenty gifted but have no experience to set themselves apart from the pack. The best defense against seeing your job outsourced is becoming so good at it that you don't have much competition. The second best defense is becoming friends with the greybeards who are positioned to argue against the manager who wants to rightsize your job.

Its a matter of perspective though. From my perspective as a voter you are correct. If you are Reince Priebus, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz than it is a "team sport." You job is to maintain the influence of you party, you do that by winning the most elections for the most powerful offices; the most trophies so to speak.

Looking at in those terms to do you spend most of resources practicing the beat the least funded teams in the league, lets call them the Green party, the Libertarians, who you will likely beat anyway or do spend your efforts to try and defeat the big rival? Additionally do you look at your problems in things you have some control over brands, marketing strategy etc; or do spend your effort on broad policy research and development only to have half your people go rogue once elected anyway?

I think understanding politics and being effective no matter who your requires looking at it both ways, as purely competitive game, and a system of government.

Sorry, son, but society (and the Supreme Court) voted and you're wrong.

Except that just like in Broad terms Hillary's tenure as Sec State IS a failure.

I am not talking about Benghazi specifically in scandal machine since that she should have anticipated and prevent the specific attack where our ambassador was killed. However in a more abstract sense its a fine example of Hillarys failure, we "went in to Libya" with a certain set of objectives and the outcome looks nothing like that, the security and human rights situations are both worse.

Ditto for her handling of the rest of the "Arab spring". Tunisia is about the only thing you could call a policy success that happened are her watch and we had a very limited role there.

I don't think there is any major foreign policy success she can point at, other than USAID handing out a money (Which isn't exactly difficult). Our security and influence certainly did improve on her watch. She does not have any major legislative successes either as a senator. The most we can charitably say is her service in these roles was "adequate."

Back to Benghazi she immediately tried to blame it on that stupid youTube movie "the innocence Islam" or whatever the title was, and proceeded to try and prosecute the person who made it. From a communications perspective which is it? Are Islam and its followers peaceful members of a global community we can live side by side with our are they violent lunatics who consider an insult on youTube a just pretext for warfare? Do we support freedom of expression or do with stand behind the idea that censorship is sometimes called for? A leader ought to have strong positions on things things, yet only a couple short years later her take on Charlie Hebdo is almost opposite.

This is a pattern with Hillary, sure I can agree her views on crime might have reasonably evolved since the 90's if she was to run away from her husbands era of "tough on crime" fine, but in lots of other areas she is doing an awful lots of evolving awful quick, so quick it starts to look more like responding to opinion polls to me.

Then we have her handling of the "e-mail" scandal I am not saying she did anything but her handling of it did more to make it look like a coverup, which gets back to the messaging and communications problems. She should have turned the operation of that server over to a trusted 3rd party immediately, she didn't. Its a lot like all of her memory and record keeping problems from the "White water" era.

Here again even if I set the whole scandal and legal aspects aside, we are left with someone who thought in 2009 that doing State Department business on her private mail server was a good idea. What sort of judgement is that? Next Bradly Manning happens and thought all that and the opsec questions it raised she never considers that her personal IT contractors might pose the sort of risk. Apparently the vetting and monitoring of active duty intelligence personnel (however junior) did not cut it, but Clintons' "guy" could be trusted?

Near as I can tell Hillary is where she is because she married Bill, who had the talent to get himself elected governor than president. Hillary got thrust into money/power/politics and has since not blown it so badly as to loose it, but never could have got where she is on her own. Which isn't to say Carly is any better a choice. Hillary's candidacy however would be a joke (like Carly's) but for the fact the rest of the national Democratic party lacks anyone with a decent brand. They are either unknown, older than igneous rock, or the special kinda of crazy that if allowed to speak more publicly risks making Ted Cruz sound normal.

The GOP is like the Red Skins, relatively few like the brand but the individual players all find their fans, the DNC is like the Starts & Stripes, more people have a favorable view of the team just don't ask them to try and name any players.

I'm getting too old to lift those 5-gallon jugs too.

A story for those who don't understand orders of magnitude?

Except that Tesla (and Smarts, and the few other cars which use batteries manufactured by Tesla) use *the exact same kind* of battery cells as regular laptops (on purpose, because they are cheap and easy to source due to the economy of the scale at which they are produced).

The difference isn't the battery it self (it the exact same cell), it's the battery management software, and the usage pattern.

- Lithium batteries age with the number of cycle they go through. It happens really often that a laptop is drained all the way down to 0% or nearly 0% (lithium batteries hate that). Whereas most of the daily commute Tesla cars are subjected to are short trips that only eat a fraction of their charge.

- The more violent the discharge rate, the faster the lithium battery will age. Under heavy load, a laptop battery will get completely drained in hour or two max. On the other hand, given its range and typical speed limitation, it would take at least 4-5 hours to drain completely a Tesla. i.e.: overall the Tesla eats up much more total power than your laptop (obviously), but each of the cells is put to less stress as it needs to deliver a much lower peak current.

(The two above are also the reason why the *extended life* batteries (e.g.: 9 cells instead of 6 cells) in laptops tend to age much slower).

- Also lithium batteries are very sensitive to temperature / environment. Whereas it's not that much controlled in a laptop (the battery tends to be right next to very hot components like CPU and GPU), Tesla car batteries have almost their own A/C system.

so in short:
- no they are exactly the same batteries. but each takes completely different kind of abuses and thus at the end they tend to age differently.

Indeed. But on the other hand, we human tend to be social being. And we tend to appreciate contact with other humans.
Some older people would insist that they *definitely* need to interact with a human being taking order at the cash register, and they *definitely* need to see humans flipping burger in the kitchen behind.
They would find alienating to pass order to a machine and have their burger prepared by a assembly-line machine.
And add to that, that people will be down in the streets protesting that they are loosing jobs, and you can see why fast-food chains are a bit reluctant to start automate everything.

But old people get older, and newer younger generations come. And our current generation, is way too much self-absorbed to care. We are too much busy tweeting and posting on facebook while in line to even care if our orders are taken by an automat or a real person : it's just a distraction delaying us from typing a reply to a youtube comment on the smartphone.

The barriers to accelerating fast-food with assembly-line like robots isn't a technical one, but a sociological one. The fast-food companies needed that the population gets used to it.

They can, but are they? I have only seen residential solar which reacted to grid overload/underload situations (i.e. situations which should never occur in an ideal world), not any which reacted to constant requirements for reactive power. Do you know of any which take part in the standard grid stabilization in normal use, outside of grid emergencies?

Will Windows Phone thrive by being a better iOS than iOS and a better Android than Android? It did not work for OS/2 20 years ago.

No, they are not. You may be thinking of this: http://www.snopes.com/politics...

When electricity is cheap, it is because the marginal cost of producing it is low. The marginal cost is low because it does not take very much extra fuel to produce it. In other words, when electricity is cheap, its production is also less environmentally harmful. (This only holds as long as the power stations are unchanged of course.)

The Economist regularly gets this wrong by saying that electric cars are polluting more if they charge at night rather than during the day. They base this on the average pollution per kWh being higher at night. However, the average pollution does not matter. It is the marginal pollution which matters, and that is very low at night. This is really the kind of thing that economists should be specializing in getting right; I do not understand how you can be an economist and get it wrong.

Another problem is that if they do accept your CA certificate, you can issue a certificate for irs.gov and they will believe that.

The trust system in TLS is really lousy.