Pythagoras, is that you?!

A lot of those early mathematicians were a bit on the crazy side, having come to that realization and not having any of the framework for coping with the idea.

Could you put multiple network cards on your scheduler machine, put the workers on different subnets and randomly dole out the jobs between those subnets? Seems like you'd be less likely to drop UDP packets that way, I'm pretty sure I ran across a utility (lsipc or something) that would list IPC resources, including shared memory. I seem to recall that the segments also show up in /proc somewhere. It's been a while since I've looked at it.

Not being able to ack important message packets seems like a design flaw.

Even though we have a LOT more hardware now than we did back in the day, you still can't BFI your way through a lot of the big data applications that companies are starting to try to get into. In the past, the company would just throw more hardware at a poorly designed application and that would "solve" the problem. I once saw a team throw 48 gigabytes of RAM at a leaky Java program, and schedule weekly restarts for the goddamn thing. But it's a lot easier to hit hard walls with big data, to the point where you absolutely can't throw more hardware at the problem.

Are you one of the people who pays no taxes?

Pretty much every manager I've ever had thought they are. All the big companies just see you as a "resource". They don't know a thing about your actual skills. They're just buzzwords to those people.

I took nothing past Calculus either and up until two or three years ago never even used trigonometry in my professional programming. The last few years I've been writing satellite simulations, which has forced me to knock the rust off some of my old math skills. Most programmers can get away with very little math a lot of the time. A lot of very interesting programming involves a fair bit of math. That programming is generally being done by some guy with a Ph.D. in another field, and he's usually doing it in Fortran.

But it will generally affect competitors equally. Two different taxi companies, or two different electricity generating companies that use coal. Or two different hotels of the same class and size in the same city.

And since competing businesses tend to have to lower prices in order to remain competitive in the same market as they pursue the same prospective customer, the tax burden is going to raise costs (and lower margins) more or less the same for both (or several) parties.

But because such penalties impact all businesses in whatever country is collecting them, it won't really change things - because all of those businesses will simply pass along the new government-mandated increase in their overhead along in the form of higher prices. To the businesses in question, it just goes in one door and out the other. You want to use the heavy hand of the tax collector to damage people's behavior in a way that makes them go out less, drive less, spend less, do less? Tax citizens directly, with a very special line item they can't miss, that says "carbon tax, because you exist" - and they'll act. Well, mostly they'll act to elect people who will undo that tax, but they'll act.

Time to put a big pot of carbon on the barbie!

Oh, yes, that was it. "Now is a great time to unionize your labor!"

No libertarians believe that tort law protects people from negative externalities. Don't waste your energy going after weak arguments that your opponent isn't making.

There was much rejoicing among the Google+ users! All 6 of them!

Climate Change is a left-wing conspiracy hoax designed to redistribute MY hard-earned wealth to fucking POLAR BEARS!

Scuttlebutt's there's a transparent roll-up display coming soon since, what? Around 2004? Maybe even a bit earlier. OLEDs were supposed to deliver them back in the day. And yet here we are 10 years later, still no transparent roll-up display. Doesn't seem like this should be as hard as a flying car, and yet they both share the same status. I'm sure this one will be different though...

Call it Transformium!

I'm guessing. I stopped watching them last season. It really felt like they were just phoning it in, and have been since The Book of Mormon took off. At the same time, I think they (and I) probably had issues with Comedy Central's standards and practices. I'm guessing once it goes over to Hulu, the various characters will now be able to say "fuck." Knowing Matt and Trey, they're going to abuse the hell out of that in the first episode.