It's also wise to remember how Apple has fared over the years when it attempted to follow mainstream practices. Those years were usually when Steve Jobs wasn't involved and the management attempted to follow the business practices of others. On ended up with a company that tried to be SGI and Packard Bell at the same time, with predicable results.

Cook appears to have learned at least a bit of the lessons of those eras. He doesn't have to do what the alleged professionals in the business community claim to be best practices; Apple has made a lot more money over the last fifteen or so years by bucking the trend and continually changing. Don't get me wrong, my ownership of Apple products is limited to a few castoff keyboards and I'm certainly no fanboi, but they've managed to build a successful, profitable company by doing what their customers, not necessarily the business community, wants.

It's kind of like how Costco is doing well, by paying employees actual living wages so those employees work at the stores until retirement as opposed to being bled dry by corporate interest. Costco still makes money, Costco is popular among customers, employees are happy, owners are happy, and things will continue to be long-term stable for them.

If Cook manages to keep Apple going strong in the wake of Jobs' demise then this will be interesting to watch.

Home economics is about learning your way around the kitchen, basic financial stuff, etc, so you don't crash and burn immediately after 18. The equivalent to home economics isn't programming, but basic computer literacy.

And I believe everyone should take some form of home economics, and that it should not be a freshman class, but a senior one. One needs to be able to cook, clean one's living space, take care of one's clothes, handle one's personal finances, pay one's taxes, and do all sorts of other personal-life tasks. I did not take Home Ec, and I struggle with cooking and keeping my house clean and organized. My wife describes as a college student having to teach other college students how to do their own laundry when they got to the dorms and apparently never learned that basic skill. This was at friggin' MIT. They were book-smart and real-life stupid.

By contrast, computer programming is useful to only a fairly small subset of the population of even computing professionals, let alone humanity-at-large. Computer repair/desktop support technicians, network infrastructure specialists, network engineers, and even many application-support specialists won't benefit particularly from in-depth programming knowledge as they won't really need much programming in those roles, and the programming that they need can probably be gleaned from O'Reilly books and other sources. I certainly don't need a semester or year of programming in order to do shell scripting.

Basic computer usage skills do make sense, but those developing the curriculum will have to be very responsive to industry changes, which makes it difficult for such an education to be terribly practical in this era of the commoditization of computers and electronics.

For great justice

Isn't this similar to keeping COBOL code bases going as they still work even though the really good developers are dying off? At least with a codebase when things break there isn't an international emergency...

The air traffic control system used at international airports in the United States begs to differ...

Would a gaggle or reactors work better?

How about a murder of reactors?

First, they came for my tacos. But I did not speak out because I was not a taco...

Then they came for my tequila drinks. But I did not speak out because I was not a tequila drink...

Did you mean JSF, not JSOC?

The A-10 is on the chopping block, as is the U2. What I don't get about the elimination of those is that one has proven itself extremely cost-effective in close-quarters ground support (as in using bullets, rather than relying on rockets and bombs) and extremely durable when taking fire (flying back with a wing missing) and the other has been extremely effective for quick-turnaround intelligence.

Both programs are effective in the kind of engagements that we've found ourselves in during the last couple of decades and both are paid for. It's maintenance only, as opposed to development.

Far fewer gaming options on linux

How do you get Quake 3 to run on Linux, anyway?

In what car?! All modern mainstream vehicles still use a master cylinder in tandem with a booster and ABS. Even if you lose all engine power, should still be able to apply the brakes. Although it will require more force to push the pedal down, it should still be doable to bring the car to a complete safe stop.

The brakes are never adequate to overcome the power of open throttle. NEVER. One is expected to stop pressing the throttle when applying the brakes, that's why one is taught to use one foot for both functions, so that one does not push both pedals at the same time.

Braking subjects lots of parts to massive thermal changes. Those changes significantly reduce the effectiveness of the brakes after only a small amount of use. That's why race cars and other performance vehicles that are expected to have *ahem* spirited driving have much more expensive brake components, that fade less.

Lastly, look at burnout competitions. In those, someone spins their tires for as long as possible, generating smoke and noise, usually either the longest-burning or the crowd favorite wins. Unless a car has been modified to allow only the non-drive wheels to apply brakes, then the same brakes holding the car still (from a standing stop position mind you, not starting out in-motion) are easily overcame by the drivetrain. Yes, the drive wheels spinning in a burnout competition have their brakes applied and it doesn't do a thing to stop the wheels. Sometimes even the non-drive-wheel brakes are overcome in a burnout competition, and the car crashes into something.

My daily driver is a '95 Impala SS. 260hp, 330lbft torque. Tires are 255mm wide, about 10 inches, and are "W" rated, meaning that they're high-performance for grip and are capable of handling extremely high-speed rotation. On smooth, dry pavement or asphalt it's very hard to do a burnout, the car simply overcomes the brakes and takes off, and that's with probably 75% of the braking force on the front, non-drive wheels. A modern FWD car puts all of its torque into the wheels that would normally do the lion's share of the braking, so once they're overcome, the rear wheels aren't going to do squat to stop the car.

This error is VERY dangerous. The ignition key should ALWAYS overcome the throttle. The brakes should ALWAYS overcome the throttle. The gear shifter should ALWAYS overcome the throttle. Hell, even the four-way hazards should trip the computer into resetting the throttle algorithm.

You mean, because all of the texts will be sent in several eight-minute windows separated by 52 minute gaps?

Wow... couldn't pull one over on you, could I?

like totally bieberiffic!

Indeed, I expect that should a learning-capable system monitor the posted text from actual teenage females, it should be able to identify aberrations, especially if that system manages to derive proper nouns and verbs. There will certainly be regional variation, variation based on ones' interests, and variation based on maturity, but with a large enough sample size it should be possible to figure out what is average/normal and what is an outlier.

If the same system was also monitoring groups that are not teenage females, it would learn what that group uses for vernacular and over time could track the migration of speech from high school into adulthood and be able to figure out when someone uses too many previous-generation words or expressions and not enough current-generation words or expressions, to then analyze their postings further. Some precocious teenagers will speak like adults, and probably get false-positive tagged, but it's unlikely that adults could pull it off the reverse correctly for any significant length of time. Even those that work around teenagers in schools or elsewhere will most likely fall out of formal speech into their own youth slang, not current youth slang.

At that level of money, it has nothing to do with education or technology, it's about people and knowing the right people and saying and doing the right things.

Nope. One still has to have something to offer in order to command big money. There has to be some defining characteristic to set one apart. Otherwise there'd be a lot more rich sports players, a lot more rich musicians and rappers. Mr. Acton happened to have been in the right place and at the right time, and to also have had that special thing. Had he not had it to build what he built, no one would have given him a cent to buy-out the fruits of his labors.

On the other hand, buying TV or radio time in one's market is a guaranteed way of knowing that the money that you've spent is paying for something that's being properly implemented, as in locally. It's intuitive that a local affiliate station will only broadcast the ad in its geographic area. It's also fairly easy to confirm that one's ad is being played if one buys time during a given timeslot as one can simply listen to the radio or watch TV to confirm.

Buying online advertising is less intuitive. The ad agency may say that the ad is being sent to this or that geographic area, but there's no obvious way for the customer-business to confirm independently. They're stuck relying on the self-reporting of the ad agency. They're also faced with adblocking software that might retrieve the ad but not display it, skewing the results.

As the Frontline documentary said, it's much easier to confirm the success by bringing someone already-successful in to co-opt a bit of their success, to ride on the coat tails as it were. If you watch Jenna Marbles because you want to be like her or want ladies like her, if she mentions a club or venue or bar that she's hanging out at, you're likely to take notice of that. Some will add that organization to their subscriptions and may even patronize it because of it.

The danger is that it starts switching from grass-roots to astroturfing. Look at the extreme press that the various big Comic Cons get, despite them not really being much about comics and really not having different atmospheres than older conventions and even SCA and renfaires have. It's a feeding-frenzy or a feedback loop, not because there's much to really offer, but because it's massively self-referential, and I have a feeling that it too, will pass. Too many seasons of ticket unavailability will start leaving people to look for other places, and eventually another thing will become hot, and they'll stop selling-out memberships as that new thing co-opts.

You sure that it wasn't $0.19?