I happened to watch the Barbara Walter albeit brief segment on Elon Musk last night and I was stunned that the mount of money he got not just for selling PayPal but for selling his first company to Compaq. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only have I never heard of that first company but Compaq doesn't exist anymore and who knows if HP is doing anything with what they acquired when the bought Compaq. I have the same questions about friggin' Instagram, Whatsapp, et al. Who decides what these companies are valued at and on what basis? It's clearly not based on company profits because many of them have no profits. In a lot of cases, the product or service that the company has isn't unique, is pointless fluff, or will be obsolete in short order. Or is it all about having representation, an agent or lawyer or whatever, that is able to convince others that their client is worth a lot like Hollywood agents do?

So is using the IP address the banking equivalent of the SketchFactor app? You just happen to have an ISP whose pool of addresses contains a bunch of scammers. Will this banking software decide that you too are also a scammer? What are the other "risk" factors? ACH made no judgements on the transaction.

Not quite. Race SHOULD BE irrelevant but it's most definitely not, particularly these days. Gender SHOULD BE irrelevant but it's most definitely not. What should be of the utmost importance is a person's ability. As a historical reference, look at how the chemical industry got started back in the Victorian era. A British research student discovered the world's first artificial dye. But his teachers were all German. Why? Because back then, the Germans were very good at opening universities and technical schools and letting anyone attend based on merit, never mind their family background. To the British, such behavior was very much lower-class so they blew a golden opportunity to capitalize on a totally new science which the Germans took to the bank.

The coffee is entirely too weak and the cup is friggin' plastic. People complain about water bottles but not about this.

Jeez, they couldn't have come up with this thing when I was in my teens?

The fact that this is even being brought up should tell everyone that it's not about making sure that all traffic is treated the same. Nope, nope, move along, nothing to see here.

I had an ad company try to sell me an online ad space. So I asked the salesperson what the click-thru rate was for the other advertisers on the site and she said she didn't know. I said, "It's 2014. This is the kind of data you should have at your fingertips. It's not like a print-ad where you have no clue how many people really look at an ad."

Isn't pure linux a contradiction in terms?

Insane, yes, but this was the type of corporate environment where, as a VP, head-count was a status symbol and meant you could command a bigger budget. Of course, this was also an environment that took lessons from the Fairchild Semiconductor school of rank-has-it's-privileges which often meant that higher rank garnered you better furniture and a better computer. Stupid. I once got yelled at by a petty office manager for swapping a product manager's computer with one of that manager's graphic artists at his request so the artist could do their work.

From my own experience in a mixed Windows PC/Macintosh corporate environment, the computer-to-IT staff ratio for PCs was 10:1, meaning that one IT person could handle maintaining 10 PC users. On the Mac side of things, the ratio was closer to 100:1. Given that, if IT staff can suddenly demand overtime pay, corporate is going to find a way to reduce the costs which translates to less-demanding platforms.

This makes me wonder what the development process is like in non-commercial environments versus commercials ones. COCOMO is supposed to let you estimate the time and costs of a project but that hinges on your estimation of the number of lines of code. The model also assumes that the average programmer can create a certain number of lines of code per day. Seems to me that this pace is MUCH slower in aerospace than it is at Google or Facebook. So perhaps COCOMO needs to be revised with an industry factor.

This also makes me wonder how old SpaceX's computers are.

obviously.

Recently, over on Gizmodo, et al, there was a quadcopter video flying over Pripyat and you can clearly see the reactor site in the background along with the huge dome that's being constructed. What I found interesting is that the plants seem to be doing quite well for a radiation zone.

Feh...memory pig.