This seems to be a rather natural result of a two-party, winner-takes-it-all system, or rather an electoral system that favors such systems.

I know this isn't going to be liked here, but I want to say it anyway:

One of the eternal prides of the American people is their freedom of speech. You are comparatively free to incite whatever kind of racial/ethnic/religious hatred, and the beautiful theory is that enough good speech will nullify the effects of bad speech.

I say (and have said before) this only works precisely because you don't live in a democracy, but in a system where the actual ruling class have the power do not let the government to be swayed by such popular sentiments and moreover control the sentiments by controlling media. I believe it is fair to say that historically having such freedoms in actual democracies very much tends to lead to genocides and otherwise really bad results.

I'd say the killer feature is pure remote management. You don't need to physically manage your systems anymore.

I'm the opposite. I can't stand lacking the ability to dig in and change software when I don't like the way it works. It's rare that I actually do, but there's a huge freedom I get from knowing that when I need to extend the software, I can.

It's common for commercial software to not do what I want it to, either. I'd love to have a working amazon instant video client for my Android phone.

I think the alternative minimum tax kicks in at some point and imposes a (hefty) flat tax structure.

Crusade : Babylon 5 :: Frasier : Cheers

Babylon 5 ended at the finale of season 4. Not sure what you're talking about :)

I think you're confusing "other stories set in the same universe as the show Babylon 5" with "addendums to the story of the show Babylon 5"

Right, most programmers aren't that great; there's a bell curve. When you encounter a poor programmer who dooesn't have a degree, you might be inclined to think that's why. I'll see your anecdotes and raise you one: I once saw a guy with a PHD in comp sci write a single 10,000+ loc function.

At some point in your career, everyone is their own snowflake. I'm never going to compete against a candidate that is my equal in every other way but has a degree.

I'm fortunate to be a programmer, though, because it's one of the few industries that has woken up and seen what a worthless institution our higher education system has become.

The problem with early detection is that many diseases are actually benign in their early stages, and, when detected, their detection can actually cause more harm for the patient. For instance, early cancer detection increases the likelihood that the patient will start chemo. Some cancers wind up being handled by the body, but *all* chemo treatments harm patients. So, early detection sometimes leads to more harm than benefit (plus an unfortunate issue with "success" rates - the cancer treatments get to include in their "success" count cancers that the body would have cleaned up anyway).

"Or are those contracts written so horribly that the company gets paid for a nonfunctional product?"

The problem is that a lot of these types of contracts are written with a clause such that launching them publicly is an implicit acceptance of the project as a finished product. So, since they at least tried to launch it, that means that the project is "finished", and everything else is billed hourly on top of it.

It has been over a decade since I last worked with Oracle, so things may have changed. But when I worked on an Oracle project, it cost a huge amount of money, took way too long, didn't work well, and required double the number of staff to manage the application. After Oracle left, a second company came along behind who specializes in fixing stuff that Oracle broke. This company, I don't remember its name, literally does its business as cleaning up Oracle's trash. They didn't even promise good results, only "I know how much pain you are in, we'll make it not hurt quite so much." Interestingly, this particular project wound up as a "success story" on Oracle's website.

Must be nice to be able to fail at a project such that they owed you $69 million, but you don't actually have to make it work.

Perhaps states should make a rule stating that large projects must be broken up into deliverables of $1 million increments.

Cleaning the grounds out of a french press is awful. The aeropress completely fixes that problem.