Doh ... Senor, not senior.

Yo soy el stupido. :-P

but THE Isaac Asimov !!!

El Senior Isaac Asimov. :-P

Part of the problem with the recent agency flubs is lack of focus on the part of the agency, something that is the responsibility of Congress.

For example the Secret Service was once a part of the Treasury Department, and had a relatively narrow set of missions. However with the creation of the monumental cluster fuck known as the DHS, the Secret Service was uprooted and badly placed under the DHS, then saddled with all sorts of diversions.

Similarly the CDC has been loaded up with all sorts of ridiculous crap like being made responsible for bicycle lane safety and policing of farmers markets. This is a world leading organization that must function at the highest level possible. Loading it up with cruft will destroy it.

Recently I've seen a lot of yammering about some of the people that are seen on TV including Freidman and Fauci, to the effect that they are incompetent and should be shown the door.

I'm sorry but this makes me want to throw up. Anthony Fauci is one of the greatest Americans of this age. His work on HIV/AIDS has saved millions of lives. He is one of the most cited scientists in the world. It is disgusting that he should be subjected to the hysterical politics of the moment.

While this is a Fox News topic, the comments are not as bad as what you would get there.

For example not one reference to Obola yet.

With all the extra mass of the ship, is this really more efficient than just strapping on some flippers?

At this stage it just looks like a special-interest art project, or a sculpture you can sit in. Video of it being used in more than 1 metre of water would make this more interesting.

Wet subs aren't new, and they can be far more efficient because the shape can be much more hydrodynamic than the human body, thus eliminating excess energy expenditure. They can also be used to haul more tanks around, or rearrange your tank to be more streamlined.

Wet subs ain't new, even human powered ones. They've come in all configurations as well - from ones where the diver is just sitting out to ones with canopies. Usually they're for really small torpedo subs, but there are wet subs used by the military that are meant to carry 3-4 SEALs.

I'd rather go with stable than EXTREME, so I go with Intel. It might not be the fastest around, but we rarely hear about Intel SSD problems.

For SATA SSDs, there's no more extreme. All modern SSDs saturate a SATA-3 bus. If you wonder why they all benchmark at 540MB/sec reads and writes, that's why - SATA is the bottleneck, not the SSD.

PCIe SSDs are where the "extreme" ones go, and even the most conservative ones are pretty damn fast - the old MacBook Air's SSD clocks in at 750MB/sec read and write. I think the newer ones can hit 1GB/'sec now easy.

As for what to buy, well, Samsung, Intel and Toshiba are the general safe bets. Even with this bug, Samsung is still stable, just slow.

Intel's got a history of failure as well, but they seem to have gotten beyond it, and while they're not stunners, they generally are solid.

Toshiba's on the slower end of the scale, but Apple uses them, so they can't be TOO bad.

And yes, I say Apple, but you can see what Dell uses as well. The big OEMs that ship lots of units will generally pick ones that give the least warranty and support issues and thus are more conservative. Plus, recalls are expensive.

If you want to follow someone - pick Apple. Given the way news coverage is, if there's a problem with someone somewhere and their SSD in their Apple product, the whole world would know in a nanosecond. Someone as heavily scrutitinized as Apple (where even one failure in millions of computers sold would probably bring about SSD-gate) means if there is a real problem, you'd already know.

Instead, I spend plenty of time in meetings, coordinating with fellow programmers, working through issues like their code sucks (and for some reason I can't figure out, they think my code sucks), strange emotional attachments they feel towards Visual Studio (even though it costs over $10000 for the full version). And that's only fellow programmers......figuring out what customers, management, vendors all want is another issue (and it's important).

You obviously are in a "software engineering" position, when you really want a "code monkey" position where you're just handed the task, you code it up and submit it.

Just get yourself demoted, you'll have to take a pay cut, but them's the breaks - once you start rising in rank, your need to interact with others increases. Why? So those below you don't!

And if you're in such a fortunate position, you have to realize that coding is one seriously annoying part of the job. Yes, I do all the meetings and all that, and I give most of the coding jobs to others underneath me. It's called delegating.

Hell, try it sometime - once you learn to delegate and trust people, you can do what I like - assign the crummy tasks you don't want to do to someone else :).

And yes, it's also meant I've had to give up many interesting tasks as well - all in the name of efficiency. I don't want to be the bottleneck, so I have to know to give up those tasks too.

Yes, I said coding was getting annoying - because the more fun part of the job ends up being the problem solving part. Seeing the problem, devising a solution that's not only implementable, but also minimizing risk, and then decomposing the solution into tasks that can be mapped to the appropriate programmer with the appropriate skill.

Heck, I even try to minimize the amount of code I have to write.

I have never seen a set of traffic lights on a 70mph dual carriage way. Usually they have a reduced speed limit to 40 or 50 in the run up to the lights. Actually a hell of a lot of dual carriageways have a limit much lower than 70 even though that is the standard national speed limit for them.

And very few motorways have traffic light on the main bit of road where you can do 70mph. On the exit slip road you should actually be stationary or nearly stationary when you get to where the lights are so you can give way to traffic already on the roundabout.

The reason you are not supposed to run red lights, ever, is because if you could not stop in the UK then you must have been exceeding the speed limit in the approach. The duration of the amber light is tuned with this in mind.

The truth is that very few speed limit signs are hidden in the manner you describe. Lets be honest, the vast majority of the time us drivers exceed the speed limit we do so knowing we are doing it, we just do not think we will get caught. We know what the speed limit is on most roads we drive down, we just sometimes push them as we are in a hurry. We are probably driving in a generally safe manner, we are just doing it too quickly.

The thing is though, speed limits do exist for a reason. They are there to force us to account for the unknown: children running into the road, morons pulling out of side streets and not looking, us getting a blowout due to something to small to see in the road. The chances of these things happening are all pretty minuscule but since we all drive everywhere so much these small odds multiple so it always happens to someone in the end and the fallout can be catastrophic and expensive for the city to clean up afterwards.

Speed limits are also actually a way of us being more flexible with other driving rules, like paying attention to where you are going. Sometimes people do some really stupid crap on the roads. Like trying to find a CD to put on and veering on to the wrong side of the road, answering the phone in our pocket that is awkward to get to, looking at maps, turning round and shouting at the kids in the back, this list could go on for ever. As it is we can do this with a certain degree of impunity as the worst that would happen is we wrote off our car and someone else's the vast majority of the time. If everyone could drive everywhere as fast as they liked the police would have to be far more ruthless at enforcing other aspects of the traffic laws, maybe even down to banning persistant offenders until they got the message.

Sometimes I actually think this might be a better idea, then I catch myself doing some of the stupid crap I describe :)

Finally a way to eliminate creationists, Republicans, anti-vaxxers, organic food consumers and climate change deniers from the human race!

I don't mind analytics in general, but don't assume that they will help rescue your favorite show by proving that there is a big following. Managers will just slice and dice the analytics until it "proves" that the show doesn't have a big enough viewership to continue.

Even worse, it doesn't matter if 10,000,000 watch a show.

The Neilson numbers come in several forms. The ones you see daily are called "Live and Same Day" (L+SD), which counts views that watched the show live and within 24 hours of airing. Other numbers you can easily find are Live+3 days (L+3) and Live+7 (L+7).

But none of those numbers are actually used by anyone. That's why Neilson gives them out for free. No one's paying for that information, nor will they ever. And that's not where they make their money.

The real money is in the C3 number, or if you're CBS, you convinced advertisers to take C7 numbers. What are these? They're commercial ratings (for programming watched live to 3 days later). Basically you take the L3/L7 numbers, strip out the numbers while the program is showing, and you're left with just the numbers related to the advertising. And that's the number that makes Neilson money and the number stations pay money for. And yes, you skip ads on your DVR, which pull down those C3 numbers because it lowers the viewers for the advertising.

And that's because the largest source of income is advertising. Sure they get some through cable fees and Hulu and iTunes/Amazon/DVD etc. sales, but that's a tiny fraction of advertising.

CBS managed this season to convince advertisers to pay the C7 rate rather than C3, because well, it more accurately reflects today's lifestyle of people who record a show and watch it later in the week.

And that's all that matters. It doesn't matter if you can find 100,000,000 people to watch a show - if it's not reflected in those 100,000,000 people watching the ads.

It also brings up cord cutters who prefer to download their TV programming from torrents and such - as far as the industry is concerned, they don't care because those people don't add to advertising ratings.

Even under the new system - the new system just means that Neilson can more accurately measure their ratings, but if you're not watching the ads, it means jack squat to the producers.

So that super popular show people pirate? Guess what, the TV industry really doesn't care - you never were a "customer" and it doesn't matter if only 1M people watched it on TV while 100M people watched it off torrents - if those 1M people can't justify the ad rates and production costs, it's getting canned. The 100M other people? Too f'in bad - if it was that good, they should've watched it with ads.

If you ever wondered why worrying over TV piracy has subsided, that's one reason (who cares about pirates - they obviously don't care about their TV show), the other is they've found legal streaming to be even better. Because if they put a stream online to watch programming, they can make it such that you can't skip ads, and that's actually worth something - enough to pay for the effort of putting an online stream up. So you beat both DVR owners and appear as a hero for making a legal source available.

Bonus material - 2014-2015 TV season ad rates (30 second spot). This is what brings in the money.
http://variety.com/2014/tv/new...

How about building your tech stack so that it can be scaled up/down on-demand? I'm using Rackspace and we have dedicated servers along with cloud servers. I can add or remove cloud servers as needed and also have the load balancers updated.

If you're just doing reads against a database, it's straightforward to add additional replicas (we use MongoDB with replica sets, don't have enough data for sharding yet). If you need to do any processing, then you should build a grid compute system where you can just add additional compute nodes. We're using RabbitMQ along with Celery. Granted, this strategy ignores issues like a saturated network, but our provider is responsible for dealing with that.

So they need to spend thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a situation that crops up ... virtually never? And you want to talk about "government waste"?

I mean, vehicle recalls are rare. Other than GM recalling a new line of cars every day this year it seems,

I mean yeah, they COULD spend their time and effort making a system that scales from a majority of 0 people looking for their car recall information to 5M people looking in a single day, wasting millions of dollars in service fees and development costs for something that "might happen".

Perhaps the government isn't wasting as much money as we thought if we use it so its infrastructure can scale up in the rare-to-never case that it needs to, right?

(Yes, the government wastes a bunch of money. But to then suggest it waste more?)

Google (like Apple), wants your credit card info for the play store

You can have an account without a credit card on both.

It's just a bit tricky, and it relies on the fact that if you try to make an account through "the front door" then yes, you need a credit card or other payment option.

But if you go through the "back door" it works just fine.

For iOS, what you do is you try to buy a FREE app. This will ask you to create an account, and will not ask for payment details (because the app is free). And now you have an account without an attached credit card.

Android is the same - just buy a free app.

Not really. You cannot launch an app that's not signed in iOS to run on that specifically device, thereby all this process just wouldn't work in iOS for instance.

It also wouldn't work in OSX unless you deactivated the permissions to run only Mac Store apps (which many of the people do though).

OS X's default permission for GateKeeper is Mac App Store and Developer Signed Apps. It has never been Mac App Store only. The other option is well, "off" (any source).

And it'll always remain that way because people do buy apps elsewhere (there are categories of apps the MAS will not have, such as demos, drivers, utilities (that cannot be sandboxed), etc.)

So if your payload was signed, then yes, it'll run on OS X just fine. Though if it's particularly virulent, Apple will probably revoke the signing certificate, thus making the payload non-executable by default.

Though there is also another nuance to it - GateKeeper only works from untrusted sources - if you compile an application from source code, even though it's unsigned, it actually will NOT pop up a warning because it came from a trusted source (the compiler). Ditto apps installed from optical media. The untrusted source here would be the Internet.

So yeah, the trick will work on OS X. Though to be honest, it seems like a rather roundabout way to do things when the user will just double-click the file anyways.

The trick appears more like those videos and crap that try to get you to install "codec packs" which don't do anything other than install malware on your machine.

For example, if a gaijin resident is caught with light marijuana -> Jail time or deportation.

That's relatively minor compared to other countries in Asia, where importation of drugs is smuggling, and smugglers get the death penalty. No if, ands or buts. They find drugs on you, you're dead within the week. If you're lucky, the newspaper articles will read "Drug smuggler arrested and sentenced to death".

Oh yeah, and some of those countries neighbour unofficial drug producing countries as well.

Others are well, if you use a gun in commission of a crime, even if it wasn't fired, increases the penalties to 5 years in jail, if someone was killed, death penalty.

Oh yeah, it wasn't some Podunk backwoods country either - it was a modern metropolis.