To pretend that the governing behaviors have a substantial correlation with the alleged governing philosophies is...empirically tenuous at best.

I imagine that it also helps (at least in terms of customer acceptance) that most of these RFID tags are probably replacing something that was as bad or worse. Keys are clonable, provide no record of use(much less timestamped logs of individual users) and if one gets into the wild re-keying the place is Not Fun. Magnetic stripe cards are trivially clonable; but on the same level as most RFID tags in terms of access logging and enabling/disabling access. Adequately rugged optical sensors have historically been pretty expensive, so bar codes, hand scanners, and any other biometric gimmicks are likely niche players.

I'd be pretty annoyed if some salesweasel lied to me about it; but it's unlikely that an RFID installation replaced something that was harder to clone, and it's still easier than keys, slightly more robust than mag stripe readers, and reasonably cheap per tag. In some ways that makes it even more obnoxious to harass the researchers, though.

Or maybe, just maybe, the US military (or any functional military for that matter) has the only organization structure, money and manpower to deal with these sorts of major threats.

Don't you watch any televison?

I know!

Let's declare war on Ebola!

Words have multiple definitions in dictionaries and in ordinary speech, which definition is assigned depends entirely on context. For example "feet smell and noses run". Scientists and lawyers have one thing in common, they are very careful about definitions, they tell others which definition they are using upfront, it doesn't have to be interpreted through context. It's an exacting and fully transparent tradition in Science and Law. Clinton's lawyer debating the definition of "is" for 15min is a fine example. The quantum property of "colour" is another one from the Scientific world.

Using the same rules for a state and a person ignores the basic nature of political power and leaves brute force as the only method of arbitration. The existing state would lose any and all authority and instantaneously collapse (re: looting of Iraq after US sacked entire public service), the power vacuum left behind would very likely be filled by the kind of people you fear most, heavily armed 18-25yo males who have just one rule for everyone - "might is right". Like Humpty Dumpty, they have no use for dictionaries, to them a word means whatever they say it means, and they will execute and torture as many people as it takes to demonstrate their point.

Aside from that the very thing you suggest happened on a smaller scale when I was at HS. The largest internal migration in US history was in the early 70's when hippies left cities in droves and started up communes on shared private land, a similar social phenomena occurred here in Oz. They had the same "no one is in charge" ideology, rules were simply "discussed" by the group rather than defined and enforced by the group. Very few of these communes survived more that 2yrs.

The most common cause of commune collapse was not financial woes or lack of soap, in almost every case the commune collapsed when the "natural leader" in the group filled the power vacuum and basically bullied everyone else out of their legal share of the land. By the mid seventies the migration had gone full circle and the hippies were mostly back in the cities, albeit older, poorer, but a lot wiser about human nature.

My experience with boat maintenance is (thankfully) limited; but I do know that wood tends to shrink and swell rather cheerfully as its moisture content changes, and that larger wooden vessels tend to suffer some 'play' from the hogging and sagging induced by wave action and any changes in relative buoyancy as cargo load changes from voyage to voyage, hence the fine naval tradition of oakum, tar, and endless manual labor lest you die a watery death.

Thinking of that, the pictures of a whole bunch of curved ribs(in what look to be several varieties of wood) forming a cylinder/cone thing with loads of joints that is expected to be immersed during use, caused me to immediately start imagining assorted ominous creaking, stress fractures, and hull geometry issues that you'll have a heroic time hammering out.

Is the coating adequate to prevent that sort of thing? Are they using some carpentry-fu of the same type that holds wooden barrels and wheels together? Will it in fact be a disaster in short order?

Some vendors skip the helpful 'provide a damn bootable freeDOS image, you cheap bastards' step, which is very annoying; but it's pretty common to use DOS for firmware updates. When the vendor is feeling polite, and for more common ones, you usually get a windows executable with some dire warnings about running it as an administrator and not interrupting it; but DOS is a pretty good choice when you want an OS that isn't going to be multitasking behind your back as you scribble over some bit of firmware that will brick the device if handled indelicately.

It probably will be an amusing test of whether Apple's BIOS emulation layer is up to scratch, or whether it was written rather closely against the specific versions of Windows supported by bootcamp and the bootcamp drivers...

They had that one a while back where the drive would mysteriously decide that it had a capacity of 8MB, though that has been quashed for some time.

The tricky thing (and I'm not actually certain where they stand on this now) is that Intel's initial reputation was founded on the superior performance and reliability of the in-house controller design that they used in their x-18 and x-25, especially dramatic back when there was some utter garbage floating around (JMicron controllers, OCZ living up to their reputation) and the safe options were comparatively slow and extremely expensive.

Then, for some reason, they just sat and stagnated on that controller design for several generations, and eventually shipped a Marvell controller in order to have something with SATA 6Gb support. Since then, they've released some Sandforce based stuff, and some of their own; but it isn't as clear exactly what "Intel" on the label means anymore.

Do remember that 'women in tech' has some very vocal friends among employers of techs.

This is not to say that nobody involved is genuinely concerned; but it should be remembered that complaints about the labor market can come from either side, with the supply side generally having the numbers and the demand side generally having the influence. (And, at times, they even shift remarkably quickly: just remember how fast getting women into heavy industry became a national cause during WWII, and how fast encouraging them to keep house in the suburbs become one afterwards.)

It sounds like your post answers its own question. A burn-and-churn industry in a period of high demand has a strong need for new workers(lest the alternatives of cushier working conditions and/or higher salaries be resorted to to retain and re-attract the existing ones and the burnouts). Since the supply has skewed heavily male for some time now, there is some reason to suspect that finding a way to increase female recruitment is the best hope of locating a new source of human resources.

Here's a list of 62 volunteer-management packages. Some are web based. Some are free. Somewhere in there should be something that solves your problem.

Bullshit. Nokia mismanaged itself to death by promoting infighting and sabotaging other product groups (rather than competing with other companies) until adopting Windows Phone and killing internal OS development was the least bad option.

Well, there is that, but if you'd make it a little bit harder then we'd move back to nearer targets, like the French and the Irish...

Burning the money actually works reasonably well as an alternative. It reduces the money supply and therefore lowers inflation, resulting in a relative increase in the value of everyone's money. The counter argument is that rich people profit more, but generally if you have enough money lying around that the effect would be noticeable, you've invested most of it in things that have a much better return on investment than cash, so as a proportion of net worth if favours the people whose money is mostly money (predominantly poor people).

That's fine, if late fees are for their original purpose (preventing people using a shared resource from impacting the quality of service for others). It's only a problem when they require them for revenue. Ideally, you want to completely decouple the revenue from punitive fines from the organisation that can set them.