So right about the time people start getting good at their jobs we should fire them all? If your goal is to ensure that the old stereotype of government being incompetent at everything gets reinforced, then that is a great idea. If you value things like, you know, competence, this sounds like a horrible waste of my tax dollars. And in many cases I trust the bureaucrat to do a better job than the politician who has honed everything to a 10 second sound bite without any real substance behind their ideas. At least the bureaucrats have skin in the game, in that they have to implement the policies.

In my experience, managers are lazy. If patches are going smoothly, with no unanticipated downtime and no obvious problems, it is unlikely that somebody will be pushing to implement a CAB, knowing it means more paperwork and more meetings. I suspect that there was some high profile downtime, or an unannounced outage that led to this.

Um, no. Gravity cares not how fast it is going. It will still start falling towards the earth the moment it is launched. Now it is true that while traveling at mach 5 the horizontal distance it drops will be much less over a unit of distance traveled than a slower shell, but it is still falling. I would be shocked if the targeting computers did not take gravity into account - unless they are skipping the computers and just using the force.

Great post, and I agree that for aviation the reduction in number of military pilots is certainly a factor. But I am going to quibble about SCUBA diving - equipment has gotten vastly better and relatively cheaper over the last 30 years I have been certified, and I don't think people who were trained by the military has ever been more than a tiny fraction of the diving population. My impression is that diving is getting more popular, not less, but I admit that I don't have any statistics to back that up.

That is fine for a site that exists to sell products or a service, and indeed in many of those cases you will find no or very limited ad presence.

The problem comes about when the site exists to sell advertising, with the content on the site being the hook to get people to the site to see the ads. This is the model for most every news site, even news for nerds. Paywalls have not gone over well in the market, and everybody wants content to be free, but the reality is that these sites have to pay the bills somehow.

Outside of specialized mixtures for deep dives (well beyond the usual recreational dive limit of 130 feet), divers breathe either ordinary compressed surface air (80% nitrogen), or nitrox/EAN, which is a mix with increased oxygen content. Interestingly, the increased oxygen in nitrox is not there for its own sake (i.e. with healthy lungs there is no physiological benefit to breathing an increased fraction of oxygen), but rather as a cheap way to displace some of the nitrogen, allowing longer bottom times before having to worry about decompression stops or getting the bends.

Dive organizations love to push nitrox since it is another certification and an upcharge on fills from a dive shop, but in my experience it is used by less than 10% of the divers I have seen.

While that particular lyric is indeed hard to understand (and for the record: "revved up like a deuce another runner in the night"), in general I don't think Springsteen is hard to understand.

But I will also note that the most popular recording of that song (at least in the states) is not Springsteen, but Manfred Mann's Earth Band

Several times I have gotten the little popup in the tray of Win7 telling me that there is a fix for an issue that I have had. Usually it takes the form of a driver update or a hotfix.

At one point I worked for a company that used Windows Error Reporting in our app, and MS did indeed route the crash reports to us, which we did debug and generally fix.

I read Anthem in high school, and it remains the only Ayn Rand book I have read. Even as an idealistic 15 year old my conception of Ayn Rand was of someone who would object to laws regulating what side of the street to drive on as an intolerable infringement on her liberty.

This is an excellent point. 3D printing is a potentially transformative technology that is very much in its infancy. How many things are there that are made out of a single material, or even a small number of materials suitable for 3D printing?

Can you print chips? Capacitors? Can you make a metal latch on a plastic body? Right now I think the answer to all those things is no. 3D printing is great for modelmakers, and some specialty niches, but it is a very long way from replacing any significant manufacturing. And even when it evolves to that point I would be surprised if a capable printer would be something that it would be worthwhile to buy for your home.

I really don't think it is that simple.

Admittedly the government can't control the money supply of bitcoins; it is not even clear that that is a good thing. The argument against the gold standard is that it takes monetary policy off the table. But aside from not permitting unlimited issue of bitcoins, what else would be different?

Suppose my employer paid me in bitcoins, and I was able to conduct all of my transactions in bitcoins. OK, my company contracts with ADP to do their payroll, who in turn do direct deposit to my bank. The bank holds my store of bitcoins. When my credit card statement comes, I tell the bank to transfer n.m bitcoins to the credit card company.

The point is, without a significant reworking of the entire financial industry, it doesn't matter what currency is used. ADP still knows how much I get paid (and have you noticed how ADP is cited as a source for unemployement data now, because they process so much of the payroll in the USA?). My bank knows which transactions have been made on my account, and report to the financial regulators in the same way. The credit card company knows what I am buying, just like they already do.

The only way that I see bitcoin making a difference is if the entire things is completely decentralized, taking banks, payroll companies and credit cards out of the picture. And you know what? I think of myself as a privacy geek, and all of that is too much hassle for me. What is going to be the motivation for the average person to completely dismember the financial services industry?

I find it hard to believe that anybody is the least surprised by this. Look around your organization. Surely there is some guy down the hall who has taken it upon himself to keep track of something that is not required but that makes his job easier or piques his interest. After awhile people start to realize that he has a list of which customer has been sent which update, something which for some reason is not tracked in the CRM, but is sometimes very useful to have. He faithfully maintains the list for several years, until he moves to a different job. Turns out his successor does not find the information as useful, so stops collecting it. 2 years later it is hopelessly out of date and it gets deleted.

There were *millions* of people involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That kind of semi-official record keeping had to have happened thousands of times. Suppose I work for a battalion of engineers doing electrical grid repairs. The CO has to make a report to Brigade every month on various metrics. Some staffer compiles the info every month for a Powerpoint. After the tour ends and the CO is no longer reporting to Brigade every month, why would I continue to maintain the data? Who is going to come asking for it? So I delete it. Now repeat that for thousands of records.

-citation needed-
I have never yet seen any evidence that MS had more than trivial calls to undocumented APIs. Given the siloed nature of the company that is nominally being addressed by this reorganization, you would expect that the Windows group wouldn't cooperate with the Office group, and would not do anything to make life more difficult for ISVs, who after all are what drive much of the adoption of Windows.

Not at all. Otherwise no professional sports team would be coached by former minor league players. Management is a distinct skill from any of the technologies used by an organization. That is not to say that someone who has no background in IT is going to be a successful IT manager, but as you go up the ladder the need to be conversant with technologies currently in use becomes less and less important. If that were not true, the implication would be that the CEO would be required to be competent to perform literally any job in the company, since all functions report to the CEO.

One of the hard parts about management is dealing with limited information and knowing how to assess the information you are given. You don't have the time to be an expert, you don't have time to understand the details, so you concentrate on putting together a staff that you do trust.

That seems completely backwards - you are pushing all of the routine care onto the insurer, and have no coverage at all for the catastrophic events. I would much rather have a typical HDHP - pays basically nothing until $X out of pocket, with that cost blunted by an HSA, and then it pays for everything.