You say, as respectfully as you can muster, "This is your opportunity to provide input on the order in which the work should be done. If you don't prioritize then you let the developers decide what's important. After all we have to do the work in some sequence. We will do our best, but we can't prioritize as well as you can. Please help us to succeed. Can you identify the ten most important defects/use cases/whatever?"

The first time you do this you will get some crazy priorities. At a very immature organization that I once worked for, we had a meeting to prioritize 1-2-3. The meeting went like this, "That's a one. That's a one. Hmm. That's a one. That's a one. Hmm, gee. Aaahhh. That's a zero..." No kidding, we left the meeting with two dozen ones and a few zeroes, but I was pretty happy about it - progress!

Another thing that can be effective, though belligerent, if you have a priority-setting session that goes off the rails is to scan the list of items in the largest tranche of like priorities (usually the highest) and find the easiest or most enjoyable one to work. Tell the group that's the first one the team will work on, and tell them why: because it's easy, fun, whatever. Even better if you can list a handful of items like that. After saying it, you will get a new higher-than-high priority class, because the easiest and most fun item is never the most important. Beware, though. This will get you what you want, but you will piss somebody off for being lazy or looking to have fun at a sweatshop.

You think that your management is inside your circle of friends, but they would do anything for money. Maybe they wouldn't kill your grandmother, not sure. In business, this is called "making the hard decisions." You have to do it to manage people. In business, this is called "playing with the big boys."

You must quit your job now, because you have an unhealthy relationship with your coworkers and bosses. You will be badly hurt if they ever have to let you go, and it will take a long time to recover from it at a time when you will have to search for a job.

Disassemble the drive, take out the platters, put them in the fireplace. The platters have an aluminum substrate that will melt and then burn. The remaining magnetic media that was on the surface will crumble in your hands, and has been heated well past the Curie point.

If you spent the time needed for two laboratory exercises, one to prove that you had created a circuit with an Ampere of current and another to prove that you had amassed a Coulomb of charge, then you would understand why the base unit is Ampere, not Coulomb.

This should be an object lesson for any device manufacturer. Developers look once when it's new, and never look again. I honestly assumed that RIM was an expensive platform for development until I read your post. I still think that it probably sucks, though. It is hard to shake the kind of hate-on that RIM had for developers in the early days. The white-knuckle, cold-dead-hands reductions in cost that you list for code signing says to me that RIM really thinks I should pay for access to their market.

The millennium bridge sways because people are walking incorrectly.

You're holding your phone wrong.

A common response for engineers and software developers is to blame the users for doing it wrong. Usually the users win. No matter what, though, the developers lose.

It's a fairly small set, so you can't have a huge bunch of servers, but for a home network it's okay.

You should read up on adaptive impedance matching in smart grid, also known as Volt/VAR optimization. Also, you should know that load shedding, like not running pool pumps for an hour during peak load, can delay construction of new power plants as well as investments in the T&D network infrastructure to reduce congestion. This stuff really works, and economic benefits can be built in so that customers will choose to take advantage of load shifting programs.

Several weeks ago I switched from Ubuntu to OS/X on a Hackintosh. I hadn't owned a Mac since my 512k in the 1980s. I had always hated that Mac because I couldn't find the command line. However, having got an iPod Touch and then an iPad, I thought I would give OS/X a shot.

I hated it. I couldn't get used to it at all, and the feeling lasted for a long time. Why is the menu bar at the top? command-tab switches applications, but not windows within applications. You can never tell what's running without a bunch of effort. Then, my wife asked me an interesting question: why does Word start quickly sometimes, and other times it is really slow to start? I began thinking of how to explain this goofy situation that the application doesn't actually quit when you close the window, and then I realized the truth of it. Sometimes Word starts fast, and sometimes it's slow. Don't worry about it. Just click. You don't know where your photos are when you import them into iPhoto? Don't worry, just click. Every application you ever started today is still running? That's what the VMM is for so don't worry, just click.

Now, I'm a real Mac user. Well, I paid the price of an iPad for my desktop, so I suppose I'm not a true Mac user. However, I have come to truly love the abject simplicity of using a Mac. I love the dock, the app store, all the shortcut keys, all the stuff that works that way when you try it... This abomination could really take off.

Well, the shuttle has about a two per cent death rate per astronaut flight, and a failure rate of 1 in 65. (130 missions with two failures.) the OP is not that far off, and there was a time when the failure rate was 1 in 50, but there have been successful missions since then. Who knows what the final failure rate for the shuttle will be?

I tend to agree with the OP that using the shuttle as a benchmark for safety is a great way to make a high risk activity sound safe. What sounds better: 10 times safer than the shuttle or 1/100,000th as safe as air travel? NASA is lying with statistics.

The risk of an accident is low, but the consequences for the Swiss would be high. An 80 kilometer exclusion zone would cover over 10% of the nation's land mass.

Proven false by example.

An acre-foot is about four-fifths of a megalitre.

There are about 9 footballfield-inches in a megalitre.

I sort of agree. US$12 billion divided by the amount of energy produced by Fukushima is one or two cents per kilowatt hour. I think the estimate is low, because nuclear engineers have cost underestimation down to a science, and because "cleaned up" has different meanings for different people. You wouldn't live for a year at a place of my choosing on a site that the nuclear industry claims is "cleaned up". Nonetheless, if you assume that every nuclear plant meets this end, it probably doesn't double the cost of the produced electricity.

I have heard a recording of an official during TMI, and two things struck me. First, he was not a "spokesperson". He was the real guy, and it felt almost embarrassing to listen someone so unfamiliar with how to "play" the press. Second, his candor was striking. When he didn't know something, he openly said that he did not know it. How times have changed.