Even if you grant Snowden every consideration, how can he have any credibility as long as he's in Russia?

It was and it wasn't. One or two devices on a Mac SCSI bus was pretty PnP but beyond that, especially when adding non-disk devices like scanners, the Mac SCSI bus quickly could get into voodoo territory -- devices that disappeared from the chain, drives that wouldn't mount and general unreliability.

Usually over time you could get it stable, but that often meant "over time" -- re-ordering the chain physically, numerically and swapping expensive cables in and out to try to find a stable setup.

I often wonder if the 25 pin connector, which IIRC was non-standard, didn't contribute to the problem. SCSI seemed to work better on PCs which used the standard 50 pin connector.

I'm kind of curious what the space program would look like today if we hadn't sent people into space and had only used remote landers. About half the current Slashdot audience is critical of manned space exploration and prefers robotic exploration only. Would we be more or less down the road of space exploration if we hadn't done a manned moon mission?

It cost a lot of money to send people to the moon vs. just robotic stuff, but I wonder if there would be as much interest in it if we had never sent humans to the moon.

I heard it argued recently that capitalists aren't interested in increased economic activity, only in increasing their share of economic activity. Suppressing labor markets and high unemployment helps.

Yeah, but how many people were editing 4k video in 2007? I'm sure the 3 people at the time weren't worrying about scheduling their Fusion ioDrives across workloads, either, just pounding them into submission. Wider adoption usually means mixed workloads where scheduling scarce resources matters more and is more complicated.

FWIW I don't know if I agree with the article premise -- it seems like most of these resource scheduling decisions/monitoring/adjustments are being made in hypervisors now (think VMware DRS, as only one example). And a lot of storage resource allocation isn't even done at the hypervisor level, it's done in the SAN which simply allocates maximum storage bandwidth to to the host and figures out on its own which storage to use.

I was a network manager at a large-ish company and took a job at a smaller consulting company.

I work much harder at the small company than I did at the large company. The only time I worked harder at the large company was when doing large, time-sensitive projects (ie, get to pause/finish stage or network is broken).

The upside of the large company workload was that I think I my knowledge was much higher resolution, because I had time to focus and dig into details. At the consulting job, I have much more experiential knowledge but very little time to focus on details.

I think there's an old joke:

Q: "How many people work at Microsoft?"

a: "About 20%"

Does Microsoft promote people into Windows/Office executive positions more or less permanently, or does it rotate people in and out of those jobs so that nobody is wed to the success of those products permanently?

If those were the jobs people strived for and then hung onto, it's easy to see how the most ambitions people would work to get into those jobs and then use their skills (political and otherwise) to maintain those products pre-eminence and power to keep those jobs and suppress disruptive technologies that might displace them.

If those products were seen as self-sustaining and needing only slight guidance, then maybe Microsoft could have kept merely average people in those positions and/or made them less lucrative to push more ambitions and talented people into other areas of the company that could have benefitted from more aggressive and ambitious people who could have furthered more innovative stuff.

My guess is that Windows & Office were seen as the jewels and where the "best" people went, where they got fat and rich and did everything to suppress anything which might disrupt their fortunes. It almost sounds like the politics of Rome or the kind of thing that cripples an aristocratic society over time by preventing disruptions and innovations that would topple the established order.

Maybe someday we'll read a "Rise & Fall of the Microsoft Empire" that portrays Gates as Augustus and Ballmer as Nero or Commodus.

What bothers me is that whatever value the Metro interface has as a touch interface -- and it has been generally well reviewed on Windows phones, although I personally haven't used it in that scenario -- it's seriously unpopular in a desktop environment and on Windows 8 it doesn't seem to add any value and in many ways is extremely annoying.

And it's not like I'm the only one with this opinion or experience.

Microsoft's continuing push of this kind of interface on its desktop operating system seems to be more hubris and denial -- they're pushing whatever their business agenda is, not what anyone sees as a valuable improvement in anyone's user experience. They want one UI across all devices so they can be a phone/tablet/desktop consumer company. They're not doing it because somehow big, touch tiles help improve the windows desktop experience.

No matter what CPU they had chosen, wouldn't they have had to migrate off it to x86 eventually? It's not like any of the alternatives like MIPS or Alpha have endured or kept up with Intel.

Maybe in hindsight they should have gone x86 off the bat but at the time RISC had a lot of hype and interest even from Microsoft.

Although a switch to MIPS instead of PowerPC might make one of my favorite alternative history stories, an Apple/SGI merger in the early 90s, more plausible as merging MacOS and IRIX would have been simpler.

Isn't there a kind of general problem in urban academic settings where you have senior, often male, academics surrounded by young students, some of whom are in a dependent client relationship with the senior academics. Senior academic uses authority, persuasion and more than a little red wine to bed the younger students?

Now let's all go out in the field and camp. Maybe overseas. In a remote location. Where you can't leave or even make a phone call. Limited privacy, communal living. Long nights with alcohol and/or drugs.

I kind of hate to use the phrases "going tribal" or "Lord of the Flies" but it's not hard to see how this situations can turn kind of ugly pretty quickly.

And it's not also hard to see how it's not just driven by the gross, predatory senior academic. You might add in the attractive but less talented student who uses her sexuality to compete, or the smarter but less attractive students with less social sophistication who gets in over her head.

I think its due to the nature of the voting system (winner take all, even if you don't poll a majority). But it also seems to be endemic to many democracies, they tend to gravitate to two party systems. The UK has Labor and the Conservatives, the Germans have Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.

But even in countries with larger third parties, they're seldom major parts of government. I think the current coalition government in the UK is one of the few times the Liberal Democrats have been in government. In Germany the FDP has mostly been a kingmaker rather than a majority party capable of forming its own government.

We just started using ranked choice voting for elections in Minneapolis, which in theory eliminates the "lost vote" problem by allowing you to make third parties your first choice but still vote "defensively" by making some other candidate a secondary choice.

So far it doesn't seem to have led to a lot of radical change in outcomes other than making the election results take a couple of extra days due to the calculations involved when there's a dozen candidates.

You don't know if it's true, but it sure seems that in spite of the weaknesses reviews really seem to be popular and they generally appear to be accurate based upon my experiences. Can you imagine Amazon without reviews?

My sense is that the true weakness with crowdsourced reviews isn't that they're too negative, but they skew mediocrity a little too positive.

...longer, better patents and copyrights, more EULAs.

This is really what we need, aspiring politicians appealing to plutocrats.

Maybe they could allow direct sales, but require that any company performing direct sales both have some minimum in-state physical presence for sales/service proportionate to the volume of cars they sell as well as allowing third party establishments to perform those tasks for them in some mutually agreed upon way?

This way, Tesla can sell cars direct but has to have some kind of bricks-and-mortar presence in states they sell them. They could all be owned by Tesla, but they wouldn't have to be if someone wanted to run the physical presence for them in the way Tesla wanted it done.

Since the existing car makers now sell a huge volume of cars in order to do direct sales they would have to duplicate the existing dealership network they have now, which would be hugely expensive. This would be the "save" for existing car dealers -- they wouldn't necessarily have to fear GM/Toyota/Ford suddenly selling direct because in order to do so, those makers would have to build out huge bricks-and-mortar presences. It would make so much more sense for the existing makers to stick with the existing dealerships.

I think that's generally good advice, but the thing that has always been a turnoff about skilled trades is that they seem to operate in a very hostile, class-centric mode, as if the labor relations equation remains stuck in some kind of black and white movie about striking workers from the 1930s.

Like most people who have done IT admin at bigger facilities during the 1990s and early 2000s as IT technology expanded, I worked a lot with electricians on data center build-outs, cabling, etc. I was always impressed with the guys I worked with -- they seemed real smart and they could do/fix about anything. But their work environment seemed kind of harsh compared to a typical IT work environment.

But I think if you were looking for a job that was nearly impossible to outsource, electrician would be pretty high on the list. A lot of stuff can only be done by licensed electricians legally and I don't see that changing for basic safety reasons and (kind of negatively) there's a gatekeeper effect that will keep it that way for the same reasons that doctors, lawyers and other types of professionals make it so only they can do certain tasks.

And I would bet with the growth in solar and the widespread adoption of electric cars over the next 50 years there will be an increasing in need for electrical work. The neighborhood grid will have to expand to accommodate a huge influx of cars trying to rapid-charge in dense areas and that's definitely the kind of high voltage work that an electrician will have to do.