And, as an engineer, if you understand the mathematical term "combine," then you should not be touching your own taxes...

If you have capital gains it isn't really worth preparing yourself anymore. If you are in the top 5% of earners it isn't worth preparing yourself. If you have anything (legitimate) that makes you an audit risk you shouldn't prepare yourself.

For the first two years I used a CPA I needed to prepare everything myself, give him the information he requested, let him do his magic, check his magic, get changes made, repeat. Everyone should know enough to understand how the calculations work and go from there; if your tax is too high or too low, ask a lot of questions!

No, but you tend to have more complex tax status... and to the GP's point, you really should be using a CPA. As worthless as my CPA is, I am happy to pay the $350 for him to dump my information into his program.

As for why the change... it is what the market will bear. It is a pain to do Schedule D and the accompanying forms now.

I use Insteon at home as well. Budget $75 per control point, and $500 for the controller. I use the ISY controller, and it is a piece of junk, but it does the job. There isn't the variety of sensors, switches, devices, and accessories I wish there was, some older devices are a pain with low-power loads, and the plug-in devices are generally a pain in the ass. Programming is clunky, but not that hard.

I still haven't put it into our vacation home, holding out for something better. Two years later, still no progress...

My biggest complaint is that it is hard to "extend" Insteon. I wish I could integrate with Sonos, and I wish I had a simpler way to do a password-free web interface. (Hard, not impossible if you really want to work for it...)

Can you really be out-played algorithmically? The two computers would have different sets of data to work from as a base point. Any additional information you can glean from your opponents can improve the decision tree, so having two hands in the game and coordinating poses a substantial advantage.

Most of the NAS drives out there have a Linux shell available. We rsync from there whenever possible, and the workstation or server does not have rights to the NAS box.

Nothing is perfect, and the ransomeware might figure out ways to skirt these protections. It really comes down to defense in depth against different threats-- multiple types of backups. The concern I have now is out of space challenges once encryption starts.

0.4% design temperature for Perth is 36.2C. A DX system with condensers on the roof would be designed for a temporary stature of 41-43C typically. Once you get much above that, there isn't much you can do with DX; you will overload your compressors quickly. A cooling tower should be more robust, but your envelope load could have exceeded the primary system capacity.

Typically in extreme temperatures a Tier 3 data center will need to eat into its redundancy for cooling. Tier 4 facilities should be more robust, but you would not expect 2N redundancy when you have record temperatures.

As for load balancing and other edge conditions, it really depends on how heavily loaded a facility/portfolio is. What I expect happened was one part of their facility went down with a "hot spot" that didn't have adequate redundancy in the first place. It is an edge condition that likely required more capital than it was worth to resolve.

I generally love everything Apple does and makes. That said, they botched iOS 8 from a user perspective. Everyone I know who had a small flash went and deleted all their apps and data first so they could download the update. They needed to tell people that they could do a tethered upgrade and use less space for the upgrade.

The way they did it reinforces the "upgrades are bad" mentality which is dangerous. Apple can do better.

The only people we hire now have relevant experience and skills in our very specific field, and experience commensurate for the position we are posting. We have sadly given up on new graduates; they are too flakey, having never held an actual job before, and needing substantial training to get to a point where they can generate revenue... and leave. Now is a great time for people that graduated around 2010, found a job in their field at terrible pay, and are now ready for an actual career.

A jumper in the wrong place or an ice-cube relay being removed can ultimately have similar effects. Ban fingers too?

A properly designed system has one set of PLCs for primary control, and a separate one as a supervisory system to ensure basic functionality always is online. The secondary system wouldn't control pump speed, but it would ensure coolant is flowing of the system is on.

It would be relatively easy to keep a nuclear power plant from operating at peak efficiency, but unless IKEA or WalMart have started making reactors forcing more serious effects remotely is nearly impossible.

Only if you make the person leaving the message listen to a machine-reading of the transcribed message and then use T3 notation to edit the message win order to have it accepted will it ever work...

I am starting to contemplate requiring unknown callers to validate their name, company, and direct phone number...

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Our Asterisk system gives me caller, length of call, and time in an email immediately after. We had transcriptions enabled before, but they were terrible so I shut it off.

I appreciate that the telephone can be more efficient for a 2-way dialogue, but it's modality kills me. I can't change trains of thought on a dime and still get things done. To me, the courteous action is to send an email, and follow with a text if it is actually urgent.

Maybe if I got visual voicemail working for the office I could use it again, or if I could play the .wav or .gsm attachments on my iPhone i would feel differently, but right now it is a pain in the ass.

Hopefully they have some kind of one-time/vendor-specific account number rather than the actual account! Risk-based assessments are nothing new; hopefully knowing what the factors/algorithms are doesn't kill the effectiveness.

Check out how much insurance is for a limo driver. That kills Uber in a second.