So you believe a thirteen year old kid with a paper route should be paid a wage high enough to allow him to move out and get a place of his own? That government should step in a prevent a person from taking a job that they want to work for the amount of money they're offered because it's not a "living wage"? That businesses should be forced to pay someone more than the value they bring to the business?

The problem is that government programs often don't provide enough to help people escape poverty, or they are structured so they penalize people for saving money or getting a better job.

I would argue the best way to fight poverty is to donate money to local charities that fight poverty. We also need to be encouraging people to work hard, graduate high school and not get pregnant out of wedlock. For a great many people in poverty that's an uphill battle against cultural expectations.

Based on the airports I typically use I had assumed that all of them used a single line with TSA agents directing people to a particular lane. Wouldn't that be a simpler solution?

The question that was posted reads, "what can sites serving an important public function do to ensure they stay running during periods of unexpected load?"

Yes, it's total overkill for this particular case, but that wasn't what was asked.

Chicago just got busted issuing tickets for short yellows. They instructed their vendor to start ticketing vehicles that ran yellows that were only 2.9 seconds long instead of the Federally mandated 3 seconds. Please note, they did not actually change the timing of the lights, just when tickets were issued. Previously if a yellow was shorter than 3 seconds then any tickets generated were discarded. Apparently times can fluctuate slightly due to electrical issues.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/...

How about building your tech stack so that it can be scaled up/down on-demand? I'm using Rackspace and we have dedicated servers along with cloud servers. I can add or remove cloud servers as needed and also have the load balancers updated.

If you're just doing reads against a database, it's straightforward to add additional replicas (we use MongoDB with replica sets, don't have enough data for sharding yet). If you need to do any processing, then you should build a grid compute system where you can just add additional compute nodes. We're using RabbitMQ along with Celery. Granted, this strategy ignores issues like a saturated network, but our provider is responsible for dealing with that.

Late to the party? Microsoft released a smart watch back in 2004!

http://www.cnet.com/news/time-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Did you remember to check archive.org?

The hospital also waited until they got a positive Ebola test result back before taking any safety precautions. Staff were exposed for something like two days and administration resisted isolating the patient. The sample was sent through the normal channels for testing which potentially contaminated their tube system. High-risk individuals who treated Duncan were not placed in quarantine and they allowed something like 70 different people to come into contact with him. Then there's the issue of them initially prescribing antibiotics for a viral infection.

I have never understood the point of using a Bitcoin ATM versus buying through an exchange like Coinbase. It just seems like a gimmick. Why would someone on the street need to convert between fiat and cryptocurrency? If you have cash wouldn't you just pay with your cash?

Bitcoin's great for storing and transferring value. No one can take your coins without your private key and you can do international transfers yourself. Purchasing with Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not terribly practical. Not many vendors accept it compared to fiat and the confirmation times are way too long for in-person purchases.

Those guys would have been much better off spending their time and money creating Bitcoin wagering games playable over the Internet.

Maybe I'm showing my age, but why do I keep hearing a lot of talk about "coding" and hardly anything about computer science? Does the world really need more people that can program a computer, but who are clueless about topics like data structures, algorithmic complexity, grammars, etc?

Are you restricted from using common techniques to protect your system during the competition? Wouldn't one simply make their services unreachable by the attackers and declare victory? Doing basic things like filtering packets and requiring that clients present security certificates are going to be pretty much impossible to bypass.

Facts cannot be copyrighted. A collection of function signatures compromising an API are just a bunch of facts, thus not eligible.

I used to work at Bank of America, they had their Internet facing routers set to ping microsoft.com and to remove themselves from the pool if the pings didn't come back. Sure enough, microsoft.com had issues one day and the entire BofA organization lost Internet access.

Agreed. I don't understand what is so difficult about giving the patient their own electronic healthcare records and letting them be responsible for providing that information to healthcare providers.

Why does a patient need their medical records in a form that can be be instantly transmitted on a global computer network? Also, I would think that you shouldn't need a detailed medical history to treat most acute things, chronic illnesses excluded. Does knowing that I had my adenoids removed as a child, or that I was treated for an STD in college really help you set my broken arm?