I hate responding to my own post, but I mis-wrote that I got my first student loan 40 years after he did. I meant to say that I got the loan 10 years after the author. I hope my post makes more sense now.

The writer describes the student loan process as being "legal but not moral". Considering when he got his student loan, and how he got it, I don't understand his perception of the loan as being "not moral". I took out my first student loan about 40 years after he did, in 1984. That was a different time. College was not nearly as expensive, and paying back loans was not as difficult. All of my student loans together added up to about 40% of the annual income from my first job. These days, comparable loans would probably come to about 120% of the annual income of a first job. The first obligation is something that could be satisfied in a few years. The latter, modern obligation might well never be satisfied. One might argue that the modern system, with towering loans to complete useless degree programs is immoral, but that was not the situation 40 years ago, or even 30 years ago.

What is immoral is not paying back what you borrowed. A couple of his suggestions for handling the situation are totally outrageous, most notably, that one should marry someone who has a good credit rating. Really? His life philosophy is to burden someone else with the consequences of his bad decisions?

I was in the Navy from 1980 to 1991 and served in two different squadrons aboard USS America (CV-66) and USS Eisenhower (CV-69). For much of that time I worked on the flight deck. I'm glad the EM catapults are more reliable and require less maintenance. I am sure sailors and aviators alike will not miss cold cat shots and fires in the cat tracks. Nevertheless, the rising vapor from the steam catapults added a kind of surrealism to the job. I'll miss the "theatrics".

It's one of those appliances that lasts a long time and a lot of people don't think about it. I replaced my old style door about a year and a half ago, and the only reason I replaced it was because I installed it in 1995 and it suddenly occurred to me that it was easy to break into. Mechanically, the old opener worked perfectly. I am glad the new door installer wanted the old unit (he builds automatic flag-raising systems with them). At least the old unit didn't go to waste.

It appears that they intend to make their money from commercial customers. The service does not work with most cell providers, but it's new, so we'll see.

I just closed my Paypal account. I hardly ever used it anyway, so I am sure I can live without it. Surprisingly, they made it pretty easy to close the account.

I was quoting the percentage off the top of my head. The number is actually lower. Here is an article on the CDC study that the numbers come from:

http://www.livescience.com/256...

I've been living with diabetes for over 12 years now. At one point I had lost 110 pounds through diet and exercise. At first my situation improved, but over time it got worse. I now live life as a type 1 diabetic.

You can certainly live better with diabetes through lifestyle changes, I'm not going to argue that. But for most type 2s, treatment will eventually still include medications and even insulin injections.

Cute. Yes, lifestyle changes make a difference for about 20% of type 2 diabetics, but for the rest, treating the disease is elusive. There are a lot of type 2 diabetics who are not overweight and follow healthy eating habits. There are a lot of obese people who never develop type 2 diabetes.
 

You know, in the past, they used to equate the amount of skill and experience it took to be a good coder to being similar with a skilled surgeon. There is some truth in that. In fact, being a surgeon is easier because you don't have to worry about basic human anatomy changing every few years. In IT, however, platforms and languages evolve and your skillset has to cope with these changes all the time.

Now they would have us believe that you can take regular people, and teach them to be "skilled surgeons" in a short period of time.

The reason there is a shortage of good coders is because it takes a lot more intelligence, skill and discipline than most people realize. There are simply not enough people with the capacity it takes to meet the demand.

A few years ago, at the company I work for, we got a spec to build an interface that would send passwords, in the open, to a vendor. Several of us warned upper management of the foolishness of this idea, but despite multiple attempts to push back on this request, management insisted that the process be written this way, so that is what was done. Perhaps 64% of employees would stay quiet about a security breach because so many managers are universally, fucking stupid, and it is always dangerous to tell the emperor that he has no clothes.

After reading that summary I feel like a juggalo. "...F*cking magnonics, how do they work?.."

Patient: "Doctor, I get a sharp pain in my eye when I drink my tea."

Doctor: "Take the spoon out of the cup."

This is basically the same thing.

Of course it's lasted more than 90 days. That's because Opportunity never landed on Mars. All the images are created in a secret NASA location in Nevada.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go monitor the Jade Helm Texas takeover.

I was an early adopter of high-speed internet and got it through my cable company in 1996. I ran cat-5 cable through the house and put in a hub to network all our plain-vanilla desktops that I built from components. I then re-purposed an old 486 machine, using two network adapters and Linux to create a firewall so we could all share the same internet connection. All my daughter's middle school friends thought it was cool that she had her own PC with high speed internet. Although all the desktops disappeared years ago, and pretty much everything is wireless these days, my Apple TV still makes use of the old cat-5 cable which I ran to the living room.

What I'm hearing here is not a story about a potential software bug. I'm hearing about a serious design problem. An airplane should not be so reliant on software that it shut down if the software is not working.

I was in Naval aviation. The 1960's - era A-7's I worked on for most of my career had redundant systems. There was even an air-stream-driven generator that could be deployed in the event of engine failure that would not only supply electrical power, but provide a minimum amount of hydraulic power to critical systems so that the plane had a chance of safely landing.

I can't believe we're designing aircraft that can carry hundreds of people that lacks redundant systems and can literally fall out of the sky due to a simple software glitch. Have I read this wrong? Are they exaggerating the danger in this article?