But Austin is in Texas. They elect dumb assess as governers, open carry deadly weapons, inject creationism in school textbooks, they are anti family planning. Life is not with living if you got to live it in Texas.

Your face will occupy all of one quarter of a pixel 25cm x 25cm. Good luck seeing your face from satellite. It is high res. But not so high as to see a face.

Does not go back very far. Just last 100K years. Similar to the La Brea tar pits in age and diversity. Tar pits preserve bones and lots of micro fossils very well, but it is very tedious to clean them out. May be this one could be easier.

NFL is a non-profit organization. It does not make any profit. What you call 9 billion dollar profit, might look like profit, walk like profit, bark like profit, smell like profit, bite like profit. But it is NOT profit. IRS will not get a dime.

America has been consistently electing politicians who promise to cut taxes. And they have been dutifully cutting the taxes for the richest people (and corporations which are people). But corporations are special citizens who can claim a non-profit status and exempt themselves from taxation. It is very expensive to create a new people-citizen. But corporate citizen is just a 25$ filing fee, no nine month waiting period, no active cooperation between two different people required. Corporation-people don't go to jail. They can be killed when it is suitable without any penalty. But corporation-people can be enslaved by other corporation-people and people-people. Corporation-people can have religious beliefs when it is profitable to have them. But they don't have religious responsibilities .

Don't blame the politicians. Blame ourselves, collectively.

Who's talking about borrowing any money from anyone? What part of cunning Wall street bankers pulling levers of influence you don't get? They will steal the required money from the Chinese. Probably with active collusion with the top Chinese government officials. If there is one thing our banksters are good at, it is using influence over government to steal money from the tax payers. And one thing Chinese, Indian, Russian, Brazilian governments are good at is in stealing money from their citizens. It is a match made in heaven.

The Europeans invested so much and spent so much to build the original Panama canal. They went bankrupt and USA picked up the semi finished canal cheaply. At that time that canal was part of Columbia. A group of influential bankers in New York with pulled levers in Washington DC, overseas American Navy etc, intervened in an internal conflict in Columbia and peeled off the zone of the canal from Columbia. They got Washington to recognize Panama with their puppets as the government. The puppets signed a highly lopsided deal favoring the banksters. They pocketed the money and walked off the mess. It took some 18 more years of stand off and then US Taxpayers stepped in and compensated the Columbians for stealing their canal.

So don't worry, our government could be weak and our military power could be misapplied. But we have some really cunning bankers who would steal the loin cloth of Papua New Guineans if they could make a dollar or two. They will steal this spanking new Chinese built canal from Nicaragua for us. Some two decades later we the tax payers will compensate the victims of their greed.

One of the main stumbling blocks for residential solar is that a typical home owner is ill equipped to make the decision, (investment needed, financing, amortization schedules, expected future price of grid electricity, sizing etc) and find the contractor to execute it. Also resale, value of home etc etc come in. The solar city model is where they own the panels, they install it, you only pay metered electricity, you get to keep the grid for back up. In the end they pack it and take it away when you want to sell the home if the buyer is not interested in it. Suddenly the home owner can try solar for very low risk.

Even without subsidies, this model has reasonable pay back period in places like Arizona or Hawaii. Of course storage technology is very bad at residential levels. Solar thermal has better storage using molten salt. But not viable at homes. But home storage does not have the size, weight and crashworthiness requirements of auto batteries. The flywheel storage mechanical batteries might become viable. But almost all the proposed storage have issues.

Do you realize Indians (from South Asia, not those mistakenly named Indians by Columbus) are Caucasians?

In fact when the Chinese Exclusion Act stripped Indian Americans of their property rights in the early 20th century, they argued the Act did not apply to them because they were Caucasians. It went all the way to the SCOTUS where Chief Justice Sutherland ruled, "yeah yeah Indians are Caucasians, but the law still applied to them because when the Congress said Caucasians they meant White, and the Indians are not White, so off you along with the Chinese."

Yeah, these places have laws friendlier to the employers than the employees. So all the employees with skills in demand have moved to places where they can name their prices. People left behind in those places are usually low skilled. When things like fracking or oil well drilling requires skilled labor they get imported from other places at premium prices. I know quite a few oil rig/fracking rig operators living in places like Naperville Il, and work on 4 weeks on 2 weeks off rotations.

Free market is a bitch. You skew the laws favoring employers, employees with skills leave, creating a vicious cycle.

... I think such a large office space needs some sort of transport for people to go from one end to another. Should not be emitting gases and ideally be very silent. Wonder who has the know-how to conjure up such a vehicle ;-)

Before you grade his performance first decide what his job is. Whether he is going to be graded as a doctor trying to save a dying patient? Or a doctor doing terminal care, pain management etc to ease the passage? Or transplant surgeon who should harvest usable organs for transplant? or is he just an undertaker brought in to dress up the corpse for one last ride in the Cadillac?

[The car analogy is left to the astute reader].

Apparently there is a registry of known images, with hashes. All google was looking was for matched hashes, not running picasa en masse over all the images of all the people.

So this is the next frontier in social networking? Farmville is so human, the next killer app is cow clicker.

There was this long discussion in that site about the meaning of Kodi and whether or not it is suitable for this package. Kodi means flag, (the flappy thing that flutters from a flagpole flag, not flag meaning getting tired). That is if you say kodi like you say "midi" in the midi-skirt. If you say it more like ko-die it would mean an umbrella or a donation. I don't know much else about the software.

The main goal of IT is to provide security to the company network. You must accomplish this by any means necessary. If it means stopping every one else from doing their job, so be it. Stop them. Most of these dim wits who think they are working, always create problems for IT. For IT to be efficient they have to be stopped. So stop them.

Once you have established the rule, "IT rules", most people will cower before you and try to get their work done without offending you or getting on the wrong side of you. That means you can celebrate "Mission Accomplished". Your company will have a few that know how networks work and know a smattering of knowledge about Unix or Linux. They might have even served as root of some lab or the other in the grad school. Find them, stop them completely on their tracks. Thwart every one of their moves. Either they leave you alone, or the leave the company. I T should have unquestioned authority over the corporate infrastructure, and ideally there should be no one in the company capable of questioning you.

So the rules for IT is "IT Rules".