As I've seen in the school system, quotas can also be racist, giving preference to minorities and not on merit. At least I haven't seen that at my work - I think the smartest coworkers I work with are minorities (the top two IMO are an Ethiopian an Indian). A couple of the best QA people we have are white women that have no degrees (unless you were grandfathered in, you need a college degree to work where I do). I can definitely say I favor competence over sex or race, and the people I'm talking about are all competent, so I completely agree with you. I have other coworkers that I would not say are competent.

yeah - when they said "enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers" I imagined a * after it...

* seats 7

I can't speak for you, but I am. Thought all the sex deprived youngsters went to reddit. Incidentally, I can't name a single video game player with such a problem that is over 30, and I know many that, like me, grew up with video games (some even obsessively - in fact, the guy I warn girls not to sleep with but they do it anyway is probably the worst offender).

The older equipment such as the Dish HD 822 DVR I have already has a skip forward 30 seconds button (and a skip back 10 seconds button). Viewers like me already skip commercials this way, it just isn't as convenient as a button that just skips all of them. If Fox really thinks we're watching commercials and have been for years, they're delusional and need to take some anti-psychotics.

yeah, but funding was largely a sham. Dave is right that studio time and agents don't get paid a percentage of record sales, but there are numerous errors in that chart he shows as well as his rebuttal of it, and I can see where this bass player was coming from. Fees for agents, studio time, and expenses all come out of the musician's pocket, not the studio's pocket. The chart completely missed the 10-15% songwriter cut, which for my band was a slightly larger share than share the entire band got (admittedly it was a bad contract, but we couldn't afford lawyers), divvied between all of us, but we never saw a cent of it - all those earnings went to pay studio time (primarily). Our singer songwriter made money on the album, the rest of us didn't.

  All in all it wasn't a failure, though - the band actually made a meager living on the road, and I made a decent living by also playing in both a variety band and as a cellist (solo and quartet) at weddings. In the early-to-mid 1990s both of these gigs paid MUCH better than my band, and both were organized by my variety band's business - I was more like an employee, not an owner, unlike with the band (technically I wasn't an owner, but we divvied the profits) - I'm sure the owner took a large %age, but still $2k-5k (I made 5k twice doing both cello solo and variety band) a gig was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, variety bands ceded to DJs in the mid-1990s and I went back to school and finished my degree so I didn't have to live by random and becoming much more sparse income anymore. The band had broken up by then anyway (mostly over the financial dispute with the record label, and then refusing to make another album without renegotiating our contract - if this sounds familiar, it is hardly rare - see the Stone Roses as an example, and they were much bigger than we were).

And neither really touch on the reality that they both were quite brilliant and just very different. For a modern day analogy, Edison was like Steve Jobs - guy with lots of ideas and a brilliant marketer, had lots of underlings actually creating inventions for him (sometimes at his direction, sometimes throwing funding at a project after he saw potential in it), and also greedy and screwed people over. Tesla was more like Woz - the guy that could take any idea and just make it better. Woz, like Tesla, didn't truly invent much, but rather massively improved on existing inventions. Woz's Microcomputer for use with video display patent even got him in the National Inventor Hall of Fame. I'm also a fan of the Disk drive improvements Woz made - absolutely brilliant.

I personally don't think you can go wrong with any inventor on this list. The oatmeal is harsh on Edison, but the same criticism could go to Steve Jobs or even Bill Gates, and neither of them got to where they are/were just by riding on someone else's coattails. They also blame Edison for radiation exposure of his workers, yet Edison was hardly the only one to do this exact same sort of experimentation, as Marie Curie also died of exposure, and the US put soldiers close enough to nuclear blast testing that many died of exposure well after the risk was known. The oatmeal seemed to focus a lot on animal cruelty, but the early part of last century and before took a more callous view of animals since there really was no birth control for them. If you didn't want a litter of cats, you put them in a bag and drowned them. Too many barn cats? Shoot a few. I remember my grandpa doing both of those when I was a kid, and that was probably the end of the era where you could do such a thing and not go to jail for it.

Interesting... probably also why, in the 1980s/early 1990s when tube amps started to make a resurgence because of their warm distortion, the only place you could still get vacuum tubes was a supplier in Russia. I remember this distinctly when I obtained three 1970s era vacuum tube amps in the late 1980s and had to order vacuum tube parts from a site in Russia while the cold war was still going on because there were no remaining vacuum tube manufacturers anywhere else in the world (that I could find at least - note this was pre-internet, so I spent a lot of time on the phone with electronic suppliers and paging through catalogs and even shopping surplus stores). Needless to say, commerce was not exactly easy and it took almost 6 months to get them, end-to-end time. We (as in my brother and I) had to modify a few things like the vacuum tube connectors to make it work (the size and connector was different from the originals), but we built our own connectors to replace the existing ones with electronics store parts and the 2 amps we managed to successfully recycle out of the three were awesome.

...or is it minute sort, as in tiny. Minute Maid or Minute Maid? Am I going mad, yes I've gone mad. The article is slashdotted already, and my mad mind will never know.

Sure blame socialists... I bet more corruption is due to lobbies and special interest groups that bribe politicians than any particular economic bend. We should ban economic gain from special interest groups and lobbies and forbid anything but individuals from backing candidates because businesses with special interests that often even go against their employees in the name of profit have too much weight. For instance, Dominoes traditionally has backed Republicans, but most of their workers are poorly paid and back Democrats based on their backing social programs (like health care for the poor). For the poor, socialism is salvation. For the rich, socialism is evil. Having been on both ends of that equation, I can sympathize with both.

Electoral colleges were put into the system by design, so that one part of the country that voted heavily couldn't offset another part of the country with low turnout. The number of voters is representative of the size of the state, so each state has a fair representation no matter what the turnout. In days of yore, an electoral college voter would sometimes vote against his or her candidate, but that is pretty much unheard of these days - in fact, many states have laws that require that the electoral college voter must vote for the popular candidate of their party. Because of this, electoral college members having to cast a vote is a bit silly these days - states should just get representative votes and not require a formal voter, and then people probably would be a lot less adverse to the system.

On the negative side. electoral colleges deter people from voting, especially in states where one side dominates such as Texas (Republican) or Hawaii (Democrat). In states like those, the people just concede to that party, whether they believe in it or not. Your vote really doesn't matter there. In states that are split, voter turnout is usually a lot better.

All of these traits were exhibited by Steve Jobs, and he made Apple one of the most productive companies in the world. Just because the guy's a dick doesn't mean he isn't right - IMO the nuclear industry is lax when it comes to safety and more concerned about their bottom line than their workers. It also stinks of a smear campaign, but I'd have to know more to know if it is - guy doesn't follow lock-step with what the nuclear industry wants, so the nuclear industry uses its leverage to get him ousted.

LFTR is ignored because the nuclear lobby is entirely backed by owners of light water reactors. It would be stupid for them to back competing technology - heck, they used their leverage to get Jakczko ousted because he was pro safety and they were pro profit. One of the previous lobby groups (the current lobby is a amalgamation of several separate ones from the 1970s) also managed to get Nixon's ear to get Weinberg ousted from Oak Ridge in the 1970s when he wanted us to invest more in molten salt reactors in the name of safety (Weinberg invented the LWR and was running the MSRE or molten salt reactor experiment at the time). Once again, the almighty dollar trumps safety, because as BP proved with their oil well (not to mention numerous refinery issues before the disaster, like the Texas City one that killed 15 people), profits are much more valuable than safety.

You seem to be referring to #1 here -
1) burning nuclear waste in an MSR - you still have lots of junk left over from the LWR, but at least you use the waste fuel, and LWRs are only .5% fuel efficient vs 99.5% for MSRs with on site fuel reprocessing. The same can be said for using LWR models that burn nuclear waste, such as the one Bill Gates proposed at TED a couple of years back, which I believe is being built in Russia.
2) burning new fuel, specifically thorium enriched to uranium in an MSR - this doesn't generate the long term wastes (as I recall, the worst decays in hundreds of years, no thousands), but does generate some shorter term waste with high signature. This actually is not necessarily bad - as I also recall there is no easy way to separate one of these elements from Uranium, making a high signature identifier that deters its use in nuclear weapons.

I'm sure they have plenty of chaff to cull from the EDS merger. As a former worker for a *profitable* EDS group that was spun off, they were in what I call the Control Data spiral before being snapped up by HP. The CD spiral is when you sell off all of your profitable divisions to keep your stock from going junk, which in turn dooms your company. Anyway, I have nothing but ill to say about EDS, so I probably shouldn't say anything. Motherfuckers.

The study was 400,000 people - that is a pretty massive sample size, and covers any amount of coffee and even decaf coffee, which contains very little caffeine. My family follows this exactly - if I use my grandparents as an example, my dad's side drank no coffee and both died of natural causes at 83 and 87. My mom's side both drank coffee (grandma decaf) and died at 94 (complications from a broken hip) and 95 (natural causes). Both of my grandpas were farmers, and had relatively sedentary housewife wives, and my grandpa on my mom's side farmed a 4x larger farm. My oldest aunt on my dad's side (since dad was a whoops when grandma thought she was in menopause - my aunt already had kids by the time my dad was born) drinks coffee and is 94.