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A system where they are fired and sent to jail for 20 years as a federal crime would help a bit as well.
The way unions control things here, they'd probably be sent to jail for 20 years and not be fired... and continue to collect pay.
Well, to be fair, it can cost a lot of money to support all the browsers if you have lousy developers. Its easy to write code the right way the first time, but if you write it the wrong way, it costs a lot of money to keep twiddling with things.
Replacing their developers with people who have better knowledge/skills would be cheaper than throwing $100k at a problem that shouldn't have existed to begin with.
Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away. Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way. But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.
The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.
That's because slot machines don't mislead on the odds. They have regulations and have to have specific odds - 98% payback for Vegas slots for example. They are regularly inspected to ensure that. You lose 2% playing slots in the long run, basically. The odds are known. They aren't presented as different numbers than they actually are, and are public knowledge for all casinos.
Not to nit, but 98% is unheard of in Vegas. CT requires close to that, in aggregate, but Vegas is WAY less than that. (Its been a while since I looked, but IIRC it was in the 70%'s.)
Yeah, their space program is such a joke. All they did was put the first satellite in space, first orbit, first man and woman in space, first space station, first probes on Venus and Mars--in fact, pretty much every space "first" except man on the moon. And they're currently the only country in the world capable of even putting a man in orbit. Ha, ha, what a joke! Let's all laugh at them!
And the Italians used to rule most of Europe and the Middle East. Your point?
Russia's space program hasn't done anything but produce small incremental improvements on *Soviet* technology. Technology built by a country under the auspices of its military that *no longer exists*. Technology built using quantities of labor and resources that are no longer available to it.
If you believe for an instant that the current space program in Russia could do something like this, you're completely ignorant of the reality of the existing space program in Russia or its history. (You'd be equally ignorant if you thought NASA could do it either -- it couldn't... not even close. Technical ability has no bearing on the political or economic realities of a program like that.)
Russia is a 3rd world country that managed a historic semblance of technology and industry through near slavery of its population, and is in perpetual decline, run by criminals with delusions of grandeur.
This has as much reality behind it as North Korea claiming they're going to settle Venus.
I'm sick and tired of these banks screwing over the little guy.
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, these companies truly represent the epitome of corporate greed and corruption in america.
They're not screwing over the little guy. They're taking advantage of the greed of the little guy, the exact same thing the little guys are trying to do. It was no different with the housing bubble. Greed (and absolutely nothing more) drove the middle class to suck money out of their houses to live lavish lifestyles VASTLY beyond their means. Did the banks profit off that greed? Sure, but the trillions of dollars that were lost in the housing market were spent by the homeowners on vacations, $40k cars, flat screen TVs and other such things that someone making $50k a year *shouldn't have*. Period. A few investment bankers racking up seven figure bonuses isn't even a fraction of a percent of the money that was stolen the greed of the "99%".
Plenty of people made lots of money on it -- institutional investors and professionals. Private amateur investors are universally told IPOs are a *bad* idea to invest in. Greed drove a lot of morons to invest money on a "sure thing".
The FB IPO dragged down a bunch of other solid stocks, which have all rebounded. If you bought AAPL the day before the FB IPO, you've already made almost 7% -- in four days. A lot of other stocks were similarly pulled down by the market wanting to realize some gains and shift money into FB. Other people shorted FB, knowing the price was at least 2-3x what could be justified. (And the IPO was far too big for single-investor hype to drive the prices up that far.)
I choose to pay about 25% more for my electricity to have 100% renewable. The extra $20 a month isn't a big deal to me, and while I'm not a dirty enviro-hippy, I do think its a matter of being responsible. I can afford to pay extra for it, so I do.
People choosing to do things like that (buy clean electricity, the people who bought the early hybrid cars, people buying the pure electric and extended range electric cars etc) help to fund the growth of the technology where it can become ubiquitous. (Or, as another example, the people who pay $250k for a ride on Virgin Galactic -- its all the same.)
I think the main problem is application developers not understanding anything about database theory. The vast majority of databases I encounter are not normalized at all, and it's almost always because they were designed by a developer with no database background.
Or a developer who is experienced enough to know how bad an idea an overly normalized database is for most applications.
If at first you don't succeed, you're doing about average. -- Leonard Levinson