here's there new Lic terms for all google code:

D&R (Death and Repudiation) License
========

This software may not be used directly by any living being. ANY use of this
software (even perfectly legitimate and non-commercial uses) until after death
is explicitly restricted. Any living being using (or attempting to use) this software
will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

For your protection, corpses will not be punished. We respectfully request
that you submit your uses (revisions, uses, distributions, uses, etc.) to
your children, who may vicariously perform these uses on your behalf. If
you use this software and you are found to be not dead, you will be punished
to the fullest extent of the law.

If you are found to be a ghost or angel, you will be punished to the fullest
extent of the law.

After your following the terms of this license, the author has vowed to repudiate
your claim, meaning that the validity of this contract will no longer be recognized.
This license will be unexpectedly revoked (at a time which is designated to be
most inconvenient) and involved heirs will be punished to the fullest extent
of the law.

Furthermore, if any parties (related or non-related) escape the punishments
outlined herein, they will be severely punished to the fullest extent of a new
revised law that (1) expands the statement "fullest extent of the law" to encompass
an infinite duration of infinite punishments and (2) exacts said punishments
upon all parties (related or non-related).

I can't tell if you're being funny or deserve to be beaten with a stick.

"Good enough" is usually good enough, especially for consumer goods that won't be around that long anyway.

The way I heard it, it was more like two drunk guys trying to hold each other up.

Yet another technology created a xerox that they never profited from. Yeah for xerox!

Right. It's part of the "stockpile stewardship" program, or the Livermore Senior Activity Center for Retired Physicists. Nobody in the US has built a nuclear weapon in decades, and everybody who knew how is dying off. DoD/DoE is trying to hang onto the expertise and recruit some new people to at least maintain the ones already built. So they have to have something for them to do.

Mod parent up. Bear in mind how this thing works. There's a resistance heater inside, and it is never completely off for long periods. The claim is that the heat given off by the device is greater than that being pumped in by the resistance heater. The heater is fed with a "proprietary waveform" from a control box the watchers were not allowed to examine. All they could do was put clamp-around current sensors on the leads to the device, voltage probes on the inputs, and feed those to a current meter. I strongly suspect problems with the current measurement.

The power was out for 5 days after Isaac, and we got used to the heat., as our great grandparents did before A/C.

A gas stove really helped, though, since even then cold meals get old.

Robotic maintenance was considered for SAGE in the 1950s. Robots were never built for that, but the SAGE racks were designed with easy-to-handle plug-in rack modules with all connections on the back.

(Vacuum tube failure wasn't a major operational problem with vacuum tube computers. For the UNIVAC I, normal procedure was to power up the machine and set it to 10% overvoltage mode for 10 minutes. This would burn out any tubes near failure. Those were replaced, and the machine would then run for the rest of the day without another tube problem. Since the machine had a dual CPU for self-checking, any problem would cause an immediate stop.)

This is a problem that the software industry faces. A level of perfection is expected that doesn't exist in any other industry.

The hourly vs. deliverable is likely the biggest conflict he is facing. I have found that virtually 100% of the time customers want hourly if the project is done early and by deliverable if it runs late. This problem gets way worse when the customer is another contractor sub-contracting out their own work. The fact that he didn't mention whether his rates are hourly or by deliverable implies that he is playing this game.

Comparing house contractors to software contractors isn't really fair. The reason is the every house is filled with uncountable numbers of 'bugs'. One of the primary skills of housing contractors is to make flaws look like they are 'supposed to be that way'.

More like this, to put over a 5 gal bucket.

So they were lying when they said they were "stretched in most areas of the country"?

My cousin, when a newly-minted psychiatrist, worked for NZ on a 6 month contract and so has intimate, first-hand knowledge of NZ's health care problems: every sector has shortages.

Doctors and nurses don't want to permanently work there because the salaries are so low. Thus, they need to spend more money on foreign contract workers.

So, in other words, it is available to you, but you don't want to pay the price of getting it.