Even if only a third of the people stick around after din-din (and it's usually more), it's still the equivalent of getting more better than a 10% increase in manpower for the price of nine dinners (in bulk) per day per extra head - FAR less than the cost of hiring another head.

Did the math wrong: Make that about 17% more "heads" for the price of six dinners per night for one in three staying an extra half-shift..

FWIW, most "free food" programs encourage workers to come in earlier (for breakfast) or stay later (work past dinner time) or to not spend a long time off the company property over lunch. The extra time at work usually pays for the food costs.

It pays MUCH more than that. A typical thing that happens at startups is the company buys dinner - and the bulk of the engineers chow down and stick around another four hours. Not only do they get half-again as much time, but they get it in a block. For a programmer or other design engineer that means they haven't "lost state" and are even more productive than if they'd just worked three days instead of two.

Even if only a third of the people stick around after din-din (and it's usually more), it's still the equivalent of getting more better than a 10% increase in manpower for the price of nine dinners (in bulk) per day per extra head - FAR less than the cost of hiring another head.

And then there's an adminstrative pathology: The new management comes in, sees how much is spent on the food (but not how much is gained as a result), decides that their predecessors were stupid and the employees were looting the company, and stops the food. So come dinner time the employees go out (or home) to dinner and don't come back. Immediately it's like they lost somewhere between 10% and 33% of their work force without any reduction in payroll costs. (That's not counting how disgruntled some of the employees become.)

I've been at three companies where this happened, and observed several more. All but one of 'em folded shortly thereafter - and the one that survived went through a near-bankruptcy that destroyed the original investors' equity and left it in the hands of the bondholders before it recovered.

It could even keep a local part of the grid up while all others around them suffer power failures.

And that is a BIG no-no. Because it kills linemen trying to fix the outage.

Those transformers work both ways. Your little generator or inverter gets stepped up to maybe 8,000 or 12,000 volts. Then a lineman who thinks the power is down brushes against a wire (or comes within a quarter-inch of it) and is "burned" - to death.

Grid-connected inverters with a "sell" feature MUST monitor the network and shut down if they detect islanding - being cut off from the grid, with one or a collection of generators running autonomously. It's perfectly OK to feed power into the grid when it's up (if you're using UL approved equipment, connected according to code, inspected for compliance, and the utility knows you're doing it according to the rules.) It's perfectly OK to have things wired so your equipment still feed your house if the grid goes down, but it MUST cut itself off from the dying or dead grid and stay off until the grid comes back up and stabilizes at the nominal voltage and frequency.

Homemade hovercraft used to be a big thing since at least the '50s or '60s (and for all I know still are). Typically made by putting a prop on a vertical-axle lawnmower engine and building a simple vehicle body with a fan shroud in the middle.

There was a classic disaster that happened to a LOT of people who did this:

After they'd played around on land with it for a while they'd decide to test how it would perform on water. So they'd take it down to the local park-on-a-lake, fire it up, and drive out onto the lake.

It would work fine ... for a few minutes. Just long enough to get maybe 20 feet or so, over well over-their-heads water...

Then the spray it was kicking up and sucking back around the motor on its way to the fan would finally short out the spark wiring. Oops!

Of course they usually hadn't included any floats...

No, flying isn't the correct word.

Story I heard, back in the '60s. (Don't know if it's true, unfortunately. But I think we have some Ann Arborites here who might check the city ordinances.)

Plans had been published for making homemade hovercraft with a salvaged lawnmower engine. Stand on it like a Segway and steer by leaning.

Kid had made one and decided to take it down the LOOOONG, somewhat steep, slope of Hill street one night. (I shiver at the thought of how fast that would be going near the bottom...)

Cops had a radar trap and clocked him at freeway speeds. Issued him a ticket.

He fought it, claiming that the cops had no jurisdiction because he was flying, not driving. Didn't touch the ground. Take it up with the FAA.

Traffic court judge (rightly or wrongly) agreed that this might be true and the cops hadn't proven jurisdiction, so he dismissed the ticket.

City Council banned hovercraft within the city limits shortly thereafter. B-b

Well anybody who has followed me here knows I'm quick to call out bullshit where i see it and saying "X is bad" because X can be used badly while ignoring that A-Z can likewise be made to run piss poor code? Bullshit.

And maybe I should have made myself more clear, when i think of server backends i think of one or more X86 units doing the job whereas the big iron is a completely different story. Sure it CAN be used as a generic server backend but considering how much those suckers cost that wouldn't be the brightest thing to do, last article i saw said the biggest growth for the mainframe were in these huge MMOs and military simulations, jobs where you would need such a huge pile of X86 units it just wouldn't be practical.

Waste mod points all you want but name ONE TIME, just one, in human history where the entire planet was sent backwards by anything OTHER than religion. Religion is the ONLY thing that can give a man the God like powers to ultimately destroy pretty much everything, be it the math revolution in the Arab world or the centuries of knowledge built up by the Romans, religion is the ONLY way to gain enough power over enough people to completely wipe everything out like that until the invention of the atomic bomb.

Now if you want to argue its not the fault of the religion itself, but the assholes in charge of it? Fine but I would argue that you are splitting hairs as throughout history religion ALWAYS gets taken over by the assholes, from the Catholics burning anything and anyone they didn't agree with to the mullahs having anything that didn't say Allah destroyed it always ends up in the hands of major douchebags, but unlike politics this is not something one can have an opposition for easily because "You are against God you heathen" and so on and so forth.

There is a good reason why religion has been called "the opiate of the masses" you know, its because it allows a handful to have control over large populations in such a way that only drug addiction comes close.

Yeah this is a giant fail because the whole point of "Ask Slashdot" is to ask solvable problems that are too geeky for your usual places, stuff like "How can I record securely in my car" or like the problem I had with a customer whose computers kept getting hacked i asked in the comments where it turned out his router had been compromised, its for questions which can actually be ANSWERED.

Whether Yahoo can pull off a come back or not should really be under general, not under Ask Slashdot. As for the question itself, if they continue to not be MSFT? Its possible, I've been making countless Yahoo accounts for customers pissed off at MSFT killing Live Messenger and Hotmail so they could pick up those users and run with them as long as they don't shit all over the UIs like MSFT does.

That's easy to fix - boost them to ~260 GeV and they will last long enough to make a 1,600 km journey. It's the 1,600 km of vacuum pipe and focussing magnets that is the real problem.

Makes you wonder what's wrong with the Great Lakes route which is presumably much shorter.

I'd be careful about complaining about the food it prints to the cook. It probably will not be long before someone figures out how to make it print an edible gun.

It reminds me of an interview I saw where one of the guys that worked on drone tech was laughing about that shit. He said he was brought into a meeting with the brass and they asked "how much would it cost to build this?" and they handed him...a picture of the T-800 from Terminator. He said he laughed and laughed...until he realized they were serious and then he REALLY laughed. They honestly thought you could just build a T-800 if they threw enough money at it. The same thing happened to the director of Blue Thunder who said he phone was swamped for 6 months after the movie was released from different military and SWAT forces all wanting to know "How much for the chopper?". he was pissed though as he made a movie against too much power in the wrong hands and the same powers thought it was a tech demo.

I'd say this just shows how much of a bubble those guys live in compared to reality when they can see something in a movie and think they can just wave their magic pen and make that shit work. Not only is this impossible from a practical sense as the gun would be more likely to fail than it would be to work but frankly it is also a little racist when you think about it since this would raise gun prices to the thousands per handgun and a LOT of the past gun laws can be summed up as "fear of an armed negro". Hell look up the history of gun laws, for nearly a century going back to the very first gun laws they can be summed up as that, and I don't even want to know how much putting all that tech into a gun would cost even IF you could somehow make it functional.

Did you ever write a program? Did it work the first time, doing exactly what it was supposed/specified to do?

Did you ever figure that was an adequate excuse?

Of course not.

Not in what you say isn't the truth, because any software that hasn't been shaken down is usually pretty bad, but using the "first time" as an actual reason for insecure software? Completely unacceptable. If you worked for me with that attitude, you might end up in the mail department where you could have an easier job.

You obviously both misparsed my statement and aren't aware
of how *I* do software development.
It includes beating the HELL out of any piece of software before
releasing it (with a full coverage test suite built into the make
mechanism in a way that causes the build to fail if a unit test
fails.)

I've developed a methodology that lets me deliver such a fully
debugged software components, with test suite blazingly fast,
as well. It takes me about three times as long as it takes a
more typical programmers to get a new component of similar
size and complexity to successfully compile and link (but not
run correctly) after a moderate feature change.

And I'm thus familiar with some of the pathologies of
people who administer programmers with insufficient
insight into what they're doing and their modes of talking
about it. Because I'm so fast I don't generally report
progress until a component is DONE. Result: Some
administrators have compared my delivery of a complete,
polished, from-scratch, component to one debug iteration
of other team members. This lead to actual publication of
a statement to this effect: "[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]
takes three times as long as anyone else, but his stuff
usually works the first time."

I've been referred to as "a god" in hushed tones (over a
nearly non-existent bug rate in a ten thousand line application),
and had a colleague comment that I was the only person he'd
rust to program an artificial heart for him.

So I'm quite aware of how to make software solid.

My point was not making excuses for poor programmers.

My point was that commercial software operations usually
have management pathologies that lead to measuring
function and not measuring (or rewarding) security.
There's a lot of WORK involved in making software secure
and doing it is usually penalized rather than rewarded. So you
have to expect commercial software to USUALLY be riddled
with security bugs.

(Which is why I migrated to hardware design about 15 years ago.
The non-recurring costs of a bug-fix respin as SO high that
administrators often appreciate and reward solid design and
execution.)

Thanks for the link - no surprise there. This is what I find maddening about the climate debate: it is full of people who are willing misrepresent or omit data to support their preconceived bias. As an outsider to the field this makes it impossible to tell which articles contain real science and which contained the cherry-picked data to support the author's viewpoint.

Not always. Look at Google's tax avoidance in the UK. To skip paying UK tax all the deals are negotiated by people in the UK but the final act of agreeing to the the sale is done by someone in Ireland. So now your simple law which is "you get taxed where the sale takes place" suddenly has to sprout a whole ton of rules about how it defines where the deal takes place to avoid Google's tactic of doing everything in the UK except the last part.

The problem is not always that governments have written laws with loopholes in them it is that corporations will twist even the simplest things, like where a deal takes place, and use it to avoid paying tax. They would run rings around any simply stated tax code. Part (but not all ) of the reason most country's tax laws are a nightmare is to stamp out the most egregious abuses.