Having been in such situations, when any sort of lower/middle manager starts using $20 MBA buzzwords such as "The Cloud" or "Webinar" (that one is like nails on a chalkboard to me), be afraid.

A better way is to read Dilbert on a daily basis. As soon as you start to think Scott Adams works at your company, you're in for a rough ride.

That sounds racist.

This would have more validity if the the title was "What Charles Koch & George Soros can teach use about campaign finance data"

Coriolis effect. Next FUD!

1) What's the sustained and peak current delivery? 10C? 25C? 50C?
2) Do you have to balance multi-cell packs like you do with current LiPo?
3) Can you use existing charging methods?
4) How much do they cost?

Assuming that this isn't sarcasm, there's a lesson to be learned here. If you are willing to operate on a shoestring budget, you can accomplish a lot. But you also have to be willing to look at your idea and honestly assess it's value and whether or not it's time to close up shop and move on to something else.

Hmm...showmanship I get. Steve Jobs was a master at it. Not offending the judge bothers me because that means they're not able to be objective. This also points out the dangers of allowing marketing to drive R&D.

George Carlin said "You nail two pieces of wood together that have never been nailed together before and some schmuck will buy it from you." I usually follow that statement with "If you don't believe me, go to Bed, Bath & Beyond." That's where you find a lot of infomercial products. Wal-Mart has an aisle for it too and so does True Value and Ace Hardware.

People seem to be more willing to buy stupid stuff than they are well-designed, practical, truly useful stuff. One could argue that this speaks volumes about the intelligence of the buying public. The segment of the population that comes up with stupid products knows this. Their goal is simply to make a lot of money as quickly as possible with minimal effort. The people who fund development are of the same mindset. The same can be said of the entire entertainment industry.

Can this be changed? Maybe. I often wonder if we created the scientific equivalent of American Idol, how would that alter public perception of geeks. If you could have an annual or bi-annual competition with huge rewards (we're talking 8 figures here) and a ton of publicity e.g. touring the talk-show circuit, would you be able to give the winners rock-star status thus encouraging more people to go for it instead of cranking out noise that some people think is music.

I'd be very interested to know a) why this kid didn't advance in his home state and b) why other kids did? Was the judging really objective or was there some bias somewhere? Did the judges base their decision on criteria other than real science? I don't think we've heard the whole story here.

But let's consider this: you write a research paper and submit it to one peer-review journal. They reject it. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to submit it to other journals? What if it turns out that your paper totally blows away popular theory and the rejection was simply a case of the reviewers sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "lalalalalala...we're not listening to you..."?

For my own part, I do understand what it means to get screwed because somebody gamed the system. In my senior year in undergrad engineering, I was up for best senior project. A fellow student also entered and won. Her secret weapon turned out to be the fact that her boyfriend, who was a student at MIT with all the resources of such a place at his fingertips, was the one who did all the work. Everyone in the class told me that I got screwed. Was I pissed? Sure. The bitch got a special piece of paper at graduation. Where is she now? Who knows. Me, I started two successful businesses. The real lesson here is not to allow someone else determine your fate. Do your own thing and the market will decide if your efforts should be rewarded. Of course I say this and yet people make a crapload of money on shamwows. Doing your own thing doesn't necessarily mean it must be technically/scientifically brilliant.

IMHO, Java is the Visual Basic of the programming world. Try playing around with Raspberry Pi.

Some radical environmentalist person on their online dating profile writes "Genetically modified people need not apply."

From way back but this particular story comes from a friend who is a retired mold-maker. One of is many accomplishments is that he design the plastic molds for the original IBM PC. That story goes that IBM came to him to get the molds made and he asked them how many parts they planned to pull off the mold. Their totally serious answer was 150,000. Ten copies of the mold later, IBM had to farm out production to ten different parts of the country to keep up with demand.

But I digress. His most recent consulting job was to do some variations of a commemorative NASCAR race car. Not an original model but a copy with a few team-specific details. The client was planning to make 3000 kits. His estimate came in over $20k. So the client asked what the cost would be if they did 6000 kits. He decided to check with a friend in China. He showed me the quote letter that said they could do 6000 kits including all the molds delivered to the US for $8000 and the guy in China had written "Let me know if that's too much and I'll sharpen my pencil.

Oh, yeah, and they'll make the kits for about 1/4th the price including the molds than we could do them here in the states (true story).

So here's a question: What if the leaking of these designs was intentional? There could be several motivations for doing this. One, maybe these aren't the actual designs and they are flawed in some subtle yet crucial way or perhaps multiple ways. Two, they aren't the actual designs but the goal was to lure the hackers in to determine their methods. Or three, that some peacenik thought that it was unfair that the US has all the cool toys and are attempting to achieve whirled peas by way of leveling the playing field.

What I really want to know is if taking vitamin C adversely affects BCG treatment for bladder cancer. http://www.webmd.com/cancer/bladder-cancer/bacillus-calmette-guerin-bcg-for-bladder-cancer