What the GP is suggesting is that Oracle the company (as opposed to the individual consultants) should have walked away from a taxpayer funded money pit but chose to continue "taking candy from a baby". Other's have walked away from similar disasters in the past in very public fashion, IBM walked away from a $800M project in NZ in the late 90's and Fujitsu walked away from a $1B project in the UK a few years ago, both claimed to be happy with the profit levels but were unwilling to continue because the government were unwilling/unable to follow their project management advice, making it impossible for them to deliver. Multinationals do not want to be seen as being unable to deliver a government contract, government work is their bread and butter and in politics reputations matter. Oracle didn't take the "high road" when their own consultants were predicting disaster, now they are getting public blowback from the client, which is why their PR department has fired up on this issue.

OTOH Oracle (as their PR points out) were not managing the project they were on a time and materials contract, which most people in the industry would understand as meaning "we will give you what you ask for, but don't blame us if it is not what you want". The client obviously wasn't listening to the "don't blame us" part when they signed the contract.

If I understand, your question is basically, "why is the human brain's amygdala hard-wired to produce emotional responses in this way?"

There's no really good answer, other than "it just is" and maybe some handwaving about evolutionary psychology.

Exactly, if Oracle were contracted on T&M then they were simply acting as an (expensive) body shop, ie they supply the bodies to the client, the client tells the body what to do. Basically Oracle takes $3 from the client, pays the body $1, and pocket's the difference. T&M on a project such as this is a cash cow for the vendor, it can only work in the client's favour if the client knows what they are doing.

Disclaimer: Having been a body for other multinationals on similar projects, the $3:1 ratio is an educated guess.

He might not even be lying. They don't have the hard drive space or the capability to spy on everyone. Of course he doesn't want to spy on *everyone*, just suspected muslims, dissidents, homosexuals or anyone else who might not support the Kremlin.

I would remind everyone that after the Boston Bombings the Russians were very helpful in providing all of Tsarnaev's text messages. They just "happened" to have him under surveillance. What luck!

Probably the same thing that spurs paranoia about automated taxes today. The government knows enough about us that they could easily auto-file/fill our forms every year but people are afraid of admitting how much is known about us.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon...

They did examine heartbleed.

http://ericlippert.com/2014/04...

Not much of a problem. I have a strong English accent, and the same technique works with Cortana as speaking abroad... I just speak LOUDLY AND CONDESCENDINGLY. :)

Years back, in the days of much higher inflation, my brother said he fully expected to be a millionaire one of these days, and he also expected to spend something like $100 of that money to get a hamburger at McDonalds.

I grew up in the 60's, all parents behaved like that (and worse), also teachers could smack you around if you looked at them in the wrong way. In grade 5 a five foot - zero female teacher whacked me so hard she broke a yard long blackboard ruler over my backside, in front of the class. This was in semi-rural Australia but "Spare the rod, spoil the child" was a universal truth in western society, everyday 1960's discipline was clearly child abuse by today's standards but I'm not aggrieved by it, it was just something everyone accepted as a "fact of life". Sticking with the old ways is the very definition of "conservative", blind faith that "the old way is always the best way" is just nostalgia playing tricks on your mind.

Disclaimer: I have 3 grandkids, 5 and under, I was an average, imperfect parent but I rarely smacked my kids when the were growing up. My youngest daughter is a better parent than I ever was, which is the way it should be. :)

What you call 'spiral dynamics' sounds a lot like Machiavelli's theory of political history, which he laid out in his book The Prince.

Machiavelli postulated that Monarchy tends to devolve into an aristocratic and oligarchic Tyranny, Tyranny is supplanted via revolution by Democracy, Democracy eventually (and inexorably) falls into Anarchy, and Anarchy is solved when one person rises to lead the masses and forms a Monarchy.

History is cyclic. The question is whether we can break the cycle, and do we want to. As powerful as the security state has become, we're likely to break the cycle by spawning an eternal Tyranny instead of a sustainable Democracy.

I'm 55, I played my first video game of arcade Pong in 1970 and still play video games regularly today. It's not injury that reduces performance, it's age. My 25yr old self had less fat, more muscle, faster reflexes, a steadier hand, sharper eyesight, better hearing, etc, etc. Consequently my younger me was faster (but not nesissarily better) at just about everything. Age related injury is responsible for things like the fact I'm no longer able to kneel on a hard floor.

I've heard something similar...

If devs have to LIVE with the consequences of their bugs or race conditions or misfeatures, by having to manually fix up customer accounts, or reboot the server, or just click through too many screens, then it really focuses their minds on what are the important bugs to fix, helps them triage more effectively, helps direct their coding energy in the right place.

PS. This is only for devops work on the systems running YOUR software. If course it doesn't apply to what most people in this thread are discussing, doing devops work for code you didn't write.

Sophisticated and knowledgeable eyes don't go trawling trough code looking for bugs, they test the functionality of the binary. They only turn to the code to explain/fix what they have found.

That scenario actually explains why security-related code is best done in MANAGED languages using something like SecureString
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u... -- this way, you still have API control to zero it out immediately, but you also benefit from the fact that you can make it ReadOnly, the fact that it's encrypted, the fact that it was authored by someone who's more expert in security than you and has had more eyes to review it than your ad-hoc solution.

Hind sight is always 20/20, nuclear is NOT the answer, neither are wind or solar, in fact no technology can replace coal by itself but they are perfectly capable of doing it in combination. The US has turned to gas in a big way, that's not the answer either, it is a small improvement on emissions but the extraction methods may be poisoning the groundwater. IMO "the answer" is a well managed "net metering" grid with a diverse range of (locally tuned) generation methods in a "polluter pays" market.

Note that the "base load" argument from the coal industry (and some nuclear zealots) is utter nonsense aimed a people's ignorance, coal has always relied on other technologies to keep the lights on. The demand curve of a city is not flat, to match it coal requires hydro to store energy when the plant exceeds demand, and fast switching gas turbines to compensate when "stored hydro + base load" is not enough. Also a coal plant will be down for 2 months a year for maintenance, meaning to get the full output of 6 plants you need to build and operate 7. Solar has a fantastic advantage in summer since air-conditioning is the drain, not much good in winter when the air conditioner goes into reverse.

Many people will be able to see all this clearly manifest itself in their electricity bill as peak/off-peak rates.