Good managers are very rare.

So we're told. Yet, the distribution of good and bad managers is almost exactly the same as good and bad line workers.

most of them are worth the money because they can generate share holder wealth.

Share value increases most when jobs are cut. Any idiot can cut salaries and jobs to get a quarterly bump in share price. The success of US corporations has more to do with corporate consolidation increasing pricing power than it does brilliant management.

We have a system where management success means the failure of everyone else who works for the company. Instead of an economy that is based on widespread prosperity, we have one based on prosperity for a very small group who succeed in a system whose rules they set, and misery for everyone else.

We actually have some historical experience with these situations, and it never, ever ends well for elite.

Anyway, more on topic, I hear there is a shortage of talent in the Bay Area. Although...since there are only so many LGBT software engineers who are good, software engineers who are good but who don't understand cost-of-living, single and straight software engineers that are good but don't understand that California girls are trained from birth to be cocaine-snorting psychotic leeches who will rob you blind (true story), etc.

Sounds like someone can't get a date.

Maybe.

Fast charging + wireless charging + ubiquitous charging stations might make it very practical. For my lifestyle a two-hour battery life with 20-second recharges from just putting my phone on a certain region of my desk, nightstand, car console, etc. would work just fine.

As I recall, the paper from Google said something slightly different. It said they found no increase in failure rate. As a result, Google data centers do run warm: 80F. The employees in data centers wear shorts and t-shirts all the time.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/#temperature

You think I'm joking - there has been a baffling increase in the amount of "Russia had it better" posts around here lately.

I bet you could link to some of those posts to add impact to your statement, if you wanted to.

Very perceptive that highly evolved alien life forms would dig Bill Evans, since he was one of them.

And banning them will do exactly nothing to address that problem.

A person who would make a gun with the intention of committing murder with it isn't likely to be deterred by a law banning his gun. Actually, that law already exists... the Defense Distributed guy was careful to epoxy a six ounce block of metal to his before fully assembling it into an operable gun, because it's a federal felony to manufacture an undetectable gun.

Is that irresponsible? Depends on the kid. There are many examples of kids using guns to defend themselves and their siblings against home intruders.

A thousand years from now someone will say: "America. Hmmm. Isn't that the place jazz was invented?"

A thousand years from now someone will say: "America. Hmmm. Wasn't that a country on the planet that humans made inhabitable, but only after turning it into a vast work prison for virtual entities knows as "corporations"?

"And why didn't those stupid sonsabitches in the 20th century do something about it? Humans...maybe we're better off with them extinct."

Yep, that's what they'll say.

Hey, that's Sherlock Holmes!

Your typical slashdotter probably sits closer to their router than the plants. And is about as likely to germinate.

Good thing, too, or we'd see a rash of siamese sextuplets.

Though, to be fair, I'd thought that all the hallucinogens I took back in college had messed up my genes royally, but my daughter turned out perfect. Better than perfect. She can type like a banshee with those twelve fingers.

You'd think that with all the federal money that Amtrak gets that they would already have better services available.

The federal money is to make sure there are not better services available. One of the strings tied to the federal subsidy is that many of the most useful national rail lines had to be abandoned to the private freight lines. This has been going on for decades now. Strangely, the private freight carriers don't seem to be the ones who worked so hard to kill the American passenger railroads.

Rail service in the US did not die because people didn't want it. It died because some very powerful interests didn't want people to have it. The corporatists and the political Right in America hate passenger trains with a passion. They actually get angry about it for some reason.

I took Joe_Dragon's comment to mean that the vast majority of rail service outside Boswash [wikipedia.org] is freight, not commuter service.

By design.

What's surprising is that passenger rail continues in the US despite the efforts of some very powerful lobbying groups to kill it.

People just like trains, and if they had just left more lines intact, the number of riders annually would be a lot more than the current 35 million. It boggles my mind that I cannot ride the train from Chicago to Memphis and back without some ridiculous routing.

rest of the country has lots of freight

Wait, are you calling me fat?

All of the commentary here completely misunderstands what Page said.

He wasn't suggesting that we ought to give up on medical privacy. He was saying that we'd be better off if we could do so -- if we chose to -- without fear of repercussions. He said that in some cases being more open might be beneficial... but he clearly chose to keep his condition secret for quite a long time, even though it was obvious to everyone that something was wrong, and he didn't say anything to imply that we shouldn't have the right to privacy.