Well, at least Ed Regis is in the esteemed company of people that believed that you would fall off the earth if you went too far east or west. I'm looking forward to toasting Ed Regis with the local moonshine from a beautiful view sitting above Candor Chasma Rim. Seriously, find reasons to do things instead of excuses for giving up.

Having robotic enforcement of laws against mistake prone, imprecise human beings is an oppressive idea of the worst sort.

How many people have made a living in some way off of GPL'd software? It's a much larger number than you think.

Freedom and money are two sides of the same coin. Freedom is useless without the financial means to enjoy it. Likewise, money is useless without the freedom to use it as you see fit.

I'm glad that Microsoft is releasing this. I really am. But you don't have to do the whole vaporware release where you say "We'll be releasing this awesome thing early next year." Just release the code and announce it when you do. Old habits die hard ...

Every situation, and every person is different. Being so binary with people rarely works as an HR strategy. All you do is throw out the best talent for people that are good at not getting in trouble. Being good at not getting in trouble does not make you a good developer, a good salesperson, a good marketer, a good accountant... it just ensures that the person is good at not getting caught and getting out of it when caught. Useful skills, but usually NOT what you are hiring for.

Every time I have been cheated, swindled or defrauded it was by someone who had no prior criminal history whatsoever. I've seen church lady bookkeepers embezzle. I've seen top workers steal inventory. I've had 10%er developers fake time records so they could go to the bar. I've had people turn in tens of thousands in fake expenses. I've had incredibly good customers for five years straight try to get fraudulent refunds.

The common thread was that every one of these persons had a major change in their personal life. Divorces. Tax problems. Spouse got fired. Kids got really ill. Every time there was a major change. So I've started paying close attention to the personal lives of people who work with and for me. When things get tough for them, I try to be engaged and communicate a lot more with them. Sometimes I can directly help (for instance pay off a killer deductible to get the bill collectors to stop). Other times I can't... but by being engaged and interested, the employee knows at some level I'm paying attention. Since I started paying attention, I've had a lot less shenanigans. I'm also a lot less afraid to hire people who are facing challenges... and I've made some amazing hires over the years as a result.

You can have indentation problems or you can have mismatched, nested grouping symbol problems. Either way you go, there's problems. Personally, I just like readable code. You can have that either way.

The assumption that you need to lock down student's devices is the root of all of your issues.

There's a lot of clueless in marketing... and there's also an equal number of creative geniuses. In a lot of cases, marketers make mistakes for the same reasons developers do: underestimating how long work will take, assuming something works without testing it and not talking to users. There's also a strong not invented here bias, people taking way to much personal ownership of their work, HIPPOs (HIghest Paid Person's Opinion) and irrational mandates (i.e.THIS WORD MUST BE IN THE COPY).

Do you think that giving the POS terminal the GNOME name was just a piece of viral marketing tactic to begin with?

I think that in marketing it is better to be lucky than good. If they are smart they will call it Groupon POS because any other name will squander the brand identity that this little kerfuffle has caused.

Hate to say, but marketers can be the most oblivious people in the wold. They also create things and have the same feelings of ownership that many of us do when we cook up a heaping helping of awesome code. So, I'm not surprised by Groupon taking a minute to figure out where they stood.

Last year, the people at my company's marketing department emerged from their cave with a Hire Veterans campaign. Awesome. Except for the fact that the helmet they choose to cap the M-16 with was a Nazi Stahlhelm. When I pointed it out I got the "what do you, developer, know about marketing" response. I answered, "Three of our board of directors are Jewish."

Redshift is a fantastic way to get started... the kind where you end up not needing to migrate to something else.

Right now, if you are starting with "Data Warehouse" you probably are using the wrong answer key to score your wrong questions.

You can find out a lot in a few hours just by going to a Big Data meetup. Traditional database vendors are trying to hijack big data and make it their buzzword. Real big data players are using tools like Hadoop, Spark, Solr, Elastic Search and other tools that allow you to use commodity hardware to get a much more performant platform for big data. The appliance vendors have some interesting off the shelf stuff... you should really take some time to see what is going on... it's wild west time.

It's the same thing as JQuery(). It searches through the DOM for any elements that match the provided selector and creates a new jQuery object that references these elements. Here's a very simple example:

$("div > p").css( "border", "1px solid gray" );

finds any div wrapped paragraphs and puts a solid gray line around them. Docs here: http://api.jquery.com/jquery/.