Hey, it's the Telegraph. You expect maybe accurate reporting or decent writing? If so, I have some waterfront land in Florida to sell you...

It is a bit difficult to take you seriously when you ask about fairly objective and impartial things like qualifications, but you use multiple flagrantly crude insulting terms in the process of doing so, and you say that your opinion is based on an issue rather than on qualifications.

I see no point in arguing about gun control here. Heck, it might even be that I agree with you on it, but that is an issue - not a qualification.

The simple answer to your question about whether she has qualifications is yes. In fact, she appears to be pretty strong in terms of objective qualifications. I won't go try to dig them out here. If you actually cared about qualifications, then it would have been pretty hard for you to miss the prominent mention of them in most of the news media reports.

If by "qualifications", you really mean "agrees with you on a particular issue", then that's a different question, and I'd have to say, that based on the limited sample of your rhetoric posted here, I'd probably not consider you qualified to judge qualifications, or probably for much of anything else requiring a modicum of judgment or decorum. I suppose posting as an anonymous coward shows at least some judgment; I sure wouldn't want a post like tied to me. But then I don't post things that I wouldn't want tied to me.

As issues go, at least on the tech-related ones noted by the OP, her decisions sound pretty sensible to me. They seem to show a lot more understanding of the issues than a fair fraction of the slashdot posts in this thread... but I guess that's not a very high standard. It almost sounds like she actually read the relevant material before writing her decisions, which pretty much puts her ahead of the traditional slashdot commenter.

Or even more likely, 'remove unapproved modules' might well have been part of the preparation. I used to work for NASA before I retired, and doing things like removing the games from standard software installations would have been quite typical. That was for ordinary old office or laptop computers - not ones sent into space - but it wouldn't be surprising at all for the same kinds of policies to apply.

Yep. I have long had a personal policy to never do business with Tiger Direct. It's such a long-standing policy that I've forgotten the details. Perhaps it is just my mind blocking out old unpleasant experiences. I recall establishing the policy, which is all I really need to remember. And now that I know, I know to extend that policy to Circuit City.

You really need a citation for the fact that NASA contracts most of its work out. I thought that was such common knowledge (including among people who worked there and knew - such as myself) as to not need citation. Not worth my time to ferret out more detailed citations, but two readily available numbers tell the story pretty well.

Total NASA workforce - about 18,000 (google "NASA workforce" size if you care to verify that; I did).

NASA annual budget - about $18 billion (google NASA budget will do).

If you can't do the arithmetic, let me do so for you. That's a million dollars per NASA employee. No, we aren't paid that well; pretty well, but not that well, :-) Pretty much all that money goes to contracts.

Spacecruft?

Practically all of physics even. I tend to jokingly refer to physics as applied math.

I can't tell whether the original poster of this thread is trolling or is just incredibly stupid (or both, which might be most likely, insomuch as trolling is stupid), but I'd say that in general math is a superb undergraduate major for quiet practical reasons (independent of the abstract beauty).

People entering undergrad school are often still a bit hazy on exact career goals. In that case, math can be an excellent choice because it is good base preparation for many, many fields - darn near anything scientific or technical, and some other areas as well. I often advise people who are still waffling about the details that math is a good default for undergrad, moving into something more specialized either in grad school or later in their undergrad work.

Edwards AFB, where I worked before retirement, had similar issues of concern about interference with aircraft test telemetry. They even prohibited wireless keyboards and mice. While the prohibition obviously was not 100% effective, I'm told that a few violators would not cause problems, but that they didn't want the many thousands of wireless units that they would see without the prohibition.

For related reasons, there is no cell phone competition on base. They have exactly one provided who they have a contract with. My cell didn't happen to work with that provider.

Is the poster trying (somewhat lamely) to be amusing? Or, as seems more likely, is he unaware that "false fact" is an oxymoron?

The article doesn't say how much the perpetrators netted from this scheme, but it is a pretty safe bet that it is a lot more than the $500k penalty, probably by about an order of magnitude. I did see a comment about "thousands" of checks.

Typical FTC "penalty". Make the crook pay back 10% or so of his take and promise not to do it again.

Wow is my experience/opinion different from yours!

I find Quickbooks to be just horrible. I use the Windows version (under VMWare Fusion on my Mac) because the Mac version doesn't even pretend to support the only thing I still use it for (the credit card billing). But even the Windows version (which all of the following is about)...

Well, it is full of just plain bugs. For example, there is an obvious trivial bug in the forms entry for credit card expiration date for a customer's preferred payment method. The month always resets to 12 even if you set it to something else. I called their "customer support" about that one. After about half an hour on the phone with a clueless script-reading "customer support" rep, he obviously decided he had spent too much time and brushed me off (telling me to call the merchant services folk, whose problem it obviously wasn't). I wasn't expecting him to fix the problem, but I was hoping he'd at least pass it on as a bug report; no such luck.

I find the interface incredibly nonintuitive, complicated, awkward... just add every poor adjective you can think of for a poor user interface.

I rapidly gave up downloading my bank statements because it was so awkward to do and messed up so often. It was easier to manually reconcile.

It won't reconcile its own automatic entries. The month-end merchant fees get auto-entered as 2 separate transactions, but show up at the bank as a single combined one... and the reconciliation won't let you reconcile a single bank-downloaded entry to multiple transactions (like Quicken can).

And a host of other problems and awkward things that would make this post longer than the too long that it already is.

Eventually, I gave up on using Quickbooks for everything except the credit card billing (which actually does reasonably match my needs, in spite of the darned reset-month-to-12 bug). I moved everything else to Quicken Home&Business and I double enter credit card deposits in both Quickbooks and Quicken; the double entry is actually easier than fighting with Quickbook's management of my checking account.

Not that I'm thrilled with Quicken. I'm debating switching (possibly to MoneyDance) at the end of this year. But it is worlds better than Quickbooks. It seems obvious to me that Quickbooks and Quicken were done by entirely different groups, and it also seems obvious which group has a better handle on user interface.