Working in Professional Services for another major enterprise application, I could really see this being the fault of either party. I think many in Professional Services (myself included) take a pragmatic approach to implementation. The focus is on getting something going that meets 90 or 95% of the requirements with a healthy dose of skepticism that anything beyond that is worth the cost. At some point, the customer has to pull the trigger, adopt and adapt. In the course of doing so, they will discover shortcomings and advantages that weren't envisioned initially, and the effort and cost of pursuing perfection initially can be saved for follow-up effort once all that real-world feedback is collected. I have found some University customers tend much more towards wanting the "ideal" solution on Day 1 and as a Professional Services provider, going that last 5 or 10% of the way to perfection can be an extremely frustrating, money-losing endeavor. At the same time, none of the above can be encoded in a contract that would ever get signed, so all you can do as a Professional Services provider is choose your customers wisely and know when to require time & materials contracts.

I would go even a step further - It shouldn't matter who holds the ticket at all. As long as it is valid, the holder should be able to board without ID. It is interesting the score on my original post fluctuates between 1 and 2. Some bump it down some bump it up. It would sadden me if someone took a comment illustrating true freedom and disregard it as flaimbait. I'm hoping it was just the condescending tone of my post - which I somewhat regret - than the content.

You should go to an airport, be dropped off at a curb, walk through the door, walk down a hallway, walk out another door onto a tarmac, walk up a staircase, have your ticket or electronic boarding pass that you paid cash for scanned and get on the airplane. Total time: 5 minutes. Spare me the comments about "that's not the world we live in." That's crap. Read history. The world has always been a dangerous place. That's what life is: dangerous and fragile. The only question is whether you and your children will live as free people or as cowering fools.

I think this story is revealing about Facebook's security architecture. One would have hoped that security policies are defined within the application at a very low level and that all requests for information -- be it photos, posts, whatever -- must pass through that low-level security layer. What this story reveals is that the security architecture of Facebook is such that each developer of each separate function (in this case, the report-a-nude-photo function) is responsible for re-implementing security checks.

There is a flipping element in Credit Bubbles. NASDAQ stocks were flipped in the 90s. Condos and houses were flipped in the 2000s. How does one flip an education? By getting a job where the hiring manager blindly extends offers to a person just because they have a piece of paper. The student buys into the piece of paper using government-supplied money and then the employer takes on the costs of paying it off without really getting their money's worth.

To clarify my comment on Apple deserving the Patent. I am generally against all patents. What I was trying to say is that given the patent system we have I do not see this particular patent as an abusive or "troll" kind of patent at all.

The iPhone was a huge achievement in industrial design, miniaturized UI (including the slide lock), supply chain, distribution, and negotiations with a major carrier. I do not think any other company than Apple could have pulled off the iPhone in 2007 and successfully shipped millions of them. It's amazing how quickly Apple's achievements are taken for granted. They are so successful in simplifying technology that the simplification quickly turns into "obvious" for people. But before Apple did it, none of this was obvious. I distinctly remember that when Steve Jobs said that the pointing device for the iPhone would be the finger, it was a novel idea and I was full of doubt whether it could really be pulled off. I distinctly remember thinking that the slid lock was a unique, elegant solution to a problem, and yes, I think it deserves patent protection if no one else had it before or at the same time Apple had it. I mean "This is how you turn it on" was part of their commercials. Those commercials wouldn't have worked unless "how you turn it on" truly was a novel and unique idea.

We live in a world of mediocrity. We get by on billions of mediocre people churning out mediocre work.

Even really great people, really brilliant people, churn out mediocre work from time to time. I know I have churned out more than my share of mediocre work.

At the same time, most of us actually have the discriminating ability to look at a piece of work and say, "that is really mediocre." Probably 10 or 20 times a day, I come accross some piece of work - mine or others' - that is mediocre. It's clear that the person who made it was in a rush or didn't care or simply wasn't smart or talented enough to deliver something truly great.

Though we may be able to spot mediocre work, most of us just are not in a position of credibility to do anything about it.

Steve Jobs saw mediocrity the way we do, the difference is he had earned his credibility and could send things back to the drawing board any time he wanted. How did he earn his credibility? He was smart, hard-working, and happened to partner with a rare person who consistenlty churned out great work: Steve Wozniak. Those early ingredients set Jobs down a path where he could tell someone what they were making was not good and that they could do better and those people listened to him and ofen were inspired by that "encouragement."

I believe that was one of Steve's many great gifts.

The strung-together sequence of news services, AFP, Motreal Gazette, Slashdot, the technology used to deliver the Pope's message to us Slashdot readers, is causing confusion about what he actually meant and said in reality and the fiction of what everyone assumes he meant or wants him to have said.

Don't forget another effect of the stimulus: making used cars more expensive. This comes about because anyone who would have sold their beater, or any dealer that would have re-sold it, for less than $4500 in the used car market, is now having it destroyed instead. This will make it real fun for any low-income or teenage drivers who happen to be in the market for a sub-$4500 used car in the near future.

Funnel. Some say its an inclined plane. Others say it does no work and is therefor not a simple machine at all. Discuss.

Sorry, I must continue this off-topic thread. There have been panics throughout history, even when 10:1 was considered highly-leveraged. The Second Bank of the United States, eventually abolished by Jackson, fell victim in the Panic of 1819, with leverage of just 9:1. (See Rothbard's History of Money & Banking in the US)

Your point is well-taken, but given the history of panics under varied reserve requirements, there may be something to the concept that any fractional reserve banking at all is a problem.

Rothbard advocates Free Banking in The Mystery of Banking, a free-market system of banks with no regulation at all. In such a system, fractional reserve lending would actually be allowed, but it would not be legally protected by the state nor guaranteed by it. He predicts that under such a system, banks would tend towards full reserves because of the constant redemption of their notes by competing banks (among other reasons.)

Microsoft was given AAA rating when they announced the issuance of $6 billion in bonds.

From the Economic Times:

23 Sep, 2008 NEW YORK: Software giant Microsoft has been assigned the highest investment grade of 'AAA' by global credit rating agency Standard & Poor's, making it the first American non-financial corporate debt issuer to receive this rating in a decade.

Also from Forbes:

09.22.08 - Moody's Investors Service said it assigned an 'AAA' senior unsecured debt rating to Microsoft Corp. reflecting the company's position as the world's largest software company with a strong and defensible market position throughout its diverse core offerings. The rating outlook is stable.