Democracy will be broken the day the vote is removed.

What good is a vote between two predetermined choices? You don't just need a vote, you need a functioning electoral system that's actually responsive to the will of the people. What we have instead is much more akin to the magicians choice than a carefully designed instrument that measures the will of the people. Until we have preference voting, publicly funded campaigns, and a media that doesn't black out third party candidates, we really don't have a meaningful franchise at all.

The problem with people "rising up" these days is that it tends to get very bloody, very ugly, and to chaotic to be managed

True. That's supposed to serve as incentive for the powerful to behave well. They will be the first against the wall after all. Prison terms within the legal system are the ideal approach, but when the government is too corrupt what do we have left?

Want to get out Republic back, vote for a moderate republican

We tried that in 2008, look what it got us.

Vote for a reasoned voice then hold them to it.

I would love to, there are none on the ballot that have a chance of winning.

You have plenty of opportunity to provide factual rebuttals here, and good arguments are modded up. All we have here are unsupported assertions that the NSA mostly does good, and the old "I was only following orders excuse". *THAT* is what you'd expect to see at Fox News.

Reasonable people with a brain can do better. Try harder.

Most times they come to work like most people, processing paper work, managing information, and trying to make it to the end of the day so they can enjoy life.

And why does that excuse them from assisting evil? These people have a moral responsibility to evaluate the system that they are working in.

As the GP said, save the vitriol for those that make policy

Policy doesn't do anything if there aren't people to carry out that policy. Those who choose to help carry out bad policy are bad people.

if you don't like the current batch of policy makers, work to get rid of them in the next round of elections.

Was that *your* attempt at humor? We tried getting rid of the neocons in 2008, look at what that got us. Democracy is well and truly broken in the US. You're not going to do anything from the top down. Only when the people rise up will real change happen.

Like any fed agency it's largely ordinary civil service just doing a day to day job to feed their family. Most of them are ordinary people no more deserving of your hate (and yes, it is bigoted hate, oriented around their job instead of race or creed) than anyone else.

Would you make the same arguments about e.g. Al Qaeda's accountant? Or the contractors on the Death Star?

Most of them are probably doing harmless innocuous work

If you sweep the floors for the enemy, you're still working for the enemy.

Beleive it or not the intelligence community does serve a useful purpose

Only useful to those interested in projecting American hegemony across the planet for all of eternity.

the same ordinary civil service workers who just "doing their job" and give no more thought to the moral rightness of what theyre doing than a Chevy worker does as he tightens the same nut 50k times a day as the line moves past.

And that's the problem. They're morally negligent, that's no better than being morally wrong. Remember, the only thing required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. These people aren't just doing nothing, they're providing support.

Either that or the good trolls have been promoted to senior management.

Does "Fed" include all the people in that room who are contractors for various federal agencies?

Does anyone believe that being once removed by virtue of a private company makes you any less part of the police state?

You totally missed the point. I'm saying you *don't* interrupt the sprint. You make the sprint long enough to get things done but short enough that changing business priorities get injected into the development process in a timely fashion.

A 1 week sprint is, in my opinion, almost always going to be too short. 30 days is almost always a reasonable sprint length, and as you say if something is *really* pressing you can always interrupt it. A one week sprint that you can interrupt is almost meaningless as a sprint, excepting of course bona fide crises (e.g. man-rated emergencies).

So, its okay for your DVD/Bluray player to stop playing movies after 5 years? For your TV to stop playing new shows? For your camera to stop being able to take pictures? For your PC to be obsolete?

I'm typing this from a 5 year old PC which runs pretty much everything almost as well as it did when I built it (it wasn't bleeding edge then, just high-mid-range), sans some games; so I should be happy if it just suddenly stopped working, for no reason other than someone decided to stop supporting it, just to force me to buy another one with slightly higher specs?

I always find it odd when people compare Apple to Android... Since you're comparing a brand name to a multi-platform OS, it isn't a very useful metric since it is Apples to oranges. Apple avoids fragmentation by being monolithic and holding a monopoly on their hardware and software. I'd rather have the fragmentation, than to only have one vender and only one set of hardware. Android is healthier for consumers in the long run, than iOS, since I can pick what flavor I want, and what hardware I want to pair it with. Android is closer to the PC market, where I can stick Linux, or Windows, or BSD or Chrome, or... on my Intel or AMD, or ARM box, with my Intel, NVIDIA or AMD graphics...

Unless you're using Verizon. They basically refuse to update, or at least they refused to update my Droid X past 2.3.

The biggest problem with the phone market is that someone else is in charge of updates. This killed my ASUS TF101, and killed my perfectly functional Droid X. The phone market should aspire towards the PC market, with open platforms and open updates. This, obviously, will never happen, since we're supposed to throw our phones in the landfill after two years, buying a new $500 bit of hardware.

You could run certainly run Ruby on any mobile device if it had a magic garbage collector that solved everybody's problems. Except there's no such thing that's immune to idiot developers who allocate memory or variables and leave reference to them hanging around. The same problems apply to java on Android.

TFS hasn't inspired me to read TFA, so sorry if it's explained there.

Who's worked out the relative energy costs of towing an ice shelf vs. doing desalinization?

I knew I was renting the place I lived

See, that's a very responsible attitude, but so rare. Even driving by the sea wall in Seabright always made me wary, especially when the crashers were coming onto the road.

When I was a kid, we'd walk the boardwalk in Point Pleasant and it was lined with bungalows. They all dated from before the National Flood Insurance Program. Nobody would insure those against water, so they weren't much more than shacks that could take some wind. My friend's grandmother owned one, and it was a place to go to hang out at the shore, but we always new a big hurricane might just make it disappear.

Fast forward to today, and Italianate mansions line that same boardwalk, all owned by millionaires. The poor people in the rest of the country now subsidize their high-life coastal living.

I second the nomination of Scrum, which complements agile development practices.

Scrum is about managing development priorities. You can't work efficiently if you keep changing priorities every day because nothing will ever get finished. On the other hand, if you *never* change development priorities until you've finished everything you set out to do, developers are happy but they might not be working on things the business needs or wants.

The truth is that businesses have to respond to change. A rival announces a new feature; the price of some related product or service changes dramatically; regulators threaten to fine your company for some reason; a PR scandal forces your CEO to get up and make public promises you'd never imagined. Things like these can change a business's priorities, and if your employer's priorities change, yours ought to as well. Just not so often you never manage to finish anything.

Scrum strikes a sensible balance between changing direction so often you never finish anything, and putting your head down and finishing things but then finding out your employer actually needed something else. Don't get me wrong, if you *can* keep the same priorities for months on end, you should. But in many situations you don't have that luxury. You have to respond to business changes, while at the same time finishing what you set out to accomplish.

Yup. When I worked at Amazon the #1 question on internal mailing lists was "my Java webservice feezes up and breaks SLA whenever GC kicks in, how do I fix this?". GC is not a silver bullet, and you're going to end up thinking about memory on anything non-trivial.

No problem on the TL DR, but you raise an important point. You're absolutely right that a strongly typed language has some optimization advantages, but CPU is only one kind of resource. Optimizing CPU usage for a sequence of statements is a good thing, but that's simply not the bottleneck in scaling web services these days.

Node.js demonstrates this. Under the covers it uses polling (I presume) to ensure that the CPU keeps doing useful work as the load climbs, rather than spinning its wheels waiting for I/O. So instead of allocating a thread per request and stalling every single thread as it waits for the results of a database query, Node just goes down the list of queries with data returned and fires off a small event handler you write in javascript. I suppose it helps that the javascript engine Node uses is very efficient (for Javascript), but there's more to gain in efficiently CPU usage by managing *other* resources efficiently than there is by compiler optimizations -- at least for *typical* web applications, where the task is to glue back end resources like databases to front end applications in HTML.