He has 5 kids. Hopefully he'll pass on his positive traits and his kids will multiply Musk's achievements.

I'm a wine drinker and lead foil used to be used over the corks of wine bottles. This ended with California's Prop 65 since it set a threshold of "detectable" instead of what can cause harm for any chemical known to cause cancer or birth defects. Seems a few atoms of lead could transfer from the lead foil to the glass of the bottle and then be carried by the wine into the glass of the person drinking the wine. Since CA is a huge market for wine (not just a producer) lead foil went away and was replaced by either another metal (doesn't have the same feel) or plastic (seems like I'm opening a bottle of Ripple).

Keep this sort of absurd approach to things in mind when discussing issues such as this. Lots of substances are detectale at levels that don't cause harm. In spite of the logic in your discussion, chances are that a detectable amount of lead will remain and thus trigger hysteria.

Cheers,
Dave

Actually, the HE-111 became a decent bomber (until it had real fighter opposition but that's a different problem) but the FW-200 really didn't. The FW-200 really was designed as an airliner and had a tendency to suffer structural failures pulling the loads that were put on it as a bomber/maritime patrol plane. It still sank quite a bit of allied shipping but it had more than its share of problems.

Cheers,
Dave

In the U.S. we call the armed forces "The Department of Defense." Calling a weapon "defensive" leaves lots of room for what you defend and how you defend it.

Cheers,
Dave

I believe you missed the key phrase "where it is most effective." The first sentence of the linked article:

The reference was to the utility of compression in this case, not the mechanics of it.

Millions of people are stupid enough to buy prescription medications of highly dubious origins and formulation from spammers. Every now and again you'll see a news piece about some idiot winding up hospitalized or dead as a result. This is a fine demonstration of a level of stupidity that you simply cannot overcome.

No, a stiff drink is what happens after the Viagra, but there's a bit of pump priming required as well.

Don't be afraid. You might like it. In the event you don't like it, as long as it was captured on film, someone else might still enjoy it.

The smartest thing anyone can do when presented with the threat of legal action is to immediately cease all contact with the threatening party and inform his own lawyer. I've seen situations similar to the one you described work out okay for the people being threatened, but I've also seen another case where things got nasty and the accused party would have been better off getting a lawyer immediately, even though he did nothing wrong.

For those who didn't get the AC's reference, it was Ruby Ridge, and it was a tragedy. This shit does happen, and things aren't getting better.

Your ignorance of history is showing. By the time of the Third Party System (generally recognized as having its origins in the 1850s), the Democratic and Republican parties had emerged as distinct entities, and these parties have dominated United States politics ever since. Especially given the incredibly self-reinforcing nature of the two party system, past performance is absolutely indicative of probable future conditions, barring the outright disbanding and reassembly of the entirety of the federal government apparatus by some means (massive violent civil upheaval, conquest of the United States by a foreign power, etc).

I do not like this state of affairs. In fact, I very much dislike it. However, to believe otherwise is merely to wish for outcomes that become less likely with the passage of time.

It won't exist for long anyhow, at least not in any meaningful way. The cost to taxpayers from dealing with the litigation concerns alone will be substantial in the meantime.

You're absolutely right. This is nothing more than an organized shakedown operation, and under color of (corrupt) law at that. Also, obligatory link for those who might have missed the reference.

For any given software project there is an optimal team size. If the project is small enough, you can keep the team size down to what works with an agile development methodology. If the project is bigger than that, things get ugly. I started my career in a company that considered projects of 50 to 100 man-years to be small to medium sized. Big projects involved over a thousand man-years of effort and the projects were still completed in a few years calendar time. You can do the math as to what that means as far as number of developers working concurrently (I remember one project that had approximately 500 to 600 people working on it).

The methodologies and discipline exist to solve such projects. It isn't efficiient compared to a small project but small project techniques can't solve big problems in time. Usually when you attempt to explain what it entails to management you get a response of, "We don't have time for that." So, the project flounders for twice as long before finally getting put out of everyone's missery.

Oh yeah. Been there. Done that. Over and over. Seen it done right when people used the right approach and I've seen more than my share of death marches that only seemed to convince good developers to look for another line of work.

Cheers,
Dave