I used to name all of our servers after famous mathematicians / physicists. Pretty nerdy but a big hit with the PhD's who used them. I've also seen movie stars names - FrankSinatra, GingerRogers, etc. And states / cities.

At my firm we rank-order the projects in terms of priorities. That completely simplifies the resource crunch. If we're out of resources, the last unsupported project just waits.

Just make sure to allocate 10 or 20 % time to support or that will wreck your timelines.

As to online degrees, I tend to value that much less than classroom-based schooling when I evaluate candidates. I just don't think it's as rigorous and at least a few online schools are just diploma mills. But in some circumstances (like the OP) I'd take into account the lack of local universities. Actually I'd consider it a plus. It would should initiative and hard work to have somebody complete a degree program like that while working full time. But I'd still likely quiz that person more stringently about the material compared to somebody with an Ivy / well-respected state U degree.

I'm surprised at the lack of support for continuing education that many have mentioned here. My firm (Wall Street) REQUIRES annual education. If you don't do it, you get downgraded on your annual review. Nothing worse than people who let their skills ossify. Both I and my manager follow this HR directive closely. And the firm puts its money where its mouth is - it pays up to 15K per year for classes.

"If the lawyers hadn't run the case, no one would have got anything. "

No one did get anything.

Except for the lawyers.

SAS is a great package but is probably prohibitively expensive. An open source version like R is probably more appropriate.

I live and work in the Financial District, NYC so I can give first hand information on what I've seen. So far the protests have been minor and largely ignored by the population down here. The largest march had maybe 200 people. I've seen another with about 50 - 100. So it's small scale events. The protesters are camped out in a common area with tents, sleeping bags & such. All participants seem to be basically peaceful young hippie types, many students, etc. About as non-threatening as one could imagine. The police have erected barricades everywhere to impede pedestrian traffic. That makes it a hassle to get around both for protesters and residents. Lots more cops than usual are in the area (and this place is normally manned like a fortress). Mostly the cops are just standing around looking bored. That being said I wouldn't be surprised if they are reacting strongly to the protesters. All the NYPD has focused on in the last 10 years is anti-terrorist training. The result is a force ill-equipped to handle peaceful, non-violent protests. So the overreaction to the crowds (such as pepper-spraying women) is not a surprise to me.

omg I'm a happy, girl :) LOL I love my cute hubby's chocolate hair. yay ! hahaha

woops - meant leech. Hollywood types who tarnish great originals with crappy remakes / prequels / sequels / etc = money grubbing blood suckers. But I'd guess most already knew that.

Are Hollywood writers so creatively bankrupt that they have to leach off of a great movie from the past. Why can't they just leave a sci-fi classic like Blade Runner alone ? Just come up with some new and interesting ideas for a change. Is that too much to ask ? I guess so.

If the mayor wanted to get the best use of MIT, he could just send naked pictures of Seven of Nine to the entire student body. The heat from so many nerds spontaneously combusting would be more than sufficient to melt the snow.

I'm not an astronomer but don't galaxies generally spin while clusters just sit there and hang out.

I didn't RTFA but it seems like there should be a mathematical formula for mass & distance which could define a galaxy easily. There are obviously many well known cases which could be used as examples for the model.

It's not just creating the lines of code. It's unit testing. It's system testing. Full regression testing. It's bug fixing. It's documentation. All the things necessary to get something production ready. And that stuff takes time. So 100 lines of code per day is actually a decent measure of a productive employee.