An F-16 engine is about 65% of an F-16 by weight & volume. It's a single engine plane. It's an engine with wings and a chair tied to the top. Can I put on a set of coveralls that say "Al's Jet Engine Repair", drive with in with a 1987 flatbed truck, borrow a forklift from a line mechanic, load 'em and drive away? How stupid is the Israeli military? Not very. How corrupt is the Israeli government? Very. Most Israeli's think so. Is everyone afraid that some higher up was responsible and doesn't want to know? Israel may have it's precarious position compromised by the greed of its own people. Take everyone on duty that night and put their feet in a tub with a chironex fleckeri, commonly known as a sea wasp, a species of box jellyfish. They will tell you everything they know and make up what they don't. Sort out the facts and do the same at the next level. When you get to the top, recover the engines. After you do or if you don't, take the top guys out in the desert and shoot them. Don't bury them. Let it be known that they were shot, not buried and and animals are currently splitting up the bodies based on how big and how mean the animals are. Doing this once should put an end to this bullshit.

Governments should know everything but we know nothing. That is the most dystopian thing I've ever heard. Over the entrance to the CIA are the words from the Bible "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free". Maybe the government can keep a few secrets, such as how to make a nuclear weapon, but as little as possible should be secret within the government. On the other hand the government needs to go before a judge and present really good goddamn reason why they should know anything at all about me. I have nothing to hide but that's beside the point. You really piss me off, Mr. Police State. Your buddies Hitler and Stalin have croaked. I bet you feel real lonely without them.

Gosh, I am so sorry.

You're an idiot.

If you take me on as a subcontractor, your ownership of my work become even more tenuous. If you hire me not to build your boat but to build an engine for it, unless we have a contractual agreement to the contrary, you are buying engines from me. - "Anybody with a typewriter can sue."

If you hire me to write a computer program for and you do not specifically state in the contract that product of my work belongs to you, I own the software and you merely have a license t use it. Larry Wall, creator Perl, was working on a contract and created Perl to simplify the job. When he was done, he put the floppy with the first version of Perl on it into his pocket and walked out. He has never been sued.

Fight however can mean a lot of things but first of all it means strategy. Sun Tzu said that the epitome of excellence in warfare is to win the war without fighting a single battle. Barring that be smart. Forget what you learned from movies. Remember what you learned from playing Go. At the signing of the Vietnam Peace Treaty in Paris, essentially a surrender, an American general confronted a Vietnamese General and said "You never defeated us in battle!" The Vietnamese General replied 'That's irrelevant now isn't it?"

If these two companies didn't see digital photography coming at them like a bus they were stupid. It was get on board in a big way or be roadkill. I'm a darwinian capitalist. No business gets bailed out. When the banks tanked the government should have bailed out the bad mortgage holders, not the banks. Like the FDIC - insure the citizens, screw the businesses. They want to make money? Don't screw up.

If someone pays you to make something, it's theirs. If you do it on your own it's yours. If you develop a tool to make the thing you were hired to make, the tool belongs to the workman...especially if it saves the contracting party money. Otherwise, on a time and materials contract you have no incentive to be creative.

It's the same concept. If drive manufacturers add more actuators, the algorithms need to change. Unless you make a lot of assumptions, a read is queued and the thread blocks. Meanwhile the next task queues a read. Unless you are doing priority queueing and probably even then, you have no idea where the sector needed for the next read is. No point in defragmenting the disk unless it's some single threaded, single user system. So you do the reads in an order that is most efficient for the passengers (tasks) and the elevator (performance, energy efficiency, etc).

Word has a little box under properties fro "keywords". The keywords are not visible in the Word document but a search through Word resumes will see those keywords. And there seems to be no limit on the number of keywords. Same is true for HTML and other types. You dump in a huge list IT and comp sci words and every search hits on your resume. You get a phone call "I'm calling you because of your experience with ...(not having actually read your resume, you hear shuffling of paper as he goes through your resume looking for the skills he searched on.)

This is "selection bias" taken to an extreme. I read he had a lump on the left parietal lobe from playing the violin and that pianists have a corresponding lump on the right. Did you read this in the Onion?

I'm 63. I design and build my own computers, I do heterogeneous parallel programming, something which this jerk undoubtedly can't spell much less understand what it is or do it. I program FPGAs and experiment with various pieces of hardware, software and shit he can't imagine. I just came back from VLDB (the Intl. Conference on Very Large Databases) in Istanbul where I attended a workshop on hardware accelerated databases, which is my interest. I work with Oracle Exadata Machines. I've talked with developers of Hadoop and from Yarcdata (a subsidiary of Cray), while this guy was jerking off some VP at a large corporation trying to make a sale. $100 says he doesn't know what a TLB is or why it exists. Yes, things are changing at an exponential rate so reading voraciously and getting your hands dirty is what keeps you ahead. In a technical debate I could cut him to pieces. Oracle is working with Fujitsu on a new processor specifically design for databases - their Exadata systems, which I have worked with, are specifically designed for databases and already have such capabilities as moving part of the query processing to the storage node reducing the disk reads required. SAP doesn't stand a chance against a company that can deliver hardware that run the software much faster than general purpose machines. I mentor little shits like him.

When I designed a database to store sequenced DNA and it's attendant "annotation", clients had to subscribe individually to about 80 feeds (beyond a few free ones) of data. Each one was a negotiated rate and contract. A client told me that if I could negotiate with all of these sources and deliver data from a single source, he sou;d make me an extremely wealthy man. I found that the only way to accomplish this would be bribes, beatings and blackmail. This is why Netflix has a lineup of movies for streaming that include the worst movies ever made, from "Amazon Women on the Moon" to "Nazis from the Center of the Earth". There is no reason why every movie, every made, in every language couldn't be available to stream on the web. Movies aren't that big and bandwidth is growing. I watch HD movies over wireless - no problem. Negotiating with the movie owners and getting reasonable contracts is the problem. He who can do this will become a very wealthy man (or woman). DVDs, CDs, etc. are used less and less to distribute everything, including software. If you must, at least for the moment, sell the DVDs that people can't get anywhere else.

A college education costs more and more and becomes worth less and less. As it is, in many professions, a company will hire someone with a bachelors degree and three years experience before someone with a bachelor's and a master's. This makes the ROI for a master's a negative number. As technology is advancing at an exponential rate, the value of degree decreases at a corresponding rate after it is acquired. The Stanford professor who taught an AI course online and had 100,000 students quit to pursue this methodology full time. MIT is putting all of it's courses online, free. Maybe colleges will become research institutions. But in that regard, when some grad students started working on fuzzy logic, their professors told them "Pursue this and your career is over" and peer-reviewed journals refused to publish their papers. Similar stories come out of every field. Nothing has changed since Galileo. I remember the scene in "Good Will Hunting" where Matt Damon tells a Harvard student that he could have gotten his $50,000 education (back then) for the price of library card. Now it's online. By the way, the text for the AI class was $100. That has to go. Doing a google search and finding that most of the papers on Hidden Markov Models cost $15-$35 is most disconcerting. That has to go. The only people left behind should be alchemists and assholes.