Some years back, I was working for a large software company. One of their clients sued them, I don't remember the exact amount but I recall it being at least in the tens of millions. When it finally went to court, the customer's attorney's said that they''d put my company's C-level execs on the stand and have them read their profanity laced emails. Quotes like, "We need to drive f....g stake through [their] heart", etc.My company settled immediately.

A few months later, at an executive off-site, they brought in an attorney that lectured about 100 of us, basically that anything you put in email is subject to discovery. Don't write anything you wouldn't say in fron of your mother, or wouldn't want to see on the front page of the Wall St. Journal.

I learned SAS In the early 80s and used it extensively. At the time, it was easily the best data analysis software available. About 15 years ago I wanted to get a few copies for my consulting team and we were looking at more than $50K / seat. Do you think Chinese users want to pay that sort of money to a US firm?

SAS sued a source compatible competitor (World Programming) out of existence some years back, to destroy competition and maintain their high prices. I had trialled the World Programming solution and it worked very nicely.

These days I use Python and a few other open-source tools. I suspect that Chinese data analysts are mostly doing the same.

Most airline reservation systems require a saved booking (PNR = Passenger Name Record) before they can issue a ticket. So, the booking class and seats are locked in before you can make a payment. Once that's done, they can't really change the price, and you can pick which card you use. So, I would suspect that they aren't trying to identify a corporate card as part of their segmentation strategy.

About the only thing outpacing higher education costs is healthcare costs. I've been awarded a few degrees, I've worked with several universities as an outsider to sponsor research, and I've spent years on an advisory board. May I suggest a few problems that need to be fixed?
- Tenured professors that teach maybe one or two classes a year
- Layers of administration that don't teach or really add to the value
- Buillshit jobs in administration. My pet peeve is the graduate school troll who has to measure the headings in every thesis to make sure they're exactly centered

Anyone care to add to the list?

I wonder how much of this is driven by developers wanting to play with new technologies and add buzzwords to their resume / LinkedIn profile?

Yes, CrowdStrike would have affected Windows machines running as front-end terminals for any airline that has that. It may also affect a lot of the operational systems that often run on Windows (flight planning & dispatch, gate planning, etc)
Southwest does not use TPF any more, they're hosted by Amadeus and they're completely off the mainframes these days. SWA's previous system was running TPF, it was originally based on a clone of Braniff's system years ago, but this system was shut down about 8-10 years ago. Amadeus runs reservations for 150+ airlines around the world.
For the other US majors - AA runs on Sabre's system, AFAIK the core is still TPF but they're working on migrating everything to Google's cloud. DL runs their own mainframe system and UA runs on SHARES, which is the TPF system that Continental used.

I suspect that most VMware applications could be replaced by Xen / Docker / etc - unless they want to run old versions of DOS, OS/2, Windows, etc. I mucked around with VMware years ago, but never found a true need for it. Pretty much all my coding is for Linux and Docker containers did most everything we needed.

Just wondering if anybody has leads on the algorithms they use. The description sounds like they explore the search tree in parallel, but doesn't give any hints on algorithms. The Operations Research community often uses things like Constraint Propagation (CP), or Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to solve scheduling problems, and there's a ton of literature on using these techniques.

A.

And then we have National Security Letters, the US government just gets a a judge to sign a letter requiring you to give them whatever data they want. Can't even tell anybody you received the letter, that's illegal and you go to jail. I don't see much difference between the Chinese government's access to Chinese company's data and the US government's access to US company's data.

For TikTok, I strongly suspect that lobbyists from Facebook and Twitter are sowing the seeds of controversy as they're trying to hang onto marketshare.

A.

One additional issue with some government work is that they rebid the maintenance every few years and then a new crew comes in and finds the code is a mess, there's no documentation, etc... The lack of continuity can lead to all sorts of problems.

I recently had first-hand experience with this, was contracted on a short consulting gig to help a software consulting firm help with a federal website (not FAA though). The current system has large amounts of code with single-letter variable names, and has layer upon layer of unnecessary complexity. Almost reminded of the class FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition (though this was Python, not Java)

This will get really interesting for law enforcement, especially in the US. The 4th amendment protects against a lot of unreasonable searches, but could the police argue that you're broadcasting your position through the walls and they are allowed to capture that information from a public place (i.e. the middle of the street)? This is going to get interesting...

Or vaccines now? Just inject some virovores and all your covid worries will be gone :-)

I don't see how this could possibly go wrong...

A.

This is not one party or the other - both sides are equally guilty, so don't go there

It's also not something recent, it's been this way for decades. Defense contractors splatter their work across as many states as possible so that almost every senator has to vote for it. "The door hinges for this fighter jet are made in bum-f#%k (insert state here), we need to preserve jobs"

On a slightly different angle, that's why SpaceX is crapping on the traditional players, they're not playing the same game.

I think the title says it. These universities smell money, and they unite to get political support to slurp at the trough of government largess...

The problem in the US is that companies worship "finance" and use investment bankers to sell off their assets to keep the share prices high. Reward the executives in the name of "shareholder value".

OK, rant over...

If it can run a microwave for 3-4 hours, that's somewhere in the 1000 - 1200 watts, about 1.5 horsepower. Similar to an entry-level motor scooter. They would really need to scale this up for a car, otherwise the range will be pitiful