Kroem3r

Well, it was until you pulled back the curtain.

if Ukraine had retained the nuclear weapons, they would have been the Russian weapons, and Ukraine would not have been flirting with the EU/NATO sphere, etc ... your implication is tempting, but does not include all the story

You can imagine the pretty natural go-go-stop behavior. "Good for prestige: go for it." versus "Going to have Mossad and cruise missiles all over the place; shut it down!" versus "Bring it on you !@#~!!!~!ers!" versus "We are entitled to do this under the various treaties; opposition will highlight the hypocrisy in the geopolitic" versus "Um, duh?"

The failure of Democracy to scale.

More specifically, the failure of people who would have common cause within some topic to actually come together over that cause and effect a change. Instead, people seemingly fall victim to 'wedge issues', reactionary prejudices, and etc.

well, and also 6 year olds. Every now and then, while talking to a 6 year old, I try to imagine what it might be like to be forensically interviewing one. Very tricky and very easy to leave the result of such an interview open to post hoc criticism.

Interesting, but it does not settle the question as to whether the US justice system is inconsistent based on the nationality of the corporation. This list might carry some weight if it discussed the fact that some of these are settlements, and how did these compare to the size of the infraction.

Given that there is a serious and ongoing discussion about the lack of criminal proceedings, but that there are other kinds of very much lesser processes, it is legitimate to be concerned that financial institutions, and their employees and directors, are getting off too lightly. Then, in light of successful prosecutions against foreign corporations, the original question is legitimate.

Actually, the pattern of national bias is well established from well before the last great meltdown. And given that, these foreign prosecutions make one wonder why there have been so few against US banks.

The Great Tranformation by Karl Polanyi, wikibooks.org/wiki/An_Awk_Primer, and just finished Anne of Green Gables

That was the point that I stopped reading. I started out looking forward to the map regarding "thinking" but it seemed a foregone conclusion.

What did you make of the discussion toward the end of the article, where it discusses ensuing lightening of the jaw bone?

Yep. Nope. You've outed yourself in an unfortunate way. Everyone wants to do business in the US and everyone is prepared to jump through the hoops to do that business. US regulation accomplishes a bunch of things, including adding friction to non-US companies doing business in the US.

It's a fine example. Are you saying that 3 case statements is too many?

Why optimize the code to support cases that don't actually exist yet?

Or even better, why optimize the code in ignorance to how it will need to be optimized in 2 years?

Funny you should say that, that's my family motto: "Qui stupidi sunt, ut strenuus me".

That he thinks it is ok to cut through residential neighbourhoods because the freeway is backed up is more than stupid, really. It is dangerous and unfair. I was going to say that, given the apologetics around this strategy, that he's being a little tongue-in-cheek. But when he opened with "the really painful part of being stuck in traffic is not, really, the actual amount of time that it takes to get from Point A to Point B" it was pretty clear that we were going to be looking for wisdom and intelligence from other sources.

Hard to say. Some places need 3 x 1 hr to figure out if a person has the chops. Other places can just figure it out. IMHO, it does seem unnecessary and could point to the area of difficulty, but some places are just goofy that way. For sure the bottom line is: Use the experience to improve yourself, shake off the negativity and move on.

Yep. But it's not. The difference is that utilities are especially regulated because they have monopolistic operations. Part of the quid pro quo for going forward with the monopoly is that they have to be open to buying power back from other producers. I don't have the Oklahoma legislation here, but given the available facts, I'm going to bet that's the case. In other words, this taxation isn't a matter of treating residential power generation like any other business, it's about the utility using the legislators to claw back a commitment they now regret making.

This is the one thing that I will not forgive MS for. They bought the lead guy from Borland rather than compete against the product. I guess it's all fair in business, but it was a gutless defense of VB - an admission, actually - that VB wasn't up to the competition.

The summary for me is that Delphi was more productive and way better designed than VB with the performance of C. I never understood why it didn't have a broader following. My guess is that developers enjoyed the challenge of C/C++, call it an aesthetic judgement.

Ya, good call. It is a super interesting fallacy that people interested in disassembling dysfunctional status quo models should be good at calling-out. Something like a "post hoc rationalization".

For me, another use case is 'all the fantastic things that have been invented because of war'.

I'm calling it: TOD, 12:20 AM PDT

REUTERS - In the small hours of the morning Irony coughed up a lung and died. It had been on life-support for nearly a decade when a seemingly innocent ...

Pff. If 'molten salt' reactors are an inch closer in 10 years, I will eat my hat. The idea is only slightly more appealing than having the reactor fly around under it's own power.

What makes you think The Economist is interested in probing the nerdosphere? Would Tesla, Apple, etc., be more effective? For sure, the '... adoption is 10 years away' thing is funny. Makes me reminisce for Popular Science.

If I were to guess; they are advertising where their technological sympathies lie. It is more about managing their brand than probing an audience.

search and replace as the last launch step

Kind of sad, really, because it once had some useful meaning - like 15 years ago. And we hardly need another synonym for "clueless douchebag".

I have to admire the trajectory of the word's decline. It joins the ranks of "conservative", "liberal", and even "neoliberal".

Ya, no doubt. But perhaps he took it as an opportunity as he was stepping away from prominence to do something positive with it. A favorite example being Eisenhower's farewell address.

Why Boeing? Why not Motorola? It would seem to come more naturally to Moto; I mean if they built jetliners there would have been no reason to invent the phrase "jet lag".

This seems like a myth to me. Radar? Rocket engines? Turing? Stealth bomber technology? Nuclear powered aircraft carriers? ICBMs? Stuff that was happening regardless of a war and stuff that was nearly useless.

Perhaps military first adopters are a net positive; like, the first buyers of a technology who will pay top dollar for working prototypes. But what on the original innovation side can you actually attribute?

I think it is newsworthy, but not for the technical details. It's newsworthy because it's such a huge budget, because it's been neutered, because fusion energy research is pathetically funded, and because NIF is like a mean old dog lying in front of the fireplace, farting from time to time - it creams the resources and makes alternatives unappealing.

This is newsworthy despite "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser"?

After decades of work they are orders of magnitude away from break-even. Makes me wonder if the goal is actually break-even and/or power generation. Not really; but it's a revealing question.

I'm no great fan of the budgets these huge projects pull down; I think the bang-for-the-buck is greater elsewhere. But modelling nuclear weapons is an even greater waste of time. It's all kind of a sad epigraph about national science and technology initiatives.

Assuming the modest proposition that fusion energy is possible, why not make fusion energy a 'man on the moon' kind of national goal? It's hardly in doubt that we need a large source of clean energy. Is it a failure of imagination? Is it a failure of the political system - Can't get Bubba to vote for no fusion thing. Is the status quo energy system resistant to change? Whatever, the NIF thing just makes me depressed.

My fave is when the wheels freeze to the ground; so when the noob guns it - since the truck seems reasonably warm, yet stuck - the drive shaft snaps. Depending which universal joint breaks, the flailing remains can cause impressive damage.

Pardon the snark, but I think that you and that misnamed philosophus dude missed the boat on this one - perhaps you didn't read the entire piece?

The punch-line is that non-participation in shared (public) resources by the wealthy is a more significant problem then disparity. An interesting premise having both plausibility and examples. Somewhere back in HN, within the last year is an interesting study of the exact question focusing (I think) on education systems. But healthcare systems also work.

You will find flood stories from around the world, from peoples with no contact with each other. You're looking at some combination of common unconsciousness or events at the end of the last ice age.

Did you mean "agitprop"?

It's been a while since I've seen that. Thanks for the belly-laugh.

Here's a reason to take the prediction / analysis seriously: The analyst makes these statements, the market joins in, and then management begins to follow along. Not a happy model, nor one that is always followed, but certainly a component of publicly traded companies.

It would be fun to have an review of how insightful a given analyst has been. It would also be good to have a proper 'full disclosure' policy.