Chris Farris

I’d like to donate to the Haitian relief efforts. However I don’t know who to donate to. I’m not going to text some number to some other number and let some slimeball phone company keep $7 of the $10 like I’ve seen going across twitter. I’ve donated to the Salvation Army and Americares in the past, but based on the sheer amount of junk mail (and blankets – yes Americares sent me a fucking blanket) I’m pretty sure my contribution went to nothing more than killing trees to send me snail mail to donate more money.

George Mason University Economist Tyler Cowen: TO put it bluntly, if the United States takes one step back and the rest of the world takes two steps forward, even in purely selfish terms we should consider accepting the trade-off, if only for the longer run. Most of us gain from the wealth and creativity of other countries, even if we can’t always feel like the top dog. via Economic View – For Much of the World, a Good Financial Decade – NYTimes.

Now this is what we should be spending our R&D money on. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated) Coolant Self-regulating Proliferation potential None Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone via Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke | Magazine.

What Xenophobic ass-hats like Pat Buchanan don’t say is that millions of people – who would otherwise have nothing better to do than hate America and start wars with us – are now able to feed their families, educate and vaccinate their children, and possibly even retire before laying on their death-bed. To describe world GDP in percentages is to assume that economic development is a zero-sum-game and for others to win the US must lose.

One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is. All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they’re the questions you answer “Ask your parents.” If a kid asked who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you “Is there a God?

If your company seems evil, the best programmers won’t work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn’t the embarrassment of the people they hired.

“Businessman Bernard Madoff pleads guilty to bilking investors out of $65 billion in a Ponzi scheme, forcing the Obama administration to withdraw his nomination for secretary of commerce.”

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I asked. “We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. “Come again?” “We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated.

Sharkoon USB LANPort gets your isolated USB drives on your local network — Engadget.

Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks. Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity. The difference is both subjective and subtle. Good IT pros, whether they are expected to or not, have to operate and make decisions with little supervision. So when the rules are loose and logical and supervision is results-oriented, supportive and helpful to the process, IT pros are loyal, open, engaged and downright sociable.