Men hur statistiken än bör tolkas, visar den att det går utmärkt att vara en demokratisk rättsstat och konstitutionell monarki samtidigt. Och att vara republik garanterar varken demokrati, frihet eller rättvisa. Principerna kanske är oförenliga, men praktiken är det uppenbarligen inte.

Most of the really wrong design decisions in the Shuttle system — the side-mounted orbiter, solid rocket boosters, lack of air-breathing engines, no escape system, fragile heat protection — were the direct fallout of this design phase, when tight budgets and onerous Air Force requirements forced engineers to improvise solutions to problems that had as much to do to do with the mechanics of Congressional funding as the mechanics of flight. In a pattern that would recur repeatedly in the years to come, NASA managers decided that they were better off making spending cuts on initial design even if they resulted in much higher operating costs over the lifetime of the program.

In suburban sprawl, you’re doomed to spending vast amounts of time at the wheel–time you cannot do much else with, and which you won’t get back. The nature of low-density automobile sprawl cities is that everything is insanely far away from everything else, so no matter what you do, you’re doomed to driving vast distances to see most friends, to commute to work and so on.

It’s a situation many of us are familiar with: a large legacy, monolithic application, limited or no tests, slow & manual release process, low velocity, no confidence… A lot of refactoring is required but management keeps pushing for new features. Now what? We talked to Michiel Rook, a Java/PHP/Scala contractor and consultant about the challenges that walk hand in hand with continuous deployment.

An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:

Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honor NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.

With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends “peace keeping forces” and “aid lorries” into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He cedes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).

In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines?

Every line of code has some probability of having an undetected flaw that will be seen in production. Process can affect that probability, but it cannot make it zero. Large diffs contain many lines, and therefore have a high probability of breaking when given real data and real traffic.

This is a long — sorry not sorry! — written piece specifically about the high-level aspects of deployment: collaboration, safety, and pace. There's plenty to be said for the low-level aspects as well, but those are harder to generalize across languages and, to be honest, a lot closer to being solved than the high-level process aspects. I love talking about how teams work together, and deployment is one of the most critical parts of working with other people. I think it's worth your time to evaluate how your team is faring, from time to time.

GitHub is the go-to place to host your open source projects, that much is well known. A lot of companies also use their paid plans to get the ecosystem around GitHub for their own code. Why would you want to use anything else? We took the decision to move away from GitHub and in the end we benefitted hugely!

Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of updates would enable the hardware they paid for to actually work, only to discover the manufacturer can turn their device into a useless brick when it so chooses.