sootzoo's comments

> Run the math, if you are paying 2% fees, you are getting straight up robbed. If your employer doesn't offer low-fee index funds, it would be worth your while to make sure that they get some onto your 401k portfolio.

Worth my while, true, but maybe not worth theirs. More flexibility comes at a higher price from the 401k vendor, a crucial part of the scam here. Employers can offer "a 401k" as a benefit but might not view this as a tax-sheltering vehicle through profit sharing or discretionary matching--they could simply see it as yet another benefit expense. As with all employers offering benefits, some are more generous than others. Most employees don't know/care to pressure their employer to offer better investment options, or would prefer to have other benefits improved instead.

> But at least in theory what Wall Street is selling you here is better return than what you could make on an index fund.

Often, 401k's offer few, if any, index funds and at drastically higher fees, even if the fees are lower than actively-managed funds.

To take a personal example, I have retirement accounts with Vanguard (Roth IRA), T. Rowe Price (solo 401k) and, through my employer, with MassMutual. All offer an S&P 500 index fund, but Vanguard's fee is 5 basis points (.05%), TRP's is 30 basis points, and MM's is 90(!). Why am I paying almost 20 times as much in fees through my employer?

Sure, you could put this back on my employer and say, "well, they should offer you a 401k with better options/lower fees/with a better vendor," and though I'd agree, it's not as though I have any say in the matter, which is the point that Bogle and Frontline are making.

As mentioned in the SO question, the head of Google's accessibility team, T. V. Raman [1], is blind. I feel like this speaks volumes about the opportunities for disabled programmers on its own, and, though a bit cliche, reinforces the thing I love most about engineering--in many ways, this line of work is as close to a pure meritocracy as one can get. I hope Mr. Raman would agree that it seems fitting that someone who is blind himself would be sensitive to the needs presented by blind and low-vision users of computer software, and I'm happy he's around to provide guidance for accessibility features for a company like Google.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman

That's a great read too. Is the paraphrasing of Peggy McIntosh intentional? Her "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/ele3600/mcintosh.html) is a classic in sociology and race studies literature, for anyone interested.

Yes, pretty much. The company is going private, and though the board and shareholders have to approve the sale, they can do so without your explicit approval, of course, just a majority (hence the bump in valuation of 25%). So those shares are no good after the deal closes, because the public company you have shares in just ceased to exist as a public company. Your return on investment is the per-share purchase price times the number of shares you hold.

This is the same thing that would happen in an all-stock transaction: let's say you own shares in Ford, and General Motors announces a buyout of Ford. The end-result is that you now own some percentage of GM, since Ford is now part of GM. Poof: your Ford shares convert to some equivalent number of GM shares. Do you cease to own Ford? Well, kind of, since Ford just ceased to exist. So there's nothing to "hold on to" in the sense you're implying.

More specifically, Microsoft is loaning $2 billion to the consortium of interests buying Dell, as is Michael Dell (~$3.5B) and Silver Lake (~$1B).

Silver Lake is buying for $13.65 a share:

> Under the terms of the deal, the buyers' consortium, which also includes Microsoft, will pay $13.65 a share in cash.

So the stock probably won't sell above that number, but won't be far off from it until the deal closes. Since it's a cash deal, after the deal closes you'll probably be compensated with cash (your shares would disappear from your brokerage account and you'd gain the equivalent cash value).

He's a great writer especially on aviation. For example, his writeup of the mid-air collision of an Embraer regional jet and a 737 over Brazil (http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/air_crash200901) was nothing short of fantastic. It's well worth a read.

Spin awareness is definitely weird at first, and I wholeheartedly agree that it's less scary after a bit of experience. Question: did you cover spin recovery? I was under the impression this was basically never done until CFI or CFII.

I assume you mean: in a simulator, in a light aircraft (e.g. a small Cessna or Piper or something similar).

In a heavy aircarft, e.g. passenger airliner? Has this even happened?

Previous HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2618316

These days, wouldn't this be more the domain of the "copyright czar" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/intellectualproperty), Victoria Espinel?

Not to go off-topic, but there are absolutely programs (and some may even be CS programs) which require "3 major papers" in lieu of a doctoral dissertation for award of the PhD. This surely has its disadvantages, but I have known colleagues--especially if they're headed into industry--who feel this is more representative of the type of work they're expected to perform and gives them a leg up on students who must manage both.

He's not running with GC permanently disabled, he's only disabled the automatic GC because of the huge overhead required (claiming 1-second pauses every few seconds). He also mentions it's trivial to enable manual GC and run that via setInterval/setTimeout/what-have-you.

Indeed, iGoogle is on its way out, another "more wood/fewer arrows" casualty: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/07/igoogle-will-be-dis...

There are some frustrating limitations. In my region (Philadelphia), they will literally have one street with full service and on the next block, they'll only sell you DSL. They announced not long ago they were "scaling back" their buildout, I suppose declaring something akin to "Mission Accomplished" when I still cannot get FiOS from them and, inexplicably, my neighbors not 500 yards away can.

Not endemic to PHP, of course, as it seems MSFT took the same approach with a recent ASP.NET security update. The workaround described in their KB (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2661403) is to add a similar configuration override and they've set the limit arbitrarily at 1000 form keys. Which vendors did not dodge the hash algorithm problem and what's the updated algorithm you're referencing? Who's doing this right?

which hasn't stopped anyone from using it in their own apps anyway (e.g. Facebook)

Switch to Profile view, click Edit Profile, and click the (probably shaded/barely visible) "Send an email" button underneath your profile picture. There are a number of privacy options here, although, notably, "anybody on the web" still means "anybody with a Google profile" (or at least I couldn't get it to work unless I was logged in).

Senders see a popup window and indeed G+ does not reveal your e-mail address, which is as it should be. Receivers get an e-mail entitled something like "Message via your Google Profile" with the sender's Gmail account's from name/address.

My comment on G+ encouraging the use of your "real" identity was just meant to highlight that apparently Twitter is the outlier as far as social networking sites go, with regard to whether you can have a completely anonymous (or pseudonymous) conversation via PM. With G+, it seems clear they just want you to use GMail.

How often does one refer to somebody by URL? You may have noticed (I have, anyway) that FB now "helpfully" defaults to an @-mention if you start typing a person's name, essentially offering it as an auto-complete option.

As long as G+ doesn't go down this path, I can live with it, but I don't like that a "mention" automatically implies "full access" to whatever has been said, especially given that the choice of whether or not to share a particular post with that person is presumed to be up to the author of the post, not anyone else who was also included.