James Branch Cabell, start with Jurgen: A comedy of Justice. Julian May, The Saga of Pliocene Exile -- though it's more contemporary and probably well read by people interested in this thread. Michael Moorecock, Tanith Lee, plus unknown authors for Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the elder eddas, The book of dun cow (Cattle raid of Cooly), Brian Boru, The Fianna, Morgan Llywelyn does good Celtic Mythos. The Mabinogion, The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed (part of the mabinogion).

There is a really good series I once found and the main character was a ming dynasty mystic/private detective. Never finished the series and can't remember the author.

Thats only the first layer of corruption. Add -- Company lays very expensive underwater fiber cable funded by stock purchases and bond issues. Cable in, but doesn't return nearly whats predicted. Company goes bankrupt. Bank and then finally hedge fund inherits the cable for 1/10 the cost. -- Stock holders screwed, bond holders screwed. Hedge fund makes huge profit selling ultra fast trading to other brokerage houses while secretly front-running the trades.

You're asking if you start feeling vulnerable and inadequate as you get older and more vulnerable. The answer is yes, unless you've reached self actualization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization. You start feeling like a quarter horse in a thorough breed race and face the natural migration to management vis a vis The Peter Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle.

You can try therapy and psychotropics, like a large number do and probably need, or you can grab hold of yourself and have a heart to heart. Reinvent yourself. Discover your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Look into why you are asking this question and what is it really masking. Old age and cunning has advantages over youth and vigor -- paraphrased from somewhere.

Courage, perseverance and planning.

20-25% of online players are winning? No. On any given night, 20-25% might have won. But notwithstanding cheating, the true # of winning players is in the low single digits percentage.

It's unfortunate and I have some sympathy with those that were able to beat the online game without cheating and who made their living and have now had their account balances confiscated. However lets face reality, that probably represents 3% or less of online poker players. Meaning that a good estimate is that 97% of online poker players simply lost. Losers complain, some I daresay, may even think they've been cheated, people who think they've been cheated most certainly complain. Looks like those complaints have been heard.

The problem then is political opponents at the national level are all too happy to pay fines for breach of campaign laws and soft laws, It becomes a numbers game. Does the fine buy more political hay then say a valid expenditure? I don't know if anybody has mentioned it, but the hackers father Mike Kernell is a Democrat and politician from Tennesee, you don't have to stretch your imagination too much to see the point I'm making.

Well, to bastardize Carl Von Clousewitz ...."Violence is Politics by another means".

Almost every point in this post is wrong either by omission or assertion. [snip ..... The government does issue and permit fully automatic weapons to citizens in danger zones .... ] The MoD is quite liberal in issuing gun permits to Jewish Israelis. .... they're quite strict on issuing permits to non-Jewish Israelis.

Best Answer by far for small non mission critical apps. If you can't justify the cost of testing vs the cost of a bug, then you'll never get funding for a distinct project for testing. When you do fix a bug, you invariably code review and write a test app against it. When it comes to internal apps, testing is typically overlooked and bugs are fixed ad hoc or work around become tribal knowledge. But even the tiniest mission critical application needs to have a test suite developed side by side with the app in question. Think of the team that let slip the bug that crashed the mars probe. Not only will that slow your career down, it will scar you knowing that your bug cost billions of dollars and years of work hours.

USS Gerald R. Ford? You have to be kidding me. What's next. USS Chevy Chase?

To quote from the Ellison article "Ellison shut down development of Sun’s Rock microprocessor, a project which had struggled to get off the ground. “This processor had two incredible virtues: It was incredibly slow and it consumed vast amounts of energy. It was so hot that they had to put about 12 inches of cooling fans on top of it to cool the processor,” said Ellison. “It was just madness to continue that project.”"

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Well Ellison gets one thing wrong. It wasn't 12 inches of cooling fans, it was 12 inches of solid copper heat sink topped by a fan. Sun took a failed Darpa project and tried to make it into a commercial venture. I was ready to dump my life savings into Lambert stock.

Scott McNealy ran his company like a Microsoft hater. His strategy was like that of a Microsoft hater. There were proposals at Sun as early as 1999 regarding cloud computing, internet based Operating systems and back office apps -- but it required a strategic alliance with other corporations and those alliances never happened. I would have lost 100's of millions of $$ making sure that Google used my Hardware and my OS. The Centurian knows why the battle was lost, but the Dux had no clue.

Regarding hardware, Sun obviously had problems. Chief being its marketing cycle. Sun put out some very good hardware, but seemed to have follow up and road map problems. The E10k was a great server when introduced and very good life cycle, but the follow up to the E10k wasn't an incremental improvement, it was a Bigger, slower and cost more and couldn't even compete well with the E10k and there are very specific reasons why this happened. It wasn't even a gamble, failure was guaranteed. It had to do with Sun Corporate Cultural Superiority Complex.

As for the software side

On the software side, Sun engaged in a political battle vs open source rather than dealing with it as a practical matter. With a big fat wallet pumped up from the dot com boom, they took a piss on everyone involved with Open Source. They were afraid of open source and falsely embraced it as that big fat wallet was bleed dry.

Larry Ellison has similar problems. Open Source isn't part of the Oracle business plan.

No I didn't. Re-read the OP.

By all means do so. But it will be transparent beings that you're a corporation and incorporated within the state in question, and you won't be doing it in a public corp .. at least not for long.