If you want to get pedantic the architecture of the chips have also changed significantly and your criticism is equally malinformed.
What improvement is due to the reduced number of clock cycles required for each operation?
What improvement is due to the addition of an extremely high speed L1 cache? The L2 cache?
What improvement is due to multicore optimizations?
What improvements are due to improved software algorithms?
We tend to forget the last point since it seems most of our work is reinventing the same wheel, but there are a lot of applications where there's been a greater impact from improved algorithms than there's been from improved hardware.
I don't know the law in Canada, but the last I heard broadband isn't common carrier in the US. They fought it because it would require opening up their lines to competitors.
DSL may be different since it's over the same physical wires as common-carrier POTS.
That said it's still shitty behavior that would make a reasonable person wonder just what they're hiding.
Not necessarily. Clocks, including electronic ones, are sensitive to temperature changes and the correction for mid-summer may be different than the correction for mid-winter.
That effect might be minimal for a watch on an office worker, but an error of just one part in a million is 3 seconds/month.
Many people seem to have missed a critical fact. Amanda Tapping was pregnant and was unavailable for filming for the first five episodes of this season.
She was starting to show at the end of the last season. That's why "nerd Sam" was always wearing a loose sweater and even seemed a little chunky. It was to cover her belly, not (just) characterization.
Claudia Black will be around at the start of the season, but she's not a permanent addition. At least not yet. She would make an interesting addition since she can be far wilder than every other regular character.
Why does everyone try to reduce every question to money alone? Oh yeah, they're selling stuff.
Governments should strive to provide services for as little cost as possible, but that doesn't mean that it should fail to provide a service at all if just because somebody declares it to be not cost-effective.
Guess what, public libraries are not cost-effective.
Public parks are not cost-effective.
I'm sure others can add their own examples. Cities provide these service because it benefits the residents and makes the city more attractive to others. E.g., it might encourage a company to locate new offices in this city instead of another to keep the employees happy, and unlike the usual "development incentives" these investments actually benefit the people, not a few executives.
Should cities provide wifi - even free wifi - in downtown and business areas? I think it should - because the public good (e.g., allowing people to check their email from anywhere in the area) outweighs the cost. If the city really, really needs to offset the cost it could impose a nominal head count on the employees in the area, and by "nominal" I mean $2/month/full-time equivalence person. It won't cover the entire cost but it's a symbolic gesture.
That's not a programmer question. Unless the position requires extremely heavy bit manipulation and you don't have a bible of solutions (in which case you're the one who should be interviewing), the answer is "Google the answer."
I would ask something like handing them a bubble sort with a simple error in it, like boundary checking. If they catch that error, they're qualified to be a junior programmer.
If they ask why I'm using my own bubble sort instead of calling the standard qsort() routine, they're senior developer/analyst material.
I've built my own "unstable on stable libc/perl" packages and after a while dependencies will kill you. The latest version of a package requires A, A requires B, B requires C, and the new version of C breaks a lot of things.
Security backports require more effort, but they're unlikely to trigger cascading updates.
Once you're using tensor analysis for your physics and engineering homework space/time is a four-dimensional vector. IIRC the spatial dimensions are real, the temporal dimension is imaginary.
Excuse me, but aren't you an accomplance if you are a party to a criminal act? It can even be after the original crime, if you knowingly provide ongoing support to the criminal act, explicitly work to cover it up (e.g., by destroying logs), etc.
Then there's conspiracy.... You can be convicted of conspiracy if you knowingly commit just one express act in furtherance of a crime. Even if it's otherwise legal. E.g., it's legal for you to buy a lighter. It's legal for you to give it to another person. It's not legal for you to do this if you know that person plans to use it to commit arson. His prior code would have been safe (since he had no reason to believe it would be used to commit a crime), but ongoing software development when he believed it would be used for criminal acts....
Anyway, to my non-lawyer mind it's easy to see the letter as an attempt to protect himself from a shitload of legal trouble if/when the company's bad acts came to light, not to threaten them unless they coughed up something in exchange.
BTW, by the same analysis they may have just bought themselves a world of pain. An aggressive DA might make a case for witness intimidation, something that might stick even if they're cleared of any other illegal activity.
(P.S., I wouldn't have called the activity "illegal" in the letter. You can raise concerns without making judgments.)
The reason we shouldn't drain it today is because we'll have nothing tomorrow. Something every generation prior to ours has understood is that you don't eat your "seed corn."
I don't know why we'll need these oil reserves in the future, just that it will undoubtably come in useful sometime during the next 10,000 years. It's extremely shortsighted to say that our needs to drive Hummers out to exburbs on 35-acre ranchettes because the relatively affluent don't want neighbors in an urban environment is more important.
N.B., I'm not saying that we shouldn't use oil at all. Just that we act in a responsible manner instead of assuming that Jesus will be along any day now and we don't have to worry about things like this.
What are the contractual damages for violating there agreement?
I think $50 / incident is probably reasonable. That's enough to get the attention of the mom and pop store that might be facing damages of ten thousand dollars for improperly storing the CC numbers of a few hundred customers, but it's no so overwhelming that they would be forced out of business.
A major processor that held 40M records (assuming that that was the number of improperly held records, and the lower number were just those that might have been exposed). They deserve a $2 billion contractual damage.
Mastercard would never collect that much in damages, of course, but it would be a corporate death sentence to any company -- and its executives -- deciding to do illicit "research." One prominent case could go a long way towards restoring confidence.
If you're writing code at 11pm on Friday (or any night for that matter) and that code isn't being subjected to normal QA/QC review, you have bigger problems than a few buffer overflows.
If you have buffer overflows "because it's late and you're tired," your process is fatally broken. It should be second nature, e.g, I use snprintf() without even thinking about it. If it's more complex, it should be encapsulated in a few heavily tested convenience functions.
Who did you say you work for again?...
P.S., there are plenty of situations where the time you dropped the ball is far more important than the times you didn't. E.g., 99.9% is totally unacceptable if we're discussing automobile accidents causing serious injury - that's maybe once every 18 months.
Besides the obvious efficiency issues others pointed out, it wastes the cold water after one pass through the system.
Seriously, how much heat can the ice water absorb in a single pass through the radiator? I bet it's still pretty chilly when it hits the garden.
How difficult would it be to invest in a fountain pump (maybe $20?) that circulates the water back into the reservoir?
If he's an upperclassman in an engineering program (or a physics major) he shouldn't be satisfied until he set up a closed system that includes loops in the ice water reservoir. Call it an extremely primitive heat pump.
Should you drive on the left hand side of the road, or the right hand side?
Despite what some people seem to think, there's no "right" answer other than following the context. I live in the US and routinely drive on the left hand side of the road... on one way streets where I'll be turning left soon. I've done it on interstates... where the right hand lanes were closed due to construction and the oncoming traffic was moved onto the access road.
Writing down passwords is the same deal. It's a Bad Idea in your cubicle. It's a Cause For Termination Idea if you're a sysadmin.
But on a router at home, or in a locked wiring cabinet? It's a damn good idea. On a card in your wallet, especially in that zippered compartment so it can't accidently slip out? Good idea, unless you routinely leave your wallet unsecured. In which case you're an idiot with bigger problems than just writing down your passwords.
When I was being evaluated for Asperger's by a specialist, she commented that she's had many patients who were severely autistic at age five, but normal, well-adjusted teenagers. The right environment, and medications when appropriate and effective, can do wonders.
The context was whether people with Asperger's can also improve as they get older. She said there's evidence that the same can happen, albeit at a slower pace. That may not be much consolation when you're 20 and can't understand why your dating life is nonexistent, but there is hope.
How does that compare to an ideal gas in adiabatic expansion in a gravity field? I can follow the math with a column, but here you have cooling from both climbing against gravity and expansion since dV/dr = 4r2.
"Home user" is not synonymous with "personal user," especially as more and more people work from home. (Either by choice or because their employers are too cheap to spring for office space.)
I paid substantially more for a Comcast "business" account at my home address, then found I still had problems hosting my own domains because of their inability to provide a static address... or even a dynamic address within a "business class" block. (The latter meant I was blocked by RBLs listing all residential DSL/cable modem IP blocks.)
Could I have bounced outbound mail through their servers? Sure.
Could I stop them if they decided to rewrite the headers to indicate the true sender of the message, e.g., in an attempt to prevent malicious users/malware from pretending to be the security department at eBay or Citibank? Nope. Besides "what's the harm" if I'm identified as "some.user@comcast.net" instead of "some.user@my.own.domain.com" since I'm the same person?
I eventually switched to a virtual server at <URL:http://tummy.com/>. It was cheaper, it has a static IP address, it isn't blacklisted, etc. Of course I still need an outgoing port 25 so I can bounce my outbound mail through it.
Nobody is defending the "right" of morons to write their passwords on post-it notes stuck on office equipment.
But a password list in your wallet? Or a file on your PDA that's sufficiently well protected that nobody can take a peek while you take a leak?
If unauthorized people have access to these items you have real world problems much more serious than worrying that somebody will use them to try to get into your accounts.
If clerks (in the study) never noticed the gunk on everyone's fingers as they demolished the "security" of these systems, what chance does any system have in the relative privacy of a cubicle or home?
That situation is different since the very nature of NIS/YP is that it is publishing information. It might be a violation of policy to set up your own client, but it doesn't involving doing anything on the server other than using a service in the usual manner. If you're outside of the jurisdiction of that policy, e.g., due to an absent or misconfigured firewall, it can't be a violation of policy.
An analogy would be comparing somebody walking down the street seeing something in plain sight on a patio vs. entering the house (through an unlocked door) and snooping in the desk.
I could point out the countless ways you're wrong. But why bother - it's clear that you have absolutely no clue about the care used by professionals qualified to make clinical diagnoses.
Here's a clue - the school nurse and school counselor aren't competent to make these diagnoses. The eating or learning disorder specialist isn't. Your pediatrican isn't. Organic mental illnesses should be evaluated by psychiatrists and licensed clinical psychologists, and an evaluation will take at least an hour.
What's the truth? Are you one of those "psychiatry kills" scientologists who believe in Xenu and evil thetans shooting out of flaming volcanoes but not imbalances in neurotransmitter levels or differences in neural activity measured with radioactive tracers?
But at the same time we're a community that's open to evaluation for "mental illness" and can pay for it. I was referred to a specialist, paid $$$ for an evaluation, and can use the results to identify an appropriate treatment. I doubt you would find many accountants, for example, equally willing to do the same.
The bottom line is probably in the second half of your comment. People who really have AS welcome a correct diagnosis since it means they won't continue wasting their time, money and effort. People who would use it as an "excuse" are probably just jerks.
Mass carnage was predicted when the double nickle speed limit was dropped. In fact the accident rate WENT DOWN.
There were several reasons for this. N.B., all of these were predicted by the proponents for the change, but dismissed by the safety "experts."
First, anyone with a clue knows that the biggest threat on the highway is traffic traveling at different speeds, not the absolute speed. People tend to stay in their own lanes - and can even comfortably stay in the right hand lane - if everyone is travelling at about the same speed. But if there's a 20 mph range (which was common in the interurban areas of the square states) there will be a lot of lane changes even when traffic is relatively light. At those speeds just tapping a car may be enough to cause the driver to lose control.
Second, a realistic speed limit actually lowered the speed of the fastest drivers. A driver going 20 mph over the posted speed limit doesn't have much motivation to avoid going 30 mph over the posted speed limit. But the same driver at the same original speed, if it's the speed limit, will often stay at that speed.
Finally, these roads were designed for traffic going at ~70 mph. At those speeds the road has just enough variability to keep the driver's attention. At the slower speeds the roads are mindnumbingly boring and the driver's attention tends to wander. You wouldn't think it would make that much of a difference, but I've driven between Denver and Seattle at both 55 and 75 and there is absolutely no comparison. (I-80 thru Wyoming and the Columbia River Gorge still suck because they were long, straight flat segments.)
That's why the death rate went down when the speed limits were raised. The annual death rate is climbing again, but that reflects more passenger-miles.
P.S., the Colorado Dept of Transportation will actually adjust the speed limit to match the drivers, not the other way around. They feel, reasonably, that thousands of drivers will make an informed decision about the best speed for a segment of road. Sometimes their hands are tied because of regulations, but I've seen them change the speed limit on other segments.
It's a given that any HR department knows the local law. If you're processed through HR I would bounce a missing final paycheck straight to state. If they're acting in bad faith that bridge is long gone so there's no point in keeping the gloves on.
If the boss handles the paperwork but there's a separate HR department, as you walk out the door "remember" that you needed to talk to the HR department about something. "Verify" the refusal to issue a final paycheck. Either you have the situation mentioned above or see interesting faces as they hastily provide that check. In the latter case it would be a good time to review their reference policy, although it might be a moot point if HR decides they've had enough.
If there's no HR department, a discrete reminder might be useful since it's possible that they're simply ignorant of the law. This is especially possible if it's a small company with low turnover, something that seems to be the case here.
Again you'll have your answer within hours. If it's genuine ignorance you'll get your check immediately. No "we'll mail it to you" since it's far too easy for a bad player to manipulate that situation. If they don't provide a check you're back to assuming bad faith and should bounce it immediately to the state.
I'm serious. Any competent HR department will insist that nothing more than job title and period of employment be discussed. Even a "positive" reference can bite them in the ass.
Going directly to a manager or coworker is equally useless. Nobody will use a reference who will slam them.
Finally the culture makes it nearly impossible to check references anyway. Check a reference and you've broadcast that the person is considering another job. That can put the candidate in a difficult position if the job falls through.
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If you want to get pedantic the architecture of the chips have also changed significantly and your criticism is equally malinformed.
What improvement is due to the reduced number of clock cycles required for each operation?
What improvement is due to the addition of an extremely high speed L1 cache? The L2 cache?
What improvement is due to multicore optimizations?
What improvements are due to improved software algorithms?
We tend to forget the last point since it seems most of our work is reinventing the same wheel, but there are a lot of applications where there's been a greater impact from improved algorithms than there's been from improved hardware.
I don't know the law in Canada, but the last I heard broadband isn't common carrier in the US. They fought it because it would require opening up their lines to competitors.
DSL may be different since it's over the same physical wires as common-carrier POTS.
That said it's still shitty behavior that would make a reasonable person wonder just what they're hiding.
Not necessarily. Clocks, including electronic ones, are sensitive to temperature changes and the correction for mid-summer may be different than the correction for mid-winter.
That effect might be minimal for a watch on an office worker, but an error of just one part in a million is 3 seconds/month.
Many people seem to have missed a critical fact. Amanda Tapping was pregnant and was unavailable for filming for the first five episodes of this season.
She was starting to show at the end of the last season. That's why "nerd Sam" was always wearing a loose sweater and even seemed a little chunky. It was to cover her belly, not (just) characterization.
Claudia Black will be around at the start of the season, but she's not a permanent addition. At least not yet. She would make an interesting addition since she can be far wilder than every other regular character.
Why does everyone try to reduce every question to money alone? Oh yeah, they're selling stuff.
Governments should strive to provide services for as little cost as possible, but that doesn't mean that it should fail to provide a service at all if just because somebody declares it to be not cost-effective.
Guess what, public libraries are not cost-effective.
Public parks are not cost-effective.
I'm sure others can add their own examples. Cities provide these service because it benefits the residents and makes the city more attractive to others. E.g., it might encourage a company to locate new offices in this city instead of another to keep the employees happy, and unlike the usual "development incentives" these investments actually benefit the people, not a few executives.
Should cities provide wifi - even free wifi - in downtown and business areas? I think it should - because the public good (e.g., allowing people to check their email from anywhere in the area) outweighs the cost. If the city really, really needs to offset the cost it could impose a nominal head count on the employees in the area, and by "nominal" I mean $2/month/full-time equivalence person. It won't cover the entire cost but it's a symbolic gesture.
That's not a programmer question. Unless the position requires extremely heavy bit manipulation and you don't have a bible of solutions (in which case you're the one who should be interviewing), the answer is "Google the answer."
I would ask something like handing them a bubble sort with a simple error in it, like boundary checking. If they catch that error, they're qualified to be a junior programmer.
If they ask why I'm using my own bubble sort instead of calling the standard qsort() routine, they're senior developer/analyst material.
I've built my own "unstable on stable libc/perl" packages and after a while dependencies will kill you. The latest version of a package requires A, A requires B, B requires C, and the new version of C breaks a lot of things.
Security backports require more effort, but they're unlikely to trigger cascading updates.
Once you're using tensor analysis for your physics and engineering homework space/time is a four-dimensional vector. IIRC the spatial dimensions are real, the temporal dimension is imaginary.
Excuse me, but aren't you an accomplance if you are a party to a criminal act? It can even be after the original crime, if you knowingly provide ongoing support to the criminal act, explicitly work to cover it up (e.g., by destroying logs), etc.
Then there's conspiracy.... You can be convicted of conspiracy if you knowingly commit just one express act in furtherance of a crime. Even if it's otherwise legal. E.g., it's legal for you to buy a lighter. It's legal for you to give it to another person. It's not legal for you to do this if you know that person plans to use it to commit arson. His prior code would have been safe (since he had no reason to believe it would be used to commit a crime), but ongoing software development when he believed it would be used for criminal acts....
Anyway, to my non-lawyer mind it's easy to see the letter as an attempt to protect himself from a shitload of legal trouble if/when the company's bad acts came to light, not to threaten them unless they coughed up something in exchange.
BTW, by the same analysis they may have just bought themselves a world of pain. An aggressive DA might make a case for witness intimidation, something that might stick even if they're cleared of any other illegal activity.
(P.S., I wouldn't have called the activity "illegal" in the letter. You can raise concerns without making judgments.)
The reason we shouldn't drain it today is because we'll have nothing tomorrow. Something every generation prior to ours has understood is that you don't eat your "seed corn."
I don't know why we'll need these oil reserves in the future, just that it will undoubtably come in useful sometime during the next 10,000 years. It's extremely shortsighted to say that our needs to drive Hummers out to exburbs on 35-acre ranchettes because the relatively affluent don't want neighbors in an urban environment is more important.
N.B., I'm not saying that we shouldn't use oil at all. Just that we act in a responsible manner instead of assuming that Jesus will be along any day now and we don't have to worry about things like this.
What are the contractual damages for violating there agreement?
I think $50 / incident is probably reasonable. That's enough to get the attention of the mom and pop store that might be facing damages of ten thousand dollars for improperly storing the CC numbers of a few hundred customers, but it's no so overwhelming that they would be forced out of business.
A major processor that held 40M records (assuming that that was the number of improperly held records, and the lower number were just those that might have been exposed). They deserve a $2 billion contractual damage.
Mastercard would never collect that much in damages, of course, but it would be a corporate death sentence to any company -- and its executives -- deciding to do illicit "research." One prominent case could go a long way towards restoring confidence.
If you're writing code at 11pm on Friday (or any night for that matter) and that code isn't being subjected to normal QA/QC review, you have bigger problems than a few buffer overflows.
If you have buffer overflows "because it's late and you're tired," your process is fatally broken. It should be second nature, e.g, I use snprintf() without even thinking about it. If it's more complex, it should be encapsulated in a few heavily tested convenience functions.
Who did you say you work for again?...
P.S., there are plenty of situations where the time you dropped the ball is far more important than the times you didn't. E.g., 99.9% is totally unacceptable if we're discussing automobile accidents causing serious injury - that's maybe once every 18 months.
Besides the obvious efficiency issues others pointed out, it wastes the cold water after one pass through the system.
Seriously, how much heat can the ice water absorb in a single pass through the radiator? I bet it's still pretty chilly when it hits the garden.
How difficult would it be to invest in a fountain pump (maybe $20?) that circulates the water back into the reservoir?
If he's an upperclassman in an engineering program (or a physics major) he shouldn't be satisfied until he set up a closed system that includes loops in the ice water reservoir. Call it an extremely primitive heat pump.
Should you drive on the left hand side of the road, or the right hand side?
Despite what some people seem to think, there's no "right" answer other than following the context. I live in the US and routinely drive on the left hand side of the road... on one way streets where I'll be turning left soon. I've done it on interstates... where the right hand lanes were closed due to construction and the oncoming traffic was moved onto the access road.
Writing down passwords is the same deal. It's a Bad Idea in your cubicle. It's a Cause For Termination Idea if you're a sysadmin.
But on a router at home, or in a locked wiring cabinet? It's a damn good idea. On a card in your wallet, especially in that zippered compartment so it can't accidently slip out? Good idea, unless you routinely leave your wallet unsecured. In which case you're an idiot with bigger problems than just writing down your passwords.
When I was being evaluated for Asperger's by a specialist, she commented that she's had many patients who were severely autistic at age five, but normal, well-adjusted teenagers. The right environment, and medications when appropriate and effective, can do wonders.
The context was whether people with Asperger's can also improve as they get older. She said there's evidence that the same can happen, albeit at a slower pace. That may not be much consolation when you're 20 and can't understand why your dating life is nonexistent, but there is hope.
Stupid HTML filters. dV/dr = 4 (pi) r^2.
"Home user" is not synonymous with "personal user," especially as more and more people work from home. (Either by choice or because their employers are too cheap to spring for office space.)
I paid substantially more for a Comcast "business" account at my home address, then found I still had problems hosting my own domains because of their inability to provide a static address... or even a dynamic address within a "business class" block. (The latter meant I was blocked by RBLs listing all residential DSL/cable modem IP blocks.)
Could I have bounced outbound mail through their servers? Sure.
Could I stop them if they decided to rewrite the headers to indicate the true sender of the message, e.g., in an attempt to prevent malicious users/malware from pretending to be the security department at eBay or Citibank? Nope. Besides "what's the harm" if I'm identified as "some.user@comcast.net" instead of "some.user@my.own.domain.com" since I'm the same person?
I eventually switched to a virtual server at <URL:http://tummy.com/>. It was cheaper, it has a static IP address, it isn't blacklisted, etc. Of course I still need an outgoing port 25 so I can bounce my outbound mail through it.
Nobody is defending the "right" of morons to write their passwords on post-it notes stuck on office equipment.
But a password list in your wallet? Or a file on your PDA that's sufficiently well protected that nobody can take a peek while you take a leak?
If unauthorized people have access to these items you have real world problems much more serious than worrying that somebody will use them to try to get into your accounts.
If clerks (in the study) never noticed the gunk on everyone's fingers as they demolished the "security" of these systems, what chance does any system have in the relative privacy of a cubicle or home?
That situation is different since the very nature of NIS/YP is that it is publishing information. It might be a violation of policy to set up your own client, but it doesn't involving doing anything on the server other than using a service in the usual manner. If you're outside of the jurisdiction of that policy, e.g., due to an absent or misconfigured firewall, it can't be a violation of policy.
An analogy would be comparing somebody walking down the street seeing something in plain sight on a patio vs. entering the house (through an unlocked door) and snooping in the desk.
I could point out the countless ways you're wrong. But why bother - it's clear that you have absolutely no clue about the care used by professionals qualified to make clinical diagnoses.
Here's a clue - the school nurse and school counselor aren't competent to make these diagnoses. The eating or learning disorder specialist isn't. Your pediatrican isn't. Organic mental illnesses should be evaluated by psychiatrists and licensed clinical psychologists, and an evaluation will take at least an hour.
What's the truth? Are you one of those "psychiatry kills" scientologists who believe in Xenu and evil thetans shooting out of flaming volcanoes but not imbalances in neurotransmitter levels or differences in neural activity measured with radioactive tracers?
Do too many people here self-diagnose? Of course.
But at the same time we're a community that's open to evaluation for "mental illness" and can pay for it. I was referred to a specialist, paid $$$ for an evaluation, and can use the results to identify an appropriate treatment. I doubt you would find many accountants, for example, equally willing to do the same.
The bottom line is probably in the second half of your comment. People who really have AS welcome a correct diagnosis since it means they won't continue wasting their time, money and effort. People who would use it as an "excuse" are probably just jerks.
Mass carnage was predicted when the double nickle speed limit was dropped. In fact the accident rate WENT DOWN.
There were several reasons for this. N.B., all of these were predicted by the proponents for the change, but dismissed by the safety "experts."
First, anyone with a clue knows that the biggest threat on the highway is traffic traveling at different speeds, not the absolute speed. People tend to stay in their own lanes - and can even comfortably stay in the right hand lane - if everyone is travelling at about the same speed. But if there's a 20 mph range (which was common in the interurban areas of the square states) there will be a lot of lane changes even when traffic is relatively light. At those speeds just tapping a car may be enough to cause the driver to lose control.
Second, a realistic speed limit actually lowered the speed of the fastest drivers. A driver going 20 mph over the posted speed limit doesn't have much motivation to avoid going 30 mph over the posted speed limit. But the same driver at the same original speed, if it's the speed limit, will often stay at that speed.
Finally, these roads were designed for traffic going at ~70 mph. At those speeds the road has just enough variability to keep the driver's attention. At the slower speeds the roads are mindnumbingly boring and the driver's attention tends to wander. You wouldn't think it would make that much of a difference, but I've driven between Denver and Seattle at both 55 and 75 and there is absolutely no comparison. (I-80 thru Wyoming and the Columbia River Gorge still suck because they were long, straight flat segments.)
That's why the death rate went down when the speed limits were raised. The annual death rate is climbing again, but that reflects more passenger-miles.
P.S., the Colorado Dept of Transportation will actually adjust the speed limit to match the drivers, not the other way around. They feel, reasonably, that thousands of drivers will make an informed decision about the best speed for a segment of road. Sometimes their hands are tied because of regulations, but I've seen them change the speed limit on other segments.
It's a given that any HR department knows the local law. If you're processed through HR I would bounce a missing final paycheck straight to state. If they're acting in bad faith that bridge is long gone so there's no point in keeping the gloves on.
If the boss handles the paperwork but there's a separate HR department, as you walk out the door "remember" that you needed to talk to the HR department about something. "Verify" the refusal to issue a final paycheck. Either you have the situation mentioned above or see interesting faces as they hastily provide that check. In the latter case it would be a good time to review their reference policy, although it might be a moot point if HR decides they've had enough.
If there's no HR department, a discrete reminder might be useful since it's possible that they're simply ignorant of the law. This is especially possible if it's a small company with low turnover, something that seems to be the case here.
Again you'll have your answer within hours. If it's genuine ignorance you'll get your check immediately. No "we'll mail it to you" since it's far too easy for a bad player to manipulate that situation. If they don't provide a check you're back to assuming bad faith and should bounce it immediately to the state.
References, what are they?
I'm serious. Any competent HR department will insist that nothing more than job title and period of employment be discussed. Even a "positive" reference can bite them in the ass.
Going directly to a manager or coworker is equally useless. Nobody will use a reference who will slam them.
Finally the culture makes it nearly impossible to check references anyway. Check a reference and you've broadcast that the person is considering another job. That can put the candidate in a difficult position if the job falls through.
P.S., it's time worked AND accrued vacation time.