Of course if you have an old processor w/o random number generators, you may need to move the mouse madly for a few days to get enough entropy into the/dev/urandom generator to get it to pump out enough bytes:)
If I fly into Bali and find someone has sneaked 4.1Kg of marijuana into my boogie bag without my knowledge, am I guilty of illegal importation?
I don't know Bali law, but under the US laws, in most cases I believe you're NOT guilty in this case. Unfortunately, from a practical standpoint, you're likely to end up with the burden of proving that you were unaware the marijuana was in your bag - which may be difficult. Note that this is not a case of ignorance of the law (that's not generally a defense) but rather no awareness of participation in the act that is illegal.
In the case of stuff in an IE cache, I think an expert witnesses would be more able to convince a jury that things can get in there without the defendent's knowledge than to convince the same jury that a traveler didn't know about evil weed in their bag (well, unless I'm on the jury).
This is an interesting case. In this case the guy had a bunch of porn images in his IE cache but over 1/3 were kiddie images -- it seems unlikely that he was not seeking and viewing kiddie porn. But the "reasonable doubt" bar is fairly high for conviction. The defendent could probably overcome my assumptions if he showed that all these images were thumbnails and/or he routinely used a automated download program to drill down and/or that the links he clicked on were not labeled in a way that he knew they would bring up kiddie porn. It seems that the html pages containing/linking the images and the detailed ISP or host logs of accesses might be very useful to one side or the other.
The whole reason a war with Iraq was politically possible in the first place without any kind of provocation is that Americans basically don't like "those kinds of people" very much.
Since you were not clear, I will assume from context that you refer to residents of the United States of America as "Americans". You have made a categorical statement about approximately 296 million people sharing one belief - but offer no reference to support this rather surprising conclusion (in my experience, it is hard to get even 20 software developers to agree to something, let alone 296 million people). Do you have a reference?
No, wait, never mind... I know your statement is incorrect since I can disprove it via contradiction. I live in the United States of America (and am a citizen of same), and don't 'basically don't like "those kinds of people" very much' (sorry about the double negative). There are a number of aspects of the situation in Iraq that trouble me, but IMHO, at this point one of the few saving graces is that the Iraqi population is being given a better chance at self determination than they had under Saddam and I can assure you that if I disliked "those kind of people" I would be unwilling to continue to expend US resources (money and lives) on the effort.
I don't think it is entirely accurate to state that "War is not fair." -- war is just played by a different set of rules than "polite society" (whatever that is!) normally plays by and it is "fair" in the context of war. Just as it is okay (and expected) to mislead your friends when playing poker with them but not when selling them used cars because the notion of "fair" is different in the two contexts (it's not, of course, okay to mark cards in poker though).
"what we need to figure out is how to stop fighting wars" is a nice idea but the problem is that out of nearly 6.5 billion people on the earth, some will chose to use force to get their way. Some of these people will end up becoming leaders of societies and even countries. When faced with someone who chooses to wage war for unjust purposes (think Hitler & Europe, Saddam & Kuwait,...), one has two choices. One can chose to not fight a war and yield to the one threatening to wage war (and hence just let Hitler et al rule and pillage substantial portions of Europe and Saddam rule and pillage Kuwait). Alternatively, one can choose to fight (and perhaps win) to result in what many believe is a more moral result. Note that if one chooses option one, this just delays war because eventually most areas of the world would be ruled by various ruthless leaders who have much less interest in avoiding war and will end up in wars with each other as each attempts to gain more control, power, and resources from the others.
I think it's unrealistic to think that we (humans) will figure out how to stop waging wars unless and until we can figure out how to alter the human race (through genetic engineering or natural selection) to change the fundamental nature of humans -- we really are rather nasty animals by nature. Of course, taking steps that tend to reduce the number and scope of wars is a more realistic goal. In some cases, I fear, this would require early forceful intervention but this is unfortunately very difficult to get worldwide support for (remember that the US was criticized by many for attacking Afghanistan -- although that's generally forgotten now as it has been overshadowed by criticism over their invasion of Iraq).
If NSA needed a whole bunch of hardware (or fab equip), they might spread the requests out among a number of shell companies. Not sure this could hide something of the magnitude of a fab however.
When I was working at a fairly small company many years ago, we got an order for some of our product from some blandly named company (like "Marketing Strategies, Inc." or something) which no one had heard of which was odd since most of not all of our customers were Fortune 100 companies (the product was expensive and really not of much interest to midsize companies). The team that went to do the install in Virginia or Maryland thought it odd that it was being installed in a bland brick building with no windows and surrounded by barbed wire topped fence.
Oh yes, they were a great customer -- I never saw a core file from them - and I suspect it wasn't because they didn't have software failures!
I believe it is illegal in all or most states. If the public was comfortable with it, I would have expected these laws to be repealed. Certainly not a scientific conclusion on my part!
Just in case the discussion is drifting that way, I don't consider political advertising to be "buying votes". If I watch an ad, I don't agree to vote for the advertised candidate nor do I receive anything of value in exchange for my vote.
Actually, I have no personal problem with selling votes (if feeding my kids is more important to me than voting for my favorite candidate, this seems to be my business) -- however, the general public seems to be a bit uncomfortable with the concept:(
However, how do you resolve the cases where people decide not to (intentionally or because they are confused) drop the paper ballot into the slot. In this case one of the two vote sources (machine OR paper ballot) MUST be the official one. If it is the paper version, all the counting of the paper (and misreads and damage from handling) must still happen before announcing the results - leaving the only advantage of the electronic component to be user interface issues and preventing overvotes etc. OTOH, if the machine count is the official version, the paper version is not useful for a recount.
The machine needs to show you your vote on paper and then deposit the paper in a box w/o human hands touching it. Obviously if you discover you misvoted, you need to be able to see it scribble "VOID" (or something) all over it when you hit the "try again" button.
I would imagine I'm the only one who does this, but when voting via paper, if I choose not to vote on an office or a ballot measure, I vote for all the candidates (for an office) or both yes and no (on a ballot measure). This prevents anyone from altering my ballot to create a vote in a race I didn't care about. Of course, it doesn't prevent someone from invalidating my votes for offices I do care about (by marking my ballot to overvote in races I did care about). So, some overvotes are intentional!
Voters should never be given a receipt showing how they voted. To do so opens up vote selling schemes and the ability to influence votes via intimidation.
Without a receipt, the person paying you for your vote or who is threatening you if you don't vote a certain way has no way of knowing if you complied or not (assuming that at least a few people in the precinct vote for the candidate you were paid to cast a vote for).
If I understand your point, in this case, one can reasonably assume the employer made the contract (it's unusual for employees to craft employment documents).
However, more symmetric relationships (such as a merger of two companies or even an independent contractor providing IT services to a business) usually have both sides exchanging documents back and forth and they eventually end up with a version that requires no further revision - so it's not possible to figure out (with JUST the two "versions" of the agreement with the same hash) which side "produced" the final copy (and hence, was in a position to orchestrate the second bogus version).
Since there are no, and I absolutely mean: no, women out there willing to "court" a man...
I have to disagree with this from personal experience. I'm a guy (by all definitions) and a geek (by most definitions) and, for the record, I am not rich or particularly good looking or athletic or politically powerful (although I'm probably a bit more responsibly assertive than most geeks).
Some of my most successful relationships were effectively initiated by the woman. In retrospect, the key was that in all these cases I was not "trying" hard to date the women for superficial reasons and instead just got to know the woman as a friend and happened to end up dating her. In fact, looking back on it, there were clearly a lot of good opportunities that I inadvertently passed up because I'm kinda dense and sometimes didn't realize I was being courted (leading to regrets about having been so dense about that cute identical twin... - ah, the mind wanders).
General recommendation... Geeks would be well served to take the initiative to put themselves in situations where there ARE actually members of the gender of interest and interact with them. Some thoughts:
1. If you're in school, be a TA or Lab Assistant -- and consider it your goal to help everyone (okay, esp. the gender of interest) -- not to prove how smart you are and how clever you are or, worse yet, how much cleverer or smarter you are than they are (and, maybe, you are NOT smarter or more knowledgeable -- you may know a whole lot less about Renaissance art than they do!).
2. Join Mensa and hook up with some SIGs that are NOT computer oriented. Although I've never done this, over the years I've run into a number of Mensa members. Some are complete a**holes, some are far from it and are quite interesting people. If you're not an a**hole and interested in real discussions and in learning about those outside your species, you will be more interesting than the a**holes you're competing with.
3. Join the Sierra Club and participate in their activities. Of course, only do this if you agree with their politics and goals (you won't win a lot of points by trying to explain to the other members why we should drill in ANWAR or that it's no big deal if we kill off the last of a species which was really just an unsuccessful genetic mutation whose ultimate demise was inevitable).
4. Join [any organization which attracts thinking people and whose focus you generally respect and agree with] and participate in its activities.
Overall, spread the bait and feel for nibbles and don't be too eager to set the hook.
(Of course, if the real problem is not one of geekdom but of needing a personality transplant, ignore all the above advice because it won't work - geeks who are a**holes are a**holes first and geeks second and should blame their problems on the former, not the latter...)
True... but Ugly is forever, Rich can be fleeting. Rich Ugly Guys who had all their assets in Webvan are now mostly just Ugly.
That's the good thing about geeks - they tend to be Ugly Smart Guys -- and barring the occasional motorcycle accident w/o a helmet, they tend to remain Ugly Smart Guys.
i should hope that the pilot turns off all comm with the cabin
Maybe not a bad idea. If there was some very visible (in the cabin) indicator that showed that all cockpit/cabin communications had been disabled and could not be enabled until the plane landed, it would put the hijackers in a bit of a tough spot and perhaps they might realize the futility of even planning an attempt. Make it public that the first reaction of the cockpit crew at the time of notification of a hijacking would be to disable the cabin/cockpit communications.
The hijackers couldn't get their demands to the pilot directly. Sure, they could use a cell phone or airphone to call the ground to make their demands and order them relayed to the pilot - but it would be pretty obvious that the FAA and Homeland Security would be unlikely to relay the commands without a bit of "editing" (like, "Fly the plane into World Trade Center North Tower" would become something like "Ignore the fighters around you - proceed to military base X, make steep final approach from 40,000 feet at 120% of maximum aircraft design rate [don't worry, Boeing was conservative in their maximums], ignore all the terrorists piled up on the front bulkhead, land on runway 130 north [you can't miss it - that's where all those fire engines, swat teams, and military vehicles are] and prepare for a boarding party").
With tuning it isn't so bad. Usually a piss-poor database reflects on piss-poor developers.
I assume this is a comment about those developing the application (i.e., determining the logical and physical database design,queries, and the platform) rather than the developers of the underlying DBMS (Oracle, SQL Server etc.).
In my experience, piss-poor database performance often comes from the failure of the customer to redesign schemas as they toss loads and queries onto the system that were not anticipated when the application was originally created.
For example, the developers were initially assured that the customer service droids would only be able to query an individual customer's service history. However, two years after rollout, someone adds an "upsell" function to the customer service interface and this results in some dreadful join that was never anticipated - and, alas, this change is deployed without DB schema changes or adequate performance testing under load. This seems to be most common in shops without a strong IT department which "owns the world" (and therefore can't stop "progress" for pesky things like design).
At least when something is patented there's no reason an inventor shouldn't release information on the invention, and charge a fee for use of the invention.
Huh? A patent owner may well choose NOT to license an invention to a competitor - and for good reason.
Consider the xerographic process - by not licensing this widely to other companies, no one could make copiers that were as good and convenient as Xerox copiers (I remember some pretty pathetic attempts though!). In this case, insuring that the xerographic process was only available in Xerox copiers, Xerox got about as close to printing currency as one legally can (until the patent expired of course). Sure, maybe they could have made as much money on license fees, but maybe their business analysis indicated otherwise.
The definition of "support" would be difficult to tie down.
Since "support" is different from "free support", if the author didn't really want to spend time on support but wanted to keep the code out of the public domain, she could simply raise the support rate to 1M USD per minute and be fairly sure the demand for support would be nearly zero (or WELL worth the effort!)
Addressing this problem by establishing a "required level of support" legislatively seems like a really bad idea.
In this area maybe the market doesn't support very many fast food places due to what's likely to be poor traffic in the evening, weekends, and even mornings. I.e., being very busy from 11:30 to 13:30 every weekday (10 hours a week) and having little business the rest of the time may not be very attractive.
I do feel bad for the talented and/or hardworking ones who got taken for ride after ride with startups...
Every job I've had in the past 23 years has been as a developer at a startup. I don't think anyone should "feel bad" for developers at these companies. As far as I can tell, everyone made about the same salary they would have made at some big crusty company. In exchange for stock options and a true "shared mission", (almost) everyone worked real hard, had a great time, and got to work with other "A" players. Those who were around just to "get rich" were, of course, usually sorely disappointed (and usually didn't last long).
... if they get pulled over for speeding (after paying 10 years of social security and other taxes), they're deported without a chance to return.
One only pays Social Security if one is working -- but if their visa had expired, I don't think there are very many software companies (as opposed to mom-and-pop computer stores) that will hire a developer.
3) What networked games can you actually finish within the 60 seconds before you hit the ground?
It's been 20 years since I made a couple hundred jumps, but as I recall (and assuming air density hasn't changed much in 20 years), one has about 72 seconds until they hit the deck (assuming exit altitude is 12.5K). Of course, in that last 12 seconds, the ants start looking a lot more like people and there would be a certain urgency to finishing your very last game - would hate to have the tombstone read "he lost his last game".:)
Similarly, a parent should be able to marry their offspring and siblings should be allowed to marry each other. Although, there may be a legitimate state interest in making procreation illegal in some of these cases on the theory that the chances of producing a child with birth defects is irresponsibly high.
It seems to me that marriage, as far as the state is concerned, should be a contract issue and not a moral issue. Any two people who jointly agree to share the "prepackaged contract" that laws provide for married partners (medical decisions, inheritance, etc) should be able to do so.
Indeed, laws against polygamy seem inappropriate, although if polygamy were to become legal, it would complicate or confound interpretation of many existing laws far more than same sex marriages would (for example, if three identical triplet females get married to each other simultaneously with all being "equals" and one of the three ends up on life support and one of the remaining spouses wants to pull the plug and the other one does not, I suspect the current laws would not suffice).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course if you have an old processor w/o random number generators, you may need to move the mouse madly for a few days to get enough entropy into the /dev/urandom generator to get it to pump out enough bytes :)
I don't know Bali law, but under the US laws, in most cases I believe you're NOT guilty in this case. Unfortunately, from a practical standpoint, you're likely to end up with the burden of proving that you were unaware the marijuana was in your bag - which may be difficult. Note that this is not a case of ignorance of the law (that's not generally a defense) but rather no awareness of participation in the act that is illegal.
In the case of stuff in an IE cache, I think an expert witnesses would be more able to convince a jury that things can get in there without the defendent's knowledge than to convince the same jury that a traveler didn't know about evil weed in their bag (well, unless I'm on the jury).
This is an interesting case. In this case the guy had a bunch of porn images in his IE cache but over 1/3 were kiddie images -- it seems unlikely that he was not seeking and viewing kiddie porn. But the "reasonable doubt" bar is fairly high for conviction. The defendent could probably overcome my assumptions if he showed that all these images were thumbnails and/or he routinely used a automated download program to drill down and/or that the links he clicked on were not labeled in a way that he knew they would bring up kiddie porn. It seems that the html pages containing/linking the images and the detailed ISP or host logs of accesses might be very useful to one side or the other.
Since you were not clear, I will assume from context that you refer to residents of the United States of America as "Americans". You have made a categorical statement about approximately 296 million people sharing one belief - but offer no reference to support this rather surprising conclusion (in my experience, it is hard to get even 20 software developers to agree to something, let alone 296 million people). Do you have a reference?
No, wait, never mind... I know your statement is incorrect since I can disprove it via contradiction. I live in the United States of America (and am a citizen of same), and don't 'basically don't like "those kinds of people" very much' (sorry about the double negative). There are a number of aspects of the situation in Iraq that trouble me, but IMHO, at this point one of the few saving graces is that the Iraqi population is being given a better chance at self determination than they had under Saddam and I can assure you that if I disliked "those kind of people" I would be unwilling to continue to expend US resources (money and lives) on the effort.
"what we need to figure out is how to stop fighting wars" is a nice idea but the problem is that out of nearly 6.5 billion people on the earth, some will chose to use force to get their way. Some of these people will end up becoming leaders of societies and even countries. When faced with someone who chooses to wage war for unjust purposes (think Hitler & Europe, Saddam & Kuwait, ...), one has two choices. One can chose to not fight a war and yield to the one threatening to wage war (and hence just let Hitler et al rule and pillage substantial portions of Europe and Saddam rule and pillage Kuwait). Alternatively, one can choose to fight (and perhaps win) to result in what many believe is a more moral result. Note that if one chooses option one, this just delays war because eventually most areas of the world would be ruled by various ruthless leaders who have much less interest in avoiding war and will end up in wars with each other as each attempts to gain more control, power, and resources from the others.
I think it's unrealistic to think that we (humans) will figure out how to stop waging wars unless and until we can figure out how to alter the human race (through genetic engineering or natural selection) to change the fundamental nature of humans -- we really are rather nasty animals by nature. Of course, taking steps that tend to reduce the number and scope of wars is a more realistic goal. In some cases, I fear, this would require early forceful intervention but this is unfortunately very difficult to get worldwide support for (remember that the US was criticized by many for attacking Afghanistan -- although that's generally forgotten now as it has been overshadowed by criticism over their invasion of Iraq).
When I was working at a fairly small company many years ago, we got an order for some of our product from some blandly named company (like "Marketing Strategies, Inc." or something) which no one had heard of which was odd since most of not all of our customers were Fortune 100 companies (the product was expensive and really not of much interest to midsize companies). The team that went to do the install in Virginia or Maryland thought it odd that it was being installed in a bland brick building with no windows and surrounded by barbed wire topped fence.
Oh yes, they were a great customer -- I never saw a core file from them - and I suspect it wasn't because they didn't have software failures!
We always assumed it was the NSA...
I believe it is illegal in all or most states. If the public was comfortable with it, I would have expected these laws to be repealed. Certainly not a scientific conclusion on my part!
Just in case the discussion is drifting that way, I don't consider political advertising to be "buying votes". If I watch an ad, I don't agree to vote for the advertised candidate nor do I receive anything of value in exchange for my vote.
Actually, I have no personal problem with selling votes (if feeding my kids is more important to me than voting for my favorite candidate, this seems to be my business) -- however, the general public seems to be a bit uncomfortable with the concept :(
The machine needs to show you your vote on paper and then deposit the paper in a box w/o human hands touching it. Obviously if you discover you misvoted, you need to be able to see it scribble "VOID" (or something) all over it when you hit the "try again" button.
I would imagine I'm the only one who does this, but when voting via paper, if I choose not to vote on an office or a ballot measure, I vote for all the candidates (for an office) or both yes and no (on a ballot measure). This prevents anyone from altering my ballot to create a vote in a race I didn't care about. Of course, it doesn't prevent someone from invalidating my votes for offices I do care about (by marking my ballot to overvote in races I did care about). So, some overvotes are intentional!
Without a receipt, the person paying you for your vote or who is threatening you if you don't vote a certain way has no way of knowing if you complied or not (assuming that at least a few people in the precinct vote for the candidate you were paid to cast a vote for).
However, more symmetric relationships (such as a merger of two companies or even an independent contractor providing IT services to a business) usually have both sides exchanging documents back and forth and they eventually end up with a version that requires no further revision - so it's not possible to figure out (with JUST the two "versions" of the agreement with the same hash) which side "produced" the final copy (and hence, was in a position to orchestrate the second bogus version).
Am I missing something about the argument?
I have to disagree with this from personal experience. I'm a guy (by all definitions) and a geek (by most definitions) and, for the record, I am not rich or particularly good looking or athletic or politically powerful (although I'm probably a bit more responsibly assertive than most geeks).
Some of my most successful relationships were effectively initiated by the woman. In retrospect, the key was that in all these cases I was not "trying" hard to date the women for superficial reasons and instead just got to know the woman as a friend and happened to end up dating her. In fact, looking back on it, there were clearly a lot of good opportunities that I inadvertently passed up because I'm kinda dense and sometimes didn't realize I was being courted (leading to regrets about having been so dense about that cute identical twin... - ah, the mind wanders).
General recommendation... Geeks would be well served to take the initiative to put themselves in situations where there ARE actually members of the gender of interest and interact with them. Some thoughts:
1. If you're in school, be a TA or Lab Assistant -- and consider it your goal to help everyone (okay, esp. the gender of interest) -- not to prove how smart you are and how clever you are or, worse yet, how much cleverer or smarter you are than they are (and, maybe, you are NOT smarter or more knowledgeable -- you may know a whole lot less about Renaissance art than they do!).
2. Join Mensa and hook up with some SIGs that are NOT computer oriented. Although I've never done this, over the years I've run into a number of Mensa members. Some are complete a**holes, some are far from it and are quite interesting people. If you're not an a**hole and interested in real discussions and in learning about those outside your species, you will be more interesting than the a**holes you're competing with.
3. Join the Sierra Club and participate in their activities. Of course, only do this if you agree with their politics and goals (you won't win a lot of points by trying to explain to the other members why we should drill in ANWAR or that it's no big deal if we kill off the last of a species which was really just an unsuccessful genetic mutation whose ultimate demise was inevitable).
4. Join [any organization which attracts thinking people and whose focus you generally respect and agree with] and participate in its activities.
Overall, spread the bait and feel for nibbles and don't be too eager to set the hook.
(Of course, if the real problem is not one of geekdom but of needing a personality transplant, ignore all the above advice because it won't work - geeks who are a**holes are a**holes first and geeks second and should blame their problems on the former, not the latter...)
True... but Ugly is forever, Rich can be fleeting. Rich Ugly Guys who had all their assets in Webvan are now mostly just Ugly. That's the good thing about geeks - they tend to be Ugly Smart Guys -- and barring the occasional motorcycle accident w/o a helmet, they tend to remain Ugly Smart Guys.
i should hope that the pilot turns off all comm with the cabin
Maybe not a bad idea. If there was some very visible (in the cabin) indicator that showed that all cockpit/cabin communications had been disabled and could not be enabled until the plane landed, it would put the hijackers in a bit of a tough spot and perhaps they might realize the futility of even planning an attempt. Make it public that the first reaction of the cockpit crew at the time of notification of a hijacking would be to disable the cabin/cockpit communications.
The hijackers couldn't get their demands to the pilot directly. Sure, they could use a cell phone or airphone to call the ground to make their demands and order them relayed to the pilot - but it would be pretty obvious that the FAA and Homeland Security would be unlikely to relay the commands without a bit of "editing" (like, "Fly the plane into World Trade Center North Tower" would become something like "Ignore the fighters around you - proceed to military base X, make steep final approach from 40,000 feet at 120% of maximum aircraft design rate [don't worry, Boeing was conservative in their maximums], ignore all the terrorists piled up on the front bulkhead, land on runway 130 north [you can't miss it - that's where all those fire engines, swat teams, and military vehicles are] and prepare for a boarding party").
With tuning it isn't so bad. Usually a piss-poor database reflects on piss-poor developers.
I assume this is a comment about those developing the application (i.e., determining the logical and physical database design,queries, and the platform) rather than the developers of the underlying DBMS (Oracle, SQL Server etc.).
In my experience, piss-poor database performance often comes from the failure of the customer to redesign schemas as they toss loads and queries onto the system that were not anticipated when the application was originally created.
For example, the developers were initially assured that the customer service droids would only be able to query an individual customer's service history. However, two years after rollout, someone adds an "upsell" function to the customer service interface and this results in some dreadful join that was never anticipated - and, alas, this change is deployed without DB schema changes or adequate performance testing under load. This seems to be most common in shops without a strong IT department which "owns the world" (and therefore can't stop "progress" for pesky things like design).
Learn to drive on a standard, not an automatic.
Just curious, do you also turn a crank at the front of your motor to start your car?
At least when something is patented there's no reason an inventor shouldn't release information on the invention, and charge a fee for use of the invention.
Huh? A patent owner may well choose NOT to license an invention to a competitor - and for good reason.
Consider the xerographic process - by not licensing this widely to other companies, no one could make copiers that were as good and convenient as Xerox copiers (I remember some pretty pathetic attempts though!). In this case, insuring that the xerographic process was only available in Xerox copiers, Xerox got about as close to printing currency as one legally can (until the patent expired of course). Sure, maybe they could have made as much money on license fees, but maybe their business analysis indicated otherwise.
The definition of "support" would be difficult to tie down.
Since "support" is different from "free support", if the author didn't really want to spend time on support but wanted to keep the code out of the public domain, she could simply raise the support rate to 1M USD per minute and be fairly sure the demand for support would be nearly zero (or WELL worth the effort!)
Addressing this problem by establishing a "required level of support" legislatively seems like a really bad idea.
In this area maybe the market doesn't support very many fast food places due to what's likely to be poor traffic in the evening, weekends, and even mornings. I.e., being very busy from 11:30 to 13:30 every weekday (10 hours a week) and having little business the rest of the time may not be very attractive.
Amen... but a couple of issues...
... if they get pulled over for speeding (after paying 10 years of social security and other taxes), they're deported without a chance to return.
I do feel bad for the talented and/or hardworking ones who got taken for ride after ride with startups...
Every job I've had in the past 23 years has been as a developer at a startup. I don't think anyone should "feel bad" for developers at these companies. As far as I can tell, everyone made about the same salary they would have made at some big crusty company. In exchange for stock options and a true "shared mission", (almost) everyone worked real hard, had a great time, and got to work with other "A" players. Those who were around just to "get rich" were, of course, usually sorely disappointed (and usually didn't last long).
One only pays Social Security if one is working -- but if their visa had expired, I don't think there are very many software companies (as opposed to mom-and-pop computer stores) that will hire a developer.
Particularly if they were jumping through the clouds (no, I didn't RTFA) - my experience is that the pointy ends of raindrops are painful :)
3) What networked games can you actually finish within the 60 seconds before you hit the ground?
:)
It's been 20 years since I made a couple hundred jumps, but as I recall (and assuming air density hasn't changed much in 20 years), one has about 72 seconds until they hit the deck (assuming exit altitude is 12.5K). Of course, in that last 12 seconds, the ants start looking a lot more like people and there would be a certain urgency to finishing your very last game - would hate to have the tombstone read "he lost his last game".
Why is the sex of a computer user important?
Perhaps the sex of the computer is important?
But those 3% will have an unprecedented amount of fun while the civilization swirls down the drain! Oh, wait, this is /. - never mind.
Similarly, a parent should be able to marry their offspring and siblings should be allowed to marry each other. Although, there may be a legitimate state interest in making procreation illegal in some of these cases on the theory that the chances of producing a child with birth defects is irresponsibly high.
It seems to me that marriage, as far as the state is concerned, should be a contract issue and not a moral issue. Any two people who jointly agree to share the "prepackaged contract" that laws provide for married partners (medical decisions, inheritance, etc) should be able to do so.
Indeed, laws against polygamy seem inappropriate, although if polygamy were to become legal, it would complicate or confound interpretation of many existing laws far more than same sex marriages would (for example, if three identical triplet females get married to each other simultaneously with all being "equals" and one of the three ends up on life support and one of the remaining spouses wants to pull the plug and the other one does not, I suspect the current laws would not suffice).