I think unions were great at busting up some frankly inhumane hiring practices. These days, it seems like you need a union against the union as the percentage they take from you is probably about equal to the percentage cut you would have to take if you didn't have the union backing you.

This is my problem, too. The problem is that companies not only expect you to to work late into the evening "when necessary", meaning on days that end in "y", but they also expect that the fact that you worked a 20 hour shift on Monday does not mean you can come in late on Tuesday, and you certainly cannot expect to be allowed to take a half hour to go run some errands during the day, unless you are willing to give up your lunch hour to run those errands instead of maintaining your health so that you can be a more productive employee.

In the vast majority of places I have worked, they have claimed that I am an exempt employee and thus cannot be paid overtime, although that is not true by the letter of the law in most cases. Also, in most of those places, they do allow you an hour for lunch and you are not actually "on the clock", however, they also expect you to work 8:30 to 5:30, not 9 to 5. So you still work at least a full 8 hours.
Recently I was told by my boss that I need to bring my laptop to lunch in case there is a problem at work. That means, as far as I can tell, that I am not actually on a lunch break at all. Also, it means that I am limited to eating places that have free public wifi, because they won't pay for tethering and I'm sure not going to pay for it just for their use, and also that wherever I go has electric outlets within reach of the table because the battery on my 4 year old laptop only lasts about 10-15 minutes.

Green Eggs and Ham FTW!

Arming Afghanistan wasn't the problem. Arming them in secret (so most of the population had no idea that the USA was spending half a billion dollars a year on helping them fight the USSR and felt abandoned) and then cutting off the money as soon as the USSR pulled out and leaving the country a mess, rather than helping to rebuild schools and so on was the problem.

One of my favorite things to do during a conference call is to wait for somebody to start some tirade after hitting mute and then to say "By the way, IT says they will have the mute button fixed by Friday."

Cutting off the flow of gas would hurt Europe a lot more than it would hurt Russia at this point. Entering the winter with your largest gas supplier no longer providing you with the gas that you use for heating would suck. And as gas is fungible, it doesn't matter to Russia if we stop buying it from them, unless everyone else stops buying it from them - if China doesn't join in with the boycott then it just means that they'll be buying more has from Russia because the price of everyone else's gas will go up.

I've been thinking about getting a dashcam. I commute less than 40 miles round trip each day and yet almost every day I witness at least one bonehead move that could have killed someone. If I could record these, at least it could be put up on a wall of shame somewhere and maybe it ought to be admissible as evidence for attempted vehicular manslaughter. At the very least, if one of these maneuvers does eventually cause an accident, i will be able to present video evidence.
Some of the illegal maneuvers are done by cops, as well. I saw one yesterday that i wanted to call in for a possible drunk driver. Weaving around, getting at least a tires width into neighboring lanes at times, etc. But he was probably just surfing the internet on his police computer. Oh, and speeding. About 75 in the 60 zone. Then sometimes I see officers throwing lit cigarettes or other trash out of the car. Excessively speeding without using their lights, etc.

The problem with accidental breakage is that it it always occurs when it would have corroborated the defendants story. The problem with this ubiquitous recording is that it never seems to be able to be used for your benefit. My friend had his debit card used at a local branch ATM. it had never left his possession, so he was curious as to who had used it. He requested the tapes from the bank. Of course, the camera had not been working that day. Undoubtedly they would have been working that day if someone had tried to steal the money out of the ATM though. Perhaps if he had gotten a subpoena, the bank may have changed their story. Or perhaps not. How can an outsider prove whether the camera system was working or not? If the bank wants the cameras to have been broken, then they were broken.

I'm not that old, but I work with quite a lot of people who are older than you at various big companies. They're all exceedingly competent. I suspect that's part of the problem for the grandparent: the older you are, the greater the expectations. If you're as competent at 45 as someone else at 25, then people start to wonder how you've managed to work for 20 without gaining more insight. If you hire a competent 25 year old, then there's a good chance that they'll mature and improve over the next 5-10 years. If you hire someone who has only achieved the same level of competence by the time that they're 45, then they don't look like such a good investment.

I have two computers, two cell phones that default to 802.11 for data, two tablets. Between all of those, I'm at 303 GB for August thus far, according to my router. I'm guessing 2/3 of it was split between Netflix, Amazon Video, and YouTube.

So I'm assuming the IAU will be naming it "REI-128717"? ;-)

What high-level language does not depend on the C standard library and so would be suitable for implementing the C standard library?

It is possible, but for good performance it needs hardware support. We've implemented hardware-enforced bounds checking for C code using our processor. If you only care about accidental bugs and not about a malicious attacker, and don't use threads (or are happy to bound every pointer store with a transactional region), and don't mind that the semantics of C are subtly broken in the kinds of permitted pointer operations, then Intel's Memory Protection Extensions will do the same thing.

The OpenBSD philosophy says that the difference between a bug and a vulnerability is the intelligence of the attacker. There are lots of categories of bugs (null pointer dereferences, integer overflows) that were thought to be unexploitable, right up until someone exploited them. It's the same as with cryptosystems: the fact that you can't break your encryption algorithm doesn't mean that it's secure.