I actually agree with you that no government social safety net is the best. Your analogy is a little oversimplified, but your preaching to the choir. The one time I was laid off and out of work for two weeks I took neither state unemployment or my companies severance package. If I was out of work for an extended period I'd take the private charity of the severance package before I took unemployment. However, accepting the current system as it is, or privatizing unemployment insurance, I do think that a system based on income makes the most sense. I also think that yes if I was a charity that offered some sort of handouts besides basic food or shelter, I might consider allowing a millionaire whose donated to my cause to "make a withdrawal" under certain conditions.

First of all, you were a rare edge case, so I don't think its "ridiculous" that you qualified for handouts. Your a really strange edge case if you're floating R&D people and your accountant told you not to pay yourself a salary at all for 2010. I think that if every person in America that was in your boat took advantage of the hand outs, its effect would be negligible. Secondly, lets say you continued to operate this way until you lost the house and car, wouldn't it be nice to know that you could just walk down to the benefits office and file for benefits.

Playing devils advocate, assume some portion of these athletes manage to keep enough of their fortune at age 35 so that when they have all sorts of weird medical issues then can travel to Sweden for all sorts of weird expensive treatment. Lets go on to assume that some of this treatment works, and has application in the sorts of diseases that sometimes normal people get.

I'm not saying I'm necessarily for this, I'm just saying there could be positive unintended consequences.

So you are suggesting:

• There is zero genetic component to intelligence. Nurture has a lot to do with it, but I find it hard to believe there is no genetic component. I've seen a lot of variation between siblings, but if we consistently remove the above average IQs from the gene pool, that can't be good long term.
• That we force these dumb people to give up their kids to be raised by smarter people. While we are at it we somehow convince smarter people to adopt. Even if you started mandatory education at age 3 and kept the kids all year for 10 hours a day, parents are still a big influence. I don't know how you'd do that.

Well it depends on what your intention is. As the author of an open source project I got little feedback on, I'm still glad I wrote the project because I needed it for my own purposes, and I was still able to treat it like a "real project." I wrote an installer for it. I had version numbers. I shipped it out on laptops I setup for my employer, because I might need to use it to diagnose problems. If the author has a real problem to solve for themselves, even if its for their weekly D&D game or for a fantasy sports league, they can still teach themselves about version control, installer software, unit testing, or other things.

I learned about version control when I was writing VB6 programs as a clerk in a security guard company. No one told me to. I decided on my own. Later when I was a programmer there I taught myself to make an MSI installer and how to use NUint. No market pressures from my boss or a client made me do this. Just a desire to be more professional and disciplined.

Depends. What if not quickly enough is 6 months? 2 years? What if part of the problem is your lack of employment makes you depressed and distant? What if you two recently closed on a bigger house before an unexpected layoff, and you were the one that pressured her into agreeing to it?

We like to consider ourselves "evolved beings" but the facade of civilization fades away after a few missed meals.

"Making stuff up" is an educated guess, or hypothesis. You can keep dividing matter into smaller and smaller pieces. Is that infinite or not? Saying "there must be atomic particles" is as educated a guess as "matter may be divided infinitesimally" if you know as much as the ancient Greeks. The same exists with continental drift. Look at a map and see that the continents kind of fit together like puzzles. Also note that sometime the earth shakes and bleeds (volcano's). So even without all the data and knowledge of fluid dynamics, you have a guess that makes as much sense as "the earth is static except for when it bleeds lava or shakes"

In the same sense, science fiction is based on science fact. Yes Gene Roddenberry did not produce any research to lead to FTL travel, but he certainly had some scientific knowledge on the matter

The problem is Louis removed may market inefficiencies created by the RIAA/MPAA, and those inefficiencies create jobs!</sarcasm>

24 Hour urgent care might be possible. I'd expect the hard part would be finding night shift admin staff. Then again, college students could do that. The problem with a hospital having a built in urgent care system is that they'd probably have to let people in for free like the ER. An urgent care could probably advertise in an ER, but most people in an ER that have insurance would go to urgent care if they knew about them. Also imagine the lawsuit if someone went to an ER, saw the urgent care advertisement, and went to urgent care, who sent them back to the ER?

If it could happen I'd love it though.

Part of their results are based on what they host their company websites on. I don't know about the top 1000. But when I worked at an ISP, several large clients that colo-ed several racks of equipment from us hosted their website on our hosted servers. If a company website doesn't do anything interactive besides send an email to someone in sales or marketing then thats probably what said company does.

Also, its really more interesting what the internal systems in a corporation are running, not the company website, which is usually not handled by IT.

That's called marketing. Sure, it might not be direct to consumer advertising, and its a different approach. You're buying doctors lunch as opposed to giving free pens out at health fairs. You're buying ads in journals as opposed to Esquire magazine. Either way, you are spending money to inform decision makers.

Well apparently you had to go past pluto at impulse otherwise. I would assume by traveling "up" you would only need to get as far away from earth as you would otherwise have to travel away from pluto before you can safely go to warp.

That seems really low for a programmer, regardless of what part of the country you are in.

As a college drop out programmer that started off in IT making less than that doing third shift help desk, I was making more than $30k the first time my title was developer.

I always wondered about the two dimensional thinking of that. Why not go UP a few light years at full impulse and then have Scotty stoke the warp core and Sulu floor the gas pedal.

Well Andrew S. Tanenbaum is not predisposed to feel strongly about version control systems. Operating systems on the other hand . . .