I mean, I'll try anything to improve AT&T signal reception, but I'm skeptical. I tried sitting, standing, and even lying down, and it doesn't really seem to change anything.

How do you envision this magical remote kill switch working?

Oh, absolutely. I just meant that it shows engagement, so it could be construed as positive in that way. But overall it fits the negative theme.

There's a great blog entry on 40-hour work weeks for programmers from, amazingly enough all considered, someone at Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmeier/archive/2010/10/21/40-hour-work-week-at-microsoft.aspx

So it's not like they dont' get this.

The idea of gamification is to give little awards for postitive behavior — or at least active engagement with the site/product/tool/whatever. A few of these fit that (the badge for working on a Saturday or Friday night), but most of them are labels of shame for doing things like writing a single line of code that is several screens too wide.

+1! Sheesh, slashdot, why do I have mod points all the time when I don't need them and then they're gone when there's something actually worth voting up?!

Large mirror. Optionally, parabolic.

On multiple choice tests, always read the answers first, and identify the key differences. Here, the options are:

141
1,175
3,525
4,700

And it should immediately jump out that one of these is an order of magnitude lower than the others. So, you know right away that either you can throw this one out or it's the right answer. As soon as you reduce he problem to 47 times 3, you know it has to be that one. Mark A and move on to a harder question. (You can check your work later if you have time.)

If the answer had a higher order of magnitude, the next thing to consider would be whether the answer is likely to be the nice, round 47 times 100 -- another easy-to-identify possibility.

Or for much less than that on AMD/Intel x86_64 too. I'm just sayin' if you're looking at that kind of money, the network technology options actually seem right in line.

The VAX-11/780 was priced at something like $200,000.

If you buy a comparable computer today, getting 10Gbps interconnects would certainly be a reasonable option.

How about requiring them to write in Objective C?

Surely they will be stopped by the login banner which clearly says "If you are a federal agent, log out now!"

I don't get it. That seems statistically unlikely.

"18.8" doesn't sound like a big number, until you consider what it stands for. Each bit of information halves your uniqueness. That means that you can be picked out of a crowd of 2^18.8 people -- 456,419. With an estimated two billion people on the internet today, that means you're down to being one in 4500. That's about the same as saying "My name is Matthew Miller and I live in the United States." Not particularly private!

Another way to think of it is this: those two billion people represent 31 bits of uniqueness. Every bit of information revealed knocks off some of that. When you're down to one, you're positively identified. Your web browser is giving up at least 18.8 of those thirty for nothing, leaving you with just about 12.

It's telling that 5 years is the biggest number before infinity. I don't expect my employer to last forever, but they've been around 375 years, and I expect that they'll be around for another hundred or so at minimum.