Your questions are valid but please consider the following.
1) Despite the fact that Time reported this and Americans would assume them to be a reliable source, nobody does fact checking any more. So I can't discount the possibility that this is a bunch of lies. I've dated a couple of born and raised in China ladies in recent years and unlike Russians, neither of them believed stuff just because the media or government said it.
2) There may be some big money backing of this where basically whoever wants it done is paying off anybody who might object to it within China.
3) Senior Communist Party officials may be backing this knowing that it's not likely to ever work, but figuring if the guy can pull it off, it might be their ticket to immortality.

Keep in mind that 100% of those people would be dead without CPR and even a 3-5% success rate would look better than 0% if you need it done on you. I have no idea how accurate your numbers are or the source you got them from, but you sure seem to be downplaying this, acting almost nobody anywhere has ever lived a normal life after CPR and I can't accept that.

Yes, the original poster's specification should have read, "...it should do something subtly evil on purpose ."

I'm not trying to excuse Disney as such, but we only have part of the story here. And yes, as pointed out by others, it's a dupe. Disney get rid of a lot less workers than a lot of other major employers (cough cough - Cisco, IBM) have done recently. My understanding is that these jobs were basically support type jobs like system admin stuff and they turned them over to an outsourcing company to save money as they opened newer, better paying jobs in IT to do more high tech things. At least that's what they claim. Might be interesting to find out just how many of those new jobs there are, what the average pay is, and whether they went to Americans or not.

I've heard of many other American companies that transferred IT jobs overseas and forced a small number of employees to train their replacements by either bringing the replacements here temporarily or sending the US staff over there to train the locals. Making people stay to train their replacements is rather mean spirited, but this is not the first time it's been done by a US company. However, some people actually don't want to leave and will willingly stay until the bitter end without too much complaint just to put off having to find a new job. My previous job was working in a US office of a subsidiary of a major European telco company. They gave us 6 months notice of an end to our jobs and the fact that they would be moved to a cheaper country in South America. I found a job about 3 months later with another company, but none of my co-workers would leave. In fact, one of them offered to move to the country where the jobs were being relocated at his own cost and to work for local wages and they turned him down. It sucks, but I've heard of other companies doing the same thing. The former employees may not like it, but the reality is that Disney jobs in Orlando have a higher degree of risk than Disney jobs elsewhere. Disney completely closed down the Orlando animation department more than a decade ago I think. They're always making major changes in Orlando that cost people jobs.

You seriously want this completely ineffectual Congress to have to do that? Not to mention the time this would take, but with the realities of today's Congress and the "my way or the highway" Tea Party supporters in it, no law would ever again pass if it had to do that. I guess if you're in favor of anarchy this is one way to do it. Keep in mind that the Patriot Act renewal was defeated by exactly one man, a junior senator in the majority party who was powerless to stop him despite many influential and senior members of that party being opposed to him. No law would ever be renewed again under this plan.

From the Supreme Court on down, courts have consistently held that profiling is illegal and convictions have been thrown out for it. TSA does profile but the only way they can get away with it is that they have to screen small children and grandmothers and then everybody here screams "Security theater!" about it. At least in this thread we have people posting who actually do fly. That hasn't always been the case. I used to be friends with a guy and he last flew in the late 1990s and has never flown since and likely will not ever for any reason fly anywhere again before he dies. He has never been subjected to TSA. That didn't stop him from railing on about how evil and useless they were and just completely losing his mind anytime he talked about air travel. We get a lot of similar people here posting all the time on this subject.

1) Managers with some degree of technical knowledge are almost always better for tech workers than managers that don't really have any technical knowledge.
2) One of the very best managers I ever worked for was a woman. The two worst managers I ever had were women. Women tech managers will either be fantastic or horrible beyond belief. The bad ones were orders of magnitude worse than the worst male managers I've ever had.
3) When a bunch of co-workers start leaving a job or the very best ones in your department start to leave, it's probably time for you to consider leaving too.
4) I've had jobs that were really great that became bad or started bad and became really good. Conditions change. Be prepared for it to happen. And if they change for the worse, it may be your signal to find a new job.
5) Try to get along with co-workers because as you change jobs in your tech career, you'll often find yourself working again with people from a previous job and you don't want to have those people have a grudge against you when you start a new job.
6) Don't be a hothead. Stay cool. I had a pretty negative opinion of a manager in a sister office over some things some co-workers told me when they worked under him in the past. My attitude got so negative that I remember once almost blowing up at him over something trivial, but I kept my cool. That guy got promoted and became my manager's manager and he went to bat for me with his management to get me a promotion at a time when it was really difficult to get promoted. You can misjudge people and if I had blown up at the guy, he'd have never gotten me the promotion. I really learned a valuable lesson on that one.
7) My dad told me years ago not to ever kick people when they were down because circumstances change and people who are down today may wield great power in your organization later and they will definitely remember who was good to them when they were at the low point of their career.

Thanks for pointing out that Roberts and Scalia were the 2 dissenters, which means that Thomas didn't vote with Scalia. I ask in all seriousness - is the first time ever that they haven't voted the same on a case?

Okay, so we have a benchmark where the bog-standard human being scores 94.9%.

Then in February (that's three months ago), Microsoft reports hitting 95.06%; the first score to edge the humans.

Then in March, Google notches 95.18%.

Now it's May, and Baidu puts up a 95.42%.

Meh. Swinging dicks with big iron are twiddling with their algorithms to squeeze out incremental, marginal improvements on an arbitrary task.

I presume that next month it will be IBM boasting about "leading the race" and being "much greater than their competitors". The month after that it will be Microsoft's turn again. Google will be back on top in August or so...unless, of course, some other benchmark starts getting some press.

Maybe the only good film ever directed by some guy who worked on Star Wars and has a tie to Lucas. I guess it gets a weak "yea" but this guy is not a good director. I had an unusual chance a few years ago to have a personal conversation with an actor or actress (I'm unwilling to name who I talked to) who appeared in "Prisoner Of The Sun" which finally got released last year and was directed by Christian. I specifically asked about that film and the person who acted in it said that they had doubts that it would ever see the light of day and they didn't think it was probably going to be very good if it did. Based on the IMDB rating, it looks like that person was right. I can say that the person I talked to did not have any negative comments about Christian himself, they just didn't really have a good feeling about that movie. Not sure given the track record that I'm going to invest 30 minutes in watching this one.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

I took a look at the actual indictment. Well, at least the first few pages. Remember how people still insist to this day that Bill Clinton wasn't impeached (he was - impeaching does not mean convicting) or that he was impeached for "cheating on his wife"? Years later, the lies spun by his spin doctors still hold fast in many minds. Clinton was impeached for committing perjury in a civil trial. Now the event he committed perjury about was cheating on Hilary, but he was impeached for lying about it while under oath, not for the actual act of cheating on her. Similarly, this indictment isn't really and truly about beating lie detector tests. The government's contention is that Williams had a business whose purpose was to enable people ineligible for certain government jobs to get those jobs through lying and deception. This is defrauding the US government because salaries would be paid to those ineligible people. The government also contends that he enriched himself (through fees he charged) by encouraging people to lie to and deceive the federal government into hiring ineligible people for jobs. The first 6 or so pages I looked at don't actually mention anything about lie detector tests.

One should be very wary of the distinction between "run without refueling" and "run without regular maintenance". Even assuming that the reactor's fuel would last, the ancillary equipment associated with the reactor's operation (coolant pumps and such) and electricity generation (steam turbines) certainly wouldn't be expected to operate unattended and unmaintained for months, let alone years.

That said, the fifty-year planned lifespan of the Nimitz-class includes, if I'm not mistaken, a mid-life refuelling and complex overhaul (RCOH). To be fair, the reactor's fuel would likely last longer than the planned 20-25 years if the carrier weren't actively steaming--but I wouldn't trust the other parts to last anywhere near so long.

Thank you for this explanation. I was really struggling to understand why Verizon would want to pay so much for the dial up business but clearly they want everything else and are just taking the dial up business as part of a complete package, not specifically trying to get that.

That would work...except that the employer insisted that she keep the phone with her and powered on at all times. According to the claim, she was on call for client emergencies, even when off the clock.

It's an interesting question. On the other hand, most collisions are something a human driver could have avoided somehow...but didn't.

I would be shocked if they didn't "know" something like it. I can't imagine any car (let alone the entire group of 44 which didn't have a collision) doing a full year of city driving without encountering multiple situations where another driver failed to appropriately yield the right of way.

The point is, I think, that in exchange for an improvement (real or hypothetical) in convenience for a small fraction of total air travellers, there is a substantial and arguably unnecessary burden of cost and inconvenience to the entire system (which is ultimately paid for out of everyone's pockets--and user experiences).

Well no, it wouldn't. A fully-served point-to-point network with n nodes (cities served) has on the order of n squared links between nodes. The number of passengers desiring each direct link gets to be very small, very quick, meaning infrequent scheduled flights on small, underfilled, costly-per-seat aircraft. So what happens is that airlines adopt (to one extent or another) a hub-and-spoke model. Most direct point-to-point routings are dropped. If I want to fly from East Podunk, NY (POD) to Los Angeles, I can't get a direct flight POD-LAX. Instead, I get a hop to an airline's hub (JFK or ORD or DTW or wherever), and a connection from that hub to LA: POD-JFK-LAX, or POD-DTW-LAX, or POD-ORD-LAX.

If I want to go to a destination served by a smaller airport (let's call it West Lemon, CA: LEM), then I'm taking three flights: spoke to hub, hub to hub, hub to spoke: POD-JFK-LAX-LEM. And each of those flights carries with it the time penalties associated with loading and unloading passengers and cargo, and a risk of delays or cancellations due to weather and other circumstances--plus the plain old waiting for connections, because service to and from the small airports at POD and LEM is infrequent.

Worse still, all those little commuter flights linking the regional airports to the major hubs are going to take up gates and takeoff and landing slots at those busy airports, slowing down the whole system and/or pushing those less-important flights to less-desirable times of day. Taken all together, offering frequent (or even just daily) service to a lot of small airports is going to mean a lot more flights of a lot more smaller aircraft, and/or passengers frequently making multiple connections. It would be expensive per-seat and vulnerable to failures and delays.

Now, La Guardia is an interesting case. Since it's right next to downtown New York, it draws a substantial number of departing or arriving passengers, and enjoys a kind-of-weird pseudo-hub status for historical reasons. Practically speaking, though, it means that there are effectively two hubs (LGA and JFK) or even three (if we count EWR) serving the same area, resulting in needless duplication of services. Routes that could enjoy frequent service with inexpensive (per-seat) full-sized jets get less-full or more-expensive aircraft, or less-frequent services divided between two or three New York destinations. Local New Yorkers enjoy the appearance of convenient, direct flights, at the cost of making the rest of the system a bit worse and a bit more expensive for everyone.