The laws of physics for starters.

Perhaps its time to exclude "occasionally paid" haulers, such as those with a gross annual revenue of under $1,000 and who do less than 12 hauling jobs for pay in any 12-month period, and provide simple registration and lower liability requirements for "weekenders" who do up to $10,000/year in gross revenue and up to 104 jobs in any 12-month period. I would also exempt "charity-benefit" jobs from the calculations - if someone makes it clear up front that all the money the customer pays is going straight to a bona fide charity, the law should treat it the same as if he was doing the job for free.*

For those excluded from the law, I would require that all ads include a disclaimer which included a link to a state-run web site explaining that if something goes wrong, the customer will be left holding the bag.

I would also clarify the law to either explicitly protect people who hire un-registered or registered-but-lightly-insured couriers from 3rd-party lawsuits due to damages to 3rd parties caused by the mover and protect them from civil liability if they don't run a background check on their mover, OR, of the people of that state don't want to do that, to EXPLICITLY put the customers "on notice" that they may be hauled into court if their mover causes damage to a 3rd party. Of course, doing the latter would practically kill this cottage industry altogether, which is why I favor the first option of making the customer immune from 3rd-party damages.

--
* When friends or family ask me to do more than a few hours of my time and it's not a situation of "family obligations" or the like, I give them an estimate and ask them to make out a check in that amount to some charity. In my case I do it so 1) they will at least consider hiring a poor starving college student instead, 2) so they will understand the value of what they are asking for, and 3) because I don't need the money and I want to be very clear that when I can, I am willing to share my time with them without being paid or having them feel like they "owe me one."

"Procedure for stealing $1B from a small country"

This is probably not the Shor's Algorithm you are looking for.

--
Captcha: Plunders

In the last decade of the century that just ended, a large company in the United States was considering adding domestic partners to their insurance policies as a way of attracting and retaining talent.

One of the arguments against adding them was the cost of HIV treatment and for those who could not be treated, end-of-life care (this was back in the day when treatment was frequently unsuccessful and end-of-life care was comparable to that of cancer hospice).

Someone made the counter-argument that maternity costs are generally lower among homosexual couples.

The company ran the numbers and the counter-argument trumped the original argument.

In any case, they were back to the original reason for doing it, which was to attract and retain employees.

Decades later, the company still exists and it's still in the Fortune 500.

Last night the parking-lot exit from one of the terminals at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport was flooded.

This meant there were now only 2 ways to get out of the terminal: walk through the rain, or take the tram that connects the terminals.

The tram was inside security and most passengers had already existed security, either to get their bags or for other reasons.

Prior to 9/11, they had the liberty to re-enter security, take the tram to another terminal, and arrange for their ride to pick them up there.

Thanks to a "tradeoff between liberty and security" they were forced to either sit in the terminal for several hours while the flood cleared or walk out in the rain to get to another terminal (the buses that connect the terminals couldn't operate due to the floods).

"Do implants count?"

Take the source code, "print" it to image files (similar to "print to PDF") then make a rectangular composite image of all of the pages, with random images to fill in enough pages so you have a nicely porportioned rectangle or other shape of your choosing.

Then use one of those "turn a bunch of pictures into a mosaic picture" program that lightens and darkens the individual pictures so you have an image that, from a distance, looks like a gun or other relevant shape.

Since it's art, it will have a much stronger free-speech claim than plain old source code. Heck, it's not only art but it's clearly art being used to make a political point (the point being to say "*BLEEP* YOU" to anyone who tells you that you can't publish gun-printing source code on the web).

Now all anyone has to do if they want the original source code is to run the image through a good OCR program that can recognize the individual pages and extract the text from them.

A word of caution: If you do this, don't use the image of a recognizable person or place as the "composite" image - it will just give the police an excuse to treat it as a "credible threat" or "incitement to encourage others to attack" that person or place. The whole point of this is exercise is to create a way to publish the source in a way that the 1st amendment is so CLEARLY in control of the situation that any judge will take one look at it and laugh any government-led censorship effort out of court.

San Jose, no, the cost of living is too high and I'd be bleeding money every year. However, there are plenty of places in America where $40K/year plus a spouse with a $15K/year part-time job will provide a modest but livable standard of living for a family of 3.

If I had 20 years of experience and I had a choice between doing what I love for $40K/year or finding another career that I didn't love just so I could eat, I know what I would do.

Java is the cure for a bad cup of plain black coffee.

Fine, just put that in the job description:

* Due to project cycles, we need programmers who can consistently work 70 hours/week, 6 days a week, over a periods of up to of 6 months during which time vacation will not be allowed.
* Project cycle expected workload: While it will be rare to go over 70 hours a week candidates should realize that during the last 6 months of a project they will typically be working 60 hour work-weeks and during the last month they will typically be working 65-70 hour workweeks.
* Early-project-cycle and in-between-projects workload: The average workload between projects and early in a project cycle will be around 40 hours a week. Vacations are expected to be taken during this time.
* Yearly workload: The position is expected to require an average of 55 hours/week.
* Overtime: Annual pay is based on an average 55-hour work-week so there is no formal overtime. Historically, at the end of a project extra vacation has been given to employees who have spent more than 6 of the past 12 months working long hours to bring their effective average work-week down to about 55 hours.
* Vacation: Normal vacation starts at 2 weeks a year but it will typically be deferred to the end of project at management's discretion even if it means deferring it until the next calendar year.

Now for the reality check:

A job description like this - if it actually matches the workload of the company AND if the workload is required by the nature of the job and the nature of the clients - will encourage candidates like me who no longer have the stamina for that workload to self-select out, which in reality is doing both me and the company posting the ad a favor. Very few positions paying less than 6 figures outside of an emergency environment [e.g. a soldiers and defense contractor employees during an actual shooting war] can legitimately claim that such a workload is required by the nature job and the nature of the clients, so I would not expect to see very many ads with this description. Also, in a war zone, the normal rules normally go out the window anyways and vacation amounts to "vacation? what's that? we are at war dammit!"

"What I'm worth" to an employer is pretty much defined by "what is the lowest that a person they really want to hire [NOT "the person they think they want to hire"] will accept."

If there is a person out there who will give the employer everything I will give them that in retrospect years from now my employer will realize was worth paying for for less than I am willing to accept and more than minimum wage, then I'm setting my expectations too high.

The wisdom and experience I bring to the table that is not directly relate to the job at hand may really have a near-zero value to a responsible, fair employer. I have to accept that. The higher "mold-ability" of someone who has never worked in industry that a "younger" person (and some people my age) brings to the table which I know that I don't have may have a high value to a responsible, fair employer and if I don't have something of equal value to bring to the table I should expect to not get the job unless the "younger" candidate isn't qualified or turns down the job offer.

One problem with the hiring process is that employers/managers/HR-policy-makers may think they know what they want and need but they don't always know what is best for the project, the work-group, and the company in the long run, so they hire for what they think they want/need not what they actually need.

Note - these are all illegal reasons to discriminate but if employers are going to use illegal reasons to favor hiring under-40s they should realize there are many "illegal to ask" reasons why over-40s should be favored:

* Workers over 40 are very less likely to file insurance claims for child-birth and neonatal intensive care than younger workers. This is even more true for workers over 50.

* Workers over 50 are less likely to have minor children as dependents and therefore they are less likely to have them on the company's medical insurance. They are also less likely to say "no, I need to spend that time with my kids" if asked to work evenings or weekends. If they do have minor dependents those dependents will likely leave the nest and their parent's insurance a lot sooner than the children of a 20- or 30-something.

From the article [numbers added for clarity]:

* I would certainly demand #4 - this combined with #3 (or a substitute - see below) is the gold standard for "there is really something here even if we don't know what it is".
* I would demand #5 or a similar process of independent peer review
* I would allow "enough reproductions over enough diverse environments to rule out environmental factors" as a substitute for #3.
* As for #2, the less the measurement error could lead to misleading results, the better, but a result that is "at least many standard deviations above the measurement error" may not be necessary to declare that we have an interesting, publishable result worthy of further study.

I would let #1 go: If the phenomenon was caused by something that did NOT scale with input power, it could still be interesting. It might not get us to space, but it would be worth publishing and studying.

... create a job where the essential functions of the job really do require at least 30 clock-hours of recent (in the last 5 years) training OR equivalent on-the-job/volunteer/self-study experience in a broad list of non-technical courses typically taught in undergraduate programs AND which candidates who have not been in school the last 5 years likely won't have.

For example, most recent graduates who went to school full-time the last 4-5 years studied at least one semester of
* American history
* Writing or composition ("English 101")
* Differential Calculus

If you have a job that really does make use of these jobs - even if you've deliberately gone out of your way to engineer the job requirements so that someone without this knowledge would have difficulty doing the job - you should be alright.

Round out the list with "relevant" technical courses. For example, for a programmer position, structure the job so that it really does require that a candidate recently had 30 classroom hours of ALL of the following courses or had the equivalent experience or self-study in these areas:
* algorithm design
* computer hardware
* [list two programming languages that weren't in vogue 10 years ago here]
* [list another skill that is widely taught in school but which only a small fraction of "industry hires" will have more than a passing knowledge of here]

Then for good measure throw in things like "must have given at least 3 technical presentations of at least 15 minutes each in the last 5 years, at least one of which is to a non-lay audience."

Again, this will only work if the job really does require the knowledge and skills that the job description asked for. If a motivated candidate that lacks one or more of the requirements could reasonably be expected to "fill in the gaps" through self-study before he needed to use those skills between the time he started the application/resume process and the time he needed them on the job, then making them a job requirement could be seen as a sham and it could get you into trouble.

Here's a hypothetical "engineered" job designed specifically to require such skills:

Job posting: Web programmer Level I
Salary range: [keep it on the low end but not OMGTHISMUSTBEANHB1POSITION low]
Primary duties: Work under supervision to design, implement, and maintain web sites using [list 2-3 fairly new web-development environments]
Secondary duties: Give short talks about your projects to other teams in the company; attend short talks given by other teams and provide feedback; present papers at technical conferences
Non-technical duties: Represent company in college- and high-school outreach including participating in "adult vs. youth" contests like "Are you smarter than an 11th-Grade American History Student," giving talks to middle school students on topics such as "how to make a ripple-carry adder circuit from the things you find at home," and giving talks to high school Calculus students on topics like "not all computers are digital."

--
Now, Mr. Employer, I have to ask you:

Is it really worth re-jiggering your employees' job duties specifically so your typical industry hire would not be qualified but your typical recent B.S.-holding technical-degree-graduate would? Add to that the fact that more seasoned professionals bring certain hard-to-define qualities to the job that you typically just can't get from less-seasoned professionals and recent grads? Also, don't forget loyalty: People who have kids-in-tow or who have lived in the area for awhile are very unlikely to want to move to a new area once they hire on with you. While you can't ask about kids or length-of-current-residence in a job interview, you can generally assume that your average person over 30 is more stable/reliable and less likely to "jump ship" for more money or a minor on-the-job annoyance than someone under 25.

Oh, and as for salary:
It's not like the 1990s, we, the "older tech workers," get it: We know that despite the benefits we bring to the table from our years or decades of technical experience, you are paying us to fill a specific role that does not require the benefits of our long experience. We get that we shouldn't expect any more pay now than the 22-year-old college grad who is also interviewing for the position and we get that unless we earn a promotion or change jobs internally, we won't be given any more in the way of pay raises than the 22-year-old will get if he gets the job. We accept this as an economic reality. If we wanted or needed more money, we wouldn't be applying for jobs that a 22-year-old with almost no "real-world" experience could do.

Showing up to shoot an unarmed-but-uniformed school police officer is hardly "showing up to squabble about it."

Good news: Media reports that the unarmed school police officer that one (or both?) of the gunmen shot has been released from the hospital.

"Don't mess with Texas" isn't just an anti-litter slogan.