I would suggest that the word may in those first 2 sentences needs to be boldfaced. I was hired to work for a startup right at the end of their startup days as they got bought out by a Fortune 500 company. I still work for that Fortune 500 company. My co-workers who were there at the very beginning of the startup were given stock in the company and they were all convinced that that they were going to get a sweet paycheck out of it. They got, at most, $10000 (US dollars) out of the stock sale. Many didn't get that. Sure, that's better than nothing, but I got the impression that they were figuring $20000 would be the absolute low end of their stock sale and they were wrong. The people who founded the company all left as millionaires. The employees they hired, even those at the very beginning, didn't even get enough to pay for a new subcompact car.

This is very good advice, but I'd like to elaborate a bit on this. First of all, somebody, but not necessarily you (I have no idea how things work in your company) does need to know those passwords besides the new guy. I'd also like to suggest that you make that requirement an up front part of your interview process to find your replacement. Find out if the guy has a problem with it and explain bluntly that it's not negotiable and he will be expected on his first day as one of his very first duties to turn those over and you need to know right now if he is going to have a problem with that. The last thing you want is to hire some guy who won't give you the information because he is some kind of misguided whacko (like the infamous San Francisco network admin who was the subject of a very contentious Slashdot debate over his actions a few years ago) or some kind of prima donna who fears he might lose his job at a moment's notice if he doesn't retain secret knowledge that nobody else knows. I'd advise you to ask some probing technical questions to make sure he/she knows his/her stuff as the IT world is full of bs artists. I feel pretty strongly that asking those bizarre Microsoft, etc. questions like "How many quarters would it take to build a stack from the earth to the moon?" and so on accomplishes nothing. Asking someone "Describe briefly in general terms how you would write a script to do task X" where X is something real world that could occur on your job is useful. If you use, say, Perl a lot and the new person is going to have to understand and maintain/change existing Perl scripts, you really should find out if they know enough to do that or not. Maybe the applicant is some kind of Ruby genius, but if you have an existing use of Perl and he doesn't know it at all, you may not want him reinventing the wheel and re-writing everything in Ruby so he (and maybe nobody else) can maintain it.

Netflix and Amazon, as streaming content providers, have apps on various devices such as some smart TVs, Roku, etc. At present I'm not aware of any Yahoo video app like that. Sure, the kids will just watch on their laptops - if they care enough to watch such shows and assuming they hear about them - but the older crowd that buys Roku, Amazon Fire, and similar devices won't watch without a dedicated app. We'll see what happens, but this sounds like a foolish thing for Yahoo to do unless they are able to get viewers that somehow (ads) translates into revenue.

I suppose anything could happen, but making a TV show doesn't seem to fit with Apple and Microsoft's business model. Google may do it or may not care about it at all and view it as a distraction - 50-50 on that. This is the first big decision Yahoo has made under Marissa Mayer that makes me wonder if they know what they are doing. I haven't necessarily agreed with everything she's done, but none of the other decisions seemed to be grasping at straws in desperation like this one does. It makes me wonder if things at Yahoo are actually pretty bad if this seems like a good idea to them. Well, if I'm wrong and Yahoo is right, they'll make some money and if I'm right that this idea won't work, I guess they won't be any worse off unless it spooks investors that they really are out of good ideas to raise revenue.

Please tell me that you are not a US citizen or if you are, you simply don't keep up with the news. The US Supreme Court has ruled consistently in recent cases that any campaign finance restrictions are infringing on free speech. At this point I'm not sure that any law could be written that the 5 members who have voted against campaign contribution restrictions would accept. It's going to take a Constitutional amendment and the odds of that happening are so low, we might as well just wait for the court to reach a liberal majority sometime in the future as that would probably take less time. Republicans like no campaign limits right now and they control the majority of state legislatures.

Depends on how you define "win". You sound suspiciously Canadian to me.

Yes, basically the War of 1812 was a failed attempt by the US to do a land grab on Canada and annex it by force, but there were some legitimate gripes by the US, notably the British practice of kidnapping American citizens and forcing them to serve in the British Navy, but that was not the only legitimate complaint on which to base the war. I cannot personally say how much or little "Canadian" forces played in the war. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't a bunch of Canucks who burned down Washington DC or got their rears handed to them at New Orleans (yes, after the war officially ended). I also am of the opinion that Canadians have very greatly exaggerated the role their militias played and while it isn't fair to say they did nothing, it's also not accurate at all to act, like you do, that they did almost all of the heavy lifting of the war in the US itself and the British were little more than interested spectators as you seem to imply.

I think just about anybody would happy to "lose" a war with this outcome. Canada "won" in so far as they did successfully repel US attempts to annex them by force. The US lost no territory, as you admit, US points were made about impressment, which stopped, A lasting peace treaty followed and set the stage for US-UK friendship which exists to this day. US naval commanders won some impressive victories and the US Navy emerged from the war with a new found respect within the US and the Navy began to get a bigger share of the US military budget as it became obvious that the young nation needed a strong navy for national defense. You act like the US won no victories at all or almost none before the war ended, which is not true at all. Yes, British/Canadian forces did a lot of winning in the war, maybe most of it, but there were some huge US victories at various times. Most historians consider this a stalemate, but your take on this is really simplistic and hard to justify.

It's likely for domestic consumption and it's just a useful coincidence that it gives him a chance to have a proxy take a shot at the USA. Putin's current line of reasoning is that Russia and its people are under constant attack by Western powers who wish to oppress them. This is part of his justification for taking Crimea back and if he has his eye on Eastern Ukraine it will be part of that as well - ethnic Russians are under duress by evil, anti-Semitic, fascist Ukrainians and Putin is the white knight who can save them. Whether he actually believes this line of reasoning or not is a question I am unsure of, but it is the public justification for what he is doing. I have to admit that I am a bit amused about his rationale because it seems to me that Russia is actually getting closer and closer to being a fascist state, but beating the old fascist boogeyman is always good to get Ivan Q. Publik riled up and on the side of the tsar, cough cough, I mean President Putin.

My best friend is an attorney and he has explained a lot about the US legal system to me. Basically judges don't like ambiguity. If people don't do things according to procedure and they get away with it, it opens the door for others to try it. For example, suppose someone is facing the death penalty in a US state that has it. A defendant could represent himself and if he loses the case (he probably will) then he can appeal that he had "incompetent legal representation" and try to get a new trial and role the dice again on the outcome. In fact, every time you lose you could just argue that no matter who the lawyer is and try to get a new trial until you win. There actually were a few cases more or less like this years ago and courts quickly realized that this was going to get out of hand so when defendants try to represent themselves, they are advised against it and warned that trying to argue on appeal that they didn't have proper legal representation won't work. So Lavabit blew it and tried a Hail Mary by gambling that the judge might feel sorry for them and overlook the procedural mistakes. It wasn't likely to work, but the US is a large country with a lot of judges and there probably is a judge somewhere who would have bought it, it's just that most won't because they don't like the potential outcome of allowing this, namely that other cases could have lawyers deliberately make procedural mistakes so if they lose the case, they can make that the basis of an appeal. Lots of people have incompetent lawyers work for them. It's not just death penalty cases. I have a friend who got cleaned out financially in a divorce case because he hired a bottom dollar lawyer and he got bottom dollar representation in court. The few cases where they have been punishingly large judgements in favor of the RIAA for "music sharing" have all involved shockingly inept legal representation for the defendant.

That's not fair. The office of president is a completely different thing altogether and Nixon did ultimately resign when he realized that the alternative was to possibly be removed from office and maybe go to jail. Very important Congressmen have been jailed over corruption. The US legal system is incompetent at times and that's a fair charge, but it's not really corrupt. Bill Clinton was actually impeached ("impeach" does not mean "removed from office") while President over lying under oath in a court case, but when tried before the Senate he was not removed from office. The court case just happened to involve him cheating on his wife and Clinton's handlers were geniuses in that they were able to spin it as him being on trial for infidelity to Hillary when in fact he was on trial for lying under oath about cheating on Hillary. Vice-President Spiro Agnew was probably facing imprisonment (it had nothing to do with Nixon's issues as it was a tax avoidance case) when he got a plea bargain to resign from the vice-presidency and face some lesser charges. If you want to argue that US presidents get a free pass for misconduct, you probably have a point, but as I don't know enough about Australian Prime Ministers to be able to comment on their lives, I can't say whether an Aussie PM would get special treatment or not if caught breaking the law.

This has been going on for a long time. Percentage wise very few Americans actually owned slaves yet it's estimated that somewhere between half a million and 1.5 million men served in the Confederate Army. That's a large number of people willing to die to protect the rights of the rich to own another human being. I have little doubt that if there were some kind of mythical Civil War today in the US that millions would willingly lay down their lives to protect the money of the rich and receive absolutely nothing in return for their willingness to fight and possibly die for somebody else's money.

They don't really know for a lot of people. Almost every year I have stuff to report that they don't know about at all. I'm pretty sure that they don't know about most if not all of my charitable contributions. I own shares in an investment club and I'll spare you what we have to do to report sales in that. I can assure you that Uncle Sam has no idea about what I'm doing in the club so it's a good thing I am honest and report it. Congratulations on having such a simple tax situation that Uncle Sam apparently knows exactly how much you owe, but I have to ask this - if your taxes are so simple, are you an idiot for hiring an accountant when you could do them yourself if they are that simple?

Some people get away with it for years by simply not turning in their forms or paying anything. Yes, eventually they will probably get caught, but we've had some recent celebrities who thought that they could get away with not paying at all like Lauryn Hill and Wesley Snipes. Snipes in particular tried to justify what he did with a bunch of crackpot excuses that the judge shot down. The fact that people do get away with this for a while shows that the IRS doesn't really know what everybody owes. They probably do have ball park figures for everybody, but not exact amounts for a lot of people.

People can always try to sue Google over this kind of discrimination, but they may not win. First of all, unless you are a person who was personally affected by this, what would likely happen is that the lawsuit would get thrown out, especially on appeal where higher courts often rule that you can't sue just because you don't like something if you're not personally affected by it. So it would require a male student to sue to get the ball rolling. Second there would have to be some kind of proof like a verifiable situation where a male student was refused assistance because the teacher only wanted to help females to get the reward. Third, and this may be most important of all, literally anything can happen in court. Nobody knows what juries or judges will do. The case might go before someone who isn't interested in this issue at all and feels that women have traditionally been discriminated against so this is OK or you might get a very conservative judge/jury who is just adamantly against this kind of "help" for anybody at all who would rule in favor of the boy. Then the losing party can appeal and the exact opposite verdict can happen on appeal and so on. Could take years to resolve it, maybe ultimately ending in a Supreme Court ruling. By the time it finally gets resolved, it may be too late (depending on the age of the student) for anything to be accomplished even if the boy wins. He may already be in college and have learned programming or moved on to some other area of study.

Well, the problem is that there are some people who do care and their influence is way out of whack with regards to their actual numbers. There are a small number of members of the US House and Senate who are offspring of Cuban refugees and they have a lot of influence. The younger generation of people who immigrated many years ago has little interest in continuing the embargo, but there are still enough of the old hardcore anti-Castro people in Florida that no president is willing to undo the embargo for fear of the next presidential election going against his party. Florida is a hotly contested state that gives a very thin majority to whoever wins it in the presidential elections. Florida has a lot of electoral votes. So if you piss off, say, 40 or 50 thousand voters who care a lot (maybe too much) about the Castro brothers and Cuba, you could lose the next presidential election. So the president never has the courage to drop the embargo as either he or his party's next candidate will face angry voters in the next presidential election and it could be enough to decide the race in favor of the other party. It's rather remarkable to see an entire country held hostage to the whims of a really small group of people over one issue, but that's exactly how it is here.

I agree with the post (just quoted the last part to save space), but I'd also point out that banks are going to have to overpay to get young people interested in learning this. You're trying to get new workers interested in what actually is dying technology. If one day your bank has an epiphany and decides to port everything to Linux, those trained young workers are likely to be out of a job and finding that the number of people who use that old technology is shrinking, not growing. Your bank could get bought out by a larger bank who uses more modern computers and the same problem occurs for the displaced younger workers who have skills that nobody wants.

It's a good guess. I'd also say that the Red Sox and A's make the short list of teams that have people in the front office who might see some value in this, although the A's are run on the cheap so it is a little hard to think they'd pay for this.

Within the US they definitely count the passengers. I flew between Canada and Asia last year and I don't remember if they counted or not, but on flights within the USA they definitely do count. There was a rather embarrassing incident where a minor without a ticket of any kind got on a plane in the US and nobody ever did anything to make sure he was in the right place or even had a ticket for the flight. I think now all the airlines want to make sure that kind of thing never happens again, because if a kid can do it, an adult with bad intentions may be able to do ti too.