The worst ones are:

4) The counter reaches zero, then you have another minute or more before the light changes. If you press the walk button again, you get a second walk cycle.

What were they thinking?

Do your 'sincerely held religious beliefs' outlaw blood transfusions? Looks like your exployees are going to be paying for that themselves.

A health insurance plan tuned for the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses [jw.org] would still pay for blood substitutes [slashdot.org], iron supplements, and other expenses associated with bloodless surgery [wikipedia.org]. Some insurers might prefer bloodless surgery anyway because it keeps the insurer from having to pay for units of blood and pay to treat blood-borne diseases.

Now take it up a notch and consider religions that reject healthcare almost entirely, like Christian Science, or religions that insist on Eastern medicine, or.... At some point, you really do have to draw a line. The only question is where the line should be drawn. The easiest place to draw the line is "never allow exceptions". Everything from there gets progressively more complex.

There is no justification for forcing anyone to pay for anything. Not even spaghetti. Government economic coercion is the real "slippery slope". Contraceptives are predictable expenses and have no business being in insurance, abortion is an elective procedure and shouldn't be covered either.

Ignoring your last sentence (snipped), I mostly agree with you, but with an exception. Some use of contraceptives is not for prevention of birth, but rather to treat underlying medical conditions, such as ovarian cysts and endometriosis. If a policy excludes birth control, that exclusion should be allowed only when there is not a medically necessary reason for the prescription.

Oh, and the policies should also exclude other drugs that don't serve a medically necessary purpose, such as antihistamines (except for treatment of anaphylaxis), Levitra/Viagra/Cialis, etc.

...they are also free to work in another with/without religious beliefs who will purchase it.

Up until that bit, we were in agreement. However, that last part should really be left out of this discussion. The same faulty logic can literally be used to justify any level of abuse, legal or illegal:

• You don't like the fact that you have to work a twelve-hour shift, seven days a week? You're free to work somewhere else.
• You don't think our working conditions are safe? You're free to work somewhere else.
• You want to get paid more than ten cents an hour? You're free to work somewhere else.

And so on. The fact of the matter is that people are not free to leave a job and take a job somewhere else. There's a very high cost to doing so. You must find the time to search for other jobs, interview for those jobs, get those jobs, and then leave. And when there are no jobs in your field nearby, you must move somewhere that has jobs. And when businesses are not regulated by laws that require certain minimum standards, those other jobs are likely to be equally bad.

As for the issue on the whole, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't like the idea of being forced to pay for things that go against my convictions. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping business leaders from professing adherence to churches that refuse all medical care, then disclaiming their responsibility to provide insurance entirely. It's hard to conceive of an exception that protects against the first situation without allowing businesses to abort coverage outright through legal maneuvering.

It will take the court granting certiorari on several other lawsuits before there's an adequate line established, and this case really should have been the last one granted cert, not the first, because there's likely to be an awful lot of abuse in the meantime as a result of this decision being interpreted in an overly broad fashion.

And 50+ years of trans fats. (The dangers were discovered way back in the 1950s.)

Just so long as you're aware that "erase everything" is useless against law enforcement, who start by shutting down your system and cloning the drive, then booting your machine off of the clone. In fact, it's worse than useless, because it qualifies as attempting to destroy evidence, and is trivially provable by comparing the original to the clone. So you'll go to jail just for trying that.

Destruction of evidence, hindering a police investigation, and so on. And unless it is done at the flash memory chip level, they could get an image of the data.

Of course, if one were the sort of person who would build a self-destructing USB stick, it would make more sense to just store part of the encryption key in a RAMDisk. Rebooting the computer wouldn't make any difference, but the rules of evidence require them to shut down the system to clone the drive, so when they ask you if you can decrypt the drive, you can honestly say, "No. You destroyed the key when you shut off the computer."

Of course, you'll probably want to have a backup copy of the key somewhere, in some form, or at least a means of reconstructing it, but because you would only use it if you actually had to shut your computer all the way down, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a place that's easily accessible, nor any place where someone would realistically look. It could, for example, involve walking around the city in a particular pattern known only to you, and typing in the text of all the graffiti you see....

This is where you learn to write automation code so that you are doing lots of work even when you're reading Slashdot. :-D

I wrote a partial C language interpreter in Perl once. Trust me, you can write code that's a lot more complex than a simple text transform. With that said, you don't write that sort of code like you'd write a script. You write it like you'd write a large C/C++ library or framework....

I've never had a drive that did emergency parking until my HD-based MacBook Pro. All my dead drives were too dumb to have the needed sensors, as were the machines that they were in.

With that said, I'm terrified at the aggressiveness with which that MacBook Pro parks its heads. I literally can't pick the thing up and place it gently on my bed without the heads doing an emergency park. I don't have a lot of faith in that drive lasting very long. Non-emergency parking is hard enough on the heads. Emergency parking is downright bad.

Except that bleach resistance is starting to show up in cholera.

Yikes.

Just as long as by "implementation-defined", you mean NaN and not, for example, 0. :)

I understand but disagree. Any language can be a write-only language if you don't care about maintainability. Then there are the wannabe gurus that save 3 lines of code not to shorten the program but to impress others. Even worse, there are people that criticise readable code for it being too simple. If you ever worked in a team of programmers with varying skills then you appreciate simple, readable code. You also will once you had to take over unreadable code.

To paraphrase the famous adage: A C programmer can write C in any language; a bad programmer can write Perl in any language.

Oh my God! Is PERL really competing for worst language with Brainf*ck? After reading the article on the operator mentioned, I can only assume so. I can't believe with all of the syntax backward-compatibility crap they've bolted on they couldn't just have cleaned up the syntax. Thus, my assumption is the only reasonable explanation. Or maybe brain damage... I hear you get that from PERL.

No, it's actually more of a vicious cycle. Bad coders write bad Perl, which leads to brain damage, which results in worse code. If you have an array with five or six indices, unless you're doing some sort of borderline insane physics computation, you're already solidly in WTF territory. Most sane people try to limit their arrays to about two indices. Three is unusual. Beyond that limit, you should almost always be assigning explicit variable names to the components, and not working with them as arrays. And that limit applies to associative arrays and data structure chain references, too. If you're going more than about two or three steps out, there needs to be a named variable in there somewhere so that the code will be maintainable.

Indeed; the compiler's even allowed to assume signed integer overflow doesn't happen, which is where you get into trouble.

Translation: In their attempt to make the spec as portable as possible, they gave compiler writers too much freedom. Honestly, the first time I heard about this problem... maybe a decade ago... my immediate reaction was, "Why don't they just change the spec to say that those optimizations aren't allowed?"

I still maintain that tightening the C spec is the correct fix, and that all the monkeying around with checking to see if the computation would overflow by subtracting one operand from or dividing one operand into INT_MAX and comparing the result against the other operand is just silly. After all, a sufficiently smart compiler, given the assumption that integer overflows are impossible, should optimize out those pre-tests anyway, by virtue of the fact that you're about to add them, and integer overflows are impossible. And it wastes a tremendous number of CPU cycles doing throwaway computation for no reason other than working around the C spec being utterly and completely brain damaged.