I hear ya, fire at will laws have made workplaces competitive. You actually have to do your job well in order to keep it. It boosts moral to go to work and see that everyone else has to do their jobs, do them right, take responsibility for their actions, show up every day on time, etc. Although union workers still have to put up with lazy-asses riding the union for security, I think unions days are numbered like tenure. What a break for all our bank accounts! Inflation will drop like a rock once you remove the HUGE amount of overhead it causes to goods and service industries. The long history of public abuse shows that some protection is needed for them.

Hey, its great news for higher education as well! Now you dont have to feel quite like that loan you took out is being frittered away by carnies. Maybe a little.

The same could be said of unions; the reasons that necessitated them are gone. We could get rid of unions and take a LARGE chunk of inflation out of consumer goods and services. Hell, you might even be able to use the money to pay off previously mentioned loans, buy groceries and afford gasoline.

The continents move over hotspots, which is why the Hawaii island chain exists. I don't know much about the Antarctic continental plate, whether it is moving or not, but it may have drifted over a hotspot some time in the last few million years.

Walk towards Greenwich and turn left.

If they want Golden Age heroes, they should read golden age comics. First, mortgage the house for everything over principle. Then, run down to the comics shop and drop the wad on all the double bagged stuff behind the counter they don't usually drag out for anyone. Don't for the love of God, read any of them. Just leave them in their bags,hang them on the wall in frames and just soak up the golden ageness of it all. There, worth it, wasn't it?
Golden age comics have their place, not in your grubby mitts. They're old, they fall apart, they tear, the staples chew through, the addresses of the ads are outdated.
Just hold your investment and realize, the reason no one reads these and most of these heroes aren't around anymore is; they're boring. They were drawn in an age of different moral standards and attitudes toward violence and sex.( yeah that comics code worked about as good as music industry warnings on albums, lol) Flash was arguably slower, Superman dorkier, Batman had less cool stuff, Capt.Marvel was ambiguously gay, etc.
Give up on this idea, roll a blunt and read a stack of underground comics.

That's like including an option "I never vote in Slashdot polls".

The absolute terms "true" and "not true" are not appropriate for a hypothesis like this. There may be some parts of it that are accurate, but for instance the size, mass, velocity, density distribution etc. of the Theia might be wrong, or the physics in the simulation might be wrong, etc.

There's no reason for anything. Life is just a bunch of stuff that happens, and one day it might stop happening if something big enough hits the planet, like the one that made the moon.

The most recent one was a custom SQL cursor in Oracle EBS. Add an index, refactor some correlated queries, and create a cut-down version of a complex view that it was using.

Another of the examples a few years back was where I reimplemented an FTP process to retry each individual step instead of reverting to the first step on failure. Given that each step had about a 50% chance of failure on a bad day, and each script had about 20 steps, it meant that it was failing... (runs calc...) 99.9999% of the time. OK I'm exaggerating a little, maybe it wasn't 50%, and only a few of the jobs had as many as 20 steps, it was about 10 years ago and I forget the details so my ego may be filling in the gaps. But it did mean that we didn't have to have a guy sitting at a screen hitting "Retry" all day long, and we could get file sets deployed in a couple of minutes instead of taking all day. The FTP was being done by a proprietary tool, so I had to implement my own system to parse its manifest.

And then there was that Excel spreadsheet that was massively bigger than it should have been. Everyone's system ground to a halt every time they openened it. No-one could figure out why it was so big, I spent an afternoon trying the obvious things and gave up. Then inspiration hit me, and I wrote some VBA to look at the number of "shape" objects in each sheet. There were millions of them. Someone had put boxes around a bunch of cells, those boxes had somehow been shrunk down to one pixel and replicated thousands of times, so a quick VBA procedure to delete all box shapes, and bingo, some people could do their jobs again.

A lot of people don't realise that computers don't behave in the way that we expect - we have an intuitive grasp of the laws of physics, but information is not physical and does not obey the same laws. There are infinities and paradoxes and undeterminables that are hard to understand. Minds that can intuitively navigate this space are few and far between.

Did someone say SRL? http://www.srl.org/
I figured they might have something to do with this.

Id be more impressed if it werent CV or Universal joints being printed....
The damned oil burners probably been printing piston rings....

The estate of John Holmes has been tossing around the idea of cloned penii to be used for transplant and are furiously sampling DNA from amongst the family.
If you have a right foot and a left foot, it only makes sense to have a foot hanging between them. Be the life of the party! Impress girls! Quit stuffing potatoes down your shorts and get the real thing!

It is perfectly alright to have toads in your hat , so long as they are not soaked in Cadmium and mineral spirits.
Cadmium, is bad shit, slowly absorbed by fondling your paint rag then running your fingers through your hair, picking your nose, eating without washing and even scrubbing the pigment off your hands with mineral spirits which carry it into the bloodstream. Starry Night was a hallucinatory painting indicative of the damage being suffered.
Not to worry though, painters, real Cadmium hasnt been used in decades for ANY paint, they merely call it cadmium red or yellow. Still plenty of unwholesome shit in paint, just not Cadmium .... or lead.

3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?

In order to write a BASIC interpreter, we needed an assembler. So my dad wrote one in GW-BASIC. Once our interpreter was sophisticated and stable enough, we rewrote the assembler in our own language (based on Acorn BBC Basic). Eventually we splashed out on a copy of MASM once we had a computer that was PC-compatible enough to run it (the Sanyo MBC 550 wasn't quite up to it, IIRC).

This is Kansas.

25k a year is pretty average for the average non union person.
As for housing costs, averages are always exaggerated compared to reality. 120 - 150k seems to be the average in most places. Personally I sit on an acre in a split level @ 70k. I pay $150 mo. for car and around 150 a week on food.
Statistics are sales propaganda and NEVER reflect anything close to reality. Who doesnt know that? There are other equally poor uses of statistics and you can find it anywhere. Usually has something to do with jogging numbers, cooking books and reports and anything else that NEEDS an excuse for funding/action/acquisition/liquidation .