I found this video interesting:

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_on_animal_movement.html

You'll see how they modded a live crab so it could run across a mesh net at near full speed, no change in gait, whereas previously it would have problems.

This video was done in 2005 so the "rethink" definitely happened way before 2010 ;).

"Do" - yes. "Should" - only a really stupid burglar. Any sane person would believe that other people should take care of their own health. This doesn't mean the said sane person would get "genuinely surprised" if he observes that other people in fact do not take care of their own health.

yes, I see the law as written, I saw it the first time. I'm not arguing the law, as I have no idea if it applies here or not (and we'll need a judge to decide). I'm arguing reality. You can't COPY, CLONE, or otherwise duplicate physical objects using photographic means. If this law is applied in such a way that says you can, and it's a crime, then I will help lobby to change the law as written. Just as I am lobbying here to change minds as they sit.

So, I'm born poor, work like hell through high school, take out massive student loans to pay for college, then see my one chance at breaking out of the poverty cycle blown because the career path I gambled on five years ago suddenly has too many applicants?

I'm lost, because I haven't seen anything proposed that remotely sounds like "letting the government decide what jobs we have." But you seem to have no concern for the massive waste of human life that happens when people educate themselves for jobs they're never going to find. It's especially tragic when a bright, talented person works hard, ends up saddled with student loans, and ends up doing the sort of menial job she would have been doing had she skipped college.

There is a huge difference between having the government "telling us to be comrades" and the government saying that you have to pay the people in your employ a decent wage. One is about personal conscience, the other is about curtailing your ability to exploit your fellow citizens.

By your reasoning, it's also not the government's job to regulate banks to ensure that they're safe places for consumers to park their money. Why should they protect investors from disappointment? Investors will learn that their choice of institutions was unwise, they'll move to a different bank, and that's perfectly fine.

It makes perfect sense... so long as you ignore the deep disappointment and human tragedy that comes from the words "they'll move to a different bank."

Agreed, although research in those fields (particularly embedded systems) also get you a lot of the experience.

The flavor of coding you want to do is a major factor here--lower-level development (particularly embedded systems work) is much easier to get into as an EE (and a heck of a lot more applicable than most CS work). If you want to be a nuts-on-bolts applications developer, then get in line behind the cheap foreign workers (if large company).

Like I said, I'm a university student. I live at school for 14-16 weeks at a time twice a year, and the rest of the time I live either at "home" - a rural exurb of nowhere that I never considered a home because my family moved me there involuntarily at a late age - or wherever I can find work. This means that I don't really have a single address where I live for multiple years at a time right now. I don't even really have a permanent home that I live in the majority of the time, because while I live at uni most of the time, they kick us out of university housing between semesters and make us pick new housing each year.

I'm not actually sure that I can legally count as a resident of anywhere at all.

When the thief fences the goods to someone who blogs about the exploits, I imagine you'll get more attention from the police.

It's true: justice is not applied equally. But that doesn't mean justice shouldn't be pursued.

As far as I can tell, dm-crypt doesn't make my laptop unusably slow. I didn't run performance test on it, but in a day to day usage I can't notice a difference in performance since I've set full disk encryption with it.

There's no explanation. Not only is it an idiom, it's really not considered completely correct -- "informal" is what the dictionaries call it. Personally, I avoid it in writing if not in speech, but it's fairly common in the US, at least. I think it was originally dialectal, meaning it originated in one particular region of the country.

This seems confused. Telling a kid not to go near the cookie jar usually leads them to doing so anyway. But this goes contrary to your point which is that telling Americans that Europeans are doing it will mean they won't want to do it.

To be fair 119 is also less than 5! (using the base 10 linear* arithmatic system), don't use punctuation which is not required, it often has unintended consequences.

*Modular arithmatic there are many numbers which are less than 5!, but that is just being unnecessarily confusing.

Let's face it, more than likely you wouldn't have gotten your first job, let alone the ones after that - if you had any, if you didn't have the degree.

When I started, most of the time, all you needed was some sort of 4 year degree. Now, you need at least a BSCS for a code monkey job.

Is a BSCS really necessary for most business applications? I don't think so, but tell that to the hiring managers. Personally, I think they're just requiring it to weed people out.

I once worked for a guy who wouldn't hire this particularly brilliant programmer. I met some very sharp people in my life but this programmer topped all of them. He had only a high school diploma - everything else he learned on his own and he learned FAST. Said manager wouldn't even look at him because "for this kind of work, I think one should have a four year degree."

Managers have a lot of hang ups about who they hire and they always rationalize for why they need certain qualifications.

Just imagine this:

But officer, my speedometer shows I didn't break the speed limit...

Maybe just maybe that they could cut the costs of most college classes as your paying largely for teacher interaction ( which I received little or needed little ).
Class space ( Teleconferencing is much more reliable now than when I went to school )
Lab Space / Materials ( This cannot be cut back and actually should be boosted )
The most beneficial thing I received from my degree was the connections I made with other students.
Basically what I'm saying is why does a degree in economics / business cost even close to the same as a person studying to be a molecular biologist / robotics engineer / etc that has to have some serious expenses.

I recently tried out basically all the calendering programs available as native applications on OS X and linux that had a chance of being able to sync with the iphone calender (which can use a standard webdav protocol for syncing). I wound up settling on Google's calender, which is a web application (even though it has had its own issues). (I used remind, and its curses front-end wyrd, for years, but no caldav sync there.)