Sure there are stats showing how many lives have been saved from seatbelts and helmet laws, I don't have any cause to disbelieve them.

Actually, there is good reason to disbelieve that bicycle helmet laws (as distinct from motorcycle helmet laws) have a beneficial effect: Simply put, the desired effect doesn't show up on country-level statistics after these laws have been implemented.

One of the more plausible explanations for this related to its interaction with the safety-in-numbers effect: The more cyclists are on the roads, the more motorists are watching for them. Requiring helmets reduces the number of cyclists on the road on a scale reaching towards 50%, both directly from inconvenience and vanity, and less directly by making cycling seem so unsafe that it needs to be regulated... but by making cycling seem unsafe, it thus becomes actually unsafe: Every time the cyclist population doubles, the per-person accident rate drops by about 1/3rd.

So -- cut the cyclist population in half with a helmet law, and you reduce the safety-in-numbers effect enough to entirely lose what little you gained. And that's presuming that people are actually wearing appropriately sized and fitted helmets correctly -- there's no shortage of studies showing that the percentage of people doing so in areas where helmet usage is mandatory is in effect is low enough that the beneficial side of the law is of little help as well.

There are other reasons to be skeptical of bicycle helmets -- motorists are measurably more careless when driving near a cyclist with a visible helmet, and the risk compensation effect (in which a helmeted cyclist behaves more recklessly on the belief that they're safer) is clearly a factor as well. Me? I wear a helmet when I ride anywhere with traffic (it's where my mirror and headlight are mounted)... but I'm vehemently opposed to any attempts to make the practice mandatory.

[And another addendum, to be fair -- there's some new work on helmets that effectively dampen rotational inertia; if those actually make it to market, something which has been effectively suppressed in the US by manufacturers having no incentive to exceed CSPC regulations, I might want to review parts of my position -- they've been shown to be quite effective at preventing concussions, which widely available bicycle helmets don't do].

Oh -- and about seatbelts: There's no question that they make folks who are belted in safer. However, it's also well-established that they make people who aren't belted in -- such as pedestrians -- less safe: Drivers behave more recklessly when they feel secure, and seat belts and anti-lock brakes provide such security.

The parent didn't indicate concern about cookies; the parent indicated concern about notice requirements for sites using cookies.

Nobody can seriously think that 2.5% rate is a fair price as there are thousands of FRAND patents involved in any smartphone concerning 3G, 4G, WiFi, Bluetooth etc.

Not per patent. For an entire portfolio, it seems an entirely reasonable place to start bargaining from. And that's what happened in the Microsoft/Motorola case -- Motorola put in an opening bid, and Microsoft immediately (with no counteroffer) when running to friendly local court asking that court to decide that the negotiations (to which they'd declined to respond at all) were innately unfair.

I doubt that any other smartphone OS is immune to this kind of attack, however.

This kind of attack is exactly why Android 4.0 introduced public-key authentication (with manual whitelisting) for USB debug access.

It also sounds vulnerable to replay attacks. I can have you touch something that secretly records the signal, then play it back to the actual input device. Seems like a password you're always broadcasting from your skin...

No reasonable authentication system works that way. Typically, one uses bidirectional communications -- present a piece of data, get back a signature with a private key stored within the device. That's been done in extremely-low-power scenarios for ages -- remember the crypto iButton?

Never even heard of either of them.

I'm a little surprised -- RabbitMQ is one of the most widespread implementations of AMQP, which is what basically everyone [founded after 2000 or so] uses when they want a distributed message queue.

What do you do? I can't imagine it involves distributed systems.

Rand's record with respect to relying heavily on public assistance is very well-documented and well-established. That you continued a thread here with name-calling and not any actual research is, well, interesting.

Don't forget that they would use gasoline instead of solar toys. The energy density of oil is 20 times the one of the best batteries.

True, but electric motors scale down better than gasoline ones do.

Just because gasoline is better for large vehicles doesn't make it better for everything.

When that language family accounts for 90% of all professional development (with the remainder going almost exclusively to Javascript, perl, and php not functional languages) that's perfectly ok. In 12 years I've never seen a functional language used anywhere I've worked. Heard rumors of it, but never seen one put into production. Even the rumors weren't about production, but some one off dev tool some guy wrote for his own use.

Dunno 'bout you, but quite a lot of places I've been at have deployed installations of RabbitMQ or ejabberd.

I was also at MessageOne when they built a high-volume real-time metrics processing system in Clojure (which blew the socks off of the Python system it replaced in terms of scalabilitiy -- transactional memory is great for that), and have deployed production code in Clojure at other sites since then.

Aside from that and Minix (which was never intended to be a production system), name me a microkernel that can number its user base in five figures.

Obviously you don't work in embedded space -- QNX has been dominant there for decades. And then there's Mach (which underlies MacOS X)...

I'd like to just point out that all languages these days really aren't that different.

I'd like to point out that you didn't include one purely functional language in that list, or one LISP. If you stick to one family, sure, you can observe commonalities.

We (in the US) are already there. Just go read the recent news. IRS/TEA Party/medical records seizures, DoJ/reporters, etc etc. It's not "ooh, shiny!" Hollywood, but what in the real world ever is? The results (and the violation, terror, and suffering of innocents) are the same.

Not following the news (retractions) much? That same audit targeted liberal groups with equal opportunity -- it did focus on organizations with political-sounding names, but didn't pick bones about which side of the fence that organization was on.

One side says that global warming exists and is manmade. They go too far and decide that your personal car and incandescent lights are solely to blame.

Nobody says that.

What's the most recent device you've worked with? I had my own share of awful experiences with Android's bluetooth stack back in the HTC Magic days (in which I was building an app to pull a live feed of motor/battery/temperature/etc. statistics from my ebike), but my current Nexus 4 has been rock-solid.

So interviews are out? Or do you want a 4-week interview?

I'd think that looking at my github account would make more sense.

If it's a simpler, totally reasonable 4-day-or-less problem, why do you need 4 weeks?

Because working on a big project can require kinds of discipline that small projects don't, so hiring someone to work on big projects based only on how they perform on small ones is a good way to get mislead. Note that I said "only". In-office code screens are essential; they just aren't sufficient.