I think you're confusing "other stories set in the same universe as the show Babylon 5" with "addendums to the story of the show Babylon 5"

That's a pretty creative position.

So if I pick up another (analog, wired) phone in the house and listen to somebody else's phone conversation, that's not snooping? It certainly used to make my sister upset ...

How about if the government adds some wiring to listen to these conversations back at the phone company? That's not snooping? (Hopefully they had a warrant for it, but that's another matter.)

Now, if my sister was talking in pig Latin rather than plain English, would *that* elevate it to snooping? Does it matter that I can decrypt pig Latin without additional hardware in realtime as long as the data rate is relatively low?

Right, most programmers aren't that great; there's a bell curve. When you encounter a poor programmer who dooesn't have a degree, you might be inclined to think that's why. I'll see your anecdotes and raise you one: I once saw a guy with a PHD in comp sci write a single 10,000+ loc function.

At some point in your career, everyone is their own snowflake. I'm never going to compete against a candidate that is my equal in every other way but has a degree.

I'm fortunate to be a programmer, though, because it's one of the few industries that has woken up and seen what a worthless institution our higher education system has become.

Yes, I can come up with a thousand free market answers. And yes, that pretty much answers your question.

Would you buy a vehicle from any company whatsoever if you knew that parts were difficult to acquire? A manufacturer can play a game with parts availability only if they don't plan to stay in business.

Maybe we should go back to renting our phones from ATT as well.

I wonder if the differences are due to extracting the result from the GPU. There is no doubt whatsoever that doing 2D with OpenGL on the GPU will be faster than a software rasterizer - what kills the performance in these tests is having to copy the result back to the CPU so it can be displayed in an X window. Once X windows are fully composited and output graphics never leave the GPU memory, the hardware acceleration will no doubt prove to be the fastest.

They are there because the employers can get away with it because there's not a shortage of unskilled employees.

And when you require their employer to increase the wage for their position, the employer will now hire a more qualified individual instead, since they have to pay for that anyway, leaving the less skilled employee (who is supposedly being helped) eventually out in the cold.

If your employer was suddenly required to pay 50% more in salary for your current position, do you think you'd keep your job long-term against other, more qualified people who would suddenly want that position as opposed to their old one? It all shakes out similarly in the end for those who used to make under the new minimum wage, typically the most needy among us who already have some of the fewest options.

Think about what you are asking here: you are trying to protect equipment from a bunch of jerks who don't follow the rules on how to properly take care of it, and are offering a solution that requires them to voluntarily log their actions. If they don't follow proper equipment maintenance rules, they aren't going to follow your logging rules either. If any voluntary system works for you, it will be when you have no jerks. If you have damaged equipement, then you have jerks. If you have jerks, you must have some sort of mandatory access control, such as signing out equipment using an id checked by the person in charge of the inventory. Anything less secure than this will be abused by jerks. After all, you don't expect them to sign out equipment they are planning to destroy, are you?

Nobody uses a facebook profile to determine if a prospective employee is a good fit - they are instead looking to determine if the prospective employee is a bad fit. With so many candidates for every position, there is an increasing need to disqualify people, and facebook is an excellent place to find dirt on them. If a capital offence can be found in six lines written by the most honest of men, anyone with an active facebook profile is entirely worthless.

I suppose I'd have mentally picked St. Laurence Island as a more representative example, as it's part of Alaska and only 36 miles from Russia. You'd have to have a mountain in the distance to see Russia from there, but it's feasible.

But more accurately, Little Diomede Island, is only 2.4 miles from Big Diomede Island, so you can easily see Russia from there and even walk between the two countries during the parts of the year it's frozen over.

I'll admit that I'm more familiar with the minimum wage history and practice in the U.S. than in the UK. Just happened to read that article the same day and it seems very topical.

However, the theory isn't that minimum wage causes unemployment for everyone. The vast majority already make more than the minimum wage, so other than increasing their costs for minimum-wage supplied products and services (which is a real wage decrease, come to think of it). Economic theory states that the impact on people who currently make the new minimum wage or lower is that they find it more difficult to get and/or keep employment, because at the margin, some of them become no longer worth employing for what they cost.

Cleaning the grounds out of a french press is awful. The aeropress completely fixes that problem.

Or, because she was smarter than her critics on foreign policy....

But hey, you can always check snopes for the actual context of her remarks on Russia...

Perhaps try some simple wikipedia reading? I mean, I know that's almost like actually researching something, but really, you could just read the first paragraph and learn more than you appear to know.

The Jim Crow laws literally required businesses to segregate facilities. It was no longer a choice by the business. It was a legal requirement by Southern Democratic lawmakers to keep their different colored customers separate.