In proper Slashdot form, I'm just speculating with no real information on the matter, but I think it something to do with a quantity of eggs being put in a particular number of baskets.

Living in Ohio, much the same.

The open blue sky is great for meeting cultural expectations, but it's not particularly special. Once you're used to the cloud, it's actually rather uncomfortable to go somewhere with directional sunlight.

This is pretty much spot-on.

I remember the last bubble well. Anything with a dot-com name meant it was on the front lines of technology, and the impending everything-online economy would wipe away the old brick-and-mortar businesses who couldn't move as fast as the upcoming technology. It turns out that economics didn't move as quickly as they thought. Companies still needed a business model, and the established companies were often able to move into online business just as quickly as consumers demanded.

Today's high-value tech companies are trying new business models, either hoping to capitalize on access to a global market or trying to sidestep inefficiencies in the traditional business. Some companies might still be little more than investors' dreams, but it's not a widespread trend.

This is a perfectly predictable ruling. Frankly, I'm amused that a lawyer even took the case to court.

The legal use of the term "imminent" doesn't mean "probably going to happen". "Imminent" means that, barring exceptional circumstances or luck, a particular result will happen before anyone has a reasonable chance to stop it.

Aim a loaded gun at someone and pull the trigger, and injury is imminent. Aim at a vital area, and death is imminent. Leave a knife in an unlocked drawer when a young child is nearby who could get the knife and harm himself... not imminent. In this case, the breach didn't cause any imminent harm. The culprit had an opportunity to not sell or use the data, so there's a break in the causality. From a legal standpoint, the hospital is not at fault for someone else deciding to steal an identity, even though they may have made it easier to do so with their lax security. In precisely the same manner, a gun dealer isn't liable for an apparently-benign buyer killing someone with a recently-purchased weapon.

That's really what the decision means. The hospital didn't directly cause the use of a stolen identity, so they're not at fault for that particular offense. There probably is still a HIPAA violation somewhere in this mess, though, and they'd be liable for that (because the administration would have made the decision not to implement strong enough security), but that's not the lawsuit in question.

Having now read TFA, I must partially retract my previous statement. Venturebeat isn't raising the angry mob, but Slashdot is.

TFA is actually mostly focused on the effect such almost-the-same claims would have on the concept of inventorship. Currently, it's straightforward: If someone discovers an alternate implementation, they get credit. However, if an inventor gives a seed patent to Cloem's software, and the software produces a list of almost-the-same implementations, who gets credit for those? The inventor of the seed patent? Cloem's software engineers? The computer itself?

In true Slashdot style, I haven't read TFA, but TFS sounds like Venturebeat is stirring up a good old-fashioned angry mob.

Historically, patent lawsuits have been won or lost based on careful wording. A good synonym can mean an enormous financial difference for an inventor (or inventor-funding company).

Patents must be specific enough to describe a particular set of implementations of an idea, rather than just the general idea itself. Despite Slashdot's love of the phrase, "on a computer" does not a patent make. Rather, the patent must describe exactly how the computer functions with regard to the invention itself. Yes, sometimes that means describing the only reasonable mechanism, but it's still specific.

On the other hand, that specificity can be problematic when it comes time to actually use the exclusivity a patent provides. A car-analogy patent might have been worded to refer to driving on asphalt, but there are some roads that are paved with concrete or bricks. Hiring a specialist to find such trivial loopholes might be a very good investment for an applicant trying to write their patent. Any realistically-equivalent implementations can be added to the patent as additional claims.

Until someone else comes along and offers $1.50 an hour. Then the next guy offers $1, and so on, racing to the bottom. Now the government is still footing the $7.25/hour bill for the company to have an unskilled workforce at $0.01/hour of payroll expenses. The workers don't care, because they still see $7.26/hour income to sit and play games.

Since the company's able to hire so cheap, they bring in a hundred such workers to boost their employment numbers. Having 150 employees rather than 10 lets the company seem more important. Sure, there's some overhead expense, but it's easily paid for by the huge payroll savings.

Now the government is paying for a huge workforce of unskilled and unproductive labor. They're not producing much, so the taxable economy isn't increasing at all, and of course the tax rate isn't going to be 100%, so there is no way for the government to actually afford to pay its guaranteed wage.

Taking another perspective, your plan essentially gives every employer a $7.25/hour/employee tax credit, with no defined mechanism to recoup the losses.

Even if the employer companies are more productive because of their huge workforce, the government only sees a percentage of the value the employees produce. If the government supports the answering-machine employee at $7.25/hour, will the employee be productive enough (through improving the company's sales) that the government would get $7.25/hour more in taxes from the company? That's a pretty tall order for a phone operator. Considering an (overestimated) corporate tax rate of 50%, the employee would need to single-handedly earn $14.50/hour for the company before the government would break even, $7.24 of which goes to the company's after-tax income.

It's a pretty straightforward government subsidy supporting corporations.

As a librarian's husband, I feel a bit of a duty to point out that a larger company (say, of the size where document control and user training are becoming real problems) may be well-served by hiring a corporate librarian.

Librarians are trained to organize documents and articles in an appropriate manner, and to help users find what they need quickly. Categorization and cataloging should not be left to the whims of the users.

A quick check shows that the official reports claim it remained standing for an entire 23 minutes after 4:58pm.

You have the evidence at your disposal. You can do the research to understand the entirety of the situation, and reach a valid conclusion. Instead, you've choose to ignore reality and ask for "evidence" that you refuse to understand.

At least your world will always remain exciting.

Um, yes.

My point was to illustrate how atmospheric nuclear fallout behaves in a ground burst vs. an air burst, which is quite well understood, thanks to the many tests conducted during the Cold War. Chernobyl was simply a convenient example of ground-based fallout. The Japan bombings are good examples of air-burst fallout, but that's irrelevant to the Port Chicago explosion.

That brings us back to the original point: if the Port Chicago explosion had been a nuclear accident in any way, it would have had detectable fallout decades later, primarily because it would have been a ground burst. Since there's no fallout, there's no evidence of nuclear material in the blast, either as the source or even nearby ordnance.

Similar explosions can be created with very large amounts of conventional explosives, which is exactly what the official story says happened, and the transport records provide evidence as to exactly how much materiel was present at the time of the incident.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated in the air, so they produced very little radioactive fallout, which spread out over a very large area. In contrast, an explosion at ground-level like you're proposing happened at Port Chicago would pull debris from the ground into the fireball, so the resulting fallout dust would have been bigger and heavier, and created a more concentrated contamination in the local area. It would be similar to what was seen during the Chernobyl disaster, where an explosion threw debris into the air.

Chernobyl is still radioactive today, and it's easily detectable even beyond the original blast range due to the spread of the fallout. If a nuclear bomb had detonated at Port Chicago, it would have been at ground level (unless you're suggesting an airstrike) and would have produced a large amount of dust. To have undetectable levels of radioactivity by the time civilians were looking at it (Vogel started his research in 1980), either there was a massive cleanup and decontamination effort that happened with nobody noticing, or the explosion simply wasn't nuclear.

You really ought not to jump to conclusions. A church is primarily a social place, and there is a wide spectrum of places that use the term.

Mine in particular is a Unitarian Universalist church, whose philosophy boils down to "don't be an ass", and whose sermons are essentially open-ended discussions of environmental and social justice concerns, with an eye toward improving ideological freedom (for all ideologies), and a social hour between services.

As for the interviewer asking that particular question, I don't know what kind of church he went to. It never came up in the workplace again, and we have since gone our separate ways.

When I paraphrased his question for the Slashdot audience, I included the part about my own resume, intending to illustrate that the church aspect was not entirely unrelated to the rest of the interview, though it was unrelated to the job. The question had a personal and informal nature to it, and did not at all seem as though a particular belief was expected of me.

In fact, I actually took it in quite the opposite manner: This was a workplace where discussion is open for all subjects. That eventually proved to be very true, as I've seen open (and not always politically-correct) disagreement with managers and leaders, eventually changing the course of business in a better direction. It's a cultural thing, and treating the interview like a first glimpse of the workplace culture is a good way to start the employment relationship.

Probably because it was a catastrophe on a military base in the middle of an espionage-heavy war.

The explosion would certainly have been powerful enough to breach containers holding classified information, which would then be scattered with the rest of the debris. To allow civilians in to investigate would also have opened unnecessary risk that enemy spies could find useful information and smuggle it back to their employers.

The radioactive fallout from an actual nuclear disaster is particulate. Even if an attempt were made to bury the debris, there would be enough dust in the air that the whole area would still have detectable radiation levels decades later.

The "unanswered questions" line is an old staple of conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, the reality is usually that the questions don't need to be asked, because their answers don't actually disprove the commonly-accepted theory.

You're not the first to claim such madness. Maybe you'll finally be the first to find hard evidence, or perhaps disprove the small mountain of evidence (like having precisely zero radioactive debris) against your theory.

For what it's worth, the best interview I've ever had was mostly nonspecific questions. In the interest of making the world a better place, here's a few of the questions:

• On that blank whiteboard, go draw a system you worked on and explain it.
• What do you do in your spare time, and why do you like it?
• I noticed your resume says you worked on a church sound system. My church's sound system is old, and is pretty much just a microphone and a speaker up front. What kind of improvements are out there that would give us the best bang for our buck to improve the quality of the service?

In retrospect, all of those questions, though sometimes posed as casual banter, were either nonspecific or relating to my own knowledge domain, rather than directly relating to the job itself. The first question gave the interviewers insight into how well I organized my thoughts and could explain a complex system on the fly. The second question is an inquiry into my work/life balance and whether I would actually enjoy my job, and the last is a chance to demonstrate problem-solving and meeting requirements.

The job in question was mostly server administration. There were a few questions about Active Directory, Linux permissions, and network design. I botched a few of those (mostly all of networking), but I still got the job because my answers showed that I was the sort of person who could recognize my own shortcomings, and learn what I need to know when it was needed.