It may be better for the employee too. After all, if I were working out my last couple of weeks I'd be paranoid about making some critical mistake and screwing something up. I'm careful anyway, but things can go wrong and if they do at a time when people are suspicious anyway then there'll be a law suit.

I've had the opposite experience. I try to do a lot of jobs myself and that means that it's not generally an emergency when I call someone and I can wait for someone who is getting good reviews or a personal recommendation from a friend/neighbor, but the roto-rooter guy had a root cutting tool that I will never own and he was quick and efficient at getting my drain line unplugged, the heating guys spent days crawling around under my house, a service I was very willing to pay for having done far too much of that myself. I could never have done as good a job making the kitchen cabinets as the carpenter I employed. In general the people coming to the house have been courteous, fair and competent.

What about sincerely held non-religious convictions. Oh that's right. the protection of the law is only supposed to extend to followers of the book.

No-one is born jewish.

And assuming sexual preference is a mental function then I'm not sure that such function is present in a newborn either (I know the brain is still developing).

Being Romanian is merely an artifice to do with the parents' legal status and the place of birth, not anything intrinsic to the newborn's biology (the baby is a citizen of Earth).

So of all of the things you list as being innate at Birth I would say that skin tone is innate, Sexual Orinetation may be innate, nationality is not a biological issue and jewishness is an add-on later (or a take-away if you count the Bris I suppose).

Have you ever seen a movie where the bomb was defused with 3 minutes left on the clock. No-one will be interested until its in single digits of seconds to midnight.

I'd buy it too. I suck at remembering people's names, its an embarassment. Even people I've known for a while I just can't come up with a name for sometimes.

Just how does one reproduce a temperature measurement from 150 years ago ? Aside from photocopying the handwritten record ?

The problem to my mind is that so many voices try to convince us that all politics has only an X axis and that every issue lies far to one end or the other on that axis.I'd love to hear a discussion on, say, abortions might be reduced, with the intent to find some workable steps to reduce the incidence of abortions instead of the sole purpose of the debate being how to perpetuate two-party politics.

When I was a kid my bed time was marked by the TV schedule, I had to go to bed at the end of Star Trek. I used to hope each episode would go on longer. The whole thing brings back happy memories of childhood. I especially enjoyed the episodes where some presumably sensitive and complex circuit board under the main console in the bridge had to be repaired by Spock using some kind of crude welding process

going off at a tangent, isn't Spock proof of god's existence (leaving aside the nit that Spock is fictional) ? There's no way evolution could account for the breeding compatibility of an earth woman and a vulcan man

reminds me of a tv documentary, I think of an investigation in Ireland. The perps had left an apple at the scene that had some unusual bite marks in it. The Dentist they showed it to gave a full description of the guy, down to hair color, how tall he was. Apparently some rages/genders/body types were genetically predisposed to gnawing on apples in that way. Of course, now I know about parallel construction... But it made for a great tv show.

I don't see that the privatization of government services is necessarily a "dark side". If the services can be delivered more effectively and efficiently by private organizations then they should be. My only problem is with those that would campaign for privatization when there is good evidence to suggest things will be worse as a consequence just because they are anti-government.

My car is over 10 years old and will still go about as fast as it did when I bought it, new. My iphone 4 is way younger and runs nowhere near as quickly on the latest iOS as it did on previous versions. These apple cars will be real unpopular after about the third software version upgrade when they can only do 20 miles/hr and need to be traded in for something thinner.

I would have thought that they would be better off creating a number of single-color sub-channels and spreading data across them. I would think that white light would have group delay problems.

My complaint about perl (and for that matter clojure too now) is that so many symbols have special meaning. and sometimes it is context dependent too. If your code contains $#`'~_ all over the place it makes it hard to read for anyone not intimately familiar with it. Sure, there are some well used conventions like _ for anything or triangle brackets for collections of types, but there comes a point where using a symbol to convey really important and subtle meaning is far harder to read than just putting in a keyword. All I can say is thank god Unicode was not invented earlier or there woudl have been 1000s of other characters involved.

Quit bragging that you look so good with your shirt off that 1800 women conspired to watch you split logs.