Thank you. I'm now glad I never finished my hole through to the other side of the earth. My parents would have been loads of pissed when the Indian ocean drained out into our yard.

I see your children have played neither Skylanders nor Disney Infinity.

I work with some of those former military types. From some of my talks with them: It is also important to note that active duty military are required to follow lawful orders, not all orders. It is the duty of any military member to immediately detain someone issuing an unlawful order regardless of rank. Not having served myself, I don't know how this matches the military regulations, but that isa seemingly widely held understanding of their obligation. It seems a bit naive to consider the military as a cohesive pro-government force if an issue is big enough for a significant number of civilian gun-owners revolt.

Lawyers don't commit theft; if for no other reason than lawyers write all the laws, interpret all the laws, and for the most part hold all the highest level law executive positions.

STL was a dirty word in the CS program I attended. It wasn't introduced until the very last day and it was essentially: Here are some standard classes to use or not. My first job I was the lone developer and I rolled a lot of stuff on my own. I feel bad for whoever has to maintain that code now because instead of using well-used, presumably well-tested STL classes there are a bunch of one off classes that are used in one package written by one very young developer with no tester. I may lose something for leaning on the STL stuff but I've gained a whole bunch of testers as well. That last part usually goes a lot further than anything I'd get from rolling my own.

I'm sure they'd be even better at their jobs if the citizens would just let them in on a live feed of said CCTV cameras. This is of course just a stop-gap measure until everyone can be fitted with crime-detecting locator chips.

I was wondering what got you on double secret probation. I was on secret probation once. I didn't find out until suspension that I was ever on probation.

It does. Whether it can or not hasn't deterred our elected officials yet. But Don't worry: They aren't deterred by whether or not the laws they pass are within their power under US law either.

"So maybe Key West would be a better alternative." And the entire research team gives a collective: "Shhhhh"

Which is exactly why it was worded the way it was.

I have a coworker who is not vaccinating his children based on the advice of his brother, a surgeon.

My first job was a contract to a network equipment manufacture. I spent most of my time in their hardware division. At least for that particular company, hiring was based entirely about making hardware. Lots of electrical engineers, a few structural guys to do placement, software engineers were only for the network management division. A lot of the guys who were tasked with writing the embedded stuff were out of their league to write code period, but project management was so physical engineering heavy that they didn't understand what was going wrong. So yeah, I've seen the same thing.

Sorry. We were running a little low on entropy in non-information bearing degrees of freedom of our information processing apparatus or environment.
Sincerely, Slashdot

My phone is already doing so much. If I'm going somewhere I know I will be taking pictures then I bring a camera. Otherwise I get pictures of the first couple of hours of activities and then a phone that doesn't do anything at all. It isn't a convenience savings if I have to bring my phone and extra charging capabilities over a phone and a dedicated camera. Same thing with a fitness tracker, my phone can do it, but I've got better use for that charge.

The Mandarin or Fin Fang Foom would fit well with Thor, probably better than in an Iron Man movie, but that is my beef with the movies. Tony has fought robot, robots, and tiny robots because he is the tech guy. Thor has fought superstrong magic beasts, superstrong and magic beasts. Hulk has fought gamma beasts and gamma beast. Cap has fought corrupted super soldier and corrupted super soldier. Antman is changing the powers of the main villian to be the evil antman. Avengers was sort of refreshing but it looks like the formula will be swarm enemy, swarm enemy before we get Thanos. I want Hulk versus Leader or Tony versus a proper Mandarin. Get these guys out of hero versus evil version of themselves.