From what the submitter said, all that garbage would be included in his traffic calculations. I would put another vote in for encapsulation.

Your findings are a good illustration of the value of a local firewall between your LAN and the ISP's network. Who knows what kind of icky traffic is rolling around out there.

If I could give out a "comment of the day" award, this one would win it.

I would say this situation is not just "not uncommon", but ubiquitous.

I would even say that most people whose job title is some derivative of "system administrator" do at least some end-user or desktop support as part of their day-to-day job duties.

This is not uncommon among comic book super heroes. There are numerous different persons who assume the identity of particular heroes (and villains). Significant examples include DC's Green Lantern, Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, and Marvel's Captain America, Bucky, and Iron Patriot. Continuity is famously not a concern among comics outside of individual story arcs, so some of these divergent identities operate in the same fictional universes and some do not.

No. It is generally considered rude, however, and it unnecessary.

And this is not a "reference". This is your prospective employer calling to verify employment. If you provide an individual (even a former boss or owner of a company that you used to work for) as a reference, they can generally say whatever they want. Normally this is only done for those you trust to provide a positive reference.

Many employers will contact previous employers to "verify employment". As AK Marc mentioned, the information they are legally allowed to request and the previous employer is legally allowed to provide is limited. They can verify dates of employment, job title, supervisory status, and whether the individual is eligible for rehire. The last bit can be very significant, and is often the reason that employees give notice and otherwise attempt to leave a company smoothly. Of course, some commit misconduct by providing either positive or negative opinions on the employees job performance or other matters, especially because the people involved (HR personnel or business owners operating in the same locality) often know each other.

Here are some relevant lists for your perusal:

List of megafauna discovered in modern times
List of recently discovered mammals
List of cryptids

Not very many on the second list that I would consider "large" (scientific definition of "large" in the context of megafauna is somewhat ambiguous, though often bounded on the lower end at 100 pounds). Most of the creatures on these lists are very similar to already known and described species (the giant peccary, for example), and aren't very impressive discoveries from a lay viewpoint. Notice on the "list of cryptids" there is only one creature with "confirmed" status - the Okapi, discovered over a century ago.

Yes, only Obama.

Thanks Obama! >:(

Tofacitinib is a JAK inhibitor, which is not exactly an anti-lymphocite agent. These drugs function by interfering with the JAK-STAT_signaling_pathway, not by killing off lymphocytes.

These drugs definitely are are immunosuppressive. They are generally considered safe for most patients, though they certainly increase the risk of opportunistic infections (example: tuberculosis).

Interesting observation. JAK inhibitors and TNF inhibitors (including monoclonal antibodies), are commonly used to treat various forms of autoimmune diseases such as arthritis (in it's varying manifestations), psoriasis, IBS, ulcerative Colitis and Crohn's. These autoimmune diseases have a high rate of comorbidity and often respond to the same or similar treatments.

Alopecia was already thought to be an autoimmune disorder, so the observed results should not be very surprising. It seems to be only newsworthy since the treatment happened to be a total cure for a very rare disease.

I think the word you are looking for is "pragmatist".

Why do you struggle to believe this?

The 17% figure reported is for tech workers only - their overall and non-tech numbers are much better, with 30% and 48% women respectively. You can see their released numbers here.

From this publication by the ASEE: "...females accounted for 18.4 percent of [engineering] bachelor’s degrees, up slightly from 18.1 percent in 2010. The percentage of master’s degrees awarded to women remained unchanged at 22.6 percent; while that of doctoral degrees decreased about 1 percent from 22.9 percent in 2010 to 21.8 percent in 2011. The proportion of engineering degrees awarded to females should remain stable over the next few years, since women represent 18.2 percent of all bachelor enrollees, 22.7 percent of master’s enrollees, and 21.6 percent of doctoral enrollees."

"The percentage of black students also decreased slightly at all levels, bringing the percent of [engineering] degrees awarded from around 4.5 percent to closer to 4 percent."

And regarding computer science, according to this infographic, 18% of computer science undergraduate degree recipients were female (14% at major research universities), and 19% of the highschool AP computer science test-takers were female. Also according to the infographic, percentage of female computer science undergraduates has dropped dramatically (by 79%!!) since 2000.

I definitely agree that the under-representation of women in the tech sector is a serious problem. However, this under-representation seems to be caused by a number of poorly understood socioeconomic and cultural factors, and the data doesn't indicate particular misogyny on Google's part.

Every arcade that I have been inside in the last 10 years or so has been filled with terrible ticket-churning games. The commoditization of gaming hardware seems to have permanently killed off the classic arcade. Do you think this is an accurate observation, and do you see any way that the arcade-game scene could be rejuvenated?

Obviously it would be ideal to adjust details such as number of senators and etc. if there were no state governments. There are a lot of things that would need to be adjusted, but without the gigantic bureaucracy of 50 state governments a lot could be done.

We already have massive cronyism in federal government, and this problem is significantly worse in many current state governments.

Interesting thought. The federal government will always get more tax money than the state governments. We have gone dramatically too far down that road to turn back. We are currently spending over 700 billion dollars each on military and social security. These two gigantic budget items are each a bit larger than the total tax revenue from all 50 states combined. These two items not going away anytime soon (admittedly, neither are state governments, so this entire discussion is basically moot).

"Not able to account for" is not the same as "missing". But yes, I do not see any reason to argue whether the federal government is inefficient and/or spends too much money. This behavior seems to be a foundational requirement for all governments. My position is that state governments are more wasteful, and less functional than the federal government.

I do not feel inclined to give control of any more tax revenue to the state governments who have already proven to be inept and/or malicious in their handling of funds at a truly ludicrous level. I think the most logical conclusion, based on my observations of state governments, that if we transferred a significant portion of federal funds to state control, the currently pervasive financial misconduct would only increase by a factor of how much more money was available.

Yes because state governments, in reality, are so much more nimble and responsive...

But thank you for the informative bit about US geography.

Are you saying that democracy cannot work in a federalized government...? Many existing, successful countries with this system indicate that it is not the case.

I believe that propping up ineffective, incompetent, corrupt, valueless state governments just for the sake of having them is insane.