Washington state has such a law as well - http://www.doh.wa.gov/YouandYourFamily/IllnessandDisease/DeathwithDignityAct.aspx . As does Vermont. I'm under the impression that the laws make it very difficult to get permission to snuff yourself, and that you have to be of reasonably "sound mind", not even depressed(!), to make use of them. So these laws really wouldn't help in the kind of end-of-life situations that most are talking about here, though I'd be happy to be corrected on that.

I think a shittier job would be doing computer forensics. You end up having to see this stuff as well as go testify about it in court. It would become part of your life, inescapable. I'd given some thought to going into forensics but the thought of that deterred me, I don't think I could hack it. I've heard it said that there's a great personal reward in locking up the pervs, but it seems to me it would come at a great personal price. I wonder what the suicide rate is in the profession?

“The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases, one of its diseases is called man.” - attributed to Nietzsche

My DIR-601 with firmware 1.02NA does not appear to have this backdoor. I installed the firmware from the D-link website a few weeks ago and it was the latest available at that time.

Cassette tape?? You were lucky. We used to *dream* of having cassette tapes. We had it rough. After going to high school for 14 hours a day, day in day out, we had to POKE our machine code into memory, run it, and if the machine didn't crash, had to write another program to PEEK it out again while we took snapshots of the screen with a Polaroid camera.

I thought EXACTLY the same thing when I read the headline. Those lyrics would have made for an excellent speech along with those of "We Will Rock You".

The equivalent on Chrome is "NotScripts".

Did you mean "geography"?
I agree, it would be very interesting to have the topologies of hilly areas like Seattle and SF taken into account in the sim. Let's say you set off your nuke over Elliot Bay. Or in a shipping container down on the south end. I wonder if the neighborhoods on the lee side of the central ridge separating the city from the lake would be spared in any big way. Places like Mt. Baker, Leschi, Madison Park. I wonder if N. Queen Anne would be partially spared? It would be ironic if the aquaduct and the 99 bridge survived. Similarly, I wonder if the blast effects would be channeled by the hills, perhaps down the Rainier valley for example.

It would be tragic, a lot of good pubs would be ruined even by a low-yield device.

Seems to me, in the mid-80s, running CMS in a VM on IBM iron, I could modify, recompile, and reload parts of the network stack as an ordinary user. In my idle hours I believe I poured through some of the spooling code and found where delivery priorities were set. Tweak!

I suppose it's just a matter of time before IBM kills off this facility in Vermont, my home state, and sends the whole works to India. http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20130614/NEWS02/306140038/Vermont-Labor-Department-responds-to-laid-off-IBM-workers

I wonder how much you know about Germany? Health insurance is public AND private. You only get to opt-in to a private plan if you make over a certain amount of money. I never said that you didn't have to pay for insurance. But in Germany you pay a % of salary and nobody is uninsured - IIRC if you're poor, the cost of the insurance is subsidized. If there's a smaller # of uni grads in the population (citation needed), maybe more people go into the trades than here, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Unemployment is much lower in Germany than in, for example, the US.

My point in all this is that being what a US reactionary would consider a "socialist" country does not translate into necessarily having a basket case economy. A prior poster mentioned Canada as a similar example of what a US wingnut would describe as a "socialist country" that's doing relatively well.

Germany likewise is roaring along whilst providing worker protections, ensuring that everyone has health insurance, and, if I understand correctly, free university educations for a large segment of the population.

I strongly suspect that that's what my wealthy Republican friend will be doing: sending his kids to Socialist in-state public schools (oh the irony). As you say they cost a small fraction of what private unis cost and if I understand correctly the two top schools in Washington state are quite good.

His health plan was changed so that his defense-contractor MegaCorp employer, that feeds almost exclusively at the trough of the Socialist military, could make more money. There's absolutely no question that this fantastically huge and wealthy company couldn't have maintained funding for the current plan. They simply chose not to, because In These Tough Economic Times, they can get away with it.