I reached the weight I am now as a sophomore in highschool, almost fifteen years ago. I haven't varied by even five pounds since then. I don't own a scale, so I only end up just weighing myself out of curiosity whenever I stay in a hotel that has a scale in the room.

Yep, still 165lbs.

WARNING
Keep Away From All Children!
Do not put in nose or mouth.
Swallowed magnets can stick to
intestines causing serious injury or death.
Seek immediate medical attention if
magnets are swallowed or inhaled.

It says right on the little plastic container that this isn't for children. The cardboard retail box gets torn up and thrown away, so I can understand a label on that *possibly* not being enough. The inner plastic cube is pretty explicit too, though.

There are a handful of stupid people somewhere out there, so bureaucrats close down a business that I like and decide that I can't have something that is of no risk to me or anyone around me. Gotta love this world we live in.

The latter, I suppose. Less than 10% of the Title IV four-year institutions in the US have an ABET CS accreditation - mine included.

What that's worth to a prospective employer, that's hard to say.

Maybe you're just hiring/working with the wrong programmers?

CSB: I finished my CS bachelor's in 2010, and with the exception of a couple "breadth" courses, I spent nearly my entire college career programming in x86 assembly, C, and C++. Admittedly, extensive use of SQL wasn't part of the degree program, but my starter job for the past couple years has been as an Oracle developer working in Pro*C and PL/SQL. If you're finding recent bachelor's with no assembly or systems architecture background, I'd start checking University accreditations before hiring. ABET is the magic acronym on my diploma.

If anything, I'm seeing the older programmers clinging to built-in function calls and proprietary languages (SQR) because "that's how we've always done it". Problems then take a tremendous number of man hours to debug and fix when the underlying code gets changed or the customer wants a small tweak, when it should have been written from scratch to begin with. It's especially frustrating when the desired functionality is really simple, like writing a SQL query out to a report or generating a dynamic table in HTML.

Something else I've never seen from a younger programmer: goto nests.

Four years ago I was single, broke, underweight, depressed, living in the dorms, bored with and failing my classes, and had racked up thirty grand in student loan debt that I didn't know how to pay off. I played World of Warcraft to get through the day.

This year I am still single, still broke, still underweight, still depressed, sharing an overcrowded house, bored with my job, on house arrest for year for a car accident, and I owe a hundred grand in restitution that I don't know how to pay off. I play World of Warcraft to get through the day.

I don't see things improving anytime soon. I'll probably pick up drinking again once I am off of house arrest.

I'm about ten hours in and so far I'm enjoying the game for what it is, but its got a few problems I didn't have with the first.

The enemy AI has certainly improved, as often times a bad guy will dive for cover when I start shooting at them, but nearly every time they've done that so far has resulted in them visually clipping through the barrier they are behind. It's really not very immersive combat when arms and legs are sticking out through concrete walls. I thought that technology was nailed down years ago (Gears of War?).

Melee combat is very clunky feeling. There is no visual interaction between my character and the enemy I'm attacking. There's just a generic punch animation, and if it connects, the damage number that follows it. Doom 2 comes to mind.

Framerate performance is... meh. For the hardware I'm running on (eVGA GTX 670FTW, Intel 2600k), I'd expect nothing less than a rock solid 60fps with the graphics on mid-to-high settings. Most of the time there isn't anything graphically intensive going on, but my framerate often dipped into the low 20s anyways.

Getting stuck has been a problem for me. I like to explore, but on foot, there are too many little crannies you can get to but cannot easily get out of, and the vehicle is even worse about that. With the wonky controls it'll easily wedge itself up onto walls and will have to be abandoned. It's bad enough that I just go on foot now instead. That was never an issue with the original Borderlands.

The UI is less intuitive than the original, and even that was just marginal - particularly the inventory screen. Picking a weapon from the list (that has to be scrolled through) usually takes at least two or three tries.

Overall, I'd say wait for this on a Steam special. It would've made a great DLC pack for the original, but I'm glad I didn't drop $60 on it. It simply lacks the polish I'd expect with that price tag.

My first thought would be to combine all of the above and just print myself a girlfriend. She'd probably get bored and leave me, though. Other than being a ginger, there's not really anything to fix on my body.

Assuming I was magically the only one that could have something printed, I suppose I would sell that opportunity to the highest bidder. I'm sure someone out there with a ton of money needs a new organ.

I've got quite a few keyboards, though all but one are stacked in my closet and most of those are still nearly brand new.

I can't use a Model M at all. Oddly enough, it's for the same reason that most of the others here seem to love them. The long key travel and hard feedback do not mix well with my double jointedness and unusually low digit ratio. In order to reach "F" and "J", my fingers end up in a claw shape and my major knuckles bend back the wrong way. After a couple days of that my joints ache enough that I simply can't type anymore. Split keyboards are even worse.

After trying out a dozen other "fancy" keyboards over the years, Logitech's Illuminated Keyboard is the best I've found. I might look into their new washable keyboard if I ever wear this thing out. That looks even mushier.

I started playing World of Warcraft on the day it came out: November 23, 2004. I was a sophomore in college at the time. Before I started playing, my grades were poor; I had no friends, no family, and I had never been in a relationship of any kind. I was underweight and sickly. I was becoming an alcoholic. I was asocial. I was severely depressed and sometimes even suicidal. I had nothing to look forward to and no will to live.

Playing the game didn't change any of that, but the past eight years have gone by a little faster than the eight before it. I log in every night when I'm done with work, get drunk, and find something to grind until I can't keep my eyes open anymore.

I play neither because I enjoy playing or because I have an unconfronted fear of failure. I play because I've accepted failure and am biding my time. Will things ever improve? Probably not. There will always be another game to play, though. I can take some comfort from that.

What kind of pressure would the clone be under to match whatever greatness the original had? I'd probably be completely resentful towards whoever "wished me back" if I was in that situation.

How about instead of choosing the person to have cloned right away, broadcast to the world that you can clone any one person, and give it about a month to find the highest international bidder.

Could you get a billion dollars for it? I doubt a billion dollars would be resentful towards me.

Email, email, email. Where I work, if a request comes in that wasn't emailed both to the intended recipient *and* the group/management he works for, it's not taken seriously and is put on the pile of "maybe someday" projects. No matter the urgency - in person, over the phone, smoke signal, and crop circle requests are all told to stop and do it through email or it simply won't happen.

Great part is, that's totally accepted business policy here, since we need to be able to frequently shift work around and without thorough written documentation of the request, that's simply not feasible. I'm glad the management here stands behind that, too. Surprisingly little falls through the cracks, since everyone has an up-to-the-moment record of what everyone else should be working on.

Insensitive clod, etc. I recognize the winter holidays but don't have any friends or family. I would like to give and receive, but alas, there's nobody here to enjoy it with. Maybe next year/decade/life.

Happy Holidays.

I'm willing to bet that on average, the people that fit in the workout group also ate healthier food, didn't smoke, and kept their excess weight down. If you completely ignored the workout aspect (or selected a test group where they were all equally inactive) and looked at just eating and smoking habits and body fat percentages, would you find the same three year difference? (Rhetorical; I know the answer.)

Don't get me wrong; as an Alaskan, I'd love to see this go in, but it's not going to happen.

First, the seas of the Bering Strait makes the English Channel look like a backyard swimming pool, especially in the winter months - that is, most of the year. Boats simply don't go there. Good luck operating any kind of floating construction equipment with colder than -100F wind chill, ice bergs, and 1-2 knot constant water currents.

Don't underestimate the difficulty in putting a rail system across the land in those areas either. Between Fairbanks and Nome is literally five hundred miles of permafrost, swamps, silt, fault lines, rivers, lakes, mountains, and simultaneous combinations of the above. There isn't any infrastructure or construction-friendly ground here. Even with ten thousand people living in Nome we can't even build a dirt road out there. I can't imagine the other side of the Strait being any better.

And let's not forget the environmentalists. If we can't drill ANWR, then this rail is out of the question.

To call this a pipe dream would be an understatement, especially for a measly $65 billion.

Why do people do that? What started this trend?

I'm right in the middle of that age group and I see it all the time. More often than that, though, is taking out a phone to play games or update Facebook right in the middle of a conversation or lunch meeting. Then all of the sudden I'm the obtuse one for getting up and walking away when the rest of my peer group is sitting around tapping away on their phones at one another. Why even go out if you're just going to fiddle with your phone the whole time?

The worst part is, I see it at all levels. This isn't just something the lower class is doing. It might be the way I was raised, but I find the whole thing impossibly rude. If I took out a Gameboy during dinner while I was growing up, it would've been slapped out of my hands into the trash can. I'll be doing the same favor for my kid, if I ever have one. Too bad there's nobody worth my time to procreate with in this day and age.

I'm not even old, but get off my lawn anyways.