I believe that the reasoning is :
- diversity is good
- finding minorities with the required skills is hard
- hiring under-skilled people just because they are minorities is bad
=> we need to give minorities the required skills

I think it is some kind of a long-term experiment, an attempt to increase diversity without compromising skills.

If you have a light aircraft you can pretty much bomb anyplace you want. Areas directly over sensitive facilities are usually prohibited zones, which means that if you penetrate them you may be "pulled over" by a fighter jet and face big trouble after you land. They won't shoot if they can avoid it.

Trouble is, these zones are usually pretty small compared to the speed of even a small plane. For example, if you have zone with a 10 NM radius and you are flying at 120 kts, it only takes 5 minutes to reach the center. During this time, they have to notice you, dispatch an interceptor airplane, intercept you, send you a few signals, notice that you don't intend to comply and finally shoot you.

I don't consider phones without user replaceable batteries "quality design". For real quality oriented design, the goal should be "as long as a network exists". And considering that batteries are expected to last for about 3 years, they make for an obvious planned obsolescence.
My old Nexus One is still in use today( although not my me and with a new battery) and there is no reason to dump it as it still works as well as it did when I bought it. The 2 or even 3 year smartphone is a pure fabrication. For normal (non-geek) people, keeping a smartphone for 5-10 years should be the norm.

The idea of opportunity cost is valid, however saying that all pirates would have bought the game is wrong, and that's how they inflate their numbers.

If we somehow managed to make piracy impossible, would be pirates could simply not play the game.
- because they don't have the budget
- because it's not easily available
- because of restrictions (invasive DRM, internet connection, ...)
- because the competition is cheaper (Photoshop piracy probably hurt Paint Shop Pro more than Photoshop itself)

Is the number of patents really meaningful ?
For example, a patent on the ballpoint pen is much more powerful than 1000 patents on various ways of making ink cartridges for fountain pens.

It may not be a bad thing you know.
Strict timing rules provide a clear separation between work time and personal time and it can be beneficial to both the employer and the employee. Basically trading reactivity for consistency.
Not all companies want "110%" and "amazing work ethic". Many prefer a good "100%" and "do what I pay you for" instead.

Of course, a company closely monitoring things such as break time shouldn't expect (or even allow) their employees to work overtime. It means that what you did is normal. No need to be defiant.

Note that it is not how I like to work. But it is a matter personal preference. Many people I know are more than ready to give up flexibility in exchange for well defined work hours.

Hiroshima today is a very beautiful city. If you happen to plan a trip to Japan, I highly recommend it.
The only traces left of the bombardment are the memorials.

I didn't go to Nagasaki but AFAIK it is also a very nice place.

Men and women are different you know. Different bodies, different brains, so it's only natural that men and women want different things and tend to have different sets of skills. Just because men and women deserve the same rights and opportunities doesn't mean that we are the same.

Learning the basics of new language is easy. Or as least, easier than doing things with an inadequate language. And because you want "quick and dirty", you don't need to know all the subtilities of you language of choice before you start coding.

You are talking about web dev, mobile dev, desktop GUIs and text file processing. These are very different use cases and I think that using the same language for all would be silly, especially for one-shot apps. I couldn't find something that beats Perl for text-file processing, PHP is really good for web pages, if you make GUIs for windows, don't forget about VB. I don't know much about the mobile world so I can't help you there.

As for Python, it is certainly a very nice language but I wouldn't recommend it : too "clean". With one-shot dev, you can throw away readability, modularity, maintainability, etc... so you'll probably want a very permissive (ugly) language like Perl. Of course, it also depends on the available libraries. Both Perl and Python have a large catalog but if the ones you need are only available in one language, then use it.

Speed trap alerts of any kind are already forbidden in some countries.
A common workaround is to relabel speed traps as "danger zones" or some kind of point of interest, which are legal.

Brands usually don't endorse hacking. Some are very tolerant and may even give indirect support but they are very careful with their name.

They don't want to be involved in an accident caused by an unsafe hack, or someone making sex toys out of their kids stuff.

This is the theoretical limit for *white* LEDs. Even with a perfect light source, you can't get much higher than this and still call it white. 100% is for monochromatic green.

Also, luminous efficiency is for human vision. It is meaningless for photosynthesis. PAR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... ) should be used instead.

It is *one way* to do that and it is totally reasonable if there are other lines of defense. That's defense in depth.

Some automated attacks can defeat security through obscurity.
For a very simple example, read "The Gold-Bug" by Edgar Allan Poe. In this book, the protagonist explains how he managed to defeat a simple substitution cypher. This method uses frequency analysis and can be easily automated, it also work no matter how cleverly you generate your substitution table.
Of course, your cypher will probably be a bit more complex than that, but if all what it takes to break a substitution cypher is to read a short story from the 19th century, imagine what the NSA can do.
Cryptography is hard. It's hard because the output always looks random (if it doesn't, you are doing things very very wrong). It means that it is very easy to make a mistake and going back to rot13 level security without noticing it. Even experts get it wrong sometimes.

If you really want to roll your own, encrypt it with a well recognized crypto-system as a second pass. Using a different key of course.

Obligatory XKCD : http://xkcd.com/1179/