And turn it back on at midnight.
That's the simple way to reset the clocks on my alarm clock, pellet stove, oven, clothes dryer, etc. (why do all these things have clocks? It's anything with fancy scheduling options, like "run at 4am").

The car clock is the only annoying one that way (I'm not going to cut the battery and lose my mileage stats...).

The computers are fine of course.
That just leaves the one battery-powered clock up on the wall, which I simply don't adjust. I kind of like it showing the time an hour late for a chunk of the year... when it catches my eye, I think for a second that I'm really running late today -- then it's a pleasant surprise when I realize I'm fine.

WRT Google -- the moral question of whether to use the loopholes is not completely clear-cut. The loopholes are perfectly legal, and all of their competitors use them. I suspect they could be sued by stockholders if they decided to optionally pay far more taxes than they were legally required to pay.

There's also the question of what the taxes will actually be used for -- this isn't so bad with EU taxes, but the biggest chunk of any US taxes you pay go straight to the military.

Morally, the best solution might be for Google to publicly post the amount of taxes they are not paying in different locations thanks to legal loopholes (thus putting pressure on governments to actually close them), NOT lobby for keeping the loopholes open, and to use at least some portion of the "loophole money" to do some direct good in the regions affected.

Right; the bottom line is that there are known loopholes that all of the major international corporations use to avoid taxes... and the governments could certainly close the loopholes, if the corporations didn't have such massive influence over the entire political process.

So every once in a while there's a big "exposé" of one loophole or other, and various politicians start bills which are all destined to die or be completely neutered -- as hoped even by the politicians flogging them, because of course if you're the one who successfully pushes through the law that closes a serious loophole, you're screwed.

He doesn't say he averages 100-hour work weeks, just that he does them (presumably in case of emergencies).

He didn't say he works 100-hour weeks on average, just that he "does them" - assume "sometimes" or "occasionally", since he DID say he averages 12-hour days.

He also gets vacation, even though sometimes it is interrupted by emergencies.

Let's assume 2 weeks off even including the 10 or so federal holidays (likely he actually gets more than this!) minus 2 days of emergency work.
He averages 12-hour days, an estimate probably based on a 5-day week (the stock markets are closed on the weekend, and he'd mention it if he had a non-standard work week, right?).

So: 50 weeks * 5 day week + 2 days lost vacation = 252 days * 12-hours = 3024 hours.
500000/3024 = $165.34/hour.

If "average 12-hour days" was within a 6-day work week => $137.97/hour
7-day work week => $118.37

Err... he didn't say he does 100 hour weeks *on average*, just that he does them.

I.e., his average week is 84 hours (assuming he works 7 days a week; otherwise 72 or 60 hours a week), and sometimes he works as much as a 100-hour week (7 14-hour days, or some other split).

Come on now,

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=difference+between+a+hash+and+encryption :D

[Okay, I admit this is slightly mean fun. And to be sure, responses that just say "you clearly are in way over your head -- go hire a lawyer/expert/whatever" are far less helpful than ones that say "you may need to hire an expert... they'll probably tell you to do X or Y based on your Z". But while I think the original poster was asking a valid question that's not trivially answered by google, finding the difference between a hash and encryption isn't so hard to find.]

doing multiple hashes of the password in a big enough magnitude for it to become slow

Hash algorithms like SHA1 and MD5 are designed to be fast. This is great if you are fingerprinting large amounts of data looking for patterns, comparing files, etc.. This is not great if you don't want your passwords to be brute-forced.

Rainbow tables are not the real danger to hashes. The real danger is simply that brute-forcing many password hashes is startlingly fast on modern hardware.

If you're hashing passwords that need to be safe from brute-forcing, use something like bcrypt, which let's you set a work factor.

More explanation here:
http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

Do some reading on the Malaysian government, though.

They do not do things by the book. There is no book. The corruption, the nepotism, the thuggery, the ridiculous government-endorsed racism, the sheer idiocy and ignorance....

They (the party that's been in power since the 60's -- not a good sign, is it?) don't come under pressure to clean house from the wider world because there aren't genocides going on, no large-scale horrors. They keep the abuses relatively low-key (like heavy "affirmative action" for the majority race, gross misuse of government funds, only occasional murders), so even their own citizenry generally think it's not worth it to stick their necks out to fix things. Sure, the education system sucks, and if you aren't of the right "race" you have to send your kids out of the country to get any higher education, and the corruption is embarrassing, but it's fed by oil wealth more than out of citizen's pockets directly, so it just goes on & on.

Er, if it's not clear, no, I would not trust the Malaysian government-run email service. The internet is finally making it possible to fight back against government abuses in Malaysia with some level of anonymity and safety, and I have no doubt they're dying to get their hands on a good way to keep an eye out for citizens who might become troublemakers. Admittedly, you'd have to be a bit stupid to use your government-given email address to talk to your friends about a protest, but their education system nowadays doesn't exactly focus on critical thinking.

Not exactly the same thing, but I've been getting a lot of spam in Greek for some reason -- and I have no idea how to filter it out (I could just capture any message with a common Greek word, but it's... gibberish to me). It's clearly spam, and probably all from the same sender, because the formatting is always similar, though of course the links vary.

First, a language is more than just a tool; it's an entire ecosystem. Writing working code in a new language -- learning the syntax -- isn't too tough for most people. But beyond that... well, just remember that every task can be accomplished in many different ways (sometimes using core libraries, sometimes using 3rd party APIs, and with many different approaches to implementation), and you aren't going to have a clue when you're new to a language. Even with languages that are only relatively newly popular (like Ruby) there are often multiple libraries offering similar functionality that you want to include in a new project, and it's quite hard to know which is better until you've used them for a while.

The benefit of someone with experience in a given language is that they'll already *know* about the weird pitfalls and bugs in specific core libraries, bugs in specific versions of this or that, the best library to use for threading, or HTML scraping, or PDF generation, etc. etc.. The syntax is a fairly small part of what you need to be an effective developer in a new language (being a developer also involves estimating effort for tasks, debugging, doing security analysis, optimizing/scaling, etc. -- all things that are doable if you know the language "ecosystem", but not possible just knowing the syntax.

Second, existing code base and existing developer experience mean that even if Python is a better fit for a new task, and you could do it in Python in 10 minutes, you may still have to use Java because most of the other guys are "Java developers" and they're going to need to maintain it.

Another factor is that diseases evolve.

Every infected person -- even if they're a healthy child who will probably be fine after a bit of misery -- is a little disease factory and laboratory. Some of the virus they produce will be the same as what they caught. Some of it will be slightly different. Some of the different strains will be the same, or less potent/communicable/etc.. Some of them will be worse, or even much much worse.

And another hint for the grandparent poster: not every child is in good health when they get a given disease. Did you have any classmates who were out all the time due to health problems? Did you pass on your measles or rubella to any of them? Or hell, just pass on your germs to a newborn infant, or a pregnant woman, etc..

The sad thing is that *yes*, of course there are large numbers of parents around the world who will see their child's first signs of autism in the first few days after a vaccine, and many of those parents will be completely convinced that the vaccine did it. "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" is how most people think.

And those poor parents will try all kinds of quackery, and develop a drastic distrust of actual scientifically-based medicine, and simply not understand that autism generally shows up in early childhood, and vaccines are during early childhood... so simply by normal chance, we're guaranteed a percentage of austistic kids who will have their first clear signs immediately after a vaccine.

Listen people, thinking that X was caused by Y simply because it happened soon after, and treating your child's autism via "trying things" until something seems to work... you are doing *shitty*, flawed science, and you are probably going to do serious harm to your child. Please take the time to learn from people doing actual, valid science.

Ditto; it takes some force and persistence, but given enough time I can even get it through the tea strainer.

The result looks great as cupcake frosting!
Note: looks can be deceiving.

Checking her cellphone messages, unfortunately -- without paying attention to traffic, or the safety of her location.

Sadly, her death could have been easily avoided if she had simply kept her attention on traffic as long as she was exposed to it.

One useful tip -- it helps a lot if you bike in a group, because you're more easily spotted; i.e., you're relative safe if your kids are with you (and dressed in bright clothing), because collectively you can be just as visible as another car.