I'd just as soon "Peggy" found something else to do. The entire "shortage" is a mythical construct of tech companies engaged in their biannual attempt to raise the H1-B cap.

If you need to be convinced to take up programming you probably won't be very good at it anyway.

I broke out MOO2 the other day and was a little worried it might not hold up. It does. Somehow they got everything just about right in that game.

Internet to your dwelling is not a right. If your neighborhood doesn't have Google fiber and it means that much to you, move to a neighborhood that does.

You get paid what someone else is willing to pay, no matter what your position is - unless your argument is the process by which the board settles on an offer is somehow corrupt, the CEOs of banks and tech companies get paid exactly the right amount.

How much of this is just because flying isn't sexy any more? Even before 9/11 commercial flight transitioned from a luxury enjoyed by people with money to a Greyhound bus trip at altitude. People used to see pilots as, you know, dashing guys with an unusual skill, and these days they're seen as glorified bus drivers. Some of that has to rub off on general aviation.

Yeah, reading the title I was all ready to gin up some outrage, but if they have to sign up it falls more under the category of a service than government harassment.

I work in a unionized environment. All wages are in contractual 'bands', every job is evaluated and placed in an appropriate band based on required skill, risk, shift, education, etc.

This means that, within the band, we all know each other's pay if we bother to look up a job classification and leaf through to the most recent contract's appendix.

We all seem to continue working without being at each other's throats.

What is more interesting here is that, while Norway obviously doesn't necessarily recognize a legal bucket a bitcoin can easily fit into, it's nevertheless viewing them as having some worth or profitability...

If you buy and sell anything the tax authorities will be waiting for their cut. They don't particularly care what it is.

This means that you can't count expenses, notably the power and the card against the profit.

Sure you can. The tax ugliness for assets only comes when you're trading existing assets. The rules for manufacturing are different.

I think it's harder and harder to avoid registering your car. There are automated license plate checkers now - a cop can drive down the street and have the system check for registration on every single car driving the other direction. I think they're used in some places in the US, though they're not widespread.

Yes. But technically you have to do the same thing if you buy and sell euros or yen.

Indeed. Snowden should release a letter of regret to the NSA, thanking them for their interest but indicating he can neither confirm nor deny possession of any NSA files as a matter of personal security.

Hit a little too close to home? For all but a tiny fraction, environmentalism is all about moral preening. It melts away when sacrifices (well, sacrifices to one's own standard of living) are in the offing.

...or maybe people don't really like electric cars as much as they say they do.

I was referring to your knee-jerk reaction referring to "cell-phone cameras", not to the (lack of) desirability of carrying interesting payloads.

There was nothing knee-jerk about it. I'm tired of people spouting idiotic nonsense about magical sensor packages.

Of course, you don't carry satellite quality sensors on reconnaissance planes because reconnaissance planes are not satellites. They don't have to qualify for the environmental condition ranges peculiar to space operations, they don't even have to endure the kind of maintenance-free operation that is regularly required of space equipment. (And also, since they operate in the stratosphere, not in the exosphere, the design considerations for the same objectives are different - different focal lengths required, different speed of the imaging platform, different ways of coping with seeing and other atmospheric influences, etc., but I digress here, as this is not as much about equipment quality but rather about its purpose and design.)

When I say satellite quality sensors I"m talking about things like resolution and tracking. Obviously.