Let's not forget the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that collapsed in November, 1940 during high winds.

I didn't say you shouldn't be able to be paid in vacation days or in insurance or in gallons of milk. All I am saying is that you should be able to make those choices for yourself and not have government dictate to you how to get paid.

Agreed. However, the whole point of my post was not just to show that there's more to your compensation than just what you see on your paycheck but to give an example of how such alternate forms of payment can be worth much more than most people think.

You want to get medical insurance through your employer then your hourly rate is going to be lower, same with any tax.

Back in the '50s my father voted in favor of a proposal by his union to accept medical benefits instead of a raise in the hourly rate. Years later, he told me he considered it one of the best decisions he ever made.

Now that we have the Magic Helmet, is somebody going to develop the spear that's supposed to go with it?

It's important to note that when speaking about infinity don't fall into the fallacy of treating it as a value.

Even trained mathematicians can fall into that trap. In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker made the mistake of talking about a mountain that was "more than infinitely tall," which is nothing more than gibberish. I don't recommend that book to anybody, and this is just one of the many reasons I was disappointed by it.

My point is that all of those emails I get about accounts I don't have is a counter-example to the claim that spear-phishing is carefully crafted to look real.

I still think we should get Galaxy Quest back on the air.

The spam from your bank doesn't normally address you by name...

Actually, much of the spam/phishing email I get claiming to be from my bank has my name in the subject. I'm rather glad it does because I never get any real email from my bank that does this, so seeing my name there is a dead giveaway.

In spear-phishing, the emails are tailored to the intended victim, pretending to be from someone the attacker knows or believes the victim trusts...

You mean like the urgent notices I get about my accounts at banks I've never done business with or the "invoices" from companies I've never heard of before, let alone done business with?

From what I've heard, the current UI for Windows was designed for a tablet, then forced onto desktops, but that's just hearsay because, as I wrote above, I only use Linux.

I'd love to see a single UI that works across...

You might, but I, at least, wouldn't because what you'd end up with was a UI that worked equally badly on all types of screens and wasn't really right for any of them. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, preferring to use Linux, but I will say that they're right in not trying to shoehorn a One True UI onto everything.

My hearing is bad enough that I need to use hearing aids, although I can get along to some extent without them. When I watch TV, I always have the Closed Captioning turned on and have, in fact abandoned shows that stopped providing it. Yes, providing it at need uses up a little more bandwidth, but very, very little. We don't need to throw out Net Neutrality to get closed captioning, especially when you consider the fact that most people won't ever need it.

I've also had the snail mailed fake invoices from them, which I can only suppose is an illegal use of the whois database.

It's also Mail Fraud, and the owners should already be in prison for what they've been doing. Let's hope that the Feds get off their asses and earn their salaries.

I like my system of avoiding this kind of scam better: my (vanity) domain is registered using my correct snail address, but I've told the registrar that I only want email from them, no paper. That means that if and when I get something in my mailbox claiming to be a bill for registration, I just throw it away unopened because I know it's not legit.

Formal logic is a branch of mathematics.

Yes, I know, but very few people except mathematicians think of it that way. Most people consider it to be an entirely different study so I phrased it that way to emphasize that much of computer programming has nothing to do with what the average person thinks of as math.