count me in as one of those rare ones. I never finished college (transferred a bunch of times and lost credits so at grad time, I thought I had enough but actually didn't; got a job offer, took it and never finished school). but I've been working in the industry since the early 80's and consider myself to be completely competitive with actual degree-holders.

its hard to get experience without a degree; but one short-cut is to go to a co-op or intern-based school (for me, it was northeastern in boston) and that got me enough starter experience to bootstrap me into the workforce. after that, no one ever really cared about my lack of a sheepskin.

is it racist for EVERY OTHER COUNTRY, when they look after their own, first; and then (maybe) give jobs to foreigners?

no, its not. its called 'common sense'; something that the US is lacking (and the parent poster, too, apparently)

Some places want them to fill lower-level rolls

you'd actually want a kaiser for that, I think. no?

I fully understand what he's saying and he's right.

I started doing software work in the early 80's and it was easy, fast and fun.

now, its about 'scrum' and 'agile' and all that stupid shit (sorry if that offends). we had a simple life with makefiles and cvs, but now the librarians are complex and not intuitive, the build systems are uber complex and the CI (cont. integr.) stuff is a big change (and a whole system in itself) compared to the nightly build idea. code reviews, enforced coding standards add more slowness to the dev cycle. bug reporting systems are also complex.

in short, its no fun anymore for us old guys. I fully see what he's saying. he's not talking about tiny snippets but getting shipping code out the door - its more process than it really needs to be, and the quality is STILL NOT THERE, so I don't think we made any real progress. and add in java where even idiots are allowed to write code (no need to free, whoopee!) and you have people who get lazy and if they ever have to write in C, they are totally lost.

lastly, there are too many fad languages and this wastes everyone's time and since you can't be good at so many things, it spreads you too thin if a project has 5+ languages in it.

That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.

The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)

I had paperbark birch seeds, which are also pretty water tolerant (though not as much as river birch), but none sprouted - ironically I think the seeds were too wet when I stratified them (same with my maples). Isn't river birch (B. nigra) a warm-weather birch species? I've got some cuttings of random local birches from a neighbor but I have no clue whether any of them are water tolerant enough to take swampy ground. Also birches don't usually get that tall so I don't know how expansive of a root system they'll put down. The abundant local species B. nana (dwarf birch) grows (nay, volunteers) readily here almost anywhere that sheep don't graze, but it's just a shrub, I doubt it'd do the trick (though it's probably better than just grass). It can take wet soil, although not totally swampy conditions.

For the wetter areas I also have about a dozen or so western redcedar seedlings - they're not as swamp-tolerant as dawn redwood and western recedar, but they're still reportedly quite tolerant of wet or even waterlogged soils, and they should be more cold/wind hardy than those two (wind is actually the big issue, it doesn't really get that cold here). I've also got a number of other pacific northwest trees with varying degrees of standing water tolerance. Oh, and a species or two of tasmanian mountain eucalyptus (don't remember which ones) that tolerate fairly swampy ground and should at least stand a fighting chance against our winds.

Basically, I'm just going to plant a ton of stuff and see what survives. ;)

One plus is that where the ground is persistently wet and at landslide risk, it is slowly flowing water, it's not standing. It's constantly replaced by fresh, cold ground-filtered water, so there's probably not as much risk of root rot as might be common otherwise. But there's still the oxygen issue. That and the damned sheep, but I'm working to fix that issue once and for all...

Sand slides in an hour glass are instances of "Self Organizing Criticality"

There is a book

Are trees supposed to eliminate the river at the bottom that's been eating away at the foundation of the slope?

The 'pedia says that it's an ancient delta of glacial sand that was subsequently exposed to a lot of water flow, washing out the silt and clay, leaving just the loose sand and gravel with nothing to cement it together.

To be fair, if you look at the scale of that thing, what fell is far deeper than tree roots are going to go.

There was a landslide on my land a few years ago... actually just 50-100 meters from where I'm getting ready to build my house (but the terrain is different, that's a groundwater-infiltrated glacial till-underlain marsh while my house site is basalt bedrock). It's weird looking at pictures of this giant slide, how much it looks like a 20x bigger version of my little one, from the smooth, rimmed conchoidal scarp to the river-damming piles of debris at the bottom. In my case, there were no trees, but there was grass. The grass managed to hold it for a while... but not forever. The roots just don't run deep enough. In my case, the solution (in progress) is surely just to plant water-tolerant trees (here's to hoping that dawn redwood and swamp cypress can survive in Iceland...). But what sort of trees could anchor such a massive slope as the Oso one? I know a lot of desert trees like mesquite can have super-deep root systems, but they wouldn't grow in Washington.

You do realize how commonly men are beaten and murdered, don't you?

Eat your red herrings on your own time. And the next time you pick a red herring in a discussion about rape, you might want to pick one that doesn't also apply virtually equally to women.

Carrying a knife will even things out quite nicely, though. Clawing out eyes works pretty good, too.

Great, so let me see if I've got you right. I'm supposed to walk around armed at all times (illegal here), and try to claw out the eyes of someone who's strong enough to pick me up and carry me up a hill as if it's nothing and could almost certainly easily beat me to a pulp, and if I don't, then it's my fault and its not really rape? Is this what you'd consider a just society, just laws and just standards? Where through no fault of her own a woman can be given the choice between "be f***ed by some guy you don't want to" or "get most likely beaten to a pulp and then f***ed by him", and if she chooses the former, even if she says no over a hundred times and tries repeatedly to walk away, then there's no crime?

I found the cited article (always with the indirect sources...) ("No Penis, No Problem"), but I'm having trouble tracking down some of their data for further analysis.

For example, I found the CIUS data on rates of arrest for various sex crimes, and the numbers match, but they don't define non-rape "sex offenses except forceable rape and prostitution" anywhere that I can locate. Given that indecent exposure, for example, is usually classified as a sex offense excluding forcible rape and prostitution, that kind of matters.

I tried to track down that "large survey of college-age women" (cite 111), but the citation is just to a book which isn't available online (at least not the relevant part). I cross-checked the author's name and the claimed data and found no peer-reviewed publications about it.

The cite for 112 is the same as for 111.

The cite for 116 is interesting because most of the results I find when I search for it are criticizing the authors for using bad methodology to support a "satanism scare", that nursery school teachers are ritually sexually molesting children for satanic purposes. It was only focusing on cases supposedly connected to satanism, and was alleging that there's a widespread problem with women running day care centers hold satanic parties with the whole staff taking part in mass sex abuse. Needless to say, this was another book, not a peer-reviewed paper.

The cite for 117 is the same as for 111.

Oh, and for this?

Females using implements still didn't count as attackers of males under that one either, natch

May I direct you to:

14-27.5. Second-degree sexual offense.
(a) A person is guilty of a sexual offense in the second degree if the person engages in a sexual act with another person:
(1) By force and against the will of the other person; or
(2) Who is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless, and the person performing the act knows or should reasonably know that the other person is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.

and

Sexual act also means the penetration, however slight, by any object into the genital or anal opening of another person's body: provided, that it shall be an affirmative defense that the penetration was for accepted medical purposes.

Oh, gee, but some guy gave some "bitches, they got it easy about rape" rant and you believed him.

Again, another case of "info I heard from some guy that made me mad so I'm repeating it here".

North Carolina's rape law The basics? North Carolina does indeed consider only vaginal sexual assault "rape" (first degree or second degree), but immediately below that they list the crime of "sexual assault" (again, first degree or second degree), which covers everything else and has the exact same penalties. So it's just a state legal terminology issue and has no practical consequences.

These things take 10 seconds to look up, is that really that onerous to do before pushing a "women are a bunch of coddled whiners when it comes to rape and men are the real victims" attitude on public forums?

Do you people get your information from a game of telephone or something? Seriously, double check things before you post.

Texas's rape law The basics?

22.011. SEXUAL ASSAULT. (a) A person commits an offense if the person:
(1) intentionally or knowingly:
(A) causes the penetration of the anus or sexual organ of another person by any means, without that person's consent;
(B) causes the penetration of the mouth of another person by the sexual organ of the actor, without that person's consent; or
(C) causes the sexual organ of another person, without that person's consent, to contact or penetrate the mouth, anus, or sexual organ of another person, including the actor;

No exceptions for gender.