Look no further than Samuel L. Jackson, who's a talented individual, but came off as stiff and wooden in the Star Wars movies.

"Hand me my lightsaber."
"Which one is it?"
"It's the one that says 'Bad Mother Fucker" on it."

At least he had a sense of humor about it. He was pretty damned funny in the Robot Chicken parody.

and insisted on directing (the one of the six he didn't direct was by far the the best film of the lot).

Lucas didn't direct "Return of the Jedi" either - that was Richard Marquand.

"What is it?"

"Your father's HOSTS file. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight admin. Not as clumsy or random as a DNS server; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age."

And that was with already having a much better headstart on her career than most, having been descended from Hollywood royalty.

For sure. Air is ordinarily very benign and quite necessary to sustain human life, but not so much when it's injected into a vein.

It's only 76 miles, so not quite "all the way across the country", but Virginia Beach's pipeline to Lake Gaston has worked out pretty well. It provides 60 million gallons/day, and so far none of the issues that people were clamoring about have cropped up.

Monsanto has been selling Roundup Ready sweet corn since 2011 through their Seminis subsidiary.

Always encouraging to see management failing to understand the sunk-cost fallacy.

Furthermore most of the squabbling over systemd seems to be about the fact that some people do not like that systemd gives you more control and flexibility over the startup process.

You appear to have misinterpreted what "most of the squabbling" is actually about.

who if they wanted to could simply tailor Debian to use their own init system, so if they dont like systemd, why dont they just put in their own init program after they install debian?

...and after they remove all of the dependencies on systemd from all of the non-init-related packages that are using it.

...but you have to give him points for consistency and not giving the first damn what *anyone* thinks of him. It can sometimes be a little grating, but generally it's quite refreshing to interact with people that lay all their cards out, whom you don't have to second-guess or wonder whether they have ulterior motives.

I never pressed him for the details of the fight, but my personal experience was that he's one of the most laid-back and funniest people I've ever known, and I've never seen him even come close to losing his temper. I wasn't making any kind of judgment regarding his conviction, just saying that having a felony on one's record doesn't mean one doesn't have legitimately marketable skills.

We need someone in authority to step up, tell the American people what is going on, and take the heat for it.

So Wyden spills the beans, goes to jail, and then we're left with no one on the inside that will let us know that the intelligence community is still overstepping their bounds. As a bonus, after Wyden tells everyone what's going on, the executive branch refuses to take any action and continues to cow the legislature into letting them do what they want because the rest of the Intelligence Committee is largely a stunning exercise in uselessness.

As long as he remains in office and on the Committee, Wyden is doing more good being on the inside - certainly more good than those like Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Mikulski, or my own state's elected dickhead Marco Rubio. Only in the event Wyden loses his place on the Committee or fails to get re-elected would coming out and telling everything he knows be potentially useful.

Remember - by law, you can't discriminate against them.

True in some cases, but not as a blanket statement. The EEOC says an employer's policies regarding one's criminal history cannot be used as an employment criteria if:

They significantly disadvantage Title VII-protected individuals such as African Americans and Hispanics; AND
They do not help the employer accurately decide if the person is likely to be a responsible, reliable, or safe employee.

I had a former co-worker that was convicted of felony battery years prior to the current job. The employer would have been well within their rights to deny him a job based solely on the second criteria.

There is only one reason to hire a criminal, and that is planning to do something criminal.

Well, there's also the situation where the ex-con is actually good at what he does. Back in 2010 I did some contract work for a large and established company (big/old enough to have a pre-ARIN /16 netblock), and I shared a cubicle with a guy that had a third-degree felony battery conviction after putting a guy in the hospital during a bar fight years earlier, and happened to be a wicked sharp Java coder with great customer interaction skills. Even with the clearly disclosed felony on his record, he was eventually extended quite a nice offer to go onboard as a permanent employee.