Plus they were afraid that if they exposed the U.S.'s fake moon landing, the U.S. would expose their fake Sputnik. ;-)

It sounds like he was also recently employed, though, which is the easy case. Employers generally have absolutely no clue how to screen for competence, so go almost entirely on resume. If the person you're mentioning has 5 years of recent experience with "a large vendor of telecommunications equipment" and didn't leave because he was fired, he's got a nice resume, so won't have problems finding tech jobs.

The people who have trouble are those who have a big gap in their employment history. Even the people who are really good at what they do have trouble finding interviews, compared to the seat-warmer who has N years of experience at a big company.

A lot of AM stations are automated these days also, syndicating popular national talk-radio programs. Any idea how to find out which ones aren't?

The laws of war generally oppose weapons intentionally intended to maim rather than kill. Mostly dates to popular revulsion around the WW1 era over weapons designed to inflict nonlethal but gruesome casualties to hobble the other side by flooding their hospitals and supply chains. As a result, countries agreed to a ban on various chemical weapons, expanding bullets, weapons designed to blind people, etc.

Also true in actual careers like nursing fwiw. There's a nursing shortage (at least in the U.S.), and men are very underrepresented in the field, so nursing schools have been going out of their way to recruit men.

Isn't it pretty explicit that the lights are on? Review of applications isn't some kind of blind-review process.

It seems to be structured as kind of an intro to programming, which is one way CS101 classes (in Harvard terminology, CS50) are structured. Not really an intro to CS the discipline, but a broad intro to computers/programming in general for people who may or may not go into CS. Traditionally MIT took the opposite approach, but many schools took this approach.

Fwiw, you can find the 2013 version of the curriculum here (it seems to have been also co-offered as a MOOC). It does seem a bit like a grab-bag of "random stuff in computers".

Harvard gets far, far more applicants in every area than they can possibly accept to their relatively small student body. So shifts among disciplines and interests almost entirely reflect decisions on the part of Harvard admissions policies. They don't necessarily reflect shifts in either broader society or even the subset of society that applies to Harvard. It's possible they do, but it's also possible Harvard explicitly decided to accept more CS applicants for various reasons.

My guess, without having any particular knowledge, is that the factory will have some kind of internal grid system (fairly common), and aligning the factory with a compass direction means you can easily convert between internal coordinates and lat/lon GPS coordinates. Of course assuming you aren't converting by hand, it's not really hard to convert even if the factory were not axis-aligned.

I could be way off, but I can't think of another way that statement could make sense.

Interesting that wearing a wristwatch might now, again, be more eccentric than wearing a pocketwatch.

Sounds like weird innovation that as an old-school technologist I'm not comfortable with. I come to Slashdot for the opposite of those things.

There's no consistent US/EU difference on that. Some states in the U.S. apply full sales tax to groceries (Alabama, Hawaii, Kansas, etc.), some apply a reduced tax (Georgia, Illinois, etc.), and some exempt groceries entirely (California, Texas, etc.). The same goes in the EU with VAT: some apply the full rate (Denmark), others apply a reduced rate (Belgium, France, etc.), and some exempt groceries entirely (UK, Malta).

If it's earned there, yes, though that's not always the case. Companies play a lot of games with where they choose to book expenses and income. Lots of companies are officially earning a lot of money in places like Luxembourg and Ireland that is really earned elsewhere.

I do think kettles are getting more common in the U.S., but in the '90s they were almost unknown. Another factor imo is that microwaves have been ubiquitous in American kitchens for decades, and are commonly used to heat water, so there's already a common alternative to the stove. They're not a great option for boiling water, but they're a common way (in the U.S.) of making near-boiling water for brewing tea or making ramen.