The map you're looking for is here. If I remember correctly, yellow is Millenium/Broadstripe/Wave, everything else is Comcast. In shaded areas of the Comcast section, Millenium can wire individual apartment or condo buildings. For example, I live in a Comcast area of Capitol Hill but we only have Millenium in my building, most likely because they offered either the building management or the builder an incentive (e.g., wired the building for cable for free in exchange for a multiyear contract).

Every time somebody complains about their Comcast internet in Seattle, I want to smack them upside the head. Try living in an area or building that only has Millenium/Broadstrap/Wave for cable service. I dream of going back to Comcast after dealing with CenturyLink's reliable and cheap but extremely slow (usually 35Kb up, 2-3Mb down) DSL. Millenium is a non-starter with their higher prices and shitty service.

Not necessarily. Decriminalization can also refer to changing marijuana possession from a crime (i.e., you go to jail) to an infraction (i.e., you pay a small fine). It can be the difference between, say, a felony and a parking ticket.

Adjunct faculty are basically the academic equivalents of temps (no benefits, low pay, term-by-term contract) or are only working part-time while making their living from another job (e.g., professional musician teaching on the side). Generally, not "a pretty good job".

These Amazon distribution centers are operated by wholly owned subsidiaries. Amazon claims that it's not their sales business that has a business presence there, but rather the subsidiaries which are technically separate companies that just happen to be owned by Amazon.

Sounds like another instance of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

EU members have passed extensive tax harmonization over the years. Rates are set by country and the details of what's taxable where and for how much has been made consistent throughout the union. No such thing has happened or is practical in the US. Every state has its own rules for what's taxed at what rate. For example, in most states you don't have to pay sales tax on food items bought at the grocery store, but in others you still have to pay sales tax on those items fully or in some states at a lower rate than you would for non-food items. In New York, you don't have to pay sales tax on clothing. North Carolina has an annual sales tax holiday where certain items like books are sales tax free for 3 days a year.

What really makes it complex though is that the rates or rules are not consistent across an entire state because local governments can also have their own taxes. Where I live in Seattle, we pay the base 6.5% Washington state sales tax plus 3% in local taxes. Some of those local taxes go to the city where the item is purchased, some to the county where the item was purchased and yet some goes to the regional transit authority spanning multiple counties. On top of that, if you're buying food and beverages in a restaurant, there's an additional 0.5% which goes to pay off debt for stadiums.

There are tens of thousands of different individual jurisdictions just like this across the country. Harmonization would mean elimination of dedicated funding sources for local governments which is just very unlikely to happen any time soon.

A few years ago, I took a training course on something or other (I think it was object-oriented design patterns). The instructor brought up an excellent example from outside the software world--germ theory and hygienic medical practices. Ignaz Semmelweis had shown that doctors washing their hands dramatically reduced mortality of patients in hospitals. At the time, his contemporaries thought he was crazy and many were offended by the implication that their hands were unclean. Even after Pasteur proved the biological mechanism of germ theory many years later, it still took years for handwashing to become a completely accepted medical practice because many doctors felt they just didn't have time for it.

Good software engineering practices like code reviews, source control, bug tracking, unit testing, etc. are generally no different. If applied correctly, they should reduce the overall time to release a product.

That's not just Prineville. All gas in Oregon must be pumped by an attendant. It's illegal to do it yourself.

Don't forget the implications of the BSD/AT&T lawsuit in the early 90s on the rise of Linux. Even Linus himself has admitted that had 386/BSD been available to him (i.e., not caught up in a major lawsuit which delayed development and release of other BSD derivatives), he probably would have never written Linux.

Many years ago I worked for a small startup that pirated pretty much every piece of software we used. This wasn't light piracy of not keeping track of licenses or something of that nature. People there had literally had downloaded programs like Word and Photoshop from warez sites. As a startup, we were broke and felt somewhat justified in not being able to afford software.

Eventually we were acquired by a mid-sized company (maybe 500 employees or so) that was reasonably profitable. When my boss went to ask for budget to actually buy the software to replace illegal copies, he was told that employees are expected to buy their own tools and that no budget would be provided. Literally, we were probably talking about the equivalent of Adobe CS for 3 or 4 people--not a ton of money for something that's critical to doing your job. So did our designers go out and buy Photoshop? Hell, no! We all just kept using the pirated versions and muttered about turning them into the SBA some day.

That management didn't even respect us enough to buy us the tools we needed to do the job was pretty detrimental to the morale. Like many startups, we all left within a year or so of acquisition. I'd have turned them into the SBA in a hot minute after leaving, but I just wanted to move on with my life at that point and just didn't want to bother with figuring out how to report them.

A few years ago, I was searching for the company's information while updating my resume. The first page of search results were all about an SEC filing against the CEO for some sort of insider trading and securities fraud. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people.