IANAL, and I don't know what the specifics of the FCRA are, but the summary says "providing" and not "selling." It's not a stretch to see how someone like Google could fall afoul of this (as a test case, Google "spacepimp" or your real name and see if you recognize anything "personally identifiable." My guess is the answer is an emphatic "yes").

This was my thought, as well. The plaintiff is either a privacy advocate (something that I support in general), or someone just looking for a payday (something that I oppose in general). In either case, his reasoning is highly suspect.

What kind of chips do you think they put in thier servers and workstations, Doritos?

Calling out the hypocrites accomplishes exactly nothing--the required solution is to actually PUNISH someone for their bad behavior. It doesn't matter if where you start is a democrat or republican, liberal or conservative, white or black, male or female, etc. until you start actually DOING something about the problem, you will continue to see the same bad behavior.

When we've reduced the entire conversation to "$PERSON did the same thing" "You're a hypocrite" we've ensured that nothing will change.

First thought: your manager was a tool, and generally a waste of space--actually he wasn't even THAT useful, since he actively made things worse overall.

That said... the above quote is a bit damning. You claimed you needed two additional people, an empty task list, and two years. You did the job in two years, with other tasks encroaching on your time, and with a single new grad that you only had for 21 of those months. Either your project was a death march (not ruling that out, mind you), or your estimate was woefully off--maybe to the point that the dipshit manager, if you two had a history, simply didn't trust your ability to give him a good answer and modified it per past performance.

I'm sure there were many more factors in play than you mentioned above, which probably invalidate what I'm saying, but it might be worth taking a step back here and asking yourself if you made any mistakes you could learn from (other than working for Mr Clueless, of course).

More simple explanation: Life is out there, it's just too far away to detect, or to visit us--and will ALWAYS be so, because you can't cheat Newton and Einstein. An alternate "simplest" explanation (though less likely) is that we are first.

To suggest that ET hasn't come to visit us because we are "too violent" or whatever, and that they are masking their presence is definitely NOT the simplest explanation--it suggests that every nearby alien species has agreed to isolate us, and every member of those civilizations is on board with the idea. No one is out there playing with an RF emitter in the VHF band, Harry Mudd hasn't stopped by and spilled the beans, no one's even accidentally done anything to give the game away.

Sorry, I'm just not buying that.

I think that the submitter getting all "zOMG they're running the whole damn country on 10.0.0.0/8!!!!11one" is at best premature, but assuming that they were, I'm wondering why you'd believe it's organized as one flat network requiring any kind of magic to operate? There's plenty of room to subnet in that /8...

Sound quality is great these days... They've replaced the telephone wire systems with low power FM transmitters with a range of about a mile or so., so the sound is as good as your car or boom box can produce, and there's a fringe benefit if you live locally of being able to listen to the movie.

The only time my wife and I go to the movies anymore is to the drive-in. Seven bucks a head, and we get to see two or even three movies (usually one new release, and one that is between one and three weeks old). Bring your own snacks, and the movie theater snack bar is cheap as well (I think the highest priced item on the menu is a patty melt (hamburger with cheese and onions) which is like $4.50.

The downside is they're only open in the summer.

There's enough uranium to last a very, very long time--effectively forever, if we manage it properly. The problem is that we throw away something like 99% of it (referring to it as "waste") using the current fuel cycle.

Heat problem must be already solved, see the battlemaster ppc example. Also, while I can't imagine mounting an avenger cannon in a vehicle other than a warthog, I also can't imagine turning it into a giant pistol, either. I imagine that if I could do one, the other would be, if not easily achievable, at least something a good engineer skilled in the art could accomplish.

You know, I haven't had a conversation like this since rec.games.mecha died off. .. Brings back memories.

Yeah, I get the in universe explanation, what I question is why this was an issue in the first place. A mech carrying around a giant pistol should be all the inspiration you need to get from point a to point b , and it's not like it's a big engineering challenge given that you already managed to modularize the thing into a pistol form factor to begin with (especially when you civilization is keeping FTL travel going with spot and balling wire... You've got to have some seriously talented engineers).

Maybe they just had really aggressive patent attorneys in the star league era? Like "on the internet" patents turned into "on a battlemech" patents and ComStar held the IP with multi century terms, while the clans were the actual successor (no pun intended) in interest... The whole battle of Tukayyid thing was actually over who owned the omnimech rights, which is why they called it a trial. Make about as much sense as the actual storyline, I guess.

Never understood why the omnimech was supposed to be such a big deal... The battle master carried a ppc around in its hand for centuries.

You're 53 years old, posting as AC, and feel the need to announce that you're a transsexual and dare anyone to have a problem with you? FWIW, I don't think it's the world that has a problem with you--it seems like you have a problem with the world.

MS had an after-tax income of over 21 billion dollars in 2013. No idea where you're coming up with a $32B loss. Ballmer was a horrible CEO, but the biggest problem was that MS continued to make money--LOTS of money--while he was destroying the company's value, which made him look absolutely great on paper.