What sibling said.

I've been socked with life events that drained all the financial liquidity I thought I had... and at the same time had to go hunt down a new job. The solution was simple - I took the first one that looked halfway decent that allowed my family to stay fed, clothed, and warm. I then busted my hump to improve my finances over a year, then went looking for a better job when it was clear the one I was at wasn't going anywhere. Turned out that I became the most valuable member of the team when I left (turnover and skill/initiative played equal roles), but by then it was too late for them (protip: never, ever accept a counteroffer!)

Now I'm doing even better than I was before SHTF. Sure, life events make you eat a shit sandwich on occasion, but you grunt through it and build back up.

It's even easier than that... I just short circuit the whole conversation by saying (and yes, this is a direct quote): "I'm looking for $x per year to mitigate the risks of leaving my current position and to make it worthwhile - meet the number, beat the number, or we'll both be wasting our time." ($x equals my assessment of the current market for the position).

It destroys any pussy-footing around, allows you to get right down to assessing the rest of the company. Note that I have also had polite refusals at other interviews and the conversation ended there, but those were very rare. By doing it this way, I've increased my yearly salary in the past few jobs by $13k and $27k over the past 12 months (a $13k bump to a contract-to-hire position that I'd later soured on, and a further bump of $27k to my current position's salary.)

YMMV, but it works out very well.

"...magic"? No. The law has a very clear reason for exempting someone who kills in the name of self defense and/or defense of others - otherwise you'd need a cop posted at a coverage of something like one for every 10,000 square feet of jurisdiction (...which is not very practical in rural areas, yanno). It boils down to this: Everyone has the right to defend him/herself against deadly threat with whatever force is necessary to neutralize said threat. It works partly as a deterrent (at least in rural areas), and partly as a mechanism to actually help the police keep law and order in areas/situations that they cannot reach in time.

Incidentally, it's almost an identical exemption that police have when using deadly force, save for the fact that the police officer is (ostensibly) under a greater burden of proof due to his training and because of his privilege to act as the state's agent (with deadly force if necessary) in keeping order.

Now we can quibble over the "currently popular" reasons why you brought up that example, but the underlying concepts are sound and should remain so.

I wish I had known how mundane and utterly banal most software development is.

I spend 99% of my time on bug fixes, documentation, configuration management, and writing new code that quite frankly, aside from exact implementation, isn't that much different than code I wrote 10 years ago.

"I need to shuffle data from point A to point B."
"I need to hit an API and stuff the result somewhere."
"I need to make sure the user doesn't enter something retarded into this form."

Maybe 1% of the work I do is even remotely interesting. Why? Because of the flood of software frameworks and libraries that take care of all that interesting stuff for you. A vast majority of us don't have to care about the best algorithm for X, for example - that work has already been done. Software is more like legos these days. You take the pieces you want and put them together.

That is good in that making software is easier and faster than ever before, but it is murder for people who did this stuff because it was interesting. There's very little mystique these days.

1. I would not do the same things second time around, wouldn't be doing full time university and full time work, I would quit the university, do full time not for 5 years as I did but for maybe 4, move onto the contracts then as I did at first, but not do contracts for 10, instead do it for 5 and start my own business 6 years sooner after getting just enough experience anyway.

2. I wouldn't bother buying and fixing and renting/selling properties as I did on the side, that diluted my effort and pulled me back from starting my own real business.

Basically if I could talk to myself 20 years ago, I would tell myself to skip college altogether, work right away (as I basically did anyway, but I did full time studies and full time job, which was unnecessarily difficult). I would make sure to explain to myself how to properly save money from much younger age and tell myself to start the business much earlier.

To be fair, in the vast majority of cases, this is exactly what happens... cop engages brain, realizes that the situation either either something dumb, mistaken, or impossible to prosecute (and is otherwise not a crime), says as much to the complainant, and moves on. Or, in the case of what may be a crime but turns out to not be, same-same, with maybe a stern talking-to of the 'offender' that maybe he should not be so dumb in the future, or at least don't make the activity appear so damned suspicious. ...and then there's the small minority of police officers who are either overeager newbies, had a really bad day, decides he doesn't like the guy, didn't get laid the night before, a closet sociopath, or suchlike.

About the same sample size as humanity at large, really, but with one subtle-yet-important distinction: force.

But yeah, otherwise, a blanket statement like yours is, well, a blanket statement that holds little meaning in the real world, since most police already do use their brains before acting.

There's more to it than making the screen look like a desktop... Not being a Windows 10 beta-testing type, an honest question or two: have they finally gotten rid of all of the 'admin-by-easter-egg' bullshit (e.g. the Charms Bar)? Is the UI actually usable without a touch-screen, or will that still require a few of the workarounds that Windows 8/8.1/9 did?

...because in an enterprise environment, that nag icon is a bullshit equivalent to spamming (e.g. wasting folks' time with a sales pitch). No other OS bothers the user with 'OMG update your shit because we need the money!' nags every time someone logs into it.

You assume he changed his stance. I think his stance hasn't changed - he just said what he needed to say to get elected. In other words, he lied. This is nothing new for him, by the way.

Nobody teaches you how to handle 100,000,000 simultaneous user requests. Throwing more and more hardware at it is what you cannot escape when dealing with tens of millions of users a second. At least Google is not a bank, where things really need to be synchronized across accounts and be perfectly transactional. It doesn't matter to Google that there are no transactions. A piece of data presented to a user in the USA may be different than the one presented to a user in Japan, but it isaybe an answer to the same question, but the data did not propagate all the way everywhere yet. Even so, it is quite a challenge to deal with hundreds of millions of users daily and tens or hindreds of millions concurrent user requests a second. They are doing it really well too. I can only imagine the massive problems that need to be solved. It is jarring. Good stuff.

It seemed that the company did, in fact, have growth on track: The article mentioned that in 2014 sales were up 40%. That's huge, and it shows that whatever they were doing was working. The company was actually doing well and had broke even for the first time.

Investors were likely unwilling to dump more money into the company because they saw these lawsuits and said, "Damn man, there's no way I'm going to make my money back in a reasonable amount of time. Sorry dude."

So... Thanks, France.

Isn't socialism wonderful? Workers of the world unite and all that? I mean, obviously, the business is rich with unlimited funds because it's a business, right?

So I read that this problem dates back to 1988 (so they say). Reminds me of a two envelope joke. A president steps down due to scandals, gives his replacement 2 envelopes. Tells him to open the first one when there is the first serious problem he cannot handle and the second one in case of another problem.

The replacement starts on the job, eventually there is a serious political problem he cannot solve. He opens the first envelope and it says: blame everything on the previous guy. So he does and the problem goes away. Later there is another problem that cannot be solved, the guy opens the second envelope and in says: prepare 2 envelopes.

I think somebody opened the first envelope.

Odd that Wakefield's co-author, accused of the same things, had his indictment reversed on appeal. Wakefield did not have malpractice insurance, and his appeal was denied.

And, of course, the oft-quoted Danish study was conducted by a researcher now under indictment for fraud: Paul Thorsen.

For now. In a few years I fully expect additional funds to be appropriated so that people can have both services subsidized.

Ummm... no, he didn't. There were a couple of issues with the study, the primary one being that a temporal association between the administration of the vaccine and the onset of autistic enterocolitis should never have implied causality. The study was important because it identified the colon symptoms present in a subset of patients with ASD as a distinct disorder. But it was misinterpreted in the press, especially for a study where the primary findings involved only 12 patients.

The main author never signed on to the minor retraction. There was nothing close to a confession of "making the whole thing up", but some (questionable) researchers from other institutions have made that accusation.