Thanks, good answer to my original question. :)

Agree, but there's honour among pimps and personally I wouldn't want to hire someone who scammed the pimp I'm paying to do the grunt work of finding someone who can fulfill my needs. The standard thing to do if the company finds someone by chance is to hire them thru the agency. The reason that large corporations do this is because they know that for a business deal to work BOTH sides have to profit, but they don't need to profit on every transaction, just the bottom line.

Disclaimer: I was a contractor for 15yrs and permanent for the last 10, I would rather deal with a pimp than HR anyday, most pimps I've met are ex-IT and can actually discuss the "technical bits" without reading from the advertised job description. All you need to know about them is you are their "product", not their customer, they want to make their product attractive. The employer pays the agent for the most attractive, if the employer stops paying for an agent he isn't going to give the money he "saved" to you, he will still need it to hire more HR people to do the work of the agent.

When both sides attack you as biased then you must be doing something right.

"Gamer" demographic: Average age 35, 47% female.

The problem in the US is that electric companies have private networks, same hassle as phone networks. The network itself should be a public utility, electric companies would be contracted by the gov to maintain/improve the network and be charged a usage fee to cover gov costs. Wholesale prices are set by a gov institution, anyone can set themselves up as a retailer and sell for whatever they can get. Net metering for residential connections where the home owner gets the same price as his retail supplier charges. Additional pollution tax for dirty wholesale generators. Of course it would never fly in the US - because 'freedom'.

When I was a kid I was tazed by coffin ray. It was comparable to being zapped by the ignition coil in a car.

Kmart announced today they were also withdrawing GTAV from Aussie stores. All it demonstrates is their sales executives don't understand their average customer to the point a tiny but well organised minority can convince them that they represent the majority of customers.

Science (with a capital 'S') is a philosophy

Science (with a small 's') is a process.

Hypothesis: The fact that Science works leads people to believe it is not a philosophy.

Art is symbolism, it's an important evolutionary leap in the workings of the human mind. It allows our species to pass on experience to future generations that in this case have now morphed into a different species. We have refined that symbolism into language and language into math. Therefore math is actually a highly evolved art that reflects our best understanding of the universe. In fact the best mathematicians describe themselves "playing with math" and "breaking the rules" (eg: imaginary numbers).

Is just symbol that annoys both of us.

Earth is orbiting the BH in the galactic plane, so wouldn't the ring of fire be seen edge on from our perspective?

The formula hasn't changed, the variables are still unknown. Someone simply used recent data to make an educated guess as to the value of one variable. The Drake equation is basically a thought experiment, it was never meant to give a real answer. People who attempt to plug in "more accurate values" are missing the point.

Speaking of shitty code, you do realise that expression resolves to "met its goal", right?

That "professor who went mad" was actually Lord Monckton, they say his eyes bulge out like that because his brain exploded.

I think so too, that's what happens when both sides of politics decide to attack the problem, rather than each other!

Sure cars are a lot safer now than in '69, consequently the Traffic Accident Commission (TAC) have mandatory safety ratings for cars, and they have heavily advertised the rating system for a couple of decades now. Also seat belts were made compulsory in Victoria in 1970, the subsequent drop in the road toll was very noticeable in the stats.

The success of the modern TAC here in Victoria is due to the bipartisan science based approach, but the on road results are why the public genuinely support them. The TAC came into it's current form in the late 80's, we know that random breath tests work because we were amongst the first in the world to introduce them. We watched our stats improve much faster than similar jurisdictions without the RBT's. A few years ago they added the drug lollypop to random testing but so far their use has been limited to the extent I haven't seen one yet despite several random tests in that period.