The Onion had an article on the Ebola vaccine and said that it was only 50 deaths of white-people away. . .

Quincy, Washington, US. Get on Google Maps and see if you can see which large buildings are data centers and which are potato warehouses. Hint, potatoes don't need backup generators. The big one is Microsoft.

Yes, you're the only one. Many of us don't call it anything at all.

You owe me a new keyboard.

If you think you can still be friends with addicts/users, you are mistaken. If they can't get clean, screw them, they will only pull you down.

I suppose it can work with hard drugs or alcohol - I am not, and never was, a user or either, so I'm no specialist though.

However, I AM a nicotine addict. I say nicotine and not tobacco, because I have switched to vaping as a risk mitigation strategy (and quit smoking for good as a result).

One thing I can tell you as a former smoker is, when you're hooked on tobacco, there's no escaping it. You can't avoid being with other smokers, because the smell of cigarette is everywhere. When I quit smoking, it'd only take some random guy who had just smoked outside, walking past me, reeking of cold cigarette smoke, to send me craving like there was no tomorrow.

Random guys who smell of tobacco are everywhere. You just can't escape the smell. You're constantly bombarded with reminders that, yes, you'd really REALLY want to smoke one just right now.

There's actually a long story behind this, and Von Braun was actually arrested because Hitler suspected he was a traitor. Von Braun was a visionary who just loved rockets and wanted to land on the moon and colonize space. The Nazis were a funding means-to-an-end for his rocketry studies. After the Nazis tried to arrest him and his team, he escaped with some equipment and top scientists to defect to the allies.

So no, it's not at all accurate to speculate that Von Braun was a Nazi or into that whole ideology.

He used his expertise to con the Nazis into paying for his very expensive hobby.
Then he came to the USA, and played the same con on Congress to fund his continued work here. Congress thought they were getting ICBMs to wave at the Russians. Von Braun was getting a moon landing, and who gives a shit about politics.

A lot of Slashdot back end code is being rewritten, and HTML5 is supposed to be part of the deal. All the people who actually work on the site and read your comments agree that Flash video is [insert bad word here].

I'm sure someone's crunched the numbers and this makes sense on paper, but seriously? Porting to Itanium before x86? I know HP wants to prop up its teensy niche CPU server line, but I just can't see how to justify that. Who's going to migrate software from old VMS systems to a new one on very highly vendor-locked hardware? It seems like anything likely to ever be updated before the heat death of the universe would probably have made the jump to Linux-on-x86 years ago.

Yep. Their Code of Ethics says:

1.5 Honor property rights including copyrights and patent.

Violation of copyrights, patents, trade secrets and the terms of license agreements is prohibited by law in most circumstances. Even when software is not so protected, such violations are contrary to professional behavior. Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned.

I don't pirate software. I pay for the stuff I use when required. However, I damn sure don't respect software patents or nebulous "terms of license agreement" EULA bullshit. I'll honor them as mandated by law to keep me and my employer out of trouble (although every programmer reading this has probably violated 3 stupid patents today in the course of their job). And while the RIAA doesn't "authorize" me to rip CDs I've bought, I'm legally entitled to do so and will at my convenience.

I think my views are pretty mainstream among programmers. If the ACM wants me to join, they need to remove the requirements for me to worship pro-corporate, anti-citizen, rent-seeking behavior. I can't ethically consent to support their unethical Code of Ethics.

My wife's a doctor and we recently moved to a new state with very protectionistic licensing policies. For example, you're required to have passed the medical boards within the last ten years. Doesn't matter if you're a professor of medicine at Harvard: you had to have passed the boards recently. You know, the ones new doctors take in their senior year of med school when they've been doing nothing but studying for the last for years straight and it's still fresh in their minds. So my wife, who's owned a successful practice for the last (more than 10) years had to pass the given-every-6-months test that determines whether she gets to keep doing the job that she's an expert at.

I'm writing this in sympathy for your situation, and to let you know that it apparently sucks for lots of professions. Your wife's not in it alone, and as someone who went through your role in the situation: I feel your pain. Best of luck to both of you!

I don't know about that. Say the average first year lawyer makes $60,000 (pulled directly from my butt; I have no idea what the actual number is and don't care to look). Suppose that 80% of bar takers pass the exam. That means the expected income for the next six months of a random person taking the bar is 60K * .8 * .5 = 24K. This is the number that a good lawyer could convince a judge (who is a lawyer) that these young, brilliant, aspiring lawyers should be compensated by the testing firm (who is not a lawyer).

That's not shabby pay for a fresh graduate sitting around (ahem, studying!, ahem) until the next testing period rolls around.

Oh wait... they haven't passed the bar yet.