The beatings^Wlayoffs will continue until morale improves.

I think training someone else to do a job is harder than doing the job, so I'd say they were better than qualified.

How is IM a new trend? AIM, ICQ, and XMPP have been around since the mid to late 1990s. IRC is even older, if you want to count that as IM. AIM and ICQ are only slightly older now than SMTP was when they first appeared (approximately 20 years vs. 15 years), but they were only about 5 years after HTTP and HTML, and IRC was developed before HTTP and HTML.

In other words, it's a scientific hypothesis. That doesn't mean it's wrong. That doesn't mean it's likely to be wrong. It only means that we don't have a bunch of extra Earths lying around with which to conduct repeatable experiments that would confirm the predictions of the hypothesis. The hypothesis might be wrong, even if the likelihood of its being wrong is very low.

By the way, science is never proven. Proofs are for mathematicians.

Uh, no, a sensible, scientifically literate person should consider it a valid scientific hypothesis. Sure, it might be completely wrong, but it probably isn't.

It's almost as if they improved Windows XP over the span of a decade.

Nah, that couldn't be it.

Well played, sir.

I think it's more than just accepting lower salary, but also accepting more abuse. A 23-year-old is less likely to have other major commitments (in particular, a family). It's a lot more difficult to force someone to work 60+ hours per week when they have to be home to help take care of the kids.

At which point you wait for a second, then answer "older". Besides, don't you have anything better to do on your birthday?

Saying that the Democrats are to the left of the Republicans doesn't make the Democrats "left", it only makes them "less right". There are some politicians who actually are left-wing (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are two that have been in the news lately; Kucinich was the only one in the 2008 Democratic primaries), but most of the leadership of the Democratic party are not.

No, the Democratic party isn't a left-wing party because overall they aren't really socialist at all, despite what Fox News repeats ad nauseum. Most Democratic politicians like to claim that they are so that they can get some votes, but their actions rarely match their words.

Keep in mind that authoritarianism is an orthogonal concept; you can have right-wing authoritarians (e.g. most current Republican politicians), and you can have left-wing authoritarians (usually what most people think Communism is, such as the USSR). As always, I point people to Political Compass.

Uh, no, "the correct amount of regulation and no more" is what everyone wants, there's just disagreement about how much is "correct". I've never met anyone that wants to create new regulations just for funsies.

I dunno, I hear Somalia is a Libertarian paradise these days.

That's pretty much it. The United States has two major political parties: a right-wing party, and a far right-wing party.

Yup, but it's almost impossible to find outside of New England, and fairly difficult to find outside of Maine.

Purely for the sake of argument, let's say you can get one person per minute to give you one dollar, and you're at an intersection for two hours during the morning commute and two hours during the evening commute. That's $240 per day, $1200 per week, and $60k per year, without paying any income taxes. Certainly not rich, but doing pretty well.