Correct. At one point I was told that I would have to quit my current job before I could be interviewed for a position at another of these companies. Naturally, applying for a position while newly unemployed would handicap my salary negotiating ability. The businesses viewed the anti-poaching deals as convenient for their HR operation and containing payroll costs. No pesky counter-offers...

No ASM programming?

That would be Knuth, of course. MIX, or, starting Volume 4 and the eventual Ultimate Edition of Volumes 1-3, MMIX.
The development of hardware capable of using this assembler is an exercise left to the reader.

They aren't the same thing. Your example is inefficient because it uses more labour to achieve the same result - a shorter working week would get less done but require less work to do it, which isn't less efficient.

Nah. We'll get the efficiency back via unpaid overtime.

Yeah! This'll fix em! Every time one of those electric vehicles pulls into a gas station, their mileage tax gets added onto... their... gas... bill. Oh. Never mind...

I'm pretty sure that if you prove P=NP, that there may be consequences. It you are very, very lucky, Bob from the Laundry will pop by and arrange for a new career for you, or at least keep your brain from being eaten.

If you're not so lucky, well, pointing a loaded theorem at the ... things ... that cast shadows on the walls of Plato's cave may make them pay attention. This is, however, a dangerous process, because many of the shadow-casters are unclear on the distinction between pay attention and free lunch buffet here. [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#The_.22Bob_Howard_.E2.80.94_Laundry.22_series

Ah, you should probably be aware that the phone company does this already for all cell phones. The database can be queries by any 'authenticated agent', a person with an account and password, such as a law enforcement officer. Social engineering works well, too. The US Justice Department classifies this information as 'routine business documents', not requiring a warrant.

If you don't want your location history known to others. do not carry a cell phone.

Although Microsoft wasn't the first to market with motion-controlled games (see: Nintendo Wii), they did capture the market by building a next-generation motion control system. Have we seen any hints in WP7 that Microsoft has created anything but an also-ran in the smartphone space?

Ah, it's articles like this that make me so glad I'm retired!

C++ programmers have it too easy. Why, in C we had to code our own bugs. C++ programmers just inherit them!

Ah, I remember looking at the sorting algorithm in a low level graphics library. Tightly hand coded, packed to keep every pipeline stage filled and make optimal use of all the parallel units in a VLIW graphics processor, it was probably the most efficient bubble sort I'd ever seen.

I coded up a quicksort to about the same degree of tightness in a couple days, and, golly gee, a whole bunch of code suddenly got faster. Some MUCH faster... That was Lesson 1 for me. Optimize algorithms before optimizing implementations.