Doesn't solve the problem. The gun has some way of detecting that it shouldn't fire. How do you make this reliable to the point that there are no false negatives? If it can reliably fire when the owner is firing with his injured off-hand that has dirt and blood smeared all over the sensor(s), it will probably fire for just about anybody.

If it happens often, it's bad management. If it happens once in a while, well, that's software development. Predictions aren't perfect, and even well-founded estimates can be wrong.

Except that the discussion was on health care costs, and you're complaining about government-paid long-term housing and similar things. Do you know how much of that 40K extra taxes goes to health care, and how much to other programs you don't like?

I've seen it used in sources older than I am, although then it was "pirate publishers" and presumably for profit. I'm conservative about new meanings for old words, but at my age I'm happy if it's older than I am.

At the very least, it beats "downloading without paying". This year, I downloaded gigabytes without paying anybody (except my monthly flat rate for Internet access), trying to decide on the Linux distro for my new computer, and this was perfectly legal and moral.

Public projects that were finished on time? How about the new 35W bridge in Minneapolis, MN? Looks great too.

I believe the Metrodome came in under budget and on schedule, and that wasn't cut-and-dried. I don't think there was much experience with inflatable domes for baseball and football stadiums before.

On a smaller scale, I've been on plenty of software projects that finished on time (and plenty that didn't).

The number of pre-vaccine deaths due to chicken pox was ~100 a year.

However, the discussion was about whooping cough, which kills somewhere around 300K a year. Chicken pox is a very mild disease, It's still worth not getting if you can manage (I was miserable for a few days, and it can cause shingles later in life), but it in general does not kill the host.

You're attacking vaccination against a fairly deadly disease by arguing that vaccination against a far less dangerous disease doesn't save many lives. This is intellectually dishonest, and makes it look like you don't have any real arguments against pertussis vaccines (which, I believe, you don't).

FWIW, I've made a few minor mistakes on tax forms, and the IRS has written me a very business-like letter pointing out the discrepancy and asking me to either pay $X or submit an explanation. Once I was pretty sure I was right and they were wrong so I sent them an explanation. I got a return letter agreeing with me, and that I didn't owe anything extra.

If you're honest with the IRS, you will almost certainly get perfectly proper treatment. You will also pay what you are found to owe. The IRS is very good at ensuring that. If you're trying to deceive them or cheat on your taxes, you're in trouble.

the point is that money is being wasted to cater to "important" people's fashion sense.

I'm puzzled why you'd put the quotes around "important", and why you attribute all of this to fashion sense. These are important people, and they likely pick their tools and equipment for other reasons than fashion sense.

Had a LTC last week whining about another Battalion's commander having the camera enabled on their blackberry while his was disabled. He wanted it, but couldnt provide any mission-related justification as to why he should have it.

Last I looked, a LTC would often be found commanding a battalion. He therefore commands several hundred men, more than the company I work for. Moreover, if my CEO screws up badly, there goes my bonus, likely next year's raise, the employee share of the health insurance goes up, and my ESPP-purchased stock gets less valuable. If a battalion commander screws up badly, there go dozens of lives. I suspect I know who's more important here. So, why is it that a LTC shouldn't have a camera in his phone? They can be handy in various ways, and that's valuable, even if he can't come up with a specific justification.

There was an emulator for an earlier computer (7090 series?) that ran on the 360. (IIRC, it had different microcode.) When working on it, the IBM engineers found numerous cases of undefined behavior that turned out to have predictable behavior on the 7090 and had to be replicated in the emulator. Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month (aka What I Learned Making OS/360) said that the 360 idea of developing multiple models worked very well, as it meant that the instruction set had to stay the same (adapting it because one model team was finding it difficult would force all the others to change), and it probably also helped undefined behavior stay undefined.

Back then, the idea that programs would outlast individual computers hadn't quite caught on, and even now I see unpleasantly many people asking what "c += c++;" does in C. When I got interested in home computers in the late 70s, I'd see lists of "undocumented opcodes" for at least the Z80 processor.

When I did IBM assembly language programming in the mid-70s, there was a single instruction that would take a COBOL-style formatted record and a list of values, and turned the formatted record into a printable line. (Lots of places didn't spend the money on a compiler at that time, and ASM/BAL basically came with the machine.) I have never seen anything that CISCy before or since.

A function is something I can stick into an expression and keep going. A subroutine or procedure is something I need to stick as its own statement and pick out the return values. They aren't the same thing.

Some of us have used COBOL and escaped to saner languages (like C++ and Perl - and I'm not being ironic). What I mostly missed in COBOL last I used it was functions, but there was a lot of competition. COBOL may be better now, but I may never know.

I figure that if I've used something for more than a decade, I have a right to hate it.

[Citation needed]

Where do you get the idea that 99% of scientists ever thought the world was flat? Greek philosophers proved it round, and there's plenty of evidence of its roundness. I'd think at least 2% of scientists would have had some clue about the Greeks and why they were right.

Role-players of Florida, beware! Will somebody notice all the time I spent conspiring with others to break into government buildings with the intent of destroying things? Granted, we didn't recognize the Empire as a legitimate government, or Palpatine as Emperor, but it was the de facto government and it was those buildings the Jedi accompanied us into.

Because the first one to name a figure gets their options cut off. If I say "How about $80K?", I've just cut off hope of any higher. They know I'll work for that, so there's no point in offering me more. On the other hand, if I ask for a figure they're not willing to pay, I'm running the risk of being considered too greedy and having an inflated view of myself. If I happen to know their high end, I can start there, but otherwise I'm likely to come out worse. Similarly, if the interviewer suggests $70K, then I know I can rely on that and negotiate up.

If you're a techie, you're probably a worse negotiator than your interviewer, so you're likely to be maneuvered into offering the first figure. Try to avoid that. Something like "I make $70K already, and I'd like an increase" will at least preserve some upward negotiation ability (of course, if the company isn't going to be offering that, you don't get the job, but that's probably what you want at the moment).