Gah! Wrong article. So much for using a cat as a personal assistant...

The best part will be the weekly stack ranking and 360 degree review sessions.

"You are an A/10! Please vacate the house at once!"

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.

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.

For persons using screen readers to read web content (Apple VoiceOver, for example) the option to simplify the content of an article and automatically pull it together as a single page is wonderful.

Try closing your eyes and reading, via a text to speech system, a typical Forbes article broken across five pages packed with links, for example. This option or the Firefox Readability extension speeds things up something wonderful.

I just wish that pre-production meetings between producers and writers could be recorded and popped onto DVDs as extras. Then you'd see where some of the goofier decisions in film making come from.

Oh, it won't happen, of course. The sort of producers that come up with these things take themselves much too seriously to want their 'process' exposed for mere entertainment.

This was a great book. I shudder to think of what they'll do with it in a movie. 3D. That means the producers will want something scary to repeatedly shove in the face of the audience. This won't end well...

First, they'll have to get rid of the fighting suits. Too expensive, and to much CGI or practical effects needed. Besides, how can we see the brilliant acting if the actors are all canned?

Second, the Taurans just aren't scary enough. They should look like multiple species of giant insects.

Third, using dead stellar objects for the FTL transportation of canned primates is so 1980. The Stargate collapsar should be a big ring thingie the troops can just walk through. This also gets rid of the tired old spaceship gags, saves money on effects, and avoids breaks in the action.

Keep the salute, though. That tests big with the 18-24 male demographic.

If Pystar can win on OSX, the same argument could, in principle, be made for other operating systems.

Correct. One could simply pay the market price for an operating system or other software, and use it in any manner one wants without regard for terms of the associated license.

One could, for example, use a GNU/Linux operating system as the basis for a set-top box, and ignore the terms of the GPL license as irrelevant, as they have already paid the going rate for the software.