Do you rent from Rahm Emanuel?

I laid that out very concisely myself, by pointing out that women would have to sustain a higher than average efficiency to make up for not being there when on leave. My basis of assumptions for the thought experiment (and belief in real life) is that men and women have very similar IQs and can be recruited at similar strengths and abilities to perform a given job. I suppose there are some jobs where the workers are pretty much cookie-cutters and interchangeable; but in the kind of jobs I care about, it matters very much having each specific member of the team there, and you notice if somebody's contribution is absent... even for the noblest of reasons, which care of a newborn certainly is.

Do your own moderating, Mr/Ms. AC. :p

Yeah, companies shouldn't discriminate against women in hiring. A woman can perform just as well as a man. In fact, she must be even more efficient in her work than a man, for her average to stay as high even with her longer maternity leave. /sarcasm

I have a huge problem with society-enforced institutionalization of untruths. Don't demand that people smile, nod their heads, and repeat along with politically correct mantras that are obviously false. Tell it like it is. People can (learn to) handle it. Women of childbearing age are statistically at higher risk than others for being lower performers for a company in the long term, both during and after pregnancy. Maybe we should or shouldn't allow discrimination (I'm not commenting on that because I'm making a different point), but the numbers don't lie. Neither should we.

Full disclosure: I am a male who as a teenager and twenty-something was charged higher auto insurance rates than females my age, because (once again) the numbers don't lie.

So you think a black hole would accomplish a gender change on the subject? Interesting theory.

I think you mean "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission".

The SCOTUS actually ruled correctly in that case. Freedom of speech in this country applies to everybody, including to people who join together in commercial enterprises (which we call corporations). Yes, shockingly enough, corporations consist of people. The day we see corporations consisting instead of evil, Terminator-esque machines, then I'll agree with the liberals in denying them freedom of speech.

No, my friend. _You_ have no idea what you're talking about. Search the Bible sometime for the phrase "fear of God".

A refutation of your post seems unnecessary since you appear to be hard at work refuting yourself. On one hand you sweepingly dismissed as not truly moral those who do what is right out of fear of the sorts of spiritual repercussions that you don't believe in. And then on the other hand you said that there isn't any objective standard for morality or ethics, implying that your first point is wrong, since their idea of morality is just as good as yours. Lol!

I would say that an ability to think about and analyze something goes along with one's strength in scientific disciplines, but the self-control required to act on what we know is right? That's a different story. How many people cheat on their partners? (Too many.) How many of them could give a good analysis and explanation of why that's wrong? (Uh, probably 100%.)

So if I lock you in my basement and threaten to torture you for the next ten years, and you find a way to kill yourself, nobody should ask me any questions. Your death was your own fault in that instance, right? I grant it's an exaggerated analogy, but it refutes your fallacy concisely. Somebody contributed to threatening an American citizen with decade(s) of prison time over essentially mild internet mischief, and I for one would like to know who is to be held accountable for that.

Which would you rather own when your economy is experiencing hyperinflation? At that point your fallacy becomes obvious: gold _is_ something, whereas fiat currencies are merely temporarily _backed by_ something. I agree with you in dissing gold as a mere "shiny metal"; however as long as most of the world disagrees, both of us would be wise to respect gold's highly superior intrinsic value.

When you get right down to it, even gold is valuable (to some degree) by convention. It's shiny, scarce, and you can make pretty stuff with it. Whoop-de-doo.

That works if you have a competent contractor _and_ you are a competent customer. However, in many software projects the customer doesn't really know what they want/need when they start. Then, instead of helping them iterate a bit and learn what they need, the contractor has to spend his time saying "no, that's not what I estimated". Fixed bids are a huge problem for the agility required on such projects, and can cause them to fail in very bad ways.

Almost all my contracting work has been T&M, and has involved cautious feature creep as the customer's understanding of their needs evolved. The one major fixed bid project I did happened to be a success, because it was managed on the customer side by highly competent engineers who knew exactly what they needed.

As a contractor I've been through this more than once, and actually had very good experiences training / mentoring customer employees to "take over" the programming of my projects. In one case I met weekly with a guy over many months, and took him from hand-holding up to completing major releases. I don't see it as a threat, because if you're already sharing the source code (which I always do), then you're explicitly offering that the customer can take over the job in the future. So -- assuming that mentoring is a service you want to offer -- do the best job you can, and have fun. And it is a tremendous amount of fun to teach when you are good at what you do, have some communication skills, and also have a beginner student with decent aptitude along with a serious attitude toward learning. I had all of those. /toot-own-horn

Good luck, hope it goes well for you!

I don't just want to learn about them. I want to know their names, where they work, where they live, the stuff they buy at the grocery store. Everything.

Maybe it's useless to you as a developer(?), and to most people. However, you benefit from this kind of technology all the time. Compare this to video encoding, where powerful machines spend a heck of a lot of time and CPU power to gain extra 3%'s of compression to save bandwidth and give you a smooth viewing experience.

This tool could have many useful applications for any kind of static content that is frequently served, including web services, as well as embedded content in mobile games and other apps. Every little bit of space savings helps (as long as it isn't proportionally slower to expand, which the article says it stays comparable).