Doesn't even necessarily come from that. Even when you promote people for being AWESOME at their jobs, who's to say that your badass Developer will make a good Lead Developer, or that even if he excels as a Lead Developer he will be good at being VP of Development? Those roles, while all in the same chain of promotion, require entirely different skillsets and capabilities.

If you've ever heard the Peter Principle: "Every employee, in recognition for their excellence, will be promoted to their position of maximum incompetence."

The way I see it you're actually making life more dangerous for children.

I pose this question to males out there: You're driving down the road and see a young child, maybe 12 years old, on the side of the road. It's cold, too cold to be safely outside, and they're trying to wave you down. You don't recognize them, but they're obviously distressed. Would you stop to help?

I, for one, would not. If it's some attention-seeking disturbed child, or just the child of some overzealous protective parents, I could wind up in jail with my life ruined for my efforts. Safer thing to do for me is pretend I never saw anything, and hope someone finds them. I'd even be nervous to call 911, because then it's "Why didn't you stop to help?" which makes me suspicious. Good luck kid, blame your parents' attitudes.

This. Even as an American I had contact with my several of my teachers outside of school. They were role models and sources of advice when I was in school, and friends now that I am an adult. Heck, last time I was in town I had a beer with my old art teacher and we bitched about clients together.

Maybe it's because he was their swimming instructor, and gave them a ride somewhere or something? It's not like he had dozens of minors' contacts lying around and a string of lewd messages to them in his contact history (believe me, the police will have checked with the phone company by now).

Christ, panic mongers like yourself are the reason children are increasingly living in padded isolation boxes to protect them from big scary reality, and men are terrified to so much as speak to a child lest they be accused of molesting them. It's at the point now where, out of self-preservation, I would drive right by a child alone on the side of the road in the middle of winter. I would not stop to help. Why? Because if god forbid something happened to them later, or they decided to say something about me, the world would ruin my life for the greater good.

Ask yourself if that's really the best thing for children. For every pedophile you've cowed into hiding (they don't go away mind you, and when they think nobody is looking they're still going to do horrible things) you scare away hundreds or thousands of decent human beings who would help a child in need. Your child is far more likely to be hurt by tripping and falling, getting lost, or eating something dangerous; and if you're not around, you'd best hope there's a woman nearby to help because with this attitude the men will stay the fuck away.

Kids of a friend? Friends of a kid? Nephew/Niece? He needed to give them a ride somewhere once, he's an emergency contact for them, or maybe they friended him on Facebook because he's a buddy of their dad's and around the house a lot, and included their numbers in their profile?

There's a decent number of reasons that a 30-something normal adult would have the numbers of a few children in their address book. If there were like... 20 children that would start to get weird, but two seems pretty normal especially if there's some logical connection.

Any reason why not? As long as they volunteer and they know they're being studied, I bet giving everyone on earth a brainscan and cataloging the results would do wonders for science.

And what, they're kids so we shouldn't study how their minds work? Do you have a better way to learn about how they develop? Won't someone please thing of what the children think?!

I think he's talking about the families where they'd serve too much food, like giving a child adult-sized portions for example, and tell them "Eat everything or you're in trouble! Don't waste food!". That kind of habit might train them to ignore their natural appetite limits, and lead to overeating later in life.

This story doesn't really support your claim. This story only proves that manipulative women who hook up with every guy in their workplace are poor relationship material, the fact that she happened to be a programmer is incidental to the story. You can tell because if you replaced "programming" with say... "painting" or "accounting" and change the other terms to match, the story still works exactly the same. I for one am a web developer, as is my girlfriend. We've been together six years and are very happy.

Estimated GNP up almost 200%. Experts remain mystified as to the reason behind this sudden surge in productivity.

Well, they ARE loaded with extremely high density fuel. Just get it into orbit and then use that stuff to propel it wherever you want. Heck, shoot them out in random directions with messages to aliens written on the side. The isotopes will continue to decay for millenia, and should be easy to detect for any reasonably advanced species studying the heavens. Add in some nuclear powered broadcasters of some kind if you want to be really sure it gets attention. When suitably advanced extraterrestrials notice the weird radiation source passing through their star system they can either investigate it directly (if they have an easy way to retrieve it) or backtrace its path to get an approximate direction for Earth.

Oh deadly radiation, is there anything you aren't useful for?

Your theory is plausible sounding (hybrid between interface characteristics and signal source) but is untestable and thus worthless unless you provide a set of criteria on which to evaluate it.

For example: I theorize that a person's soul is the source of their personality. Thus, if the soul is damaged somehow, the person's personality should change.

I suggest an experiment in which people sign the bottoms of hidden documents. The control group will sign pieces of paper that are blank. The test subjects will sign papers that condemn an innocent person to death, or the cutting of funding to an orphanage. (For the sake of rigor, we should actually carry out whatever horrible act is proscribed by the signed papers)

If the "soul" theory is correct, such soul damaging activities should result in measurable personality changes to the test subjects' personalities without corresponding changes to the control group.

So yeah. I disagree with "we do not know". We "do not know" all sorts of stuff, like why gravity works or why the universe exists, but that doesn't stop us from determining things about them based on their observable characteristics. (i.e. gravity exists and is tied somehow to mass) We can also remove possibilities that fail to show evidence of existence (i.e. there is no ether in space).

We know that almost everything that makes a personality can be explained by various functions of the brain, with the only gaps being left in some of the more complex interactions between our systems of consciousness. We know which part of the brain creates emotion, which part recognizes faces, which part lets us analyze our own thoughts, and a bunch of other things that were once attributed to "the soul".

Pretty well, actually. The most progressive designs actually have enough salt on hand to store 3 days' worth of energy. I'm assuming you'd need 5 or 6 days of excellent sunlight to save that up, but assuming you're consistently collecting more than you consume you'd be able to weather a couple days of rainstorms without issue.

And they would, in fact, still produce some energy on cloudy days. Most designs call for parabolic mirror installations, which will focus the light onto the tower even if the source is diffuse (i.e. on the other side of clouds). It wouldn't look as impressive, but you'd still be focusing all the available light onto the salt reservoirs and slowly heating it to the melting point.

If I can use the power at a significant discount? Deal. (Why more companies don't offer this as a way to secure property and put down opposition baffles me. Give every person whose property borders the solar plant a $5k annual electricity credit and watch their complaints melt away....)

Actually, this only allows for sharks with lasers going INTO their eyes. Not nearly as scary unfortunately...

They didn't do it properly because what they wanted to do was not properly legal. The US government wanted to prosecute someone on NZ soil based on flimsy evidence provided by biased parties, without due authorization or process.

Protip for US Law Enforcement: If something you want to do is against the law it doesn't mean the law is bad, nor does it mean the law should be rewritten/removed. It means what you want to do is wrong, and you shouldn't do it.