This is idealized and only a few unions ever truly seemed to work for the employees.

Personal Anecdote FTFail!

Here are a few things you can "blame" on Unions:

• Weekends
• 40-hr work weeks
• Sick days
• Being able to live wherever you want, not just a company house
• No more child labor
• Benefits
• Fair hiring practices
• Fair promotion practices

Now, please regale up with more tales of flight and fancy and how the unions are to blame!

Incorrect. The cities/states with higher union presence have a higher standard of living, due to the increased wages and benefits, which fuels the economy when those workers pay for goods and services.

Would you like help writing a letter?

Shame on you for crushing him with facts!

Please think of the Tr0lls and don't crush them. They're really quite squishy and drippy and make a mess that SOMEONE is going to have to clean up.

I was under the impression that they pretty much all include some basic "personal finance" in the required curriculum these days.

That skill was taught in the class known as "Home Economics," which was one of the first ones cut after the 'Reagan Revolution', along with Art, Music and PE.

My point is that at some point, people are responsible for their own decisions and their own positions in life.

Let 'em burn, eh?

No penny for the guy, eh?

I hope you find your Ayn Randian paradise soon (but make sure it is far, far away, please!)

Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men. — Mahatma Gandhi

It depends on the shop. I've worked many places that paid weekly. Some shops paid me bi-weekly or on the 15th and the 30th.

I can't say for printers (but if they're PostScript, I'm sure generic drivers will work). However, for scanners, do take a look at VueScan. It's not all that expensive and the amount of scanners that are supported is staggering. It also works on Linux and OS X... Since I don't use Windows any more, but do have some speciality scanning devices (still on SCSI, so you can guess the age), VueScan on LInux did all I needed an more.

Because it's running in multiple worlds simultaneously? It's not just using 1's and 0's but superpositions of the two that are effectively in both states at once. Heh... I'm really don't understand this stuff, but the big deal about quantum computing is that it will make some previously intractable (e.g., non-polynomial) problems accessible to us. All problems in complexity class BQP become, essentially, polynomial on a quantum computer. If you've got enough qbits, among other things.

Seems to be how most companies are run, too.

...except without the blackjack, hookers or even a modicum of efficiency.

But in a world where school shootings are an extremely rare event—even to the point of being statistically non-existant ~.

FIFY.

You know how I know you watch a lot of TeeVee news and/or read Fox.com? Because you're all worked up over a non-existent crisis.

Except I wasn't talking about gas emissions from volcanoes.

I was talking about the basic frequency of volcanic and geologic activity. Let's just say "Earthquakes" so we can stay clear of preconceptions.

Earthquake frequency is steadily rising, and this, among the other non-emission related items indicated, are tightly linked to the climate change events we are experiencing today.

People are clinging to the belief that climate change MUST be our fault, and therefore is also within our power to fix.

It isn't.

As for reading about sun spots. . , I suggest you do some.

Never answer a question directly. Require your Padawan to ALWAYS ASK THE DUCK before they bother you. If the duck can't answer the question, then it is okay to ask you. If you don't know the answer, then YOU need to ask the duck. Learn this lesson, you must.

And you won't make it universal until you bake into a popular protocol that's easy to use, that doesn't require extensive setup or pay-to-play, and that doesn't allow the user to trust a suspicious connection. OpenSSH and bitcoin have probably done it best so far, and I'm not sure that's anywhere close enough for the general public.

Even then, I think we underestimate the arrogance of law... if you successfully made encryption universal, then laws would be passed to force decryption (5th be damned) or monitor the endpoints.

Preserving liberty ultimately requires activism and civil disobedience.

And if you're an embedded software developer and I ask you what some of the issues might be when using C++ on a resource-constrained embedded system, please don't get uppity, look at me like it's an impertinent question and shrug your shoulders as if it's me that's being unreasonable...

I'd love to work in that industry. Any openings in Luxembourg? ;-) 1MB of RAM still considered a luxury? I like challenges like that. Mean and lean data structures, if you can use them at all. Last time I did something fun like that was a CGI in C where I could not change anything on the target system (which was a big-ass server), but I had to do everything from scratch as the only thing I could assume were standard C libraries. Me, vi, my C compiler and valgrind. Hours of fun.

And "var" is terser than the average class/type name.

...which are implicit/ducked-typed. In a statically-typed system, you explicitly define the interface for the sake of the type system. To help it help you, so to speak.

Granted, this is more language specific, but most dynamic langs have evolved from being able to run as straight-line scripts with no nesting/front-matter. I was trying to list all of the things that make dynamics langs briefer in general... beyond casts. :-)