$15/hr is the minimum wage in Seatac, Washington. There is political pressure to raise the minimum wage to $10-15 nationwide, and one likely effect of that is to increase incentives to automate those jobs out of existence.

The poverty rate is based on households, not individuals. So if you are single and making $11.50 or less, you might want to share the rent with some friends rather than getting your own place. Not every job needs to pay enough to allow a teenager to buy a house and start a family.

If you are not going to switch, why should your ISP care if you complain?

No, because that is nonsense. The actual* figure is 52% (not 90%) of accidents occur withing 5 miles (not five minutes). But that is not because driving within that radius is particularly dangerous, but simply because most driving occurs within that radius.

* This figure comes from a survey conducted by Progressive Insurance in 2002. Many articles attribute the study to the NHTSA, and often exaggerate the percentage, or the distance, or both.

Quite difficult. C4 has a density of 1.6 gm/cc. So 500g of C4 would occupy 300cc. That is more than half the volume of my laptop, including the case. I would have to strip out the battery, and circuit board. I don't see any way to do that, and have it still work.

Obvious solution: Have more than one screen, so each one is not a single point of failure. But that is already part of the design, since the pilot and co-pilot each have their own screen.

Obvious solution: Route the backup power to the view screens as well.

Employers generally don't make a specific salary offer until after an interview. So if what you said was true, we would be interviewing plenty of qualified candidates, making salary offers, and then having those offers rejected. But that is NOT what I have experienced. We are simply not finding many qualified people. When we do find someone, they almost always either accept our offer, or reject it for reasons other than the salary, such as commute distance. We pay $80k-$90k for college graduate starting salaries, and a median of $150k for developers with five or more years experience.

Include a few dried habanero peppers in the package.

This makes no sense. Why would an employer want a permanent resident instead of an H1B? A permanent resident can quit and go work elsewhere, and is no better than hiring a US citizen. But an H1B visa is tied to a specific company, so if they quit their job, or are fired, they are sent back to where they came from, at their own expense. As an employer, I love H1Bs, because I can make them work long hours on tight deadlines, and if they complain I can threaten to send them back to Bangalore. Also, since H1Bs have to be paid the same as US citizens, I can use them as an excuse to hold down salaries across the board. If a US citizen employee starts whining about wanting a raise, I can tell him that if I give him a raise, I will be legally required to give the same raise to all of the H1Bs, and since there isn't enough money in the budget for that, it mean no raise for you! Heh, heh.

The American dream is alive and well, depending on where in America you live. If you live in a rural county in South Carolina, then you are screwed, because those counties are some of the least economically mobile places on earth. Poor people there tend to stay poor. But the most mobile place, not just in America, but anywhere on earth, is Santa Clara County, California. No where on the planet are there more rich people that used to be poor. America is still the land of opportunity, but the opportunities are not evenly distributed. You have to go look for them.

He says it is "fastest", but he does NOT say it is "ten times faster" as the summary claims. He also says it is "advanced" and "reliable" but neither of those adjectives necessarily imply that it is precise.

Except he really isn't claiming much. It is easy to make a 3D printer go fast, if you don't care about quality. Many existing 3D printers have a "fast" mode for quick prototypes, and a "slow" mode for higher quality parts. Of course, it is hard to get speed and quality, but I don't see where he says he can do that. Also, I don't see where he claims it is 10x faster than "any existing" printer, as the summary says. He only claims that it is 10x faster than a Makerbot.

It is a stupid question in any case. The average American spends more than 40 hours a week watching TV. Creative, ambitious people that actually get stuff done, tend to watch far less. The presumption that his accomplishments come at the expense of "riding bikes" is idiotic.

Whoa! Phrenology has no scientific basis, but Eugenics certainly does. If you take all the people with traits you don't like, and murder them, you will have fewer of those traits in the next generation. That is a scientific fact. Just because you don't like the political act of mass murder, doesn't make it scientifically invalid.

The military doesn't want them to survive. They want them to complete their missions. What good is a cruise missile that chickens out, and returns to its launcher? Besides, Darwinian evolution doesn't select for survival, it selects for reproduction (the survival of traits or genes, not individuals). But computers don't reproduce that way.

Many of those traits, like anger, selfishness, envy, greed, etc. are emergent properties of Darwinian evolution. But computers don't evolve in a Darwinian sense, so there is no reason to believe they would have any of these characteristics unless they were intentionally designed in.