Nah, just add a battery fire error message. We've been doing that with printers for decades.

I had a CS prof who graded each class individually with the idea that a 75 was the average and each letter grade (10 points) represented a standard deviation from the score on the tests and homework. interestingly enough, very few people were anywhere near the mean. I got a 104 in the class by scoring approximately 3 standard deviations above the norm. I did not bother to point out the flaw of using such a small sample size, but I imagine he would have given extra credit for doing so.

order of magnitude faster than C, that is. The difference between it and assembly was negligible.

And it's clearly no more difficult to study when you have 5 siblings in a 1 bedroom household where you have no computer and eat nothing but dollar menu McDonalds with no hope of ever paying for an education than it is if you live in a McMansion with more bedrooms than occupants, have private tutors, go to private school, and have a trust fund waiting to make sure you don't have to work in college.

Yeah. Unfortunately for me I don't have much chance moving back to the west coast without going through the big companies (ms, google, amazon) since they're about the only ones that consider out of state candidates, and they all do the stupid tests.

I recently did 2 rounds of all day interviews at a big tech company where they ask you to solve these kinds of problems. I can see the value of some programming tests to make sure people can actually code, but I saw some major flaws in their methodology. One major problem is conveying what it is you really want the applicant to do. I had several questions where I thought they wanted the algorithm to solve the problem, when really all they wanted was a library call. Another issue is when there's not one clear "best" solution. I had one interviewer tell me to code a problem optimizing for time and space complexity. He interrupted me 3 times because he didn't understand my algorithm, and when he announced the "correct" algorithm, it was actually worse time complexity and only slightly better space complexity. The biggest problem of all, though, is the questions where they want you to implement some sort of bit manipulation algorithm when doing so is both unreadable and a non-optimal approach to solving the problem.

In the end, I didn't get the job. I was out 4 days of vacation time and 2 weekends that I could have spent with my family. They were out about $4000 from the cost of flying me out and back twice, putting me up in a hotel, etc. In the end both of us would have been much better off if they had just called some references instead.

I get what you're saying, but who is supposed to give them that home? Do *you* want the tweaker that tries to stab everyone staying in your homeless shelter? Or if you give them money to get an apartment, will they not just spend it on drugs instead? Short of physically forcing them into a location and providing everything for them (like in prison or psych ward), you can do nothing for them. If that's your solution, fine, but that really just means spending more on prisons and depriving people of their civil liberties. I guess you could have druggie hospices: you get all the drugs you want, and food and shelter, and just live out your short druggie existence there until you die from an OD.

The vast majority that I ran into were punk rockers or metal fans (sampling bias: I like punk rock and used to go to shows on a regular basis in my younger years), and they all seemed to be living out some fantasy notional freedom, where freedom is defined as not having to do anything and getting drunk/high as often as you can. There was also a post-hippie cross-section I encountered that would tend to be a little bit more productive and collaborative, but only to the point at which their basic needs were met (food, shelter, and weed), at which point they would return to their finger painting or whatever.

As an aside, there was one older homeless guy that I would talk to nearly every day at the bus stop on the corner of 39th and Hawthorne. He never asked me for money, but I know for a fact he needed it. If he asked me to buy him a sandwich, I would have, but I don't think he would have ever asked. He's an example of the homeless that really need help, that deserve help, and that likely will never get help.

Wow, you sure make a lot of assumptions. For the record, I vote in the following order (depending on my choices at the ballot): Justice Party -> Green Party -> Democrat -> Snoopy. Anyway, it's important to note that we're not talking about the mentally ill homeless population here, we're talking about able-bodied, able-minded upper middle class kids who decided they'd rather panhandle and do drugs than do something productive with their lives. Most of them are not even *really* homeless, they can go home any time they want. I'm not exaggerating or being facetious or ignorant here: these "homeless" people are gobbling up the resources that we should be spending on helping people with serious mental illnesses or who have through some unfortunate circumstance ended up on the street.

I lived in Portland for many years. Hell, I hung out with some of those kids, and even had roommates who were one step up the ladder (renting a room in a shithole on 82nd street). The fact is, they're lazy fucks. There's all kinds of resources to get them food, shelter, and jobs, but they'd rather get high instead, and most of those programs require that you remain clean. Also, the vast majority of them simply go back to stay with their parents during the winter months -- notice you only see them around in the spring and summer?

They're all in Portland. Also, most of them deserve it and would not contribute to society in any meaningful way regardless of whether they're on the streets or in their parents' homes.

You really need to clarify your sarcasm, it doesn't come across as well over the internet as it does in person.

If by "anybody", you mean anyone who has passed a mental health screening, a background check, and has proven that he or she has a secure location where the gun is stored (gun safe with both PIN and biometrics), and is trained in the usage and handling of a gun, then yes.

It's a straw man because he claims that I implied (through use of rhetorical question) guns have no purpose other than murder, when clearly my point was that guns have no purpose other than *killing*.

That's a straw man. Guns have no purpose other than *killing*. So maybe we should ask ourselves, who has a legitimate need to kill, and what tools do they need to do it? A hunter might need a hunting rifle. A police officer might need a hand gun. I'm not sure why anyone outside of deployed active duty military or on-duty swat team members need an assault rifle.