No. They did a reasonable job of feeding the people they wanted to be fed. But this debate is not really about productivity anyhow.

Now they'll have a record of both when you called and when you took a leak.

"Mom, why does the fire hydrant keep ringing?"

Ballmer wants this technology for his chairs.

There is zero enforcement of these rules

Often it's because either the perpetrators are in a different country, and/or they are small fly-by-night "shadow" companies that shuffle names and recombine every couple of weeks such that you can't find them.

It's not government weenies who are responsible for this, it's lobbying groups. It started out with legitimate problems, such as laws against help-wanted ads that said, "White Christian gentleman," and laws against KKK lynchings. Once they got enhanced penalties for crimes against black people, everybody wanted in -- Jews, women, the elderly, the handicapped, etc.

One of the problems is that a lobbying group thinks its a success if they can get the penalties increased for breaking the laws they're promoting. That contributes to the draconian jail terms in our prisons. So Mothers Against Drunken Driving got the penalties for drunken driving lengthened. The drug war people got the penalties for marijuana, cocaine, etc. lengthened. The anti-sex people made it a felony for teenagers to have sex. And I don't have to tell you about the anti-abortion movement.

The underlying problem is that voters vote for politicians who push things like this. A lot of the government weenies don't want to do these things at all, but it's popular among the voters. So blame the voters.

He sold drugs to MS H1B's ;-)

If you are looking for a weird combo of product expertise and you can search the whole world instead of just the US, then your chance of finding a skills match for that weird combo goes up about 3 times.

I can see MS's perspective, but that's not the same as a general tech shortage. More STEM graduates won't create more weird-combo matches in the US because universities don't target specific product combos of a given company.

Congress is too naive (or too bribed) to understand this key difference. Companies should allow a bit more time for product-specific training rather than cry "shortage!".

But now you can get quad-core sticks for $100 or less. So while the Pi is still cheaper, it's not that much cheaper. The issue is as you say reliability. The cheap ones tend to be garbage.

Those games are irrelevant because I'm not playing them.

Sorry, my sentence was a little backwards, but those are the windows games I'm playing. I also have an Xbox 360 which I bought used, and whose optical drive I have replaced. I bought it on the theory that it hasn't RROD'd yet even though it's old. SFSG.

These arguments are hypocritical. If Florida really believed the shit they said to stop this development, then more than half the development in Florida would have never happened. But let's face it, Florida is a warm storage facility for dying people that most of us are hoping (secretly or not) will get wiped out by some sort of massive wave, and their primary exports are citrus (better from Mexico anyway) and bad legislation.

I have nothing against vilifying specific groups by name, on either side, if they deserve vilification. Libertarians are those who want police protection from their slaves (and are sure they'll be on the enslaving side.) Teabaggers don't even know what that means. I have lots of things to say about hippies too, if you want to hear more negativity. I grew up in Santa Cruz, so I am more intimately acquainted with their smells than I would like.

Well, if you're convinced, then I'm convinced. baa! baa!

The fact is that the natives who lived in the pacific northwest had successful land management practices. They had rules for who could fish where and how much, they set fires yearly when moving between their summer and winter grounds which kept down the brush including poison oak, and they were able to subsist primarily on hunting and gathering because their land management was so very successful and the land so rich. Predictably, ol' whitey fucked it all up for them. First he murdered them wholesale, notably in the form of the U.S. 1st. Cavalry killing every man, woman, and child on an island in the lake (one of the larger settlements) in revenge for deeds by a distinctly different band of Pomo. Then he destroyed their way of life by attrition, granting their land to others and then paying them a dollar per tree planted to rip out the oaks and install black walnut. You can't live on walnuts alone, but you can live on acorns.

The point here is that humans are capable of responsible land management, the problem is which humans are chosen to make the decisions. Baa! Baa!

I suppose you've been out to the site and taken a nice broad range of soil samples, then brought them home and analyzed them? Because military bases of all kinds have a tendency to become superfund sites because of decades of disposal of hazardous chemicals involving burying barrels or simply dumping things out in back of the shop.

It's a nice idea, but it doesn't work that way for several reasons. One of them is that when someone walks away and leaves a housing development it doesn't just vanish. Another is that there's always impact from the construction that you can't simply wish away.

What kind of torture did you use on this sentence? Waterboarding? Thumbscrews?