Most states don't need to- a majority of electoral votes need to. And as the constitution also says states may allocate electoral votes for any reason (in fact, they don't even need to hold an election) it would be a supreme court case to decide which holds precedence. Given the supreme court's reluctance to weigh in on presidential elections, it would likely allow it, although that's never assured.

Actually there is a backdoor way to have it occur without a constitutional amendment- agreement by the states. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

It's about halfway there.

Of course they do. See Wyoming- a single person's vote in Wyoming is worth 3/563000 =5.32e-6 of an electoral vote (based on 2012 census data). A vote in California is worth 55/37200000= 1.47e-6 votes. A person in Wyoming is worth 4 times as much. That's completely unfair.

Now historically it makes sense- it dates back to right post revolution where we were really 13 nations who decided to band together into 1, and it was a compromise to get the small states to go along with it. It stopped making sense when we became a real nation beyond point of breakup- basically after the civil war it was outdated. Now, due to geography its a system that's totally unfair.

You realize that in most of those higher level languages *everything* is a pointer. So you're not actually saving yourself anything except calls to delete. Most of the difficult parts of pointers you still need to worry about.

They use Lua for the non-performance effecting parts of games. They'd never consider using it in the graphics code, which is the bottleneck.

Actually study that suggestion. He wanted to mint it so we'd technically have 1 trillion in assets and could ignore the debt ceiling. Which is an idiotic law- if you pass laws requiring us to spend the money, then say we can't spend the money legally, it makes no sense. He never suggested using it to fix the economy, but to end run around bad law. Although I do happen to disagree with that approach- it gives too much power to the presidency, I'd rather see a constitutional challenge to the debt ceiling claiming that either the 14th amendment makes it invalid or that its overriden by the bills that require us to spend money.

But the coin was never an idea to fix anything, it was a legal loophole.

So as an insult you call me a nobel prize winner? I wish everyone disagreed with me like that.

The fact is we have plenty of takers for our debt at ridiculously low rates. That means it isn't a short term problem. It may become one in the future, but for now we're perfectly fine.

We spend more money on the military than every other country on earth combined. This with an existing nuclear arsenal that could destroy any country 10 times over. We should be slashing military spending to the bone- its just not needed. How about reducing military spending to even just say triple what China (the number 2 country) spends? We're fucking ridiculous.

He wasn't trying to spend his way out of debt. He was trying to spend his way out of recession- something that does work if you borrow (or use savings) the money you do it on and the cause of the recession was lack of consumer confidence/demand or lack of capital (which this was in part). The trick is that you have to make up for it in good times by repaying the debt, something we've been bad at. Also, it helps if the extra money being spent is on things with long term results like infrastructure and R&D. Spending it on things like wars will give a short term bump but no long term advantages.

THe fact is right now our debt not only doesn't matter, any business leader in the world would be telling us to take on more of it. We're borrowing at about 1% interest. That means if we have anything to invest in that would pay better than 1% return, we ought to borrow to pay for it. Since the rate of inflation is higher than that, anything with any real long term value is a good buy, as the principal will be less when due than it is now. Debt really isn't a short term problem for us.

I understand and acknowledge that this Agreement is not intended to require assignment of any of my rights in an invention that I develop entirely on my own time without using the Company's equipment, supplies, facilities or trade secret information except for those inventions that either: (1) relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the Company's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the Company; or (2) result from any work performed by me for the Company.

That's what I have now, or close enough (I googled for a similar clause so I could copy-paste). I also had one once that had this and further spelled out that minor uses of company time/resources (such as answering a related email while at work) did not count as using work resources, but case law has established that as well.

Typically not working for a competitor is a separate item in the contract. That's a reasonable restraint. But if I'm writing something not related to my job at your company? God damn right that's mine. I've heard of contracts that are more restrictive, but I've never been handed one and I'd refuse to sign if asked.

1)Because wrapping also would have broken the UI. Printed page, remember? It would have pushed data off the page. And in that particular app, the printed page was a scantron, changing line positions would have moved bubbles and broken the parser. But even in a normal printed page there's a hard bottom and sides you can't write past.

2)Wrapping might take care of it- if there's room to wrap. And if you don't care about an ugly result. And if there's a place to wrap- you can't just wrap mid-word. And if you're in a wrappable language (can you wrap chinese/japanese?). And then we can deal with left to right vs right to left languages and how they'd have to be handled differently.

Translations aren't simple. There's good rules of thumb that will reduce problems, but just saying "oh, do this one thing and you're good" shows you don't understand the problem. Flexible sized fields in particular only work if either the screen scrolls (and you're ok with scrolling) or if you have lots of empty space in the design. A busy design and you're fucked, text will overrun each other.

Works great for some applications. Doesn't work when using or previewing a printed page (as was my case). Doesn't work if it pushes other data off the screen. Life isn't that simple, unfortunately.

And a lot of them aren't. You can get a much cleaner, better UI in a native app than HTML, and you don't have to deal with the horrible GUI editing language that is XML or the utter pile of shit that is Javascript. So the user and programmer get better experiences. Native apps are always better, its just a matter of if its worth the cost to make one.

I think he was lookign at websites- rentacoder, freelancer.com, elance, etc. The hourly rates there are very low, because they're used to hire people in 3rd world countries and by people who have no real respect for your work. And plenty of high school/college kids who bid low thinking it will lead to future work. Freelancing pays well, but only if you drum up the work yourself.