About 51%? (I'm not a statistician). You have one boy, so the odds are whatever the odds are for a random child being a boy, which is slightly greater than 50%. Do I get the prize?

He shrugged and said, without any sense of irony whatsoever, "I don't really know how to handle exceptions. I find it easier to just write code without any bugs in it."

Exceptions != bugs, as anyone who has programmed to a database connection would know. Not saying your friend isn't much better than I am, but there are a lot of areas where exceptions are part of the normal dialog between program units.

I know several people at Google, many at Microsoft, and many in other companies. The guys at Google are generally pretty good, but no better than MSFT or Amazon, both of whom value degrees much less than Google does.

Oh, please, for the love of god, mod parent up!

A EULA is not a contract.

IANAL, but I suspect that it is in fact a contract. It may be a bad contract, and somewhat unenforcable, but if it wasn't a reasonable valid contract people would be suing the shit out of MSFT for every BSOD and error that was encountered in windows and Office. There aren't a bajillion lawsuits out there, so I suspect this means that the EULA is sufficiently a contract to protect MSFT in the majority of cases.

This is a really bad idea. Browsers shouldn't be able to elevate privileges. That's a key mechanism in preventing content from being able to hijack the system. The LAST thing I want in a browser is for it to operate as admin/root.

It seems that your beef should be with Verizon, not microsoft. MSFT just cut a deal. It's verizon that treated their customer like shit in your situation.

As a whole, Postgres started as an open-source Oracle clone.

Not accurate, please see this, which notes that postgres is descended from Ingres, an early object/relational effort. It's not even close to an Oracle clone, which you will see if you bring up the command line client and try to display a table's structure.

I tried to look up SOGo to figure out what the heck you were talking about, but google doesn't find it. Mind giving us a few more keywords?

Then, if somebody gets a job, decrease benefits by 1/4 to 1/5th the earnings.

One problem with your approach is that economically it doesn't work very well. If you decrease benefits by 1/5 of your earnings (just to pick a number), you are in effect taxing those earnings at 20%, which is far higher than the income tax rate paid by poverty level workers otherwise. It's the equivalent of taking the $8/hr job and turning it into a $6.50/hr job. It's not hard to see that this might disincent many people that would be eligible. Add to this the costs of transit, child care, and work clothes, and it's possible that working may be a zero gain for some of these people.

Unless Murdoch is going to have some very unique, in-depth content that you can't find anywhere else, I can't imagine anyone with half a brain would be willing to pay for it.

Murdoch -does- have unique content, that is uniquely appealing to people with half a brain. There are few other sources which give the relentless right wing spin on everything, and those who are inclined to view the world that way are attached to Fox News in a way that is different than how I and probably you consume news. CNN is not an alternative for some of these people. I wouldn't be surprised if this works for him.

This is Fox News we're talking about. It's consumers aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer, and are fairly attached to their source of propaganda. This may actually be a brilliant move on Murdoch's part.

If the consumers of Fox media had to go to, say, the BBC, or the Washington Times, they might encounter information counter to their views. The resulting cognitive dissonance is painful, and might be sufficient to make them pay for the comfortable conservative pablum ranting of the Murdoch press.

This is plenty of time to transform the safety of buildings and overpasses and tsunami zones throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle had a large quake in 1949. Building codes are pretty earthquake aware already, and most construction of roads and buildings has happened since the advent of strong building codes. I live here, I'm not worried, I don't pay extra for earthquake insurance.

slashdot ate my link, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Nisqually_earthquake

However, it appears that while the Pacific Northwest doesn't get struck by earthquakes often,

Actually we get small to medium quakes quite often. There was a big one in Seattle in 1949, and there was a mid sized one in 2001. See this for some discussion. There was a 4.something discussed on the news a couple of nights ago. Little window rattlers aren't rare at all.

I know you meant this to be funny, but MSFT ( and google) are all over this earthquake thing. That, along with access to power, is why they are building data centers in eastern washington, away from the fault lines.