Uber is about to get hit with unpaid employee taxes from the IRS because of this. The IRS has a list of 20 points that separates contractors from employees. Uber violates about half of them. Also, employees get mileage and overtime, some folks are about to get paid then fired when Uber goes out of business.

and they gave them a 20 year patent on it too.

Screw you and the not crucial to human life bit. Have you priced one of the new CFC-free Asthma inhalers lately, 50 bucks for one with insurance. Before the FDA and EPA banned the old style a few years ago, they were 3 for $10.

You don't buy one of the these for a regular desktop that just runs email, word and internet. This is for those people that need to move large files around even faster. One of my use cases for one of these is a cheap SAN cache for a backup to disk system.

There are limits on what you can sign away on an employment contract since they are so one-sided. A 20K fine for leaving employment in an at-will state should be considered very excessive.

a 30-50 percent turnover rate is not sign a of a healthy company, normally companies that are doing that, had a massive downsizing and got rid of the wrong people. You don't lose half your companies employees if things are going well. I expect that hiring is way up at their Indian and Chinese design centers considering who they have in charge of their Engineering team.

So what you needed was some bright CS grads with a BS, but they wanted 6 figures, so you grabs some postdocs for half. That pretty much explains it all.

Don't forget Females, there are a lot of them out there with a Degree in Criminal Justice looking for a break.

one of the reasons that nobody got arrested at the Bundy ranch, there were a lot more people there with guns than there were Feds. Also, the Feds were in a really bad tactical position being in a gully armed with AR-15's vs people who held the high ground with long range rifles and their own AR-15's.

I have a well and live next to a river on the east coast, water is basically free around here.

The hate on here today for PHDs is amazing. Lots of places for this guy in Government and Military plus the usual suspects like Google. A GS-11 or higher position in IT wants you to have an advanced degree and may not be all that interested in his experience level.

Also, location, he needs to move to DC, Austin, Atlanta, or the west coast. Trying for a job where there is a steady supply of PHDs is a bad thing.

Access and Excel programs exist because there are no more programmers in local offices anymore. They have all been move to the HQ and getting anything done takes an Act of Congress and a year to get done because of Project Management

duh, the former head of the NSA was an Army General, he would tell DOD "Top Secret and Need to Know". They would then shut up and tell Microsoft to quit bothering them.

Not many pipeline spills in Iowa and Idaho.

nope, they are in the block chain, even if you are mining them. All it is needed is for some sites like Coinbase or Coindesk to publish their historical prices for BTC. The rest is just a software problem.