bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone is more appropriately shortened to BTABQ. Taq (polymerase) is already taken and well known. They are just going to confuse people.

This is only useful if batteries are still offered for the phone when you need one. The last time I ordered a spare battery on a 4 year old phone, the 'new' battery mfg date was older than the OEM. And the mislabeled knockoffs that catch fire, which is one reason they went away with replaceability in the first place.

"increasing the acidity of the ocean" should not be confused with calling ocean water an acid. If ocean water were ever classified as an acid or base, everything on the planet would have long since been dead. Most oceans sit around a pH of 8, already in the basic range and relatively much higher than even our own blood. Adding sodium (bi)carbonate will in no way result in some immediate release of CO2 back into the atmosphere. Such a statement shows a severe lack of chemistry and ecology knowledge.

Another minor factor may also be that the average human body temperature is not 98.6F anymore and hasn't been for a long time. Search on 'human body temperature decreasing' and you'll find plenty of publications.

I have had dozens of beyond burgers. It's all about how you prepare it and what you prepare it with. Does anyone just cook plain hamburgers with no seasonings and eat it plain? Meat is really just textured protein filler. The taste comes from the fat and everything else it goes with. If you are sensitive to MSG you should avoid this brand though. Had an Impossible Burger in Kanab UT at a restaurant with a trained chef. Might have been the best burger I've ever had. Then came the couple hours of horrendous gas later on. But then I get the same result with meat burgers, cheese, and a couple beers.

Prions are predominantly present only in human, and a few other mammalian, brains. If we have brain matter abundant in sewage, we have a completely different problem. They are present in urine and feces only in extremely low quantities and only from affected people. Prions can be destroyed with UV-C treatment, and also bleach. I would hope we would be disinfecting human waste first and not just relying on the actions of composting.

Apple IIGS, hot stuff. Friend showed me how to abort and dump the source code of whatever was running. Then one day we got a true acoustic 300 baud modem for it and hit the BBS scene. The kicker was that the phone upstairs was literally shaped like a shoe so it did not fit nicely into the modem like in War Games. Any loud background noise would send static all over the screen. Oooh, and that dot matrix printer!

As a programmer, I work off of requirements. I do not set those requirements. I build what is asked of me. Those who set the requirements typically work on the business side and have no programming experience. During the process, it is normal for a developer to go back and ask what to do in many scenarios when there is ambiguity. They are not all going to be caught, nor are the responses and clarifications received from those dictating the requirements going to be 'correct'.

Is the e-mail address the ONLY accurate information they have on file? I hope you did not provide a publicly searchable phone number or such information to them when you called. They WILL enter it into the system and it will be used if they ever need to collect on that account. If they have any other information, such as a physical address or even a zip code, then you need to get it taken care of. Companies can, and do, file erroneous negative credit report entries without having a social security number if they can track down the person they 'think' is accurate. This is especially true of utility, cable, and Internet providers. I have seen it happen multiple times to my ex, once with an old recycled phone number (The Bill-Me-Later companies) and with a previous 10+ year old common maiden name that was just in the same city. I would first file a complaint with the cable regulator in that area, as was already suggested by someone else.

I wore glasses from the age of 6 until 23 with up to a -9.50 diopter, which is fairly extreme. I had tried both hard and soft contacts and could tolerate neither for very long due to extreme eye dryness. Night driving headlights would sometimes be uncomfortable in rural areas but I could deal with it. Had LASIK at 23 with one eye done a week apart. I would not recommend separating them unless you are able to take that entire time period off of work or school (the latter for me at that time). Having a corrected eye with a -9 eye for a week resulted in many headaches and trouble reading screens.

Everything was great and I was 20/20 to 20/30 for years. Had to start wearing glasses again from 30 to 35, when I again looked into corrective surgery. After that long, most will not do LASIK again, was told it is like cutting into old scar tissue. Also, when they were taking corneal measurements and comparing it to the first surgery, the comment I heard was "well that does not make sense" but "it is what it is". The old measurement minus what was removed during LASIK did not equal the new number, it was too low. Explanation: Corneas thickened resulting in nearsightedness again. I have never been able to find any information or studies about such a phenomenon.

Had PRK done at 35, very very painful recovery period on the next day which was earlier than expected. The examining doctor said she had never seen an epithelium heal quite that fast. But again good results in the end. I was slightly farsighted in one eye for some time during the healing process.

Wearing a very slight eyeglass prescription again at 38, although I could still pass the last driver's license eye exam. Am curious what my corneal measurements are again. But I am essentially done with laser surgeries unless something completely new and different comes out.

OP didn't provide a lot of details for me to determine if what his uncle received is similar to below: Here's a third hypothesis based on e-mails that I've been seeing in the past month: Contact lists are being hacked hypothesis: - I have a secondary user@mydomain.net e-mail that I have not shared with any family members. It is in my Yahoo contact list. - Been receiving malware link e-mails at this e-mail address from junk domains, but the sender's name is some random family member - The only location of those family members' names is in my Yahoo contact list. Have not even added most to my Gmail. Malware link spammers are getting ahold of Yahoo contact lists and cross-sending e-mails to people on those lists using the contact names. Yahoo is filtering those e-mails as spam, but for those messages that go to other providers, their spam filters may not be trashing them such as the mydomain.net address.

Have to respond here in case anyone decides to make any serious life decisions based on this terrible bit of information.

Many companies use software and/or non-technical people to weed out applicants. If the job requisition comes through with a college-level degree requirement, the lack of one on a resume or application can cause it to be immediately deleted, tossed, shredded, or dropped to the bottom of the pile without looking at any other qualifications including experience.

Is this a good way to judge applicants in an IT field? Probably not.

Is it maybe a sign that this is not a company you would want to work for if they can't put any decent effort into their hiring practices? Possibly.

It doesn't change the fact that this process is not a rare occurrence, especially by large corporations that can get dozens or even hundreds of resumes for select openings.

I've worked for 3 different Fortune 500s over the last 11 years, a defense contractor, a telco, and a bank. Big companies, big IT departments, many many custom-written applications.

Reading a lot of comments it looks like there's a wide variety of definitions for some of the job titles and roles people are discussing here, so I'll list how I see them:

* System Admin - Person(s) responsible for the hardware and supporting (OS, Web service, code language and client libs, JVMs, etc) software. They do not in any way support the applications running on said system and would be incapable of debugging or supporting an *application* problem even with a gun to their head. Most can only describe 2-3 sentences of what the applications even do. They do not report to or answer directly to the application teams. They also do NOT install application code.

* Database Admin - Only want to address roles here. At every location, the actual application data stored in the database is NOT the role or responsibility of the admin. It belongs to the application team and any changes are their job and their accountability. The DBA only deals with schemas, packages, procedures, scripts, access roles and grants, etc. DBAs should NOT MANIPULATE DATA. Asking or allowing them to do so opens up a never ending blame game and is counterproductive. If you want to create some title and role within the application team where all data manipulation funnels through, that's the way to do it.

* Implementation Specialist (Code Migration) - Trained monkeys who are supposed to follow a set of pre-delivered instructions for deploying application changes. In my experience their technical knowledge is limited, they cannot verify copy/paste correctly, and screw up (transferring ZIP files in ASCII instead of binary) more than they succeed. I don't feel this position is even necessary. The PROCESS is necessary and it can be performed by anyone, even a developer, as long as they switch their role hats before starting and are held accountable for accurately following the deployment instructions given.

* Production support - They act both in a technical and relationship role, being the contact point between the customer (internal or external) and the application team when issues arise. Generally have read-only access to production. They are able to debug many problems and resolve a few, but definitely not all of them. They do not participate in any part of the development lifecycle processes.

* Developers - Not going to discuss or debate any pre-production roles here since it's irrelevant to the topic. Developers are the only ones I would be confident could debug ANY problem. They are going to need some reasonable level of access to production, logging, or information if you want to have an application that can maintain high availability and recover quickly from any type of outage.

If your definitions to these roles differ significantly, then my answer for your company's situation would change.

Depending on the size of the application and the team allocated to run it, I've performed up to 4/5 roles and was pretty much the 5th as well since the Sys Admin only could barely squeak by supporting Windows 2k and definitely had zero knowledge of any of the supporting software. Are you going to hire someone to do 6 hours of work per month just to separate the responsibilities? Of course not. So the OP's generalized question is open to a million different interpretations because of all the different variables that weren't specified.

My most recent application team recently went through our production lockdown after finally migrating over an application suite purchased from another company. Developers and Prod Support have read-only access. Database passwords used by the applications have been restricted down to just a couple individuals. When changes need to be made to either the application or data, an Emergency ID is checked out to a requesting individual with the appropriate access level, and is tied to whatever tracking and incident/bug/problem ticketing system the company uses. Any change they make, anything that is screwed up, can be tracked back to who and when. The auditing processes in place are the key to how you answer the original question.

Regarding back doors and any type of screwup or botched job in production due to someone's access, it all comes down to people following good auditing, security measures, communication, and processes. When any of those fail, it is usually a people problem, not a process problem. Fix the people or get rid of them, the processes are generally fine.