The new 911 Turbos do not offer manual transmission any more. You can only get the PDK (Porsche Dopplekuppling) dual-clutch gearbox as an option. I enjoy my manual-shifting 996, though it's no fun in stop-and-go.

I'm a computer science professor who started as an assistant professor on an H-1B visa, making less than $110,000. Since then, I've won a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and brought in a few millions of dollars of federal grant funding, as well as established strong ties with industry and government labs. I've also mentored many graduate and undergraduate students who are US citizens, some who have gone into graduate school with fellowships that have been based on work in my lab. Others have gone onto academic positions of their own after earning a PhD under my advising. Another group of students has gone on to get excellent jobs at major tech companies.

Were this program in place, I would not have been able to get a job in the US. I'm now a green card holder on the path the naturalization, making above the threshold that Senator Cruz proposed, and bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to the university where I work. You should ask yourself whether I have been a net positive for the United States or not. If this proposal, supported by many here, goes through, others like me will not even have a chance to prove their value.

I get the issues with the H-1B and the lock-in to companies while making under the prevailing wage, but this is a blunt-force solution that could end up having wildly unintended consequences.

Importantly, this looks to be a Facebook-specific implementation of Vanish, a project with the goal of making data "self-destruct" after a set period of time done by Roxana Geambasu and her colleagues at the University of Washington, linked here. They describe in their USENIX Security paper why encryption alone doesn't solve the problem.

Phew! Thank goodness I defended over the summer. Maybe I should register for a new number certifying I've read the new rules?

These are well-known techniques in the telephony world. AT&T has been using this for many years to combat telecom fraud; knowing who you call means that if you don't pay your bill but another phone number starts calling people in your circle of friends, they can identify that it's you making those calls. Communities of interest have also been examined in the context of IP networks and email. It's an interesting field of research and this seems like a novel analysis, though I'm sure they are doing something very similar within every carrier network.

If you're interested in theory, read up on the DIMACS group at Rutgers. They are very well regarded.

UPenn, Cornell, Stanford immediate come to mind if you're looking to play at the top level. Look at proceedings of the POPL and PLDI conferences to get a sense of what people are doing and where they are doing it.

One good book on investing is David Chilton's The Wealthy Barber. I recommend it.