Because insurance IN EVERY OTHER INSTANCE WHERE IT IS APPLIED is about replacing things that are, well, replaceable. In general, a crappy car, even if it does cost a bit to repair, won't leave you bankrupt. And if it starts to go that way, you'll probably ditch it and buy a new car. Not so easy with one's body. The fact is, breaking your foot could cost more than a lot of people make in a year by the time it's all said and done. And, in case you haven't noticed, a number of companies now sell insurance for car repairs as well. It won't pay for your gas; but then, health insurance doesn't pay for your food, either, so we'll call that one even.

Ssshhhh!!!....do you really want people going around putting sharp pointy things in their eyes?

That, or it's neo-Nazi propaganda, and really wasn't written by Card...meh, probably not.

Do not those very writings give them the right to disagree, and to express such? One might even say that God gives them these rights, that they are somehow...inalienable. "I declare, I think we'd all be better off if the government put cameras in our houses and made us wear GPS devices to track our every move!" I may be an idiot, but I think that the preceding expression of my idiocy is protected free speech...and I'm certainly not alone :-{

I don't know that this is accurate. Even in 1950, it's my impression that prosecutors, judges, and everyone else had the common sense to realize that I might not keep my "stolen" portraits with my legitimate art collection, especially if I felt that "the fuzz" (g-men, etc.) were closing in. I would think that the warrant would be issued to search my house (looking for artwork, of course), and perhaps that or a separate one would be issued for my place of employment, any rented storage I might have, perhaps even my parents' basement; and that such inclusion of "likely" hiding spots would be fairly routine. That's what I get from watching lawyers on TV, anyway.

I'm going to second this. I was lucky enough to fall into something that matched what I wanted to do, and what I specialized in, when I got laid off 3 months after graduating. What that was, was working with networking protocols (obscure ones, unproven ones, rarely implemented ones with errors in the specs, you name it). Contrary to what has been said about not writing a kernel your first year, I was handed a rather large book of standards & protocols and given a somewhat comparable mandate (on a smaller but still very ambitious scale). In any case, the job was C, so I did C, and I became very good at C (and used my Assembly knowledge to impress the boss when he had a bug in his code one day - as mentioned by others, practice saying "how can I help?") It being a government contracting environment, where I was on-site and treated almost like a gov't employee, I was able to and did drag C++ in and learn on the job at the first opportunity - but only when it was appropriate to the task. I have moved on, but that early experience led me to a new company, a more complex and commercially viable version of the same router, and that's what I do now, and still mostly in C. And I still drag other (OO) languages in when appropriate, and I wake up happy every day. Do what interests you first. The language will be dictated at first by requirements; later you'll either have different requirements, or you'll figure out what languages interest you, and if you're lucky they'll be appropriate. And you may be writing the requirements. You should have taken a course called "Programming Language Concepts" or similar, and the main thing you should have taken away from that class is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Programmers tend to write everything in the language they are comfortable with (often because it's the only way to get it done right and on time). But, that class should also have given you the tools to understand, evaluate, and be able to become fluent in new languages quickly. Again, your education is about learning how to learn, how to think about Computer Science problems, and obtaining a nice collection of reference books along the way. At the end of PLC, you should have realized that it's best to carry more than a hammer. If you were coming to work at my company, I'd say be fluent in C, and at least competent in either C++, Java, or C#, so if you had to go balls to the wall on any of them, you could. Play around with Python, Ruby, or both as much as you can. And learn Perl, awk, shell scripting, and basic UNIX shell commands as much as possible - those are powerful tools that can do a lot for you with minimal effort. This will all take time, but you will end up with a toolkit, and the ability to choose the best language for the job, whatever the job may be, as well as the ability to evaluate and learn the "hot new languages" as they come along. Finally, remember two things: 1) You should always be learning; both on the job and on your own. Sorry pal, but you signed up for a lifetime of further education. 2) Half of your job is to be a computer scientist. The other half is knowing your company's/customer's business. These percentages vary depending on the domain you choose to work in. Hopefully your professors got this across to you, because you signed up for a lifetime of learning your customers' business as well.

That's exactly it. No one is questioning the spammer's right to say something, or to sell his product. He can sell it on the streetcorner, in a shop, wherever. He can advertise it on TV, on billboards, on the Internet. What is, or should be, illegal, is sending it to the private e-mail accounts of people who don't want it, at the expense of their service providers. If that action is covered by free speech, then I should be able to throw a brick through your front window, step inside, and start hawking my wares to your family during your dinner hour. "Hey, just exercising my right to free speech!" The disturbing thing here is that any U.S. court would even entertain such a patently ridiculous argument.