dripton

I like the idea too, except for fraud. When everyone making less than X automatically gets money from the government, the temptation to work off the books and double-dip grows. (Though I don't know if it's really any more of a problem than faking disability.)

Some people do have a lot of kids. However, the overall total fertility rate in the US was estimated in 2011 at 1.89 kids/woman, below replacement level. So without immigration, population would indeed be shrinking.

Actually, not a lot of major US airports were built after 1970. Denver International Airport is the only big one I can think of. NIMBY makes it really hard to build airports except in the absolute middle of nowhere, where there's no need.

The Ctirp study last year showed that remote CSRs at a Chinese travel agency were more productive than the ones in the office. Of course that might not be applicable to other jobs.

They don't all forget. S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire series is full of bikes.

You're assuming that he won't murder anyone in prison.

This time of year, the package delivery companies are hiring lots of temporary help. There was a sticker looking for temporary delivery guys covering up the local paper's lead story last week.

Sometimes, anyway. Recall that the Canadian Supreme Court invalidated the parent on Viagra last week for failing to disclose the active ingredient.

I've seen professional women coming to the office with free logo-emblazoned tote bags. Not all professional women are fashion-obsessed.

"Hey, POTUS, you got us. BTW, we'll never lend you money again. Or vote for your party again."

The US would never need to default on its debt, since its debt is in USD. Worst case, it would just print more money, leading to inflation.

I have one in my car, with my entire music collection on it.

Though I might want to delete some, since my car's interface for switching between albums is serial. Takes a long time to go from A to Z.

Sorry, I was looking at the wrong page while I wrote that. But the greater point stands -- swinging Florida, Ohio, and Virginia would not have swung the election.

Regardless, there's no way all of those Libertarian voters would have voted Republican. Some who voted Libertarian did so out of concern for civil liberties or drug legalization or avoiding war, and many of those would be more likely to vote Democratic than Republican if the option of voting Libertarian were not present.

You can't just put voters on a left-right axis.

No. Obama won by 313 to 225 electoral votes. Florida had 29, Ohio 18, and Virginia 13. If you switch all three states to Romney then Romney would have won 285 to 260.

I am really annoyed to see many of these pages calling states for a candidate with 0% of votes in.

Can't we at least wait until a statistically valid sample of actual votes is in?

We used to only have the optical scanners in Virginia. The machines are a recent addition, and a big step back. I want them gone.

Of course there's no foolproof way to tell if someone opened an email. You can do something like embed a link to an image with a unique URL for tracking, and hope people's email clients automatically follow such links. (Yours doesn't, mine doesn't, but your grandmother's might.)

If they can afford Lucasfilm, they can surely afford to license Zahn's books. (Assuming Lucasfilm didn't already have the right to film them, which they might, if they thought to insert the right language into the book contracts.)

Whether they want to is another question.

Counterexample: I got a National Merit scholarship. I didn't study for the PSAT at all.

Good for you. I also categorically refused to buy anything with DRM on it, until I caved and bought a Kindle last year. I figured the DRM on the Kindle was at least easy to crack, so I could make backups of my books to keep Amazon from stealing them from me. But I must confess that I haven't been diligent about backing up my ebooks.

I think the country most similar to the US is probably Canada. Canada has both significantly cheaper medical care (US$4360/person/year vs. $7960/person/year) and significantly higher life expectancy (80.7 vs. 78.2) than the US.

Another candidate would be Australia. Life expectancy 81.81 years, medical cost $3445/person/year.

Or maybe the UK. Life expectancy 80.05 years, medical cost $3487/person/year.

I think we can get there from here. We've had Medicare for over 40 years. It's just a matter of slowly lowering the eligibility age until everyone is covered. Of course it's not politically easy -- the healthcare industry makes a ton of money and owns a lot of politicians -- but it's possible.

Maybe most of the market doesn't care, but I care a lot. I gladly paid $30 more for an ad-free Kindle, and I won't be buying one of the new Fires if they don't have an ad-free version.

How would you know how many apps were blocked, if they never showed up in the store?

I don't like the way he does coordinates for triangles and hexagons, having hexes with the same y-coordinate slope up to the right. I prefer having hexes with the same y-coordinate stay as close to horizontal as possible, meaning that even hexes will be shifted up or down by half a hex compared to odd hexes.

I found that keeping the hex coordinates as close as possible to the square coordinates that your GUI library uses makes things easier.

Obviously your test case is insufficient.

In Kent Beck's "Test Driven Development by Example", he starts just like this, with an insufficient failing test. Then he writes a minimal function that passes it. Then he adds another test, then improves the function until it passes both. By the time he's done, he's got tests for all the edge cases he could think of.

I think it's a great way to make sure you cover all the edge cases, for a sufficiently complicated function. I don't have the patience to write all my code that way, though.

In a couple of decades of occasional job interviews, I've done mostly 1:1 and a handful of 2:1.

I've only done one 4:1, which was actually lunch in between all-day 1:1 interviews, and which didn't feature any technical questions just random social conversation. It was definitely still part of the interview, though.

I was in the same boat until last fall, when I finally caved and bought a Kindle. I hate DRM too, but at least Kindle's DRM is easy to crack, so you have a way out of Amazon's walled cesspool if you need it. (I haven't needed it so far, since the Kindle is my favorite mobile reading device and Kindle Cloud Reader works in Linux. But if Kindle's DRM were stronger, I never would have bought one.)

Warm rain doesn't matter, except that it affects your stopping distance so you need to brake earlier. Rain gear is mostly pointless in warm weather because it reduces ventilation and leads to getting wet from sweat rather than from rain.

For colder rain, I use a Showers Pass jacket, and I ride a bike with fenders.

For snow and ice, I ride my mountain bike with studded tires. (The studs aren't really needed for snow but they help a lot with ice.) And I switch from clipless pedals to flat pedals so I can get a foot out faster to catch falls. (I fall about once per year in the dry, versus several times per ride in bad snow.)

I ride to work every day. Most of my commute is on a popular bike path. I always warn people before I pass them. Every few months, someone decides to do a U-turn or a left turn, without looking, right into my path, while I'm passing them, leading to a near-collision. So far, 100% of the adults who've done this have been wearing headphones. (I've had one kid without headphones do it; I said "on your left" and she got confused and veered left into me. Now I just say "passing.")

Based on this, I think joggers and cyclists with headphones are significantly more dangerous to themselves and others than those without.

Of course, it's possible that you are different and can hear fine through your headphones, but I'm skeptical. (Just as I'm skeptical of people who claim they can drive fine while talking on the phone, or while drunk.)

It's true on Linux as well. I upgraded my work machine from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 12.04, and my VMWare Workstation 7 stopped working. (The kernel modules it uses are incompatible with newer kernels.) There are some third-party patches that are alleged to make it work, but I couldn't get them working quickly, so I just downloaded the version 8 beta instead. When that expires in October, I either have to pay for version 8 or retry hacking version 7.