milspec

That's great for marginal costs. What about fixed costs?

The lobby needs to be mopped. The parking lot needs light. The lawn probably should be kept from turning into a forest. The heat should run in winter, and the cooing in summer.

Which hospital users get stuck paying for those things? What is your fair share?

12 mL worth of battery ought to be able to handle most of those methods. That's about break-even, but better because you refill the same way you refill the computer and propulsion. Charge the battery and you're ready for more action, mess-free. If you can do the job with less than 12 mL of battery, it's a definite win.

That does seem kind of neat, but it still doesn't make sense to me. You have to carry a poison supply that will run out. You need 12 mL per starfish.

Is that really more effective than just injecting lots of seawater? You could pump in seawater by the kL, not mL, and you'll never run out. The starfish will surely die after all bodily fluids have been washed out with seawater.

The other idea that comes to mind is a needle with an electrified tip. Depending on voltage and current, this kills in various different ways. You can heat the animal, zap the nerves, or (via electrolysis of salt) fill the animal with either chlorine or sodium hydroxide.

The really sad thing is that we build on our best farmland. If you want to grow apricots, the best place is San Jose. That whole area in fact is mighty good for farming.

People need to eat! Californians ought to be living in the foothills of the Sierra mountains. This puts them close to water and saves the more farmable land for farming.

Good farmland is flat, is not full of annoying boulders, and has nice weather. We thus pour slab foundations for giant 1-story McMansions and dig holes for giant swimming pools. Doing that in the foothills would be a short-term expense, so instead we'll destroy our best farmland forever.

You missed the word "repeated". Also, some participants in drunken fights act in self-defense or as part of a fighting sport, and so would not be criminals.

So it's actually like this:

You reach 25. You assault somebody. You serve time in prison. (now a questionable case) We decide to give you a second chance. You feel no need to follow the law, and you enjoy assaulting people, so you do it again. OK, at this point we know what kind of person you are. You didn't just make a bad decision one day. Simply letting you out into society is pretty much the same as assaulting a random person, because that is clearly what you are going to do.

If the offender has only ever committed one crime, and they did so while a teen, then OK. Give them another chance, provided they have a workable budget that includes a non-criminal job.

If the offender repeated the crime while being older than 25, then no. There is no realistic hope that the person will ever be non-harmful. Never let them free.

(cases between those two extremes are questionable)

Standard algorithms are standard for very good reasons. They are 100% reliable and at least reasonably fast, if not the fastest.

Failure to learn the standard algorithms impedes progress. You are unlikely to do well in the next course if you are slow and can't handle numerous cases.

Learning alternate algorithms is great... once you have the standard algorithms down solid and are ready to prove equivalence.

Japan does this right: nobody tips. Customers pay the restaurant, and the restaurant pays the waiters.

Tipping is one small step away from paying bribes. Don't do it. Don't encourage it. Don't accept it.

That's a tough one. Maybe you could help work on a JIT for Javascript or Java. This would get you into working on the low-level stuff while still making use of your existing knowledge. Another option is to pretend you are back in school. Find a course with syllabus and homework assignments posted online, buy the book that goes with the course, and do all the assignments. The aggressive approach is to just sit down and write your own boot loader or maybe jump into a capture the flag (CTF) problem with IDA Pro. In case you want to learn from a simple OS, look into xv6 from MIT. Add a few features, possibly as suggested for various courses that use the OS for teaching. You could add a debugging interface. Another idea is to write a disassembler.

It's horribly insecure to keep the company's source code on a computer with a connection to the Internet. For example, this is how the F-35 secrets wound up in China.

We wanted our own site because the parent company's branding was extra-uncool and they wouldn't change it for us, but they wouldn't let us use their name without controlling the branding. This was the compromise. Aside from a few issues like that, we are pretty distinct from the rest of the company. We have our own culture (unusually lively for a defense contractor, almost start-up-like) and we like to show it.

We have a rockstar programmer.

No, really. He put out CDs and all. Technically he's a former rockstar I guess, but close enough. He rocks.

We still lack a ninja. We have been unable to find one who could do low-level programming and get a US (not Japanese!) security clearance. So far we've had to settle for Nerf dart skills, which really isn't up to ninja standards.

Those places are silly. We'd hire you if you can do low-level stuff. (background check too, but I guess you'd pass based on other posts)

* (If anyone is looking for a smart C++ dude, preferably someone using QT, lemme know, I'll hook you up.) *

Uh, maybe. Is he OK with low-level stuff too? We do use Qt, but we might ask him to write a disassembler or a kernel driver.