I have often wondered whether UK Immigration Officers have a quota to meet...

I would be curious to know if some ethnic groups are being targeted so that the statistics show that they're deporting a 'correct' amount of people from each group.

This was suggested by one of the people I spoke to afterwards. They can now say that they don't just stop a certain kind of group or look... "We stopped a blonde American girl last week."

It's easily as useful a comparison between any smartphone and a mainframe.

I have regularly wondered how all these Hedge Funds (let alone the Banks) are doing so well without some kind-of inside information and/or some means to "generate interest or concerns" in the direction they would find the most beneficial.

The banks and large hedge funds manage so much money that their opinions and positions actually impact the market prices.

For example, akin to the "Colbert Bump", there is a "Buffett Bump" where position prices rise as Buffett releases his positions. Over the past few weeks a bunch of firms were required to disclose some positions as part of a 13F filing.

But it's not all puffery. Check out the story of David Einhorn and Green Mountain Coffee (GMCR).

There is a continuing misunderstanding between "suits" and dev's, where most dev's _do_ learn the business through experience, but the suits continually choose not to, and instead of working as the "teacher" and filter between both areas, just push the demands down to the dev. And "yes": teacher is always part of the job.

In the UK and NZ, the vaccine is only given to those at-risk from Chickenpox. Children don't receive it as a matter of policy, and I don't believe adults who've never caught the disease are normally offered it, either.

One of the reasons/theories I've heard for this, is that if you've had Chickenpox, you are at-risk for Shingles -- which is often extremely painful and difficult to overcome. However, if you are regularly exposed to Chickenpox, your immune-system gets "reawakened" to the virus, therefore can more-quickly recognise and fight-off a recurrance, before it becomes Shingles.

One of the easiest ways to aid this exposure is to keep the virus active, but under-control, in the community. This has a useful side-effect of the community also being aware and more-knowledgeable about the disease, too.

Another argument I've heard against the vaccine is that it's simply not possible to get rid of Chickenpox totally -- it's _highly_ infectious, and the infectious stage is before symptoms appear, etc -- but the vaccine gives a false sense of security of protection, perhaps in the same way as everyone thinks they're safe from Smallpox, Hepatitis, Ebola, etc because we worked so hard to get rid of or control it.

Strictly speaking, it's not the same as Chickenpox, especially in symptoms and effect.

I agree. It's a little like a Java programmer knowing JVM bytecode: definitely not _needed_ but you'll be much better at understanding why (for example) some code structs are more efficient than others.

Years ago, before ActiveRecord, I started writing my own ORM for Ruby. I got a reasonable way into it, too. I gave it up, because I realised that it was much, much simpler to write many small PL/SQL views and write-triggers and use temporary local objects and/or lazy writes (etc). The DB could do much better query-optimisation this way, for one thing. But anyway, that was a long time ago.

TBH: If you want all your relational logic in your app, NoSQL systems make an awful lot more sense these days -- esp. if you've got a decent API/wrapper-layer that can automatically manage the freshness of locally cached data for you.

Was it really "giving" or did they just get an arrangement to be able to use them "defensively" against other patent suits?

Not quite: businesses (or corp's) are effectively made of groups of people. These particular groups seem to want to act more psychopathically / self-interested than an individual might -- think mobs or riots.