When I was trained as an interviewer at Microsoft (circa 2006), they explicitly warned people against asking questions like that (and had been doing so for some time). There may be older employees who stubbornly persist, though.

I should add that my personal experience contrasts with yours - I did a lot of interviews around 2004 and got asked riddle-type questions by one, maybe two, people. My memory is that they mostly died with the original dot-com boom.

> From a human-memorable standpoint

Not to derail your point, but who needs their WiFi password to human-memorable? Tape it to the bottom of the router like the rest of us.

Yup; recently had my REAR wheel stolen (a large pain to replace tire, tube, wheel, AND cassette). Now I lock both of them.

I bet a lot of people would use the same key to open all those places if it were actually a plausible option.

That said, physical keys are different enough that an analogy breaks down. They're much easier to circumvent (break a window), while their use by a thief is much more impractical (finding the lock and avoiding detection at the location). Criminals in possession of your physical keys will be local (or irrelevant) and limited in numbers. It's easy to get back in your house after a criminal has entered.

Ambiguous. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4286857.

To be boringly practical: The contract would almost certainly be determined when you first signed up for the service (i.e., when you were still alive).

"Surely failing to graduate in an environment that places everything on having a paper diploma, including one's own image/self-worth, is more to the point of the suicide."

I can't speak for the parent poster but my criticism of the film is not with the themes, but with the trite way in which they are portrayed. I can't imagine an audience not understanding that this is what the filmmakers intended them to take away from the scene, but I can imagine them being put off by how they went about it.

> I can imagine them being put off by how they went about it

Remember that we're talking about the same movie industry where a man can slap another man and have him fly some 20 feet, after which he gets up and starts dancing with a lover. Relatively speaking, 3 Idiots was sane.

Suspension of belief I something I expect to need for stunts, not social commentary.

I read that as potentially firing someone as an expected outcome, not a desired/optimal one. HR is short for CYA.

Clearly the author is hesitant to report it because of that outcome.

While you are correct in this instance, the original article is complaining about subtle inequalities that go unnoticed or tolerated by a much larger portion of the industry than just the "creeps".

And the existence of that behavior is an obstacle to increasing the share of women in the industry.

If it's in an wildly inappropriate context, her perception of you can switch from "like" to "dislike" quickly.

It's a factor, but lots of women have stories about attractive creeps.