Perpetual Motion violates the laws of physics - can't be done, so any patent application is bogus, either wrong or fraudulent, not worth wasting time on.*

Cold Fusion might or might not be possible - the scientific community at large hasn't seen a valid description of the physics or chemistry, and without somebody understanding the science, it's extremely unlikely that they'll engineer a successful implementation by tinkering around, and unlikely that somebody who's keeping the science a "trade secret" has actually done real science, as opposed to waving their hands around in ways that seem pleasing to their scientifically untrained eye, and the mere fact that they haven't blown themselves up isn't proof that it works.

* ("Free energy" is a different case - it usually refers to quackery, but sometimes is used to refer to things like taking advantage of heat differences in the ocean or earth or other things that you might be able to engineer usefully into a long-term economically viable power source, but probably can't.)

I've read too many articles like this recently to keep track of who said what, but one of them pointed out that women especially get attacked by trolls when they're starting to become well-known and people are listening to their opinions. Kathy Sierra, for instance, started the Head First line of programming books, which I found useful, and got enough sexist trolling that she left the business. It's happened to other authors I know as well. And of course there are the trolls who hate having women in gaming.

As a guy in my 50s who now needs reading glasses, I'm finding digital displays increasingly frustrating, especially small cheap LCDs that aren't very distinct unless you're looking at them from straight on. I much prefer digital clocks, but if you can't tell a 3 from an 8 or 0 or a 1 from a 7, they're not very useful, and it's almost always easy to tell the big hand from the little hand. Similarly with digital meters, big numbers with fat segments are still easy to read, small skinny ones aren't.

It's not so much a flying car as an airplane that you can also drive. It's useful if you're a private pilot and want to be able to fly to a small airport and drive your plane from there instead of renting one. But it's still airplane physics, not cartoon physics, so you still need to take off from an airport instead of from your driveway like the Jetsons Flying Car my generation always wanted.

Any bets on when the first one gets to Burning Man?

The Constitution actually gave the slave states Congressional representation counting 2/3 of a person for slaves, even though the slaves didn't get the right to vote. It was a compromise between the Southerners who wanted to get 100% representation and the Northerners who mostly didn't want them counted at all. Effectively, it meant that a Southern white man's vote counted more than a free state man's vote, because it took fewer Southern whites to get a Congressman.

No, the point of being a telecom company is to connect your customers together, move their data where they want it efficiently, and get them to pay you for it. Telecom workloads not only include digging ditches for your access line and running wavelength division multiplexors across them, they also include things like routing IPv4/IPv6, firewalls, load balancing, intrusion detection, preventing and mitigating DDOS, hosting CDNs, routing lots of private networks that all run RFC1918 addresses and maybe VLANs, MPLS, maintaining really large BGP tables, fast rerouting around failures, etc.

We're virtualizing that stuff instead of buying big expensive custom-built routers for the same reasons you're virtualizing your compute loads instead of stacking up lots of 1U machines. Internet-scale routers are blazingly expensive, and we want to use Moore's Law to do the compute-bound parts of the workload cheaply and efficiently and let us build new services quickly because we only have to upgrade the software, while using expensive custom hardware only for the things that really need it, plus a lot of that hardware is getting replaced by things like Openflow switches and SDN, which we'd like to take advantage of, and buying expensive dedicated-purpose hardware means you're often stuck overbuilding because the scale of your different types of workloads changes faster than you can redesign hardware.

Also, the transition of lots of enterprise corporate computing from traditional data center structures to clouds means that the communication patterns change a lot faster, and we need to keep up with them. This stuff does seem to be driven a lot more by the needs of the users (telecom and data center) than by the manufacturers of virtualization software or traditional hardware.

And yes, every bit of business buzzword bingo does flow across our desks.

The main change is that when I hear people say "You're more likely to get hit by lightning than to have X happen" I can say "I've already been hit by lightning."

Back around 2000, I was with a group of people at an observatory up in the mountains, which we'd reached by ski-lift-gondola, after some discussion about whether the weather was turning thundery and we should cancel it because we might get stuck there for the day which would mess up our schedule. The thunderstorm decided to show up, and I was outside the observatory looking at the mountains. A few raindrops started to fall, and a bolt of lightning bounced off the building and hit me on the head. The impact wasn't very hard, maybe like dropping a pen onto a hard floor from 5 feet. My wife yelled at me to get in out of the rain. And we did in fact get stuck up there for a few hours - the gondola system shut down when the lightning struck, leaving a gondola full of kids hanging about 100 feet from the observatory for a while before they could restart it, and once they had them safely unloaded they left it stopped until the storm was over.

The other effect was that I had to tell my wife about the previous time when the group I'd with had almost been hit by lightning, hiking at the top of Colorado mountains when the early-afternoon thunderstorm set in. We'd sat down in a low rock shelter, and some of the folks were having sparks from their fingers to the wet rocks, which were making a bit of a sizzling noise.

The original court decisions that allowed wiretaps did so on the basis that telephone companies were third parties in the cases (so they didn't have standing to make 5th Amendment refuse-to-incriminate-yourself complaints, because they wouldn't be incriminated), and were corporations (so the government has the power to audit their business records, and phone bills are business records.) It was basically a loophole that was allowed because it was new technology and the government's lawyers could make some plausible arguments.

That's totally different from any supposed obligation to continue to provide services in a way that makes wiretaps useful. If Apple and Google want to provide good secure end-to-end encryption, they're allowed to. If they want to provide encryption with backdoors in it, the police can subpoena information they collect through those backdoors (though the FTC may have opinions about whether they're making honest claims about security of their products.)

These days people ban it because one of the characters is called by the N-word. Used to be it got banned because N----- Jim was a sympathetic and three-dimensional character, and racists didn't like that.

Dude, best quote of the day!

My dad was a chemist and chemical engineer, but he mainly worked on synthetic rubber, so while it was interesting as a kid to know that he worked on debugging new chloroprene plants, blowing stuff up wasn't part of his trade. (It was useful in college when I needed to replace some gaskets in my car with stuff that wouldn't rot as fast.) So if my friends and I wanted to blow stuff up in high school, we had to do it on our own.

Yes, X is a lot more bloated now than it was back in the late 1980s, when I was running it on 386/25 PCs or Sun3s. But on just about anything but an ARM microcontroller, it's still small enough that you can run a basic X distribution that's enough to fire up a browser, and still not make a dent in the system resources. And you need that browser to use lots of management applications, some of which you're going to need before all the networking is really done, and you probably also want to run a couple of X-terms at the same time, doing something that alternatively you'd have to do on a 24x80 Emacs screen.

Yes, there are lots of tools that want Gnome or KDE, which are both a lot more bloated than some TWM upgrade or Motif or something, and sometimes they're useful enough to drag them in, but you can still have enough X Windows for a server machine without including all the LibreOffice, GIMP, and other large desktop application suites.

If it's in the San Francisco Bay Area, which roastery is it?

Reclining is perfectly reasonable, even though there are people who whine about it because they'd like to be using a laptop. The exception is during meals, where people behind you need to be able to reach their tray and where most airlines no longer provide enough space (though they've mitigated this by no longer providing meals either.) And as a tall passenger, I especially need to recline, because airplane seats aren't built for tall people's backs.

However, I agree with you that you should recline slowly, giving the person behind you time to move a laptop.

It should be pretty obvious. Reclining seats is more comfortable, and that matters more on long flights or flights where you want to sleep.

Sure, it's not the only thing I drink, and there are lots of really great arabicas, and even some of the libericas are drinkable. The taste is different, and if you haven't had it, Vietnamese coffee is the easiest source to find. (There are some non-Vietnamese robustas, and some non-robusta coffee in Vietnam, but basically they dominate the market for good robusta, plus there's some from Africa as well.) Many of the varieties of coffee out there were developed by looking for mutations in existing coffee strains, trying to find weird beans that would breed true, and mainly looking for disease resistance and good production quantities.

And you really should go read the recent research article on DNA results from coffee, or at least the popularized summaries. Interesting stuff about how caffeine evolved separately in coffee and tea plants, in both cases probably because it kept insects from eating them.