1. Get swim suit made of magic fabric.
2. Swim, thereby heating the pool.
3. Say goodbye to expensive pool-heating bills!

The friction from the road generates heat, which is converted by the tire back to electricity, which runs the car!

The faster you go, the better the mileage you get! In fact, cars like these can achieve near-infinite mileage! (YMMV.)

What's not to like?

And who, exactly, would have been hurt by learning to use a slide rule to solve problems 40 years ago?

Sure, the slide rule skills themselves aren't terribly valuable - although it's not a bad tool to reach for occasionally if you have one on your desk - but the problems and solution methods haven't really changed. Math is still a pretty damn useful thing to know.

Programming has been pretty similar over the same timescale. Specific tools come and go, but the general problems and solutions have only evolved. Hell, if you had learned to program back when slide rules were still common you probably would have learned FORTRAN. FORTRAN is still valuable to this day, because the problems haven't changed and the solutions still work. At most, you'd move to something like C++ or OpenCL for those problems, which is a smaller change than moving from a slide rule to a graphing calculator or computer math package would be.

Obv. you've never flown in an Airbus.

Then, the DMV. No traffic violations, car chases, or accidents. Why would anybody be required to carry a license or other ID except as a method of social control.

They want to post Snowden's photo in the hallways of the Pentagon and CIA, right next to Aldrich Ames and General Petraeus.

Systems people just need to do their goddam jobs. Workers have enough crap to worry about.

Nonsense. If you spend 6+ hours a day working at a computer, you have some responsibility to know how to use that computer.

What next? Is every company going to have an "office chair support" department so people don't have to figure out how to raise and lower their own chair? A typist pool so that nobody has to learn how to type?

While the researchers in TFA took account of "harmonic" and "timbral" chnges, whatever that means, the study is still meaningless because it doesn't take into account:

1. Changes in population demographics;
2. Changes in recording technology, e.g. multitrack recording, use of digital effects such as delay, flanging and reverb;
3. Evolution of synthesizer technology including sequencers, MIDI, etc.;
4. Changes in distribution channels, i.e. obsolescence of physical media;
5. Increases in the amount of music composed and produced primarily as motion-picture promotional tie-ins;
6. Changes in radio audience measurement (ratings and their effect on playlists);
7. DJ motivation for airplay, including payola.
8. Changes in the way consumers access music, for example transistor radios, boom boxen, Walkmen,. iPods, smartphones, Sirius XM.

I'm sure I could think of a dozen or so other factors. Nice try.

His business card said "Office of the Public Defender."

Here is the actual washing machine.

If I enter -$1000 will they credit my PayPal account?

It's not clear that saturated fat is bad for you either. That leaves trans fats as bad, and Omega-6's as questionable.

The trick is that "the level of cholesterol in the blood" is not a meaningful health indicator. The ratio of LDL to HDL is much more useful. And saturated fat actually makes that ratio slightly better (while raising the values of both). Thus, the best evidence indicates that saturated fat is *good* for you.

I used to think the author(s) of Revelations were unbelievably prescient and ahead of their time in predicting the ascendence of bar codes, RFID tags, etc. to identify and to number people.

Now with facial recognition, and with DNA readers in the future, who needs to "mark" people?

The problem remains: it's very likely that other projects just as important as this one are probably facing the same kind of issues, but it would be nice to hear about them before they get in trouble, and not after.

Not really, because there aren't that many projects as important as GNUPG but without a foundation or something backing them up. OpenSSL is probably the next good example, but that's run by a consulting company.

Without GNUPG, no major GNU/Linux distros could security download updates. It's *the tool* that does digital signatures. It's at least as important as OpenSSL, but in that case there are viable alternatives (e.g. GNUTLS, NSS).

Really, the GNU project needs to spend some more money on maintaining the infrastructure that they sponsor. They'd get quite a bit more money if the had fundraisers directly for core GNU software (e.g. GNUPG / GCC / Bash / libc) development rather than generic funds that might get spent sending their mascott to protest at an Apple store or some nonsense. Activism is great and all, but it's a waste of time if the concrete infrastructure that the movement has built is allowed to rot.