You seem awfully angry.

The show has evolved into 5 people getting paid to blow crap up. If someone walked up to you and offered you a mind-boggling amount of money, plus side income from speaking engagement fees, etc, to set fire to things, blow stuff up, and to build and play with large and dangerous equipment, are you saying you wouldn't jump at the chance?

For 90% of the myths that they test to demonstrate a lack of understanding of basic physics, at least 90% of the myths they test would have to require such an understanding. I would submit that many of the myths they test require no such understanding, and so your statistics are called into question.

I have yet to see promos for Obama (care to link to that?), and of course they put zany antics high up on the list. It's a TV show. People skip physics class to watch TV because most people find TV more entertaining than physics class. If TV just broadcasts a physics class, people are going to change the channel. After all, the show is called Mythbusters, not Science Hour. Without ratings, the show goes away and gets replaced with another iteration of Ice Road Truckers. Which would you rather have on the air? Even Ed Murrow had to do stupid entertainment celebwatch pieces in between his good journalistic pieces in order to keep his show on the air.

As for the comment you replied to, yes shit sometimes does happen despite all best efforts to prevent shit from happening. As others have noted, this scene was undoubtedly signed off on by the fire department, the cops, the insurance underwriters, and probably ordnance/explosive experts. It isn't as though these guys wandered out and began blindly firing canons toward houses without thinking the situation through, which is what you're implying in your eagerness to crap all over the show.

I have contempt for anyone who is unwilling to learn to use a tool in order to benefit from it. I have contempt for people unwilling to explore. I have contempt for people who expect new tools to be handed to them on a silver platter.

Yeah, me too. But that doesn't mean Apple was dumb to kill Hypercard. They're trying to market to the average user for whom we share (contempt is a strong word. . annoyance? Pity? ;) ). Their whole niche is making the computer that's supposedly geared for non-computer people. "You're creative, so your computer should allow you to create rather than requiring you to learn how to operate it."

Whether we believe that OSX is easier than Win7/Ubuntu/Whatever is immaterial. The important thing is whether Apple's customers believe it. And, apparently, they do.

So now that they've got these "be creative!" artists and musicians and writers, the quickest way, from Apple's perspective, to piss them off is to tell them "so if you want your computer to do something, you have to build the tool." These people want the tools handed to them, as you say, on a silver platter because the tools don't interest them - the stuff they create with the tools does.

From a business perspective, I can have contempt for my customers all day long and no one will care, until I let that contempt dictate that what I produce isn't what those customers want. This holds true whether you're talking about computers or any other industry.

Get a world-renowned chef who's the best on the planet at what he does to run McDonald's and the place will fail because McDonald's customers don't want herb-crusted salmon fillets on a grilled ciabatta roll with a balsamic reduction glaze and au gratin potatoes with truffle flakes. They want a Filet-O-Fish and a paper box full of machine-cut fries, and they want it cheap, and they want it fast. Even though this chef is turning out a product that is an order of magnitude better, and even though he'll delight foodies with it, the foodies aren't McDonald's core customer base.

And the type of person who appreciates what Hypercard could do is not Apple's core customer base either.

There's a book (Traffic) in which traffic engineers say the same thing.

They've been doing that since long before the Monster crap. I worked there many years ago in high school. They'd purposely adjust the lower-priced TVs so that the color was off or the image was blurry, or sometimes they'd even futz with the vertical hold settings to introduce a slow roll (this was long before non-CRT tvs were available), and meanwhile they'd have the higher priced ones set perfectly to get people to pay more.

You said you'd be in New Mexico. There are lots of geek places to visit. Geologically, Carlsbad Caverns is incredible. By far the most impressive public-access cave I've ever been in. In addition to the VLA, there's Los Alamos (several museums dedicated to nuclear stuff), Cloudcroft (the solar observatory near there in Sunspot), Alamogordo's Museum of Space History, White Sands (largest gypsum-sand desert in the world. Nothing but blinding white as far as you can see), Valley of Fires - a huge ancient lava flow that you can walk around in/on. There's Bandelier outside of Santa Fe - the 10,000+ year old human cliff dweller settlement. Check their website before you go though - they've had issues with wildfires and flash floods, so what's open at any given day is in flux right now.

If you want different geek fun, Roswell is always amusing with all their UFO stuff. Even the McDonalds is shaped like a flying saucer.

There's more in the state too, like the lightning field, etc, but those suggestions should keep you busy for awhile.

Gates' claim that they wanted to clean up 95 and that meant leaving out file naming stuff that WP relied upon, though, is disingenuous and a lie.

I agree. I think even a non-technical person might be suspicious of that claim. "Yeah, by astonishing coincidence it just happened to be that the thing that you say was broken and had to be removed was the one thing that kept your competitors from being able to run on your platform. Right."

-sigh-

Pronounces the fish *right.*

I really need coffee today.

My SO has the opposite problem. As a fish nerd (board member of an aquarium society etc etc) she pronounces the fish wrong, but talks about betta software releases. ;)

Definition of promissory estoppel:

"In the law of contracts, the doctrine that provides that if a party changes his or her position substantially either by acting or forbearing from acting in reliance upon a gratuitous promise, then that party can enforce the promise although the essential elements of a contract are not present."

So in other words, if I promise you $100, and based on that promise you hire someone to do work for your organization, and then I change my position substantially by refusing to give you $100, you can enforce the promise.

Your premise is basically correct, but the use of the word "advice" was somewhat improper. It's if someone promises you something - for example, if you call a charity and promise to give them $10,000, and they then hire a contractor to build them a new food shelf building, and you then refuse to give them the money, they can sue you under p.e. to force you to follow through with your promise.

Just giving someone advice ("hey, you should think about building a castle in this swamp!") does not mean that someone could then sue you when the castle burns down, falls over, and then sinks.

And I bet Win8 will be popular trash that will make a lot of money too. ;)

You hit the nail square on the head. I think what's happening is that the suits are running the companies now rather than the nerds, and so we're seeing what happens with suits everywhere - they see something work once, and they try to force it to work everywhere. This is why we see one good product quickly find itself surrounded with 50,000 lesser clones of itself.

"Hey, Survivor was a big hit! Quick, make me a billion more "reality" shows!"

MS and others are looking at the wildly successful smart phone and assuming that it's entirely the OS that makes them successful. They're right, of course, but for the wrong reasons. The OS makes them successful because it makes something so freaking small very usable. Miniaturization adaptations used by iPhone/Android/etc are only slick on miniature things. Shove them onto a 25" widescreen that you don't want to be touching all the time, and the concept which was so loved on the phone is going to be hated on the big(ger) screen.

I see where you're coming from, but it seems to me that China would still be in the testing phase at this point. They didn't exactly get started in space at the same time the US and USSR did.

I get the idea that a lot of changes can be made in a couple of years, but that doesn't mean the changes have to go into the spacecraft. The shuttle ran on computers that were outdated at the time of install, but they did it that way because those computers were proven. Even when they got a computer upgrade later in life, the upgraded computers couldn't hold a candle to the desktops being sold in stores at the time as far as processing power goes. But again, they wanted reliability rather than new shiny. I haven't seen any indications that the Chinese program is eager to install massive amounts of untested upgrades. Whether you launch 10 rockets in 1 year or 5, if you aren't making changes between launches then you're not any more unsafe from a hardware point of view.

I'm very disappointed that this wasn't the first post, but am pleased to see it here nonetheless ;)

Not really. Comparing Apple to Samsung is comparing hardware to hardware. Comparing Apple to Android is comparing hardware to software.