We got the same advice at an awful career fair for scientific post-docs that I attended. Sitting in a room with 300 other young scientists who recently earned their Ph.D.'s, being told not to give a wimpy handshake when meeting an interviewer - what a tremendously embarrassing waste of time.

The "bailout" was a loan. What do you care how it's spent? You'll get, or have already gotten, it back. Plus interest.

Mine too. I wasn't sure how to convert degrees to length since the depth can very from inches to billions of light years. So I answered "neural interface".

"Over 30 inches" just seemed too wishy-washy.

Will it blend?

I was in the beta program too and didn't enjoy it much either. I'd play a game or two and then quit for the evening, whereas with the original Starcraft I'd get sucked in and play for hours (often into the wee hours of the morning and miss out on sleep).

One problem I noticed is that the game moves too fast. The units do so much damage that they kill each other or buildings in mere seconds. There's no time to send reinforcements, cast spells, or even retreat. Well, maybe pro players with 600 APM can do that stuff, but for an average player the battles are over before you even get the alert that they've started.

The problem is that the competition takes place on web sites like Orbitz or Travelocity where the only criteria for comparing airlines is route and ticket price. There's no indication of whether a particular airline charges extra for checked bags, carry-on bags, or refreshments. Nor is there any indication of how much leg room to expect, how often the airline departs on time, or how often the airline leaves passengers on the tarmac for six hours.

When the only information passengers have is route and ticket price, the airline that can scheme to have the lowest upfront price will win.

I was crucified once. It's not so bad. At least it gets you out in the fresh air.

Is £11.78 inherently too much to spend for a web site visitor? When I need to renew my vehicle registration, a web site visit that let's me do it online is certainly worth more than that to me rather than spending half a day at the DMV. For some business-oriented sites that deal with licenses, £11.78 per visitor could certainly be worth bringing in a few more £1,000,000 per year businesses to town.

Car companies refusing to evolve [...] Those businesses deserve some intervention to help them get through the rough time that is no fault of their own.

I think it's unfair to claim that the car companies deserved to die during this recession. GM needed the bailout because car companies depend heavily on the availability of credit to consumers and dealers. When that dried up, they faced a rough time due to fault of the banks, not themselves. They have already turned around and become profitable ($900 M in the 1Q2010). If they were truly obsolete then they wouldn't be making so much money already. But if they had been left to die, there would be a massive disruption to the economy as a vast system of suppliers crumbled.

Chrysler probably does deserve to die, but it wouldn't really be fair to offer a lifeline to one car company without offering it to all. Ford chose to pass on government help and live off their own reserves. Now that the credit crisis has passed, those companies should be left to live and die on their own.

George Foreman

My kingdom for an editor.

Most anything I write would be improved with a second pair of eyes (and an extra computer).

I can read source code. With a refresher, I can read machine code. Give me the kernel and I can plug and chug my way just as well as any digital computer, although a bit slower.

I'd like to split my vote between "Older than 15 years" and "Which component, you insensitive clod?".

I spend almost all my waking hours using a computer my parents gave me in 1972. As you might expect for the era, its floating point performance is poor and its communication rate barely keeps up with a 300 baud bulletin board. But it kicks shiny metallic ass at analog computations, pattern recognition, and language comprehension. It also self-modifies both its software and hardware to tune performance for any new problems I throw at it.

My oldest computer is my brain.

Agreed on the 3rd party email. I can't believe that people get themselves tied up with an ISP or, worse, their workplace for their personal email account. But I'd still be reluctant to establish myself with any commercial provider for my main email account. Google isn't evil today, but they might be in a few years.

I use my alma mater for my permanent address. They've been around for almost two centuries and their mission statement includes "communicating, preserving and applying knowledge" rather than "turn a profit by any means necessary", so I trust them to be around and act in my interest for the extent of my life. Right now I pay them $10 a month for my email and web space, but they'll forward emails for free if I ever want to go the cheap route.

The "damn computers too slow" comment tells me that he really means the problem can't be solved numerically. A simple computer program can certainly tell you what will happen if you perform a certain burn. But it can't tell you what burn will achieve a certain outcome with minimal fuel expenditure. It can try to grind through all the possible variations, but if the variations are too numerous and the computations are too strenuous then it's not practical. Hence, the damn computers are too slow.