I don't think you quite understand how steel works. Steel gets dramatically weaker as it gets hotter. At a temperature of merely "too hot to hold", it's already lost a measurable amount of strength. By the time you hit the ignition point of wood, your typical structural steel will have lost about half its strength (and will stretch like taffy, making materials testing an exciting proposition).

This would be a good thing to sell policies for, though... the odds of the company not also being obliterated in either the impact itself or subsequent extinction event/societal collapse and having to make payouts would be very small!

Actually, it would be a pretty poor thing to sell policies for. Most asteroids aren't dinosaur-killers. They're 20-meter city-shattering rocks, and if one of them actually hits a city, the resulting payouts would bankrupt most insurance companies.

The problem as I see it with Apple doing this is that it doesn't make a lot of sense for most MacBook Pro users. At least that's my understanding of the market. Perhaps Apple is privy to market information that I'm not (in fact I'm sure they are). However, when I hear life-long die-hard Apple power users complaining about MacBook Pros and Mac Pros for years in a row, feeling like they've been abandoned by Apple, maybe there's something to that.

I was a hard-core Mac user from 2001-2008, but I realized they were moving away from my needs after that in favor of iOS and jumped ship.

The touch bar is just the opening volley. Meanwhile Apple is doing the boiled frog thing with key travel, slowly getting users used to less and less key travel.

Eventually, they will probably replace the entire keyboard with a touch-board of some kind and expect that users will simply adjust. I think they've lost the plot somewhere.

Note this is not my original idea -- Merlin Mann mentioned it on the Back to Work podcast and I think he's spot on. And he's a huge Apple fan.

Good discussion including moxie here.

Forget Ryzen. I'd like to see one of the latest CPUs benchmarked against a Core i7-3960X. 6C/12T, 3.3GHz base clock, 15MB of cache, fully buzzword-compliant. Oh, and it's almost six years old.

Honestly, it's hard to get excited about "bringing the heat" when we're talking about single-digit percentage gains. There hasn't been a breakthrough in either clock speed or IPC in years, and even core counts have remained pretty much the same.

I have seen a few reports that they are lasting quite a bit longer than expected and still performing, in some cases 10 years past their estimated 20 year functional lifespan. If we have to make a lined pit in the ground and throw them all in it every 30 years, that will be fine.

They have no moving parts (unless you use trackers) and they take advantage of "free" energy that will be here as long as the earth is habitable. It is inevitable that they will take over energy production.

What happens with phantom limbs is twofold:

First, the nervous system uses both positive ("there's something happening") and negative ("there's nothing happening") signals. If you amputate a limb, the brain stops receiving both types of signals, and the absence of negative signals is interpreted as sensations from the limb.

Second, the boundaries between the parts of the brain controlling different parts of the body isn't sharp. If you cut off somebody's hand, signals from other areas such as the "arm" part of the brain will spill over, and there won't be stronger "hand" signals to override them. Since the signals don't come with tags indicating their source, the "hand" part of the brain sees them as coming from the hand.

First class.

That's not pirating at all, that's the nature of open source. For example, take a look at RHEL and CentOS.

It must be really frustrating if that many of your applicants answer as you say. I don't know much of that in depth and I was still thinking it would be a multiple hour answer.

Congratulations -- you found the edge cases, the few works that continue to bring in substantial profits for a long time.

For literature as a whole, 99% of profits are made within the first decade of initial release. For music, within a year. Magazines make their profit within a month, and newspaper articles, within a day. Movies probably fall into the "one year" bucket, but Hollywood accounting makes it impossible to tell.

The single greatest threat to most creators is copyright terms. Most people aren't the next Shakespeare, or even the next Douglas Adams. Their best bet for keeping their works in circulation isn't a company raking in the millions, but communities of dedicated fans, and copyright terms -- even if they were a simple "author's lifespan" duration -- prevent that.

I've never watched much TV as an adult, and only had cable when my roommates wanted it in college. However, there are a few things I want to watch sometimes, and it's extremely frustrating to try to find one to three services that will allow me to watch those few things at a reasonable price.
If I watched more than this, I think it would probably be simpler and cheaper to just get cable or satellite.
I suspect and hope that one day the shakeout that's happening now will be resolved, and real a la carte service will be available.

Code.org seems pretty good actually for teaching programming logic with a sort of visual pseudocode. My 8 y/o has been enjoying it. They use it at her school too.

The newest StreetView data around here is ten months old, the oldest ten years. Most small towns have coverage of exactly one road; some don't even have that. Even in cities, there are gaps in coverage, and not just minor dead-ends: I'm aware of a three-block gap in a major arterial.