As one of those folks in the 40+ age bracket...

1) Back when us old farts were teenagers, U2 was considered somewhat revolutionary (and in a way they were). The music itself? Compared to the mass of dreck we had thrust upon our ears via radio in the 1980s? It wasn't half bad, but there was better out there (you just had to really go look for the good shit, in an age where the HTTP protocol didn't exist and the Internet was unknown to 99.99999% of the planet. This meant buying a shitload of blank cassettes, a wide circle of friends, and having a boom box with cassette-to-cassette recording capability.)

2) I once felt the same way towards my old man's 60's/70's Psychedelic/ProgRock collection (played on reel-to-reel no less!) that you feel towards a 1980's has-been band. However, my ears, like the rest of me, grew up - I inherited his collection, and after a cursory listen-through, am ripping the hell out of some of those reels to the audio-in on my home desktop machine (Thank Heavens for Audacity on Linux...) Good news, though! Old stuff, new stuff, in-between stuff... it doesn't matter to me any more; I find good stuff in every era, to the point where I have 78 RPM 'vinyl' with stuff I've ripped to FLAC. Mind you, I'm typing this as some rather kickass German industrial rock is pumping into my headset. Before that, The Temptations' Power was playing. Jazz musicians call it the act of having 'Big Ears', where you find and love good music from practically every genre. Someday, you'll get that too.

3) One fine day, *your* kids will point at your current favorite tech and laugh their asses off, as surely as I once laughed my ass off at inheriting my parents' old Amstrad 2286 (complete with maths co-processor!) and its dot-matrix printer... in 1997. Deny it all you want, I don't mind... I know different. ;)

Wait... I thought the first proper zombie movie was Romero's Night of the Living Dead, set in Pennsylvania.

Besides, you have Triffids... be happy with that.

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(That reminds me - you also have Quatermass; when the frig is someone over there going to resurrect that series?)

Well, *someone* has to find a safe hiding place for all the Senators and Fortune 100 CEO's... you don't think they have time to find that on their own, do you?

Same here (I have Windows 7 parked on a small VM for Windows-only stuff that I still find useful, but opening that VM gets rarer and rarer these days...)

A good idea, especially since the Moon has a two-week rotation. (by the way, many early drawings of lunar colonies did have underground living featured prominently. There was even a (IMHO dumb) idea to use nuclear weapons to carve out the caves with.

That all said, I think your body (or at least mind) would be in for a shock if you stepped outside on midnight colony time to see the sun high in the sky. But then, folks who live within the Arctic Circle have to put up with seasonal day/night cycle shifts that have some weeks in total darkness during winter (and the opposite in summer). They seem to adapt well enough (though to be fair, they still can rely on a 24-hour rotational cycle no matter where the sun is at any given moment.)

Seriously - people aren't as fragile as TFA surmises. In the spelunking world, cavers have discovered that after a few weeks without a day/night reference, their circadian cycles stretched out to a 24/24 cycle. In the case of a newly-minted Martian, it won't go that extreme, which means that at least within the timeframe of an exploratory journey, it would be no big deal, and they can adjust between the two on the way there and back (there's plenty of time on the journey to do that.)

Long term is a bit more difficult to predict, but only in how it affects the body overall. It would certainly adjust and stay adjusted, but I can guess (with no evidence either way) that the effect would be no different than Daylight Savings Time cycles would have on the typical adult here on Earth.

Yeah... today just went real sour.

It had to happen sometime, I guess... doesn't make it any easier to accept, though.

1%? Probably not. 5%? More likely.

Incidentally, what I do and give in both time and resources has never been disclosed, nor will it (also a Christian tenet, incidentally).

Fair enough - you did cite the sources. That said, you still have a problem (which you have not resolved), and I should've pointed it out earlier: none of what you quoted is contradictory or an endorsement of what you intimate.

Mark 10:21 was a challenge to a wealthy man, who subsequently failed said test. Luke 14:26 is a statement as to how you should prioritize Christianity over the objections/demands of anyone else, including your own family. 1 Timothy 2:12 is your closest to an actual argument, but it only concerns the role of women in the church itself (and the reason why, for instance, there are no female priests in the Catholic Church). 1 Peter 2:18 was written when slavery was common, and yet it held/holds true - it also aligns perfectly with the Gospels, in which all Christians are to love their enemies, be kind to those who harm you, work the extra mile, etc.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum: All of what you quoted can be followed without contradiction *or* violation.

Here's the fun part - applying it to robots; the first two are superfluous, since robots have no property rights or family, though the lessons could still apply. The third fails because gender in that context is a human-specific thing, and so robots could simply relegate that as a human-only thing. The fourth is the only relevant verse you provided, and I'd damned sure want a robot to hold to it.

Nice try on the pre-emptive "cherry pick" charge BTW, but the burden is now on you to prove that I did such a thing. ;)

One would hope that a good manager would have enough practical and direct experience in writing software to at least come up with a half-decent estimate, no?

Most shops I've seen lately have the scrum masters spend a part of a planning session simply asking individual contributors "Here's a rough outline of the proposed project [...] now how long do you think doing that will take", and they come up with an estimate adjustment from there... most of the time, it's fairly close. PMs pad things a little of course, but the results tend to be fairly close.

YMMV of course... depends on who is posting the final estimates - is it devs, or is it the MBAs.

(If it's the latter, run like hell.)

I never said that 'my' path is the "original path" - I said that humankind has perverted the original ideal; nobody escapes this statement.

Also, I noticed that in your haste to quote scripture, you made a rather large mistake.

Anyone can mine quotes, but unless you provide the context for each, you have no strength in your argument.

No, no self-respecting AI developer will use .NET. Get that thought out of your head right this instant.

It's not as simple as you surmise. As a Christian, I don't perceive that God stops by and literally vocalizes "...dude, you need more beer in the fridge! No, I'm okay, it's just that this week was a monster what with the whole planetary re-org over by Praxis IV, but you don't want to hear about that, promise. So how about those Trail Blazers last week?" Instead, the communication that does occur is a lot more ephemeral and IMHO a form of meta-communication, and it doesn't even involve presence at times.

If you think about it, communicating with the Almighty is a lot more subtle and complex than most folks realize - some never do. Human technology simply does not have the means to record the common, everyday stuff that most folks experience in their lifetime, and saints/prophets/saviors/miracles are very few and far between. It took Mother Teresa a very long time before she came to the realization, and if anybody deserved to have a straight-up chat with Him while she was in this world...

I do agree though - anyone who tells me "God spoke to me last night, and said..." is going to be met by me with not just a grain of salt, but a whole damned block of it.

TL;DR - not every Christian walks around claiming to have a two-way communication line open to the Divine. I daresay the majority of us claim no such thing.

This is true... and in this case, if robots are going to have any sort of religion, Christianity ain't a bad way to go (mind you: I mean it as originally proposed, not as perverted by humanity since.)

On the other hand, Isaac Asimov covered this very nicely in I, Robot (in the book, not the abortion of a movie.) The specific short story within the book is here.

...and then first-person shooters were invented, at which point dial-up immediately began to suck ass. :p

(I remember when a 180ms ping was something you *bragged* about...)