I got my pitchfork right here. Let's go!

How are we going to get there, again?

And one that is generally frowned upon by religious people. The names are essentially anti-religious, not religious, in nature.

If the state of Utah is theocratic and makes funding decisions based on particle names, choosing blasphemous ones is not the path to big research bucks. Mormons take the prohibition against taking the name of deity in vain pretty seriously.

Or are we going to have to put up with an idiotically asynchronous connection like we already do with DSL (768K) now?

I mean, the smallpox was there, why not the plutonium?

The mistake I was referring to was smallpox's occasional error in failing to leave a few survivors.

"The web is just an enormous stack of kluges upon hacks upon misbegotten designs. This Archaeology of Errors is no place for the application programmers of old: it takes a skilled programmer with years of experience just to build simple applications on todayâ(TM)s web. What a waste. Twenty years of expediency has led the web into a technical debt crisis."

I know, right? We had it so much easier back when we could just write our own interrupt handler (and pray we didn't step on DRAM refresh or vice-versa) to pull bytes directly off the 8250 - And once we had those bytes, mwa-hahaha! We could write our own TCP stack and get the actual data the sender intended, and then do... something... with it that fit on a 40x25 monochrome text screen (yeah, I started late in the game, those bastards working with punchcards spoiled all the really easy stuff for me!).

And now look where we've gone: Anyone using just about any major platform today can fire up a text editor and write a complete moderately sophisticated web app in under an hour. Those poor, poor bastards. I don't know how I can sleep at night, knowing what my brethren have done to the poor wannabe-coders of today. Say, do I hear violins?

Look up the term autism and understand why the author used that term.

Because it has become a meaningless buzzword used to describe every introverted snowflake on the planet?

The GP responded more-or-less appropriately to the TFA's nonsense. You have simply said "nuh-uh!". Substantiate, please.

Normal humans are effectively excluded from developing software.

I've said that for years. You, however, seem to hold that against those with the rare gift and dedication to code. Kinda missing the point, dude.


a vocation requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication. The way things are today if you want to be a programmer you had best be someone like me on the autism spectrum who has spent their entire life mastering vast realms of arcane knowledge â" and enjoys it

Yes, yes, yes, kinda, yes, and yes. Again - Your point? You've described exactly why normal humans will never succeed as devs, and to a degree, why many devs tend to look down on those who can't even figure out Excel.

And you call that "injustice"? I have a rare combination of qualities that let me do seemingly amazing things with computers, and in return, I make a decent (but by no means incredible) salary. You want injustice? Some of those same morons who can't even figure out Excel (much less writing their own override CSS) make millions of dollars per year telling me they want my latest app to use a differerent font color. Another group of those morons make millions of dollars per year because they can whack a ball with a stick better than I can. Yet another group of morons make millions of dollars per year doing absolutely nothing because Granddad worked a town of white trash (sometimes literally) to death.

And yet you would call me out for busting my ass to turn my one natural skill into a modestly decent living?

Go fuck yourself, Mr. Edwards. Hard.

Most, maybe. But there are a substantial number that do demand a degree, and the non-degreed will always have at least a small handicap, because given two otherwise equivalent candidates, the one with the degree is likely to get the job, and after 10 years or so the extra four years of experience aren't going to mean as much as the formal education.

In addition, if at some point in your career you want to move into another career track the degree may well become even more important -- though the choice of major may become much less important.

Well, everyone makes mistakes once in a while.

It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable

Agreed.

I started buying CFLs 12 years ago. I have had four fail in that time, out of 40, spread over two different physical houses. 90% lasting over a decade? I'll take those numbers over replacing every single one every 3-6 months!

That said... "It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable" that they last two months when everyone else has them lasting for several years. Someone in this discussion has stated an irrational conclusion. Me, I still have 36 out of 40 CFLs working more than a decade later, so I don't think I have the logic problem...

BTW, all those "sensitive" electronics you describe? Each and every one of them have beefy power supplies designed to deal with brief poor power conditions, whether they simply turn off or buffer a few seconds of suitable power to make it through momentary rough patches. A 3-for-$10 CFL has no giant filter caps hidden in some nearby pocket universe to help it magically weather a brownout that would cook all those devices you describe if they didn't possess exactly such safeguards.

They do comply with OBDII. Some of the bits are different, obviously. I have an OBDII scanner I use regularly with my LEAF. It extends the spec to allow reporting on some EV-only parameters, such as the state of each of the hundreds of cells in the battery, but it also reports lots of the same data reported by an ICE.

Never. Why?

Insurance only works because of uncertainty. The very concept of getting people to buy insurance depends on aggregating risk over a sufficiently large population.

When the insurance companies can actually offer people rates that come within a small margin of actual payouts (plus a hefty bit extra for the insurance company's cut) - Why would any sane person still pay for insurance? Put the same money in the bank and cut out the middle-man.