I find the it curious that the extravagantly wealthy are so resistant to even modest social reform to improve the life of the poor. Where I a billionaire, I would take a page from history and consider that when there a lot of people with nothing to lose, I become a target. I would push for social reform for the simple reason that I am selfish, and I want to be surrounded by a large population that is well educated and wealthy.

In the end economic systems are just ways of distributing resources, and any system allows a small minority to aggregate everything is by definition a failure to distribute.

This is news that nerds might be interested in. If you have no use for it, clearly you aren't a nerd. Go elsewhere for your news. I am tired of people bitching about stories that don't pertain to them. If you don't find them useful, then don't read them.

This is important news. If China is stepping up it's state sponsored spying and digital theft, I want to know about it. It might be useful background info to know so that when the president decides to park a cruse missile on a building in China, you know some of the history that lead to this decision.

It is actually quite simple, about 200 TVs, all in one room, playing a differing episode. The marathon last the duration of the longest episode. BAM!

This campaign seems to me to pointless and idiotic. I saw the propaganda video that Greenpeace produced, with is heavy handed at best, and I am at a total loss over what they hoped to achieve. Ok, so they bullied a toy company into dropping a partnership with an oil company, but to what end? Now Lego models will never have oil company logos in the sticker sheets?

Greenpeace, you have truly won a landmark victory here....

This is a great idea, it makes the whole engine room smell *DELICIOUS*.

I like VB and VB.NET. When I see a coder willingly using it over another option, I instantly know they are an inept tool. Without it, I would have to speak with them possibly for several minutes in order to make this determination.

Well said. You also want to know if your vaccine causes a recipient to contract rapid onset brain cancer, or some other side effect that might be just as bad as the thing that you are trying to prevent/cure in the first place before you administer it to everyone. The Hippocratic oath contains a line about 'Do no harm'.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" But not on other peoples property, like, say, servers not on your property.

but while it isn't your server it is someone's server, and the same rule applies to their effects. An interesting law that might be passed is that "any party that is holding property or data on behalf of another, must require that a Warrant be served before yielding control of said property or data", forcing cable providers to stop piping every damn packet under the sun directly to the NSA.

Make the punishment death of the highest ranking company member to get them to really fear it.

I got a wife, does that count as a toy? In order to expand my toy collection, I'd have to become a Mormon....

It is interesting that you mention this point about the half-life of Uranium ore. The inverse claim that you could make would be that there longer it takes intelligent life to evolve after the formation of a planet, the more difficult it will be for them to create nuclear weapons, as enrichment will become more and more costly/ time consuming as each successive billion years pass.

Consequently, the the mean longevity of a civilization on an 'old' world would be ever so slightly increased in Drake's equation, as nuclear weapons would be less likely to end it. If you are targeting SETI searches, aim for the older planets in the universe?

Galactic actuarial tables for nuclear fallout insurance drops your rates after you turn ten billion...

"A spokesperson for Ocean Power Technologies announced, that after a number of years of testing and development efforts, that Wave farms are a wash."

*ducks* *runs*

I was thinking the same thing, it would be an interesting event to witness. The only sad thing about living when we do, is we will never get to watch solar collisions from under 100 AU.

... the window (from our single data point) seems rather tight.

Except that our sun isn't the most common type of star in the universe. IANAA (Astronomer), but I recall hearing (possibly from the New Cosmos series) that dwarf stars are far more common than G type stars. Since they put out a constant volume of energy for a very, very long time, this would give life plenty of time to evolve into intelligent lifeforms. The more massive a star, the shorter a window of time for life to evolve near it, so it would make sense for us to focus our efforts looking at smaller stars.

I taught my self to code at age 8, dropped out of college, with only a 101 comp sci class. All elementary school comp sci education was self taught. I recently got thrown on a team at work with a guy who was a couple years out of college with a masters in cs. He is pretty sharp, but he knows little about anything other than elementary algorithms, was no experience with assembly, sql, and hasn't even heard of touring and has never read Knuth. Give me a passionate, self motivated coder any day. They will teach themselves whatever the need to know to solve an interesting problem.

The Soviets didn't send their enemies home on paid leave.

Perhaps they should have. It would have been so much more difficult for the US to paint them as villains with propaganda if they were refereed to as the 'Iron curtain all expense paid vacation empire of evil".