>>>> travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than an hour
>> I am exceedingly skeptical this would be survivable by humans.

Turn in your geek card. Here's an easy back-of-the-envelope calculation for you.

Let's start with a gentle rate of acceleration and deceleration at 1mph/sec (e.g., "zero to sixty in 2 minutes"). That means that the vehicle is at a maximum speed of 420mph in 7 minutes, during which time it travelled about 24 miles. The distance between SF and LA is about 400 miles, so assume we have 350 miles to cover at top speed. That happens in 50 minutes, which when added to 7 times two is about 64 minutes. In other words, we can achieve this trip with less-than-elevator acceleration in about an hour.

Wait - different clothes have different colors? And people care about this?

>> 33 HD films in a second

How many LOC/sec (Library of Congresses per second) is that?

How about a car analogy?

>> Re:Highly more cable

Do NOT Google that.

...that most "brick and mortar" banks have been outsourcing their "back end" account management (i.e., your money) to "the cloud" for decades? (OK, back in the day, no one called it "the cloud," but it was the same damn concept.)

What else do you think EDS, FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry, etc. have been doing all these years?

>> So a job listing website has a "Chief Economist" on staff? What the fuck for?

I'll bite. Back in the back I was an intern for an economist at a huge phone company. We were part of the marketing division, and our job was to parse economic trends to figure out things like which regions were growing fastest (so we could reallocate resources there to capture market share), which seasonal trends were emerging (e.g., non-Christian holidays) and which corporate markets were healthiest based on indicators like sector stock performance. It was never double-digit percentage revenue stuff, but at a very large company it made sense to spend a million on economists to capture a few extra dozen million or so in revenue.

>> tuition $48K (a year)

My first kid will be entering college in about 4 years and I plan on giving each of my kids about $20K (total) to help with their undergraduate education. (Each also went through 9 years of private school before high school at about $3K per kid per year, so I'll be about $45K into each kid's education total.) I'm already harping on the importance of getting through college without picking up debt. That means they will (hopefully) be shopping for ugrad creds from cheap alternatives (e.g., community colleges), and then transferring into a university only when they absolutely have to to get their 300/400-level credits. They'll also need to work through college and/or pick up some scholarships and/or live a home a bit to escape with little or no debt (and hopefully be completely out of college and the house in four years). I'm also looking at some trade options for one of my sons (good grades and great personality but dislikes reading and scores only the 70-80th percentile on standardized tests).

With a lot of other gen-X "middle class" parents like me (single IT earner, wife works part time) doing the same thing, I see the market for on-premise college and university undergraduate degrees starting to dry up. After watching the collective fail of an overeducated millennial generation so far, we just want our kids to get out there and succeed. Whether or not they have the same diploma on the wall that dad, grandma or the neighbors do...not so much.

>> Elon Musk Probably Won't Be the First Martian

Neither could anyone else on Earth if there once was (or still is) life on Mars.

>> Why is it always "learn to code"? Why not learn to wire a house or install plumbing?

Because this whole thing is about deep-pocketed companies that employ a lot of mostly male coders avoiding class action lawsuits. Attorneys aren't particularly interested in chasing down all-male but independent electrician or plumbing crews when Google or Apple are ripe for the picking.

>> Out of this 10,000 we got 1 programmer.

Not a problem. See comment about "avoiding the class action lawsuit" above.

>> Google's $50 million girls-only Made With Code initiative

Somewhere inside Google someone made the decision that a near-future class action targeting Google about its lack of women (whatever the number is, someone will be annoyed until it's at least 50%) would cost a lot more than $50M, so there's the budget.

>> Does anyone pay attention to the music in the films

I certainly do. In fact, I often "watch" my favorite movies with the video OFF so I can just concentrate on the audio. If you've never tried this, a starter list might be: Once Upon a Time in the West (Morricone), 2001 (various classical), Conan the Barbarian (Poledouris) and The New World (one of Horner's scores).

1) Get full copy of file to scan in memory
2) Check file for viruses
3) Send complete copy to national HQ, er, I mean, check the AV database
4) Open file

>> Other scores notable to the /. crowd include ...Willow...

Um...what are you trying to say, exactly?

Bennett, is that you?