I for one do stare at black holes and wonder what's inside?

Coincidently Conway's game of life got me interested in programming way back in the mid 80's. The original argument you pose is of course the same one posed in the matrix. Douglas Adams does the best version of the counter argument.

From an Aussie POV it looks like Americans are paying caviar prices and being served dog food. The Aussie health system has statistically better results that the US system, however a 'single breadwinner" Aussie family of four is paying about one tenth what a similar American family pays for health insurance. To add irony to injury, one tenth of what the US family spends on health is already included in their tax bill and spent on government health schemes.

It's been said that the measure of a nation is found in how it treats it's weakest citizens - the US does rather badly on that score compared to other (modern) western countries.

You do realise there are 27 nations in the EU, dozens of different languages and hundreds if not thousands of provinces, all of whom have been at war with each other for at least the last 2000yrs. Agree the US is far more diverse than most non-American's realise but it's diversity was inherited from Europe, not only via the early settlers, but also the gold rush days, and the two world wars.

That's odd, I haven't noticed an increase in local warlords since we implemented similar hand gun laws here in Oz about 25yrs ago. It's definitely a cultural thing, hand guns have never been popular in Oz or the UK. Even when they were legal if you claimed you needed a gun to protect yourself you were seen by "polite society" as a either thug or a coward, probably both. This is also reflected in Australian law since "self defence" is no longer a valid reason to own a gun, "hunting" and "sport" are ok. Under the heading of "sport" you can own a handgun for target shooting, provided you keep it at the range, or submit to "surprise" inspections of your home armoury by the cops.

He has clearly stated it was his mistake. The third option you hint at is of course "Admit nothing", it's the preferred option for 10/10 corporations, governments, religions. This guy is an engineer, one who's moral compass points to option 2, he has stood up publically and owned his mistake so others can be aware of the problem and do something about (coincidently "what to do about HB" was the topic of discussion at work today).

Correct, doing the "right thing" doesn't require brains, it requires principles and the balls to live up to them.

You seem to be arguing against a different quote than the one you posted? Also "weather" is the correct term since he speaking in the ignorant words of his antagonist's voice.

From a "big picture" POV, there are two schools of thought, the first says if you reduce everyone's hours there will be more jobs, the other says it will just shrink the economy, both schools of thought have valid points. I suspect the answer is somewhere in-between the two schools, neither is a clear "winner" because we are dealing with a very complex system called the economy.

Exactly, it's one of the reasons why soldiers have been predominately 16-25yo males since the dawn of time, they are much easier to indoctrinate.

Remember that back when that was written most people believed that things that appeared in the sky were gods in their own right, particular importance was placed on the sun and the moon because of the influence they have on the seasons and the timing of animal migrations and fish spawning's. Understanding these cycles is critical to forming a civilization as evidenced by massive structures like stone henge dotted all over the planet, these are basically gigantic "farmer's almanac calculators", telling the owners when to plant, harvest, look for salmon runs, birds eggs, etc. They certainly did not think of the Moon as a lifeless rock circling the Earth, it was the physical manifestation of a God in the heavens. The bible changed all this by claiming there was one true God and what went on in the heavens was his doing.

There was no such thing as astronomy and the claims made in your post would appear to be gibberish to them, they could see with their own eyes that the gods played in the heavens that encircled the Earth [hamburgeruniverse.com]. The idea of the dome is reflected in the domes of temples and churches. Genesis waffles on about god separating the waters above from the waters below with a dome, not sure if that's referring to rain, the fact that the sky is blue, or something else.

As an old fart "gamer" I find temper tantrums and trolls in the chat window of most games are relatively easy to ignore but the constant flow of bullshit does get in the way of useful communication between teammates. I like the common gaming feature where you can quickly filter a particular troll/spammer out of the chat window by clicking "ignore" on their name. It's a simple and very effective way to clean up the chat window on the spot. I don't use audio chat but it wouldn't surprise me if it had a similar feature.

Win, lose, or draw, I call 'gg' when I die, a lot of kids don't understand old fashioned "sportsmanship" so it sometimes confuses them and they respond with something like - "How is it gg? We lost!". Problem is, if they are old/sober enough to type coherent comments into a chat window and still don't get the "play nice" thing, they probably never will.

There are two mutually exclusive sets of frequencies, "can hear" and "can't hear".
Max(can hear) = 20k.
Therefore 320k and uncompressed (above 20k) are both in the "can't hear" set

IMO the "right" thing to do is either release the source or provide full API and file format specs. Also, if we are going to grant software patents as well as copyright, an "implementation" requirement should be added to the patent - (electronically) attach the source/specs to the patent. I don't thing corporate bean counters will like any of those options, but as someone who has spent 20+yrs developing commercial software I think they are "cutting their nose off to spite their face". Anyone who has ever pinpointed an unknown bug in someone else's proprietary O/S or application will know just how much time and effort goes into just finding the "other geek" in the different department/company who can understand what the hell you are talking about, let alone convince them it's a bug that needs fixing in their code. Fortunately we developers don't see much of that activity, just the delays, missed deadlines, and contradictory requirements that flow from it.

However it must be said that in cases where public safety is an issue suppliers board members, managers and "principle engineers" are often in the legal crosshairs if it can be shown they were "negligent" (eg:Y2K issues). The gaping hole in this approach is an ISO (or similar) audit once every few years is generally enough to get you off the hook. In my experience such an audit can be anything from a full day inquisition with detailed and relevant questions to "I was audited? When?"

OT: Truth be known most IT corporates would love to have a "developer pool" just like the old "typing pool", ie: cheap, replaceable cogs. I'm only 10yrs from retirement, so I doubt it will affect me personally, however IBM's "Watson" is starting to look like a viable way to send many relatively expensive "IT knowledge workers" to the unemployment scrap heap along side the secretaries, typists, telegraph operators, tea ladies, bank tellers, etc. Now may be a good time in history for ambitious young developers to become an expert in the "art" of developing/training expert systems such as Watson. .

The invisible hand has America by the balls. It feels good, for a while...

Ever heard of software "clean rooms"? - If a thousand monkeys did actually manage to recreate the windows source code they would not be infringing copyright, monkeys can't read so obviously they cannot be guilty of copying anything belonging to MS.

You might think they are making decisions like stupid morons, but very likely it is a calculated response Indeed, my point was that their calculations are based on a different worldview, one that equates informed and uninformed opinion. One of the key words in Sagan's quote is "knowledgeably".