Also, if you dig into their footnotes, you find that the median debt in collection is $1349, far less than the average (mean) that they so prominently feature.

Space travel is a big dead-end. Outside of sci-fi, nobody really wants to live in anyplace remotely as horrible as the friendliest of non-Earth planets. Think about the worst places on Earth: summit of Everest, South Pole, bottom of the ocean, middle of the Sahara. All of those places look like Eden compared to the nicest environment available within 10 light-years of here. Get real - we're stuck with our one Earth, and we should take care of it.

This result (which basically says that any planet with life has to look like ours) reminds me of an article I read long, long ago speculating on what ETs would look like. The author basically concluded that they'd have to look exactly like us, i.e. two arms, two legs, head on top with two eyes and a mouth and a nose, etc., and he had arguments for why each of these things was necessary. Of course, almost none of the thousands of other species on Earth look exactly like us, but that didn't faze him in the least in his application of logic...

Why does everyone always assume that life requires water, anyway? Couldn't there be a planet out there infested with silicon-based life forms who live at 300 degrees Celsius, or whatever?

When I was in grad school back in the 80's, I knew a guy who was researching AI. He complained that as soon as some technique was understood, people would say it wasn't AI any more, so as a result the AI profession as a whole never got much credit for advancing.

Reading a huge codebase is an unlikely way to spot backdoors anyway. After a few thousand lines the reader's eyes would glaze over, and anything subtle would be missed. This isn't as easy as looking for two-digit year fields a la Y2K reviews.

Besides, the Heartbleed bug should have been a clue that open source alone doesn't make security issues "transparent". Somebody has to both read and understand the code to detect these things, and an OS like WIndows is so huge that nobody can understand the whole thing. Even a relatively small, specialized module like OpenSSL slid by for years without anybody noticing the problem.

Legendary alpinist Reinhold Messner once wrote a book about his encounters with suspected Yetis in the Himalaya. He concluded that they were bears, a variant of Ursus Arctos, the same species as polar bears.

Actually it's about non-standard-conforming "security" hacks causing unexpected results. If the result of an operation is undefined, the compiler can insert code to summon Cthulhu if it wants to.

And I'm disappointed that you're disappointed that he's disappointed. Snowden has sure been bad for morale.

So I know where this might be going.

IMO, the biggest problem is that the two sides get to reject jurors. If they just picked 12 random people without any challenges allowed, then required (say) only 10 of 12 to agree on the verdict, the system would work more efficiently and with less gaming. Maybe exceptions could be made for hardship or disruptive jurors could be ejected (and fined), but the current system is mostly gamesmanship. Lawyers don't want intelligent jurors, they want jurors they can manipulate.

This redistribution of orbital motions is trickier than I thought.

It's simple; you just need to change the motions of the heavenly bodies so that Earth orbits the sun exactly 13 times per year, the Earth rotates exactly 28 times per month, and the Moon orbits the Earth exactly once per month. If you can arrange that, I'll gladly switch to your new calendar.

Is that a showstopper? I mean, he's a fucking genius, cut him some slack. :)

I like the idea of having the interviewee read code. In a team environment, that's more important than how much code you can crank out.

Or at least a way to launch rich people and vapid celebrities to 50 miles above seal level. Unfortunately, we have no way to keep them from coming back (yet).

Besides, the empty skin looks like a used condom. Eeew.