Extremophile

I'm thinking more along the lines of "Life that will use radio signals (or similar) to communicate in such a way that we have a chance of detecting them without either of us leaving our solar systems".

But that's a bit wordy.

I know, Occam's Razor would explain this by simply having all airline employees be psychic, but in fact, when you call and talk to someone, they note what you talked about, then when you call and talk to an entirely different person who magically knows what you talked about before, they're just reading that note. OMG!

I've never actually had this experience when dealing with an airline; I typically have to explain the situation to each employee, often more than once.

How much do Kremlin astroturfers get paid?

And where exactly are you from? Some of the most accusatory reporting is coming from Europe.

I feel like I just read a Soviet era Pravda article.

I find it also exceptionally hilarious that this attack is coming from the Tea Party, considering that they are nominally libertarian. Buffet, Gates, and Adelson ARE their masters of the universe - at least, they would be, if the Tea Party or the libertarians had any sort of consistency in their beliefs. Instead, this diatribe exposes them for what they really are: run of the mill politicians who are just more xenophobic and nativist than the other politicians.

The idea that the Tea Party is libertarian is silly. The idea that Warren Buffett is libertarian is ludicrous. He's the guy who is well known for claiming he doesn't pay enough in taxes.

"And this picture we see the tin pot wearing Johnny Appleseed and distributing Spam to all the starving earthworms in the New York subway system."

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

The only reason that I can come up with for this focus on fuel cells is that Toyota and the other existing car manufacturers want to see a hydrogen distribution system put in place so that they can continue producing internal combustion engines using hydrogen instead of the fuel cells themselves. I think these car companies see their long term intellectual property investment as being in the internal combustion engines and drive train technology. My guess is that they fear the drive trains becoming commodity parts (how many ways are there to make an A/C electric motor) and then they are left simply styling auto bodies and being fashion statements...

I think that fear is unwarranted, as Tesla has shown just how differentiated an electric car can be and how much innovation there can be in the car cabin and features themselves... But history has shown that old companies cannot always change even when they recognize that a disruption is coming. And oh boy is one coming...

Tesla = iPhone
Gas cars = Blackberry at best

It's like the new CEO is bragging he purged more workers than the last CEO.

He is. Main Street isn't the audience; Wall Street loves downsizing.

At which point they bring a foreign worker over and train them in J2EE and Joe Bob's Serialization Framework

Nope. They bring a foreign worker over who already has, on paper, the required (and often impossible) experience in J2EE and Joe Bob's Serialization Framework. The foreign worker then fakes it. And that's assuming the job ad wasn't just a phony to substantiate a green card application for the foreign worker already in that position.

The problem with UI design is it is subjective, it depends heavily on who your target user is. The "good designers" of the past were catering to a particular type of user who no longer makes up the majority of customers. They were indeed good at what they did, but the market has shifted and thus a new crop of designers are trying to work out what serves the majority of user now well.

This is the UI design version of "the lurkers support me in email". The new crop of designers is enamoured with particular design principles which are simply bad. Pretty much every technically sophisticated user hates them, and many of us can explain in detail exactly why they suck. So the designers claim they're designing for a new kind of user who isn't technically sophisticated in order to silence their critics. Management is perfectly willing to buy this line of bull... at least until the bad design hits the regular users who may not know exactly what is wrong, but they DO know it is wrong, and out come the torches and pitchforks.

The good designers of the past were _already designing_ for the same sort of user the new designers claim to be designing for; that's been the case since about 1984. This new user who likes the new stuff... basically doesn't exist.

"You must be stupid if you believe that" is not a logical fallacy. "You are stupid, therefore what you believe is false" is a logical fallacy (ad hominem). "People who believe things that are obviously false are stupid. That is obviously false and you believe it, therefore you must be stupid" is valid, assuming you accept the premises.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

Yeah, like the free games are stupidly hard and you can realistically only complete it if you pay for an upgrade or hints.