You seem to know your stuff around glass. Klein bottles are child's play. Think you've got what it takes to make real projective planes?

The ideal candidate should be able to do both: Come up with a solution to a problem quickly, and also be able to research and evaluate the longevity of the solution. The more experienced the candidate, the more accurate the latter evaluation should be. There's little time in an interview, but given time the ideal candidate should be able to come up with better solutions than the initial one.

The experienced individual should at the very least, have a hunch as to a direction to start. You can spend days surfing Google if you don't know the right questions to ask. Your intellect gets you to the solution, but your experience points you in a good direction to start.

Sometime after Steve Jobs' death, the Russians managed to acquire his reality distortion field on the black market thinking they could use it to pacify the locals.

I don't know about prison, but you'd think that in Afghanistan, there'll always be sheep. Or goat.

If you think I'm kidding, there are places where young men practice on livestock to get experience before getting married.

From the first paragraph of the Obituary at cartalk.com:

They're actually the galactic equivalent of potholes. Alien spaceships keep breaking apart every time they hit one.

How about: "Houston, we have a problem."

If it's coming from FBI servers, it can't be good. Must be malware. It's just like how pages served off the CIA and NSA's servers are called spyware. They're spies after all.

"Let's go places...whether you want to or not."

It wasn't a misunderstanding. The CNN intern just made a typo.

Which wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if the change was actually to a functional link.

Maybe it's not the link. Maybe timothy's just broken.

That's flat out wrong. Other countries have been and continue to meddle in Chinese affairs.

China does not have a history or culture in meddling in other countries' affairs, at least not the type of meddling that's associated with Western powers over the past five centuries. This is quickly changing as China's adapting to the needs of the 21st century, but it's largely ingrained in the philosophical underpinnings of Chinese culture. The cultural tenets that reinforce this begin with not pointing out the faults of other's houses if your own house suffers the same faults, and end with the (historical) idea that the Middle Kingdom is the strongest culturally and economically. In fact, this is the very premise that led to the disastrous Great Leap Forward (though the Cultural Revolution was a result of the complete opposite). That China could've been beaten by other countries economically was simply inconceivable. This cognitive dissonance resulted in, as you'd expect, insanity.

China's not benevolent, not by a long shot. But the Chinese have been playing this game for far longer, and are far more adept at it than most Westerners are willing to believe and able to recognize (even though they've been self-handicapped by starting at a point 50 years behind everyone else, they're catching up quickly). China understands how to acquire and retain power. If and when they do become a dominant superpower, historical European imperialism and modern American imperialism will look like a child's drawing against a da Vinci painting. This is assuming by then, people would even known where to look.

At which point, we can only hope that the American ideals of freedom and self (which are far more interesting, even if applied imperfectly) will not be buried under Chinese pressure to conform and behave. Unfortunately, I think our ignorant and powerful within our own society are currently more dangerous to these ideals than China is and could posssibly be for the next 30 or so years

The only hope we've got is if the Communist party collapses. That probably won't happen considering the rest of the world is basically keeping them in place by continuing to buy cheap stuff.

Sorry, I do have to bring something up. One of Microsoft's most lucrative patents is for FAT32. One of the reasons they're making so much money off FAT32 patents is because some genius standardizing SD flash cards put in a requirement that all SD cards use FAT32 ("genius" may or may not be sarcastic). Thus anyone who wants to include a SD card reader, including microSD cards, must license the patents from Microsoft.

However, the tides may be changing after Alice vs. CLS. Those FAT32 patents may not be valid anymore. In which case, Microsoft is about to lose a fairly large revenue stream.

I don't disagree that they are still fairly research-heavy, and that it's a good thing. The problem I see is that their business side (marketing, sales, etc.) has a history killing all the cool stuff that's coming out of their engineering side (including research). This closure may be symptomatic of a continuance of that culture under the new CEO, or it may not. Without intricate knowledge of the internal politics at play (because it's Microsoft and there's always politics at play there), it's hard to say for certain either way.

At this point, there's no use for a control group. There's also no point in artificially introducing test subjects to the virus, since there are so many people at risk already. Inject everybody already infected with the vaccine/cure and see what happens. The likely worst case is that people die from side effects of the drug, but without the cure, most people are going to die from the disease anyway. The absolute but unlikely worst case is that one strain has mutated to the point where the cure is no longer effective (e.g. entry under a secondary pathway). But that's even more likely to happen if we don't get the outbreak under control and soon.

As for manufacturing capability, many governments have been known to seize drug patents in times of crisis and take on the bulk of manufacturing and distributing responsibilities. The real issue is the time needed for them to ramp up, which would be a similar issue for GSK as well.

Not sure, but when it happens we'll all know a precedent has been set. It may have already happened, and we just don't know about it yet. In fact, we won't until another whistleblower comes forward with the information, or a court ruling makes information public.

I think it's unlikely though. The biggest roadblock is the government itself. Remember Qwest and their CEO Joseph Nacchio? Doing the right thing, doing the ethical thing, is literally dangerous to people's health and freedom. I'm certain Page and other Google executives are under the same pressures, and probably worse, since Google has a far bigger public face. In fact, I wonder if they've already been threatened. There've been numerous instances of the government dropping charges against Google or giving them a slap on the wrist for something clearly illegal (not necessarily unethical, just illegal). I'm suspicious Google's compliance in some government matter was behind those outcomes. What those matters are however, we'll probably never know.

What's interesting is that since those events, Google's grown increasingly silent on advocating for social "good." Microsoft and Yahoo have publicly stated they are fighting government attempts at intrusion into the private affairs of people and other companies. Funny that while Google has announced certain moves that appear to increase the privacy of their users, they have made no similar announcements that they've been actively fighting government intrusion and overreach. In fact, a good number of the moves are largely ineffective against NSLs and the other tactics of federal agencies. It's also strange that Google has recently stopped loudly advocating for net neutrality and voicing their opposition to draconian IP laws.

This all might sound like something that would come out of a conspiracy nut, but time and again these past two decades, the conspiracy nuts have been proven right. It's not so far fetched that the government and corporations are locked in one large circle jerk and have been since the 50's or even earlier; anyone on both sides who doesn't play ball gets disqualified from playing.