Forget the spoon rest - will it be able to compete with Spatula City?

Hey now, be fair. Superman did use a revolving door once, because the only phone booth nearby was rather unsuitable for the purpose.

I'd say the bigger issue than talent (or creativity, as one poster put it) vs. skill, since both can be learned with enough effort and training, is a reasonably-congenial personality. That is to say, you might have the hottest c0d1n6 5k1llz in the world, and the actual creative thinking ability to put those skills into practical use, but you're a complete asshole, no one's going to want to work with you - either your coworkers or your next prospective employer - and you'll basically just not get anything done that an employer will be willing to pay you for.

There are good reasons not to have the talent and/or skills to do the work - maybe you can't afford the necessarily schooling, tools, etc. or you have no opportunity - but there's never a reason to be an asshole, whether you are skilled/talented or not.

"That's because the payload would re-enter the atmosphere and return to the point where it left the accelerator at the end of its first orbit"

Not to be pedantic here, but If it's on a ballistic arc, and assuming the payload' orbital insertion motor fails to fire at all, wouldn't it hit not at the place it launched from, but on some plot of land hundreds or thousands of km away from the launch point (depending on the initial trajectory)? After all, that trajectory must intersect with Earth at some point, otherwise the object would stay in orbit...

"Water disappears into thin air, [...]"

And then it goes...where exactly? Oh, wait a sec - there was something I read back in grade school, the "water cycle", I think the called it? Some mumbo-jumbo about water in the air turning into clouds and falling as rain/snow.

Cutting the sarcasm for a moment, that's my biggest gripe with all of these "OMG WE'RE USING UP ALL OUR WATER! TURN OFF YOUR SPRINKLERS!!!" types. The water doesn't just disappear or fly off into space - it goes right back into the environment. As long as the returned water isn't being polluted, there simply is not a real problem here.

The united states is officially a lost cause. No justice in this country anymore.

I think it goes one step further: If there's an error, don't just print/log a message that says "12:34:56 X failed while reading Y". This might be somewhat useful, but also TELL ME WHY it failed in the first damn place! Over the years, it seems to me that these sorts of "failures at reporting failures" fall into three categories:

* The program just exited unexpectedly (but cleanly, i.e. not a segfault), but without logging so much as a "Sorry, I'm broken."
-- Why did it exit?
-- What function failed?

* The program received a piece of data of a type that was unexpected and can't be handled, but the program just issues a generic bad-data complaint.
-- What was the allowable range for the expected piece of data?
-- What was the actual data that was received?
-- From what source source was the offending data taken?

* Some ancillary process crashed before the main program threw the error, but the main program doesn't bother to mention this fact.
-- What was the error/crash message from that process?
-- Why couldn't your program continue gracefully after the other process crashed?
---- Why exactly did THAT program crash anyway (see above)?

I'm not talking about spitting out detailed crashdumps, backtraces, etc. or sorting out the cause of some random segfault. That's gdb (etc.) territory. I'm talking about printing, on the way down, a complete explanation of the error, the most likely reason it happened, and what the values of those (likely very few) variables were that were directly related to the process/function/line that actually failed (depending on how much granularity your language of choice offers). Even if your users can't make sense of those messages, YOU can (in theory anyway).

If you can't do that much in the error-handling part of your code, you're doing it wrong.

You know perfectly well we're not permitted to land on Europa, or even to attempt it.

Though there's a certain streak of flamebait in the above AC's post, he indirectly brings up a point that I've been saying for years:

If you don't want to be treated like the stereotype, don't act like it. That applies as much to groups as to individuals - clean up your own house if you don't want people bitching about how messy it is (especially if you yourself have complaints about others' untidiness), AND KEEP IT CLEAN.

Stereotypes don't come into existence or persist without there being SOME evidence of the behavior that the stereotype covers. That isn't license to use the n-word against all blacks, for example, but those who DO act like it deserve the label.

The difference between me and the AC though is I don't think any of the subjects' attitudes are inborn at all. You wanna get rid of gangs? Change how and what you're teaching to your children - ALL OF YOU - AND KEEP DOING IT until there's no one left (young or old) who will tolerate that kind of life, no matter how long it takes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Er, no, you quoted the Declaration of Independence, which is not legally binding (beyond its initial use of course). As much as it really should have, the US Constitution indeed says nothing of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

Well, there's a delicate corneal inversion procedure... a multi-opti-pupil-optomy. But, in order to keep from damaging the eye sockets, they've got to go in through the rectum.

Or, as incredibly unlikely as it is, you could've actually discovered some little corner case that no one else thought to test for, and thus hasn't written a law/theory/etc. (or updated an existing one) to cover it.

Nonono, in Soviet Russia, *BSD confirms Nyetcraft. Jeez, get it right.