I'm not too sure about that part.
Consider a world where child porn exists but is totally hidden from everyone else's eyes.
If people don't know that something is going on, or how prevalent it is, then they're less likely to take or support any action to stop it.

Don't get me wrong, i not saying everyone should be exposed to CP, all i'm saying is that hiding it away may make the problem worse.

USB3 has charging standards which allow for much more power.
I don't think any manufactures have added support for it yet though.

Profile 1 - 5V @ 2A
Profile 2 - 5V @ 2A or 12V@1.5A
Profile 3 - 5V @ 2A or 12V@3A
Profile 4 - 20V@3A
Profile 5 - 12V or 20V at 5A (100W).

I believe the idea around profile 5 is so laptops can drop the custom power connector and use a USB3 port instead.
It makes things interesting if all laptop USB ports support all power profiles. You could charge one laptop from another and even make a figurative 'energy black hole' by looping the charge back again with another cable.

There is an important difference between
- People who have no motivation and don't want to be a programmer so never find out if they're any good at it.
- People who believe they're not smart enough to do programming.
- People who don't not have the mental capacity necessary to follow logic.

I reckon if you took a random sample of say 1000 people and put them through a decent 2 year programming course with the legit promise of 1 million dollars at the end if they pass you would find a pretty large percentage of them would be able to code reasonably by the end and get the money.
After they got the money however, most of them would go back to their normal jobs since they wouldn't actually enjoy or want to do computer program as a career.

Yeah, i totally agree.

Start with Voyager and see what their response is. It's the easiest to watch for non-treks and doesn't seem horribly old fashioned like TOS and TNG do.

The problem is that you can divide what people enjoy about a show/series into many different categories. Hardcore fans tend to require them to be perfect, or at least even, in all categories. The general public only care about one or two of the categories (random distribution) and couldn't care less if the others are crap.

They will be if the price drops to what they consider reasonable.

And that's the point, a better marketing approach is needed.

If it can be expressed digitally then it costs next to nothing to copy it. So no matter how much money they get from someone, even 10cents, they are making a profit on the sale.

Yes, care must be taken with everything in life. I fail to see any reason to repeat this fact in every conversation. I don't really want to live in a world where everything includes a reference to 'the need to being careful' while doing things. Its a given that we should be careful and do things the right way.

Yeah, that's true, but its only around 10% of their funding. I think their reasoning for doing it are acceptable, considering the degree of funding.

You have to be 'careful' about doing everything in life. It's a given that if you do something without being 'careful' that bad things may happen. For example- If you fail to cook some meat properly you may get sick. If you eat lots of fatty meat you may die an early death. Care must be taken with everything.

<quote>
<p>And as we all know, anecdotal evidence always trumps scientific research.</p></quote>

The scientific research says that vegetarian and vegan diets adequately meet nutritional needs and are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including infancy and early childhood (American Dietetic Association)

And before someone suggests that the American Dietetic Association is not qualified to make that determination.
The association has 72,000 members and ~72% are registered dietitians and ~50% of those hold advanced degrees.

<quote>
On the other side of the coin, what I DO hate is when new agers or wiccans attempt to use known science -really badly I might add- to try to support their beliefs. Currently there is no such support whatsoever, and instead of authoritatively, pompously citing electromagnetism or dark energy as the source of their power, or blather on about "frequencies" when they clearly have no idea that a frequency is just a unit of measure, not an energy or substance- they should simply acknowledge that there is no empirical evidence for it, only anecdotal, and leave it at that.
</quote>

True, but frequency is a bad example, as matter can be considered vibrating energy at frequency.
So someone could talk about 'frequency' in relation to energy/substance in fringe science without too much of a leap.

There does seem to be quite a bit of reuse / patterns in the universe. eg fractals, fibonacci sequence. So maybe it isn't so bad to try and explain concepts that are currently unexplainable by using incorrect but similar modern concepts.

But i do agree with you, it's annoying when science is twisted and things are considered to be scientifically proven when they're not

That's not really the point he was making.

Lots of people go about their lives with absolutely no understanding of how things work. Even things they might use on a daily basis.
And if you try and explain how these things work they just cannot comprehend it. So for them, in some respects, these things are magic.

In general it's important to show which definition of magic people are using when they talking about the subject.

-) Something that can't be explained with current scientific knowledge (but maybe explainable in the future)
-) Something that, by its very nature, can never be explained scientifically
-) Something that the specific person cannot understand or comprehend.

The whole concept of pseudoscience is the study of things outside basic scientific principles.
Arguing about it using scientific knowledge only proves to show an inability to understand the concept.

It's inherently only ever provable, the fact that this may never happen is beside the point.

Yeah, definitely.

But I was more thinking of just text on a pcb as the invite, instead of typical paper.
He could get some nice looking invites as a plaque with silver writing on white.

But yeah, going to a full on electronic idea with chips and leds is quite a bit of work.
Though the design is more time consuming than the assembly.

My boards have 1 microcontroller, 4x led arrays, 30 resistors and 10 or so capacitors.
I can assemble ~20 of them per hour. but the board design/ mcu coding took many weeks to get right.

They don't have to be typical green PCB color either, you can get the solder mask in a few colors. (green,white,red,black,blue)
Also you can get the exposed metal gold or silver plated (not expensive at all).

I quite like gold text on a blank mask, but for a wedding maybe silver on white.

As a rough idea, i recently got 300x PCBs made with gold plating and blank solder mask.
They were 55mm x 58mm and cost ~US$300 from pcbcart.

All you need to do is find someone who's experienced with PCB drawing software.

If you want to go all the way and have a microcontroller and led display, Jameco have 0.7inch 7x5 pixel dot matrix led displays for 75c each in qty of 100.

Best approach i can see is..

1) Make sure you do own the software and there's no way they can claim it belongs to them. (ie, talk to a lawyer)

2) Tell the company you work for that you've been working on some unrelated software in your spare time which you're selling.
Say you have some buyers lined up, be causal about it, don't make it sound like you wrote it for them.
Say that the software with a few minor tweaks could also be quite useful to them, go into reasons why and what the software could do for them.

3) Let them try the software on a trial bases for X months with an agreed price at the end "if" they decide to buy it (and an agreed upon service plan).

4) Go out of your way to fix, improve and enhance the software during those months. (Your goal is to make it so at the end of the trial they can't live without the software)

5) Profit.