Before I met my GF's mom, she told me that her mom looked much younger than she was, without telling me her age (or I forgot). So when I met her, she proudly asked me how old I thought she was. As a good programmer, I compensated knowing the way the bias went, and gave her a good decade more than she actually was. She didn't appreciate. Yeah, social skills, blah, blah, blah...

But, if they call it an engine, it must have a lot more specific impulse / momentum than just beaming microwaves off the back of the device. You CAN move by pointing a flashlight the opposite way (in space), but the acceleration is so low that you'll be dead of old age before you've moved a meter. So this must clearly be different and quite a few orders of magnitude better.

I don't understand how those lab technicians are not in jail for criminal incompetence.

You can actually find plenty of 'unpersons' in the Egyptian pharaohs carving out any references of some of their disliked predecessors out of all the monuments they could find. Leading to plenty of perplexing datation problems for historians.

Well, one of those two is obviously wrong since they are mutually exclusive. So, what of it ?

...until I recently got a brand new laptop. The internal wifi cannot work properly at the same time than the internal bluetooth (thanks Dell!), so I need to disable one in the BIOS and add a USB wart. Then with all the variants USB2, USB SuperSpeed, USB3, USB Power, to which to add eSata with possible USB, all of those incompatible in mysterious ways, that makes at least 6.

I'm a climber too but the GP has a point: there are a few summits, namely Everest, Mt Blanc and Denali, which attract inexperienced idiots. On those 3 you find people who have never put on crampons before, or even gone camping ! I've seen it firsthand. Climb on !

The one for 'blue baby', cyanosis due to missing heart/pulmonary valve.

It's something that somewhat pissed me off in the movie The Mummy: they used Imhotep as the bad mummy came back to life. It's an insult to that guy who was a true genius of Galileo/Newton/Einstein caliber. 5 millennia ago he wrote medical texts, built the very first pyramid (still standing), invented collumns, performed surgery, astronomy, poetry, philosophy, was a prime minister, was born a commoner but was accorded divine status after his death... One of his diagnostics is still used in current medical textbooks. Come one Hollywood, have some respect ! OK, besides that, the film was halfway decent.

Yeah, the industrial milk and meat from the Netherland doesn't have a good reputation in the rest of Europe. Just google "dutch giant industrial farm"

Well, if only that was true... I remember a long time ago (Win95 ?) I applied a service pack in a different language than the OS. The result was a clusterfuck. I called MS and from the conversation I could tell that something wasn't right. After a while I asked: "It sounds like you think I'm using a pirated version", which I wasn't (full on-site license with hundreds of seats). I think it was my beginning of a search for something better.

Right on the money. The only artificial language I did find interesting is one whose premise that you could use any word that exists in at least 4 European languages. I think it was Interlingua, but I can't find its specs right now. I did find it very easy to read. But then a chinese or bantu wouldn't understand a word anyway, so why bother ?

Hey guys, we found the Python programmer !

Don't like the license ? That's absolutely fine. But then don't use it and write your goddamn operating system FROM SCRATCH !

So, how retro-compatible are they ? Can you take any kind of TC container (file or device) and open it into those newcomers ? Or do you have to transfer the content into a new container ?