"Pass me that last piece of pie, would you?"

No. Lose some weight.

OTOH, Quark's garbage route will be shorter.

I saw your bad SCI-F, and raised you :)

Since E=mc2, have a negative mass would mean negative energy.

How do you have negative energy content?

"I read an article recently about scientists saying the speed of light is not constant. "
scientist selling a book. Not scientists, and certainly not consensus.

And what do you mean so fundamental?

Reading both your post is like watching dogs try to explain airplanes.

"but it's the way the universe really works. "
at the quantum level. The macro universe is also how the universe really works.

It's easy to cheat at Missile Command- use a touch screen.

But it works so well for aircraft. Look at AF447, for example.

Oh, hang on, they couldn't figure out what was wrong and flew the plane into the sea.

You're right, though: if a car requires a human to be there to take over at any moment, it's hardly 'driverless'. It just has a cruise control that can steer as well as control the speed.

Absolutely. And if only 1% of your staff is black you've got to suspect that something else is already in play...

Starting with "how many African Americans have an education in tech?".

When I went to university, I do not remember a single black person in my courses. Since then, I've known only a handful in tech.

I've known and worked with Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, Czech, Russian, Australian, Egyptian, Pakistani, Turkish and pretty much every other nationality I can think of -- which makes for awesome company pot lucks.

And, for reasons I cannot even begin to explain, the only blacks/African Americans I've met have been what I'd call "recently African" (ie. first generation immigrants).

I have never known anybody who refused to hire a qualified black candidate. But, in my experience (which admittedly doesn't cover everything), there's simply not many applicants.

So, the question to ask is: do blacks, as a group, even go into tech? Are they self excluding from the profession? Is the education system failing to get them into it?

I don't think it's so much that people are excluding anybody, it's that you can only include people who come to the game.

The liability thing isn't an issue if you think about it. If the accident was caused by lack of maintenance, then its the owners fault. Otherwise its the manufactures fault.

Sure, that sounds great. It's a nice simplistic response, all neatly tied up in a bow.

But, until there is case law (or laws explicitly passed) to address this, the reality is ... you have no basis on which to make that statement.

The law is much more complex than what we here on Slashdot like to reduce it to. And until someone has passed a law, and the courts have had a chance to rule on it, I'm going on the assumption this is FAR from a resolved question.

While I think that Jackson is an opportunistic jackass, resorting to racial epithets is completely unnecessary and only serves to undercut your message. Be better than this. You owe it to your society and yourself.

Pre-existing condition exclusions are required because of adverse selection. Flood insurance works the same way; you've got no coverage at all until the policy has been in effect for 30 days. If your house washes away on Day 29 you're SOL.

In any case, I didn't share my story to indict the insurance companies. It was more of an indictment of the healthcare system in general. There was one unavoidable expense: the $4,500 immunoglobulin shot. Why then did the total bill come to nearly $7,000? It came to that much because treatment was routed through the most expensive delivery system (the ER) available in our healthcare system. Why is that? The rabies series is not time sensitive, waiting a few days causes no ill effects. The taxpayers ostensibly pay for it anyway so why not just have it at the County Health Department Monday through Friday?

I try to route my healthcare through my PCP, because 1) I like him, 2) It's cheaper (both for me and society) than the alternatives. Of course, we're killing the PCP providers, they're barely paid cost as it is (less than cost for medicare patients) and there's no incentives for med students to pursue primary/family medicine as a specialty. The ACA didn't do anything to address this either, a fat lot of good having insurance for the first time is going to do you when you can't find an MD that's taking new patients.

Has it been scheduled yet? Been hearing about this off and on for 30 years now.

Of course. But putting your servers behind a separate firewall isn't the same as putting them on the same network as the clients with *no* firewall.

In any case, we're talking about an in-store POS system with TWO clients. We're not talking about an Internet facing server that has to handle thousands of connections per hour. Even if the server had FIFTY client terminals the impact on performance would be nil.

Well, I think the first two films are a mixed bag. I rather liked getting meet Radagast, and to see what Gandalf was up to in Dol Guldur.

A screenplay adapted from a book has to stand on its own as well as live up to the book. Where the movies have fallen down is living up to the book. The consensus of my writer friends is that the screenwriting team (Walsh, Boyes, Jackson and del Tormo) doesn't trust Bilbo to carry the story, which deeply undercuts the themes of THE HOBBIT. Lack of respect for THE HOBBIT novel is pretty common among LotR fans. They often dismiss it as "just" a fairy-tale -- an attitude which would have disgusted Tolkien himself. It would have been better if writing this screenplay had been entrusted to someone who loved THE HOBBIT for itself, and understood it better.

Surprisingly, I thought the non-canonical character Tauriel was one of the best parts of the movies. Yes, she was there to give the story a so-called "strong female character", but that's a silly objection. Writers always put characters in stories for some reason; the question is whether they fit in and come to life. I think adding a strong non-canonical character is better than giving so much screentime to a weak but canonical one: Legolas. No disrespect to Orlando Bloom, but the writers dont' give him much to work with. The part could have been played by the CGI model they used in the action scenes.

One of the reasons I'm accepting of the whole Tauriel subplot is that it carries a deeply Tolkienian theme: the love between mortal and elvenkind. That was a profound part of Tolkien's personal mythology. On the gravestone he shares with his wife Edith, he added "Luthien" to her name and "Beren" to his. So I don't view weaving that theme into a dramatic treatment of the HOBBIT story as disrespectful to the author at all.