You're using the Skunkworks as an example? Seriously?

Hint: The Skunkworks built airplanes for the US government, under US government contracts. Here's the list of planes they built- see anything civilian on that list? A number of your other examples are dubious at best- a huge amount of GE's R&D is government funded through the military. Bell Labs existed only because Bell had a monopoly on phone service- it's no accident that as soon as that monopoly was gone and they had to compete in a free market Bell Labs was gone as well.

As for your thesis that government research crowds out civilian, I'd counter that long term R&D simply isn't something most companies these days can budget for. That's not because the government is competing with them, it's because the stock market demands that they produce higher quarterly profits every single period. Pure R&D is expensive and almost always results in nothing more than a bunch of research papers without any revenue. It's the first thing to go when the CEO needs to trim costs.

I know- $25/hour for a job that requires a bachelors, a ton of certifications and increasingly a masters degree. I mean, who are these folks to demand middle class wages? I mean, they're only responsible for educating our kids. We need to cut their pay to something reasonable like $10/hour. We'll save a ton of tax money that way, and I'm sure the kids will never notice. (At least those unfortunate enough to have to go to public school, that is. The deserving wealthy can use their tax cuts to pay for private school tuitions.)

You think that, but you're not correct. An awful lot of advertising has nothing to do with selling X to you right now. It's to let you know that X is available, and from company Y. In a year or two you might find a case where you need X, and your subconscious will remember that you can get it from Y. Most people only consider 2-3 options when buying something, so getting on that list is critical.

Yes, both Home Depot and Lowes do events like this. They also sell kits that work along the same lines. My kid's grandfather likes to give them to us and the kids have a good time putting them together. They're nothing very complex- you can usually assemble them with a hammer and a screwdriver in 30 minutes, but it's good practice. The kids were actually thrilled this year when the birdhouses they built over the winter ended up inhabited with baby birds.

Code all your websites in Flash! You get a stable, cross-platform rich browsing experience without all the issues of figuring out what version of HTML you need. With some work, we can turn the browser into a stable, speedy Flash-delivering platform and let HTML die like the dinosaur that it is.

You don't work anywhere where there are more than a dozen computers, do you?

One of the biggest challenges we have is trying to deal with the slew of constant updates to dozens of applications, all of which seem to break in subtle ways. Testing a large application for browser compatibility is a royal PITA, and every time one goes through you end up having to come up with a new set of workarounds for small bugs and explaining why the old set of workarounds isn't needed anymore.

Or you can just do what we do, which is freeze all your applications for a specific build every semester or year, then carefully turn off every farking updater to stop the blizzard of login messages you otherwise get socked with. But then you get people wondering why you still have machines running Firefox 3.6

Worse, Earth's moon is slowly moving away from the center of the Earth due to tidal effects. At some future point the barycenter of the E-M system will be outside the surface of the Earth, and which point Earth becomes a binary planet as well.

One amusing bit-they had a competition between the British and Aussie Top Gear presenters. When they first did it with the German cast, they had a race where they welded two cars on top of each other- the top could steer, the bottom had the gas and brakes. For the Aussie show, the British presenters helpfully set up the same challenge, with the second Aussie car welded on upside down so they'd feel at home. This worked as well as you might expect.

The Aussie Stig also arrived in a shipping crate, upside down.

Or rather, don't. Seriously, don't.

Insofar as he was cloning Gates' 1975 introduction of Altair Basic, yes. Of course, neither was remotely original: BASIC had been around since the mid 60's, if just hadn't been ported to small machines.

It was a wonderous language. It was (for the time) very easy to use, powerful and understandable. Millions of lines of code were written in it because it *worked*.

Fortran's pretty similar- nobody here is going to hold it up as a language marvel, but it was- it fit the niche of "powerful number processor" very well. Perl is noted for being a complete mess, but if you need a quick script to massage some text nothing is better. BASIC fit into its niche as well, and frankly so does PHP

None of them were "elegant" in the sense of LISP, Smalltalk or Haskell. How are those doing by the way?

Holy crap, that's it. I'd tried any number of Amazon searches with no joy- you managed to find the winning combo! Thanks!

Since other folks checked the "vampires are people too" box maybe one of you can remember the title of a book I read ages ago (probably 1980s). It was set in Spain back during the Inquisition. The basic setup was that there were two brothers, one a vampire and one who was the chief local inquisitor. I remember it mostly for a line from the vampire that said something like "I'm a monster because that's what I am- you had a choice to become one"

I recall that it was actually halfway decent and was trying to think of the title the other day but now it's driving me nuts. Help me Internet!

Have you ever actually tried to take mathematical notes on an iPad? I have

It sucks. Utterly sucks. The touchscreen is nowhere near responsive and accurate enough even with a stylus.

The best thing I've ever found for mathematical/science notes is a Livescribe pen. Paper, pen, nothing else to learn- except that everything is stored and synced to audio.

doesn't have protection, it's that mayors, assistant Governors, and the like do. Seriously, it's not necessary for a mayor to bring a multi-person security detail with them everywhere, nor is it necessary for them to get high speed police escorts where ever they need to drive. We don't live in Afghanistan. It's simply not that dangerous- there are plenty of mayors, governors and the like who *don't* have protection layered around them and there hasn't been a wave of assassination attempts on them.