The best comments are done with a speech-to-text converter.
    Put a picture of some pretty movie star next to your screen (that shows your code). Pretend that she is just !fascinated! by you and your code. Turn on the speech-to-text so that everything that you say gets dumped into a text file. Pretend that you are talking to here and describe your code in all the detail that you can imagine. Describe everything. When finished, close the text file and include it with your source code. Way better documentation than any other method and faster also.
    THis is weird, but it really works if your speech-to-text is working. Not 100% is OK, but at least 90%.

By the way, there will be no Mars mission, ever...
The United States is broke, seriously broke from losing two trillion-dollar wars (lost in the sense that the money is gone and the assholes are still car-bombing and slicing off the noses of teenage girls). And there was the trillion dollars used to bail out the banks 'too big to fail'. Not to mention the trillion dollars pissed away on the housing bubble. And several hundred billion that disappeared after the dot-com bubble. Not forgetting the 100 million 60+-year-old people about to incur serious medical expenses for the first time. And totally ignoring the economic disruptions from peak-oil and global warming.

Broke means no money for things like manned Mars missions. So plan them endlessly to the exacting detail, debate and discuss them forever on Slashdot. But don't ever delude yourself that manned Mars missions are ever actually going to happen.

Every time the question of how to best think like a programmer comes up, one needs to remind people to not think like programmers. Remember the old but true adage: If architects made buildings like programmers make software, then the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

Programmers seem to have no trouble with the concept that every single individual bit of the billion or so in a complex program has to be correct in memory for the program to work correctly. And this is assuming that there aren't errors or oversights in the program design, language, or algorythm.

Isn't there anyone out there working on this insane situation?

According to the universal rules and guidelines set forth at the Aisaiso Women's Convention, any word, phrase, gesture, or implied version of the same can be construted to be a firing offense for any male in any job in any company, if any woman, anywhere, decides it to be 'sexist'. All she has to do is say that " it's sexist, because I say so..." and the man MUST be fired and his job be given to the woman as compensation for his crimes against humanity (women).

Show any woman who can explain to me in a five hundred words or less what exactly a 32-bit number is and what it is used for, and I will seriously consider her argument that use of the character string '0xB16B00B5' could be considered to somehow be offensive.

Until then, from one girl to another, 'Sister, sit down, and shut the fuck up...'

SUVs will be more useful in 10 years then they are now because most High-Tech centers in the USA have transit channels operating at 100% or over. Presently most SUV use is divided 70/30 between single person use and multiperson usage. And this is so despite all the protestations that SUVs are used primarily to drive kids to school,soccer, whatever. In the next ten years, SUV use will shift from primarily 'single driver in a status vehicle' to a car-pooling tool that takes workers on pre-planned home-to-work-to-home trips. Pre-organized commutes are the only under-utilized transportation channel available in most American high-tech areas. Public transit is packed and highways are jammed to near-standstill with single-occupant autos. If high-tech cities are going to continue to grow, especially with the idiotic American pattern of having affordable housing outside of the personal-transit (walk.bicycle.local bus) range, then pre-arranged car-pooling using SUVs is the only option.

    But it's total green-wash to rebuild a standard SUV engine into a Hybrid. It's just stupid. Better to get serious and just buy your next SUV with a factory-designed and engineered Hybrid engine. When resource management becomes serious, and it will when gasoline reaches $8-$10 a gallon within ten years due to the disruptions of peak-oil, then you don't get any green 'brownie-points' for expensive projects that basically just symbolic in their nature. Like converting a 2010-era old stupid SUV into an semi-electric vehicle.

Use a picture of a person bending over puking. Then put the symbol of the uranium atom next to it. With 238 protons and neutrons. Then a map of the area where the junk is stored.
Complete it with a cartoon of a man, a woman, and a child. Then a symbol of uranium with 232 protons and neutrons. And a map of the area with a big X over where the radioactive stuff is.

In a 100000 years from now, somebody will figure it out.

Hell, a single Frenchman mastered ancient Egyptian from the Rosetta Stone 180 years ago. People are smart. They will continue to be smart 100,000 years from now. Hopefully smart enough to know not to make radioactive poisons that last a million years.

Will never happen because:
one- The United States is broke. They pissed away all their money on permanent unwinnable wars, housing scams, and Wall-Street bank bailouts. The idea that they would be able to spend trillions of dollars to build 1000 mile long tubes to convey peasants across North America at 4000 MPH is absurd.

two: Present company excepted, but Americans are technologically incompetent at long-term projects. All their bridges and highways are in disrepair, and they can't even get 50MPH trains to run competently. Didn't they once even have a space program?

three: What's the point of moving thousands of people around? For every person in one place, there is a another person in just like them in any place that you would send them to.

four: Walk to any corner and there's a McDonalds, a Bank of America, a Chevron gas station, and a Starbucks. Travel a thousand miles in any direction and you're on a corner with a McDonalds, a Bank of America, a Chevron gas station, and a Starbucks. What's the point of travel?

Bad Now? Just wait 300 years! Apartments are going to be a B*I*T*C*H when Star Fleet United Federation of Planets moves into Sausalito.

The reason I dislike PHP is because it has a bunch of bizarre patched together conventions that don't make sense to me. But if they make sense to you and you're absolutely sure that your code is safe and maintainable, then it's the best framework for you. Someone mentioned asking this is like asking about religion and they're right. Since you asked, I'll point out the advantages I see with two frameworks I'm using today:

1. Google App Engine: super easy to get started and have something running. Lowest amount of code / task of any framework I've used.
2. ASP.NET MVC 3: clean separation of concerns that uses reflection and dependency injection (so there's very little configuration required). Lots of support on stackoverflow and asp.net/mvc.

Both of those are great for me mostly because I like and respect HTML/HTTP and want full control over some aspects of the request/response paradigm when I need to do fancier things like domain based routing. Both frameworks allow me to dive deep without complicating themselves too much. And I like C# 4.0 & Python 2.7, both are very pleasant to work with.

"WebOS is crap"

I agree if you change it to this

"out-of-the-box WebOS is crap"

Though I still love WebOS and most things it stands for, for the reasons you mentioned. Here's what I did to make it not crap (I have a TouchPad and an HP Pre 3).

1. Install Preware: http://theunlockr.com/2011/09/16/how-to-install-preware-on-the-hp-touchpad/.
1.1. Install the patches that muffle system logging.
2. Install custom kernel and set the lowest CPU frequency allowed to 768, keep the max at 1.4 (for the HP Pre 3, same idea for the Touchpad, different freq.)
3. With your HP Pre 3 which comes unlocked for only ~ $200, sign up for an unlimited "non-smartphone" data plan with AT&T. This'll get you $10/month unlimited data.

These simple steps will get you a phone that's just as smooth as an Android device (iOS is still smoother), and $20/month cheaper for unlimited data, and without a contract. The downside is of course that you're now definitely deep inside geek territory installing custom kernels and what not. I'll say that I'm pretty sensitive to basement-nerd induced stress, and so far that's been low on WebOS compared to other open-sourcey crap like the new Ubuntu.

How very shallow. I'm coming at this from a radical left perspective, but I happen to think it's good to think things through before pulling your hair out and running around like a crazy person screaming bloody murder.

This story has no mention of any *new* civil liberties violations. Palantir *aggregates* existing data. If anything, this could help *limit* civil liberty violations. Palantir or a similar system means the government can actually use the data they are already collecting, which implies they can optimize it and get rid of spying tactics that never help deter crime. A logical person should probably agree that if there's a proven way to stop a crime from happening, it's in society's best interest to use it. The point of civil liberties isn't to protect criminals, it's to protect ourselves from the government's mistakes. I think Palantir will allow the government to make less mistakes and be more efficient.

To all the people talking about Big Brother: you are all very shallow. I'm coming at this from a radical left perspective, but I happen to think it's good to think things through before pulling your hair out and running around like a crazy person screaming bloody murder.

This story has no mention of any *new* civil liberties violations. Palantir *aggregates* existing data. This is extremely useful and, if anything, could help *limit* civil liberty violations. Palantir or a similar system means the government can actually use the data they have, which implies they can optimize it and get rid of spying tactics that never help deter crime. A logical person should probably agree that if there's a proven way to stop a crime from happening, it's in society's best interest to use that. The point of civil liberties isn't to protect criminals, it's to protect ourselves from the government's mistakes. I think Palantir will allow the government to make less mistakes and be more efficient.

Sure, if you look at it that way. But...

You don't need to store 1000 batteries, you only need to store enough for X hours worth of demand. So you take data on your gas station and find the busiest X hours in history, where X is the number of hours it takes to charge a battery. From that you find that you had N cars in your busiest X hours. So then you set up N charging stations with N spare batteries. You can multiply N by some fudge factor to give you the ability to handle failures, unprecedented spikes in demand, etc.

Hard numbers are indeed scary, and we humans are scaredy cats so we evolved this lovely brain to help us out.

This is the only post from someone qualified to comment on the subject. Everyone else is just speculating based on age old notions of what mob rule might look like. In my opinion, the world is different enough now from ten years ago that a direct democracy is worth a shot, at least in a controlled environment like Switzerland has.

Mob rule has a bad connotation because it's in the powerful minority's interest for it to be so. There's no fundamental characteristic of humans that makes them incapable of picking out a good future for themselves. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of human existence was spent under "mob rule". Now, of the hundred thousand years or so that we've been running around on two feet making cool weapons, let's list out the conflicts that resulted in massive life loss. And then let's list out the progress that we've made as a species and let's fairly compare mob rule to other systems. I might be biased, so other people should chime in. But here's my list so far:

Casualties:
- Most of these are instigated by warlords (Genghis, Julius, Alexander, Hitler, Napoleon, etc.): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_by_casualties
- Also, most of these, even the Chinese rebellions (because there were always leaders): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll

Progress:
- individual people, sometimes sponsored by their community, sometimes by states invented most of the things we find useful today.
- populist movements, especially the nonviolent kind, helped win us many of the human rights we enjoy today. Labor laws, equality of races, genders, etc.

I love Ron Paul. He's the most idealistic person I've ever known. He's basically lying to everyone though. Most of the things he says go like this:

1. Cut funding
2. ??? Allow free market to do it's thing ???
3. Problem solved

He doesn't mention two crucial things. One is that step 2. may take a very long time. The other is that for 2 to happen effectively, we have to equalize any unfair and corruption-driven advantages that others have gained in a crooked system over two hundred years. Once highly paid yuppies get busted for illegally claiming "expenses" as tax free money and corporations get busted for gambling with pension funds at the same rate that people get busted for stealing a piece of bread or robbing a grocery store, then we'll have a truly fair environment for the free market to do its thing. In the meantime, Ron Paul is selling pipe dreams. Awesome pipe dreams, but ultimately dreams without good plans to back them up.