I can't help but see this as a horrible injustice that should be treated as such, and should land those responsible in jail. If someone taught me in school that Santa Claus created the world, and somehow I became smart enough to snap out of it someday, I would be furious that my education involved any sort of nonsense like religion. This is the problem. You stand back and give people their space, instead of telling them how stupid they are and this is what happens eventually. I've had enough. God and religion are truly for the stupid and ignorant.

Damn, I wanted them to enhance the feature. Search nearby was "search from a point". A common use that I had was to search for a particular store along a route. For example, I'm driving home from the white mountains back to Boston - find me a home depot that is somewhere close to the route that I'm going to take, doesn't matter if it's up north or closer to Boston, just want it to be as close to the highway as possible.

I respectfully disagree - at least, in my experience I've noticed the opposite. Asians who are difficult to understand appear to be given the benefit of the doubt simply because non-technical management are confused by them. This confusion leads to an assumption that they know what they're talking about - ie. "since I don't understand what the hell this guy is talking about, it must be some sort of technical wizardry that is way over my head".

This sort of thing has actually made me miserable several times in my career. I don't necessarily 'look the part' of a programmer. It's very frustrating when dorky looking people who don't really know what they're talking about get promoted to the point where they're dictating the technical direction of what we're doing - when I could actually do it much better. It happens all the time. Lots of these people learn how to play the part and 'geek speak' instead of learning how to actually code or design functional software. The management - who generally don't understand technical subjects - are more easily impressed and convinced by such people. This is how and why we produce a lot of crap in America.

I've always been into having the maximum real estate I a monitor. That's why I hated when most of the monitors started coming out at 1920x1080 versus 1920x1200. I still love my dell 24" 1920x1200, but i'll be looking forward to getting something with even more pixels.

Yeah, but I'm betting that lots of molten radioactive stuff is worse than smaller pools of radioactive stuff. Also, I didn't mean to blow the rods to bits (as in a dirty bomb), but instead to eject them whole. Point taken - in that you've explained well how they will continue to heat even though they are not reacting with each other. My thought is that it would just be easier and quicker to clean up a bunch of rods than it would a molten blob.

Nuclear reactions happen when you enough radioactive stuff close enough to itself so that it begins a chain reaction, right? So why don't they just make some mechanical failsafe device that pulls the chunks apart to a distance where the reaction doesn't occur? Even if the bars had explosive bottom caps that would go off at a certain (high) temperature - blasting the bars away from each other like bullets is better than the situation where they all melt together and create a runaway reaction... I would think...

The previous phone that I had bought for my parents had this very feature. It had a prominent "911" button right on the phone. During setup, you program the phone to take a certain action when that button is pressed. In this case, I set it up to send a generic "Help - I'm in need of assistance" message to me and both of my sisters. A year later, we naturally forgot about this. One morning, around 2AM I got this strange message from my parents with that message. My sister called me soon after but no one could reach my parents - we feared the worst and called the police. Long story short - my mother had received a "wrong number" phone call late that night. In fumbling around in the dark, she had inadvertently sent the 911 distress. It took us a few days to piece together what actually happened, as we (at that point) had completely forgotten about the feature and it's function. So - morale of the story is I guess it can be a good thing, but the ease of use of sending a distress can also make it easy to send a false alarm and get a lot of people very worried and upset.

I've had significantly less 'support calls' from my parents in recent years. Back in the XP days it seems like they caught a virus every month. So I'm not sure if it's security essentials or Windows 7, but things are much better these days. The worst thing that seems to happen nowadays is that they get tricked into installing some sort of application that it designed to look like it's either virus protection or something to speed them up. They were getting phone calls - the person was trying to get their credit card number out of them by scaring them with nonsense like "our monitoring on your computer is all lit up red...". Anyway, all I have to do these days is occasionally uninstall anything that they got tricked into installing and running through windows update to install non-critical updates. The MOST important thing, I believe, is setting Java and the Adobe products to auto update - as these are components that can allow malware to be installed from just browsing

How can it be illegal to be racist? I mean - I know it's socially unacceptable and personally I know it's wrong to be racist - but illegal?

I've often considered that there are more than just 3 (directional) dimensions in space. Gravity has the tendency to pull matter into as few dimensions as it can. Large balls of matter (planets/stars) are spherical (or really as much of a 1-dimensional point as is allowed by the inability for matter to occupy the same space). Solar systems and galaxies are eventually (more or less) 2 dimensional. Yes there are spherical galaxies, but "you're not thinking 4'th dimensionally" - they won't be that way eventually. The universe itself may have been many dimensions for some time after the big bang, but gravity has pulled most of the matter into the same 3 dimensions. It's possible that the universe is the analogous equivalent of a warped record - entire galaxies unseen to us because the light emitted by the stars aren't in the same 4'th dimension plane as our 3 dimensional eyes. Cosmic rays - pieces of matter that come at us from high speeds far away - could be oscillating back and forth through our plane, which would explain how they can pass through matter (they don't pass through our matter - they go around it). A lot of interesting ideas can be more easily realized if you reduce the number of dimensions. Pretend that we're 2 dimensional beings living on a 2 dimensional plane - with 2 dimensional light sources (sun). Anything slightly above or below that plane would be invisible to us - even though it's gravity would have an effect. We would really have no way to access these other physical directions - since our limbs and anything else that we have access to can only produce momentum in our 2 dimensions. Think about (I haven't been able to get this one) - if you were such a 2 dimensional being, how could you move yourself or some thing in that 3'rd dimension? What would you see?

How about take the kids that are actually fascinated by it, and do things to enrich them? Then when they're ready to work, make sure they're in a position to use their talent and gift - instead of putting them in the "everyone is equal crowd" where everyone goes to meetings and discusses the various wrong way to do things?

I do this all the time in the winter but never knew it had a name. As I approach my driveway, I pull the E-Brake and make a more or less right angle turn into the driveway.

I thought it was more about static friction versus kinetic friction. That being, it takes more force to start an object sliding than it does to keep an object sliding. So if you're sliding, it's hard to regain control. ABS ensures that you're always in the realm of static friction.

But doctors love to save lives, teachers enjoy making that connection with a kid and watching his light bulb go on... People should love what they choose as a career path - but why is software engineering different? I DO love to code, but I feel as though I should be paid well to do it - since the fruits of my labor are making SOMEONE a lot of money. Why is it wrong to think that I deserve a piece of that? I honestly believe that software engineers are the worst business people in the world (as a generalization). My curse is that most of my colleagues think in the manner that you described, and thus I'm lumped in with them - treated more as a work horse than the scientific genius that I should be.