yea... i remember how awesome it was to get 5 bucks out of my mother and then literally run to the "dream machine" arcade. There was also a big arcade in it's own building the next town over that we used to go to once we got car licenses. We'd play robotron for hours, as well as some of the other classics. I think the downfall of the arcade was - well I remember when they started replacing "skill games" with the "hack and slash" genre of games. "hack and slash" being - games where you'd fight or something... basically, there was no way to get good at the game. A quarter was going to last about 90 seconds no matter what. Then came all the giant sit down games that pretty much had the same theme - no skill, just 90 seconds of play for your money. Arcades didn't last much longer after that. Games, music - most entertainment types have just seemingly gone downhill too far to get any excitement out of me, and seemingly anyone else for that matter.

Also i should point out that I completely agree with you. I was arrested when I let the police search my car and they found a sandwich bag in which I kept a 'stash' of my medication in. I have grade 4 arthritis in my ankle and it can really get bad at times. I always tried (past tense) to keep a few in my car because I never wanted to get caught in the situation where I needed them and didn't have them. These were vicoden-ibuprofen, and I had a regular prescription for them. I ended up getting charged with posession and OUI. The posession was dropped when I came back and showed the prescription, the OUI was continued without a finding - but what they don't tell you is that you still have to go through the RMV's version of an OUI, which is not pleasant at all - especially seeing as I got one that I deserved some 22 years ago when I was about 21. So this one counted as my second, and required an "interlock device" be installed in my car for 2 years. I just can not describe to you how awful this device is. Food sets it off, and every time it goes off, you have to pay 50 bucks.

yeah, i agree - but as soon as you refuse they say "Ok well we're going to have to wait a couple hours for the canine to get here". What do you do then?

I consider it a violation if I turn the corner and I find my wife snooping through my phone. What if you came back from the bathroom and your co-worker was going through your phone? This is personal property. It's absolutely insane to think that a cop could have the right to search through it without some court order of a serious magnitude. The fact is though, they'll do it anyway - they find a way. It's like searching your car. If they want to, they do it - they simply have a way around everything. They'll ask, "Do I have your consent to search your car?" If you say "No", they will say, "Ok, then we're going to have to wait a few hours for the canine cop to show up with the police dog". The thought of sitting there for hours would make me less likely to want to stand up for my rights.

To be more specific about the testing of 4th dimensional space... I thought of using an enclosed cube containing some solid that isn't too - well, solid. I think that cosmic rays are chunks of matter that are thrown across the universe, possibly from a place that doesn't share the same 3-dimensional space as us (possibly off by small amounts - meters even). This is why they can pass through solid objects - the don't pass through them, they go around them in the 4th dimension. As they travel through space at high speeds, they oscillate in and out of our 3-dimensional space as they adjust for the gravity of the local matter. The cube, placed in orbit, could take a few hits from cosmic rays. The shape should be the same as if you shot a bullet diagonally through a cube of balsa wood, then cut a thin sheet from the middle of it.

Gravity is bending of space due to the presence of matter. To use the 2d analogy, it doesn't matter if the object were above or below the paper, you'd still feel the pull of gravity. Light is a ray of photons. What you can see, is a ray of photons that bounce off an object and into your eye. if something were above or below the paper, the light from our 2d sun would never hit it. There would be no way to detect it other than gravity. I have some ideas for testing the plausibility of space being more than 3 dimensions, but none for accessing matter or gaining any kind of momentum into that 4th dimension.

I agree that it is more likely some missed calculation... My theory has always been that space itself has more physical dimensions than three. So, dark matter is just the collection of regular matter that doesn't happen to share the same 3-dimensional space as we do at any given instant. It jives because, light from our 3 dimensional space wouldn't "Hit it", though it's gravitational effects would be present. I like to use a 2-dimensional analogy to think these things through... If we were 2-dimensional beings that lived on a sheet of paper, anything above or below that paper would be dark matter to us. Our sun, in our 2 dimensional plane, wouldn't produce rays that would bounce off that matter and into our eyes. We'd be able to feel the gravitational pull though. Perhaps the universe is like an ocean, where the matter oscillates above and below the 3 dimensional space that we are presently in. The thing that always makes me think is - if I were one of these 2-dimensional beings on my sheet of paper, what possible means could i use to access that 3'rd dimension? If we could move an inch out of our 3-dimensional space for just a second - would we die instantly? Would any part of the earth occupy that 4th dimension? If it did, it would be dark to us in normal times. Could all of our calculations still work if our round planets had some 4'th dimensional component in which some matter were present?

If photons with a frequency in the visible spectrum don't react with "dark matter" than why would photons with a frequency in the xray spectrum?

Some smart, driven, career oriented girls will see the advantage here and latch on to it. So in another 5 years, we'll have a whole new batch of females that get hired to fill a quota, turn out to be better at ordering people around than they are at writing software, and get promoted. These girls will be making the decisions on what gets done and how. I feel bad for me, but I feel worse for my sons. They would be foolish to get involved with tech, especially if they turn out to be good at it. We're taking the people that are truly talented and putting them at a massive disadvantage. What the hell is going on in this country with all of the gender and race based discrimination? It's totally destroying the melting pot concept that i was taught to believe is what made this country better at everything than everyone else. Have we always been this stupid? or is it recent? Was I just too young to know that I was being taught a bunch of bullshit? or did it actually used to work properly?

Consider this: Look at all the men in the industry. Pretty much everyone has something that is "Not quite right" about them. If you're honest with yourself, you'd come to the realization that most of the people that end up working with computers are that way because they don't socialize well with human beings. Thus their friend - one that wouldn't bully or make fun of them - was a computer. Women have a built in goldmine called a "vagina". This means that they don't have to do anything that is remotely hard in order to live a decent lifestyle as they approach adulthood. All men have the built in disease of endlessly craving "vagina". If they want it, they have to find a way to provide a lifestyle for their self and whoever will provide them with access to their vagina. It all sounds harsh and blunt. But if you're real with yourself, you know it's the truth. Women don't bother with STEM because they don't need to.

A girl would have to be pretty ugly to want to learn how to code. I can't think of another reason why a girl would want to do something that is hard, and uses logic - which goes against her nature. If I were a girl, I'm pretty sure that I'd go the "latch on to a rich guy" route instead of doing something that is difficult and not fun.

I actually did more thinking on this tonight... I realized that - being a good looking girl leads to an entirely different life than what we are used to. We all - as we progress into adulthood, figure out what we're going to do in order to live the best lifestyle that we can. As men, we use whatever skills that we've developed in order to get a job that pays the best that we can achieve. Some would argue that the underlying cause for that is to attract the best mate that we can, but that's a deeper conversation. Girls are the same but different. In most cases, they don't have to rely on a great skill set in order to achieve their goals. If they're good looking, they'll be sought after by the highest bidder (to cut it cold and blunt). The skills they use, mostly are different. They take jobs that are traditionally run by wealthy businessmen - ones that their 'skills' don't really matter that much. They can be legal assistants and hook with lawyers. Medical professionals and hook with doctors. Marketing babes that tend to hook with the more successful sales guys. You don't see a lot of professional athletes with ugly wives. You also don't see a lot of good looking women in the poorer towns - they get exported. The town that I managed to get into (after suffering for 10 years with a 15 year mortgage) is totally full of MILFs. Some of them work, but what they do doesn't really matter, nor do they seem to care to be the best they can be at it. More important to them is to make themselves look good. It all makes sense in a Darwinian type of way. Female engineers are usually 'B' players. They are smart girls, but fully take advantage of the silly diversity stuff. They end up in management positions that they are totally under qualified for, and can become extremely bitchy and tough to deal with. They usually marry successful men because the types that they end up ruling at work are no match for them once they've gotten a taste of being able to order people around, make bad decisions and get to make men implement them anyway. Me? As an engineer who was a pretty solid partier, and had a car accident settlement when I was young - I was able to marry a girl much prettier than a guy like me should normally get. As a trade off, she's uneducated past high school and comes with some hefty baggage that she manages to pull out at times. We have two good looking and smart kids - they got the best of both worlds it would seem. Back to the topic - all the diversity stuff is silly, because STEM is not a desirable career for a girl. They have options that just don't exist for us (men). They also have an evolutionary advantage - a body part built-in that most normal men crave every couple of days, and do stupid things to get it - that they normally wouldn't do if they had neutered themselves at a young age. That - by the way is a theory of mine of how I could have been far more successful in life. Had I not been constantly driven to obtain vagina - I can't imagine the things that I might have been able to accomplish.

Hey - thanks for noticing. I like to think that I often have good insight and ideas, but in an effort to be entertaining I'll usually bury them in too much sarcasm and cynical babble - thus the negative karma!

Ever notice that there's also a difference in the way women in tech tend to "look"? I'm not saying that every woman in the industry is akin to an animal. In my working history, the girls that I work with tend to definitely be lower on the 10-scale than average. The ones that are cute, well there are two possibilities - either they're not cute, and after working there for a few months, they start to look cute because the talent pool is so shallow, or you find their 'niche' cuteness. There's a real point to what I'm trying to say - the fact is, that women choose their career based on things other than what they find interesting. There are many factors - including how they have been treated while growing up, which totally depends on how desirable they are to the opposite sex. "Hot girls" are generally used to getting things done for them, including their thinking. They tend to not be so smart, because they don't have to be. These girls are all in fields like Marketing - where they can hang around with guys who will make a lot of money and latch on to one of them. They sit in their marketing meetings, make their stupid comments - but no one cares because they are nice to look at. Fact is, most women don't want anything to do with tech. It's hard, it tends to be based on logic - which most women are not, and the pool of men that are in tech are generally the less desirable - prone to make less money. The women that I have worked with, seem to like that they can be a "4" or a "5" and be treated like a "9". The dopey tech guys will drool over them, and will usually let them order them around. They usually fit into a mould - the corporate woman. In the end, what a woman ends up doing from 9 to 5 is based more on finding a suitable mate than it is about the pursuit of a career.

I wrote one of the first CD/DVD emulators back in '98 when my wife was pregnant with our first son. At first, it was just a project that I could use to teach myself some Windows Kernel programming, but eventually I productized it and got a lot of copies out there. Eventually, after adding a bunch of cool features, it became just a game of trying to beat the latest CD copy scheme that the game companies would release, and it grew tiresome. One thing I was pretty proud of was the audio engine. CDs have a data mode and an audio mode (the audio mode has more data at the cost of some error checking and correction, and a completely different low level format. Microsoft made development really difficult by really changing up the storage stack on every release of windows... I'm not sure what things are like now, but I dunno if anyone is even keeping up with the virtual DVD market now a day?