I've always said that if I were a terrorist organization, my next move (after 9/11) would be: At 12:30 on Christmas eve, I would sent 50 different martyrs to a mall in each state, with a bomb in a backpack. The martyr would be instructed to go to the food court at 12:30 and detonate at exactly that time. On the news, the stories would pour in from every state in the union - and terror would ensue. People would be afraid to go to shopping malls, and the economy would take a massive beating.

During my 23 years as a programming engineer, I've noticed that a lot of the people with the same job just aren't good at it. They tend to be nerdy. My speculative theory is that social dropouts are drawn towards computers, because a computer offers a very simple social interaction - whether it be with people connected through the network, or with a computer itself. I'd estimate that 80-90% of the people who claim software engineer as their profession, actually suck at it and chose it because there's nowhere else in the corporate world for them to fit. The other 10-20%, like myself are normal people with normal social desires and a slew of hobbies. I've always gotten along better with the sales guys than the other programmers. I like to golf, drink beer and eat steaks. It's pretty simple, really.

I'm not sure that FTL communication is impossible. If we had a base on say - pluto, we could put a probe midway between pluto and earth. That probe would emit entangled photons in both directions simultaneously. Once the photons reached one destination, they could be modified, and their modifications read instantly at the other point. In some sense, the law isn't violated because it takes a huge amount of time to get the probe physically in the proper point in the first place, then it takes time for the initial photons to make their way to their destinations. ie, the "startup cost" doesn't violate anything - but once that were established, we'd be able to communicate instantaneously.

I've been thinking lately that Venus might be easier to terraform than mars. It would be a bonus if we could figure out how to move the excessive atmosphere from venus to mars, and we could perhaps get two for the price of one.

What even is code these days? I don't even see professional software engineers writing much code. The last few projects I've worked on (I've been contracting, so several different companies) - everything is just a bunch of scripts and bloated freeware executable, more or less duct taped together. The elegance that used to be a well designed and written software application - I haven't seen that in at least 5 years. So, my question is, if we're going to teach people to code - what exactly are we going to teach them?

Yet, the brass probably spends more than 3% of that same budget on steaks and wine so they can have "business meetings". That's the problem with engineers. We're the smartest group of people, yet the stupidest at the same time. The "We should be happy that we get anything at all" attitude is widespread amongst engineers and scientists, and it ensures that we are and will always be underpaid.

But I'd still usually rather browse to a piece of software that I want and click on it. I always assumed that yum was a workaround for a way to install things when you don't actually have a GUI.

Well I stand corrected. It makes me wonder though, back before the internet existed, how much of the stuff that we absorbed as fact (back in grade school) was a misunderstanding passed on by a teacher...

I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that I learned a long time ago that the only two states that are commonwealths are Massachusetts and Virginia.

Sort of... If two massive bodies were orbiting each other, if you were standing on one of them - if you were directly underneath the other body, you would be lighter. If you were directly perpendicular to the other body, you would be heavier.

In theory, you're right. But my idea is that the event horizon (which is related directly on the gravity of the body within) is NOT necessarily spherical, but instead is elliptical due to the gravity of the second body. As you say you've witnessed this, I would imagine that in a lot of cases, the black hole is sufficiently massive - or the binary twin is not massive enough - to warp the event horizon to the point that light could escape. I'm talking about special cases, where the opposite is true... Either the black hole is not so far away from not being a black hole (I mean, in terms of mass), and/or the orbiting body is massive enough to have the effect of warping that event horizon to the point that it's below the body's surface. (or the gravity is weak enough to allow light to escape - you could think about this in terms of the event horizon or the gravity of the body. Keep thinking about it... I swear it makes sense when you get the right frame of mind.

Why wouldn't it be influenced? Think about a binary star system. Replace one of the stars with a black hole and nothing is really different. I'm not sure how you could say that it wouldn't be influenced by the presence of another object...

The light - well the light that would otherwise be emitted if the star weren't of sufficient mass to have it's event horizon be outside of it's physical outer boundary. The "it" that I referred to in "stretching it into an oval shape" is really the event horizon of the black hole.

I'm one of those that doesn't believe in the singularity aspect of a black hole. I think a black hole is just a star that has sufficient mass and density such that it's event horizon is beyond it's exterior. I don't think anything magical happens inside, I think it's just a regular star, or a neutron star. Even there were a singularity, my idea about pulsars isn't really any different.

The idea is simply that, the gravity field of a single star, black hole, or planet if it has no neighbors is spherical. If it's in a tight orbit with another body, as is with a binary star system, then it's gravitational field could be considered elliptical (if you imagine removing the other body - like take the moon out of the picture and just think about the earth's gravity field - it would be eliptical). I'm making the jump that the event horizon of a black hole in a binary system would also be elliptical. If that gravity field IS elliptical, then it's possible that radiation (I called it light) could escape at the edges.

My thought about what a pulsar is... Think about the way the moon causes the liquid part of the earth to stretch in the directions both exactly toward the moon and exactly away from it. Now imagine a binary star system, but one star has gained enough mass to become a black hole. However, you've got that other star circling around the black hole - stretching it into an oval shape. If the black hole isn't huge (just above the critical mass required to be a black hole), then perhaps the distortion of the gravity field is sufficient such that it allows the light to escape at the side facing the other star, and the opposite side. Since the side facing the star would be obscured by the star itself, we'd only see the other side - a focused beam of light that would otherwise be trapped inside a black hole. Very exciting for me.

When the country is owned and operated by the stupid, does it really help to be smart? If you're full of a room of people where the "leader" says that 1+1 = 3, and everyone else says "yes sir, you are correct". If you're the smart one and say that 1+1 actually equals 2 - in some sense you're actually going to be wrong. We don't respect the thinkers. We elect the charismatic ones with the team mentality that don't have half a brain in their head. Those who get ahead are the ones who actually follow the rules the best - not the ones that buck the trend and show that things aren't necessarily as they seem. I have school aged children, and I can tell you that success in school has to do more with conformity than it does with intelligence. The teachers reward the kids that sit there and take notes (even if they're useless). You get rewarded for doing the problem on the test exactly as the teacher outlined. If you were to solve the problem with some brilliant and novel approach, you might be penalized. If Einstein were alive today, he wouldn't even be recognized. he'd be some bum working on a team just like the rest of us. We've modified the system so that "anyone can do it" - whatever "it" may be - and if you don't follow the procedure, then you're not doing your job well.

Gee I don't know smart guy. But you go with those skillz.