Same reason I cringe at Star Trek battle scenes. I I was Picard (or Worf) I would just beam a big blob of plasma straight onto the enemy bridge. Or beam their warp core out. Or just beam them all straight off their ship into a holding cell. Or to the inside of a star. OR beam the enemy warp core containment into space. Why even launch a photon torpedo? Just beam it there ASAP. I could go on and on on on.

If enemy shields is a problem just beam the photon torpedoes en masse to a point 1 second before impact on their shilds. They can't evade and you can saturate the shield with missiles until it collapses. And then go beaming away.

A transporter beam a la Star Trek is pretty much the ultimate weapon.

Breaking Bad has a classic piece of dialogue between Badger and Skinny Pete about this.

http://www.cinemablend.com/tel...

I got a chemistry set and a best friend's dad who had PhD in chemistry and was a professor at the school for explosives technology.
He brought us a bag full of the stuff put in the casing of a tank shell.

And my GF's father used to be the head of analytical chemistry in a uranium enrichment plant. He actually built a nuclear bomb.

The internet (and a lot of research in general) came from a goverment program that gave money to fairly free universities and research institution. Academic Freedom is a important principle for this reason.

Right wing theory vs left-wing science??!! Have any of you kids ever read actual left-wing stuff? Theory, theory, theory.
Go and read serious left wing things from a world socialist website or even Lenin's works. It is at about the same as the old theological debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

The Soviet Union with all its horrors was created by a bunch of intellectuals. In the end, the only non-intellectual Bolshevik, Stalin, was left standing.

See any liberal arts curriculum involving political philosophy for more examples. The left is just as theoretical as the right, if not more so.

As for quoting Monbiot on the intelligence of people? What next? Hitler claiming that Aryans are more intelligent than Slavs? Staling calling all Capitalists stupid for not understnding Lenin? Bakr al-Baghdadi calling all non-Muslims stupid because they do not understand the Koran?

Calling a whole group of people less intelligent because of their political beliefs is really the worst kind of bigotry. I can well imagine that that particular snob would do this, yes. George Monbiot is one of the most radical columnists alive, he is a nutcase.

You don't know what you are talking about.

"The page" consists of a lot of small components. If one loads the page, high bandwidth or not, just to change some small part just because you pressed a button, the server has to figure out the contents of the whole page. And it has to push back the whole UI in response to a single button.

This is a major PITA because it wreaks havoc with modularity, which is definitely a good principle in Software Engineering.

The old way sucked. And most webpages and interaction sucked for exactly that reason. It is hard to design a server to schlep the whole damn UI over again just because someone pressed a button. Using small, modular components that are updates and treated separately on the server is easier to program, faster, works better and gives you better UI.

Composability is the whole point in engineering and it is high time it is adapted in web design.

You do understand the concept of optimising for development time, right? One hour of a dev's time can buy you two months of server-time.
And we are talking a i7 dedicated server here, with 32GB of RAM and SSD, not some ephemeral virtualised thing.

It ain't brain surgery...

At least you are willing to admit it and stick to your domain. I do web apps, and have dabbled in embedded a looong time ago, so much that I would not trust myself.

My colleague though, thinks because he did a lot of low-level work that Webapp work is 'easy'. He is wrong, and it shows. That is a problem.

My favourite was some kind of SuperTweeter that has a frequency response in the GHz range.

Yes, that G stand for Giga. In an Audio Product.

> Stallman is endlessly criticized around here, laughed at,

Have you ever seen him live? I have.

Besides, he is usually not laughed at here. That is the scary part.

Maybe he is not lying. Maybe he did steal a DVD from his customer.

Easy!

You have a reference for this? How much s that attributed to a less testosterone-filled more violent lifestyle?

Sorry to break the news to you, but....no

> I find people who do nothing but weight lift obsessively look ridiculous.

There is a guy like that in the gym. Me and my buddy calls him "Hulk".

He DOES usually have some cool chicks hanging with him though...

> an occasional period of mental concentration.

Well, now we all know where THAT went