I know, Occam's Razor would explain this by simply having all airline employees be psychic, but in fact, when you call and talk to someone, they note what you talked about, then when you call and talk to an entirely different person who magically knows what you talked about before, they're just reading that note. OMG!

I've never actually had this experience when dealing with an airline; I typically have to explain the situation to each employee, often more than once.

I still have a copy of that issue. :)

The "mankind" thing was just poetry for a domestic audience, read Kennedy's speech and it's crystal clear that the Apollo project was a military response to the "threat" posed by sputnik.

The day they landed on the moon, I landed on a plate of spaghetti. I was 10, I had put my meal on my chair and gone to get some juice, I came back and was so enthralled with the TV I sat back down on the chair without looking.

I'm not sure which came first, the fake landing theory or the movie Capricorn One.

I find it also exceptionally hilarious that this attack is coming from the Tea Party, considering that they are nominally libertarian. Buffet, Gates, and Adelson ARE their masters of the universe - at least, they would be, if the Tea Party or the libertarians had any sort of consistency in their beliefs. Instead, this diatribe exposes them for what they really are: run of the mill politicians who are just more xenophobic and nativist than the other politicians.

The idea that the Tea Party is libertarian is silly. The idea that Warren Buffett is libertarian is ludicrous. He's the guy who is well known for claiming he doesn't pay enough in taxes.

My bones say - close enough to 40 in round numbers.

Never played myself, I was 17-18 when I first heard of it. It appeared to me to have nothing to do with motorbikes or girls so it failed to hold my attention. We did however as younger teens play a (nameless) game that used a die, a ruler, an eraser, some pencils and a roll of wallpaper or similar.

The idea was to set up a battle, drawing in pencil the units of your army on your end of the paper. To move a unit you erased and redrew it, the dice determined how far a unit could move (in inches). To shoot you put the pencil point on your unit, put one finger on top of the pencil to hold it upright, and flick it with your fingers on the other hand. The pencil would leave a line on the paper which represented your bullet. Other than that there weren't any fixed rules, you could make up your own rules for each game...how small can a unit be, how many hits could a unit take, different coloured pencils for different bullets, a bouncing bomb is a series of pencil flicks, etc, etc. Had just as much fun playing that as a kid as I do playing WoT as an grandfather.

Have no idea if the game has a name or where it originated, it seems to be quite old, my dad showed us how to play but it was not his invention since I found other kids at school who had learnt it from their dad, not sure but I think dad played it as a kid in the late 30's, early 40's. While on the subject of kids games, here's something a bit geeky that will blow a grandchild's mind.

It's like the new CEO is bragging he purged more workers than the last CEO.

He is. Main Street isn't the audience; Wall Street loves downsizing.

At which point they bring a foreign worker over and train them in J2EE and Joe Bob's Serialization Framework

Nope. They bring a foreign worker over who already has, on paper, the required (and often impossible) experience in J2EE and Joe Bob's Serialization Framework. The foreign worker then fakes it. And that's assuming the job ad wasn't just a phony to substantiate a green card application for the foreign worker already in that position.

The problem with UI design is it is subjective, it depends heavily on who your target user is. The "good designers" of the past were catering to a particular type of user who no longer makes up the majority of customers. They were indeed good at what they did, but the market has shifted and thus a new crop of designers are trying to work out what serves the majority of user now well.

This is the UI design version of "the lurkers support me in email". The new crop of designers is enamoured with particular design principles which are simply bad. Pretty much every technically sophisticated user hates them, and many of us can explain in detail exactly why they suck. So the designers claim they're designing for a new kind of user who isn't technically sophisticated in order to silence their critics. Management is perfectly willing to buy this line of bull... at least until the bad design hits the regular users who may not know exactly what is wrong, but they DO know it is wrong, and out come the torches and pitchforks.

The good designers of the past were _already designing_ for the same sort of user the new designers claim to be designing for; that's been the case since about 1984. This new user who likes the new stuff... basically doesn't exist.

"You must be stupid if you believe that" is not a logical fallacy. "You are stupid, therefore what you believe is false" is a logical fallacy (ad hominem). "People who believe things that are obviously false are stupid. That is obviously false and you believe it, therefore you must be stupid" is valid, assuming you accept the premises.

Keep your paws off my coffee mug.

World of Tanks and other titles from wargaming are IMO "free to play" in the original spirit of the idea, you can get the same in-game advantages with points as you can with a credit card. The credit card just means you progress in the meta-game much faster. But the meta-game is never ending, so who really cares how fast they progress?

Disclaimer: I have been playing video games on and off since ~1970-71, WoT is the only game I currently subscribe to, after a year of playing for free I was convinced they were a company worth supporting. Suitable for kids, no blood and guts. Speaking of teenage kids, don't ever let them use your credit card - end of story.

TFA is really about the human mind. We understand patterns as different forms of language, music is the most basic and universal, it lights up all areas of the brain, then you have spoken language built on top of musical patterns, then along comes symbolism in the form of writing and icons, math is our most recent and most precise form of natural language.

The take home message is, expose your kids to maths without boring them to death.

The same way Ronald Regan and the Iron Lady acted to reduce sulphur emmissions that cause acid rain, international cap and trade treaty. Cap and trade is a market solution proposed and implemented by the founders of the neo-conservative movement, that has actually worked as advertised. The problem today is that influential "conservatives" are sitting on coal mines that could easily become stranded assests ten years from now. Funny how the politics turns itself upside down if you watch for long enough.

I'm surprised they are not routing all traffic to Andrew Bolt's page.