It's not red, you fool. It's burgundy!

Yes, yes, I do realize that some people will take this opportunity to imply that I am of a particular sexual orientation.

Fuck, I only just noticed. TFA is not on some retarded blogger-blog, but on the Discovery Channel website. They have really and utterly gone to shit.

Yeah, it's bullshit-nonsense. Stupidest-most thing I've seen all day.

That would be fucking amazing.

That's actually the point. Warm temperatures and near constant sunlight = high productivity - if you import water. Ag in California takes up 80% of the water, but ag + mining together is only 2% of the economy. It's fine when water is abundant, but when it's in short supply, ag has to give.

There are quite a few arbitrary precision libraries out there. Sure, not "unlimited", but close enough for the video. These days, with multi-core machines, you can even generate images of decent resolution, far beyond the useful precision of double precision floats, *fast*. And since distributed computing is all the rage, these days, you can do even better: http://www.ultrafractal.com/

I don't think the Mandelbrot Set itself persay is all that useful, but its 3d relatives like Mandelbox, Mandelbulb, etc sure generates some amazing landscapes... I could totally picture that used in games or movies. It's amazing the diversity it can do with some parameter changes - steampunk machinery and evolving spacescapes, reactors / futuristic computers, art deco, extradimensional beings, alien cities, floating viny landscapes, transforming robotics, things hard to describe, etc.

I'd love to have a house / secret supervillain lair that looks like this one ;)

The death penalty solely exists because people want a "just" excuse to kill people. And to tell themselves, that it is justified, they dehumanize the to-be-killed as much as possible.

Oh, my bad, he probably just wanted her to land on a trampoline and see the errors in her ways through superfun bouncy times (maybe even with a fancy somersault)!

No, that is not what it means.

There are legitimate cases where the proverb applies and he was very clearly implying this was such a case (his added reasoning was that teachers were better able to handle coffee without making a mess than adolescents). In fact, there are many legitimate cases encoded in law. One need only look at age limits to see that this is the case, although the juxtaposition of 'god' and 'cows/oxes' is perhaps too inflammatory for the proverb to be used often.

Anyway, my point is that a lot of people in power positions place themselves above the law with (very) questionable rationalizations. We all do it when doing things such as speeding, but feelings of self-importance exacerbate the behavior.

The majority of major, targeted hacks (rather than just sweeping the net for vulnerabilities) - aka, the kind of stuff that the US military cares about - involves sending emails or making phone calls and introducing yourself as Bob from IT, and sorry to bother you but there's a problem that we need to discuss with you, but first a couple questions...

They don't need script kiddies, they need social engineers. Question number one in the job interview should be "Is your native language Russian, Chinese, Farsi, Korean or Arabic?" And even as far as the more traditional "hacking" goes, rather than script kiddies they're going to need people who are going to custom analyze a given system and assess it's individual vulnerabilities, people with real in-depth understanding. One would presume that in most cases that the sort of targets that the US military wants to hack are going to keep themselves pretty well patched to common vulnerabilities.

AIs doing hacking? What are you talking about? This is the real world, not Ghost In The Shell.

I actually never listen to music in my car at all, except the radioprogramming is sending some. But I don't listen to music stations. So MP3s are a non-option for me. (In some way, I am a-music at all, as I don't listen to music in general). My preferred radio stations for long drives are news/information broadcasters, but when I was in the U.S., they seem to be missing in general, at least in the regions I was driving around.

You do realize that by implying that killing her is possibly an appropriate reaction, you've actually showed yourself to be a worse human being than aforementioned cunt, don't you?

Woops, I meant in class.

I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for. I don't want to have to quote every word like I have to do with Google to make sure that the word is actually in the page, and by "the word", I mean "the word I type, not a word that Google things may be similar to the one I typed". It's worst when you're searching for foreign words, product names, acronyms, or whatnot and Google tries to treat them as if they're English words and declines them or chooses synonyms.

"Did you mean X?" is fine. Even "Searching for X (see original results here)", if you're very confident that the person made a common spelling error or whatnot. But just going in and swapping out words as if this is expected behavior? Terrible. At least let me disable it if you want to do that...

Beyond all this: I do like how one can do simple commonn operations on Google - math, conversions, etc. The more of these the better IMHO, so long as they have a standardized format - be they tracking numbers, flight lookups, whatever. It's okay in my book to be a bit Wolfram-y.

Keep the interface plain, simple, the sort of thing that'll work on any browser, from a modern Chrome to a simple text-only browser. Only use javascript where it's not essential for the site to work. Here's an example of something that would be a good use of javascript: if you need to track clicks, like Google does, do it through javascript rather than by having a link redirect like Google does. I hate how I can't just right click and copy link on Google without getting some massive Google redirect link.

Just my thoughts. :)