Yes, clearly I was unaware of this fact when I made this comment. Because, you know, it's an all-or-nothing world where people offering product features tell their users to do it their way or stick it.

If you cannot offer a helpful suggestion when someone questions something they aren't comfortable with, perhaps you should cut down the snark and just ignore the comment.

Indeed. That is a great idea. Thank you.

Really? Some of us really enjoy our books -- as someone who has a personal library with ~4,000 books, I would be appalled if I had to write on any of their pages with a pen.

Not because I am planning on selling any of them, but because to me, I just see it as damaging the book.

A good many of them are autographed or antiquarian books, and the last thing I'd ever want to do is sign them with a *pen*.

I find the whole deal oddly disturbing -- maybe it's just me as a bibliophile, but writing on a book sounds like a sacrilege.

The Commodore interface was like that too.

The easiest way to answer that is by saying you're thinking about it incorrectly. Our every day experiences leads us to believe that distances are absolute. That time periods are absolute. And if we're talking about the relative speeds in human experience, that's a very, very good approximation.

Turns out reality is weirder. It's not that spacetime "knows" how fast something is traveling through it. It's that space and time don't behave like our senses lead us to believe. So, from our perspective, if energy to use to accelerate a ship wasn't a problem, and we're here on Earth observing it head someplace 10 light-years away, the very earliest that ship will get to its destination will be just over 10 years, as no matter how much energy is used to accelerate it, it's going to just asymptotically approach c, but never reach it.

However, the thing is, it's not really a speed-limit, of how you would think of it. From the perspective of the people on the ship, if energy isn't a problem, you can get to your destination as quickly as you want. Under 10 years? Sure. You can get there in under a second (we'll assume we've figured out how to ensure everyone won't die from accelerating from 0 to close to c, then back to 0 again all within a second). You can get there in a millisecond. If you put more energy into acceleration, you can always get there faster. However, you still never go faster than light. It just so happens that, as you accelerate, you disagree with the people on Earth about how far your destination is. It used to be 10 light-years away, but now, after that huge acceleration, it's only 100 meters away, and you can cover that small distance really quickly at near the speed of light. To you, an infinitesimally small amount of time has passed. To the people on Earth, over 10 years.

TL;DR; It's not that that spacetime is preventing you from going faster, it's that spacetime is a 4-D Minkowsky space, and we're approximating it as a 3D Euclidean space + time in everyday life. That's a great approximation, until you start going really fast. Then it's just not good anymore.

Wouldn't notice until kernel upgrade time:

$ ls -d /*.* /initrd.img /initrd.img.old /vmlinuz.old

Visualization is also great for evaluating randomness; remember the images of broken RNG implementations a few years ago? http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/new...

WHO recently halved its recommended sugar intake for adults, from 10 percent of total daily calories 5 percent. For an average adult, that's about 25g.

Your average (12 oz) can of coke contains 39g of sugar. Your 44 oz coke or Pepsi contain about 154g of sugar. That is not 150% of your recommended daily amount -- that's more than six days' recommended daily intake.

You owe me a coffee! :-)

I am going to offer a slightly different perspective.

I work for a management consulting firm, and we hire (arguably) some of the smartest people in the world who are usually good with both critical thinking and with the soft skills. It sounds like an easily accomplished task, but it really is not. Some of the most analytical and quantitative people in the world also come with personality quirks that makes them unsuitable for most client facing professions.

I have also had my fair share of experience interacting with CEOs, both big and small. And it has been my experience that among successful people (the way society values success today anyway), there are two key elements to being at the top.

One is strategic thinking. Not everyone is capable of it, no matter what people may think. Some people are great at focusing on one problem; others are capable of bringing in disparate problems together and finding holistic, long-term solutions. This is a non-trivial task, and one with incredibly devastating consequences in the event of failure (and people do focus on failure, which is understandable, but discounting the success of social, political, and economic progress is disingenuous and silly). A good doctor is great at one problem, but cannot bring to bear the breadth of their experience to handle a disease outbreak, which has much wider consequences.

The second is capital. Modern society runs on capital. You would be staggered at just how much day-to-day credit companies use to run. If the cogs in the wheel were to stop, they will close their doors in a week. Take away the access to capital and you will be stuck at status quo. And identifying which ideas and which cogs in the wheel deserve capital is also one of onerous responsibility.

And that is the real reason executives and people in financial services (capital) get paid as much as they do. It doesn't matter whether or not you are in private or public sector -- those jobs are incredibly demanding, not the least because the burden of responsibilities demands a far more diligent performance.

An entrepreneur can create new ideas, but to bring them to bear on market and to make a company successful requires a different kind of expertise. There's a reason even Google brought in Eric Schmidt as a CEO from the outside -- from having an IPO to exploring growth strategies, running a company is a rare and valuable expertise.

And I am pretty egalitarian (in that y'all muggles look the same), and yet, I would say that the value society places on strategic thinking and capital allocation is justified.

Now, is this sometimes done blindly, without regard to performance? Of course, and that is a structural problem (e.g. Wall Street). And are there other professions (e.g. scientists) who should get similar incentives, but do not? Of course, and that is a perception problem. But neither of those really discount the importance of the jobs many executives play.

And at the end of the day, there is certainly a trade-off. People in those jobs work with little sleep, work brutal hours, and find it difficult to make time for their family, let alone anything else. Most successful CEOs I know wakes up at brutally early hours (~4 am) and are stressed beyond repair. They trade a relatively structured, stress-free life for one that offers great risk with great rewards. And ultimately, that's what society rewards. No guts, no glory doc.

For every Associate at McKinsey or Goldman who burns through 80 hour weeks, there are others who settle for a 9-5 job with a cute barista girlfriend and play pool on the weekends. For every 20 year old who partied through college with debt, there are many, many others who scored perfect GPAs and had clearly defined goals in life. For every geek who started coding in middle school and dropped out and played Counter Strike, there is a kid who busted ass and made it in life. Intelligence only goes so far -- structure, planning, and hard work go a lot farther.

Whether or not you like it, success is cumulative -- and course correction is a lot harder later in life than it is earlier.

There's a ton of evidence for the Big Bang, the existence of the CMB at all being one of them. That result was meant to be evidence for Inflation, which is used to explain why the universe appears evenly distributed everywhere you look, among other things.

Zero Motorcycles has a few electric versions, but they are pretty expensive (~$12k and upwards).

Not all bikers are like you. Personally, I would absolutely love an electric motorcycle.

Plus, all that power and more will be exerted in an electric motorcycle - they just won't be wasted on noise and vibrations. They will be efficiently used in a servo motor, and as a geek, that excites me more than any rumble of power being at my command.

I dunno, as someone who enjoys crotch-rockets (Hayabusa FTW), I love its look.

It's almost like something that Batman would ride.