"Yes, it does. It doesn't matter what luck you get, being able to 'be' a character requires talent. If you don't believe me why don't you get on a microphone and do a passable impression of Mr. Burns reading a scene from Hamlet. There might be 14 million in it for you!"

It also requires luck to "be" a character, as you say it. We think that Harry Shears is Mr. Burns because that's what twenty or more so years of the Simpsons taught us to expect as the voice of a modern day Scrooge. If another moderately capable voice actor got the role when the casting was done, we'd think He is the only actor that can do justice to the role.

Incidentally top Japanese voice actors get paid much less, and just look at how much more "anime" gets produced, rather than just a few notable American cartoons.

"It is no more wrong to call piracy theft than it is to call it the same if you tap into your neighbor's cable so that you can get cable without paying for it."

There's a big difference between tapping a neighbor's cable and pirating a movie off the Internet. An unlicensed cable connection generally involves one connection/source, your neighbor's. But if you want to download from the Internet the same number of movies you could watch from an unlicensed cable connection, you can choose from more than one source, from the various file-sharing sites to torrents uploaded by thousands of different individuals.

To summarize the difference:

Illegal cable connection: one source (your neighbors).
Internet movie pirating: many sources (unless you're the sort who watches only one movie)

A bit creepy maybe. But how's this different from installing a GPS on a company car? As other posters have pointed out, it's a work issued phone. So if you're being monitored by your use of company property, then don't use it unless you're at work. Leave the car/smartphone at the office. Get another car/phone for your personal needs.

There are other technical solutions like turning off the cellphone. Or put it inside a microwave oven (just remember to take it out before you pop in your burito). It would be another matter if the GPS thingy was being embedded into her skin/scalp.

Maybe someone can port a text mode browser like Lynx, Elinks or W3M or something really hardcore, a command-line browser like edbrowse (http://edbrowse.org/). Then we don't have to worry about all the panning and dragging around the small screen.

Want to have the most crisis-proof career? Then start living the life of a survivalist. The idea is to grow, build and fix as much of everything you need. Then as a sideline, get any job that doesn't pay starvation wages and give you enough time off to starting growing, building and fixing the things you need. Make sure the stuff that you can't DIY is merely a luxury not an essential when worst comes to worst (nuclear winter, zombie apocalypse, asteroid impact, etc). Or at least make sure the thing is easily repaired rather than an iGadget only a service center halfway across the country can fix. Then you can use the income you get from your taxable job to buy your iPad, aPhone or electric scooter.

In the future our algorithmic overlords will decide for what's good in everything we do, from our gadgets to our leaders to our lovers. It would be a technological utopia for the sheeple, a dystopia for the freethinkers. Rather than war, it's our Facebook likes, Google searches, Amazon (Alibaba?) buys, aggregated and analysed by machines, that will bring about the Matrix.

In the future the human race will be divided into Apples and oranges. The masses will be the oranges, while the Apples will be the genetically sequenced elite with access to not just the latest medical technology but the biometric clearance to become part of the ruling technocratic class.

No help file. WTF is this supposed to do? A bad example given our age of touch and click operating systems, even the most arcane GNU or BSD program is more comprehensible. Maybe it says a lot about the politics of his country, smart but not very user friendly.

It's definitely a myth since there are different kinds of programming. Just like in music or sports, someone great at playing the piano might suck a playing the violin. Michael Jordan was a mediocre baseball player at best. Of course your might get those rare all-prodigies, the Mozarts who excel at everything in the field. How would Linus rate as a COBOL programmer?

This could be a problem when running simulation software. You set the date to 2040 and bam your VM crashes.

Somebody's sense of humor went out the window.

I read somewhere that not only do people age differently but different parts of the same person age differently. But just what is age, if not meausred against some arbitrary clock? Just think of Einstein's thought experiment about relativity, the astronaut twin who ages a few years vs the earh-bound twin who ages thousands of years (assuming he has someone managed to find a life-support system that makes him surive to that age).

But if we assume the mundane notion of age being something we celebrate each year or put in a person's obituary or Wikipedia page then clearly no visual system or medical diagnostic can accurately calibrate a person's calendar age. The lungs of a forty-year old smoker who never exercises may well look and feel older than the lungs of an eighty-year-old who jogs regularly and plays the saxophone in the local orchestra. So yes maybe Obama does look 70 years old, visually at least, when compared to a sample of photos of people born on this planet 70 years ago.

"Yeah, that's why black people are 3x as likely to be killed by the cops than white."

Even if that was true (citation please), it could be down to other factors other than simply racism.There ratio of blacks living other the poverty level could be higher, so the police were simply trying to arrest all poor-looking black guys, and they could just as likely arrest a similarly "suspicious" looking white guy. Incidentally, what's the ratio for black girls to white girls getting arrested or shot?

Now how exactly did they calculate how much the "free" ebooks were worth? (Smell the oxymoron in that?) Is this some sort of MPAA/RIAA accounting scheme where the price of an ebook is quantified by the price of a physical copy (DVD/CD)? And why focus on the so-called reputable publishers? Can't the government just hire the authors directly and have them put out Creative Commons licensed textbooks (BTW this has already been done by some independent groups)? This is like hiring the mafia to build your house.

"Telling people they will be ok 'Once you get your VR legs' is a wholly wrong idea. If people need to get used to it then that's failure."

Telling people they'll be okay once they know how to drive is the wrong idea. If people can't just get behind a steering wheel and drive to Manhattan then automotive technology is an epic fail. Technology should be as simple as a baby's foot.