Thank you for an insightful post. No discussion of this will make sense without the point you made. IMO, it only makes the whole situation seem that much more tragic.

If we can't sort out an asteroid coming right at us by 2880, we kind of deserve what we get. I'm not going to worry about it too much in any event.

I do know sexual tension when I see it. I appreciate you trying to get my attention but if you have the hots for me just come out and say it. I don't swing for the same team, but I'd be happy to take a picture of me with my shirt off so you can have a hot fantasy while staring at my prodigious man boobs.

They just really don't want to do that and are going to stall as long as they can get away with it. Most of them are probably running no form of IDS, have no personnel capable of actually detecting a breach, have no security policy beyond poorly-enforced DOD mandates (Which effectively boils down to "Change your password every 90 days") and really don't want to be distracted from collecting their fat government checks every month by anything resembling actual work.

That's a funny question. In order to write a program, you have to understand your requirements. Most people with their meatputers are not capable of this. Given that they have no hope, how is an AI supposed to do anything?

Header files are totally optional. You can write all your code in one big file if you want to. You just need to make sure no function calls any function that hasn't been defined yet. No problem!

Having to maintain a bad programmer's code is bad in any language. If the programmer is breaking the problem down, reducing coupling, and writing unit tests for his class APIs then maintaining his code will be easy. If he's writing a ton of spaghetti code where ever class inherits from every other class and nothing is documented or tested, you're going to have a bad time. The difference between C++ and Java or Ruby is that you're more likely to discover you have a problem at compile time with C++. Your java code will probably quietly sit on a web server somewhere, quietly shitting exceptions into a log file no one looks at for a decade.

And was pondering what would be in a geek tomb. Probably old Dilbert dolls, models from the original Star Trek, B5 and Firefly and a large pile of dirty laundry. Naturally it'd be found in Alexander the Great's basement.

Anally rape you harder than the student bookstores do? I doubt it. College was a couple decades ago for me and my ass still hurts.

Who hasn't asked Siri that. It's in a ton of "Stupid Siri Tricks" youtube videos. If you ask Siri after a recent software update, she says "I used to know the answer for that." Stupid reporting like this is why we can't have nice things.

My favorite response she had for that question was "What, again?"

Of course, point 2 should to a large degree prevent point 1; you want to fly your shit in the USA, you have a maintenance logbook that is kept up to date and can be produced whenever your local FAA rep comes 'round asking for it. Of course, that's one of the reasons for point 4. You maintain your engines in part based on how many times they've been started. Due to this, it effectively costs my local dropzone $100 just to turn their plane on.

We do get a story every so often, of someone forgetting to put gas in their plane. This doesn't necessarily have to be an unforgiving situation if you keep your wits about you. Most planes don't plunge out of the sky the second their engines stop. Bob Hoover demonstrates this quite effectively. If you're flying a gyrocopter, they can get down on autorotation. An ideal flying car would have one of these characteristics.

If you want a flying car now, go buy a small airplane -- you can get a used Cessna for about what I paid for my car. There are a number of ultralight possibilities, too. You'll still need to be cognizant of the FAA regulations governing your flight if you're in the USA, so you won't really be able to treat it like a flying car. But that's as close as you're likely to get for the next two or three decades.

Einstein, Tesla, Newton, Boole.

Contributions way the freak ahead of their time, and not just the knowledge they knew, but what they decided to do with it, was probably pure genius in my opinion.

There are lots of smart people in the world, but very few of them really contribute anything beyond paper test scores or academic nonsense.

To be a true genius in my opinion, you look the world straight in the eye, tell it your full of crap, and whack upside the head with a contribution that challenges civilization at the time.

All of the above men did that, some centuries before their contributions fully took root.

The Economist was, ironically, founded as a "free market" newspaper, in a period when that meant specifically, the fight against the patent system. I.e. that was its first purpose, to argue against the re-establishment of the patent system in Britain.

Pay no attention to the Google street view vehicle that captured your dong. Or at least, some dong. To be fair though, there are probably a lot of dongs on that street.

I spent the morning taking a ride in a hot air balloon. That's a unique perspective on the sky, even if you fly in airplanes a lot. Highly recommend it. I've been skydiving the past couple years but think I want to hang out in the sky longer. Might have to take up paragliding or one of the other gliding spots. I don't suppose I'd find much there, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be fun to explore. In '15 or '16 I want to go wingsuit flying over Hawaii from one of their dropzones.