Good thing he didn't figure it out. Dying from radiation poisoning from all those stray neutrons would have been a bummer! Especially when you're sitting on a pile of freshly-transmuted gold (Which would also have a pretty short half-life IIRC...)

90 minute ping times will kill your head shots. All the people in the Mars cities are going to have to log into the Europa WoW servers.

I remember when those fuckers (OPEC) were terrified to let it go over $25 a barrel. It's not "low" now. It's just low enough to fuck over the competition from fracking wells in North America. Maybe if they keep it where it is for two or three years, the current round of investors in North American fracking companies will lose a fuck-ton of money and be a little more shy about investing in the technology next time OPEC lets it spike up.

They let it run a little too long this time, though. Hybrids and electrics have had a chance to get a foothold in the market, and some people are already starting to think about how pure electric vehicles and ones with fuel cells could potentially change how electric grids work. It wouldn't take a very big push for countries to start adopting electric vehicles powered with Clean Atomic Energy. And that'll plunge us into the next ice age lickety split, once global warming starts to reverse. Hah, didn't see THAT coming, did you?

Reaper carrier signal.

Kind of like Galactic Civilizations III? I'd guess they'd better hurry if they don't want Sid Meier to steal the wind from their sails.

I thought about that as well, having done a similar exercise in a similar training. It's pretty rare that a team encounters a problem that only one member of that team can solve. I stayed on a project from 2000-2005 and got so familiar with the code base and the capabilities of my team that I could estimate the times pretty accurately based on the team member doing it. The manager could ask me how long something would take and I'd say "About 3 days for me, or about 2 weeks for John." Those numbers could easily be reversed if it was a piece of the code I hadn't looked at very much and John had. Sometimes they'd still elect to have John make that change, if I had several tasks that needed to get done, but it was pretty easy optimize the team's performance by mostly keeping them in the parts of the code that they knew.

Were there any tasks that only one person could have achieved? Very few, really. There was some work around making the code more stable that I ended up doing. That involved changing how the code was launched, building the code base with electric fence and using a a debugger to find the locations of core dumps. I feel like that's stuff any programmer can do, but the rest of the team didn't seem to have any experience with that process. But agile is also willing to accept a half-assed job if a half-assed job meets the needs of the business. It really doesn't matter to agile if someone on the team gets pulled in every weekend because the program can't run without constant hand-holding, as long as the business' needs are being met.

Just ignore that bit about being secure in your papers and possessions! The Government should be able to take what it wants, for your protection!

Terrible. It insulted my intelligence at every opportunity. To pick just three:

1. A hard drive that's been at Ground Zero of a Chernobyl-level event, exposed to hundreds of sieverts of ionizing radiation, extraordinary extremes of temperature, a hydrogen-oxygen explosion with such tremendous overpressure that it blew the containment dome, and seawater pumped through the building as a last-ditch effort at cooling the core, is still somehow so readable that it just requires a classified forensics program to recover it fully.
2. The main bad guy's ultimate plan involves speculating on the future of a commodity that isn't exactly rare.
3. Targeting nuclear reactors in the U.S. and China as a practice run for the real attack is pretty stupid, as the practice run is so devastating that it guarantees an immediate and vigorous reaction from two world-power countries known to have active cyberwarfare programs, thereby announcing your presence to exactly the people you want to keep completely in the dark

This movie insulted my intelligence at every turn. I have a long (and spoilerific) list of all the what-the no-they-didn't good-Christ moments I saw in the movie; if there's interest I'll post them here.

And are now sending the phone spiders!

I run some software on my android phone that sends calls with numbers not in my contacts list straight to voicemail. If they're important enough, I'll call 'em back. Most of the time they're some very-low-quality recruiter or the newspaper asking me to pay to have them litter in my driveway.

Back in the ol' Landline days, I ran a SIP gateway that went to an asterisk system. It would always ask you to press 1 if you weren't a telemarketer and 2 if you were. Option 2 would politely tell you to fuck off. I never got a telemarketing call after that. I'm guessing the VRU confused most of the robo-calling software they used. After a while I got fancy with it and installed SIP software on the cellphone I was using at the time. So if my phone connected up with the wireless network, it would register with the asterisk server and the asterisk server would ring the phone. If the phone was not available because I was away from the house, calls would go straight to voicemail. If you were on a whitelist, the asterisk system would ask you to hold on and then dial out over VOIP and connect the call to my cell phone. The software on my phone now works pretty well but I miss the power I had with Asterisk.

It already does a pretty good job.

Has anyone ported cyanogenmod to the phone yet? That's my default answer to the heaping helping of unwanted crap that always seem to get bundled with my phones.

The compatibility patch from Microsoft has been out since forever. Office 2003 reads and writes .docx files without any trouble.

I notice that it's been a while since I've worried about document formats. I'm not so vain as to need features not supported in Rich Text Format, so for 20 years I've been sending people .rtf files out of compatibility politeness. Once, when I explained all this to someone, the response I got was something like "Dude, these days, everyone can open basically everything." And there's something right about that. In the old days I worried about formats forcing MS Office lock-in, but nowadays it's hard to get me too worked up about it. It's kind of like video files, where you barely notice whether you downloaded a .mpg, .avi, .wmv, mkv, or mp4. You double-click and it all plays.

May 11, 1989 and Apr 4, 1993.