Yes! That's another problem! No new humans to oppress! I wasn't going to say anything, but there you go!

Well another problem is that we actually know what conditions are like there. It's one thing to ask a bunch of religious fanatics who are being persecuted in their current setting to move to someplace nominally more rustic where they'd be free to practice their heathen rituals. It's another to ask someone to leave their gravity well for a long trip to a much crappier gravity well. It's kind of a hard sell. "Yeah, Mars is a shithole with nothing but dust and more dust, but we'd like you to move there so you can scrape out a subsistence living that we'll probably lose interest in the next time the budgets come up." At least in the new world you could live off the land hunting beavers in the event the budget for new world colonization ever got cut.

It's really not that much of a problem. You just replace any words you don't recognize with "Jihad!" Like "Hey Alex! You want to go to jihad later and get some burgers?" Clearly there's some sort of terrorist activity going on there which justifies an increase to the budget next jihad!

You get typecast. You could have 3 decades of C/C++ and mention that you studied APL for one semester in college and all the calls you'll get will be for APL jobs. I don't even list LISP on my resume, even though I became enlightened in LISP in the 90's. With LISP, enlightenment is a heady feeling where you suddenly see the elegance with which everything fits together, followed by the sinking realization that if you want to actually do anything with the language you'd have to write all the libraries yourself.

LWN is still a thing? Damn, I stopped reading them ages ago, when I realized that all the stories I was reading were popping up on slashdot several days earlier.

Amm... anyway, most of the programmers I've known over my career have been average. They don't seem to particularly enjoy programming but they can generally make the computer do what they want it to do. Then they're quite happy to go home to their families and do other things. I've run across (and had to clean up for) five or six truly inept ones. And I mean people with no ability with computers whatsoever, who were essentially defrauding the company they were working for. Usually those people had left the company by the time I'd gotten there.

I've never met a true rockstar programmer at any company, although I have met a couple in Linux channels on IRC. I got to audit the source of the AT&T C standard library on a contract in the '90's and a lot of that stuff was brilliant. I wish I could have worked with the programmers who wrote it.

Me? I'm not going to try to appraise my own skill at it. I enjoy programming and do it at home. I've retrofitted several projects with data structures and will fix crashes that other programmers tend to ignore. I've also been told code I've worked on is easy to understand and maintain (By people in other countries who it was outsourced to.) I prefer not to subscribe to institutionalized learned helplessness that dictates that the software works that way because the software works that way and nothing can be done to fix it. I have several github repos where I work on things that interest me at the moment, mostly licensed under the Apache license. That may make me different from a lot of programmers, but I won't argue that it makes me any better or worse.

Why doesn't the industry just charge those people for the addition of chemicals to their water? Those people are getting those chemicals for free right now, and chemicals don't cost nothing! The industry should be billing everyone in that town for the chemicals they're currently getting for free!

Oh we went to a 64 bit time_t ages ago. You should just have to recompile, even if you use long instead of time_t. Assuming you ever upgraded your machine to a 64 bit platform, which won't be a problem for most people by 2038. Even the US military and NASA should be on 64 bit systems by then. So essentially we've already fixed the problem for Linux. Specific installations that don't upgrade might have some problems, but most of those systems won't last another couple of decades and will require replacement sooner. Specific in-house software that was compiled 32 bits and the the source lost might also have problems. Any remaining SCO installations might also still have problems. I actually kind of hope I can spend my last couple of years before retirement stamping out the remaining SCO installations, naturally while billing $200 an hour.

The Forbes article lists five criteria that would make it a more plausible claim. One stands out in particular: the thrust scales with power. The drive reportedly creates on order of 30-50 microNewtons (uN) at 100 W input power. 1 KW power at microwave frequencies really isn't that hard (most kitchen microwave ovens operate near or at this scale), and 10 KW shouldn't be beyond the skills of a decent microwave engineer. Beyond that and it gets into Serious Engineering.

This idea came to me in a matter of seconds, so I must assume that the people currently testing it at NASA should also have thought of it as well and are working at testing the device at a range of power levels to plot out the power-vs-thrust relationship. Should be a piece of cake for at least one order of magnitude.

I ran across a great quote the other day.

There's really nothing to see here. Except that long distance with per-minute charges are still a thing. And AOL is still a thing, I guess? I definitely would not have called that. And old people are easily tricked into buying both those things. I don't think addressing the ease with which old people are tricked is on the agenda. Whether it's aluminum siding or their uncle in Uganda, tricking old people is just way too easy. And phone companies will just let you run up tens of thousands of dollars in arbitrary charges in one month, and let you keep doing it for several months when you don't pay the first one, that's definitely been a thing for a while. I'm actually a bit surprised AT&T waived it. In the stories I've heard in the past, the telcos usually put up a pretty good fight about that sort of thing.

It creates a "Virtual quantum burrito"? As long as there's a burrito in the microwave, thrust is always guaranteed to be generated!

Well the tests keep showing the damn thing works! Maybe it's just magic. Works based on fairies flying out of an engineer's butt, or something. Hopefully it doesn't break the universe :-/

It turns out it was only actually torture about 39% of the time.

Real doctors take an oath to do no harm with the knowledge they've been granted. I guess that's why the CIA went with psychologists.

Um, and that minor incident at the Bikini Island Atoll. Entire island nation loses their homes permanently and a bunch of people get cancer and die within a couple of years. But you know, you want to make an omelette, you need to break a few eggs. The USA and the USSR were doing open-air testing until nearly 1960, when the USA finally screwed the pooch hard in the south pacific. And then there was that time some jackass decided to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Van Allen Belt. That was in the mid 60's and for a year or so you couldn't launch anything without it being disabled by the trapped radiation. There was some concern that we'd ended space exploration permanently. But you know, minor little whoops there, no need to mention that in history class.

He never was the Libertarian messiah. Anyone who thought he was just wasn't paying attention. He has a marginally more interesting back-story than most congresscritters (Joker killed his parents and then he spent his teenage years spanking it to Ayn Rand novels,) but he's really only qualified to be a Fox News android.