Eh? It took me all of a few days to read through one of the many reasonable books about jQuery, and I found it makes it a whole lot easier to make sense of the DOM. In a browser, what else is there to JavaScript, other than messing around with the DOM? Of course, I only use JavaScript on the client side, for the server side I use J2EE and GlassFish. jQuery is perfect for my use and very, very easy to learn.

Look, it isn't just me saying this - it has been measured over the last 4 decades. Follow the link I provided and read about it - this guy isn't a wild-eyed prophet, but a down to earth guy who has done the foot-work. He's not asking anybody to accept it on faith, there is good data to back it up. We can all read it and make up own minds.

A quick guess: Not very. But the point here, I think, is that we are now taking it seriously enough to start doing it at any scale at all. Technology is almost always crude and inefficient in the beginning - just look at computers - but it becomes better over time - just look at computers. Of course there are many problems to overcome, but they are only problems.

America's problem is not immigration, but the myth of trickle-down economics, which has been implemented blindly in the West. Read:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

This is not about 'bleeding-heart socialism', but about why it is a good idea to maintain a balanced society, where the gap between the richest and the poorest is not too big. People only leave their home country with the culture and climate they grew up to love, when the situation becomes bad enough to make the alternatives look significantly better; modern America is the result of such migrations, so American's are well placed to understand how this works, and the America you are now mourning the loss of, was the result of these migrations.

I think you are losing the true spirit of America, because you have allowed the rich upper class to persuade you that trickle down economics will make everybody richer, and have lulled you into thinking that what they call 'democracy' is actually democracy. The solution to this problem? Well, I'm not an expert, but to me it looks like the term 'redistribution of wealth' is relevant in some form. The rich have to get less wealthy, and the poor have to get somewhat richer.

Hmm, I often wonder if it shouldn't be changed to include the word "both" between "bear" and "arms".

- the morning after a major Curry Binge...

Grow a sense of humour; or are you so insecure that anything that suggests that somebody hasn't prostrated themself in humble adulation is taken to mean that they are 'haters'? You wouldn't last long as part of an engineering team with that sort of sensitivities; we all get teased for aspects of what we do, in a friendly way - it's part of belonging. Perhaps it is way of saying "We know you understand because you are one of us".

If you want my opinion without any hint of humour, then it is like this: I think the Apple Watch is a kitchy little gadget that doesn't add much value to one's life.

- Is it an impressive, technological achievement? Well, in a modern context, not really - it is just a gadget on par with many others, and it will be dated in another year from now.

- Is it beautiful? Not to my eyes, but then I appreciate function over form, and I don't find women more sexy in high heels either, just to pick something at random.

- So, what is the point of owning an Apple Watch? Beats me, really.

Whether the Apple Watch is going to be a success remains to be seen, I think. It tries to latch on to the same instincts that has made fashion or reality TV a commercial success: the instinct to follow the crowd without having to think about anything essential. No, I'm not a neck-beard, but probably only because I have taught myself to shave with an old-fashioned straight razor, which I find is a satisfying skill.

The expression 'MacJob' used to mean a crap job; so this MacWatch....

No, the crime was that he was exploiting a weakness in the system. This is equivalent to the closed door; even if a door is locked with a flimsy lock or perhaps not locked at all - if you know that you are not allowed to go in there, you will be committing a criminal act if you enter uninvited. Or if you find a bag of cash by the road-side, or if you discover that you can get unlimited cash out of a cash-machine; if you take the money, you commit a crime. This guy knew what he was doing and that he shouldn't.

I don't have much sympathy for big finance; they too belong behind bars, for preference in a zoo.

Good point - although, what that means is only that we can, theoretically, see the objects that were, back then, going to be observable, but are now further away than the maximum distance, over which we could have received a light signal. (Wow, how about that for a mouthful of grammar?). I suppose that still qualifies as observable.

Also, thank you for not pointing out the small error of 9 orders of magnitude :-)

Hey, what's a few billion light years between friends? :-)

It had never occurred to me to consider that life might cause erosion.

No, I think that is something nobody really appreciated in the past; it is only in the last ~10 years that I have started reading an increasing number of articles about this, but it seems that life has been a very major factor in shaping the environment of our planet. There has been a number of great 'events' throughout Earths history - not just "the great oxygenation" if that is the name, but several others, one being (from memory) when life first colonized dry land and caused the release of iron into the sea by erosion, which apparently laid down all the major iron deposits. Perhaps it isn't so surprising - after all, most life exists by breaking chemical bonds and extracting the energy.

But plant life large enough to stop erosion is fairly recent (less than 1/2 byo) and constitutes only a small proportion of the actual biomass on the planet, it is only on the surface. Compare that to the fact that we keep finding life everywhere, from deep within the crust to the top of the atmosphere; there is such a huge amount of living things munching away at the chemistry of the planet.

Who knows, but the point of speculating is to think through different, possible scenarios - the very foundation of prediction, I'd say. Since we don't know all the parameters that are going to shape tomorrow, we have to think through what might happen - what if the car breaks down, what if that cheque is delayed etc - so we can be prepared for things and make contingency plans. In my opinion this is the very thing that makes intelligence an evolutionary advantage: the ability to plan ahead and make reasonable predictions.

Correct, we already know how things turned out on Earth, but if we at any time in the future were to go to planets outside our star system, it would help prepare us better, if we could make even just an educated guess about what we might find when we arrived. I don't know - I think it is common sense.

I have deperately tried to interpret some insight into this 'discovery' - and failed; this may be because of my lack of understanding, of course, but I don't think so. Mathematically, the set of complex numbers is infinite - uncountably so, in fact (Cantor's diagonal argument):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

The observable universe is limited by the speed of light, so it will be less than ~28 ly across (we can at most see as far as light has traveled since the big bang), and intuitively infinite must be bigger than something of limited size. It is a misleading argument, though; infinity is a strange thing, and comparing the sizes of infinite sets has to be done with care (as Cantor's argument demonstrates). For one thing, we don't really know that the universe is a continuum in any of the senses defined in mathematics - there are speculations that there is a "smallest size" of distance and time "because of quantum" (I'm being deliberately wooly-mouthed because I don't know what I'm talking about here). If that is the case, then any infinite set will have more elements than there are bits of universe that we can observe (total volume of observable universe / volume of.the smallest element = finite number)

If we are talking about continua, on the other hand, then we don't really know, I think. A Mandelbrot set is a subset of the complex numbers, so is at most of the same cardinality as that one. Incidentally and perhaps surprisingly, there are exactly as many complex numbers as there are real numbers, and there are as many real number between 0 and 1 as there are between +/- infinity, courtesy Cantor again. The universe, on the other hand may or may not be fully describable as some sort of N-dimensional, smooth manifold (manifold: a winkly version of space, so to speak); a smooth manifold will again have the same cardinality as [0,1], and if the universe can not be fitted into one of those, it is anybody's guess, I think. There are sets larger than the real numbers.

As an aside note: why have I ignored the idea of 'size' as in distances or volumes? Because it makes no sense to talk about metrics, when one of the sets does not have a defined method of measuring distances in meters or any other physical distance. Assigning a physical unit to an abstract set would be arbitrary.

This is a great idea, and as we hear on BBC, there are already existing tunnels all over the world, dug by Tibetans:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...