That's what I was thinking too--we got hit by something's little brother *again*? But OTOH, there's a whole metric crapload of stuff that passes us close by, check this out: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

Any relation to the asteroid that got well up into our pearthonal space earlier today?

Humans are now distributed systems, there is no value in memorizing any fact when information is available 24/7 everywhere.

False. Speed. Everything I've been taught is in a book somewhere. You absolutely cannot take someone of equivalent intelligence, hand them a big stack of books, and expect them to perform anywhere near as well. You can't expect them to perform AT ALL. If you think this, you've never been in that situation. My workplace is filled with smart people with advanced degrees. It is laughable to think that the expert software developer can just switch seats with the expert CFD person. They're both intelligent, one just has a wealth of knowledge to draw on that isn't matched by a stack of books on advanced math and physics.

Basically, your method tests whether people are able to teach themselves physics on demand, not if they've actually learned physics.

Why? There's a simple solution when someone offers you a bad deal. Don't take it.

I used to buy insurance for phones. It was a decent deal. I spent a little money, and if the not super likely but possible happened, I was spared $hundreds out of pocket. Then prices went up, and deductibles went up, and before long I was spending too much money. When the not super likely but possible happened, I was out a fairly hefty deductable anyway. I just quit renewing the policy, and quit buying them going forward. I don't need someone to pass a law prohibiting me from doing something dumb. I'm capable of simply declining to do something dumb.

If you live somewhere with sufficient wind. In my part of .us, there's often not even a breeze unless it's stormy. I checked, and it looks like average wind speeds here are 4.5m/s at 80 meters. 4.5m/sec sounds breezy, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's enough to drive a generator, but 80m is really very, very tall for something in my yard. At a guess, it's about 2x the tallest tree I have.

What's broken? "Everything is a file" and other traditions are ignored. Log files are no longer text files. I'll stop right there.

No need to paint the male gender as a whole as being filled with sociopaths. It's just the law of large numbers at work. There's maybe 30 million American men in the age rage that are likely to pick up srange women; if just 1/10 % of them are sociopathic predators that's 30,000 predators; and since they *are* predators they'll be overrepresented in young women's encounters with men in pick-up scenarios. Small numbers can produce disproportionate problems. In this case it represents numbers the actions of such a small proportion of men that our ideas about how normal people act aren't a reliable guide.

Drink spiking is a very rare crime. Most studies that look for evidence of it find very little. The highest I found was a government study which found date rape drugs in 4.5% of the cases from four sexual assault clinics. Note this is 4.5% of the cases where the assault occurred, so we're not talking about 4.5% of encounters, we're talking 4.5% of rapes. 4.5% is certainly high enough to be a concern in certain situations, like residential parties at a college. In such a situation a date rape drug detector might actually have some utility, even though it addresses relatively rare actions by a tiny proportion of men.

A bigger concern than what we think of as a "date rape drug" is alcohol itself. The same study that found date rape drugs in 4.5% of sexual assault samples found alcohol in 55%. This result is consistently found across studies: alcohol is very frequently associated with sexual assault -- around half of the time. This is especially concerning because some people (men and women both) don't believe that surreptitiously incapacitating someone with alcohol in order to have sex is rape. They don't distinguish ethically between two people getting drunk and having sex and one of them slipping extra alcohol into a drink.

But the fact remains most men wouldn't do something like that. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that a woman might often encounter the few remaining men who would. A typical man has sex with a small number of women many times; a man who has sex with a large number of women only once is bound to be encountered by women disproportionately often.

Exactly. If you want to regard yourself as an engineer, you have to start by accepting you are working to serve the interests of the client, not your career. I've seen so many problems occur because programmers want to have a certain technology on their resume. And the sad thing is that it works to get them through the HR filter. If HR is told to look for experience with a particular technology, it doesn't seem to matter whether the candidate's experience with that technology is failure.

My algorithm does better than 66% and I'm open sourcing it right here...
(Predicts whether site will be hacked between now and the destruction of earth)

public boolean willSiteBeHacked(Vector whateverYouFeelLike) {
        return true;
}

You can't disprove my claim.

Ambiguity: "Thou shalt not murder"? Well, is that killing I just did *really* murder, or just killing? What if it was an accident? What if he was trying to kill me? What if he just threatened to kill me? What if my property (dog) killed him? What if I told my dog to kill him?

Lawyers: Lawyers are multipliers of ambiguity.

Politicians: Politicians look like they're doing something by passing a law, even if it's a law that doesn't actually do what they hope or claim it will. When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

And your point would be?

You realize calling the Big Bang an "explosion" is a metaphor, right?

This is a much bigger deal than people seem to think. I tried getting my father set up on Linux not that long ago.

"I need help, this says GNOME needs updating, I thought I was running Linux?"
"You are, Linux is the kernel, but GNOME is the desktop environment."
"Well, what's Debian? It says Debian needs updating."
"You're running the Debian distribution of Linux."
"I thought it was GNOME?"

Except water vapor is the gaseous form of water; the plankton would have to be transported on individual molecules of water to reach the ionosphere.

If plankton were transportable in microscopic *droplets* in the troposphere as you suggest, a more plausible explanation is that the equipment was contaminated -- both the station itself and the gear used to test it.

Or he may have spent years building up a tolerance to iocaine powder...