Found a bug in physics.c, those cars we mass produced last year will spontaneously explode after 367 days of exposure to an atmosphere containing oxygen, or when white lines are painted rather than vinyl, or when attempting a corner of a prime number of degrees when speeding on a cambered road.

Why wasn't this spotted sooner?

Because we hadn't expected to need chemistry or non-Euclidian geometry in a physics engine.

Then make the episodes longer. Or have one set of presenters on the first show (they're usually paired) and the others on the second show. Or eliminate redundant footage so that you can have two or three times the content. Or eliminate the advertisers, sorry adverts, and get three times the running length.

The assumption seems to be that as 90% of kids 15 years ago were diagnosed ADHD, 90% of the target audience now must also have ADHD. Except for Game of Thrones viewers, who apparently have other issues.

Discovery got caught using fake footage in documentaries. No scientist should be working with a channel that is peddling fraudulent material. History lost a lot of reputation with their academically bogus Ancient Aliens stuff, but at least they didn't try to offer photographs and videos they themselves doctored as "evidence".

If the three have projects worth taking seriously, they won't be projects on Discovery. HBO has less of a credibility issue.

"USB mass storage".

I know, mind-blowing, eh? Instead of supporting fifteen different incompatible protocols to get people's phones to talk to your massively sub-par onboard electronics, you just treat everything like a dumb ol' external HDD, and they all just work like magic. Who'da thunk it?

Oh, I just graduated top of my class from Calcutta University.

Fair or not, quality of education correlates highly with median income. Poor areas have poor education systems, plain and simple.

Particularly in any tech-related field, good luck in the modern world after graduating at the top of your class with all that experience you have working on 486 PCs, 20khz scopes, and textbooks that still refer to transistors as an exciting new technology.

Now I want to work for $0.40 an hour and live in a shanty because a college education is about coming home to dirt floors and non-insulated tin roofs!


What you "want" has no relevance here.

Industry math? 700k downloads does not equal 700k movie tickets or DVD purchases or rentals. Some significant portion of that number would never have bought the movie, whether available for download or not. Regardless of your views on criminal/violent punishment for non-violent IP crimes (I disagree on that level personally), basing any punishment on a false metric is the worst kind of injustice.

There there is also the third catagory those people who would have bought the DVD only because of the seeing the download. This is the number that could meaningfully be compared with "lost sales". Even if "were never a potential customer" covers the vast majority of downloaders.

If this paper were to turn out to be correct, current climate models are useless and will need to be completely reworked. Well, maybe not completely. Some more than others. But it would contradict some of the fundamental assumptions of most of those models.

We already know that these models useless at predicting. Which rather implies that ALL of them have at least one fundermentally wrong assumption.
How many truely independent models exist anyway?

I've worked in tech (SE) for 15+ years now, and I don't know of a single colleague that would agree with the sentiment expressed in that quote.

Ditto, this!

He clearly means "I have talked with CTOs" and doesn't grasp that that title just means yet-another-stuffed-shirt, not any sort of actual engineer.

Because, while I have no doubt that good engineers exist outside the US - They don't need to come here to work as indentured servants. Thus we have exactly the wrong sort of selection bias in who applies for H1Bs in the first place.


"Tech Looks To Obama To Save Them From 'Just Sort of OK' US Workers"? No. Real tech (as opposed to "pointy-haired cat herders") wants Obama to clamp down on importing "Just Sort of OK" foreign workers to displace equally qualified American workers. Simple as that.

Funny thing about banning something like this - It creates an audience that didn't previously exist.

I had zero interest in this whole situation, but now that some repressive backwater dipshits have banned it? Into the collection it goes!

'Course, I live in the US, not the UK, and we consider that sort of footage "Primetime TV", but the principle still stands. You ban it, I will find a copy.

/ No, that doesn't apply to CP, Mr. Hansen, move along ya old perv.

Since 2000 there's been an unusual number of La Nina years.

We don't have enough observations to ever begin to know what is "usual" in the first place.

Under normal circumstances, this should have produced a noticeably cool period, similar to the 1940s and 1890s. Instead the decade was still the warmest on record.

Even the longest records we have may well be a few orders of magnitude too short to be of much use here. That's before even considering issues of accuracy, when can even apply to records being currently collected.

I also wonder will they prosecute any of the newspapers that showed images from the video? I don't know of any news channels that broadcast the clip, but there might be one of those somewhere too.

Of course just telling people about the video means that it's possible to go looking for it.
Probably be of far more use to strip anyone who wants to join a foreign military/paramilitary of their citizenship. After they leave, of course.

That's easy to fix. If a cell has not just the existing error correction codes but also digital ones as well, then mutagenic substances (of which there are a lot) and telemere shortening can be fixed. Well, once we've figured out how to modify the DNA in-situ. Nanotech should have that sorted soonish.

The existing error correction is neither very good nor very reliable. This is a good thing, because it allows evolution. You don't want good error correction between generations. You just want it in a single person over their lifespan, and you want it restricted so that it doesn't clash with retrotranspons and other similar mechanisms. So, basically, one whole inter-gene gap/one whole gene protected by one code. Doable. You still need cell death - intercept the signal and use a guaranteed method.

Here, in the year Lemon Meringue, we decided to solve the problem once and for all.

Instead of trying to kill cancer, we hijack its techniques. We start by having nanocomputers in the vaccuelles of each brain cell. These keep a continuous backup copy of the state of the brain up to death. Cancers disable the hard limit on cell duplication that cannot otherwise be avoided. By using the techniques of cell-devouring microphages, the cancer "consumes" the old cells and replaces them with new ones. They can't spread anywhere else, because that's how the cancer is designed to spread. Once the body has been fully replaced, the cancer is disabled. The brain is then programmed by the nanocomputers and the remaining cells are specialized by means of chemical signal.

This does result in oddly-shaped livers and three-handed software developers, but so far this has boosted productivity.

The free market didn't provide alternatives. The free market created Microsoft and the other monopolies. Adam Smith warned against a free market.

The majority do not create alternatives, either. The majority like things to not change. The familiar will always better the superior in the marketplace.

Alternatives are created by small groups of people being disreputable, commercially unproductive and at total odds with the consumer. These alternatives will typically take 7-14 years to develop. Adoption will typically reach peak after another 7-14 years. By the 30th year after first concept, the idea will be "obvious" and its destiny an "inevitable consequence" of how things are done.

In reality, it takes exceptional courage and a total disregard for "how things are done". 7-14 years with guaranteed losses is not how the marketplace works. Even thinking along those lines is often met with derision and calls of "Socialism!" by the market. No, real inventors are the enemy of the free market.

If you want a Linux desktop, you must forgo all dreams of wealth. You must subject yourself to the abject poverty that is the lot of an inventor in a market economy, or move to somewhere that supports the real achievers.