While I find your comments interesting and I think there's some truth in there, I think it's ridiculous to assert that all intelligent people should be tinkerers, builders, and tech-oriented. I think one of the reasons that we have so many idiots in management and politics is that when a kid is good at math we steer them toward engineering whether it's something they actually enjoy or not. One of the most appealing things about non-engineering fields to a lot of people is that they can side-step intense math courses. For instance, I was appalled to learn that my girlfriend's nursing program required no more than a basic algebra course and bio/chemistry 101. After that pretty much everything was nursing specific like A&P and pharmaceuticals.

Mathematics is a pure logical exercise that has value beyond working with numbers.

Perhaps this falls under the "something new" category, but Michael Crichton wrote some pretty damn good books and he went to Harvard Medical School. Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty brilliant and his main occupation is that of a pop figure who teaches and evangelizes science. Nate Silver uses his intelligence to predict the outcomes of sporting events. Okay, maybe that last one wasn't the greatest example.

My point is that it would greatly benefit society if companies were run by people who understood more than ROI, if politicians did more than play a social game with one another, and if educators weren't limited to their speciality. I can understand wagging the finger at those who don't contribute to society, but I interpreted your post as saying that contributing to technology and industry is the only way.

I think IQ is an irrelevant measurement. When it comes to mathematics, I think it's a failure of our education system that we allow students to graduate (both high school and college) without a strong foundation in that subject. The same goes for biology and chemistry. Every day I'm confronted by people who believe the most inane things because they don't have a basic understanding of biology or chemistry. But now I'm just ranting.

Perhaps they want to kill off SAP's Sybase division once and for all.

I believe that Micros was one of the last big support contracts that Sybase still had. Now that Oracle owns them, you can be pretty guarantee that new version of Micros ReS will have an Oracle backend.

But, hey, Sybase is a Dead Division Walking already. When was the last time you heard about them getting a NEW Fortune 500 contract?

I'll bet that my wife is going to be one of those people. She has a 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid, which only gives her an average mileage of 29 MPG.

They don't even MAKE new Ford Escape Hybrids anymore, and for good reason. The new 2014 Escape with the 1.6L "Ecoboost" 4 cylinder gets better highway mileage than her old car did, and it's $7,000 cheaper with a similar option package. We're not a fan of the styling (It looks more like a Crossover than a real SUV now), but I'm sure that we can get something else with the same gas mileage for the similar price.

Expedia is using something like Bitpay for their Bitcoin processing, right? If that's the case, they get their payment in cash right away and do not need to worry about any price fluctuations.

Yeah... if this dumbass had half a brain, he would have mined a script based coin like Litecoin or Dogecoin instead. You could mine those profitably with a GPU up until recently.

It's a shame this is what he's most remembered for. He was brilliant but his "test" was incorrect. I doubt he would still support it as a standard of true AI if he were alive today, able to see our modern computers and the massive amounts of data they can hurl around. Perhaps it's possible to create a conscious machine but I don't think that Eugene Goostman is one.

Perhaps a better standard would be an intelligence that makes decisions of its own choosing -- basically, one that can defy the constraints of its programming and have an original will. I guess that's a bit harder to unambiguously define. Something like Neuromancer/Wintermute.

The main problem that I see with Android security is that it takes forever to get security patches. It can take over six months for an Android point release to get validated by the carriers and pushed out to all of the phones, and many Android phones that are more than 18 months old aren't getting ANY Android updates anymore.

Combine that with clueless end users (like my poor Mom) who seemingly click on every e-mail and SMS link they receive without thinking twice, and you have a disaster waiting to happen. She switched to an iPhone after her old Android 2.3 phone got hacked and filled with malware.

Can they do magic, too?

Where do you connect wealth, power, and presence with the ability to draw more women into the IT pool? How would you respond if someone tried to convince you to become a nurse because "there aren't enough men in nursing"? Furthermore, why is it Google's responsibility to get women involved in IT?

Perhaps I've just never seen these amazingly compelling PowerPoint presentations, but I'm going to have to disagree with you there. At least HyperCard had Myst -- I've yet to see a PowerPoint that comes close to that.

Just to make sure I wasn't sticking my foot in my mouth, I even YouTubed "Amazing PowerPoint Presentations" and I didn't find anything interesting. I find the super-animated artsy PowerPoints to be more annoying than the boring, static, bullet-list crap my boss slaps together. Our customers want to be wowed by numbers, statistics, and a few pictures. They couldn't care less about how artsy the PowerPoint is.

I think that's the flaw in the point you're trying to make, and especially with your Word analogy. When writing a story in Word, the story is the product and it must be polished and ready to be published with minimal changes. PowerPoint presentations are a way to communicate ideas; a super-duper-polished PowerPoint, in most cases, represents a poor use of one's time as it's an inefficient way to communicate ideas.

It should be. It's unfortunate that attitudes such as yours and the electric car hype may prevent it from being so.

I live in the midwest and our electricity primarily comes from coal. Unlike gasoline cars, burning coal emits mercury, which then falls into rivers and lakes, and is then absorbed by aquatic plants that are then consumed by fish, which are then consumed by eagles, bears, and people. Because the mercury stays in the organism until its death/decomposition, the animals higher on the food chain end up with higher and higher amounts of mercury than the organisms they consume. The ecological damage of coal goes beyond the greenhouse gasses.

We don't have smog in most places around here. Plus, we have roads that are real fun to drive on.

See why this idea horrifies me?

This is one of the problems with the utilitarian model. People in the big cities have this or that problem and then the country folk have to suffer because population-wise, we're the minority. Our problems are different and we generally require less regulation rather than more.

I get that there are good intentions behind the regulation, but I don't think this is the way to do it. If California wants to get the ball rolling on green energy and reduce smog then they should invest more into hydrogen fill stations, push bivalent hydrogen cars, and build more trains. I see a future of electric cars as just another problem -- it could massively increase energy costs, possibly cause supply problems (leading to more coal burning) and, hell, they're no fun to drive.

I thought that they still relocating entire offices to third world countries, and staffing them with people making $3 an hour to do your tech support calls. You can't get H1B's for that cheap!

What... you still want tech support that can actually understand English and isn't just navigating through a troubleshooting flow chart to "fix" your problem? You better pony up for the Gold level Enterprise support package for $$$$$$ a month.

Well, your suggestion is pretty ridiculous and it does sound like a very bleeding-heart liberal thing to say. Personally, I'd probably fail a "psychological compassion test" but I'm still pragmatic enough to realize that our current prison system is a terrible way to deal with criminals and does nothing to reform them. Your solution is very micro and does nothing to change the overall structure of the prison system. It also doesn't do anything to cull the prevalence of sociopaths among prison guards -- a defining characteristic of sociopaths is that they're pretty good liars (lying is easy when you lack a conscience), which makes subverting a "psychological compassion test" pretty easy for them when they realize what they're being tested for.

A macro solution would be removing private industry from the prison system so prisoners aren't merely livestock for a company that lobbies to incarcerate more and more people. Turn prisons into educational facilities rather than controlled housing facilities that sometimes offer bits of education. Reduce prison populations by legalizing marijuana, improving public education, and get rid of prison sentences for most non-violent crimes.

About the only thing psychology is good for is advertising. It's an embarrassment to science.

Anymore? This is the way it's always been. The good old Catch-22.

Have you?

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/B...