The problem isn't people coming here on H1-Bs, but their difficulty in turn that into a green card. The "apprentices" would mostly stay here if they could. And does anyone really want to argue that immigration of well-educated, highly-skilled engineers is bad for America?

All the focus on the political immigration debate seems to be on low-skilled workers, and the answers aren't so easy there. But anyone who can come here and work a job that pays $100k+? Keep em coming, I say.

That's good, now tell me about your mother Dave...

My mother's name wasn't Dave.

Sounds more like M-M-M-Max Head-Head-Headroom, to me.

"Activate interlock! Dynotherms connected! Infracells up! Mega thrusters are go!"

Yes, as long as they fit in the box (so you're likely limited to 1 kitten), and as long as they're not water cooled kittens.

From what I hear, death threats are quite normal in the video games industry. Certainly the vitriol flies on gaming forums (can't imagine how busy the moderators for official game forums must be). This article seems to boil down to "but women get rape threats too". OK, sure, men don't often get those, fair point. But in an industry thick with death threats, how many developers or commentators have actually been lynched by angry fans since the beginning of time? Roughly zero? It's not rational to actually be creeped out or worried about this stuff.

For goodness sake, Jack Thompson is still alive and well. If any of these threats of violence could be taken seriously, he'd be the first casualty. Think you're more hated than that guy?

I have 100 discs in my Netflix queue that aren't available on streaming. Go through about 6 a week, and have for years (I don't have cable). Only about 10% or what I watch can be streamed. And sadly the count of "very long wait" is up to 20 now, and climbing.

For the most part, it's only recent (but not too recent) content that's streamable. Heck, you can't even stream The Wire, and that's not that old. You can't stream any of the pre-reboot Dr Who episodes, and I could add another 100 discs to my queue just for Dr Who (does the BBC have these streaming yet?)

If there were an alternative to Netflix for disc shipment, I'd switch today. I might pay double, certainly 50% more, for the breadth of selection Netflix once had, if catalog growth continued, stuff got upgraded to BluRay, and so on.

But there's no such animal. Kids these days are all about streaming. Netflix's model of "delayed gratification" for TV watching was a miracle in the first place. I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has.

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Netflix streaming is nearly-worthless - there's just no content.

Hulu streaming is totally worthless garbage. Fuck commercials.

Amazon has the wrong model. PPV isn't where it's at.

There's no question Netflix is gradually ending their disc service (selection is falling rapidly), and that really sucks. The ~$1.50 price to watch a disc was right for me, and it's sad to see it die. There's so very much great stuff from the 20th century that seems doomed to vanish with the death of physical media (and the complete and utter failure of government and the legal system when it comes to streaming and licensing).

At this point, I can only hope good rips of everything are around somewhere and being archived by hobbyists, awaiting some fix to copyright law. (Torrents may be plentiful for new stuff, but new stuff is easily available in legal ways for those who aren't broke anyhow. Torrents for last-century works are a different story).

You wouldn't boil the saltwater in foam, genius. Use properly prepared and recycled water as a heat transfer fluid and use that heat to distill seawater in tanks built for that process.

We lack the data to second-guess the judge's judgment. I'm elated by this story, personally. There was a judge; there was a warrant; that's amazing progress for email!

I talk about retrocomputing with several people and most of those who are both over 30 and a long time computer users remember the Amiga.

LK

You seem blind to the fact that your arguments only make sense when viewed through the "only Americans matter" lens, but are obviously false otherwise. How else do you explain it?

Well, assuming you mean a few hundred years, like a European building, then not so much. Look at the Vostok Ice Core Data, if you haven't already. The past 10k years or relative climate stability is a stark anomaly compared to the previous 400k (apparently the previous 800k years are much the same).

Based on the data, the warming spike to current conditions should have been over very quickly, and the glaciers should have been on the march by now. No one knows why the last 10k years is odd. Heck, we don't even know that much. Is the Quaternary Ice Age coming to an end after ~100 M years? If so, human actions mean nothing on the scale of that, but it seems a bit non-Copernican to suppose it's so. (OTOH, the past 10k years of anomalous climate stability were key to humans emerging as a technological species, so it wouldn't be entirely coincidence.) What mechanism causes the abrupt temperature spike every 100k years? What brings it down again so sharply? What's different this time? The science here is in its infancy.

Don't watch so many disaster movies. America grows enough food to feed itself on a small fraction of the land it needed even 100 years ago, and there's plenty of land to the North of current farm belts. This stuff won't change in a handful of years, not by and order of magnitude or two, and a handful of years is all it would take for modern agri-industry to move farming north.

Basically, the bad case for warming is that cities would have to move over generations to higher land. There's certainly an economic cost one could assess for that. If the climate models ever get to the point where they're useful, we could even put a dollar figure per year on it. But I expect heavy dependence on fossil fuels is just a passing phase in technological progress anyhow, and we'll be largely beyond it before it really matters.