Until 1987, doctors didn't anaesthetize babies for surgery on the logic that "babies don't feel pain". In fact, they do. Yikes.

No no, the presence of a brass gear is all that is necessary to make something steampunk. The Antikythera mechanism is just as steampunk as a rolex watch or a hat with a gear hot-glued to it, which are much more steampunk than a steam locomotive since they produce way too much torque to transmit through brass years. Don't you know anything?

You missed the point.
Entirely.
As for snark, check the mirror.

you suck at haiku
four lines is too many
do you even count syllables?

What makes "the greatest system" depends entirely on what "great" means. If it means "fitting into 500 bytes" or "1ms boot time", etc., then flexibility might be the very last thing that you want.

I've intentionally let the world pass me by, and spent my career learning how to optimize for time & space in several proven stable languages, rather than learn every new widget and buzzword. The drawback is that I'm a little slow when it comes to new tech. But the new shit is way easier to learn than what I've been torturing myself with over the years, and "youngsters" won't catch up to my skill without a decade of practice. And I've never had trouble landing a job.

One has a right to not be abused in their place of work. Did you even read the fucking article? She doesn't want to feel special. She wants to go work, do her job, and go home without getting ostracized by her coworkers. When your JOB involves working with people, your success in doing your job depends crucially on how those people interact with you.

The predominance of black males in some sports is a byproduct of segregationist culture. Professional sports are like playing lottery. A long shot is significantly more attractive to those with the least to lose. Whites don't go into sports 'cause they are practically guaranteed to find good paying work elsewhere. Moreover, professional sports teams represents a few hundred jobs nationwide. Compare that to IT, offering tens of thousands of jobs, and ever-growing.

If you somehow think that white men are smarter, or more capable, than everybody else, then I'm willing to bet that you haven't spent much time as 'the token white guy'. If all your experience with other races is service oriented (restaurants, banks, etc) or with 'token non-(white guy)s', then you experientially have no reason to expect as much of them as you do of yourself. This is natural. Racism is natural, just like rape, theft, and murder.

Humans: more than just a lizard brain. Act like it!

In fact, people who are raised in different cultures think differently*. From a completely utilitarian viewpoint, diversity of ideas is the most critical ingredient to problem solving. Moreover, in terms of numbers, there are vastly more non-(white male)s than white males. By maintaining the status quo, we restrict the talent pool to a tiny margin, and homogeneous dev teams get stuck in groupthink. You're trapping yourself in a stuck mindset, and the competition will pass you by.

Without diversity of eye, hair, and skin color, think of the example you're setting. When white folk inevitably lose supremacy, who the fuck is going to hire your white ass? If we get diversity up & running nice and smooth, it'll seriously work out in our favor in the long run. Make people feel welcome, regardless of their coloring. They might return the favor... but slight them, and that'll surely come back to bite you.

* If it needs to be said, culture and pigment levels are strongly correlated. Also, sending white babies to be raised in different cultures so you can maintain a lily-white workforce with a diverse cultural footprint probably won't end well.

I'm a grad student with a patent. It's a pretty sweet deal for all involved parties. I can't afford to get a patent. The university can, though. They file for a patent in my name, and I keep a large percentage of the proceeds, should it ever get licensed. It's potential revenue for them, with nonzero costs -- did you know, you have to pay for patent renewal year to year? On the rare occasion that a google happens, the university wins big... but obviously Page isn't dead broke in a gutter somewhere. They helped him get off his feet in a number of ways; he'd have lost a much larger slice if he'd gotten private help starting his business.

Yes because time and time again it has been proven that lampooning conspiracy theorists is the same as buying into their theories. Thank you, lieutenant obvious. Hope you get that promotion you've been working towards.

I predict this turning into a "global conspiracy to push more vaccines (hence autism) on our kids". I, for one, welcome our viral overlords.

Well, about a quarter of them did, anyway.

Yeah... about that...

The shovel is to give to Liebnitz in exchange for the shovel that he borrowed from Newton. That'd settle the grudge that culminated in the calculus debacle, and advance scientific progress to the point that we'd have a time machine in our lifetime.

Let's accept, for the moment, the claim that pigs are dependent on humanity. I think that this is an oblique nod to the intelligence of pigs, which (accoring to a friend of mine who grew up with pigs) is similar to that of cats. The claim here is that "since this life form is dependent upon us, we can eat it despite being as smart as a cat". Pretty sure that the same argument can be applied to justify eating human babies.