Hey, if it gets you laid, go with it. We have to use what works, not what we wish would work in a Utopia. It's a big shit sandwich, and we're all going to have to take a bite. When you reward a behavior, you get more of it. This is science.

Newsflash: places with machine shops need to fabricate objects, so they use the latest technology available. Surprise to uneducated people: US Navy ships have machine shops on-board, because they often need to fabricate objects while at sea. The surprising twist: when you're at sea, you can't just order from Amazon, you have to make it right then and there. Crazy, eh?

I was deliberately being misandrist.

Yes. Switching computers on my KVM switch (scroll lock + console number)

I'd have to question that (not that she has to do it or the reasons she was told, but the supposed reality that elders can't read normal text as well as caps). One of the pieces of research that was done here in the 1950s resulted in motorway road signs in the UK being in mixed case rather than all caps - it caused howls of anguish from old-timers resistant to change - but the thing is words with lower case text have more of a shape - for instance "Manchester" can be resolved as the word "Manchester" much faster than "MANCHESTER" - it was found you could read the mixed case before you could even resolve all the letters because you could recognise the shape of the word, given that lower case text has more features like ascenders and descenders. Hence all UK road signs ever since have been in mixed case.

This is a technical solution to a social problem. I learned this on Slashdot. The problem isn't urine, it's the fact that filthy people - sorry, MEN - are pissing all over the city. All the paint in the world won't fix that. Installing clean, publically accessible bathrooms would fix the problem permanently. Men who already piss everywhere aren't too worried about a little splashback.

I knew someone from Google Maps would stop by to comment.

Pressing shift one time is the least destructive way to wake up a computer that may be in screensaver or sleep.

Drones are subject to the same rules that RC aircraft are subject to.

It is however extremely hard to enforce. RC users are generally pretty responsible - they've probably spent many hours building their aircraft, and during this time it has sunk in the dangers they can pose, and usually they've joined a local club to help them learn to fly their new expensive aircraft and the club will also coach them on safely operating their aircraft.

Drone users not so much. Many of the ready-to-fly drones require pretty much zero skill to operate, so people can take off and cause mischief pretty much straight away.

I've been wondering for the past few years when the new wave of laser-caused blindness will strike the world. There are already plenty of lasers that won't burn a hole through you, but they will irreparably damage your eyes in a few milliseconds. Still, the rash of blindings hasn't happened. I'm not talking about airline pilots being temporarily flashed by some asshole on the ground, I'm talking about people being permanently blinded by lasers, either in war or criminal activity.

Now if anyone knew what BSG was, your comment might make sense. No, we do not all watch the same anime movies that you do. Please express your thoughts in plain speech, thanks!

It doesn't matter. What are you going to say, some random stranger on an internet forum explained things to you the right way, and suddenly you changed how you think about nuclear power? That's never, ever gonna happen. It's a deeply-seated belief, and you'll never give it up, because to do that you'd have to re-examine your entire self. Anti-nuclearism is a religion, plain and simple. It doesn't matter how many citations from Wikipedia I throw in, you'll never, ever change your mind. Hell, if you actually did, you'd be socially ostracized by friends you've had for decades. You might even get fired if you work at an NGO or somesuch.

I'm sorry but when your entire facebook feed consists of anti-Obama trolling, that isn't being judgmental. That's making a conscious decision you don't want horrid people like that working at your company.

Or put simply: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We have an extraordinary claim here - highly extraordinary - but the evidence falls very very far short of being even just ordinary, let alone extraordinary.

Utf8 not being implemented is a feature, not a bug. We can communicate quite well in ASCII without having silly quote marks that face the "proper" way and those dumb Unicode drawing characters. It also helps a lot to keep the conversations in a language that all of us speak.