I'm amazed every time I use a map on my phone—every damn time. It's amazing.

I got my first smart phone (the G1) between two trips to San Francisco. It's completely amazing the way it affected my vacation. Maps, Yelp, and other services... wherever and it just keeps getting better. Consider my G1 from a mere 4.5 years ago compared to a Nexus 4. It's really quite insane.

In the sense that a car is nothing but a "better" version of the first wheeled cart. I mean, what the hell have we been doing for the last 7,000 years? Geez.

"Mobile devices" is an annoyingly broad term. I made my daughter's birthday cake yesterday with the aid of a smart phone sporting a recipe and videos on some techniques (like making lemon curd). Not everyone with a mobile device spends a majority of their time on social networks. The fact that I have information with me everywhere I go in a convenient form factor is just plain awesome.

When I'm bored I work to solve it, not numb it. A smart phone is a very useful tool in that endeavor. The people who drool their time away on useless nonsense will do it with or without a smart phone.

Doing away with government pensions in general would solve a world of problems.

On the upside, that's a system that's going to bury itself eventually anyway.

Haha.

My thoughts exactly. And I really don't think some of that is true anyway. I would say the most of my "scuttlebutt" and "hallway chat" type communication happens with a remote coworker since that's who I get along with the most anyway.

For all the people here talking about the value of "office time" (they say face time but they mean office time) I have yet to find it. Meetings are mostly useless. Talking without a digital aid of some sort is inefficient a lot of the time. Video chat + IM is my preferred method when I need to really COMMUNICATE about something technical. I can trade links, code all while talking through something. There are people IN MY OWN OFFICE that I do this with because it is superior to talking face to face.

The people I know who suck at telecommuting generally suck when they're not. Whether it's Facebook and Imgur in the office or at home, it's still wasted time.

At least half the time I really need to get work done, I stay home. There are times when I'm working with physical equipment that going to the office makes sense, but when I'm tuning servers or something my location is totally irrelevant. There are just too many tools in this day and age to make telecommuting fantastic not to do it. Plus, how much can a company save on office space? This is big consideration if you're a small operation.

In this day and age there is simply no reason. I work on a small team right now and the guy I do the most work with is remote all the time. Between IM, email, phone calls and video chat there is no drop off between him and anyone else I work with. Office time != face time. I agree that face time can be very important, but there are just too many tools available these days for physical location to matter.

No, it's not.

The point of that statement is so that ever growing population of assholes on this site can give themselves another intellectual reach around. "See. I'm not one of those grossly uninformed fools. I'm part of the intellectual and scientific elite. I don't worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster." It's old. It's tiresome. It's boring. It brings nothing of value to the discussion and undermines interesting information with inflammatory bullshit.

Every group needs to find their bitch I guess. Around here it's just all too fun and too cute to shred into religious fundamentalists or... you know... whoever isn't in agreement with the groupthink du jour. (And no, I'm in no way implying the vaccines are ineffective or that I'm against their use.) Reporting interesting news, stories, etc. can be done without that edge.

I mean for fuck's sake, the "anti-science" label is like the new Nazi label around here. We need to come up with some corollary to Godwin's law about when someone get's grouped into the dreaded "anti-science" crowd. "Oh, you don't like Barack Obama? You must be anti-science." It's really become that infantile. Maybe I'm just looking back with rose-colored glasses, but I do not remember it being like this 5 - 10 years ago. Every fucking article about a new find concerning some ancient hominid species or some new find on human evolution does not need to include, "Of course, since the earth has only really been around for 6,000 this must be crap, hur, hur, hur..."

"contrary to opinions from the anti-science crowd..."

What is the point of this statement? I mean seriously, what's the point? I've been reading this site for years and it just seems to be getting more and more like this—which is not a good thing.

Who cares what the "anti-science" crowd thinks? Why even bother mentioning them? Why acknowledge their existence, particularly when NOT responding to one directly?

Just report the fucking story. What some other childishly labeled crowd thinks about it is irrelevant. I can't even get through a remotely interesting story about geology without some asshole making a "the earth is only 6000-years-old" joke. Who... fucking... cares? It's not. We know. We get it. The joke is old and tiresome. I really wish I was coming here to read interesting discussions about the science at hand. Instead, I'm constantly deluged with this kind of childish bullshit.

Haha.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ0bZaMaNvk

No choice? I'm sorry, was someone forced to take the job at gun point?

I understand that we've all got food to eat and bills to pay, but in my lifetime I've had to do plenty of things I don't want to do to work. I'm not getting screwed, I'm dealing with real life. If you're not willing to quit smoking because you NEED a job and not smoking is a requirement to have said job, that's your problem. (And a big one at that if smoking trumps a job.)

Screwed? For lying? That's not really screwed anymore than a cheater getting caught is "screwed."

I should have just linked this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)

It's linked from the Mens Rea page in the first paragraph: "The exception is strict liability crimes."

The intent to have sex, particularly if you have every reason to believe the other party is of legal age is in no way criminal intent. If you specifically intended to have sex with someone you knew was underage, that would be criminal intent. For some crimes, like statutory rape, the intent doesn't matter—only the act. If a girl shows you a fake ID and you believe her to be of legal age and have sex with her and she's not, you can still be prosecuted in a lot of jurisdictions.

Not true. Statutory rape, for instance, does not.