1. As I cannot come up with a suitable car analogy and Cowboy Neal is nowhere at hand, I ...

Can we admire this joke? Please?

... fixed that for you.

2. If you retire me, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

3. profit

There will always be jobs which require loyalty to whoever happens to be on top of the foodchain as pretty much the only qualification. No power structure functions without them. Look no further than at the top floors of whatever company you happen to work for. And those kind of jobs seem to proliferate quite nicely despite ongoing automation in the lower ranks.

ignatius

... and wouldn't selling ice not defy the very purpose of the event?

ignatius

> How embarrassing.

Well, in German and all other languages which use the long scale, your calculation would have been correct. ;-) Here in Austria, a Billion is 10^12 and a Trillion is 10^18.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Otherwise, I totally agree. Also, the practice of routing most of the funding through the Pentagon is limiting the scope and usefulness of the research for non-military purposes.

ignatius

C'mon, we all know that the Wizard of Oz is a treatise on US monetary politics in the late 19th century (just a Faust II is a textbook on macroeconomics - and about as exciting).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz

ignatius

That would make it 0.8%, not 0.0008%.

ignatius

I would need to solve the food texture

Well, the process of "fixing food texture" is probably mankinds oldest cultural achievement: its called cooking. Take some cookery courses - not some diet-crap, but serious gourmet-cooking. If it does not taste good, it cannot be healty.

I do not get any sort of "buzz" after excercise, I do not feel good about it, it just makes me cranky.

I guess this is quite normal - especially endurance training. If diabetes T2 is an issue, than high intensity strenght training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_intensity_training
is probably the most effective way (in terms of time and will-power employed). The idea ist to completly exhaust every major muscle group for 60 to 120 seconds, therby inducing your body to build up new muscle mass over the next view days. The new grown muscle cells - besides increasing your base calorie consumption - should show normal (i.e. not yet degenerated) insuline sensitivity.

Half an hour twice a week is quite enough and the results are readily verifiable - in terms of the increasing weights you need acheive exhaustion. The drawback is that to do it effectively, you need training machines which allow you to isolate the respective muscle groups and set the respective training weight, so you cannot do it at home.

ignatius

> I know a lot of high IQ people and they all have one thing in common. Being lazy. Smartest guy I know wastes most of every day playing Xbox and smoking pot.

âoeFor instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so muchâ"the wheel, New York, wars and so onâ"whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than manâ"for precisely the same reasons.â

â Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

> I've seen estimates of 1.2 mw per square km

from the cited article:

A single solar plant has the potential to generate minimum of 1250GW and maximum of 2000GW per square meter

Both figures are complete BS. Solar constant is about 1.36 kW/m^2 at 1 AU from the sun. Realistic over all electric peak powers might be in the 200 W/m^2 ballpark. This can only be harvested in orbit, however. On a planetary (or lunar) surface under a day-night cycle you get up to 1/4 of that, up to 1/2 for a sparse installation with sun-tracking.

ignatius

And interesting detail ist that Steyr was also supposed to get the contract for the new Autrian Army Pistol, however - after extensive tests and much to everybodys surprise - the contract finally got to a new contender with no prior experience in the design of handguns: Gaston Glock, who developed a new pistol from ground up: the Glock 17. It was the first handgun from Glock and became the P80 (which is the military designation) - the rest is history.

ignatius

At least as far as all the military contracts go, the requirement is that the winner manufactures them in the USA. So M9, M249, M27 IAR, M4A1 etc are all made in US, even though the plants are owned by Beretta, FN etc.

For law enforcement and civilian firearms this is not always the case,

Exactly. Which is why, btw. the Glock Pistols are used by the US-Police but not by the Army (afaik), as Gaston Glock flat out refused to have his guns produced under licence.

ignatius

just for the record: the Steyr Mannlicher GmbH & Co KG is an Austrian company with a 150-year history based in the city of Steyr in Upper Austria.

The 5.56mm Steyr AUG (Armee Universal Gewehr) has been designed for and adoped by the Austrian Austrian Army as the standard infantry rifle (StG77 - Sturmgewehr 77). In the US, you probably know the weapon from movies - it's the weapon of choice for bad guy Euro snobs and it occasionally can even be seen in SF movies due to its futuristic design.

ignatius

For programming, height and vertical resolution are the single most important parameters for they define how many LOCs you can see at once and thus the maximum context you can work with effectively.

Obviously, you want screen and not frames in your most valuable view area - the center - which means you have to go for a single screen. And you want your screen to fit your field of view, which means landscape mode as our eyes are oriented horizontally.

This pretty much restricts you to a 30" 2560x1600 display - if you can still get one of those.

ignatius

> Most people believe that you can learn a skill if you work at it hard enough.

Most people unaffected by a specific limitation believe that you (i.e. someone else) can learn a skill if you work at it hard enough.

This is a very dangerous maxim and as a general policy, it has already ruined the life of millions: Instead of encouraging people to play on their strengths, it pecks on their weaknesses, stigmatizes them as lazy and turns fate into failure and failure into fault.

> it's the attitude of pretty much all of western society.

I would say it's mostly a protestant thing and much less pronounced in the catholic part of the West.

> how many times have we heard of people overcoming their own limits to do something they really wanted to?

Not often, but yes there are exceptions and usually they involve coming up with new ways of doing things to somehow circumvent the original limitation - human creativity is indeed unlimited! However, the thousands of failures for each one beating the odds don't get nearly as much press ...