First thought: your manager was a tool, and generally a waste of space--actually he wasn't even THAT useful, since he actively made things worse overall.

That said... the above quote is a bit damning. You claimed you needed two additional people, an empty task list, and two years. You did the job in two years, with other tasks encroaching on your time, and with a single new grad that you only had for 21 of those months. Either your project was a death march (not ruling that out, mind you), or your estimate was woefully off--maybe to the point that the dipshit manager, if you two had a history, simply didn't trust your ability to give him a good answer and modified it per past performance.

I'm sure there were many more factors in play than you mentioned above, which probably invalidate what I'm saying, but it might be worth taking a step back here and asking yourself if you made any mistakes you could learn from (other than working for Mr Clueless, of course).

More simple explanation: Life is out there, it's just too far away to detect, or to visit us--and will ALWAYS be so, because you can't cheat Newton and Einstein. An alternate "simplest" explanation (though less likely) is that we are first.

To suggest that ET hasn't come to visit us because we are "too violent" or whatever, and that they are masking their presence is definitely NOT the simplest explanation--it suggests that every nearby alien species has agreed to isolate us, and every member of those civilizations is on board with the idea. No one is out there playing with an RF emitter in the VHF band, Harry Mudd hasn't stopped by and spilled the beans, no one's even accidentally done anything to give the game away.

Sorry, I'm just not buying that.

I think that the submitter getting all "zOMG they're running the whole damn country on 10.0.0.0/8!!!!11one" is at best premature, but assuming that they were, I'm wondering why you'd believe it's organized as one flat network requiring any kind of magic to operate? There's plenty of room to subnet in that /8...

Sound quality is great these days... They've replaced the telephone wire systems with low power FM transmitters with a range of about a mile or so., so the sound is as good as your car or boom box can produce, and there's a fringe benefit if you live locally of being able to listen to the movie.

The only time my wife and I go to the movies anymore is to the drive-in. Seven bucks a head, and we get to see two or even three movies (usually one new release, and one that is between one and three weeks old). Bring your own snacks, and the movie theater snack bar is cheap as well (I think the highest priced item on the menu is a patty melt (hamburger with cheese and onions) which is like $4.50.

The downside is they're only open in the summer.

There's enough uranium to last a very, very long time--effectively forever, if we manage it properly. The problem is that we throw away something like 99% of it (referring to it as "waste") using the current fuel cycle.

Heat problem must be already solved, see the battlemaster ppc example. Also, while I can't imagine mounting an avenger cannon in a vehicle other than a warthog, I also can't imagine turning it into a giant pistol, either. I imagine that if I could do one, the other would be, if not easily achievable, at least something a good engineer skilled in the art could accomplish.

You know, I haven't had a conversation like this since rec.games.mecha died off. .. Brings back memories.

Yeah, I get the in universe explanation, what I question is why this was an issue in the first place. A mech carrying around a giant pistol should be all the inspiration you need to get from point a to point b , and it's not like it's a big engineering challenge given that you already managed to modularize the thing into a pistol form factor to begin with (especially when you civilization is keeping FTL travel going with spot and balling wire... You've got to have some seriously talented engineers).

Maybe they just had really aggressive patent attorneys in the star league era? Like "on the internet" patents turned into "on a battlemech" patents and ComStar held the IP with multi century terms, while the clans were the actual successor (no pun intended) in interest... The whole battle of Tukayyid thing was actually over who owned the omnimech rights, which is why they called it a trial. Make about as much sense as the actual storyline, I guess.

Never understood why the omnimech was supposed to be such a big deal... The battle master carried a ppc around in its hand for centuries.

You're 53 years old, posting as AC, and feel the need to announce that you're a transsexual and dare anyone to have a problem with you? FWIW, I don't think it's the world that has a problem with you--it seems like you have a problem with the world.

MS had an after-tax income of over 21 billion dollars in 2013. No idea where you're coming up with a $32B loss. Ballmer was a horrible CEO, but the biggest problem was that MS continued to make money--LOTS of money--while he was destroying the company's value, which made him look absolutely great on paper.

That actually answers something I was wondering about the other day. My company was looking at a facility in Houston and it's in a brand new industrial park that is literally across the street from some of multi-million dollar homes I was amazed that the homeowners didn't manage to kill the project, and now I understand why they couldn't.

FWIW, I think zoning is like any other form of government intervention: a necessary evil. Some is absolutely required, a little more is ok, and it's only when those in power have an axe to grind, or engage in mission creep that the problems start. I'd honestly hate to live somewhere without at least rudimentary zoning, lest someone come along and build a sewage treatment next door, or put in heavy industry across the street from your $5M house like the example above.

Prion diseases?

I disagree quite strongly with the above--text based interfaces really don't become unusable until you hit absurd latency (>2500ms). ssh/telnet are quite usable at >1000ms latency, and even high packet loss isn't really a huge concern. Even working over 110bps links, where one could actually type faster than the line rate wasn't a real problem until you filled up the buffer (I can't give you examples of what latency was like under those conditions, because I never measured it, but you've got 200ms or so built in RTT for a single byte from the bit rate alone)

The constitution, as written, is a whitelist of things the government is allowed to do. The bill of rights is a list of examples of things it is not allowed to do. This suggestion that there are exceptions has no basis in the text of either one. I'll never understand how some people can read, "congress shall make no law," "shall not be infringed," "no person shall be deprived of life liberty or property without due process of law," and other similar statements and come up with "this isn't absolute."