The poster thinks that being knowledgeable about tech is knowing your memes and posting selfies of yourself regularly. I could ask my 20 year old millenial daughters how they think their phones/laptops work if you want an example of "clueless". Being a crack addict does not confer knowledge of plant alkaloids or even botany.

On the other hand people who aren't clueless about tech (and the disturbing direction it's headed in) will voluntarily use as little tech as possible...

"IBM's PC strategy from the mid '80s to mid '90s could be summed up as using their influence to prevent networking, multi-tasking and file permissions from happening on the same platform at the same time."

Of course yes.

That explains why in the mid '80s to mid 90's IBM was busy in a joint venture with Microsoft first and alone afterwards... to produce a PC system with networking, multi-tasking and file permissions and even 32 bits (OS/2).

Or maybe you are wrong.

"An ELE shows up about every 60 million years. If it kills 6 billion people, then that is on average 100 people per year, which is small, but still much larger than they imply."

It would directly kill those 6 billion but then, it would stop humanity from growing at least 25x that number (provided it takes 25 generations to rise back to 6 billions and that 6 billions is more or less the max capacity of the Earth). This would mean -as per your numbers, about 2500 people/year, and that is without taking into account the life standars for the survivors or if it doesn't manage to extinguish the species altogether.

"It's good to have a healthy fear of asterisks -- there's a big difference between "rm -rf *.tmp" and "rm -rf * .tmp"

But surely the space is the villain there."

No, no... it is the asterisk coming from the spaces.

Did the number of "users" drop because of the switch in tactics by the police, or did it drop along with the overall drop in crime? And did prostitution really drop at all, or did it just migrate from the street corner to escort services, craigslist and twitter? Not as black and white as you think.

While I only code as a hobby, I started with TRS-80's running BASIC (yeah I was the guy hogging the computers on demo at the Radio Shack near you!), did an official BASIC course at my high school before PC's went mainstream. Then I got into ASM, COBOL, Pascal and C, all self taught. After that I got a life.

But if you think about it languages are just different ways of doing exactly the same thing. If you know how what your code is doing to the machine, then you can program in any language - it's just a case of learning the new syntax. Unfortunately too many people think a language is like some arcane spell where the words have to be said just right or the Computer God gets angry.

That knowledge of Pascal will last you a lifetime son.

that brain teaser has been around for what, eons now?

I literally (not figuratively) cannot remember when I first heard that one, but I was using it to get a friend's head around spherical geometry in the mid-1980s, so I knew it long before then.

I'd finger Eratosthenes as the guilty party. Or a close contemporary.

He was lying. [aside]You can tell when politicians do that by checking to see if their lips are moving.[/aside].

What a refreshingly open and honest political culture you have. Here, we can tell when our politicians are lying by their not being decomposing into putrid puddles of greasy bones. The only honest politician is a dead one. Dead and clearly decomposing.

tasteless hops to make their piss water.

"their diabetic horse's piss", please. Go the whole hog on the (entirely justified) insult.

(The version I'm thinking of is $BIG_MERKIN_BREWERY$ sends crate of it's best product to Czech brewery $BIG_CZ_BRAUERIE$. Some weeks later a reply is recieved at $BIG_MERKIN_BREWERY$, which is opened with excitement : "Dear Sirs. We regret to inform you that your horse has diabetes.")

Are not public schools subsidized by the childless?

Severely. And some of us are fighting back to move the tax burden back to the profligates where it should fall.

The policeman camera is the best reign of all,

From a country (most likely, this being Slashdot) where the reign of monarchs was overthrown by terrorists over two centuries ago, and where the national self-image is as a cowboy clutching the reins of his horse and riding off into the sunset ... I find the inability to distinguish the two homophones particularly hilarious.

And it seems to rapidly be becoming a more common misspelling.

To be honest, I was thinking of a second laptop on a cart, with a bunch of cables hanging out of the back end of it. Possibly four laptops (TFS mentions VMs running XP so any brain-dead 32nd-hand laptop should have the necessary grunt) on a cart so you can do an entire island at a time.

- set out the cones to stop new cars arriving at the target island then hook up the cables as existing drivers finish and leave.

- set upgrade running on first system to be ready. When you're blocking on that pump, swap to starting the process on the next available pump ; lather, rinse, repeat until all 4 are running away.

- meanwhile, start moving the cones so the first machine to be finished will be the first available to the next customer, and you're ready to start isolating the first pump of the next 'island'

If you can spread things out evenly, then your maximum hanging around time has dropped to 7 and a half minutes, and if there is any significant amount of user input, your idle times are going to be shorter than that.

Though it is a networking problem, it's really an optimisation issue.

You can get a much, much larger effect by attaching a much larger, more easily manufactured and testable actual solar sail.

How are you going to do that attachment again? The attachment mechanisms for Philae worked spectacularly well given the amount of information that was available about the comet's surface structure ten years before contact. So we can realistically anticipate a similarly accurate degree of knowledge about the surface properties of the asteroid we need to manage in two years time.

Next suggestion?

Yes that put a stop to prostitution all right. Er wait, what? What do you mean there's still prostitution?

It's one thing to try to come up with solutions. It's another to come up with solutions that actually work.