since 2001, which was at least 14 years ago.

I hate it when people show off their mad math skills.

When a company wants to do something risky, I try to make sure I practice C.Y.A. with a well-CC'd email with wording similar to, "I believe it's notably risky to do X. I highly recommend against it. A lower-risk alternative is to do Y."

Management can go ahead and choose X if they want, but at least you've documented that it's against your recommendations.

Some people simply enjoy blaming and pointing fingers, and will jump at the chance to do so. (Sometimes there's also sticky politics behind it that a techie isn't made aware of.)

And don't expect outright apologies. Many people really hate to admit they are wrong. Humans are just that way. The best you can hope for is that they respect your opinion more in the future because your prediction turned out correct and theirs flubbed.

Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is a great book on office relationships and human nature, even if it's a bit disturbing in places. I highly recommend all geeks read it. It should be required reading in college.

Well, we have an ex-Prime-Minister who paints puppies, goats, and feet sticking out of bath-tubs!

'Cause its my money and I need it NOW!"

J G Wentworth, taking money from idiots.

Probably. It's difficult to project such in an interview and I'm not very good at faking not being nervous. Most geeks are probably more like Jamie Hyneman than Adam Savage. "Oh goody, a beta DLL, watch this mamma smoke! Heee he he...!"

I knew the risk of startups at the time and was willing to accept it then. I was trying to transition off of desktop application dev, expecting it to be a shrinking field, and knew I'd probably have to eat some salary for a year or two in exchange for web-oriented experience.

There is a middle ground between groundbreaking and dud. We could learn something new about the interaction of fairly well-known forces, for example, even though it won't provide anything of significance in space due to some yet-to-be-found limit. Or be some inadvertent testing snafu that will make future testers smarter, having this hard-won lesson.

If I had to guesstimate the probabilities right now, I'd go with:

10%: Revolutionary breakthrough

50%: Somewhat interesting lesson having only incremental practicality per new technology or testing methods

40%: Dud or scam

I find myself watching youtube videos for my video, "normal TV is damn near unwatchable, with a 50 percent commercial rate, you can forget what program you were watching.

Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is worried that scientists employed by the U.S. government have been running roughshod over the rights of Americans in pursuit of their personal political goals...

And politicians, corporations, and the wealthy have NOT?

Let's not have a double standard here. If we are going to hunt down bias, hunt down ALL bias.

While some are claiming this means

I don't know who the "some" are in that sentence, but no one at the link provided in the story is saying this means NASA created a warp drive.

Stop, already.

The original design was not faulty - it worked fine for years, until people's habits changed to carrying so much junk on their keychains. It would be the same as if people, instead of just hanging a pair of fuzzy dice from their interior rear-view mirror started hanging their purse or pack-sack from it and complaining that it broke off after a bump.

We have way too many common-sense fails nowadays, such as "This plastic bag is not a toy" and "Objects in mirror are closer than they seem" and "6PCS Precision screwdriver set not to be inserted into penis" and "Do not eat Ipod shuffle" (found on apple's website) and "Do not use for personal hygiene" (on Scrubbing Bubbles Fresh Brush) and many many more.

That would presume that every writer actually read Tolkien - a very dubious assumption, since (a) there were plenty of writers who wrote fantasy before Tolkien wrote LotR, and (b) that many modern writers would even bother reading it. I bought the series on sale because of the hype, and after 50 pages put it down because it sucks pretty much on the same level as C. S. Lewis.

Have I seen the movie? I walked into a relative's basement and after a minute I asked "What the heck is this anyway?" "Lord of the Rings." "No wonder it's so f-ed up. Bye!"

Tolkien was a poor second-rate wannabe of HG Wells and Jules Verne, or if you want to go back a few centuries, Johnathan Swift.

A pity that Tolkien didn't invent any of those - then his estate could sue the modern fantasy genre into non-existence, and nothing of value would be lost except Anne McCaffrey's works. :-)

Lessee, a guy goes nuts and kills a lot of people a few years ago

A person makes a direct comment saying the same thing that happened a few years ago is going to happen tomorrow.

If that isn't a credible threat to you, nothing is.

Sure, it's likely to be yet another kook, but let's put it this way. I don't know if you are married or have children, but let's just say that the person you love most in the world is shot, and it turns out the police had actual credible evidence that the person that shot your loved one made a threat the day before, but the police had your attitude, "Oh we shouldn't be so quick - let's ignore the threat."

You okay with that? I mean, we wouldn't want to assume the person who made a threat was actually going to do that, I mean, he might have just been having a little fun. Or maybe had a bad day, so it's understandable he might make a threat to re-enact a mass murderer's rampage. Hey, just sayin' right?

In a sane world, sane people take threats seriously. The Facebook/Twitter world we are in now is not sane, not when credible threats of harm are considered free speech or just havin' a little fun.

In a deliberative body that's chock-full of dumb sonsabitches, Louis Gohmert stands head and shoulders above them all.

Here's my favorite Louis Gohmert quote.

On gays in the military:

"I’ve had people say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing wrong with gays in the military. Look at the Greeks. Well, you know, they did have people come along who they loved that was the same sex and would give them massages before they went into battle. But you know what, it’s a different kind of fighting, it’s a different kind of war and if you’re sitting around getting massages all day ready to go into a big, planned battle, then you’re not going to last very long. It’s guerrilla fighting. You are going to be ultimately vulnerable to terrorism and if that’s what you start doing in the military like the Greeks did as people have said, ‘Louie, you have got to understand, you don’t even know your history.’ Oh yes I do. I know exactly. It’s not a good idea."

Want another?

Regarding caribou and the oil pipeline:

"So when caribou want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline. ... So my real concern now is if oil stops running through the pipeline ... do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?"