All these people can file SLAPP motion. Even the legitimate ones can claim she's running SLAPP cases around the whole issue, and have her barred from bringing this shit up ever again.

Here's what your future will look like if we are to have a shot at preventing devastating climate change

The West Antarctic Ice Shelf has already begun its collapse, guaranteeing us 10-12ft of sea level rise over the next 50-200 years (only the timeframe, not the result, remains in question). We have officially lost our "shot at preventing devastating climate change".

We do, however, still have a shot at preventing the necessary abandonment of every major coastal city on the planet, by avoiding another 200ft of sea level rise that would result from the rest of Antarctica melting.

At this point, we need to stop asking how we can go green, and start planning for our new seaside vacation homes in Arizona.

By what metric do you declare Plutonium to be the deadliest substance on Earth?

Well, if it's not the deadliest, it's gotta be in the top ten. Doctor Jonathan Osterman, notwithstanding, that is.

Oh, and you are absolutely wrong about Hobby Lobby being "just like it was a sole proprietorship". A closely-held corporation is not like a sole proprietorship. They are granted a level of exemption to liability by the government that sole proprietorships are not. That means there is a "veil" between the individual and the corporation.

Apparently, the five (male) justices on the Supreme Court who comprised the majority in the Hobby Lobby case believed that the veil is impervious to all but the Judgement of the Lord God Jehovah, based upon absolutely nothing but their own religious beliefs in the Lord God Jehovah.

As I said, it will be looked back upon with embarrassment.

When I talk about "they" I am not talking about a corporation, but Mr. and Mrs. Green who own Hobby Lobby.

But Mr and Mrs Green are not the ones paying for the employees' health care. Rather, those checks are from the corporation.

People are acting like Hobby Lobby employees are somehow harmed by not having their employer pay for something they never paid for in the first place.

Maybe you don't understand how employer health care works. The reason an employer provides health care is because an employee works for them. So, in a very real way, the value of the health care has already been earned by the employee. Thus, it's not Mr and Mrs Green paying for the health care at all is it? It's the employees who pay for it, with their labor (and also direct deductions from their paychecks). Employer health care is not charity.

Hobby Lobby is this era's version of Plessy v Ferguson. In a relatively short time, it will be looked back upon with embarrassment.

Oh wait, it gets better. The esteemed Dr Cohen also stated that you could not die from exposure to radiation.

I'm pretty sure you'll agree that 1410 lbs of plutonium is probably not safe to keep under your bed.

You will notice that while Dr Cohen offered to consume as much plutonium as you would caffeine, he never actually did so.

The annals of the history of science are littered with cranks.

Dr Cohen also said that he believed uranium to be a renewable resource. Unless he's figured out a way to grow uranium, I'm sure you'll agree there is a finite amount of the substance. Dr Cohen did not believe that the amount of uranium on Earth was finite.

Crackpot.

"The web is just an enormous stack of kluges upon hacks upon misbegotten designs. This Archaeology of Errors is no place for the application programmers of old: it takes a skilled programmer with years of experience just to build simple applications on todayâ(TM)s web. What a waste. Twenty years of expediency has led the web into a technical debt crisis."

I know, right? We had it so much easier back when we could just write our own interrupt handler (and pray we didn't step on DRAM refresh or vice-versa) to pull bytes directly off the 8250 - And once we had those bytes, mwa-hahaha! We could write our own TCP stack and get the actual data the sender intended, and then do... something... with it that fit on a 40x25 monochrome text screen (yeah, I started late in the game, those bastards working with punchcards spoiled all the really easy stuff for me!).

And now look where we've gone: Anyone using just about any major platform today can fire up a text editor and write a complete moderately sophisticated web app in under an hour. Those poor, poor bastards. I don't know how I can sleep at night, knowing what my brethren have done to the poor wannabe-coders of today. Say, do I hear violins?

Look up the term autism and understand why the author used that term.

Because it has become a meaningless buzzword used to describe every introverted snowflake on the planet?

The GP responded more-or-less appropriately to the TFA's nonsense. You have simply said "nuh-uh!". Substantiate, please.

The market is what makes engineers and scientists. NASA created some market niches earlier than they would have existed, and it did create a few on its own. The least likely is satellites. The DOD created the friggin' Internet.

Also who ever decided to become an engineer because of the moon launches? This is pop culture: every kid wanted to be an ASTRONAUT, and their idea of an astronaut was a fat man in a white suit with a hose and a fish bowl on his head, playing in outer space! Nobody looked at that and went, "Wow, I want to design a new super armatron to manipulate heavy materials via shuttle so I can repair a space research lab's solar panels!" They might have seen something like that on TV and decided they wanted to blast the thrusters and throw shit around with the giant machine arm, but that's about it.

People have this uncanny ability to rewrite history. Look at the Lebanon war, where people said the fighting "came out of nowhere", and "would be over in a few days." It kept being "almost over" for almost 20 years, with some people in hotels in the next country over, waiting because they were sure that THIS week would be the week the war ends. What does history say? It says everyone could see the rising tensions (no they couldn't) and the breakdown of the economy (that had been happening for decades), and people started to flee the country because they knew the fighting would start (they fled the country immediately *after* it started), and holed up for a long and protracted war (which nobody actually believed--they thought this was just a big, three-to-five-day skirmish). People who lived through this shit and wrote it in their diaries immediately, a week or two after the war, talked like all these deformations of history were what actually happened--even though their own diary said absolutely the opposite.

Put away the romantics and come back to earth. Reality's down here.

Normal humans are effectively excluded from developing software.

I've said that for years. You, however, seem to hold that against those with the rare gift and dedication to code. Kinda missing the point, dude.


a vocation requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication. The way things are today if you want to be a programmer you had best be someone like me on the autism spectrum who has spent their entire life mastering vast realms of arcane knowledge â" and enjoys it

Yes, yes, yes, kinda, yes, and yes. Again - Your point? You've described exactly why normal humans will never succeed as devs, and to a degree, why many devs tend to look down on those who can't even figure out Excel.

And you call that "injustice"? I have a rare combination of qualities that let me do seemingly amazing things with computers, and in return, I make a decent (but by no means incredible) salary. You want injustice? Some of those same morons who can't even figure out Excel (much less writing their own override CSS) make millions of dollars per year telling me they want my latest app to use a differerent font color. Another group of those morons make millions of dollars per year because they can whack a ball with a stick better than I can. Yet another group of morons make millions of dollars per year doing absolutely nothing because Granddad worked a town of white trash (sometimes literally) to death.

And yet you would call me out for busting my ass to turn my one natural skill into a modestly decent living?

Go fuck yourself, Mr. Edwards. Hard.

Seriously, does everyone think programming is a spatial relationships problem or something?

Let's put this on the table right now: Normal humans can build houses. Oh, you might not have any construction knowledge, and you'll build a horrendous little shitheap that falls over when the wind blows, but that's not the point. I can put construction knowledge in your head and, in a few months, you'll be able to properly select foundation for a site, properly frame a house, and properly build out the sheathing and siding and insulation and walls. You won't be a master craftsman, but you'll be able to do it right.

Humans are good with spatial things. Humans can look at a two-by-four and understand what a two-by-four is. The engineering concepts behind building a workable shed are a little different, but easily transferred. Given a little time and guidance, a human can learn to relate building materials spatially, measuring and cutting and nailing or screwing or gluing as needed, planning and building a proper structure.

Humans are terrible at numbers and algorithms.

Humans are so terrible at numbers and algorithms that they become *extremely* proficient at math if you teach them with a soroban--a machine that converts numerical problems into spatial procedures--and can't be taught algorithms without visual diagrams of trees and boxes and other shit to show sorting and transformation algorithms. Have you ever looked at textbooks or Wikipedia pages for stuff like PKI, red-black trees, or AES encryption? There's pictures of the simplest shit! Why? Because HUMANS CAN'T PROCESS ALGORITHMS!

The easiest process for a human programmer implementing an algorithm like a quick sort is to associate variables with objects in the visual diagram, associate their state changes with the movements in the visual diagram, and write code that carries out the analogous behavior. By comparison, BUBBLE SORT IS FUCKING HARD TO IMPLEMENT when your only guidance is: "iterate through each list element. Compare each element to the previous. If the previous element is larger, swap them." You actually have to think about how to do the comparison (greater than, less than? Wait, which am I comparing to which?), and how to swap them--usually with a temporary variable, although "A ^= B; B ^= A; A ^= B;" works. Most people visualize some kind of diagram while trying to understand the algorithm.

The real world requires interaction with space, mainly to avoid hungry tigers, kill tasty deer, and avoid driving your car into trees like you're fucking drunk. It doesn't involve shift accumulator left and XOR with memory at address $FC. It doesn't involve explicit semaphore locking and deadlocks if you fail to unlock the semaphore in a loop with multiple function calls and thread branching during the loop. It requires things you can put your fist through if they don't work right, and then continue with successfully.

We can't all be rocket surgeons.

What has NASA ever gotten us? I always see huge lists like more comfortable chairs (memory foam) and shoes, but industry would have invented those anyway. Satellites? Legit; nobody sane was ever going to build space launch shit on private money. Other than that, piles and piles of junk, and some history.

Skip NASA. Move their funding over to something like a National Institute of Health, and take up researching new medical treatments and drugs. Release all that shit to the public. If you're into social democracy, issue a $1 tax per prescription filled or treatment carried out to give the government revenue; if not, release them to the public domain so we can have new $4 generics.

We need to take that kind of thing out of the hands of Pfeizer. The US got it wrong: we don't need public healthcare; we need public health research. Let the private sector handle healthcare; we can revisit the issue when our healthcare system isn't a weedy mess of overpriced, ineffective bullshit. I do support regulations to force hospitals to provide free clinical care, with staffed clinician hours based on their size, and distribution based on the saturation of healthcare facilities in their area (i.e. more hospitals, wider spread of clinics); but the immediate economic issues of healthcare aren't "how do patients pay for cancer treatment?", but rather "how do we get the best, least expensive cancer treatment to the people?"

Where else can you drain the ocean, trap whales in lead cages, load them into lead minecarts, and send them careening down the steep, steep slope to hell as a kinetic anti-demon weapon?

You've clearly never used DMT.

Clean, safe and too cheap to meter.

Anybody who tries to use a misplaced 640 kilograms of plutonium to spread FUD about 1950's Energy Source of Future is just a damn liar.

But you have to admit, Japan has a pretty remarkable record with nukes. They must have it in their blood. At least the ones whose grandparents lived in Nagasaki.

Regarding the lost 1410 lbs of the deadliest substance on Earth, I'm pretty sure it has something to do with that giant lizard marching toward Tokyo (and no, I'm not referring to Shinzo Abe's economic policy).