I was not trying to kill him, I was simply sending him a large amount of high speed data.

People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

Most of which is not done by the surgeon. I've worked a lot with surgeons, and can assure you they are used to having other people do almost everything but surgery for them.

Surgeons are the equivalent of the "master programmer" team, which is a now mostly-obsolete team structure where there is one (or a very small number) of expert coders surrounded by a larger group of admin/build/whatever types who make sure the master programmer has nothing to do but code. It works on certain problems, but unlike surgery, the scope of what we expect software developers to do has grown far beyond what one person can handle in almost all interesting cases (I say this as a team of one who does everything from firmware to UI, but it is on a very narrowly defined embedded application that I've worked extremely hard to keep more-or-less within scope for a single very senior person.)

First off, what we can or cannot imagine has absolutely nothing to do with what is or is not real, so it isn't clear why you're bringing this up. Three hundred years of knowing what is real through publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference had demonstrated that the pre-scientific "method" of "imagining what might be the case and then reasoning from it" is a hiding to nowhere, knowledge-wise.

That said, as it happens I can imagine such an alternative history. One simple way of doing it is to have an intelligent species that evolved somewhat more quickly than we did on a planet formed in very short order after the supernova that birthed it exploded. Such a planet would have a good deal more 235U in the mix, making light-water moderated natural uranium nuclear reactors possible (of the kind that existed on Earth in at least one location 2 billion years ago).

An intelligent species on such a planet would likely never go down the hydro-carbon-fuels path, but would be all-nuclear, all-the-time from a very early stage of technological development (one presumes that in such an environment they would be evolved for somewhat higher radiation-tolerance than most terrestrial species.) As such, no hydrocarbon pollution would be evident.

Now, to be clear, I am not saying any of this is true. Merely that I can imagine it. There are quite possibly any number of subtle issues that make such a scenario impossible, and the failure of philosophy (knowing by imaging) tells us that we will be very hard-pressed to find them. But you asked for an imagining, and there one is.

Hell, if I put a Raspberry Pi inside the scooped out guts of ENIAC, it would be just like ENIAC was streaming a movie... right?

I'm thinking of pulling the beads off an abacus and throwing a Raspberry Pi to show how an abacus can stream movies... and then maybe hollowing out a stone and showing how cool streaming could have been in the Neolithic...

Sarcasm mode off

Yep, I used to walk 20 miles a day just to pick up one processor instruction manual...in my bare feet...and then had to carry it back.

In the 80's, you had a few manuals on your desk and it was enough. Now you need the WWW just to hack your way through all the details to get something running. The systems were smaller back then, the languages were simpler, the assembly code was simpler. Nothing is simple any more.

The cursing thing *might* have come from a bit of reverse semitic paranoia. In some far out fundamentalist theologies- Jews are actually revered and considered *closer* to God than Christians ( a strict literal interpretation of the events of the Pentateuch).

Oddly enough, I've noticed this in non-fundamentalist forms of Christianity as well, especially my own Catholicism. There is a reason why Pope Benedict XVI forbade the sacred name from being spoken in Mass, out of respect for our older brethren, and why a good deal of 20th and 21st century theology has been devoted to the consideration of Christianity as a sect of Judaism.

Some people would think that you put "every man" in quotation marks because it's a quotation, but it isn't. Brianna Wu does not use the phrase "every man" a single time. She doesn't claim that all men are sexist, or say anything like it, so you can safely put your righteous indignation aside.

The biggest generalisation that she does make is saying that "it’s telling that men in the gaming industry, or simply commentators, refuse to listen to the reality of these situations and try to help" - which seems borne out by reactions like assuming her article is a sexist overgeneralisation when you clearly haven't read it.

Had a girl who acted like this in my wife's daycare. One day, due to misbehaving, I put her in what we call a "Daddy time out", which is one of the more serious corrective actions we take (spanking's not allowed in our state, and you can even get your own kid taken away). Instead of sitting with me on the couch, she spent the whole four minutes (a minute per year of age) standing ramrod straight, as if I was about to do something to her.

I found out later she had been abused, and her mother had converted to fundamentalist Xianity to get her some free counseling. Due to my Daddy Time Out and her reaction to it, she was removed from the daycare soon after, presumably to one run only by women.

Windows 7 is notorious for always preparing to do something.

Preparing to download updates.

Preparing to install updates.

Preparing to restart machine.

Preparing to remove device.

Preparing to install device.

JFC! Just do it already. Stop preparing.

This is one of the most stark contrasts between XP and 7. XP didn't waste time preparing to do something, it just did it. In 7 you might as well go get lunch because it takes so long to do anything (or find anything for that matter because things are deliberately hidden.)

For certain limited definitions of "support".

For some tasks I can understand recycling. I use older hardware to build routers, anti-spam gateways, VPN appliances and the like. Normally these are fairly low-cycle tasks, at least for smaller offices. But I've learned my lesson about using older hardware in mission critical applications. I've set up custom routers that worked just great, until the motherboards popped a cap, and then they're down, and unless you've got spares sitting around, you're in for some misery.

Honestly, what a fantastic way of completely screwing your enemy. smallpox bombs are a fantastic weapon that will make the people turn on their local government and military as soon as their children start dying.

Biological and Chemical warfare is worse than nuclear warfare, and it's heinous to it's core.

The court actually took a pretty sensible view on this, I think.

The judge's reasoning was that the use of data that was recovered and stored was (as a matter of law) subject to the same test of reasonableness as what could be recovered in the first place. He considered trying to decide how long was reasonable now, but decided that he wasn't in a position to do so, since he didn't know how the investigation would go. Better for a later court, looking back on all the facts, to decide whether what was done was reasonable, than for him to try to decide what would be reasonable based on a guess as to what would happen.

In other words, there are limits on storage and use of the data, although they aren't rigid, and a court may be called on to decide whether they have been breached at a later date.

"No difference"?

Yep, exactly the same...