I pretty much came in here to say this. People already game the system in so many intricate ways, but those ways at least are social engineering techniques that mean you at least have to have a clue about how people tick (and thus in a social situation, like a date, you can reasonably hold your own/not suck at being a conversationalist). But if you're optimizing against a machine algorithm the sky's the limit. Make a few fake profiles and hit yourself up to increase your attractiveness score, or convince your friends to do the same in kind. Figure out what keywords get you more attractive girls/guys, and build your profile around that. Then you finally end up on a date and...*pfft* now your out of your element. Then the dating site loses credibility and gets washed back into the primordial ooze from which it crawled.

I have to tell you that if the woman who wants to be a housewife isn't herself a hard worker then it's never going to work out. Maintaining a house takes a lot of effort. Now if a woman wants to be well kept then you need to start involving servants to maintain the house and that's a whole different prospect. But your implication ('more ambitious') that a housewife doesn't have to work very hard is fairly insulting to the many good women (and some men) who choose that path in order to make their families the best they can possibly be. It's noble work, and hard, and a perfectly valid choice if one partner makes enough money to allow it. But it is absolutely not for the lazy.

Not so. Basically all consumer desktops are shipping 64-bit by default, but Windows 7, and even Windows 8 come with 32-bit editions that still include the 16-bit emulators to run legacy software.

Great, thanks for ruining the next episode of CSI...

"It's a two car collision, where's the other car?"

"No sign of it anywhere, just a mess of Lego bricks..."

Tune in Wednesday to see the mystery unfold!

I'm not so sure Gene was that far off the mark. If you think about it money is basically a bartering tool to assist with the distribution of scarce resources. If you reach a point where resources are no longer scarce (sometimes called a post-scarcity society) then what would be the point of money? You want a mansion, order it up! You want a rocket ship to fly to Mars? Submit the requisition and the machines build it out for you. Too crowded on Earth? Grab a new residence on the ring-world being built around Alpha Centauri. And on and on. The Culture series of novels by Iain Banks envisions such a society, and I have to say it makes a lot of sense.

The part where Roddenberry's idealism got ahead of reason was in thinking it would happen that soon. I get the sense that we're still at least 1000+ years away from getting rid of money entirely. But if we don't blow ourselves up and we keep on developing tech at the current breakneck pace, I would say we will definitely eventually reach a point where money is no longer a necessary concept.

It will be more of a problem with 2003 since Microsoft extended support for another year and change.

You do know that's confgurable right? I mean, yeah it comes that way out of the box and that's kind of annoying, but you can set the shutdown behavior of your laptop any which way you want. Don't want to install updates? Disable the install updates on shutdown feature. Here first Google result for "disable update on shutdown windows 7" (minus quotes).

Because being washed down the drain doesn't impact their survival. There's no selection pressure to make them glue better to the skin, they thrive just as well (if not better) in the drain pipe/sewage.

I suppose that would depend on how well your reflective surface withstands the raise in temperature. Even if only 10% of the energy is absorbed it can pretty quickly cause a cascading effect of reducing the reflectivity of the device until the whole reflective layer ablates away. With mylar this would hardly take any time at all, with highly polished mirrors the first tiny scorch marks would melt the glass away in seconds. The laser doesn't have to be 10x as strong, it just has to be strong enough to wreck the reflective armor and still punch through the vitals before the payload can get to the target. When you're playing with 10's of thousands of watts, this is not a huge bar to meet.

It probably happens when you're driving along and one of those flash freezes like in "The Day After Tomorrow" hits. The bugs in flight like instantly freeze or something and smack your windshield like little hail balls.

In today's lesson we learn that life is not like Die Hard 2. You are not going to somehow remote hack a plane's altimeter. And any pilot worth anything is going to recognize that the tower data is screwy.

I'm not sure such a terrorist would even live long enough to plant such a device. If it's strong enough to kill people who are sitting next to it, it will at least sicken, if not kill, the person who plants it.

No. Millions have fought and died for our freedoms. I would not be willing to give them up for a couple of thousands civilians who tragically died. And in following your hyperbole to the end - if we were having 100+ similar bombings a year we would be drone striking the ever loving fuck out of whatever country we remotely thought was behind them. I'm not saying rollover and take it, I am saying don't let them wipe their asses with the constitution and tell us it's okay because their shit smells like roses.

I don't need to put forth an alternative. Boo-fucking-hoo if he thinks he needs this to prevent the next terrorist attack. If it's outside the bounds of the constitution as myself and many like minded individuals believe, then he is not allowed to fucking do it. I don't care if it could've prevented an attack. The odds of an attack happening are fairly slim to begin with, and even if attacks increase 1000% (to what, like 1-2 major incidents a year?) then it's worth it to keep our essential liberties intact. The things people freak out about boggle the mind. Hundreds of *THOUSANDS* of people dead to heart attacks and cancer each year, tens of thousands dead in automobile accidents, and maybe on average a couple of hundred *MAX* to terrorist attacks. Talk about disproportionate response.

As long as you can side load apps and the APIs are free for developers it will still be light-years more open than Apple ever allows you to be. Heck, you can't even write an iPhone app unless you're doing it on a Mac with a sanctioned Apple developer license.