If a candidate finds technical questions threatening or condescending, you probably don't want them as your boss. You want someone who's okay with the fact that you have more technical knowledge than they do, but is still able to speak (and listen) intelligently about technical subjects.

According to the Gates Foundation Student Survey, the best predictors of a teacher's success are a) keeping control of the classroom and b) continuously challenging the students, keeping them focused and busy.

As you say, good luck with a video (or even a reasonably sophisticated computer program) doing either of those things.

You've slandered the Romans, I'm afraid. Even at their most expansionist, they insisted that their wars have a strong moral underpinning, based on the idea of self-defense and/or defense of an ally. Each new war was passionately debated in those terms in the Roman republic. Not that they weren't sometimes (often? always?) hypocritical in their moralizing and warmaking, just like the Crusaders and modern Americans were and are. Gibbon had his famous sarcastic quip about the Romans and their moralizing, that they "conquered the world in self-defense." But, hypocrisy acknowledged, St. Augustine wasn't working from a blank slate when he codified things for Christians.

I'd like to read the article, too. Link?

If the Yuri I is anything to go by - and this craft looks almost identical to the Yuri I - the ground effect at these low power levels - even for this size of rotor - don't extend much above 1 meter or so. They're going to have a hard time climbing above that.

This looks like a near-clone of the Yuri I (the last successful human-powered helicopter), but slightly bigger and heavier:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caHCbuh_Yyc

My quick back-of-the-envelope calculations say that it won't get more than 1 meter off the ground for any significant length of time. If it was much bigger (2 or 3 times) it might have a chance, but at this small size it will be depending too much on ground effect for extra lift, just like the Yuri I did. Fly too high - over 1 meter or so, if the Yuri I is our guide - and that effect disappears.

They also haven't added any twist or taper to the rotors, so they're not getting any extra efficiency gains there, either.

Name one this century, or last.

I'm afraid I won't be able to limit myself to just one. Remember, we're talking absolute monarchs, otherwise what I said makes no sense. Here's a quote about the Empress Dowager Cixi, who was the supreme ruler of China until 1908:

"During Cixi's time, she used her power to accumulate vast quantities of money, bullion, antiques and jewelry, using the revenues of the state as her own. By the end of her reign she had amassed a huge personal fortune, stashing away some eight and a half million pounds sterling in London banks. The lavish palaces, gardens and lakes built by Cixi were hugely extravagant at a time when China was verging on bankruptcy."

If you want a more contemporary example, do some reading on the only absolute monarch left: His Royal Highness, King Mswati III of Swaziland.

If we go further back in history, when absolute monarchs were more common, the examples come a'tumblin'. Under Phillip II, Spain went bankrupt multiple times. Louis XIV drained the treasury of France: "Some estimates suggest that by the end of Louis' reign half of France's annual revenue went to maintaining Versailles." The Emperors of Russia and Austria bankrupted their respective empires - and ultimately lost their empires - by entering WWI. I'm sure if I knew more history, I could dredge up more examples. If you want, I'll make the attempt.

This quote bugs me every time it's trotted out. Why? Because it doesn't consider the alternative forms of government. An absolute monarchy? Monarchs are notorious for voting themselves largess from the public treasury that bankrupts the rest of the country, and subsequently losing most of their power to aristocrats. Then the aristocrats do the same thing. Military dictatorships pump money into the military and bankrupt the country. Oligopolies are no different. The list of governments who've bankrupted their countries and themselves is very, very long. As soon as a person or a group of people realize they have their hands on the levers of power and thus the nation's funds, they'll milk it for all it's worth.

Try out the timeline view. It's pretty cool.

Then try to input a search query that makes the timeline go back further than 4500BC.

You can't do it, can you?

We reason thusly:

1. Google knows everything.
2. Google says nothing happened before 4500BC, which is very close to the date calculated for creation in the Bible.
3. Therefore, the universe must have been created by God about 6000 years ago.

QED.

(Did I do better or worse than an ID troll?)

Making a marriage work requires three things:

Communication, communication and communication.

The dude at the Love Lab disagrees. In his research - which is more serious and rigorous than I'm making it out to be - he's found three marriage styles that last, and in which the partners are satisfied. One of the lasting marriage styles involves two partners who desire low communication levels. They have to respect each other for the marriage to last, but they don't have to communicate, communicate, communicate.

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.

That laptop you kept dropping is exactly where you could've used the increased reliability of an SSD.

Just sayin'...

Fair enough; RAID was, indeed, developed to deal with (as Wikipedia puts it) "low-cost and less reliable PC-class disk-drive components" rather than any and all rotating media.

However, even with more expensive rotating media, it now enjoys near-universal use whenever data is critical. Notice the common thread: Rotating media. RAID is hardly used outside of rotating media, and almost universally used with it whenever two or more are gathered together in the name of storing data.

And I salute you for making a grammar correction without making a mistake of your own. You still won't get me to be a fuddy-duddy and use "media" with a plural verb, though.

I've had to build more than one server from consumer-class components when money was tight. Once these are down to 70 cents or so a gigabyte with 500GB+ capacities - let's say in two years, if prices keep dropping as they have been - I'll be putting them in servers at first opportunity. With their random read performance, they blow away even the best server-class rotating hard drives.

I can hardly wait. Really. Rotating media is the bane of my existence.

Ah. My experience is mostly as a sysadmin storing other people's data. It's no wonder we have very different views on hard drive reliability.

You may not be extremely lucky to get a regular HDD to the 5 year mark, but you are moderately lucky. Lucky enough that I would recommend regular backups rather than depend on your luck with the hard drive.

Wouldn't you?