Ah, yes, the famous "silent majority."

Heh. I still use RCS :) Definitely good enough for one person projects. I use it (in conjunction with EMACS) for fiction writing.

My point? Fit the tool to the job. RCS is old and doesn't scale well, but what I'm doing only requires something simple and straightforward. CVS, SVN, GIT --- all are overkill for me.

The tradition was, in order to prevent the divine name being pronounced by accident, that the vowels for "adonai" were placed in the letters of the tetragrammaton. If you read that as written it sounds like "yehovah". As I understand it, a dumb Middle-Ages Christian scribe transcribed this as-is without knowing the background, with a "J" which sounds like "Y" in German. In English that got pronounced as "Jehovah."

So the JWs got it completely wrong. Their religion is named after a nonsense word due to a scribal error. But none of them seem to know it. A couple of times when they've come calling, I've asked them if they know the origin of the word "Jehovah" and I get blank stares.

Many modern plants have passive cooling that doesn't require mains power. Every plant I'm aware of has multiple generators and multiple redundant grid links. Disabling them all is not as trivial as you make it sound.

That aside, the compounding problem at Fukishima was that the surrounding infrastructure was totally wrecked because of the Tsunami. Most places in the world they'd just truck in a back up generator before anything untoward happened.

That's a misrepresentation. Feed enough different sets of red noise into the algorithm and you can get a hockey stick shaped result. Even the wikipedia article notes this;
"McIntyre and McKitrick's code selected 100 simulations with the highest "hockey stick index" from the 10,000 simulations they had carried out, and their illustrations were taken from this pre-selected 1%"

That's hardly surprising and tells you nothing about the validity of the analysis. Look at enough random data sets and you'll eventually find one that gives you the 'correct' result.

There tend to be three levels you can buy in the UK. The least common is 'Third party only', which only covers your liabilities to other people. Next you get 'Third party fire and theft', which does what you'd expect. Last is fully comprehensive which covers everything including making good your losses even if there's no third party to pay out.

The stuff Cray used was a fluorocarbon liquid. 3M make it under the name Fluorinert, last time I looked it was a couple of hundred quid a litre.

I think you need to have confidence in yourself and believe that you can do something. But then you need to do the actual work, solve the problems, work for success. To me, there is a difference between fantasizing about success and believing in your ability to achieve it.

In other words, I know I can do X. But to do it, I must do A, B, C, D, and overcome obstacles I, II, III, and IV. That's positive thinking combined with realism and the willingness to do what you have to do.

I guess this article is here because I'm supposed to care what Ballmer thinks, or that his ravings are somehow important or influential.

Sorry, but I don't, and they're not.

I question whether most employers really want critical thinkers. What they really want are sheep. Yes, there are exceptions, but by and large, what's really wanted in Corporate America?

And are employers willing to pay for critical thinkers? I don't think so.

I have often wondered if some kind of boredom conditioning could help with gambling addiction.

My idle thought is based on experience my brother and I had about a decade ago while undergraduates. Around this time the online casino business was extraordinarily competitive and they were offering rather large incentives to sign up and play. At this time, although not any more, the terms and conditions of these bonuses were such that you could claim them, wager the minimum amount they mandated and withdraw a large proportion of the free money they had given you. Of course, to be profitable, you had to play a very short list of games with a low house edge and stick absolutely rigidly to the optimum playing strategy.

Over one summer this was our 'job'. Between us we gambled a cumulative total of many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even accounting for various sites where we wrote software to do it for us, we played more blackjack than the vast majority of people ever will in their lives. To start with it was very exciting as the variance ensures a rollercoaster of upswings and downswings. By the end it was just another massively boring data entry job as we'd seen regression to the mean work its magic so many times. Neither of us ever wanted to see a casino game ever again.

ITER doesn't actually exist yet. I think this is based on lessons from JET, the previous generation tokamak.

The MOAB equivalent yield is 11 tons, not 11 kilotons.