Hero worship is so quaint when it completely ignores reality. You may want to look for a less fake and evil hero though...

He does not have enough money for that. And neither has he enough money to make up for the damage Microsoft did in delaying innovation and killing good but competing technology.

I agree. Duh, the program is obviously not perfect and screws up sometimes. But I'm amazed by how good it actually is. Even being able to just ballpark it some of the time would be impressive, but the fact that it gets pretty reasonably close most of the time, I find that incredibly impressive.

Someone on my Facebook feed was complaining about how in a washed-out picture of three children the picture guessed only two of them right, but saw one (a young boy) as an adult woman. My response was to crop out just the washed out face, take it out of context, and point out, if you saw this face, not understanding anything about the context, could you guess it? I certainly couldn't have. But that's exactly what the software has to do.

I took a number of pictures of myself in different angles, making different faces, etc, and its range on age guesses was only 3 years. My brother-in-law managed to get a 20-year difference in guesses by making faces, but I couldn't manage it, and neither could most people I know who tried. Again, computationally, it's very impressive.

Yeah, it bites all of us (I can't write a thorn here). They only care about Americans so after countless redesigns there's still no proper unicode support.

Speak for yourself. My lander was near the epicenter and I lost five crew :( I was aiming for Diablo Canyon to pick up some radioactives but I had to return to orbit to recrew.

And how exactly do you know what her DNA is? There are XX men and XY women.

And seriously, of all of the stupid measures of who someone is, DNA has to take the cake. "Okay, okay, this Stephen Hawking guy seems to be smart, but that doesn't matter, what does his DNA say? Does his DNA say he's smart? If not then I don't care what he has to say."

I completely agree. Customers are stupid, and those that rip them off the best make the most money. Microsoft and Apple are excellent examples of that.

He was probably inspired by today's CEOs and politicians who have no skills beyond lying, cheating and destroying things. Pro-tip: even these things require some level of skill...

Parenting is overrated. This kid is just an idiot and probably has poor impulse control. There is nothing that parenting can do to fix the former and little it can do to fix the latter. Stop looking for people to blame.

It is also this type of person who wil continue to be a problem as self-image and actual capabilities do not match at all.

Basic was so bad, I learned assembler. And then PASCAL, and C, and many more. As examples of really bad technology go, BASIC is a true gem!

Would not surprise me. He certainly did and does not have any reasonable engineering skills. On the other hand, inf the field of sabotaging competitors....

I don't think NASA needs to make the fictional heroes; I think every piece of sci-fi that comes out helps inspire the next generation. I guarantee you that there's tons kids and young teens who saw, say, Gravity and think that's what it is to work at NASA and have set that as their aspiration. "Astronaut" is usually in the top 10 of what kids want to be when they grow up.

More than anything else, I see the main point of having astronauts is just to inspire kids. Just knowing that there's people going up there is enough - they don't need ot be doing big stunts that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to put a footprint on a distant body; they simply need to be twirling around in zero G in LEO.

How many current astronauts can you name?
How many current astronauts can anyone here name off the top of their head?

The time of astronauts as heroes has passed. Far, far more people today do care about MESSENGER and New Horizons than they do about what astronauts are doing in space. They get more coverage in the popular press too. MESSENGER hasn't been a big public eye-catcher (except briefly when it crashed) but there was lots of attention about Rosetta, MERs, MSL, Cassini periodically (for example, the geysers of Enceladus, the Huygens landing, etc), and you better believe New Horizons is going to get a lot of coverage when it does its Pluto flyby (the public has a lot of interest in Pluto, more than in a long time due to the "demotion" controversy)

Yes, the percentage of Americans who read about these sort of things when they come up in the news (let alone follow them in depth) is probably in the 10-20% range. But so? How many specific sub-programs in the Social Security Administration or Internal Revenue Service can you name? NASA still captures the public imagination in a way that no other part of the federal government does. It doesn't take a moon landing to do that.