Though there was a good reason for the original compact Macs to discourage users from opening them up -- there were exposed high voltage monitor electronics in there which could give you a hell of a zap of not properly discharged.

The later all in one Macs of the 90s were better in that regard. Their user suitable parts (motherboard, drives) all were easy to get at, but the monitors and power supplies were fully enclosed.

Can you imagine the dystopian dictatorship where trekkies come to power? All of the halls of power full of people walking around in spandex and fake ears and brow ridges, the fed directed to work toward the absolution of currency, the military directed to accelerate development of phasers and for all recruits to undergo "Kobayashi Maru" training.... NASA would finally get their proposed $18,5 billion dollar annual budget passed - except that the bill would have the word "annual" crossed out and the word "monthly" written in its place. National anti-bullying legislation would be passed, probably with a name like Spock's Law. And of course they'd insist on referring to the UN as the United Federation of Planets.

If I were asked that question, I think I'd answer it well. Not because I would be able to figure it out quickly under pressure, but because this brainteaser is very old.

When I was a kid in the 1950s I read both it and the original intended correct answer (the North Pole) in a book of brainteasers.

When I got into high school, someone who was actually smart discovered that the answer wasn't unique and that there was an infinite family of additional answers all involving points close to the South Pole, and I read about that, too. I'm not sure where; I think it was in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.

There must be million of people who know the answer, not because they figured it out by themselves, but because they read or heard the answer somewhere.

Of all the candidates who give Mr. Musk the correct answer, I imagine very few of them are solving it on the spot. I wonder how many of the others are honest enough to volunteer the information that they had already read the answer.

Or perhaps that's the point--perhaps it's an honesty test rather than a brain-teaser.

I've never enjoyed playing a bad guy in games. For whatever reason, I always want to play the hero. In Bioware games, I'll often go into a game thinking that this time I'll choose the "dark side" option as a real Darth Maul character, and I typically end up feeling bad enough that I only end up about as rogue-ish as Han Solo. It's sort of funny that I feel so guilty about treating some pixels and algorithms badly, but what can I do?

So, it's sort of a shame, because I absolutely love these sorts of huge, open world games, but I've just never really felt compelled to try out the GTA series. Red Dead Revolver, on the other hand, was awesome.

A great point, and one I also thought of only after I posted. An entire bureaucracy will need to be set up to install, monitor, and perform maintenance on these devices (or else it will be contracted out) at significant expense. It would be interesting to see exactly how much the overhead ends up costing per vehicle. And don't forget privacy concerns, as well as the fact that these devices will also track your use on private roads. There are so many negatives to this system, it's sort of hard to figure out why this is getting pushed through.

While per-vehicle fees are slightly less "fair" to those who drive less, you could also mitigate this by scaling by the cost of the car. Those who can afford the expensive cars can also shoulder a greater cost. This also tends to work well for commercial vehicles, which are typically much more expensive than your average car. And even so, I'd still offer slightly preferred rates to electric vehicles to get more of them out on the road. Once they're out there in greater numbers, you won't need to subsidize them.

I think the car has always been more a symbol of "personal freedom" than "free markets." Besides, any notion of cars being symbols of the free market died when the government bailed out GM, leaving taxpayers on the hook for over $11 billion.

Yep, a few years ago I used to send a LOT of CDR's and DVDR's to friends in Canada I would trade for Cuban Cigars.

I say we take the Politicians money first. That would be the ultimate in honest.

Or, simply configure the pumps to have different IP addresses. Does his boss pour gasoline on him and set him on fire if he changes their IP addresses?

Which is why it should be tied to the car value.

Driving a Bugatti Veyron? you pay $22.50 per mile for the tax.
Driving a 1995 Civic? $0.05 per mile.

Very simple to do, which means the government will completely fuck it up.

Maybe we should just nix the idea that road infrastructure needs to be paid for with gas or vehicle taxes, and start paying for it from the general fund. I don't have kids, but I still pay a crapload of taxes to pay for funding public schools. I'd argue that someone who doesn't own a car still indirectly benefits from the road infrastructure just like I benefit indirectly from our public education system.

Besides which, are we serious or not about encouraging people to buy and use electric vehicles? Why are we still offering subsidies if we're just going to stick it to the customer another way?

Additionally, I'd love to hear how officials expect to defeat those who attempt to hack or disconnect whatever methods are used to track mileage use. People are already plenty adept at rolling back odometers, and I'm sure creative folks will also find a way to defeat any system for mileage tracking.

"Shipping costs would also be prohibitive."

no it's not. jam them in as tight as possible into a $5.95 flat rate box.

Functions are named in human readable ways, and are designed to reflect the function they perform. If that functionality changes, then it makes sense that the function name has to change as well. Leaving a function name alone when it's functionality change is terrible programming practice, because the name is now actively misleading anyone who uses the function or reads code that uses it. There may be other considerations as well, such as the name simply doesn't match the style of naming conventions elsewhere in the project. People make mistakes, and code often has to be reworked or refactored.

True, it's not something that happens often enough (at least to me) that it would affect my productivity if I didn't have automatic renaming tools, but it's not like this is some new-fangled fad. I'm pretty sure you can find some advice on good naming conventions in "Code Complete", published a few decades ago.

I don't see how it's any more dangerous than ripping off roofs or picking up cars or other random structures and debris and throwing them around. Tornadoes tend to have a relatively small footprint as well. The damage they do is severe, but limited in scale in most cases. It makes news only when a very large one happens to plow through a densely populated area, but keep in mind that there are hundreds of tornadoes each year, and most don't do widespread damage.

Wind farms also tend to be located in low-population areas. So, the odds of a blade flying off and hitting anything also seems low. If an F5 tornado rips through a wind farm, it's not like it's going to suddenly become significantly *more* deadly than it already is.

Ever since they changed it so I have a goddamned horizontal scroll (are they on crack?) I've only come by occasionally to look at journals.

Look, Dumbass Holdings Idiots, there's no reason whatever short of GROSS incompetence to introduce a horizontal scroll on a widescreen format notebook!! I'm all for hiring the handicapped, but you don't hire Ray Charles to be a bus driver and you don't hire the educationally handicapped to code...

Although I suspect it may be retarded PHBs than retarded coders. Someone is obviously VERY stupid. The idiotic mistakes I see should NOT happen at a so-called "nerd" site.