I'm not fan of Obama, but I'm suspicious about the results of that (single) survey. 35% of respondents rated Reagan as the best president since WW2, followed by Clinton (18%), Kennedy (15%), and Obama (8%). On the other side, 33% said Obama was the worst, followed by GWB (28%), Nixon (13%), and Carter (8%). As far as "worst president" goes, it looks like recent memory plays more of a role than anything the guys actually did. Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, the 3 directly after WW2, got 0-1% of the votes. Carter is probably happy just to be included.

Maybe it's because Ada envisioned that the machines that would become computers would one day be capable of all kinds of useful things, as opposed to Babbage who saw them strictly as number crunchers.

Hardly. She didn't translate the book for a programmer, she translated the book for a machine. She was the programmer.

They aren't spending all of their oil money to gear themselves up to be a power producer and distributor. They are positioning themselves to be a financial center and tourist destination. If that fails then they have nothing to show for their oil wealth except a shiny city built on top of sand.

I sure don't, but that has no bearing on this conversation. At all.

Yes, she was wronged. Who wronged her? Was it Pinkmeth? Was it Verisign? Was it Katz? Was it the Tor project? No, it was none of those. It was whoever she sent those pictures to, whoever stole her phone, etc. I don't see that individual listed on her lawsuit, which is the reason her lawsuit (not her personally) is deserving of ridicule. Asserting that Pinkmeth is engaged in a conspiracy with Tor is ridiculous (literally - deserving of ridicule). The reason I included links was to show that suing Pinkmeth will have no effect on whether or not people will see her pictures. Those links were within the first 8 pages of Google results for her name, and none of them point to Pinkmeth. In short, not Pinkmeth, nor Verisign, nor Katz, nor Tor are the reasons why her images are online. The person who posted the images is the reason why they are online. If she wants justice, she needs to go after that person, not useful things that plenty of other people use for completely legitimate reasons.

It's a little strange that I have to point this out, but the benefit of Tor is anonymity and the ability to not be tracked. Hopefully you understand why protection of privacy is a good thing for everyone, not just people interested in committing a crime. If you want the argument for why Tor is a good thing, read what the EFF has to say about it.

The F-35 program started with the VSTOL requirement and had the conventional and navy variants added on.

I think that they'll find that selling solar power is far less profitable than selling oil.

Yeah, except that we've been using energy from powerful nuclear generation reactors for decades, and if all of that effort had gone instead into the incredibly inefficient solar technology of the day, we'd have had to burn a huge pile of coal or volume of natural gas to make up for the enormous shortfall. You seem to think that time travel is available, and that somehow even somewhat better, but still very inefficient solar tools available today could have been magically manufactured decades ago, and in enormous grids blanketing (where, exactly?). And of course you're probably also suggesting the use of the same time travel machine to send back the scientists who are only just now - despite the availability of huge amounts of capital, decades more accumulated research, and more - figuring out how to make batteries and other storage devices that kind of, sort of make sense relative to things like powering homes, let alone whole cities.

It's a shame that you're wasting all of that energy on such an angry rant when you don't have the patience to educate yourself a bit. The enormous swaths of chopped-down rainforest aren't being allowed to grow back. They're being used to inefficiently provide lumber (once) and then provide development and farming land - activities that in turn also produce more CO2, not that you actually care.

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the the fact that their enormous and rapidly growing population is completely overtaking their ability to produce energy, clean water, and enough farmable land to keep up. Hence their steady importation of oil and food from everywhere else.

How is it that you think lying is helping whatever point you're trying to make? The UN has recently pointed out that sub-Saharan Africa has an exploding population, and that the population on that continent will likely quadruple before the century is out. Africa's population is the fastest growing in the world. You know this, everyone else knows this. So the fact that you're pretending it's otherwise, and lead your post with "moron" and "racist" ... well, I guess I should know better than to feed an obvious troll. I've always found that the ones who start their posts by screeching "racist!" are themselves the ones with the race problem. You certainly seem that way.

Hilarious. You're the one fantasizing about population trends that are the opposite of what the UN reports, that imagines time-traveling to solve energy issues, and who sees everyone who doesn't play along with your imagined alternate reality to be morons and racists. Print your post out, on paper, and set it aside someplace safe there in your mom's basement. You'll still be there in ten years, so make an appointment with yourself to read it again, and compare it to each of the next ten years' worth of UN population reports. Not that you'll have the intellectual integrity to actually do that.

Nothing we could have done in the last 100 years would have made a bit of difference with respect to what you mention.

Well, except possibly for doing something to reduce eastern population booms by a few billion people. The couple hundred million people in the west with the economic latitude to pursue the type of stuff laid out in TFA won't make a bit of change, relative to four billion people digging coal in China, sprouting up on the subcontinent, overgrazing in Africa, and plowing down rainforest in Central and South America.

You want any of this to change? Stop having so many babies in places that can't afford them.

She's on quite the fishing expedition. Here is another lawsuit filed by her, from 2012, suing Pinkmeth (again), Katz Global Media (for the crime of providing anonymous hosting), and Verisign. Yeah, she sued Verisign. Maybe that suit didn't work out so well, so she thought she would try her hand against Tor. Not exactly the best way to make a name for herself as a criminal justice major. I suspect that pursuing suits like these will serve is much more of a "loss in earning capacity" than a porn picture ever would. She might also be interested that her Facebook profile is open for the world to see. Here she is.

Maybe she's just trying to clog up the Google search results for her name with information about lawsuits instead of her actual pictures. You have to go to page 4 to find this one (which is not Pinkmeth), page 6 for this one (also not Pinkmeth), and page 8 for this one (again, not Pinkmeth).

I'm assuming she has no proof that would allow her to sue the person actually responsible for distributing the pictures (you know, other than her). Life lesson learned, I suppose. Try not to clog up the justice system.

What you really need is to deal with this anti-intellectualism that's so popular in the culture today, and replace it with genuine curiosity, a joy of discovery, and a delight at learning new things.

Do that, and the rest will naturally follow, and not just in software development.

Humans nearly died out entirely from hunger and thirst, it was visionaries that led them out of a dying region of Africa into Asia, by a route that appeared to defy reason to any non-visionary of the time.

Pre-humans nearly had their brains the size of a grapefruit and wired backwards. It was visionaries who developed fire, 2.5 million years ago, providing the much-needed nutrition that allowed us to avoid the same fate as every other lineage of hominid.

Visionaries allowed the Norse to split quartz in a way that permitted them to track the sun even in cloudy skies and well into twilight, giving them greater access to the seas, trade and food than any other society of that time.

Visionaries developed cities to handle the logistics of the brewing and baking industries, again counter to any "obvious" logic that farming and hunting were how you got food.

Visionaries are the reason you can post stuff on the Internet, and why persecuted minorities around the world can have a voice and education.

So don't tell a visionary that he is defying your common sense. His work may have implications for society that you cannot imagine simply because he has the imagination and you don't. That does not mean that it will have such an implication or that he does have that extra imagination. It simply means that visionaries have a track record of saving people from starvation.

What about normal people? Those are usually the ones who manufacture conditions suitable for mass starvation. They're the ones who create nothing but buy the rights to sue to oblivion those who do. They're the ones who have allowed security holes to develop in critical infrastructure, like nuclear power stations, and then place said infrastructure on the public Internet where anybody can play with it. They're the ones who deny Global Warming and have endangered all life on this planet.

At this point in history, we'd be better off if the normal people were rounded up, put on some nowhere continent, and left to rot at their own hands. This would also solve much of the operpopulation crisis, as they're also the ones that breed morons like rabbits. If they choose to become civilized, they're free to do so. That would be helpful, in fact. But as long as they remain normal (read: proto-human), their fate is their lookout but they've no business making it everyone else's fate too.

If I am hit by your acquaintance while they are giving you that free lift, their private insurance will cover my medical bills for as long as needed.

If I am hit by a taxi from a regulated company, their business insurance will cover my medical needs for as long as needed. The fact that they have adequate insurance is something that is checked by the taxi licensing people.

If I am hit by an Uber driver, well who knows how much insurance they have - Uber covers them for $1Million but that doesn't necessarily cover even a year in medical expenses or long term care, so I am left recouping the cost of my care from the Uber driver themselves. Uber drivers are not regulated or inspected (yet - wait for that shitstorm to hit Slashdot when it happens) so there is no guarantee that when you get into that Uber car you are actually insured at all.

Scroll down to the list of pictures and see if you can detect any DC-owned intellectual property.

http://sf.wish.org/wishes/wish...