I read a NASA report awhile back that claimed the changes of a nuclear powered probe/ship causing serious damage/death on earth was one in a million.

I'd say that's a decent size risk for a mission like this. Perhaps less so for a Voyager mission.

Of course. You sound reasonable. I'm not referring to people who attack government policies. Many Israeli's themselves do that. However, many of the protestors/activists I've observed are calling for the destruction of the state and the killing of it's Jewish/Christian/Muslim/Druze/Bahi citizens.

A recent example was when the Israeli Judo team when to Morocco a couple weeks back, the people in the stands at the event screamed "we're going to murder you. you'll never get out of this country alive" and the event organizers needed to organize a military escort for the team just to get them out of the country. Sounds extreme, but shit like this happens every other day.

I've seen interviews from the ME where many people claim that ISIS was created by Israel and is being commanded by Israel to take over the ME. Yup. That's just what Israel wants...an Islamic Caliphate surrounding/invading their country.

Anti-Israel is the new anti-Jew. If only the Jews would all die, the world would go back to being the happy loving peaceful place it was prior to 3,000 years ago when the Jews established the state of Israel....so goes the core meme...of deranged, deluded, and evil people the world over.

My work machine is a 2012 MBP 15" with Quad i7 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD. It was $3,000 new.

I've never had a work machine more than 3 years old, so it feels like I should upgrade.

But when I look at the newest machines, I realize they're pretty much exactly the same as my 3 yr old machine, except that they now cost $2,000 and are very slightly faster.

Oh, that sounds great. Pointers please. I've bluffed my way in, but have yet to achieve the god-like position and huge sums of money.

because they had the wrong attitude....

Yeah, I hate it when jobs advertise for X experience in Y language, rather than just asking for a creative, analytical thinker with development experience.

Ok, I'm being partly sarcastic, but in an ideal world, I'd be serious.

Oh, they slowed down alright, but the attitude was not right.

WTF? No automated system check to determine if all needed files are present before flying??!

I'm sure that's true wrt writing and compiling....but there's plenty of programs I write that need to run for days to weeks on current i7 processors before producing output...so CPU can still be a bottleneck.

Hahaha...yes...there's that. :)

Although personally, the last desktop I bought/built was in 2001. I've been exclusively on a laptop since 2004.

pretty amazing. the yearly updates make me feel like I'm getting a new device each year.

yeah, the cost is trivial. No one cares. Except perhaps in principle.

You can develop for a Mac in any development environment. It doesn't have to be Xcode. That's just a free IDE from Apple.

You can distribute your software to anyone without paying Apple anything. The Mac is an open platform.

Only for iOS devices, which are closed platforms, and which all software is sold by Apple and not third parties, do you have to pay $100/yr to have Apple sell your software.

World Wide Distributed Cluster