How many people even think of shifting to something other than P, R, and D? How many people know how to transmission brake? I suspect they are the same number.

The solution to a good number of car accidents is better drivers, which means stricter and more comprehensive drivers license tests. The auto industry would oppose such a thing because that would also mean fewer drivers, which I think would actually be a very good thing in the long run.

Somehow, I'm not sure priesthood would be the alternate profession of choice for out-of-work scientists.

In the biomedical research field, everybody fabricates results. Or selects them. Or fails to do the research properly and contaminates the experiment. That's why so few experiments are easily reproduced, and a good chunk of published literature eventually gets refuted, or at the very least, refined. The only thing is that scientists don't attempt to reproduce most experiments. So nobody really knows for sure what's real and what's not.

There's pressure to publish, but there's also pressure to selectively publish positive results. No journal will publish experimental dead-ends, so nobody writes papers saying their experiment failed. And so people who spend years of their life working on an experiment will force their paper through by forcing a positive result from the data if it doesn't go the way they intend.

Things are only really called out when there's a lot of money involved in the results of an experiment, and there's pressure from private industry to monetize, stem cells in this case, clones in the other. Otherwise, things languish for 30 or more years before somebody takes a good, long hard look at the data. Sometimes, it's because the original researcher has to die first before the revocation is even allowed to happen.

Look at that fish oil B.S. recently. It was known fact for 30+ years that fish oil, specifically omega 3 fatty acid was beneficial for the cardiovascular system. Turns out somebody fabricated it, and nobody caught on for the next 30 years.

Or Dolly, the cloned sheep who turned out not to be a real clone. Or any early literature on vitamins supplements, whose effects are largely found to have been literally pissed away. Or the ever-changing food pyramid and other nutritional recommendations.

And I don't even have to mention all of the monetary incentive-based skewed research.

Pure research, that which deals in either the microcosm or the macrocosm exclusively, is not subjected to this fault. The former tends to not have such ambiguities, and the former is taken as ambiguous by nature. But beware reseach that tries to tie the two worlds together (for example, asserting that a protein deficiency is correlated to a certain disease, or tying cell phones to medical disorders) and presents some solid, concrete result. Both socially and academically, we're still unable to support that kind of research the way it should be supported. And so it's really a crapshoot which paper ends up withstanding the test of time and which one doesn't.

Even a global search and replace probably wouldn't be a problem unless it's a multi-line, lazy regex, as I believe hard drives went up to 20MB. And at that point, I'd expect the CPU to DIAF long before hitting the 640K memory limit.

Considering the lack of inconsistencies throughout the text, I would hardly expect there to be any major issues with GRRM's expanded memory.

*ducks*

Solution: Don't use IE and Chrome. And maybe even the latest version of Firefox, but I wouldn't know.

Actually, he only spends four years on the writing. It takes five years total because his daisy wheel printer can only print two pages a day.

The best part about Minecraft's success is that in this period of neverending one-upmanship of glitz and glam in video games, Notch delivers a great game on practically gameplay alone.

Of course, there are plenty of other indie successes out there (Torchlight I/II), but Minecraft's target demographics is archetypal for gamers while it is the third most successful game in the world (the top two target a wider range of demographics).

Long range snipe-fishing.

Yeah, but now the device would cost $1M each and the system would require $200M/year to operate, as opposed to the $50K price tag on these dumb units.

Ok, so I'm pulling numbers out of my ass, but you get the point.

Try not to be distracted by the hyperbole of GP. Companies aren't going to go bankrupt or lose all their large international contracts overnight.

What'll happen is a gradual shift away from doing business with U.S. based companies. Nor will the business necessarily go to the Chinese counterparts. Instead, what'll likely happen is niche local players will suddenly find that some new doors have opened up. And regulators will give U.S. companies more trouble when they're making large acquisitions of foreign (or domestic, from their POV) entities. And maybe some overseas companies will refuse to do business in the U.S. or not be allowed by their governments to form U.S. subsidiaries, though that's far less likely a direct result of this revelation.

Chances are, this will isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world a bit more, and maybe that's a good thing, or maybe it's a bad thing. Corporations will feel the sting particularly hard, but the people willl survive.

You mean heat turned on low. If it was on high, we'd be jumping out of the pot right about how. As it's on low, nobody (in power, with money) really feels sufficiently threatened to care.

I like how people automatically assume change == good. Maybe I'm getting old, but it seems to be a young person thing (as is the rewrite everything from scratch mentality).

Change is change. It can be good, it can be bad. I'm not an expert on such things, but from everything I've read, the change to systemd is bad. And it seems to be a bad change in much the same ways the examples of change you gave (Metro, Unity, etc.) have turned out to be bad.

The Unix philosophy has always been to do big things by using little pieces. To violate this philosophy is not necessarily bad, but it would seem like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Sure, if you hammer it in hard enough, the thing will fit. But your square hole might have trouble fitting square pegs through afterwards, and your wooden board might crack after you fit more things through the hole irrespective of shape.

I'd have used a car analogy, but the best I could come up with is using the wrong kind of motor oil, which when put that way, doesn't seem quite as severe as the systemd problem.

Intelligence is a difficult thing to quantify, and there are environmental factors that come into play when measuring the intelligence of an adult.

It'd be more accurate and appropriate to say that behavioral tendencies is genetically inherited. It's also accurate to say that what those tendencies lead to is non-trivially dependent on environment.

I think witnessing a comet burn off its remaining supply of water and go dark could hardly be called disappointing.