But more importantly it doesn't have reaction traction.

http://youtu.be/5ooEz9QtErM

The surprise twist ending is when we end up with an authoritarian regime because too many people just sighed and said, "this is news?" any time something that should outrage us happened.

I think that's a little backwards. We have used math to model the universe. The universe is just the universe. It's an impediment to thinking when you mistake the model for the reality.

Pythagoras, is that you?!

A lot of those early mathematicians were a bit on the crazy side, having come to that realization and not having any of the framework for coping with the idea.

Could you put multiple network cards on your scheduler machine, put the workers on different subnets and randomly dole out the jobs between those subnets? Seems like you'd be less likely to drop UDP packets that way, I'm pretty sure I ran across a utility (lsipc or something) that would list IPC resources, including shared memory. I seem to recall that the segments also show up in /proc somewhere. It's been a while since I've looked at it.

Not being able to ack important message packets seems like a design flaw.

Even though we have a LOT more hardware now than we did back in the day, you still can't BFI your way through a lot of the big data applications that companies are starting to try to get into. In the past, the company would just throw more hardware at a poorly designed application and that would "solve" the problem. I once saw a team throw 48 gigabytes of RAM at a leaky Java program, and schedule weekly restarts for the goddamn thing. But it's a lot easier to hit hard walls with big data, to the point where you absolutely can't throw more hardware at the problem.

Not sure about a movie, but it IS a line from a Firesign Theatre piece. :-)

I'm from Europe and I didn't learn English in class. Instead I learned it from the AD&D (2nd edition) material. Together with a class mate who also had DM aspirations, we swapped and traded material through BBSes.

We were so far ahead of the class, the teacher would set us apart and just let us do whatever we wanted. As long as we whispered, we could talk and read separate from the rest of the class. Of course that got us nasty looks, but we got to talk for a solid two hours about Planescape or Forgotten Realms.

After class, we'd ask the teacher words that we couldn't find in the dictionary. He couldn't them either. I remember finding out what "to be marooned" meant, ahead of the teacher.

I also remember that me and my gaming buddy got an A- on our final exams. After the verbal part of the exam, the teacher said he was a bit disappointed in my verbal skills. But because he knew I had it in me, he'd give me an A-.

I stopped gaming when college started, I couldn't find a gaming group. After almost twenty years, I found out my current employer has a group of colleagues who regularly play Pathfinder, and I joined them. I'm playing a fifth level thief, and it's an absolute blast.

Sounds like a cool idea to me, but it seems a bit like a cosmic joke that we would in a way be reverting to a past we had here on earth by living in caves. The symbolism is nice, though; starting over in a new environment.

Pretty much every manager I've ever had thought they are. All the big companies just see you as a "resource". They don't know a thing about your actual skills. They're just buzzwords to those people.

I took nothing past Calculus either and up until two or three years ago never even used trigonometry in my professional programming. The last few years I've been writing satellite simulations, which has forced me to knock the rust off some of my old math skills. Most programmers can get away with very little math a lot of the time. A lot of very interesting programming involves a fair bit of math. That programming is generally being done by some guy with a Ph.D. in another field, and he's usually doing it in Fortran.

"At some point you sometimes simply have to live with a certain level of risk..."

The problem is, the risk isn't yours. It's on the people whose private data you've leaked to the world. This just happened to me. My former employer (of about 8 years ago) had his laptop stolen while on location. Names, SSN's and who knows what else from former employees were all on that laptop. No encryption I assume. I got an email of warning but I'm too angry to make contact for more information.

I have a child who has cerebral palsy and as a result has quite limited use of her right arm. Adding fingers to her left arm could maybe really benefit her.

Although a definite cure would be nice, simply improving the quality of glycemic control would be a revolution. Optimal glycemic control can be very complicated, especially for patients who do not have the courage to follow strict dietary and healthstyle recommendations. Being able to treat a complicated disease with a single daily injection sounds nice. I know it would simplify my job as an MD...

I am not a great cook but I do enjoy cooking and I can't think of a texture that you can't achieve with good materials and decent cooking technique. Healthy food really doesn't have to have a bad texture I think. Maybe an investment in a few cooking books and some classes would help you?

Time to put a big pot of carbon on the barbie!