As a counter-annecdote: when I was taking a course in Fourier theory, the professor teaching the course was in the process of writing his own textbook on the subject. Each week or so we got a printed copy of the appropriate chapter. He had been working on it for a while, and it was more or less complete: with huge numbers of embedded mathematics (including lengthy derivations), graphs produced in Matlab, all properly typeset using LaTeX. It was a fantastic "text" (although not exactly in book form), and better than the actual assigned text. It cost us, the students, nothing (other than the costs of being a grad student, monetary and otherwise).

Just for the heck of it, I did some searching to see if he ever got it published. It's available for pre-order now (more than a decade since I took the course). I guess it'll be the required text now, and retails north of $100, but at least it will be good.

I misread "propet" like you did, then wondered what "prophet software" was supposed to be. Maybe Windows ME was supposed to be Windows Messiah? Instead it turned out to be Windows Anti-Christ.

crack addicted meth head chimp

Ooooh, now THAT I gotta see!

Tablets and wireless communication aren't exactly the pinnacle of human achievement right now

You're tellin' me - I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Sounds like we need some Programming, Motherfucker!

Do you speak it?

Why? As long as there are 3 or more, why care about anything but price and selection? If you can find what you want, then it's just about price, no? At least, it is for me.

Because I rather like having vibrant communities sprinkled with local businesses - places where people go and interact - and a local economy not predicated solely on the whims of the Fortune 500. The end-game of what you are advocating is that everyone stays home and buys everything online or, if they opt for brick-and-mortar, their only option are big-box stores: nondescript cookie-cutter islands of mega-commerce in a sea of blacktop parking lots. I don't want that to be the dominant model, even if it means I sometimes pay a smidgen more. That smidgen more "buys" me a community I want to live in, and neighbors that can afford to live there. There's a place for big-box stores and online commerce giants - I have made purchases at Target, Amazon, and Home Depot in the last month - but I worry about me and everyone else being screwed by hegemony.

I had to replace the screen on a broken smartphone in the last year. To get the screen free required a nearly total disassembly of the phone itself, followed naturally enough by a nearly complete (re)assembly. Most people would consider say that smartphones are a subset of computers; one can quibble as to whether "repair == assembly."

If the intent of the question is more along the lines of "When did you last purchase components for a desktop computer and put them all together yourself (i.e., sticking processor into socket, RAM into the mobo, etc.)?" Then the answer is: not in a decade, since that was when I last had a personal machine that was a desktop that required such assembly.

As a middle ground, I changed some of the components of my personal laptop (new HDD, more RAM, new battery, replaced a finicky flex cable). That was to years ago.

Starting from the Earth getting kicked out from the center of the universe to the present hypothesis that visible matter is just a tiny fraction of all the stuff in the universe, having the mass of the Milky Way reduced is just another step in what Carl Sagan called The Great Demotions. Hopefully by now humanity is getting used to it.

It all could have been one movie it they followed the book

that's what I'm looking forward to once the third film is out: the fan-edit that removes anything extraneous (i.e., not explicitly in the book). Take out all of that, cut each chase sequence roughly in half, and you will end up with ONE tightly paced movie about 2:45 in length that is an entertaining adaptation.

Dozens of times during my lifetime peace has been within reach, only to be shattered by some asshole on one side or the other

Soooo, you're saying it's just like that speech in Team America: World Police

Show me another country in the region that has a single Jew or Christian in office.

You mean like Lebanon, Israel's neighbor to the north?

From Wikipedia:
"High-ranking offices are reserved for members of specific religious groups. The President, for example, has to be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, the Speaker of the Parliament a Shi’a Muslim, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Deputy Speaker of Parliament Eastern Orthodox....

"Lebanon's national legislature is the unicameral Parliament of Lebanon. Its 128 seats are divided equally between Christians and Muslims, proportionately between the 18 different denominations and proportionately between its 26 regions."

I wouldn't say that government-by-religious-and-ethnic-quota is necessarily a great way to go, but it does provide diversity.

What kind of ridiculous regulations do you think they'll try to impose on devices that contain a multi-kilogram slab of Widely-Known Drug Precursor?

I would argue that none are really needed - it's a self-limiting problem. Any meth-head dumb enough to try to crack open an enormous battery pack and pull out a metallic lithium anode is likely to end up extra crispy.

After all, prior to constructing the LHC, Europe didn't have that expertise either and yet all those devices got built just the same.

I disagree: there is a decades-long history of building similar, though simpler, devices in Europe and the United States. Sure, there was a lot of invention involves and new challenges to tackle, but a lot of the fundamental technologies already existed. More importantly, there was a substantial population of people who had experience in designing such (earlier) technologies, manufacturing them, getting them to work, and maintaining them. China does not have that kind of depth.

The cost of the LHC has been estimated at $9 billion. I know there are different labor costs between Europe and China, but there are lots of costs that can't easily be brought down. The tunnel's gonna need a whole lot of concrete, steel, etc. - global commodities whose cost doesn't vary that much by geography. The LHC is packed to the gills with custom components: everything from the the superconducting magnets to the RF generators to the detectors to the massive computing systems to sift through all the subatomic debris. Even assuming China has the technical expertise to create that custom componentry (a question I can't answer - I simply don't know)...

does it pass even casual scrutiny to think that China can make a collider of twice the size at one-third the cost?