Smart phones killed dead time, if you have five minutes riding the bus or whatever and you can rather instantly find/read/check anything you might need which is rather convenient. It's rather limited how entertained you can get while driving a car, since your attention is legally required to be on the road. And if you're only two you're usually socially required to be in the front seat making conversation, not zone out in the entertainment system. Really it's most kids in the back seat who get to do that and then why not on their cell phone or tablet or 3DS or whatever? You need a significant value-add to make up for the fact that it's stuck in the car. And as long as you're driving, the car's handling is going to be a big deal.

Now if we're talking a self-driving car where it's really my en-route entertainment center that's an entirely different matter. You just tell the car where to go and it goes, how it is to drive doesn't matter. It probably doesn't even matter if it takes a few minutes longer because you got to play another round of Candy Crush. In this case, yes having an Android/iPhone dock so it could integrate with the rest of my entertainment world makes sense. Until then, I'll be busy limping along bumper-to-bumper listening to the radio....

Went on two weeks vacation to the US from Norway with my cousin when I was 16, zero parents seemed to work just fine. Of course I already had a passport, in Europe that's like travelling to another state. I'm assuming my cousin had some kind of permission slip though I never saw it, but that seems easy to forge. And with all sorts of long-distance relationships and immigrants travelling back and forth I really can't imagine crossing the border with one parent raising any flags unless the child's name already is on a kidnapping victim list.

Oh right lol Starbuck.

In general in BG the men were incompetent emotionally unstable and violent fools while the women were the rational and stable ones who got the job done.

One of the issues is how out of place the females look in their roles. In Flash for example all the female scientists and engineers look completely out of their league. You can tell how strange the role is for them. It makes for terrible acting performances. Actually one of the coproducers is gay and has publicly stated it's his goal to include more gay characters and actors. Eddie Thawne's actor is actually a very flamboyant gay person in real life (just watch an interview), which may explain why he looks so stiff and awkward playing the role of police jock/boyfriend to hot girl.

I haven't seen this movie, but you can see a rather annoying pattern in network TV. Take the Flash, where every single woman is a super smart engineer, computer programmer, or tough as nails military soldier or policeman. How many women do you see in the hard sciences? Their personalities also suck. They're entitled spoiled brats with no empathy or understanding. Take Battlestar Galactica, where Apollo, a male in the original series, was replaced with a very masculine female in the Sy Fy version. She's a real pain in the neck. In reality very few would bother with a long term relationship with someone so irrationally short tempered and whiney. Or Fringe, where the male and female roles were essentially switched, but the personalities weren't, leading to a very awkward situation where the guy acts like the passive sidekick and states he wants to "stay by her side", referring to the female protagonist. Or Dexter, where a policewoman character has the personality of an extremely douchey guy.

None of these character really fit into their roles well. I can't imagine the actors feel all that comfortable. The audience can't relate well because the personalities are so different from what we encounter in our own lives. On the other hand there's a show like Daredevil, where the female is unashamedly a secretary, and emotionally is an understanding girl who tries to keep her guy friends together. Oh and she asked a married guy out for a drink because she really liked him (women are attracted to married men like bees to honey). Her character reflects what women are like today. And it doesn't stop her from having her own scene where she saves her own life.

Some of us are lucky enough to have parents who made a conscious decision to have children, worked out what it would cost them, understood that it was a responsibility and a commitment, and decided that the costs were worth it. Some people have parents who fucked and forgot the pill (or whatever) and decided that keeping the child was the path of least resistance. For those of us in the first category, one day a year per parent is nowhere near enough - we owe our parents a lot for the advantages that we had early on that let us succeed later in life. For people at the opposite extreme, even one day can seem like an insult.

You don't need to do any of that to qualify as a mother, you just need to make it to childbirth. If you're in the first category that I described, then please do remember to appreciate your parents, but please also remember that those advantages that you're thanking your parents for giving you (teaching you right from wrong, as you say, and hopefully teaching you to value education and how to be happy) are not universal.

Remember, occasionally, just how lucky you are. If you're born in an industrialised society, in a stable family, with supportive parents, then that gives you a huge advantage in life.

I had exactly that experience! Though mine was on Linux and was one of the things that pushed me to *BSD. An unstable text-based format that varies between architectures and between kernel versions turns out to be a piss-poor way of getting information from the kernel.

I can't speak for other universities, but we (Cambridge) publish undergraduate admissions statistics (though the 2013 figures are the latest published so far, I think 2014 is out soon). If you look on pages 13 and 14, you'll see the gender ratios for applications and acceptances. 8 subjects have more female applicants than male, 7 have more women accepted than men. 18 have more men apply than women, 19 accept more men than women. In total, 54.4% of the applicants and 53.1% of acceptances are men. I'd hardly call that underrepresentation. You are right that the figures look slightly different if you exclude STEM. For Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 43.8% of applicants and 42.6% of acceptances are men. White men and women make up 74.7% of our applicants and 75.6% of our intake. It's pretty hard to argue that white people are under-represented here.

If you look at other top-10 universities in the world, you will see a fairly similar picture. A big part of our admission training is getting interviewers to understand their subconscious biases (usually this means 'people like me', although the aspects of 'like me' that they think are important are quite varied). There's no affirmative action or direct equivalent (the closest thing is a set of targets for state school applicants, which we usually meet).

The idea of reverse discrimination is to correct for unconscious biases. The end result is intended to be the result that you'd get if you had a really unbiased person making the judgement (which doesn't exist in the real world).

You are TOTALLY right. Black people in America were equal the SECOND slavery was repealed. Great insight.

I don't know much about OS's, but I feel that iOS's UI thread priority system was pretty revolutionary. It lets you run an extremely responsive OS on very underpowered hardware.

*raises hand* I still like pop. I don't have super varied tastes.

I have a dislike for many SJW causes... I feel it's a disservice to associate what he's doing, which I think is a good cause, with the SJW tag.

I wonder how improvements in logistics and remotely operated weapons systems change the need for this. The danger of having everyone on a base be incapacitated by illness while surrounded by a hostile enemy was huge 50 years ago and would easily outweigh possible dangers from side effects of a less-tested vaccine. Now, it's far easier to have drone patrols protecting a quarantined base and deliver men and equipment from reserves far away to fill the gaps in an overall strategy.

It's hard to translate miles into actual value. 30K United miles + fees buys you a transatlantic flight. When I was looking a couple of weeks ago, it was the same going from LHR to EWR or SFO, with $188 for the UK leg and about $6 in the other direction (UK airport taxes are pretty huge). The round trip to SFO is about $1200 without the miles, so 60K miles works out to about $1K on that. That makes the value of 250K miles about $4000. This is a pretty low bug bounty.

On the other hand, the value depends a lot on whether they count as premiere qualifying miles and flight miles or not. If they count as PQM then the 250K is enough to give you the highest level of premiere status, which means you're at the head of the queue for upgrades and get a number of other benefits. If they count as flight miles (exceedingly unlikely!) then it's a quarter of the way to the million mile thing, which gives you star alliance gold for life (and, having flown far too much recently, I can attest to the fact that gold status makes it far less annoying. Apparently it actually become enjoyable at higher levels, but I'm hoping not to fly enough to find out).

The IPCC's estimate of action was like .1% of GDP/year, or about $10 billion for the US.