Golf certainly is frustrating. That's quite deliberate, as it makes excelling very difficult and thus worthwhile. Think of it as like a Scottish martial art... taking years to become fairly proficient, and never being sure of reaching that elusive perfection.

But golf is also a spiritual discipline. It teaches you self-control, patience, and sportsmanship. Witness the far better behaviour of professional golfers, compared to soccer players and many other sportsmen.

"Do remember that poison gas is a WMD, and under US policy is treated exactly the same way as nuclear weapons".

In the sense that the USA maintains enormous stocks of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons? Presumably the policy you refer to is "let's have more of them all".

I would never, ever trust anyone who dismisses out of hand all utterances by any specific individual. It's a sure sign of a rigid, closed mind.

Sorry, in those days there were no links. Indeed, there was no Internet. I offered the anecdote purely as something I remember because it made a deep impression on me at the time. (The same mathematician who told me about it had also been refused entry to the USA because he had recently attended a conference in Poland, then a communist state).

Many years ago, I recall that the US government refused entry to certain Russian mathematicians coming to attend a major conference in the USA. The reason given was that the commies were obviously trying to steal good ol' American know-how. The funny part was that the Russians in question were actually the world experts at the time (in that particular field), so the only people who lost out were the American mathematicians who had hoped to learn from them.

It's one thing to have a policy of pretending that all worthwhile innovation originates in the USA. It's quite another thing to start believing that's true. (See, for example, Joy's Law: ""No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”).

If you're old enough, you can distinctly remember when exactly the same thing was said about Japanese products. (I refer to the post-WW2 period, roughly from 1950 to about 1970). Then Japanese products suddenly became synonymous with quality so high that most US companies couldn't begin to match it.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to Basic; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration".
- Edsger Dijkstra

Actually, we are all made of antimatter. It was just misnamed "matter" because it's a shorter word.

Could it be that people are quick to label an opinion "troll" if they find it unsympathetic? Yes, I believe it could. Please remember that open-mindedness is an important virtue.

Have you ever wondered why homosexuality persists, in that case? Once you give it a little thought, you can see that there may be all sorts of unobvious benefits. And equally obviously, heterosexual couples have been giving birth to homosexual offspring as long as there has been a human race.

That being so, why wouldn't the same apply to autistic people? If you believe in technical progress, and want it to continue, we need more people who are mostly interested in truth, logic, numbers, and scientific inquiry.

In the special case of bus and taxi drivers (and ambulances and police vehicles and fire engines and...) there are strong arguments for allowing communication while driving. They aren't just chatting for the sake of chatting - and they often can't afford to pull over and stop before they talk. However, such people can be (and are) trained to keep communication to the minimum, so they can get back to driving (or whatever).

Far too many people nowadays seem honestly to believe that it's a more efficient use of time to juggle several activities at once. If they only knew, even a computer (single-core) doesn't run several programs simultaneously; instead, it time-slices them. The big difference is that, when a computer process is preempted, its data is safely stored on the stack whether it's two bytes or 20 million. Human short-term memory evolved to handle half a dozen or so items, not more - and it's apt to drop them on the floor if it gets a sudden shock or surprise.

Actually, that objection applies to all encryption systems. You must have a key - which must also be hard to guess, thus fairly long and random - and that key must always be available to YOU. Once you recognize the necessity, there are many ways to handle it. Two or three USB sticks, for example (in case you lose one).

More generally, the objections to this approach seem to be largely based on cost and inconvenience. That's fine: you simply have to take a view of how much security and privacy are worth to you.

Sorry, the story I linked to related to the International Date Line not the Equator. I was thinking of the much older stories about an F-14 or F-16 that flipped upside down when it crossed the Equator due to some software bug. Here is a reputable source for that (but only as a rumour): http://www.yourdonreport.com/i...

I may be wrong, but looking at the map it seems the plane was on exactly the opposite course from where it should have been going. Strange problems are not unknown with computer-controlled navigation systems going haywire when crossing the Equator, and oddly enough MH370 went AWOL quite close to the Equator...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...