Like lack of qualifications has ever stopped any /.er from arguing they know best anyway. This place is pretty much the definition of the Internet peanut gallery.

Life that already exists will have very strong evolutionary pressure to find new and untapped resources that are exclusive to them, it's not certain that living in the middle of the most lush rain forest is better - evolutionary speaking - than in a barren desert. But just because it can spread almost anywhere, doesn't mean it can start almost anywhere. In fact, we still don't have any experiment or strong models that will create life from inorganic compounds indicating that it is quite hard and quite rare. The exact right mix of chemicals and conditions may be an extraordinary event that only happens once every hundred million years in one place on earth, but it only needs to happen once.

The trouble with creating new numbers is that you'd disrupt everyone else, imagine you'd want to add a new number 5 then old 5 would become 7, 7 become 9, 9 become 11 all the way up to 419 becoming 421 and beyond. Generally here in Norway if you build say a huge block instead of several small buildings you get multiple numbers like 13-17, if you build say three houses on a lot that used to have one they become 13A, 13B and 13C. Which is also open-ended (my current workplace has buildings B-H, A is demolished and doesn't exist anymore) while 419 1/2, what do you do if you build another house? 419 1/4? 419 3/4? It's a poor system just asking for a situation it can't handle.

Somewhere I feel that analogy fails, it is more like "the artist formerly known as Prince" who decided an unpronounceable symbol would be his new stage name - for contract reasons. Imagine he'd asked that all government databases also would identify him the same way, his driver's license, his social security card, every form of public registry should now support this symbol. Or that everywhere there is a male and female restroom there should also be various options for crossdressers, transgenders, ladyboys and whatnot other combinations that exist somewhere between or outside the traditional genders. Or that stairs with no elevator should be generally outlawed because it's discriminatory to wheel chair users. Having one doctor trying to treat your rare disease is very different from trying to make world revolve around a few people with special needs.

Presumably it was in the requirements or it was done to check off some fluffy requirement of logical input validation. If you can't play off the "Well I can type in anything here, two women, two men, this software has no checks at all" "Okay, any other rules we should add or does checking it's a man and a woman satisfy requirement 72" conversation in your head, you haven't been to enough of these meetings. It is exactly the kind of simplistic rule you throw in to close a nasty requirement, then anything else is a change order because they didn't provide a complete list.

If you're doing any selective marketing or sales campaigns or you show them any form of targeted advertising or you're selling customer lists then it does matter or at least it has value. Statistically speaking males and females of same age have vastly different interests, so they're not going to stop collecting that information.

But building a pi*(384,000 km)^2 = 463,000,000,000,000,000 m^2 solar panel is not, the effective energy density per m^2 is just that of Earth minus the atmosphere and cloud cover. When it reaches earth sunlight is 1366 watts/m^2 and 75% of that reaches ground level. In the best areas for solar panels you get 25-30% effective sunlight so in total you get about 20% of the effectiveness of a space based 24x7 solar panel. What do you think costs more, setting up 5 m^2 in a desert or sending 1 m^2 into space - or building it in space? Make that 20m^2 and you've covered most populated areas on the globe. Not to mention that with cosmic radiation, micrometeorites and such space is actually rather nasty, maintenance is a bitch and recycling impossible. Outside of space probes space-based solar power makes no sense whatsoever.

Because private companies are totally not flip-flopping based on quarterly performance and managers playing musical chairs. Most of this is simply political theater because none of these missions are funded, so nobody really cares how often they change except to make other politicians look bad. NASA's got plenty more mundane missions which will continue.

Well considering the telegram would have to be 47 years from now, Charles would have to live to 111. Must be a frustrating life, he's now 64 and in an age where most are looking to settle into retirement he's still waiting for the "job" he's been chosen to do from birth. And if her mother is anything like her mother again, it might still take another 15 years because I definitively think this is going to be one of those "over my dead body" successions.

All real world machines are analog, but the communication is digital (signal/no signal). SOS = ... --- ... = 101010001110111011100010101 (for human convenience a dash is three dots long as is the pause between letters, seven between words). I agree it's an odd wording though, with that logic the blind have been reading digital books for ages - with their digits, even.

It doesn't take a PhD to use the TOR Browser bundle, you could also direct users to a TOR gateway service like onion.to if you only care about protecting the anonymity of the site. I think the main reason it's not happening is because the current whack-a-mole game is not working very well. Search for any popular item + torrent on Google and you'll find plenty sites, public torrents usually refer to many independent trackers and on top of that there's trackerless peer exchange. It doesn't really matter where you get the torrent/magnet link, you'll be part of the same swarm. They can't win unless they shut down that down and if they shut that down moving the torrent sites to TOR wouldn't help.

If you remembered what life was all about you wouldn't be working 12+ hours a day in the first palce. Add sleep, commute, basic living like hygiene, meals and basic housekeeping and it's obvious you don't have a life outside work. I could do it for a short while for lots of money, but in general life's too short to live it later. Not that I'm doing anything "useful" with my spare time in that sense, but I'm certainly enjoying it. You want to be an old geezer with money because all you've done in life is work? Well if you make it that far, most that work all day and all night don't.

If you didn't provide a license to download it, they're going to sue because their pirated source code crashed the airplane? Can anyone find even one actual court case like that, not just hyperbole?

Well I feel there's an underlying assumption in pretty much every review that you're the kind of person this matters for. If any SSD is good enough for you, you don't need to read SSD reviews just like you don't need to read CPU or GPU reviews to play solitaire but if you do 3D rendering or play Crysis 3 you do. If you read reviews for things that are utterly irrelevant to you, well I'd grab those free page hits too if I could.