An honest question: Is smoking part of it? From what I've seen, a huge percentage of people in China smoke quite a bit. Obviously, this is hard on the lungs and heart in the longer term, but in the short term, it does burn more calories and tends to make people thinner. So are people healthier or do they just "look" healthier?

Even before that, he was a steroidal writer.

A moose once bit my sister. No, really!

Yes, in the movie version of computer reality, error-checking was never invented. Thus, the only alternative to a condition that can't be solved is to whirl around until you explode. (In actual reality, we have of course perfected the unhelpful error message as an alternative to exploding).

LOL. "Then later on, after it's gotten out of sync with Production, we might even check it in to source control." Too painfully true.

All this reminds me of when a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were told of a man who is across the room from a woman and moves half the remaining distance to the woman every minute. The mathematician said, "The man will never reach the woman." The physicist said, "In twenty minutes the man will be within an atomic radius of the woman and can be said to have reached her." The engineer said, "No problem, in five minutes that guy will be close enough for all practical purposes."

Please adjust this joke to the sexual proclivities of your audience as needed.

Naw, that's just an old colloquial Kentucky term for "wife".

Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays!

To get more realistic characters, the author could interview the old folks in Japan who've been volunteering to go fix things up in and around the Fukushima reactor complex! I can only hope that, given the opportunity to help like that after I've raised my kids and made my mark, I would be willing to do something that selfless, knowing it might could take a few years off.

Of course, if it were a dystopian sci-fi novel and the government were forcing us to "volunteer," well, I'd put together a resistance movement just on principle. Unless the aliens were cool and/or hot and green.

Disagree! "Merely" doesn't do justice to the change in algorithm. Search engines were *terrible* before Google came along. Don't know about you, but I'm old enough to remember the first time a Google search brought back *amazingly good* results in comparison to others, and pretty much switched then and there. They may not be a perfect company, but but they've had a good 10-14-year run creating hundreds of billions of dollars in efficiencies for thousands of industries. Now search has gotten so good, I don't even see many people using bookmarks anymore.