The people involved learned certainly nothing from history.
While Germany was dabbling with all kinds of expensive new tank designs, the Russians built only one kind (with incremental improvements) but in large quantities. Guess which one made the difference? Actually, the same goes for the English and the Americans. While inferior, the Sherman tanks could be made in much larger quantities.
I discovered 'The Hobbit' on my Speccy in 1984. The first adventure game I ever played. I then tried to solve it with a cousin of mine who had the book.
In order to stay on topic, I read the story when I was 11 yrs old in another book (for Dutch and Belgian Slashdotters: Het Bonte Boeketboek), a kind of single-topic book, but with the topic seen from different angles. This one was about the human body, and this story was part of the chapters about the brain and the nervous system. I must say that it did made an impression, but due it being written in the first person I did not completely understand it at the time. But I always felt sad after reading it.
Your insurance agent would like a word with you.
Yes.
The scientific method was invented/discovered and honed in Europe. There are no other people who have created the same.
There might be other *technical* or *mathematical* accomplishments by other peoples and cultures, but not science.
It seems that George R.R. Martin is a comic book writer, without the comics.
Please choose your examples well.
Although son of a well to-do farmer, Newton was not nobility, and could only study because of recognition of his talent. Gauss was the son of really poor people.
The victors always write history. Caligula and Nero were not so crazy as is often told. However, they both were contemptuous of the Roman Senate, which is what brought them down in the end, and which is why the historic writings about them paint them in the light of craziness.
We should try to follow the money more when such rules are implemented.
Who benefits the most from this? Big, big breweries who feel probably threatened by people who brew good beer (as a Dutch colleague of me said, they make Heineken by pumping the Maas water into the bottles).
This is a US problem. What company bought (more or less recently) a US brewery? Those Brasilian pump-and-dumpers do not know anything about beer, only about making money by selling something that resembles beer and manipulating the stock market, and since it is rather easy in the US to bribe officials, this really looks a move from their side.
We are not here to decide if we are paranoid, but to decide if we are paranoid enough.
Yeah, 1,000,000,000 lines of code. And it takes 9 women just 1 month to create 1 baby.
Please mod this up.
There is also a whole lot of papers, theses and doctorates about dynamically reconfiguring FPGA's, showing that obtaining information about their structure is very possible (the most advanced of this is IMHO, the work of Dirk Koch).
Tuberpunk?
So, just basic BI and data warehousing, but without the lessons learned in the past?
Even this integration with a massive database is not new. I remember reading about development of such systems in the beginning of the eighties (in Readers' Digest, ffs). The only thing changed since then is the speed of CPU, the size of memory and the size of databases.
Me: distrusting Microsoft since 1990.
Of all signs warning not to trust MS stands out for me the following.
I was at my first job, PC technician and we installed Macs for the graphical sector, and Compaq servers for Netware installation, also for the same.
For Apple and Compaq, I had to follow courses so that the company could get its preferenced dealer status.
In the income of the building, there hung a small plaque, Authorised Microsoft Dealer with Gates' signature. At first I thought that my boss had also done a course for MS to get this plaque.
However, in the course of time I saw that companies did not need to do much to get this plaque from MS. That's the day I realised the extent of Gates' snake oil dealership. Never trusted 'em from that day onward.
and which does not take too much time
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.