For the record, the oft-quoted statement "Do as thou wilt be the whole of the law" does not mean what people think.

Especially if people think it's related to Satanism. Crowley delighted in playing a wicked character, the "Great Beast", but he was very definitely not a Satanist.

Agreed. Kiva is one of the most blatant examples of "Machines should think, people should work". The intelligence in the system is in computers. All the humans do is reach into the bin the laser pointer points to, take out an item, wave it under a bar code scanner, and put it in the output bin which has a light on. It takes 15 minutes to learn the job (really, about 90 seconds, but you get a little faster with practice). There's no hope of promotion, and it's only a temporary job until the picking robots are developed.

Welcome to the future.

This is why we need a clean separation of church and state. And yeah, the evangelical in OK are going to go nuts once they realize that they MUST allow this garbage.

I've always found COBOL quite readable. Math, especially, always looked clean.

SUBTRACT 10 FROM WS-A GIVING WS-B

DIVIDE WS-A INTO WS-B GIVING WS-C REMAINEDER WS-D

And I think this stolen example of conditional code is also pretty clear to read...

  IF WS-AMT IS NUMERIC
                    ADD WS-AMT TO WS-BANLANCE
            ELSE
                    MOVE ZEROS TO WS-AMT
                    PERFORM ERROR-PARA.
            END-IF.

[COBOL is incompatible with the lameness filter...]

I still remember her on Letterman and her giving him one of her nanoseconds :)

Wouldn't getting access to Blizzard's servers make this a whole lot easier? Couldn't you just mine the player data and make Blizzard record the conversations that take place in-game, rather than actually walk around in WoW?

This should be very effective if it works. Which it should. Automated manufacturing usually takes a lot of startup time. Production lines have to be designed, fabricated, and carefully installed with everything aligned properly.

There's already a big success in this area - Kiva Systems. They make those little mobile robots used for order processing. Kiva already is handling about 20% of online orders, and Amazon bought the company recently. Setting up a warehouse for Kiva is simple - all you really need is a big flat floor. You put down markers for robot guidance, bring in the shelving units, the charging stations, and the human order-picking stations, which are all standard components, hook everything up to the servers, and go. No need to fabricate and install complex conveyor systems. No need for on-site robot repair techs - all the Kiva robots are interchangeable, so you have spares, and you can just send them back to Kiva HQ (which is small) for repairs.

I love gaming. I have spent far too much time at it. The thought that somebody in our nation's government is getting paid to do it and spy on the rest of us while doing so is ludicrous. The NSA will never be able to assemble enough SIGINT to prevent anything, only follow key words retroactively to find perpetrators after it's too late. In the meantime, the temptation to exploit casual behavior for political ends is too overwhelming.

The NSA represents the most existential threat to our freedom as Americans that has ever been, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined & included. If we fail to put an end to the NSA, then what happens with China, Russia, and Islamic terrorism is entirely moot.

What entry do I put in my hosts file to block apk's spam?

So few of even those who understand what the government is doing were interested, much less concerned, or more properly, panicked and furious beyond belief. Maybe this will ring a bell that means something to them?

Yes, all our fresh water, once drunk, is lost forever to space. Some say water you pee into the toilet or behind a tree runs to the sea, evaporates into clouds, falls to the ground as rain, and flows as rivers and springs back to the great intake pipes that lead to your faucet in the great hydrological cycle, but I call that junk science. Mumbo-jumbo about conservation of mass and energy aside, once you've used something. IT. IS. GONE. FOREVER.

The only innovations eBay has done in the past 2-3 years are innovative ways to charge you more money when you sell things using their service. Amazon is eating their lunch and they know it. I have sold 3x as much random junk from my house on Amazon than on eBay in recent times.

It will explode from using low quality components.

Many of the quality product you associate with "american-made" or "european-made" are in fact made in China, part or whole.

If you still think China churns out shite copies of good products like in the 70s and 80s, you need a reality check. Many, MANY China products are brilliant, quality made and innovative. Granted, many are still shite and copies too, but that's changing fast.

Rooting for a weak home team hoping that the stronger team fails is pathetic.

The correct attitude is to make the home team better.