The solution, obviously, is to have a dedicated lane for the automated cars. Made out of train tracks. And for the cars to be trains full of commuters. Called subways.

It's the professor's job to certify that you can learn and do things like a functional human being.

Otherwise your degree is worthless.

Unfortunately, your misconception is so prevalent that degrees are becoming... worthless.

Former child prodigy and current Fields medalist Terence Tao agrees that genius is overvalued when compared to hard work:
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-genius-to-do-maths/

As he says, "attributing success to innate talent (which is beyond one’s control) rather than effort, planning, and education (which are within one’s control) can lead to ... problems." (particularly for children; cf. http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ )

These posts have put an end to my dream of shipping myself across the country.

I see the BOFH spirit is alive and well.

So mind-numbingly wrong. Why do you think satellite dishes must be painstakingly aimed in the proper direction? Try listening through a parabolic amplifier (those dishes spies use) and see how quickly the volume drops off if you point it off the mark. You'd think more parabolas would show up in nature if they had the magical focus-making properties you think they do. I somewhat suspect you also meant your two ALWAYS assertions in a way that's mutually contradictory.

So, please meditate on this applet:
http://users.dickinson.edu/~richesod/focalpoint/

Since the only case where a parabola fixes the focus is when the incoming rays are parallel to its axis (meaning the sun could only move toward and away from the face of the building), this makes the original poster's distance from being right more in the range of "hardly at all".

In fact, rays that are not parallel to the axis don't even converge into a focal point:

http://users.dickinson.edu/~richesod/focalpoint/

Sheesh, around here it seems like people think "parabolic dish" means "magic focus-maker".

Yes.

Probably because I've been playing Robot Unicorn Attack WAY too much.

Yes, XORing each plaintext block with an encrypted block index/counter would be enough to render the output theoretically indistinguishable from random data. This is "CTR" mode, and I'd be surprised if most hard drive encryption systems aren't using it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation#Counter_.28CTR.29

Does anyone have a cached copy of that comic?

Frankly, I find the "dramatic" architecture buildings that look like Gehry-inspired crushed aluminum cans to be the ugly buildings.

Seriously, why does it look like they built a square mile of a concrete courtyard? Grass allergy sensitivity? Should help the thing bake like crazy in the LA sun.

This is not the rule, nor are several other popular explanations I've heard. Unfortunately, the end result is that I hear many people in America saying things like "Aerosmith are playing ..." specifically when talking about bands. My guess is that this is because the hipster types who do the most writing/talking about bands have a hypercorrective urge to appear cultured by conforming to fictional linguistic oddities.

For the real rule (well, description of common use before the fauxrule took hold), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement .

The reason for this, no doubt, is that they're trying to prevent "LEGO" from becoming a generic term for little plastic bricks, like how XEROX came to mean "copy" and lost most of its trademark protection.

Some people don't seem to realize that instructions from a company about how you should refer to it and in what style they want you to advertise their trademark protection are NOT ENFORCED BY LAW. Consider them as requests from a flea shouting at the top of its lungs.

Nice about the RFC, but the ICMP problem shouldn't exist if both nodes send their packets out at approximately the exact same time. By the time each packet reaches the other side, the port should be open.

I hope utorrent's new utp protocol implements some of this magic, since I'm *STILL* seeing routers without UPnP.

Using an intermediary is not the only way for two nodes behind separate NATs to talk to eachother: for UDP there's also a connection bootstrapping trick that gets them both hooked up. It works when the NAT doesn't rewrite the source port of a UDP packet, as is usually the case when a node uses an unoccupied source port (and as a random port is likely to be): each node simply starts sending a packet to the other node's source port. As the packet passes out through the NAT, it will remember that there is a "conversation" going on on that source/dest port pair and forward the incoming packets with the same port pair to the proper destination.

This could work for TCP, also, if a node could generate a blind SYNACK with the correct sequence numbers and thereby cause the NAT to start forwarding - which is possible with the momentary assistance of an intermediary.

Yes, this is a gross kludge and is inferior to proper NAT-traversal protocols like UPNP port forwarding, but it works in a large majority of real-world cases. Too bad it's not widely known or implemented.