Hmm... there are some issues with your fix

- 250 km/h winds would be called a category 5 hurricane in the gulf of Mexico
- I don't think nations come in a more relevant category than Hong Kong / China these days.

I have actually never experienced an unscheduled power outage where I live. Whenever it does happen somewhere in the country, once every couple of years, it is nation wide headline news. If you have "frequent, though brief, outages during the summers", I assume he means he has an outage almost every summer. I wouldn't call that reliable either. I hope he's not paying much for that service.

In your experience, do older developers have solid knowledge of data structures, algorithms, OS and related topics, networking and distributed systems, etc, etc? That sounds more like skills of a recent college graduate, with no kids and plenty of time for hacking and going to conferences.

Global cooling incorrect? Ice ages are a theory very well supported by evidence. As long as there are still permanent ice caps on the poles and glaciers in the mountains, there is no indication whatsoever that the holocene is a 'post' glacial. We are 10000 years into an interglacial, which on average have been lasting about 10k years. The 'flips' between glaciation and interglacial are very sudden (on a geological scale) after a period of slow decline. This wasn't a baseless climate scare, because there is every reason to assume the next glaciation will happen 'soon' (on a geological scale), it is just not known exactly when the 'flip' will take place. It was prudent to think about the consequences then, just as it still is today. If you feel a warming climate is bad, wait until the snow doesn't melt one summer.

Yes, it got so bad that the FBI saw the need to release the photographs they were interested in, stating people should only focus on these and not others, because the amateur sleuths were creating unnecessary extra work for them.

Half a dozen innocent guys were at some point accused or harassed, not by the authorities but by 'the internet' and trashy publications and similarly 24h cable news networks.

A Hacker Specific addition would be a remarkably short number of cycles before age related obsolescence is reached.

Most likely, South Korea would supply most of the ground troops and assume all of the nation building duties. The main risk for the USA would be provoking China or Russia into getting involved.

Hey Wycliffe, it's good to see you (LIE!). You look great (LIE). How are you doing (DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT)?

You'll still have to file federal taxes no matter where you live. Even renouncing your US citizenship won't save you, because they'll fine you for the amount you'd be expected to pay in taxes during the coming decade (iirc). If you don't pay, expect to be arrested if you ever try to visit your family. That is, if you can get a visa at all, because they're not known to be very accommodating to people who renounce they citizenship.

When you say Northern Europe, you really mean nearly all of Europe except for parts of Spain, Italy and the Balkans.

Uhm, where did you get that figure? 700 million years is two supercontinent cycles ago - Antarctica was slightly north of the equator then. The antarctic ice cap didn't even start to form until the end of the Eocene. According to wikipedia, lake Vostok may have been isolated for the past 15 to 25 million years.

Indeed. If it escapes, it might colonize every pitch dark, ice cold and almost sterile lake in the immediate area!!!

Thank God I, Mr. Pedantic, got here just in time, to ruin your joke with unsolicited facts: bacteria do not have a cell nucleus.

Steam is much like their games: technology-wise it's behind the curve, but the 'gameplay' was well designed.

I suspect Valve painted themselves in a corner by designing their own game engine. It's expensive and time consuming to maintain, and it's clearly not one of the best ones out there. I can' t think of any major titles outside Valve that have licensed it. They do produce top class content: game design and game play, which seems to have paid the bills despite the glacial pace of development.

You're showing your age with conspiracy theories from a decade ago. Microsoft isn't the fear inspiring behemoth it was a decade ago. No one talks about them any more, no one fears them any more, if anything, they are the ones being bullied out of a market or two these days. The only place still obsessed with them is Slashdot.