Put on The Evil Dead Part 2. They'll be saying it too.

They do actually address this in a couple of episodes. Part of the explanation of the retrograde technology on board the Galactica is that the Cylons were just so much better at cyberwarfare that the colonists essentially ceded that field - all computer systems were isolated so that even should one be compromised, it could not be used to stage attacks on other systems. There was a good deal of hocus-pocus involved, but at least there was an effort to explain it.

I'm sorry, my inner snarky atheist is about to chime in. Please ignore the rest of my comment if you're not in the mood.

Ahem:

In the study, published in the current issue of Journal of Affective Disorders, researchers comment that people with a moderate to high level of belief in a higher power do significantly better in short-term psychiatric treatment than those without.

...researches also identified a notable exception to this phenomenon. Certain types of psychotic disorders, notably delusional disorders concerning the existence of supernatural entities, were strongly associated with belief in god.

Yeah, they could have used.... Flash. Hooray? Or Apple HLS?

The bottom line is that non DRMed content is a non-starter for them. It's not that they can't figure out how to get away from Silverlight, it's that they can't figure out where to go instead.

Do you see the obvious contradiction in what you just said? The article focuses on the birth of these Mac colo companies, which can make money in an extreme niche of the market because they're in a small group of services providers standardizing on Mac hardware. Because they have stayed almost identical between model years, the provider can just by them by the truckloads as little commodity services, knowing that if one goes that they can just swap another one in.

The in house IT department, which you like to deride, doesn't have that luxury. They're not going to buy a dozen Mac Minis just to support one small group which is completely wedded to one server platform. So in the end, everyone is happy: the colo companies get their niche business, the fledgling web business gets their preferred platform, the data center admins get to stick with their core competencies, and schmucks who have never had to run a large data center get to call them assholes. Everyone wins.

Depending on your relationship with your coworker, you could try something like this:

"Dude! What the fuck is with this? This whole module reads like it was written by David Foster Wallace after sustaining a concussion!"

Then, having gently broached your general concern, you could offer a few helpful suggestions. "How about actual English names for some of your variables, instead of packing everything into a global array called "Stuff"?"

I'm actually only half kidding here. I'm lucky enough to work with guys with a sense of humor, so when one of us screws something up we expect a certain amount of ball-busting. I really do feel that this is a valuable practice, so long as the critics don't go too far with it and the critiqued can keep a good sense of humor.

I feel I should point out that Paglia's identification as a feminist is a matter of some debate. She lays claim to being a "dissident feminist", which as nearly as I can tell is about as uncontroversial as claiming you're a "Jew for Jesus."

Clearly, SKYNET has some commitment issues when it comes to day trading.

Man, you have to read pretty deep in that article before you get to the really cool bit. But there is a really cool bit. Check it:

I have spent the last four years championing an initiative within Google called the "Grok Project", one that will at some point burst beyond our big walled garden and into your world. The project's sole purpose in life is to bring toolchain feature parity to all languages, all clients, all build systems, and all platforms. (Some technical details follow; feel free to skip to the next section heading...) My project is accomplishing this lofty and almost insanely ambitious goal through the (A) normative, language-neutral, cross-language definitions of, and (B) subsequent standardization of, several distinct parts of the toolchain: (I) compiler and interpreter Intermediate Representations and metadata, (II) editor-client-to-server protocols, (III) source code indexing, analysis and query languages, and (IV) fine-grained dependency specifications at the level of build systems, source files, and code symbols.

There's a bit more, but that's the gist.

Or even worse, programmers who use the Visual Studio C# .NET WPF paradigm at work, and then use a Linux desktop coding open source at home. Probably so.

You found me.

"Portal is basically a new IP. The universe is the same, but so distantly related that they're essentially different. " That's more or less true, for now. But Valve dropped plenty of hints in Episode Two that the two stories are going to converge in Episode 3. Here's a clip of a scripted sequence in which the Half Life scientists talk about the Aperture science research vessel "Borealis".

Ahem:

We had a very, very successful recipe of what BlackBerry was all about. There were four main pillars: battery life; typing; security; and compression. Then there was a shift with LTE. With LTE it was important actually not to save network resources, it was important to load the networks, to sell data plans and sell data volume. We didn't miss on innovation. I think we missed on understanding, specifically in the U.S., that this trend was shifting, and that our positioning and our value proposition in the U.S. market was not following that trend shift.

So, according to the CEO of RIM, the reason that Blackberries don't sell is that carriers don't want to sell phones that don't require big data plans. It's a good thing I didn't try bringing my new Brick phone to market. I mean, okay, technically it's just a brick with a pretend touchscreen, but it requires to data plan AT ALL.

Very good to know: thank you!

Wow, are you likely to get an earful over this. Here's my perspective (not a neutral one):

The "individual mandate" part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires you to carry health care insurance. However, supporters claim that because the risk associated to insurers is now spread out over a much larger segment of the population (those who would normally decline health insurance are obviously less likely to need it), the cost to individuals in terms of premiums is likely to decline. In other words, they're betting that the cost of your insurance is likely to decline. Personally, I think that's likely... for insurers, anyway. Whether insurers pass these cost savings to individuals is a craps shoot. When Massachusetts (under, ahem, Governor Romney) passed a law with an individual mandate, premiums fell something like 40% at the same time that it was rising nationally.

Another big part of the bill is the "pre-existing condition" clause: basically, an insurer cannot deny you coverage because you already have a medical condition that they don't want to cover. There was some worry among ACA boosters that the court might strike down the "individual mandate" part without the "pre-existing condition" part, which would have been catastrophic to the risk pools: seven states have tried passing pre-existing condition laws without the individual mandate, and it went very badly for all of them. So if it turns out that you come down with some kind of chronic or severe condition, it can no longer be used as a reason for an insurer to deny you insurance.

I'm having trouble that nobody involved in the direction of this site is familiar with the term slash fiction, or that none of them made the connection between that term and the term "Bi-". This is just... weird.