Comment Speaking as a Mac owner (Score 3, Funny) 282
Oh, fuck.
bad enough every video cable is an adaptor, now what, more? [groans]
Oh, fuck.
bad enough every video cable is an adaptor, now what, more? [groans]
The criminal definition is different from the military definition. That's all this is. Criminally, a weapon of mass destruction is one that destroys indiscriminately, that's all it really means. Yes, there's a lot of verbiage about the size of the explosive and the delivery mechanisms and whatnot, but the underlying thought is causing indiscriminate death. The thought processes and motives are different and state of mind is an important issue in the legal system.
Based on my experience (YMMV), corporations love consistency. Their recruiters are uncomfortable with varied background, because they don't think outside the box and don't understand that a person can do more than just the same thing for the entirety of their lives.
Agreed. I've spent 1/2 my career as (primarily) a system/application programmer and the other 1/2 as (primarily) a Unix system administrator - usually alternating between the two. Invariably, whenever I apply for one type of job, the recruiter/HR person only sees the other type of experience and/or can't seem to understand that one person can do both things, often at the same time. Fortunately, it hasn't kept me from being continuously employed for the past 25+ years - or, perhaps, I've just been lucky.
Also, perhaps, if we reject DRM, the parts of the web we wall off are exactly the ones we should.
Music will be on our side of the wall; DRM is dead there. Seems to me that's a trend worth encouraging.
You can't run any other language than JS in the browser (practically anyways),
That's more a function of browsers bundling Javascript support than of the language itself. You could substitute Tcl/Tk, (or Perl, Python, etc...). Presently, there's a Tcl/Tk plugin for Mozilla and IE.
Is there a one way, write-once technology which is provably tamper proof? Can one be designed?
Save simultaneously to multiple, external, independently controlled locations. If the data is not private there should be no problem with allowing 3rd parties access for truly independent record keeping. If the data is private you could still upload encrypted copies to 3rd parties on a defined, regular basis, to be unencrypted only by court order.
Here's the question. If you meet one of these women in the elevator and happen to remember which booth she was working, would you feel confident that you could ask her a question about that company/product and get an informative answer? If yes, they're not booth babes, they're marketing people who happen to be attractive (which certainly helps their career, don't get me wrong). The problem isn't attractive women manning the booths, the problem is when the women are there solely to be attractive (in a very literal sense).
To put it bluntly, you underestimate kids and overestimate yourself
That's not it at all. I wasn't trying to be condescending (like you apparently are). Just stating a fact.
No one, including your brightest six-year-old, is capable of understanding something before their brain is sufficiently developed. To argue otherwise indicates that *your* brain is insufficiently developed. I love my god daughter a LOT (and she loves me a LOT) and I think she's really - really - smart, but Quantum Mechanics is beyond her grasp at this point, no matter how well explained.
Einstein was either over-simplifying or had never actually tried explaining something really complex to a six-year-old.
Even women are more likely to want to talk to a well-dressed, attractive woman than the pushy marketdroid or worse, the obese engineer wearing a t-shirt and ripped jeans who smells like he hasn't bathed in a week. It's not just about appearance; it's also about appearance. Know what I mean?
Frankly, I was a little disappointed in this article. His arguments seems a bit - for lack of a better term: simple.
Well... Any idiot can make a complex argument.
"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
-- Albert Einstein (attributed)
Having recently spent time with a friend and her six-year-old daughter, I can honestly, accurately, say that is not true. The kid is really, really smart - for a six-year-old - but, like *all* six-year-old humans, her brain simply isn't developed enough to grasp many - many - concepts. This also applies, to a lesser extent, to gifted kids (my wife was a Gifted Education teacher). In either case, any parents (or Albert Einsteins) who say otherwise are fooling themselves.
There is no resistance but the mass of the ship and the cargo will increase with the speed.
Or does the mass of the Universe decrease?
If you have a ship big enough to hold heavy people with heavier supplies that is a lot of momentum to fight all the time.
Only send skinny people - duh.
they'd have to be specially selected with the idea that everyone back on Earth that they knew would be dead by the time they arrived
Heck, I'd go with understanding that just certain people would be dead back on Earth...
If we can build capsules for space, why not do the same thing here
You make good points for cases where the Earth in general becomes less/un-inhabitable - for whatever reason - but not for large asteroid strikes, gamma-ray bursts and eventual Sun death. Yes, those are very rare or far off in the future, but the long-term survival of those types of events requires us living somewhere else.
Hopefully, we'll evolve into a less stupid, petty, short-sighted, self-destructive species by the time we need to deal with those kind of things.
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde