Yes the posters attitude may be the problem, and yes classes in people skills would be helpful but honestly the biggest problem here seems to me to be convincing HR that the poster can do the job. A problem I think plagues many people who aren't specifically trained for a given job.

And convincing them that he can do the job without being a problem. Often (not always) PhDs are considered (or consider themselves) really good at stuff because of their credentials. Even stuff outside their major. In the general case that is not so, but it can lead to arrogance, or preferential treatment, both of which are bad for the work environment. I had a manager tell me he'd only ever hire a PhD if he wanted someone with that specific area of knowledge due to this phenomenon.

I've worked with a number of PhDs mostly working in areas of their education and it's been mostly great with a few that had ego issues. OTOH many of them were working in their area of expertise and were quite good ;-) Come to think of it, the problem guys were working outside their area of expertise.

Apparently - if you believe the LERN (cold) fusion folks, the easy path to gold would be so type of platinum-hydrogen fusion. No exactly cheap precursors ;-)

That's so stupid. If your code is going to generate a 24 byte GUID then it should do so under any valid set of inputs to the GUID generator. In fact, if there it's even possible to generate a larger number it should be truncated to 24 just to be sure. If date and time are going into it, you have to consider a reasonable range of dates. But thanks for the example, it shows how little effort some companies put in.

When you buy a ski ticket, you waive your right to sue the ski operator if certain rules are properly followed. When you buy a ticket to go to space, you willingly assume all of the risk.

They're not talking about protection for people on the ground. They're saying the people onboard are taking all the risk and directly comparing it to skiing. We're at the point where ski equipment is probably quite reliable and in addition a skier can and should inspect their own equipment and be blamed for any liability. None of that is true for the space industry - the passengers are not in control, could not make a reasonable inspection of anything, and the field is so new there may certainly be negligence on the part of the manufacturer. Watch the videos from Space Ship One, see where Burt Rutan tells his guys to go down to the junkyard and see what kind of parts they can find - 'cause the automotive guys have some good stuff. While I'm certain they're doing a higher quality job on the commercial vehicles, I think it would be unfair to shield them from liability to the extent of the ski-equipment industry.

You explanation is informative. Not only is your definition of temperature new to me, I find the consequences unfortunate. They should have a different term for this state rather than "negative temperature". Sure it's interesting physics, but the headline seems a bit sensational due to the definition of temperature needed to make it possible.

Got tips for catching time/date bugs "from the mysterious future"?

Why does software functionality depend on the date? Calculation issues maybe... but failure to lauch? WTF? I'm most curious to learn how this even happens.

Ford, Toyota, Ferrari and Honda would start publishing comic books, so that they could protect what, up until now, was unprotectable.

Hollywood will love it when they have to pay a licensing fee for every car in every shot in a movie - retroactively of course.

And then there's this from TFS:

attorney J. Andrew Coombs argues in legal papers that the Batmobile incorporates trademarks with distinctive secondary meaning...

Trademarks have to registered with the PTO or they do not exist - looks to me like he's making this up.

The failure to convert falls squarely on the government. See building codes for examples. So long as your construction industry is using imperial units, society is not going to change.

How about having actual butter for the popcorn? I can no longer get the overpriced popcorn at theatres, not just due to the shitty taste of the stuff but because the "popcorn topping" is full of MSG and consistently gives me a migraine headache right around the time we're heading home. It used to be "butter" then "butter flavor" and now they don't even pretend it's that. And guess what? It's not just me that doesn't buy it any more.

Popcorn popped in real vegetable oil, with real butter and salt will give off a smell that will draw tons of people out to get some even at movie theatre prices.

And a TV tuner.

Reading this on my Eee makes me sad. I was hoping for an upgrade soon - like the Eee 1225b perhaps for graphics improvement. But I'd like an 11.5" screen in the same package as the 10.1. Or increasing the size a little may allow a 12" with a tad wider keyboard and that's getting into laptop size range. Those laptops cost quite a bit more but IMHO should not.

The only future I see for TV is when they gain wireless DLNA or some such (Like Apple TV but standardized). Then there's this big screen in the room that anyone can stream stuff too from their phone/whatever. Portable devices then need to be able to encode video for streaming to the big screen so you can use it as a large monitor (with codec dependent latency of course). That's it. All TVs and computer monitors should get this capability in the future. Wired connections should remain available for higher quality and low latency, but TV as display server is the only thing that makes sense IMHO. They'll need to keep tuners for quite a while too.

I would bet the entire "article" was created for LEGO. They're on an advertising blitz because they have competition now.

Sure they have franchises. But the Barbie sets are not made by LEGO. Since the patents expired and the lawsuits have been lost, there's lots of competition. Perhaps this will lead to the availability of large boxes of bricks rather that just trademarked sets...

That's what the black box is for. It records all the interesting sensor data - enough to reconstruct any view you want via CG. The only thing it can't tell you is if anything is already missing prior to the crash like at Reno last year. But I agree, an automated system to record every departure and landing from a couple angles shouldn't be very expensive.

Sure they'll find one. But being the correct distance from a given star doesn't really make it earth-like. Seriously, Mars qualifies as earth-like but it doesn't seem to have life even though the planet next to it does.