So, does this mean that somewhere out there is someone who wanted to join Al-Qaeda and become a terrorist and blow themselves up and all that jazz but got rejected for poor penmanship?

"Well, Ahmed, you scored high in fanaticism and lack of moral scruples, but this application is frankly a mess. I could barely read the thing. I'm afraid you're just not what we're looking for, sorry. Have you tried Amway?"

"They sent me here."

Yeah, they do seem to have been run through a legal/marketing filter, don't they? Certainly don't sound like engineer's answers. I have a sneaking suspicion that her actual answers were swooped upon by serious people in serious suits until we got the above. Frankly, I kept expecting the phrase:

"Thank you for asking. Your question is very important to us. Unfortunately we cannot answer your question at this time. Please ask again later. Thank you. [BEEP]"

To pop up.

Still, the few little nuggets of info we did get were pretty neat. I like about getting more recharge stations in new home building, and standardizing the charger plugs. Hopefully those will have spread a bit more by the time these suckers get down to my price level.

Yes! I was hoping somebody would mention this :) I read it when I was a kid in school, and it chilled me to the bone. I wasn't really into sci-fi at the time, but Bradbury always knocked me out with his stories. He really got into the human side of things in a way a lot of the "space opera" types never did. This particular story is very haunting, and I think comes very close to how it will be--heck, come back and read this thing now, and see how plausible most of it is as our homes get smarter and smarter.

Phone's quiet all day, I step away from my desk for five minutes, and some idiot calls and doesn't bother to leave a message. I freaking HATE that.

(*skips over the inevitable juvenile comments, false equivalencies, and associated detritus that always show up when feminism comes up in geek spaces. I don't even see 'em anymore.) I have to say that for most of my career a lot of the software I've been involved with has been, if not passing the test, fairly close to. At every place I've worked, there have been women on my team at least part of my time there. It tends to fluctuate a bit--at the moment, there's one other on my team, and she's actually a QA (and why *do* we have so many women in QA?). So I guess our last project doesn't pass. Still, the company as a whole passes with flying colors, so that's cool. There's only a few of us, relatively speaking, but we're spread out pretty good. So our code may not intersect often but we're affecting every part of what our company does. So I think that's important too.

In short, I think it makes for an interesting thought experiment, kind of evaluate where you and your team/department/company stand. I'm sure people will get all defensive, yell about quotas and all that jazz, but really it just asks you to think about it for a moment. Not at all unreasonable I think.

Now, if you'll excuse me, build's done.

You know, Reaper Man was the first Pratchett book I ever read. I was in tech school in the Air Force, just after basic. We got to go off base and go shopping, so I picked up the Hitchhiker's Guide omnibus which had just come out. Another airman saw it, and lent me his copy of Reaper Man. I've been hooked ever since. The guy was flat-out one of the best writers in terms of sheer skill I have ever seen in any genre. Reading Pratchett spoils you, and so much comes off short after you've seen what a real master of the written word could do.

Anyway, as someone up there said, this sucks. Now I'm thinking about that book, and how it was, reading it for the first time... I think I'm going to have to reread it again.

The "Embuggerance" was his name for Alzheimer's. It wasn't a euphemism so much as his using his gift for language to very concisely convey what it was like having this happen to him.

I can vouch for this. Google was VERY active in the east and south sides of KCMO during the various rollout waves, going out to community gathering places, knocking on doors, the whole bit. And these are not nice neighborhoods I'm talking about either. I was doing voter registration at the time in some of the same areas, and we did tend to bump into each other. They really wanted to get demand sufficient for all the neighborhoods they could, particularly those with schools in. I gotta say they did a pretty good job, too: in our neck of the woods, I think only 3 out of the 70-odd "fiberhoods" didn't qualify.

OK, so we use vertical resolution for years and years, and everyone susses it out. 480 interleaved? Got it. 720 progressive? Keen. So what genius decided to switch us over to the horizontal resolution? I'll bet you anything it was some schmo in Marketing who figured hey, the horizontal is twice the vertical, so if we use that number instead it'll make our TVs sound twice as good. Instead, it's confusing as hell and deeply annoying for anyone trying to keep u with this crap.

Personally, I think they should do like camera sensors, and go by megapixels. 1080p? 2 megapixels? Got it. 4K? 8 megapixels? Spiffy.

Anyway. I reckon 1080p will hold me just fine for a good while. I'm in no hurry to upgrade. And I doubt many people are.

If you haven't seen this yet, you can er, "help" fix the book by adding your own captions here.

Great fun for while you're waiting on the build server.