Of course Earth is special, but there might be lots of other places that are special too, maybe in some other way. The universe is not a small place.

What is even more disconcerting than electromagnetic jamming is that the west is unsuccesfull at communicating with some groups of people.

This becomes obvious if you study the following case:
step 1: Ahmadinedschad holds one of his talks at the UN assembly.
step 2: Western news report that diplomats walked out of the assembly in protest.
step 3: News reports catering to other groups of people report that Ahmadinedschad was applauded while talking in concilatory tone.
step 4: Shit happens
step 5: Profit

Suppose you signal the nesting level by indentation, as most programmers today do.

If you add a condition around some code, then for example 3 lines might indented, resulting in 5 lines being altered instead of the 2 which actually have changed.

For this, the proposed improved grep and diff might be good, at least better than the current state of diff. Okay, maybe I'm not telling about the -b flag, but the -b flag might be a problem if you code in whitespace or so ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)

The appropriate way to deal with this would be to convert all program code to intermediate language, including comments and if available assertions, and to only check this code into the versioning system.

On check out, the code would be transformed according to an either agreed on formatting, or even to a different formatting for everyone.

tags:programming languages versioning systems patents prior art

I still find it interesting that in most RTS games, it is fine to massacre the peons of the enemy, while our modern military learns that this is not supposed to happen.

I think Cossacks: European Wars was the exception, where peons and farms would actually convert to your side if no enemy military unit was near them.

Some outer space conquest games penalize you by harming your relations to other players that is AI if you use biologic warfare. So the concept is not totally unheard of in games.

Well, I might have no clue how you sequence a gene or genome today, but I would guess the procedure would involve using traditional rna in a non-arsenic environment to multiply the dna before analysing it.

This process would of course not preserve the arsenic.
To get better tools, you would have to look at how the adapted lifeform reads and processes its dna, and how the cells factories actually translate the messenger rna, as this might be different.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Code#Variations_to_the_standard_genetic_code

Your company is just looking for a reason to fire anyone on their terms.

It is completely fine to play some game that comes pre-installed with the PC, if you are waiting for an important reply, or an action to be taken.

Of course you could instead write some document in the meantime, with a probablity of 10% that anybody but you ever reads it.

However, they are most certainly included in this report to make it more "sensational".

Ehm, no, they are included because it is hard to tell what the program is doing. Not all things can be resolved with rules, e.g. a chain of regex replaces. And you cannot brute-force it either most of the time by checking all inputs.
All you can do then is to determine the possible outputs by some rules, so a false positive is reported, whenever your rules are not exact.

Strange, and I thought I knew all the software developers working at the company.

.. they were lost by the 10% of commuters stupid enough to lose an USB stick.

After finding the God particle, scientists will say: "Hey let's find the Devil particle!"

Then we will escalate experiments till we manage to blow up Earth with one.

Fermi paradox solved, some of the most advanced lifeforms just blow themselves up.

You never know what the IT guy is worth until you replace him. Preferably with someone new on the job.

And then you go and complain about schools, and ask for more H1B visa ;-)

It is also very hard for the IT guy to know what he is worth.

For the sales guy it is easy because he just adds up all money he has raked in. Probably he will even have a tendency to overestimate because he doesn't know at what cost the company is producing its goods and services.

A manager with access to financial data, knows when the company is doing well financially, and knows when his pay is tiny in comparison to the turnover of his department.

Both are obviously in a better position to negotiate, unless the IT guy analyzes the company's data, for which most IT guys neither have the time nor the desire.

75% didn't look at confidential data, and of the 25% who admitted to peeking, you don't know how much they strayed from their tasks.

Management has access to this information as well and no one can complain.

America has not won a single war since WW2.

Grenada worked out fine.

The liberation of Kuwait worked out well, it only got a bit more trying after expanding the mission to enter Iraq.

But I guess all that was "too easy" to count as a war eh?

The shape of the drone alone might have required hours of computing time to optimize for a low radar profile, so I'm not so sure that it was designed in a way to reduce technology creep.