It gets harder to tell them apart every year.

I was treating it as a boolean issue (i.e. gravity exists). Kinda like evolution.

Depressingly true. I had *exactly* this experience driving home on I-10 just outside of Houston during rush hour. Veering out of the moron's way in the rain caused my truck to do a 180 in the middle of the freeway. Luck was with me. I ended up rear ending a retaining wall. My right turn signal was still on.

Well, the money's pretty good.

Sigh. There's just no cure for stupid. Full disclosure. I live in Texas and yes, this embarrasses me.

They're now private citizens, and deserve some regard for their personal privacy. IMHO, they should be left alone and this guy is a dick.

I'm sorry, but programming jargon like "regular expressions (pattern substitution), service packs (bug fixes), binding (pulling information from elsewhere), tuples (an ordered list), virtual void functions (as close to masturbation as it gets in programming) and even web browsing" seemed more designed to obfuscate and inflate the self importance of programmers than convey useful information to anyone who wanted to understand what computing was about.

In contrast, loops, if-then statements, variables and constants all were pretty clear and made immediate sense

It's a little more complicated. There's a broad campaign to influence the mainstream media and google search results to convince the public that peak oil and energy supplies are not a problem. Oil companies need this perception so that their stock prices stay up, their assets don't lose value, bank financing keeps rolling in and everyone gets their bonuses.

It's nonsense of course. Net energy from oil keeps declining even as available supplies increase slightly or stay stable. Prices keep going up and will keep going up. It's just more expensive to get oil out of a deep water well in the Gulf of Mexico, or Antarctica than it is in Saudi Arabia or West Texas, both of which are seeing their major field production decline.

Natural gas, which is a bright spot, energetically speaking, isn't making any money. So, the talk is about oil and how wondrous it is.

You first. I'm baking them cookies.

FYI, water, which you'll have to carry anyway, makes pretty good shielding.

Windows 8 is pretty tolerable if you know and do a few things.

1) If you can't find something, just type the name and it will probably show up as an icon.

2) Properties are at the bottom of the screen when you right-click and icon.

3) Move the mouse in diagonally from the left corner to get the stupid "menu."

4) Immediately download a start button substitute like classic shell.

Once you dig down, it's windows 7.

Microsoft apparently doesn't treat the acquired knowledge of their products by millions of users and developers is the extraordinarily valuable asset that it was. As Windows 8 continues to circle the drain, it's possible that even Microsoft's management may be getting this lesson. If so, expect Windows 8 "Classic" or "Business" or something. If they're just too collectively nutty to admit they made a mistake, well, Linux is a great thing, eh?

And any signal we might detect would have most of its entropy shifted to the main signal block, followed by a little orderly decryption section, which to us, would also look like noise, so running your signal though a zipf analysis probably wouldn't work.

Frankly, I think the radio thing is a bit silly. The detectable radio interval for any civilization is likely to be quite short. Even we're moving to photonics wherever possible. We'd probably do better looking for light signals, or astronomical star sized objects that look like artifacts, or creating large area Casimir antennas in space capable of detecting wide area, coherent changes to virtual particle activity.

I can't help thinking Microsoft still doesn't really get design

You think? Ditto for language design, corporate organization design. Frankly, if it's something that needs to be appealing and useful to humans, you'd be better off asking your garbageman.

If I assume there's more to a story than what appears in the mainstream media, I must be experiencing "conspiratorial thinking." Or I could be assuming that most journalists are morons who are paid to write *something* whether they know anything about it or not.

You'll take the crap we're shoving down your throat and you vill like it!