Wait, are you saying that Three Mile Island doesn't really need a REST API?

And of course, union dues aren't basically a pay cut.

That's hilarious, I thought you were kidding. I remember an amusing publicity stunt in which a scientist pwned Ralph Nader by declaring that he would eat as much plutonium as Nader would consume caffeine, but this is the first time I've heard of someone actually putting their money where their mouth is.

Course when you really get down to it, if you are going to go through that much trouble to make a table top accelerator, it seems like it would be easier to skip the electrical energy to mechanical energy and mechanical energy to electrostatic potential steps. Seems like charging a capacitor and using some sort of cathode/annode setup..... and that is how the VDG ended up in the museum :)

Agreed, a Cockroft-Walton multiplier should be pretty easy to construct these days with HV components available on eBay. It now occurs to me that it might make sense to ditch the belt and motor in my VDG altogether, and just build a CW multiplier into the acrylic column. Hmm.

That's some pretty impressive kookery, but actually a small VDG can be used to accelerate electrons (and presumably protons as well in the form of H+ ions). See the chapter in C.L. Stong's anthology of Scientific American's The Amateur Scientist columns, beginning on page 344. There are a few copies on Amazon, and there is also a .PDF floating around, along with the 'official' CD-ROM edition which is a pile of proprietary crap.

I keep meaning to try this, if I ever get the mechanical reliability of my own VDG up to par. Right now it will run for about a minute at most before something breaks.

Area needed for experimental appratus: One 6' folding table from Office Depot

Equipment needed: One petawatt-class laser, occupying a large portion of the physics building

how would you know if any of it is true?

Do you seriously think that a facility of this size is only used to collect and process "metadata", or only "foreign" communications?

Could you get a perpetual license for all of CS6 for $360? Was the educational discount that good? If so, I can see where some people would be pretty unhappy about it.

IMHO the Creative Cloud package isn't too bad a deal. I mostly use it for Photoshop, but I needed a good video editor the other day and it was nice to be able to run Premiere Pro without jumping through any other hoops.

It also appears that CC apps can coexist on at least two different PCs without any licensing hassles. The DRM is not as unobtrusive as Steam but it is still fundamentally pretty usable, from what I've seen so far.

Like in the past. Hit the "Windows" key, type "Control Panel", and it'll show up. I never had a problem with Windows 8 because in Windows 7 I always hit "Windows key" and started typing whatever I was looking for. Did you really have to Google that?

I liked this feature better when it was called "DOS."

Gee, Wally, I dunno. Because law-enforcement resources aren't endless, and need to be prioritized effectively?

Even though Bill and Steve were fierce competitors, they were sort of two halves of a whole. The "yin" and "yang", so to say.

Yeah, like Hitler and... Randall Flagg.

Nice. I see a lot of insults in the replies to this comment, but I don't see any substantial explanations for your observation, or even any real denials.

Adding programmers to a late development project makes it later.

Adding writers to a late screenwriting project makes it worse.

Those are the closest things to genuine axioms in either field of endeavor.

To play devil's advocate: ubiquitous surveillance as in the examples you bring up would not come with unlimited resources to follow up. The very existence of this capability will force the authorities to focus their efforts on people who actually might be a threat. You know, like people who are actually on terrorism watch lists.

That assembler I did in the 80s is no use to me at all now.

If you're not a different, stronger programmer for having written it, then you must have been wasting your time.