Based my personal experience with several people who died or who are clearly dying of their smoking habit, or wwo quit, I would say the only intensity smoking gives is an intensity of coughing; amplification of bronchial illnesses; stale smoke stench; loss of resale value on house and car; muted taste and touch sense (limited cases); and a really horrible death, way worse than boredom, in my opinion.

That's why I don't believe in string theory, quantum theory or people from Iceland.

Throwing your child in a furnace is child abuse; threatening that you will is just bad parenting. But that is a pretty fair comparison.

So, one wicked action in the name of religion makes religion bad, but clearly you don't feel that one wicked action in the name of something other than religion is bad, so only religion is bad? I suppose if you believe that right and wrong exist only with respect to religion then a non-religious person can't possibly do anything wrong because there is no wrong.

Now, has religion - Christianity or otherwise - been used to commit horrible atrocities? Absolutely. Does that mean religion is bad? Well, if one is in the practice of ascribing evil to inanimate objects, then I guess it is. I, on the other hand, think people are to blame. And "most people" are nothing. Rather, we are just inundated with bullshit from a very loud few. When a person blows up an abortion clinic for Jesus or blows up a crowded disco for Allah, their ignorance is projected onto the lives of many innocent people, and that is truly a tragedy. But once again, let's not lose focus on the fact that people do this shit, not their religion. If any of you religion haters spent any amount of time with typical religious people, you would find they abhor blowing shit up as much as you do. Yes, even the nice ones often let their belief cloud their otherwise intelligent minds into ignoring some really good science. And yes, sometimes large groups of people get stirred into a frenzy (crusades, witch trials, jihad), but other than jihad we are pretty much passed those days.

For the record, I am not religious or christian or anything. Since there is no way to prove the existence of god, I think believers and non-believers alike are both wrong. It's not that one has the wrong answer; it's that neither is answering an answerable question.

I agree and I do not agree. It is hard to find a plausible reason that someone will ever need to pull a Gates or a Woz and assemble a computer out of spare parts in their garage, but what happens when this knowledge is completely decentralized and everyone is so specialize that no one can?

Likewise, most kids these days may never need to interface with a computer the way we did twenty years ago, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't learn.

I was amazed recently to see my 15 month old niece playing with an iPad. As I watched my first thought was how lucky she is to be creating those connections in her brain at such a young age, but then I realized we are raising a generation of newly-born children who may very well reach a significant age (say, 8, when I started using computers [in 1980]) before they ever need to touch a real keyboard. Their expectations of a user interface will far exceed ours, and at the same time they may be more a prisoner to the technology because - forget about command line - they'll barely know how to use access a file system using a GUI and a mouse.

At least they will be inside on their computers and not trampling all over my lawn.

That code obviously isn't peer reviewed. Shouldn't it say if(!(typeof theWorld == "undefined")) ...? The variable worldHasEnded will require updating to indicate that it has ended, which will be impossible once it actually ends.

Touché.

Silverlight is actually a pretty cool way to handle data in ways tedious or unwieldy in HTML or Xml/Xslt. And if you work for a company totally wrapped up in Microsoft technology and you find you have this requirement for an internal application, I say run with it. I do agree, however, that requiring plug-ins for end users, particularly infrequent or uneducated ones, is a bad practice. But give the browser market two or three years - in which time I expect a radical shift in consuming web-based content - and plug-ins may be a moot point.

Sounds like paleo. My wife's lab is always covering up bones and such when people visit because apparently in that field you can publish based solely on what you remember seeing at someone else's university. Maybe, the more imaginary the discipline, the more likely that shenanigans comes into play? So, psychology, paleontology, string theory...

Your iPad battery can't start your friend's Mercedes.

There is enough that won't be changing - conceptually and literally - to warrant a thorough treatment of HTML5; however, I doubt it is worth the cost of this book given the volume of people writing about it for free on the intertubes. And for the truly masochistic, there is always w3c.org, where you can read the entire specification for free.

As for how browsers interpret the standard, that probably changes faster than the specification itself, so one is better off looking to quirksmode, et al, for how browsers handle various elements of HTML and CSS. Or better yet, just experiment with it.

The O'Reilly "Head First" series turned into hardcore porn so gradually I didn't even notice...

I disagree with your disagreement of his disagreement. There is a such thing as looking too real, at least at the current level of CG technology. But then, if we are talking about a Camaro turning into a two-story building I say all bets are off (no, not strictly sci-fi in the outer space sense). Perhaps a more apropos example is the shiny silver space ship in Star Wars The Piece-of-Crap Prequels.

The other aspect of this discussion is, what happens when CG is so good it is impossible to tell from the real thing? Particularly, when human interaction with generated elements becomes completely fluid?

People still do stop-action animation as an art form; however, at some point it will so completely be for the sake of the art that one wonders if there will be a point to doing it the "old way."

My salt and pepper shakers came as a set. They did not, however, come with salt and pepper in them. They were a - wait for it - Empty Set.

Hope I didn't break the maths too much.

I won't argue whether or not the weapon is useful (in fact, that is unknowable - either we use it one day and thank [insert favorite deity here] we developed it, or we never use it, which takes an awfully long time find out), but I will argue that we waste - provably waste - far more money than the development costs of this weapon. It is sad that the majority of people (or at least the vocal minority) focus so hard on symptoms that they completely miss the problem.