Agreed. I've spent 1/2 my career as (primarily) a system/application programmer and the other 1/2 as (primarily) a Unix system administrator - usually alternating between the two. Invariably, whenever I apply for one type of job, the recruiter/HR person only sees the other type of experience and/or can't seem to understand that one person can do both things, often at the same time. Fortunately, it hasn't kept me from being continuously employed for the past 25+ years - or, perhaps, I've just been lucky.

Also, perhaps, if we reject DRM, the parts of the web we wall off are exactly the ones we should.

Music will be on our side of the wall; DRM is dead there. Seems to me that's a trend worth encouraging.

That's more a function of browsers bundling Javascript support than of the language itself. You could substitute Tcl/Tk, (or Perl, Python, etc...). Presently, there's a Tcl/Tk plugin for Mozilla and IE.

Save simultaneously to multiple, external, independently controlled locations. If the data is not private there should be no problem with allowing 3rd parties access for truly independent record keeping. If the data is private you could still upload encrypted copies to 3rd parties on a defined, regular basis, to be unencrypted only by court order.

Here's the question. If you meet one of these women in the elevator and happen to remember which booth she was working, would you feel confident that you could ask her a question about that company/product and get an informative answer? If yes, they're not booth babes, they're marketing people who happen to be attractive (which certainly helps their career, don't get me wrong). The problem isn't attractive women manning the booths, the problem is when the women are there solely to be attractive (in a very literal sense).

That's not it at all. I wasn't trying to be condescending (like you apparently are). Just stating a fact.

No one, including your brightest six-year-old, is capable of understanding something before their brain is sufficiently developed. To argue otherwise indicates that *your* brain is insufficiently developed. I love my god daughter a LOT (and she loves me a LOT) and I think she's really - really - smart, but Quantum Mechanics is beyond her grasp at this point, no matter how well explained.

Einstein was either over-simplifying or had never actually tried explaining something really complex to a six-year-old.

Even women are more likely to want to talk to a well-dressed, attractive woman than the pushy marketdroid or worse, the obese engineer wearing a t-shirt and ripped jeans who smells like he hasn't bathed in a week. It's not just about appearance; it's also about appearance. Know what I mean?

Well... Any idiot can make a complex argument. :-)

Having recently spent time with a friend and her six-year-old daughter, I can honestly, accurately, say that is not true. The kid is really, really smart - for a six-year-old - but, like *all* six-year-old humans, her brain simply isn't developed enough to grasp many - many - concepts. This also applies, to a lesser extent, to gifted kids (my wife was a Gifted Education teacher). In either case, any parents (or Albert Einsteins) who say otherwise are fooling themselves.

Or does the mass of the Universe decrease?

Only send skinny people - duh.

Heck, I'd go with understanding that just certain people would be dead back on Earth... :-)

You make good points for cases where the Earth in general becomes less/un-inhabitable - for whatever reason - but not for large asteroid strikes, gamma-ray bursts and eventual Sun death. Yes, those are very rare or far off in the future, but the long-term survival of those types of events requires us living somewhere else.

Hopefully, we'll evolve into a less stupid, petty, short-sighted, self-destructive species by the time we need to deal with those kind of things.

Coincidentally, the alt text for that xkcd image is: "Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory."

Agreed. The entire notion of secret courts should be anathema to any free society.