drag their sorry asses through middle America to see the seeds they have sown

It is really, Really, REALLY hard to convince the people who believe in Free Trade. They were taught the theory in school. Often they were taught it or had it reinforced in Comm school while getting an MBA. I had an argument about this with somebody taking Comm school while I was an undergrad. This was back in the 90s, when Perot was running. It was all "why should I listen to an undergrad. What do you know?" and I was like, "our grandchildren are going to hate us". It looks more like our children will hate us. I had no idea how fast it would happen.

Finally, a lot of these guys are doing well for themselves. Even if they see other people doing badly, they still buy into the "they're just not working hard enough and smart enough" meme. It's waaaay too easy to believe something when you're paid to believe it. The people who are doing well are often paid to believe in Free Trade.

Finally, the middle class can indeed get a temporary boost from Free Trade. It's the macro economic version of selling your house and using the money to take trips and throw parties. We sell our production capability, the middle class gets $20 microwaves at Wal Mart for a few years, while ignoring the relatively small number of people who used to work at the microwave factory. Then, we cut another trade deal.

Eventually we run out of new trade deals to cut, just as you run out of possessions to sell. Then the party is over.

Ah, but if one layers fails, they all fail. It always works like that.

Bits coming through the cable would sound warmer.

Oh, fuck.

bad enough every video cable is an adaptor, now what, more? [groans]

why do companies that go under the market, get bought by private equity and then come back into the market and get valued highly?

Because all companies hit rough spots, and when a company looks vulnerable PE vultures will do anything they can to put their talons in. This might include back room deals for another investing house to short the stock and make it look bad. Another tactic would be to seat board members who will make "poor decisions" in running the company while preserving what the vultures want (real estate, patents, etc.). Then the vultures take the company into their lair, beat it into submission, and rape it. After that they pump just enough silicone into the boobs to make her look pretty for a few months. They then sell it back to the public market as a virgin beauty queen.

Any other silly questions?

I know you were going for funny, but much of what you will be smelling in your experiment is from bacteria eating the protein and polysaccharides in the meat. The DNA is remarkably stable and even if some of it is fragmented, you have a massively redundant set in your pile of meat.

We've sequenced DNA from nearly a million years ago and I regularly store DNA dried out and stuck to a piece of paper. DVDs won't last nearly that long before the dyes start to break down. For a long term archival system, we could do much worse than DNA.

I do not "fear" the cloud. I do hate, however, the hype, with stratospheric hate.

I just watched the video ( too bad I can't understand the Japanese ). Utterly cool. I already find myself thinking about how the next generation could look like, and what capabilities it would have the current generation has not ( yet ). One thing, though, puzzles me: what about using a material different than plastic ? If these robots are to ever go on a space walk or do work in hard vacuum, their plastic parts are going to be broken down quite rapidly by cosmic radiation, most of all, however, by UV radiation from the Sun. Titanium an option ?

Regarding your last question: I recently went to quite a lot of interviews ( and just landed a great new job, so it was worth all the hassle and bullshit ). I was formerly in a ( non-US ) Navy, and I can tell you from recent experience: be low-key about it . Don't rub it away, but ... your military background is not, most probably, what a company is going to hire you for. Insisting upon it is the worst option, as you will be looked ( and frowned ) upon as one who lives in the past. As soon as you are hired and start working, you'll see: the importance of military background fades to near-nothingness, as you and your new colleagues will have enough problems to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Godspeed !

Stallman is right, in sofar that any sensible engineer should never have had his works, artefacts, algorithms and data "in" the cloud. Period.

My point was: even though the stuck formerly-molten salt may be safe in itself, it is in a position to impede flow in the pipe or valve it may now be clogging and cause future use of those pipes or valves to cause complications or emergencies of its own if not discovered and fixed before then - next time you try to drain the tank in an emergency after missing leftover sub-critical non-molten salt stuck in there, it may fail to work because the clogged pipe or valve is not allowing flow.

So, while molten salt may be easier to keep under control, its very nature also opens up a whole gamut of new potential failure modes. Finding pipe/valve/pump materials that can survive the very harsh nature of molten salt for a long time is a big challenge as well.

Oh please. According to the DHS, the US has only been at elevated risk of terrorist attack or higher since the vague Advisory System was created. What exactly does this weirdly unspecific system do besides promote general fear?

Is it because they're not real attacks, but crap like this story? Is it because they're attacks that the FBI actively assisted because the "terrorists" were actually idiots that couldn't pull off a real attack if they tried? Is it because the "jihadi attacks" were to take place in war zones and didn't warrant domestic spying?

Because the attacks we did hear about were pretty lame.

Now that's off the deep end. Get back on your meds.

I'll just leave this here. It's come in handy in the past, and does much to clear up the nerd/geek/dork debates.

I think you have that backward. It should read, "people who break big laws, also tend to break little ones."

As in, "people who intend to bomb a rally have no qualms about not keeping up with their taxes."
Not, "people who don't keep up with their taxes have no qualms about bombing rallies."

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.