"I have an idea for an app" is exactly what riles up programmers. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you, the "nontechnical person", do your job right, then you'll find a competent and cooperative programmer.

GOOD ideas are NOT a dime a dozen. If they were, every programmer would have a successful business simply by implementing their own good ideas. I've been programming for decades and have a couple ideas I think are really good. One has been described as a "billion dollar idea" by a friend of mine. We don't have the type of experience necessary to bring it to life on our own (without huge learning). We do embedded software and the idea is web/network/mobile. Another neat idea I've got could be put together by a competent Android programmer in a week or two - again, I haven't tried 'droid and when I have looked at Java it made me cringe. This one seems less likely to be a blockbuster, but the risk/reward is still good 'cause it should be relatively easy.

So what do you propose I do? My best bet is probably to bite the bullet and learn Android programming on the simple app. That would then provide some experience for the mobile part of the other. Or should I hire an Android programmer for the simple app? And would they be an asshole because all I'd provide is the "idea" while they write the code for a price?

Yeah, I'm starting to think they're a pump-n-dump stock. They keep talking about the price of rare earths and how they have this mine, and how they just need to clear some government hurdle... It's always right around the corner. Dude, it's their own fucking mine, just ramp production back up and show me the money. They need to stop talking about it and start producing. Been a few years now.

I was asked to interview a guy that my boss wanted to hire from another part of the company. I gave him FizzBuzz in the interview. He spent a long time and did not complete it - he did have stuff running and partly working. He's a young guy and was really distraught over the whole thing. I recommended we not hire him "guy can't code" but they did anyway. Turns out he's actually not bad in normal circumstances, and rather good at some other things (which is why they wanted him in the first place). So NO, you should not base a decision on a single programming task. Now had he failed FizzBuzz AND shown no other promising characteristics they would not have hired him.

BTW he sits next to me now and his nick is Fizz...

Yep, I've heard the stories about standard panel size. But I'd rather have a 30" 720 than a 32" 768. Shit, just give me a mode that puts black around the 720 image on the 768 TV. Nope. The rescaling really does hurt image quality. Notice that ALL 720s are like this now and NONE of the 1080s have an unusual panel resolution.

1080 on a 720 TV requires a scaling of 1.5 to 1 which is relatively easy. Going from 720 to 768 requires a stretch of 16/15 which is NOT easy. Also going from 720 (most broadcast TV in the US) to 1080 is a multiplier of 1.5. So OTA and bluray will look great on a 1080 TV but will require an unusual scaling to reach 768. I used to have an actual 720 DLP TV and it looked quite fantastic compared to the 768 LCD that replaced it, and that's not due to the tech difference. This is why many people see a difference between 1080 and 720 TVs. Try rescaling a nice clear image by 16/15 and see what happens.

The real problem is that the resolution is exactly double that of 1920x1080. This means scaling up or down will work very well and people won't be able to tell the difference between this and 1080p. You know, because all the 720 TVs are actually 1366x768 which means images have to be smeared to shit, making 1080 TV look so much better (even with OTA 720 shows). And yes, I'm claiming industry-wide effort to make 1080 appear visibly better than 720. Or perhaps the 1080 sets will start to be 1152 to make 4K look better than regular HD even with 1080 content.

With a theme park, at least, you can also choose to avoid the place entirely

Yeah, but when you're already booked and just spent 2 days driving 1200 miles to get there, already checked in and spent one night at a resort, then show up at a theme park where they ask you to stick a finger in a scanner.... That's not really the time to opt-out. Thanks Disney World.

Yes the posters attitude may be the problem, and yes classes in people skills would be helpful but honestly the biggest problem here seems to me to be convincing HR that the poster can do the job. A problem I think plagues many people who aren't specifically trained for a given job.

And convincing them that he can do the job without being a problem. Often (not always) PhDs are considered (or consider themselves) really good at stuff because of their credentials. Even stuff outside their major. In the general case that is not so, but it can lead to arrogance, or preferential treatment, both of which are bad for the work environment. I had a manager tell me he'd only ever hire a PhD if he wanted someone with that specific area of knowledge due to this phenomenon.

I've worked with a number of PhDs mostly working in areas of their education and it's been mostly great with a few that had ego issues. OTOH many of them were working in their area of expertise and were quite good ;-) Come to think of it, the problem guys were working outside their area of expertise.

Apparently - if you believe the LERN (cold) fusion folks, the easy path to gold would be so type of platinum-hydrogen fusion. No exactly cheap precursors ;-)

That's so stupid. If your code is going to generate a 24 byte GUID then it should do so under any valid set of inputs to the GUID generator. In fact, if there it's even possible to generate a larger number it should be truncated to 24 just to be sure. If date and time are going into it, you have to consider a reasonable range of dates. But thanks for the example, it shows how little effort some companies put in.

When you buy a ski ticket, you waive your right to sue the ski operator if certain rules are properly followed. When you buy a ticket to go to space, you willingly assume all of the risk.

They're not talking about protection for people on the ground. They're saying the people onboard are taking all the risk and directly comparing it to skiing. We're at the point where ski equipment is probably quite reliable and in addition a skier can and should inspect their own equipment and be blamed for any liability. None of that is true for the space industry - the passengers are not in control, could not make a reasonable inspection of anything, and the field is so new there may certainly be negligence on the part of the manufacturer. Watch the videos from Space Ship One, see where Burt Rutan tells his guys to go down to the junkyard and see what kind of parts they can find - 'cause the automotive guys have some good stuff. While I'm certain they're doing a higher quality job on the commercial vehicles, I think it would be unfair to shield them from liability to the extent of the ski-equipment industry.

You explanation is informative. Not only is your definition of temperature new to me, I find the consequences unfortunate. They should have a different term for this state rather than "negative temperature". Sure it's interesting physics, but the headline seems a bit sensational due to the definition of temperature needed to make it possible.

Got tips for catching time/date bugs "from the mysterious future"?

Why does software functionality depend on the date? Calculation issues maybe... but failure to lauch? WTF? I'm most curious to learn how this even happens.

Ford, Toyota, Ferrari and Honda would start publishing comic books, so that they could protect what, up until now, was unprotectable.

Hollywood will love it when they have to pay a licensing fee for every car in every shot in a movie - retroactively of course.

And then there's this from TFS:

attorney J. Andrew Coombs argues in legal papers that the Batmobile incorporates trademarks with distinctive secondary meaning...

Trademarks have to registered with the PTO or they do not exist - looks to me like he's making this up.

The failure to convert falls squarely on the government. See building codes for examples. So long as your construction industry is using imperial units, society is not going to change.