Me too. My last post: Sept 7 2014.

What got me is that he admitted that he hadn't even tried the thing he's poo-pooing.

My first Lasik was done back when the procedure was considered "experimental". Then later I had it done again on the same eye. Before I laid down on the table, they were testing the laser on something like a block of wood with copper mesh. Sparks were flying, IIRC.

Having studied the Therac 25, I asked them if they ever had to reboot the machine. "All the time" they said. Yikes.

I got curious about this, and found a handy chart on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

According to the fatality data, the US is worse than Australia, Germany, France. But it's also worse than Italy, which when I was there seemed pretty bad in terms of the things you mentioned. But in my experience it all pales to India, which, sure enough is much worse than all of those countries. :)

I had some kids in a class I was teaching invent an umbrella that used a closed system of two connected canisters, one on each end. The liquid inside (I forget which) was chosen so that when heated it became *more* dense, causing the sun-ward side to be heavier, turning the umbrella toward the sun. It seems that sort of passive system is possible, if you wanted to go down the invention road. :)

From what I can tell, nakedness drives American fear.

Full disclosure: I work for NVIDIA on cloud gaming.

I was as skeptical as you about the latency. In this interview. Phil Eisler talks about 200ms of XBox + TV latency that people live with every day. (See page 2) If that's our target, then that's pretty doable, since with strategically located data centers you can get the network latency down to 20-30 ms.

In the work we're doing, we're actually focusing more on hitching in the game than latency, since the latency isn't as big a deal if you're say in the Bay Area where one of our test clouds is. Heck, I played Trine2 from the east coast and it was very playable. I wouldn't play BF4 across the country, of course. :)

There are plenty of other risks with the idea, but I wouldn't put latency at the top of the list.

Hugh Pickens is Slim Pickens' son.

SQL is being replaced with NoSQL DBs + imperative code. Want a join? Code up a couple of loops.

How long before makefiles get replaced with something imperative? Is there anything else widely used that's declarative?

Come to think of it, if I remember correctly, "iterate in the living room" is something my wife and I used to do before our daughter was born.

And now you're lucky if you "iterate" in the bedroom, with the lights off, on your birthday.

> They don't use proprietary chargers.

Eh? Have you ever tried charging a iPhone with a "normal" USB charger?

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/08/03/1743240/Hardware-Hackers-Reveal-Apples-Charger-Secrets

So what's your answer? They shouldn't have any app at all? If they added an Android kickstarter campaign to their next funding drive, would *you* contribute?

Interesting idea, but it sounds a lot like affirmative action, with the same problems.

Frostbite porn?

Learning that my pacemaker runs Java?

Seriously though, here are some things I've heard:
- Software written by a bunch of graduate students was going to be used in surgery
- Windows NT used to control a ship
- Invalid software models used to "prove" that the foam that hit Columbia's wing didn't cause damage