I really like that quote:

Or it could be that they both evolved from an earlier and different process which was quite inefficient and which was replaced by the 2 mechanisms of bacteria/archea so thoroughly that no genetic trace remains.

Did that include the graphic card in that laptop or not ?

Yeah, a lot of jobs are done with their body. I never understood the people who oppose sex work because "it uses the body" or similar arguments. A lot of jobs are physical and will destroy you over time. What about a mountain guide and his rotten knees, a wallbuilder and his painful back, an electrician with crawling on his knees and repeated shocks, a plumber with handling shit, etc, etc...

It wasn't "anything goes" before capitalism. In Europe it was often king-given monopolies. The first one to do something could often get a monopoly for life (and sometimes even more) to continue doing it. A lot of industries were controlled like that, and it crushed any competition or hope for technical improvements. It also applied to unions (trade unions of which only one per job existed and you were not allowed to work if you were not a member). It even applied to weird things like composing/performing musicals (for Lully in France under Louis XIV for instance).

I have actually written captcha bypasses for webcam/video based webcams. This is an absolutely terrible idea. Them being manipulated for account registration is one problem, using them to login to pre-existing accounts is a completely different, far worse problem. I cannot imagine the smoothbrain thought process that lead to this making it out of a brainstorming session as a real thing.

I used to work in Antarctica. One summer on a new station in the center authorities decided to put us on the same time as the big coastal station, saying that we had sun 24/7 anyway so it wouldn't matter. The idea was to synchronize communication with the head station. Well, the sun still has daily ups and downs, so we had to get up when the sun was lowest and start work when it was the fucking coldest at -50C and we'd go to bed when it was a balmy -20C. After a few days of that we started getting up and start work later and later, until we'd start work at 2pm or so !!!
The next year we had our own timezone.

Well, it needs to be quoted quite subtly. If you try "I don't believe murder is wrong", your are in for a bad time.

Still better than the Ministry of Lies we currently have...

IIRC some of the claimed code at the time were C header files. Sure you can change the comments, but it's not like you can change a function name or its parameters in a public API...

How to they evacuate the heat ? And with the size decrease, doesn't leak current increase, leading to more errors ? How did they solve that, particularly with a 10-fold jump ?

Yes, we can do things like that, so why can't we keep morons at bay ? We need (as a specie) a way to keep toxic people away from power and money and the possibility to ruin things for the rest of humanity. Pipe dream, I know.

Maybe, but honestly having people snort loudly next to you is fucking disgusting. Maybe *they* are the asshole ?

As a manager she is quite direct in telling people hard truths... And often does.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a biker colleague who claimed that motorbikes *need* to make noise for their protection. I was like "so cycles should have a boat horn blowing constantly for their protection too ? And electric cars as well ?" He disagreed.