Yeah, but when just 1% is convinced that they need to take up arms against our atheist-liberal-secular leaders our lives could be disrupted.

You can't troll a hobo by ordering a machiatto, and then snarkley saying, "I KNOW WHAT IT IS I GOT THE CARAMEL ONE FROM STARBUCKS YESTERDAY."

As someone who has developed Java professionally for a while, I can say that having to pepper 100s of interfaces in the code just to do a closure then write a bunch of cruft to use it is kind of annoying. Not to mention Java the most verbose language gave birth to a bastard child for configuration: XML. I prefer to build cool stuff, not write a bunch of needless code. If JavaScript replaces Java it will be because the JavaScript shops developed better software, faster while the Java shops where writing XML. I have been doing 90% JavaScript the past year or two, solely because of the faster dev times and it's a better language than Java.

The one guarantee in aviation is that a plane will ALWAYS land, however, when and where is up for debate. :)

Right, but the internet was indexed and made traversable by Google, assuming you'd want to know what has the highest hits (has the most authority). Facebook is assuming that you don't really want to know the opinion of an authority on a subject, but instead care more about what your friends think.

I tend to agree with this: Mark Zuckerberg: I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try - but there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention - you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing. If he really said that it was FTW.

http://www.plimoth.org/discover/myth/dead-at-40.php Life expectancy was more like 62 if you made it past infancy...

Good thing human error causes the vast majority of parachuting accidents, as well as aviation in accidents in general. Read the NTSB.gov or the incident reports on dropzone.com

The USPA can ban you from all USPA member drop zones (most commercial skydiving centers in the USA). The only person I know of that had that happened jumped a non FAA TSO'd BASE rig from a plane and pulled at 500ft over the main landing area. USPA minimum altitude for deployment is 2000ft.

The big advantage of text messaging is concurrent conversation with many people. Seeing the advantage of this by computer programmers and tech people should be beyond obvious... Trying to coordinate a night out with 5 people? You can wait to talk to all five or mass message them and reply as they reply.

The Japanese had 70% literacy in the 18th century...

I routinely fly from Raleigh, NC to San Francisco, CA and a few times I've done it at less than 2 hours notice. That's 2 hours from flight booking, to take off. It's not really as bad as everyone seems to be making it out to be. I'm rarely in line longer than 15 minutes, and a lot of times I have lots of electronic devices (G1, huge laptop, Kindle) and occasionally a parachute or two (I skydive for recreation). I never even get hassled when I have a parachute, even the weeks after September 11th.

Right now we have plenty of robots in combat. We have 12,000 unmanned flying machines. They are remotely managed at a rate of 1:1 (man per machine). The military is very much interested in making that ratio more efficient. I imagine the next phase will be remotely controlling multiple drones at once ala StarCraft. Then the strategy aspect and resource management will be more important than the individual decisions. The first group of developers to market such systems are going to be very wealthy :)

People have jumped from 140 ft self deploying the parachute on a BASE jump and that is still air (known as a freefall). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6-MrXBACsk Since wing suits have considerable forward drive and a lot more airspeed you can deploy 100 ft off the ground in the vertical direction.