vadman

I didn't try to invalidate your words :), just sharing my experience. I was also more Russian-looking, especially at a younger age.

Perhaps I was just caught in a bad moment (just after the collapse of the USSR, on the wave of "independence" of Armenia). Or perhaps it's my first name, which is totally Russian (my last name is Armenian and not even Russified like yours - I suppose it's kind of a curious juxtaposition of the 2). I was constantly fighting other kids in the street and had to go to the only Russian elementary school in Yerevan, otherwise my school life would probably be miserable. When I lived in Moscow afterwards, I was just going to the local school with the Russian kids. This is not to say Russians are as a rule extremely welcoming to immigrants, but in my case I had a much better time there.

As far as the good old days, of which I don't remember much - I'm guessing Russians always had a bit of a superiority complex, being a "metropoly" within the USSR, but generally things were kept more in check than now, given the state's declared internationalist policy. Both my parents are half-and-half, which was very common in Armenia - so it must have been not so bad on an everyday level.

Same thing happened to me, only it was in Armenia and grown-up Armenians were talking sh*t to me for being a half-Russian kid (think 1st-grade age). I wouldn't say "Russians are discriminatory", just "people from the former USSR are usually discriminatory". From my experience, in both countries, Armenia was a lot worse.

I sent my Nexus 7 back because the screen made my eyes seriously hurt. That was on mid brightness. Might have been the LED backlight flickering due to PWM or something along those lines, I don't know. E-ink seems like the way to go for now.

I didn't check the roof for snipers, but I had nightmares of heavy cavalry charging at me in the open field while I was one of the poor underequipped peasants. That's what Total War games can do to you :) BTW - a heavy cavalry charge is very scary, I don't recommend standing in its way.

I would guess (based just on observing people in the New York subway) that around 20% of people, at least in the USA, do not have education/income/some other contributing factor to provide a healthy diet for their kids. And they themselves were likely even worse off as kids.

Quick googling result: http://frac.org/initiatives/hunger-and-obesity/are-low-incom...

The drinks used to be much smaller in the 1950's, so 3 martinis would not derail your day. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Hows-Your-Drink-Cocktails-Drinking/dp/...

I don't entirely agree that "absolute numbers are pointless here". If you look at the amount of human suffering, your world is 2x worse.

I didn't study the topic in depth, so take it with a grain of salt, but I recall reading something like this:

* the % of people capable of highly intellectual work is quite low * as time goes on, more fields of activity require those people * you need a growing population to provide that supply

They cited Russia as an example (population has been declining since the collapse of the USSR) - basically, to have e.g. a competitive aerospace industry in the 21st century, Russian population would have to increase by about 25%.

This is just one example.

Code that was well-engineered 3 months ago may suddenly become lacking in light of a client having a brilliant new idea/requirement.

And a programmer is not always in charge of his estimates. He may have to arrive at it together with his team lead who is under pressure from 2-3 project managers, thus only the minimal reasonable time will be allocated, without concern for architecture changes or refactoring.

Why should the grandparent jump through the hoops though?

Also, isn't stripping DRM from Amazon ebooks against the TOS? Potentially exposing him/her to some legal trouble?

Indeed. I don't know much about the designer subculture, but there are a bunch of "iconic" industrial designs that they (should) know about. Another famous one is the IBM wall clock: http://vimeo.com/40953003 (one of the Windows clock gadgets is obviously inspired by it).

(Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fan.) As for the design itself, there is the blatant copying of the seconds hand, but otherwise it seems whoever did it took some care to differentiate the apple clock from the original. E.g. how the lengths of the hour and minute hands relate to the radius of the clock and the size of the hour and minute tick marks. Then of course there are obvious implications of being viewed on a tiny 4" screen. Whether that is enough to build a legal defense on, I have no idea.

That was exactly my thought as I was reading the OP. Pissing off the waitstaff at restaurants is not only rude, but incredibly stupid. As is, there is already a chance that they don't like you for some reason and spit in your food regardless of how nice you are.

Touchpads are IMO less ergonomic and less intuitive than mice, sounds like her grandfather could use an extra bit of both.

Real response from the cops: install a chip in everyone's brain. When a citizen happens to be within 10 ft of a "forbidden" object without authorization, his/her body experiences violent seizures.

Should be possible within 10 years, no?

Do you go to "Doctors" much? You have an extremely idealistic image of them.

Thanks for this. Added to the "read-when-I-get-home" list.

Do you have github/sourceforge? I'd love to read some of your non-trivial code.

I'm not trying to be an a$$hole btw. I am not a coding guru, I genuinely want to minimize the need for comments in my code and am willing to learn from examples.

Your comment reminded me of this video on black holes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYKyt3C0oT4

I hated it too and then I installed the "Tree style tabs" add-on. It's great, they should add that functionality in the vanilla Firefox IMO.

"[Rotator cuff tear] also commonly affects orchestra conductors, choral conductors, and drummers (due, again, to swinging motions)." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotator_cuff#Rotator_cuff_tear

I wonder if this could be a side effect of Leap. The motions required are not as violent as those of conductors, but then again there are finer/weaker muscles in our wrists/fingers that could be affected.

I have to enable way too much stuff in NoScript to proceed when I actually click on an editor button. Giving permissions just to shortcutfoo is not enough. NoScript also shows airbrake.io, stripe.com, olark.com. I don't know what any of those are, so I'm not enabling them. So I cannot use your website, as cool as the premise sounds :/

The article had the bit about Microsoft shutting them out of the market.

In any case, superprogrammers != super marketplace conquerors, and IMO should not be judged as (un)impressive on that metric.

Hmm. Well I was thinking in the context proposed by the grand-grand...parent, even though he backtracked:

"...eugenics. This is not something I am opposed to from a scientific point of view. We do it with livestock, so why not us?"

You can be predisposed to a lot of things -- diabetes, heart problems, and so on -- most of those don't necessarily prevent you from reproducing. But being "intelligent, motivated, imaginative" has little to do with having a "disadvantageous" genetic makeup leading to health issues. So you are not taking the whole "nature" part into account, only part of it.

Also note that I am not necessarily supporting eugenics, just thinking aloud. At the same time, I don't see how your proposal is any better than "classical" eugenics from the human rights point of view. We can take it one step further and assign an importance coefficient for voting. Let the professor/researcher vote count for 3 units; as for the proles, .7 will suffice. After all, why shouldn't people with intelligence, self-control, and imagination have more of a say in where the country is headed -- it's mostly their kids who will live in this country in the future, so it's only fair.

If you want to prevent individuals who are e.g. predisposed to certain disorders from being born, I don't see how money as criteria can help.

The last paragraph of the article (about the chip in one's brain) is quite scary. Force brain chip implants that keep the serotonin levels artificially high to keep the unwashed masses content; some kid at school is too active - put a chip in his brain to keep the hormonal level down; etc. etc. The possibilities are endless.

EDIT: typo

If the general population programs as much as it applies math and sciences, Atwood's worries about "more bad code" would be completely moot.

Or a smaller rock moving really fast. "The Killing Star" describes it well, here is an excerpt: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Rela...