ChillyWater

Or, the system automatically keeps your car a specified distance from the vehicle in front of you.

Definitely not serious, but super fun: "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson

Nature finds a way :) (Door #2)

I suppose if it was an alcohol poisoning situation or something like that, I have to get my stomach pumped.

I had acid reflux from the time I was 15 years old. By the time I was 22 it had eaten holes almost through my esophagus, so I had Laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication surgery. They basically wrapped part of my stomach around the valve and it tightened it up. No more heartburn.

On the down side, I no longer can vomit, so there's that. (Confirmed after the not-so-smart decision to try every booth at a chili cook-off.)

Not a single good place in the entire United States to move to?

Miami, Savanna, Boston, NYC, Austin, Vermont, Minneapolis, Duluth, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Nashville, Colorado, Scottsdale, Vegas, Tahoe, San Diego, Seattle ...

It seems like there are a lot of different climates and feels to choose from ...

Red/Green/Blue Mars is authored by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Dream-killer. :P

If it is actually an average of one every 3 minutes 14.159265359 seconds ... now you've got something.

Without checking the interweb, isn't Stuart Smalley == Al Franken?

I worked for that organization from 1996-2005. Nothing earth-shattering:

- Requirements Reviews with Customer, Requirements Analysts, and Testers all sitting around the same table going over them word by word. (e.g. 12 people to review changing an interface by one parameter so that a new value can be displayed in the cockpit.)

- Code reviews with 8 people around the table going over the changes line by line.

- Independent organizations performing unit tests and system tests on the software. Again, with 10 people around the table going over your test results line by line, plot by plot.

38 Sioux in Mankato, MN 1862. This sounds like a lynching, but it was the sanctioned by the government, so maybe it doesn't fit the definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibley_Park

I'm thinking you would want to keep batting around the cycle of various meals. Seems like you wouldn't get the full nutrient coverage with only one or two (or five) different meals. Sometimes I really crave a salad with a bunch of vegetables. Sometimes I crave meat. Makes me think my body knows something.

Exactly what I saw during my stays in Singapore for the last six months or so. How can there be so much retail? The only thing I could figure is that maybe there is nothing else to do ...

You can't work around the house on the weekend (because you can't afford a house). You don't go RV-ing for the weekend (because the are no RVs or places to take them). You don't go to the lake cabin (because you can't afford one).

I don't know, I must be missing something.

I'm sure there is a clever internet name for it, but in the absence of that information, let's call it Chilly's Postulate:

"An online post pointing out a spelling error will inevitably contain a spelling error."

I used to be on the Space Shuttle Primary Flight Software team in Houston. Super motivating environment.

There was another independent team in Huntington Beach that wrote the Backup Flight Software. Never used it in 34 years of flights.

Poor bastards ...

I think the funniest thing about the books are the names of the ships. Things like: The 'Probably Not a Good Idea' dropped into orbit around the fourth planet.

"Song of Stone" was written in an interesting style to me. It is some sort of post-apocalyptic The Stand kind of situation.

He alternates between normal modern prose and some very dense poetry-prose. I would have to read and re-read those passages to get the meaning, but it was enjoyable.

If they both succeed and NASA wants a third, SpaceX would seem to be sitting pretty.

If they both do not succeed and we assume that SpaceX reached too far, then NASA still looks like the good guy because they gave them a shot.

Usually, with aircraft or spacecraft, this is a reconfigurable plumbing setup that allows engines/jets to use the fuel source from a different engine on the fly. For instance, the Shuttle could perform OMS to RCS crossfeeds.

That is where I am. I work for <major defense contractor> and they pay for my phone. I can have any one I want as long as it is a BlackBerry Curve.

This is my only chance at anything even resembling a cool phone.

You see the same thing when laying tile. If you have a small field tile with fancy glass accents or whatever, the customer really wants random uniformity, not pure random.

It may close off an outside career, but it also opens it up within the huge company that you are doing the secret work for.

I don't know of any reqs within my company (GlobalDefenseCorp) that indicate salary is increased when you go dark. Your compensation is that you get to work on cool shit, which will likely lead to another project in the same vein.

I think elevators are usually counter-balanced so that the motor doesn't have to really lift anything except the occupants. Maybe not though ...

I brought my MacBook in the other day because an iTunes upgrade broke it. Didn't have an appt. so I just walked up to the bar. In a few minutes, a guy was helping me. Tried a few things, ran some diagnostics for about 15-20 minutes. Finally found the culprit.

I asked him how much I owed (I don't have AppleCare). "Nothing." Awesome.

If you haven't been around here, you may not have noticed that there aren't a whole lot of "Me too" or "First post!" type of comments.

Some of the comments on HN could pass for short essays with subsequent panel discussions. That's why we read it.

How much encouragement is enough? What's so special about science and engineering? Why aren't young boys encouraged more to get into Nursing and Early Childhood Development? Why have all of my realtors been women?

What a waste of time. Wear what you dig. Get a job that interests you (not society or your parents).

Most of it is written in a custom language called HAL/S (High Level Assembly Language / Shuttle). Some of the nitty gritty is written in assembly.

HAL/S looks a little bit like basic or FORTRAN. It was designed to be very readable and uses some interesting formatting. When you print out a module (lets say GG1ASC), it uses three lines for each line of code so that the superscripts and subscripts are above and below like they should be.

"Levels, Jerry. With cushions ... like ancient Egypt."

Is it just me or does the misuse of the label "Engineer" bother anybody else?

Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University?

I was a little squeamish calling myself an engineer since I never took the certification exam to become a Professional Engineer after graduating with a BS in Aerospace Engineering...

I can smell if someone is taking antibotics. Maybe I can't smell if anybody is, but I can definitely tell when some are.