It's easy to sling a coin into the ocean. Not so easy to find it again.

Forget masks, Ironman suit baby...

Just be careful when handling Tiberium.

Modded up! Ah nuts...

First, you get the sugar... Then, you get the money... Then, you get... the foldable smartphone...

"C'mon Microsoft, we need you" - Never thought I'd read those words on SlashDot.

Well, the family of the owners of corporate entites that own the federal reserve have been at this before Running Bear and Sitting Bull were just a twinkle in Chief Big Feather's eye. Herr Bauer's son had a fantastic idea in Frankfurt. I think that was around 1730, no?

My friend, how I hope you are correct.

The problem here is we are living in the ecosystem of 2019. The genies are all out of the bottle, and they are feeding off each other. The family unit is degrading quite rapidly, and with two working parents as the person who stays at home to rear our next generation is not valued, we are going to have institutionally raised children by a set of teachers that either can't get more money in another job, or are of the few that want to selflessly make a difference, even though they can have a financially wealthier lifestyle on the production side of things. P's make degrees and if you can't do it, teach it. That's the reality. I think back to when I was at university, there were more 2nd year students transferring to education degrees than freshers. We don't even respect our teachers enough to pay them in satisfaction of a job well done. Now they have to add danger and mental damage pay. No wonder teaching isn't many people's first choice.

If we destroyed all smartphones and portable devices today, and snipped the social networks, I can guarantee you that we will still be continuing on the downwards spiral, as the inertia is there. Imagine the riots for a start, followed by a bunch of dopamine junkies shifting their addictions. There's plenty else out there to get hooked on.

I agree that degrees of separation make it feel more possible, but there is a magic trick in there. Everyone's social profile is biased to puffery and posturing. Scratch at the surface there, and it's not perfume. Everyone has a dark side, everyone lives with shame, everyone dwells on their defeats. Especially those that scream from the mountaintops how fantastic their failures were. There are moments where they believe their mistakes will be repeated, there is outright shame when the thought of their defeat comes to mind.

It is this manic depressive recklessness coupled with arrested development that is the cause of the rift in society, and the cracks that are forming all around us. I used to go to the US and the UK and wonder at civilisation. Now they are approaching third world countries. Good old Australia is not far behind.

Rock bottom will happen sooner than a correction. You would have to start a "grass roots" leadership dancing guy movement, which is a pure emotional thinking play. Unfortunately, a club formed through emotional thinking is not one that a critical thinker ever wants to be a part of. How else, apart from force, or financial constraint, do you get people to work more productively?

But again, I truly hope you are right.

This to me is a very complex topic with multiple dimensions.

Yes, social media does play a deep role, I think not because of hyper-connectivity, rather the hacks that have been used to make it sticky to users. Instant gratification is like crack to young people. Delayed gratification is a learned skill, which is what you seem to be referring to here.

Couple that with media of all sorts showing people spending beyond what is even remotely reasonable, and making it feel as though this is the new norm. Think about it, flight to Europe? No problem! It`s cheap. In real terms as well. Hotels? No problem. Want it now? I can buy it on my phone.

Look carefully at how people in the USA lived in the 1950s. It was very frugal, people worked hard for what they had, and they valued it because it involved a lot of peoples time. Nowadays, we live in a throwaway economy, and if something breaks, buy something new. Too expensive? No problem. Make it cheaper. Drop wages in real terms, prime business to be hyper opportunistic and fast. This is not Mana from heaven, this is a tragedy of commons.

Why do you think young people are committing suicide? It's because their expectations have not been set correctly. There is a wide gulf between the amount of effort *in reality* that you need to put in to be where you *want* to be. A core culture of fake it till you make it is present, and people pull the trigger when in reality they can't make it - in the timescale possible.

If you're a kid, who is in a "no child left behind school", where if you don't do your work, that's OK, we'll just rebaseline, where parenting culture is always, "it's OK little Johnny, it's OK little Suzy", you're always awesome, and participation = prizes, what do you think will happen when these kids who have been set up to be very narcissistic, meet other narcissists? There's a loser there. More importantly, a loser that can't cope. It's a form of arrested development, because grown people now can't wait, can't work hard for a long time with no payoff, kudos and general cheers all around. It's built a neural hunger for dopamine, because who will tell big John or Suzan that they are accepted? That they are worthwhile?

The kids get it. They are scared that they won't be accepted, as they can't handle rejection or failure. There is a backlash to the culture now, where people try to live simply, economically etc. Unfortunately, when you look deeper, they themselves are creating their own tragedy of commons, as they don't spend on capital investments, but rather on operations. We as a society have made systems so cheap, that they are brittle. There is a brilliant Indian word, Jugaad. Google it for a laugh. It's basically McGuyvering everything, and then wondering why core infrastructure and services fail more often. It's cheaper and faster on capital investment, but it never really solves the problem, as although a great hack when you have very limited resources and no time to survive, it doesn't stand upon the shoulders of giants. Our solutions these days are wheat fields, which need to be replanted every year, instead of orchards that bear fruit for decades.

Grimly, I don't think we will solve this. The problem is, we are instant gratification junkies, not just in social media, but life in general. We operate on feelings, not facts, so don't see the hidden traps, and it costs us. We as a society will have to hit rock bottom to reform, and I can guarantee there will be swaths of casualties along the way.

I hope every day that I'm wrong, or that someone much smarter than I will be able to really solve this. Alas, I feel we will be the pheonix that rises from the fire. Let's hope it's not nuclear.

You would think so, and you would be right until you figured out that true omnipotence brings impotence. It's a game of not exercising your powers, and rather influencing those around you. Very much like C-Level office politics. You rule the world, seas will rise when you give the word, and how many people need to die so that you can fish from your balcony?

There's always at least someone on Slashdot who uses discussions like these to get free programmers. "Work for us, and you'll get a paid job later!"

It was a mac shop. You have been warned!

And yet both people failed the embedded chip portion of the interview.

The egg.
The life cycle of a chicken begins with the egg, results in procreation to produce more eggs, and eventually the death of the organism. Ergo, a "chicken" to this argument is viewed from the point of the egg.
Applying evolution, one must define a strict categorization of what a chicken is. Once that is established, there is no "slippery slope" logical fallacy, and you can determine, in binary, what came first on the life cycle, as a chicken.
An "almost chicken" laid a mutated "almost chicken" egg, which is now classed as a chicken. Ergo, the mutated "almost chicken" egg is the world's first chicken egg, which becomes the first chicken.
q.e.d.

So male = C runtime
Female = Flash Runtime
?