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User: Dgtl_+_Phoenix

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  1. Re:Totally agree on Why We Should Teach Our Kids To Code · · Score: 1

    One of the products at the company I work at does this sort of thing with a configurable administrator experience. You would be shocked at just how surprised the average user is to discover that you can do this. It's super neat, as far as business applications go...

  2. Terrible summary on Facebook To Put Off IPO Until Late 2012 · · Score: 1

    The summary absolutely mischaracterizes the blogs it references. The blog relating to Bacebook's bankers doesn't saw anything more than that they can't rule out unsound financials. However, the author himself goes on to say that he doubts this, instead suspecting that the planned delay most likely relates to market conditions. He's likely correct. While the likes of Goldman Sachs may have over paid, Facebook appears to be a solvent venture. Groupon would love to say as much... But don't worry, if they just get big enough they'll start raking in the cash. Never mind the fact that as revenues grow at Groupon, so do loses.

  3. Re:Yes, if you must on EU Extends Music Copyright to 70 Years · · Score: 3, Informative

    Correct, but to be fair the original point of copyright law in Europe was to regulate and control printers. The crown got control over what could be printed and printers got a monopoly (limited time, could be reissued). It's much easier to monitor the printing of seditious materials when only a handful of people can legally print. I like the new purpose better than the original...

  4. Not a partisan issue on Amazon Drops California Associates to Avoid Sales Tax · · Score: 1

    Say what will about Liberals vs Conservatives, Democrats vs Republics, that isn't the issue here. The issue is whether or not California, a state, has the right to collect sales tax from an entity that, legal speaking, isn't selling there. SCOTUS has pretty clearly said that it doesn't have this right. Now, in an effort to raise revenues, California has tried to tax them anyway. Why? Because many of the roughly 25 thousand affiliates "forgot" to include their affiliate income. California would like to have this money and the online retailers are easier to come after than all of those affiliates. Frankly this isn't Amazon's problem, at least so far as California is concerned. California is trying to control interstate commerce. And as much as I don't like the over application of the commerce clause, this is EXACTLY why it's part of the constituation.

  5. Re:Lawsuit maybe? on Software Firm Looking To Hire Naked Coders · · Score: 1

    Baby, of course you're probably smarter than me. I just fear that all this time away from the kitchen has probably addled your delicate female mind. Why don't you rustle me up an ice cold beer and maybe fix me a sandwich. I'm sure after that you'll feel right as rain...

  6. Re:Lawsuit maybe? on Software Firm Looking To Hire Naked Coders · · Score: 1

    Of course it's also possible that I may have been joking... But don't let me stop you from stereotyping geeks in the name of putting down sexism.

  7. Lawsuit maybe? on Software Firm Looking To Hire Naked Coders · · Score: 1

    Sounds like a sexual harassment lawsuite in the making... Now if only they can find a woman who can code.

  8. Re:Not only that on Bashing MS 'Like Kicking a Puppy,' Says Jim Zemlin · · Score: 1

    Technically yes. Philosphically the difference is irrelevant. Of course I don't blame them for the whole forking thing... Oracle is evil. The difference pretty much comes down to this: Don't be evil - Google Just make money - M$ Be evil :-) - Oracle

  9. Re:Not only that on Bashing MS 'Like Kicking a Puppy,' Says Jim Zemlin · · Score: 1

    What an insightful, thoughtful reply about MS and Linux... You do know that this is slashdot, right?

  10. Re:Not only that on Bashing MS 'Like Kicking a Puppy,' Says Jim Zemlin · · Score: 1

    OSX is really pretty slick... But the best office suite on the Mac is MS Office for Mac. I believe it's still Microsoft's number three most prrofitable products behind Office and Windows. Of course the Open Office Zealots will tell you that everyone uses it primarily due to vendor lock-in.

  11. You get what you pay for... on The 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As much as we might like to think otherwise, software development is a business. And like all businesses the goal is to generate profit by increasing revenue and decreasing cost. As such an inherent bargain is struck between consumers and software shops as to proper ratio of cost to quality. High volume consumer applications get a lot of attention to quality though less to security. It's all a matter of threat assessment verse the cost of securing against such threats. Sure we all want perfect software where the software engineer is held accountable for every bug. But we also want software whose cost is comparable to a 20 dollar an hour sweet shop programmer. The software that results is really an economic compromise between the two. Running a space shuttle or saving patients lives? You probably are willing to shell out for the high cost software engineer. Putting up your hello kitty fan club blog? You might settle for something a little bit less... high class. I've been in this business for awhile now and as much as we like to wax poetic about quality we are still just trying to have our cake and eat it too. Better, faster, cheaper. Pick two.

  12. The debate ended long ago on The Lancet Recants Study Linking Autism To Vaccine · · Score: 1

    The American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, and the WHO have long since agreed that there is no credible proof for link between autism and vaccine. The 1998 study has been under intense fire for over a decade, with most of the doctors having pulled their names from it long since. We've been at the point of next to zero proof for a long time and yet the "debate" drags on. I would postulate that the cause is tightly linked the timing of childhood vaccinations in relationship to the symptoms of autism first becoming apparent. Unfortunately, I think that means that the debate is far from over.

  13. Re:human brain on 100 Million-Core Supercomputers Coming By 2018 · · Score: 1

    Not sure about the number of cores, a number of experts say that around 20 petaflop should do it. We should see computers capable of doing this by the end of the decade. Of course creating the AI or brain scans necessary to accomplish this is going to be the more challenging problem. What will be fantastic about simulated brains is that their neurons will be significantly faster than standard human neurons. This means that your simulated brain can produce orders of magnitude more work despite being no smarter.

  14. Re:How many problems can these systems really solv on 100 Million-Core Supercomputers Coming By 2018 · · Score: 2, Funny

    When the comparable multi-processing capacity is in your cell phone, what are you going to do with it?

    Stream high definition porn... duh.

  15. Re:Germans and Wolfenstein .... on Russia Recalls Modern Warfare 2 · · Score: 0, Troll

    While only antidotal evidence, my experience with native Germans was quite similar. Attempts to speak of the Nazi era were generally dismissed with the tone that an American northerner would dismiss slavery. Pressing the issue yielded more awkward results. Only the Jewish population had any interest in anything beyond tacit acknowledgement of the Nazi regime. Given the culture of quite denial, it’s not shocking that many German laws focus on keeping this portion of German history out of the spotlight.

  16. Kurzweil would disagree... on Has the Rate of Technical Progress Slowed? · · Score: 1

    What utter nonsense. While the singularity folks don't have me running off to turn myself into a robotic nano-swarm just yet, the proof of continued growth is more than just speculation. The author is setting a false measure of the expansion of knowledge and then concluding that growth has slowed when society falls do measure up. A flying car argument by any other means is still a flying car argument. He admits as much by citing Moore's but quickly shifts gears to focus on going to the moon and curing cancer. Amusingly, we've made vast headway in the last 50 years in the later topic. Cancer death rates have been declining decade over decade since the 60. Cancer death amongst the young has shown huge declines during this time, a statistic that often flies off the radar due to how cancer mortality rates are reported. While there isn't a cure yet, the incremental gains we've made over the past century have turned a cancer diagnosis from a sure death sentence to a survivable disease. Just because knowledge growth has come in the form of digital growth doesn't mean that it has failed to grow or accelerate. It just means that you won't get getting your flying car (or in this case super Apollo++ rocket) anytime soon. The law of accelerating returns isn't about the market accelerating in the direction you want, it's about accelerating in the direction the market wants.

  17. Re:CD-RW is a good middle ground for archives on Thanks For the ... Eight-Track, Uncle Alex · · Score: 1

    CD-RW can last 30 years, assuming pretty ideal conditions (and even up to 100 if you believe some of the ratings). Cool dark place is pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered. Pressed CDs can last quite a bit longer. 50+ years should be no problem. Likewise, I think that it's pretty likely there will still be disk players that are backward compatible with CD/DVD. Either way, an external drive that should be backwards compatible with USB descendants should at least let you hedge your bets. That way you're using two very main stream technology staples of the moment and not just one.

  18. Re:Strongly typed language? on Scala, a Statically Typed, Functional, O-O Language · · Score: 2, Informative

    Assuming you're not being merely rhetorical (because the definition is kind of loose), strongly typed just means that the language makes some restrictions on how operations operating on different value types can be intermixed. Assuming that you're not a programmer, I'll give an example. Letâ(TM)s say you have a BMW Z4 roadster. It's a car. Understanding the nature of cars, you know that it can be classified as a vehicle, a sports car, a BMW sports car, and a BMW Z4 roadster. Strongly type languages make restrictions like you can't just say: roadsterCar car = myCar. This is implicitly is saying my car is roadster. Rather you have to explicitly say that the car is a roadster (called a cast) like this: roadsterCar car = (roadsterCar) myCar This concept has a number of benefits, most of which are related to catching programming mistakes before they become bugs or immediately at runtime. Without strongly typed languages, you won't notice that you tried to call a bike a BMW Z4 roadster until you try to get it up to 140 miles an hour. And by then you might have tried to do valid but nonsensical things that might have really broken something.

  19. Communist China... on Teen Killed At Chinese Internet Addiction Camp · · Score: 5, Funny

    In America, you can beat internet addiction. In communist China, internet addiction beats you.

  20. SAP's ABAP on What Programming Languages Should You Learn Next? · · Score: 1

    Clearly you fools have been forgetting ABAP, the best business application language 1972 has to offer.

  21. Re:I wonder what.... on $5 Per Month Fee Proposed For Legal Music P2P · · Score: 1

    50 years from now we won't likely be the computers' pets... We'll likely be the computers. Or at least near enough to them as to not make much of a real difference.