DeBeers should just flip their marketing strategy. Each diamond should come with a certificate with the names of the slaves who died mining it. Preferably stamped with their blood. Otherwise, it's just a hunk of carbon, which would be easier to make in a lab.

It's really nice to hear from an insider. I now see the balance Google needs to strike, and it doesn't sound like there are any easy solutions. I wish that there were more phones running plain Android with fast updates. That's why I'm just sticking with Nexus phones. I tried CyanogenMod but it's too buggy for me...

In my view, this problem can only be solved by improving the Android OS itself. They need to carve out way more things out of the core OS and make them updateable through the Play Store. Microsoft manages to do this via Windows Updates, I don't see why Google can't figure it out. What makes things worse are carrier specific builds. Apple managed to do tell them to F off, Google should too.

So instead of connecting chips via a circuit board, connect chips directly. It sounds like a good idea, but I think the conclusion, that it would enable every IoT manufacturer to customize their chip configurations, is wrong. It would be expensive due to economies of scale, and I don't see why IoT devices can't use the plain old circuit board. Do IoT devices need to be super small and super power efficient? However, I do see that it might benefit smartphone manufacturers, where size and power consumption matter. However, it is likely that suppliers would offer chip configurations for narrower use cases.

Good luck to the AI who needs to implement the "Do What I Want" button specified by the idiot customer.

I use IMDB mostly to pick out movies to watch based on user ratings. But I've noticed that in the past 10 years, there's been a divergence in IMDB ratings and my ratings. Anyone else notice this? Some movies rated 8 are total crap. 10 years ago, every movie rated 8 or above was guaranteed to be a great movie. Maybe my tastes have changed, but i feel the voters have changed. My theory is that IMDB is more popular, and now the people who vote on it are just the average person, not computer nerds like me.

Can't we use this DCMA takedown system to take down all content posted by the RIAA and pals? I'm curious, what's stopping someone from just submitting random DCMA takedown notices? Google has no idea who holds copyright for what song. We should use this weapon against them. The real solution is to starve the beast. Don't buy music, go to concerts, where more money makes it to the artists.

That means that bankers should be getting 20000 years in jail because the amount of fraud and theft they have committed are in the billions.

I'm waiting for notepad to be ported to Emacs

• Functions that span 1000 lines with heavily nested if and switch statements and behaves differently depending on global variables
• Massive 10k line classes that are more mystifying than God himself
• Everything is an interface because you may want to create a mock for it, and you get multiple inheritance!
• No comments. Code essentially comments itself!
• Functions should create side effects, otherwise life would be boring.

In Germany, a non-compete clause is only enforceable if compensated, since that goes against the the constitutional right to work where you want. The company has to pay at least 50% of your salary during the non-compete period. That means even if you did sign a non-compete, it's not valid unless the old company is compensating you. Effectively, this forces companies to balance the need for a non-compete with the cost. Effectively, this means only high up people have the clauses in it.

These are a great idea, but I read that these filament LED bulbs suffer from poor quality, low lifespans, and bad yields, I guess because they're difficult to manufacture. Philips and the big western manufactures have stayed away from making these bulbs, so they're mostly made by Chinese manufacturers, which unfortunately push for lower cost rather than higher quality. I'm not really keen on buying cheap Chinese LED bulbs on the internet because they may not be that safe due to insufficient insulation or distancing and isolation of components.

The problem with Microsoft is they're reactive, not proactive, ... followers, not leaders. I can't think of a lot of things Microsoft has done in the past decade where they were the innovators and leaders. Except for Visual Studio, which is by far the best IDE. However, I think that's changing. They are doing some really cool research. Like their stitching technology Photosynth and Image Composite Editor, and their cool touchscreen technology. I think they feel their fire burning under their asses.

Am I the only one who isn't a big fan of superhero movies? They just rehash the same story over and over again. Like Superman, every movie rehashes the same story.

I hate that uncaptured function call return values get automatically appended to your function's return values... WTF