the continued existence of a universe is based on its ability to produce complex structures without intelligence that would find out how to collapse it and use that as a weapon. The best protection against intelligence getting too far is a steady rate of catastrophic events. As universes get older, their contents get more evenly distributed and catastrophic events get less frequent, opening the odds up for their eventual demise.

Many people move on from programming to management or entirely other careers because it is so hard. What makes most existing systems hard to develop is the unnecessary complexity, lack of or overabstraction and negligence of test code. Management coming from such mess and never seeing anything better can not strive for anything better. It is hard to navigate such an enviroment and stay sane and become productive. Once you succeed it is highly rewarding to coach younger team members. I'm living proof of that and there are plenty more at least in the Finnish agile circles. Career age would be of essence to anyone looking for real successful team leads.

Alternatively, you may refer to it as Wiki-wiki-web, Usenet, Matrix, Information Superhighway, Virtual Space or Altavista.

Text all the way.

Most of those images were invented only because it was expected at the time to have a picture for every action, which was kikd of stupid in first place.

1. pandemia
2. ???
3. profit!

It dragged them down unnecessarily and nobody figured any way to use it for anything so they schemed a plot to leave it behind.

It probably won't hurt your corporate image too much to bolster some idealism every once in a while.

Myself I'm an elitist bastard who only takes jobs at very liberal companies, but through the contemporary global society this corporate/bureucratic culture of general hostility is bound to make its mark on the lives of us free dwellers as well. Not to say I didn't care for the people suffering this in the first degree, but they've got their own choices to make. It would be best for the common good, though, if these environments would go largely disregarded.

If the streams were secured, there'd be a monopoly or oligopoly of the information thereof, paving way for police states. As long as it's publicly accessible (though it should be properly accounted and publicly listed) it's common knowledge to be leveraged by all. Want to check whether your friends are hanging at their usual place? Check it out from the live stream. Want to see how it's like to live on the other side of the world? Want to follow an uprising in Tunisia? Likewise.

Awesomely clearly explained context and subject matter. This is one of the reasons why c# is so nice to write in itself even if it's not very unixy.

Looking forward to scala myself.

"And not a single house blew down."

That's an F for the testers, then.

...their interpreters. Powershell isn't as backwards compatible.

Languages compilable to self-contained executables not installing anything extra on your computer (not a single file) are typically a lot more effort to work with - and the users can't just read the file to find out it's trustworthy to run.

Only exception to above rules I saw in comments here (pardon me for not linking, htc hero is really hard for this stuff) is the PAR perl exe packager. I'd jump to try that out if I developed for Windows.

I'd say keep it simple and avoid the colors. They bring extra complications and add no business value.

I admire your mad batch skills. How do you talk to the printers and send mail without extra dependencies, by having the script write out small com files to run, eh?

Oh, my ++ is really rusty on the conversion details to which this boils down to, but naturally this is an irresistible challenge, Fnord:

36 False Fnord
14 7 Fnord

Can't remember off the top of my head, but I'd imagine since we have a bool type, it'd render itself something sane such as "False" as a string, and stream:: would have the decency to prefer the string presentation to numeric; I could be miserably wrong and it could as well be either 0 or NULL (well, hopefully not that). Fnord.

I take it that truish to convention "class Fnord" would override the bool Fnord() in scope and create a Fnord by name Fnord. Fnord.

Then again, my eyes have to have been contaminated from some coding style guide, since they hurt from just looking at all those violations. Fnord.

Yes, I've completed my work at current customer and just biding my time. Fnord.

Now please tell me why I tend to land on non-programming jobs? Fnord.

This post contains no Fnords. Please keep the world safe for children and carefully dispose of any Fnord. Fnord.

There's water on moon, mars, europa, other bodies. We haven't yet even settled on the ethical price of human life. If it suddenly somehow became feasible to exploit those worlds, many of us would not care that some of us would see to it that we'd never notice signs of life there.

Did I mention Avatar yet? In real life we'd never heard about Na'vi.

It'd be great to have ethical guidelines; that would at least make people think about their actions. Get general public ponder it a bit. Fix Earth first perhaps? Environmentally acceptable solutions for getting out of the gravity well?