Great engineers write code because they love to and cant stop. Mediocre and lousy engineers write code (for some reasons) so they get ego points "contributing" to open source and hope to pad their resume. The great engineers then have to evaluate and fix their lousy code. Or it slips by and the whole suffers. I would love help from the great engineers for my open source projects but would prefer no help at all from the rest. Even then it will take work to make sure its up to my standards or biased egotistical opinions. "Its a cathedral not a bazaar". The best software I've ever seen and used was written by very few people, usually only one. A few exceptions (say Linux itself) but shouldn't be taken as the model for Open Source but rather a magical exception.

What purpose does this serve that Amazon S3 doesnt ? Is it the "free" part or is there a category/search/index to help find your "legitimate" files ? Amazon S3 even supports torrents. No takedowns required. Push files, make them public. Sit back. Oh you pay some $ ... but very little.

C++ and Objective C co-existly about as cleanly as any two languages can. XCode natively supports both even intermixed within the same expression. In fact really OC is really C++ - some things + some things ... I find writing iPhone code much easier (and more efficient) when I stick to C++ for everything except where I have to communicate with the native OS API's ... Building, Debugging, Running ... all seamless ... as long as you follow a few constraints like not putting C++ objects directly in an OC class. ( pointers to C++ objects yes, actual objects no). A few other gotchas but very easy to deal with.

It does take a bit of effort. About as much as setting up an ebay and paypal account. But it can be 'worth it'. I "Found" 50 BTC lying around which I had minted this year then lost when I got tired of the game. Then last month I read that the exchange rate was $20 USD/BTC ... It was worth the about 2 hours of work it took me to get a mtgov account, a dwolla account, track down my backup of my bitcoin DB and sell them. By then the rate had got to about $17 and I sold a few blocks as the rate further dropped ... but within a week I had > $800 USD of "Real Money" in my "Real Bank" ... for about 2 hours work (and 2 days CPU/electricity time). For me, it was "worth it". But now mining is so hard its not worth it anymore. I had lucked out in Jan and had gotten a block solved with only 2 days of CPU time.

I so bought into the California Liberal Philosophy when I lived there ... Da Evil Man, Green Green ! Down with Da Nukes ! Wicca Hippies with Tolerance (except towards anyone else) ... I still have my pony tail in my freezer to prove to the grandkids I was Cool Once ... Thankfully I moved out to the Midwest 10 years ago and met real people and came out of my lifetime of drug infused smokey haze and eventually woke up and realized "WTF" ? not that I'm apposed to drug induced smokey hazes ... but you should avoid making laws and spending other peoples money while so influenced. Drugs and Hallucinations are for personal enlightenment not fiscal policy. Salinas is a rich agricultural capital of he world ! whats wrong with that ? Now they are Green Techno-Bubble Idiots of the world. They should have asked the farmers if it was a sound investment. maybe they'd have sold some tulips instead and made a killing. -D -D

They dont need to. As long as their algorithm is executed faster then their competitors they will win. Financial algorithms are not about sanity, they are about out-guessing the competition and making changes to your algorithm faster then they do.

I agree with all the Sharepoint stuff. And cloud hosted documents is not a one-size-fits-all ... although I can see the benifit. But ignore all that. Just look at Exchange Hosting. A company I'm with is paying about $14/month per user for Exchange hosting with ActiveSync (for iphone syncing) and a "vast" limit of 150MB/user mailbox. And thats with a year's commitment. For 7 users this is quite cheep compared to managing our own exchange server (complete with MS Server licensing and a M$PhD to administer it). I tried the Office 365 beta and was up and running in minutes on my desktop , iPhone, and iPad with full exchange/outlook both native (all devices) and web. Pricing - $6/user with 25GB / mailbox. Thats just seriously kick-a$$ pricing if your org wants exchange. (mine does, I tried moving us to pure IMAP but the boss likes his Outlook, contacts, calendars etc). Its a flipping steal. As soon as were done with our (ignorantly signed 1 year contract last month) I'm moving us over to 365 ... unless the smoke has been let out in the meantime. You can take your Sharepoint and web office apps .,... I just want full exchange/outlook for dirt cheep pricing. -David

I am just jaw-slacked-wordless-amazed at where this thread is going. Is it really a common meme to say "stealing from walmart doesnt seem as bad as stealing from a local store" ??? To whom ? Who thinks like this ? When did this happen ? When did the particular particular owner of property make a difference in peoples mind as to if stealing it 'seems so bad' ? wow. If you don't like Walmart for whatever reason, fine, don't shop there. Deprive them of income by not being a customer. Picket them. Start your own store. Write complaints in the newspaper or post on the internet. Diss them until hell breaks loose. Or just ignore them. But its OK to just STEAL from them ? huh ? 'it doesn't seem as bad' to STEAL tangible goods from one company if you don't like them but not another if you do ? WTF. ??? So now the morality of crime is dependent on if you like someone or not ... wow. blows my mind. Maybe I'm just an old-fart but this is just way too weird for me to handle. What the hell is happening to society where this is even contemplated as if it were a normal thought and tossed out as if everyone is thinking this way. seriously mind-blowing.

"BTC were designed to live in your own private wallet, " This is why I uninstalled Bitcoin. One day I launched the app and my coins were gone. Who knows where ... my wallet was empty. Probably some Fileystem glitch who knows. I didn't even bother looking through my backups as my experiment ended there. If BTC's can simply vanish on my computer they are worthless without a solid backup infrastructure (they probably ARE on my backups ... but why bother, the effort to possibly find them wasn't worth their value in $USD). To me this proves Bitcoin actually needs a trusted banking/storage system to really work. And that doesn't exist right now.

Not just is the driving light external, but the cells had to be place between tiny mirrors. So the only biological component is the green florescence. To make the whole laser biological would require growing mirrors as well as the blue light.

Barter is considered income by the US Tax code. You will be liable for income tax on the perceived value of your work, and you'll have to pay with US Dollars. Of course the IRS will have to find out somehow. If you don't report the income then they later find out you'll be liable for a felony of tax evasion.

Time to tax Bike Miles and Public Transport Miles. They all take a toll on our infrastructure.

This has to be the lamest /. topic ever. I mean EVER. Who would ever waste their time even THINKING about video games and sex at the same time then thinking it would make a good article to post? Then again I just posted about it. Damn me ! Back to the video games.

Oh and the Backspace Key.

How can a small courier compete if they can only afford vans, where the Big Boys can afford fleets of their own 747's and their own airport hub, train rails and ships. And how can these Big Boys compete against a government subsidized international (mail) delivery service paid for largely by taxes which the Big Boys *pay* instead of receive. Clearly competition is impossible in the face of an unlevel playing field. Wait, damnit !