I think we have lost a fair amount of Helium though.

Selling the surplus of Helium at a discount seems to be unusually shortsighted since that's more or less what's left on earth and the alternative is to mine it from space somehow.

I can top that; I did exactly that in an intersection while towing a trailer. :-)

The clutch requires rather more force than the brake so it really puts the car to a stop, and you have absolutely no idea why.
If you are driving a manual, try braking gently with your left foot to see what I mean...

I've stomped on the brake at least once almost every time i've use a manual car, and it's certain situations that triggers it - typically when I'm focused more on navigation than driving...

Seems to be hard to unlearn... ( Like those random emacs sequences that sometimes spontaneously emits while I'm using other tools...)

No it isn't.

It's a total loss for civilization, what it is.

There is now a disabled widow and a fatherless child.

A moviegoer have been killed because he texted his (presumably) babysitter, *before* the movie.

As a moviegoer I'm not really seeing the upside of getting shot, so I guess I'll just stay home.

And as several idiots at slashdot has modded this comment, not as troll, or even funny, but fucking insightful,
I've come to the conclusion that I've wasted too much time in my life reading comments on Slashdot,
which was apparently totally pointless too.

Bye.

Imagining that is +1 funny.

Running an old C or C++ program with newer libs isn't exactly without risks either. Even if the abi is the same, the behaviour might have changed, unintentionally most of the times.

It's more a question of what you can manage to test and support. Large applications are more expensive to test, so you are reluctant to upgrade infrastructure components. (Be it Windows versions, JRE:s, dll:s, database servers, etc)

Spot-on about java.

Regarding Slashdot, I think that Slashdot just reflects the state of affairs in software development (or the world) in general. Younger generations appear clueless, since they don't know certain obvious things. They will therefore reinvent a lot of wheels, and while doing that, inventing a few new things, some other things just like before but a bit different, while all the time making some old stuff irrelevant.

It is to expect, but It might get worse. I'm a bit worried that a lot of young people don't seem to be able to read, as in "read a lot of text, fast". One indication is that a lot of new projects have video introductions and video tutorials instead of text documents.

I mean, why watch a 40 minute long video to figure out if a toolkit might be of use or not, instead of skimming through a few documents for 2 minutes.
But then, It's clearly is a huge effort for many to read a long document - maybe they can't skim or speed read and they need to subvocalize but a lot people don't like to read long texts.

If it's "quicker" to watch a video then less is learned since it's not as efficient as speed reading. Maybe the youtube generation have learned to skim through videos quickly but I doubt it.

Also, the universities are not exactly excelling at producing good developers ( the trade , not researchers ) . Further, very little seems to be focused on "modern history" other than unproductive academical anecdotes. I think that schools should stay away from teaching "products" but maybe there is value in exploring historic and existing products and ideas. There are some giant's shoulders to stand on, or at least code monkey shoulders, actually, but it's hard to know since some of the knowledge is stored in long boring texts, and most just exists in wetware outside academia.

I mean, no one would have been using PHP (or creating PHP) if they had paid a minimum of attention to what's been happening the last 30 years.

I actually do like Java - the lanugage. It is very stringent and well defined and not sprinkled with random syntactic sugar. Quite the opposite to PHP actually.
The core libraries are mostly nice, except some pre 1.2 crap and some outdated javax junk.

Some of the 'code bloat' has been fixed, and more is fixed in the coming versions, so that's getting better.

A lot of 'code bloat' is actually culturally inherited 'architecture bloat' since IBM decided to market a servlet container + transaction manager as a e-commerce platform, and puked out the worst programming model ever. Enterprise Java was then abused by thousands of programmers and attracted hoards of useless "architects" and consultants that built "enterprise" applications and sprinkled them with billions of lines of xml configuration.

However, the jvm is still unbelievably slow to start. As it's rather fast while actually running, it seem to me that it should be possible to fix with some reasonable effort, like not loading every class in the known universe during startup for instance, and not jit-ing unless the program has been running for a while.

Java is also confusing from a user perspective since Sun messed up with executable jars, which could have been fixed by just using a separate suffix, like jxe . which even looks cool. Some more polish on the look-and-feel, and perhaps a better looking default font, and then it's done :-)

I think the most important work for a manager is to :

a) Find, Recognize and Hire talented people.
b) Make sure that the talented people figure out how to work together.
c) Improve and optimize the processes and the organisation ( continuously and in small steps.)
d) Arbitrate discussions and help making decisions, but do not take them on your own
e) Especially in larger organisations, evangelise about skills and every good thing that has been done by your teams.
f) Have an eye on the horizon now and then. Engage the teams in strategic discussions and long term planning.

To do these things well a deep knowledge about software development is required. ( Or about teaching, or medicine, or whatever it is the organisation is doing.)
It's not possible to get this sort of insight without having practiced the trade for some time. Yes, it possible to manage without, but then there is a high risk that things go wrong in some - and then maybe all - of the above areas, simply because it is easy to misunderstand some things and fail to recognise others.

Another risk is that the important things are replaced with less important things:

v) Make sure that everyone is aware of deadlines, project plans, priorities.
x) Order stuff that is needed.
y) Make budgets, and report progress.
z) ...or even : Handle and approve vacation requests

Sure, these things must be done, but it isn't exactly rocket science and everyone and their dog is capable of handling these tasks.

Less knowledgeable managers and project managers tend to focus a lot on status reports and reminding of deadlines,
sadly adding about as much value as an automated mail could have done (I'm looking at YOU tick-box-guys) while missing the important stuff.

One problem with non-technical managers is that they may 'accidentally' accept unfortunate (technological) decisions made outside the team without challenging them, or even worse make their own, perhaps because they fail to see the implications. They will then end up defending senseless decisions or policies against the team, generally having to revert to "just because" arguments, and since the decision may not be easy to back from once committed, everyone involved will become angry or whiny and the team will become generally obstructive and unhappy.

Can someone enlightened explain why is Sony in bed with Microsoft and Apple against Google - Sony's only hope for their mobile and tablets division?

Is it the media and games departments that are fighting a war against their own company?

As soon as I think that Sony might be doing something right, they shove their heads up their arse again.

I don't think that statement is correct unless you remove water too.

Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas, and CO2 absorbs just a few percent of what water does.

The thing is that the breakdown is just plain silly.

It doesnt really make sense to have both a "licence cost" ( pulled out of a hat ) PLUS compensation for lost sales.

A compensation as a licence cost * penalty factor OR a compensation for the actual lost sales makes sense.

Both the licence cost or the claim about lost sales are in reality just made up, since there is no equivalent licence available,
and there is no way to actually calculate the damages for lost sales.

If they invented a list price for 10 trillion dollars for an "online unlimited redistribution licence" or claimed 6 billion lost sales,
it would have been obvious that they were just arbitrary numbers. As it is now, they somehow managed to convince the laymens that
contitutes the first instance court in Sweden that the number are solid.

I think it would at least have been possible to argue against the claims. If the ruling is appealed,
and with a new laywer, there is a high probability that the ruling will be different, even though the courts in sweden
are lobbied hard with "immaterial rights conferences" and interest groups sponsored by the media companies.

Isn't this what everyone does today? I thought the whole point of tracker images was personal urls like 'img158294.png'.

It won't help the users privacy a bit, or actually make it worse since users can't ignore image attachments anymore - google automatically hit the tracker url for them...

I don't know, I think it's only Larry Ellison that calls heaps of servers in the basement for "personal cloud" ....

No, it doesn't work that way.

If you are sick and poor and potentially malnutritioned, it's a higer risk that you wont be able to cope with a serious infection.

Maybe some people have better immune systems, but if you get MRSA - and get sick, it's a coctail of very expensive antibiotics and possibly surgery that will save you.

Uhm.

Germany has a population of 82 million. It's about 1/4 of the population in the US, and about 3/4 of Russias. Only US, India, China and Russia have larger economies. It is also one of the worlds most technically advanced countries. They certainly could have technical and economical capability to monitor american politicians.

  It is only for political reasons they probably not are doing that, but you can be certain that they monitor the political situation and the military capabilities of all relevant parties,