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Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 857

At the same time I'm stumped as to why so many liberals seem to be completely fine with ramping up our over-seas assassination program to entirely new levels. As you say, Bush got the ball rolling, but Obama's numbers leave any other US president in the dust when it comes to blowing up foreigners (or the occasional American on foreign soil).

Please take a look at any of the major liberal blogs, such as Firedoglake.com or dailykos.com, and see how much cheerleading for Obama's assassination programs is happening. You won't find any; in fact you will find much criticism. OK, there was some cheering when Bin Laden was killed, but I recall there was also some angst over how it was done.

Liberals are held hostage; there is no liberal party to vote for, only a choice between the lesser of two evils. And the lesser evil is clearly the Democrats.

Comment Re:It was the Paula Jones Law suit (Score 1) 501

No, the Paula Jones lawyers (who were being payed by the billionaire-funded "Arkansas Project"), committed some ethical violation in sharing information about Lewinski with the Ken Starr lawyers. They wouldn't have known what questions to ask Clinton without that (and also, the information Linda Tripp dug up by pretending to be Lewinski's friend whilst secretly taping their phone conversations).

Comment Re:89 Corolla = 42 MPG freeway, 32 City and it's.. (Score 1) 633

I didn't buy a Prius because I expected positive ROI via reduced spending on gas. It is a great car (kind of like a sized-up Honda CRX), and by using less gas, I'm causing less environmental damage. That said, after applying the rebates available at the time (both federal and state), my Prius only ended up costing about $3000 more than a equivalent non-hybrid. And if I had my shit together, I would have gotten one of those "drive in the carpool lane" stickers, before they ran out.

Comment I smell bullshit (Score 4, Informative) 633

We own a 8 year old Prius, we get slightly over 40 MPG, something the author claims is difficult. When the car was newer, we got over 42 MPG.

To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg.

We drive on freeways like everyone else, routinely driving 70-80 MPH. I'm not a lead-foot accelerator, but I drive like most people. I don't practice any exotic hyper-miling techniques.

There are also hills. Hybrids work best on a perfectly horizontal plane.

We also happen to live at the top of a large, steep hill (Berkeley Hills), which we go up and down every day. And yet we still get 40+ MPG, unpossible! The hybrid engine is great for recapturing some of the potential energy that would otherwise be lost.

Comment Re:"from user's machines" (Score 2) 307

What I remember from accidentally using OpenJDK a few years ago... Apache Tomcat, one of the most popular servlet containers, did not work with OpenJDK. The first thing I do with any Linux server is remove OpenJDK and install the latest Sun (now Oracle) version of Java.

I don't know what the incompatibility was, and maybe they have fixed it by now. But I don't care enough about "freedom" to bother with OpenJDK.

Comment Re:This just in... (Score 1) 427

OK, I've been using computers since the days of teletypes, and I've yet to get any virus, even on Windows. I used to run Norton AV on my old Windows machines, for about 10 years. Eventually I noticed it was doing nothing, except wasting CPU and harassing me about buying updated virus protection plans.

I suppose the time at work in the '90s when we got hit by a outlook macro virus might have counted, although I don't think I fell for whatever it wanted me to do. I also had a pirated copy of a game that tested positive for a virus on my Amiga, but I don't think my computer got infected.

Comment Re:Spoken like a true extrovert (Score 1) 475

As a life-long introvert... At one of the best jobs I ever had (in hindsight), I would go out to lunch with a group of coworkers almost every day (this was informal, not a company policy). These days, I'm a contractor at various places. In my current gig, the tech guys never talk much, don't go to lunch together or socialize, ever. I have no sense that I belong here. I think of this as a place I'll be leaving soon, when my contract ends.

Forced corporate "fun" is painful, but so is sitting alone at that lunchroom table. Don't give me any of that "time to recharge" bullshit, that is what I am doing all day when I'm coding or surfing the web.

Comment Rear Cameras are Great (Score 1) 754

My Prius already has a rear camera, it is great. Should it be mandatory? I don't know, maybe.

I do know how to use my mirrors, and I double check everything. Yet, a child could walk behind my car, just as I am looking away. The back up camera could help in those situations. It is also quite useful for parallel parking, as I can tell exactly how close I am to the car behind me.

Comment Re:Snobs don't get jobs (Score 1) 897

In over 20 years of employment, I've never programmed with any Microsoft language or framework (I've used Windows OS and Visual Studio, of course). At the moment, I've gotten 2 Java contracts in rapid succession, so I don't think that is going away any time soon.

Comment Re:Congrats! (Score 5, Insightful) 559

Give me a fucking break. Had there been a "Texan on board with a pistol", there would have been 4 armed terrorists on each plane (and most likely, they would have exploited security flaws to ensure they had more and better guns than your hypothetical Texan Freedom Fighter)

The terrorists exploited a flaw in how we dealt with hijackers. It wasn't about a lack of guns at all.

Comment Re:What are the negative consequences? (Score 1) 436

This Java developer is using a Macbook Pro, and will continue to do so, as this announcement means little to me. I won't go into the details of why I prefer Macs, other than, I find the alternatives less useful to me.

My server development is done using the Sun/Oracle JDK, Eclipse, Tomcat and other open source frame works. My server apps run just fine with the Sun JVM, and the WAR/JAR executables can be copied to Linux or Windows Server, where they run just fine, with no problems.

I did once develop a GUI client app using the Apple tools, it wasn't so hot.

The only thing that will make me abandon Macs would be the unlikely move of restricting what apps can be installed, as on iOS devices.

Comment Re:Now, the true app experiment begins. (Score 2, Informative) 668

As an experienced J2ME developer... The real pain was not "writing apps for individual handsets", it was dealing with all the undocumented bugs and "novel" interpretations of the J2ME spec. A game coded perfectly to the J2ME spec might run great on one family of handsets, and crash mysteriously on others, or even fail to launch.

Other major nightmares included: undocumented (and radically different) threading models, sound (which was not a part of the original J2ME spec), memory management and networking. And then you had to squeeze everything into a tiny JAR limit for the crappiest phones (64K when I started, later upped to 100K).

Did I mention that each phone (of which there were hundreds) was potentially different, and almost completely undocumented?

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