Development with a proprietary language is ultimately harmful to your own interests, whether you make proprietary software for a profit or Free software.

The one thing every business needs is control. When you make it possible for another company to block your business, you lose control. Your options become limited. Solving business problems potentially becomes very costly, involving a complete rewrite.

The one thing that should be abundantly clear to everyone by now is that making your business dependent on Microsoft anything is ultimately a losing proposition. They have a long history of deprecating their own products after customers have built products upon them.

All Open Source licenses come with an implicit patent grant, it's an exhaustion doctrine in equitable law.

The problem is not patent holders who contribute to the code, you're protected from them. It's trolls who make no contribution and then sue.

Of course these same trolls sue regarding proprietary code as well.

You understand that the release of the latest iPhone generations produced the highest rate switchers away from Android and over to the iPhone, right?

I don't mind the debate - I've had an iPhone since the 3GS but was and am seriously looking at switching away for various reasons. The debate should be based on fact though, and the facts are that Apple doesn't have a dearth of people moving off other platforms and over to its own.

Imagine what we can do now when we know how old they fake they are in their passports.

So the data leaked, is that secret or just personal?

Absolutely agree with that. Some of the horrors I've seen include everything is a singleton, virtual methods replaced with templates, a complete reimplementation of std::map and std::vector, with map implemented as a vector of key/value pairs (Yes - seriously; they had O(n) access time). Actualy, that last one was all about reinventing the wheel. A reinvention of string class (where we already use 3 standard-ish implementations).

The nicer projects use standard types, base the architecture on existing successful products, and have a fairly simple class heirarchy.

Sadly there are no Goat Grazing service providers near me

Autofill errors have happened on Voting machines too. it filled in the ballot with the last guys ballot.

Could it also be related to poorer parents working more hours, thus having less time to be with the kids during their early years

There are probably dozens of measurable ways being poor affects the development of brains. But ultimately, it's happening because that's the way the people at the very top in terms of wealth and power want it. The last think they want is for poor people to suddenly become successful, and develop political power.

One of the side-effects of the New Deal and the labor movement in America is that a bunch of people who were on the shitty side of the street suddenly were able to take a big step up. GIs coming out of WW2 who would normally have gone to work in the coal mine or slaughter house suddenly had the means to go to college, buy a house, live a life of reasonable comfort. And do you know what they did with this sudden shift in circumstances? They developed political power. Their kids went from blue collar to white collar. And similar steps up during the pre and post-war period occurred for women and American blacks.

And this scared the bejeesus out of the elite. So, in the 70s, and peaking in the 80s, there came an effort to undo these advancements. The effort included an attack on New Deal programs like Social Security and the labor movement. The effort included the flooding of the inner city with crack cocaine (which we now know to have been run by our own government). The effort included the confluence of evangelical religion with supply-side capitalism by Billy Graham (who started his ministry with funds from the Chamber of Commerce).

The effort to put the genie back in the bottle continues to this day, and it's been quite successful. Economic disparity hasn't been this out of whack since the 19th century. Militarized policing, private prisons, an attack on public education are all fronts in this class war being waged by the elite. You want to see it in action, watch the political policies being pushed by governors of Kansas, Indiana, and many states throughout the South and in big cities in the North. Just watch.

The only thing more annoying than a computer is a computer that tries to be helpful.

These two were tied up in the chain of evidence that led to his conviction, so depending on what gets tossed he has a chance here. Now he did admit that at one time he was DPR and that he had resumed work under the alias so he's probably not going to get everything overturned. But his defense was that someone else associated possibly with MTGOX was the mastermind framing him more recently.

So what's intriguing here is that one of the investigators was doing some shenanigams with MTGOX accounts and was involved in seizing MTGOX assets. Since MT GOX started having liquidity problems right during this investigation of Silk road, it really makes you wonder if this is where some of those missing assets went.

Furthermore the agents appear to have done things as their shenanigans came to light to obfuscate the trail back to them. This is not too far afield from ulricht's claim that someone was framing him, asking him to step in as DPR, and putting keys on his computer.

It actually seems it's not far fetched to imagine Ulricht was telling the truth about having relinquished DPR that someone suddenly invited him back into the game as the FBI closed in. Perhaps there's some grains of truth in there somewhere. e.g. maybe one of the agents did add his bitcoin keys to Urichts computers.

Given those sorts of conjectures it seems very reasonable he should get a new trial. He's guilty by his own admission, but maybe not guilty of everything he's charged with.

this is just a good way of dealing with a shortage of a product availability (since there's such a proliferation of combinations) and minimizing returns of a high wear prone item. It's not supposed to make it seem like you are visiting your personal jeweler at tiffanies.

Crashing through a gate where there's a guy armed with a machine gun is a really good way to get shot, a lot. It annoys the guy with the machine gun, and he has a tendency to shoot things that annoy him. And he's not using the cheap Wal*Mart bullets, either. The last thing to go through your head, I mean, before bullets, would probably be "Wow, those are really some high quality bullets that guy is shooting me with!" I seem to recall that this sort of thing was fairly common back in the 70's and 80's with the hippies trying to disrupt the SAC air force bases. We seem to be having a spike in the crazy/stupid lately, where people seem to think that if you go crashing through a gate with a guy with a machine gun, they'll be nice to you or something. Nope. Not the case at all.

It's certainly not a 'hoax'. Coal contains (to varying degrees) all of these pollutants.

Coal plants do often have filters these days, but always:

http://www.epa.gov/mats/powerp...

the emissions are significant, and not everything gets filtered out.

Also the filtering is expensive and the carbon dioxide that coal emits is becoming a *massive* problem. Although carbon capture has been trialled, it makes coal non competitive with other technologies.

I can't speak to the chemical plants near you but with nuclear power, you always have incredibly dirty radioactive materials inside a container, with lots of complex plumbing leading into it, and under worst case conditions that stuff can potentially always get into the air and water and get spread far and wide.

Although in principle we could make it never fail over the lifetime of human beings, in practice, we as a species, don't know how to do that, and the proliferative effects of nuclear power and their association with nuclear bombs cannot be underestimated either.

To make nuclear power completely safe, is like trying to make water not wet. It's built into the nature of what we are doing with the materials, for utility-scale nuclear power they are always on the edge of melting down.

Because of these inherent properties it's also never been cheap; the extensive containment and safety you need to engage in, seriously impairs the economics and what you have to do to get around that problem, renders it an inflexible source of power. You have to run it essentially flat out to get the kWh price down to reasonable figures. The most successful systems (like in France) have hydroelectricity or other additional flexible supplies to balance out the power. But if you have that anyway, then overall, technologies like wind power are now usually cheaper and incredibly less risky and easier to install, and compared to nuclear power which is a more mature technology, still getting significantly cheaper over time.

Throwing money at such inherently risky technology like nuclear power to try to make it less risky is not a wise investment right now, and all the signs are that it is only getting less wise with time, other technologies are rapidly rendering it moot.