Agreed.

The science should be of a publishable quality, but that doesn't always mean the result is publishable. AC's wife got screwed.

It's valid science, but unless it conveys important information to other people, why would other people be interested in reading it in a journal?

No one remembers the 100s of ways Edison found not to make a lightbulb - even though they were each as important as his one successful attempt.

Doesn't justify the outrageous cost of some schoolbooks. I don't care if Johannes Gutenberg himself did the book layout, $50 - 100 per book is not a reasonable price for a high school textbook, especially when the publishers push out unnecessary updates every other year.

So the government wants you to publish your stuff in open journals, but they wont fund your research unless you publish in closed journals.

Did I mention how much I love the government?

You're kidding, right? There is absolutely no reason to believe that the money people donated to UMaple would have otherwise been spent with MapleStory. MapleStory probably made money as a result of UMaple existing as it drew people into the community. When the judge making the finding is incredulous at the awards he is being forced to hand down, you know things have gotten out of hand.

Just another example of the job killing regulations enacted by the Obama administration. When will the federal government get out of the way of small business owners and job creators?

Facebook only owned 56 parents at the end of 2011 - that's why they were such a tempting target for Yahoo - no real prospect of a big countersuit. They must have shit a brick when they heard Facebook had purchased 750 patents from IBM out of the blue.

Having known someone who suffered from Lariam induced psychosis some years ago, I find it shocking beyond belief that they would give this stuff to men with guns.

Whether Bales was suffering from such psychosis at the time should be considered secondary - the US military was giving its soldiers a drug that can lead to violent psychotic episodes. The person who made that decision needs to be escorted to the cell adjoining Bales'.

You've never been to a Rails convention have you?

Programming languages are tools. You pick the best one for the job, but no language is every going to be ideal for every possible application. It would be like a builder saying 'all I want is one good screwdriver'

No one ever designed a language intending for their to be flaws or omissions.

When someone designs a programming language to solve a problem that they have, they are designing a programming language that will likely solve the problems of a lot of other people (unless you have particularly esoteric problems).

Matz has said that he built Ruby because he wanted a scripting language more powerful than Perl but more object oriented than Python. He solved his own need and that coincided with the needs of other people, making it a popular language.

Design-by-committee languages tend to feel like they've taken a blind guess at what problems need to be solved without consulting the people experiencing those problems.

The rate of change is fast by evolution standards, but it is still years between a shift becoming inevitable and it completing. The cloud has been on the way for the best part of a decade. It has been called different things along the way, but the basic concepts have stayed the same and technology has been catching up, making it easier to implement, cheaper to maintain and more reliable to run. If the cloud has surprised you, it is because you weren't paying attention.

Microsoft have been pumping resources into Azure recently, both in terms of money and in terms of their best people. They're all-in at this point.

Today your boss doesn't see the sense of it, but he will one day - either that or he'll get fired when your business is no longer competitive in the marketplace.

There are no safe jobs. Only complacent workers.

If the industry shifts and you no longer need as many IT staff, so be it. Throughout history, advances in technology have wiped out entire professions - when was the last time you met a fletcher, tanner or a pencil and paper draughtsman? This would be no different. Technology progress inevitably makes some people's professions redundant, but they also open new doors. It is for those at risk of obsolescence to spot the trend and make the transition to one of those shiny new doors before their existing one slams shut in their face.

I say bring it on.