He's not a troll. If you search on "hackingbear" you can see that he's (probably) just some Chinese adolescent who's fallen for the nationalist line that problems in the U.S. mean China is no worse off.

Anthony Wiener's shens ==> it's ok to lock up dissidents in China. QED.

Sweet! I'm in!

MS is lying and you're a chump. (Sorry.)

(1) Both IE and the Bing toolbar are from MS. Doesn't matter whether they use one or the other; the directive at MS has come down from on high: use Google's results.

(2) The Google search results are only one input into MS's algorithm (they shouldn't be an input /at all/.) Of course all 100 honeypots won't show up. The fact that any did at all is incriminating, given that the data is completely synthetic.

I understand the technologies for both of those things have been lost. (Apparently, the Romans had some trick they did with oxhairs or sinews or something that gave their ballistas a lot more power than the competition.)

...and I have this to say:

Oh, bullshit.

[with feeling]

To know the difference between a million and a billion. Maybe a semester-long project to fill a swimming pool with a bucket?

Um... No. Stupid Americans kill themselves. And sometimes take some of the rest of us with them.

Geez, you guys. There's a real person behind the question. Do you HAVE to be an asshole?

Ya know what? I don't think employers give a shit about "paradigms". Imperative rules the world (as opposed to functional or declarative).

You're right about picking up a new language within the imperative paradigm (it's easy). The challenge is in learning the LIBRARIES. LINQ (are we gonna call that a paradigm, really?), MVC, MVP, all that other alphabet soup that's the latest framework. XML, XSLT, yada yada.

It's not spying if they're up front about it. Which they are.

Really? You're going to use their free web mail and their free browser and then complain about them using the info they harvest? Did I miss something?

Not to mention the fact that Joe Developer claims he needs access to all rights because he's too lazy to come up with the minimal set he really needs.

Second.

MILLIONS of additional system? C'mon....

Yeah. I read their "Questions from Luis Villa" (wth? Can't paste into this edit window w/Chrome?) blog post at the beginning of the summer and I didn't think it was going to work out so well. Undergrad summer enthusiasm, rejection/unawareness of earlier efforts.

And here we are. I wonder if they'll be able to collect their KickStarter money (wotta scam that turned out to be) because they met their "promise" (whatever we release will be open-source, yay (note the absence of a specific feature list in the promise)).

There's still hope, I guess, but probably not for Diaspora, due to the dependencies they'll probably introduce. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

There's also print-on-demand. Drop your Kindle in the tub and you're out, what, $175? Drop a paperback in, and you're out $6. Same with whacking insects, trips to the beach, leaving the thing lying in your chair while you move the laundry to the dryer in the laundromat....

Wait, wait... .NET is ruining the industry? Can you tell me how, exactly? I mean -- I know it's Microsoft's gigantic walled garden, but once you accept the horrible reality that some shops really do prefer a MS-only environment... what's so bad about .NET? It's got everything Java has, doesn't it? Is there some computer-sciency reason why .NET is Bad, apart from the whole monopolistic thing? Or is that what you're talking about?