Nada. We're in the middle of some of the worst right now. There's a piece up somewhere...can't remember if the link was on fark, gawker, or vice...but they gave a decent explanation of things are being run today (look for the Olive Garden piece) -> there is zero interest is keeping these companies alive, now it's about stripping them of their assets, and getting them to pay a hefty dividend. Feel me? Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of yesterday; Microsoft of yesterday made software; Microsoft of today is a corporate giant that could cut all of its employees, sell off then lease the buildings it currently occupies, sell off its name in certain areas (Microsoft ice cream, etc.), and so on. It's going to die only after it's been pimped out to every piece of gutter trash that the Street can find. And it's brain? Completely controlled by people with the worst intentions for it. It's like one of those zombified snails.

No no no no take it back, no! We've already paid for everything with Windows 8, they owe us a good version now.

And that's why I use throwaway / random passwords...authorize once, throwaway if it needs to reauthenticate. I can't give them what I don't know. ;-)

I'm sure he does, but like everyone else, if he wants to see tits, he has to pay (am I am not talking about the people lending him the binoculars).

"Oculus Rift CEO Says Classrooms of the Future Will Be In VR Goggles"...and people will live out their lives in self-contained tubes.

I swear, when some of these CEOs talk about new technologies for education, you can hear the line from The Hudsucker Proxy in the background ("You know...for kids!").

"we can have relationships and communication that are just as good as the real classroom" -> *facepalms* Drop the Web 2.0 'Social Media' bullshit. "It's a social thing, where you communicate with other people, doing other social things, kind of like a party or something, but using our technology!" -> Someone please kill me, it's the same story every single time. Why not just promote the damn VR stuff for what it can do that RL (real life) can't do? Displaying stuff that can't fit into a classroom, like a tesseract. You have this great technology which can be used to push the boundary of what students are exposed to these days, and these jokers want to use it for a glorified chatroom. Gah!

Indeed. Looks like the BBC has derped a little too hard recently.

But let's be honest, the endless assault on IT has been ongoing for some time. 'Cloud services,' 'NSA firmware,' 'H1B personnel,' etc., etc. Government / business isn't done until the internet won't run.

Here's to hoping that there's a planet out there that doesn't suffer from this insanity.

Sometimes doing things the insane way is the sanest method available.

Let me explain:

A new programmer will look for a method to transform one object to another another; a new programmer will write a method to transform some bytes into some other bytes.

A (slightly more seasoned) programmer will realize that even though you are using a higher-level language, someone inevitably said "f*ck it" at some point, and built byte arrays[] and so on into the various namespaces / classes, and that it's more of a search for the right namespace than inventing the wheel for the 5000th time. From the usual 'sane' standpoint, resorting the byte[] arrays in a high level language kind of defeats the purpose of using a high level language, and yet, somehow, between the hours of 1-3 AM, it makes perfect sense for a high level language to be filled with all these nitty gritty options.

+1, Funny for the BOFH style response.

What does it say about condensed water vapor?

More along the lines of "they never knew what a server was, and would artfully dodge your phone calls, elevator meetings, and eye contact to avoid accidentally imbibing any knowledge that might furnish them with this understanding; all they know is that the slick salesman with the nice sports car and itemized billing said they'd magically do everything from their end and never bother them, and they believed them."

I can't wait for programmers, sometime in 2020, to rediscover the performance boost they receive running an OS on 'bare metal'...

See it with me: one day, we will have clouds inside clouds!

There will always be another war, another enemy; it seems that mankind keeps track of its history this way, from who we were at war with last, to whom we are currently at war with, and whom we will be at war with tomorrow.

Nonsense. We'll start making things out of quarks then.

EE, CE, SE, CS, and Physics majors of the future will stare into the void that is sub-atomic computing, and see something staring back at them.

Hush. The god of education demands his sacrifice -> the minds and souls of millions of children, being taught to warm a chair and loosely follow some obscure lesson by someone engaged in private theatre. If you don't teach them, they might learn something other than what has been planned...and if that happens, anything could happen!