Yeah, Obama is evil and the Democrats are psychotic control freaks who want to do weird medical experiments on the US people and create an army of mutant zombie liberals that derive pleasure only by paying 80% taxes...

For crying out loud, boy, get a grip. The people at your HMO will do everything that they legally can to kill you rather than pay for your medical treatment. You should fear the people who want everything to be the same.

Stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.

There have been several in eye (it's not a HUD, that's a projected screen) displays available through the years. They all sucked and disappeared. The military targeting versions seem to be pretty good though.

He he, good one. I wish I thought of that.

Sounds like the result of Mathew Broderick movie festival and too many Red Bulls.

---------------

Bomb Mars now!

Agreed. Pascal to learn structured programming, then assembler to understand how a computer works, then C/C++ and Java to learn objects and threading, then C# to be employable.

Lisp is not much used outside of AI and difficult to understand without experience.

I guess I should call up the USPTO and apply to patent the alphabet. I would probably get it since it seems to be obvious that no one working there can read.

You may be right. My wife tried to get me to patent a portable telephone that I built the OS and HW drivers for and two EE grads did the hardware design. It contained an interface that worked like much the iPod, a database that you could scroll through and auto-dial like all cell phones now do, and had a voice activated command like hands free sets. She was convinced it would be a money maker. This was 1986. I said: "who the hell wants a phone in the car?". OK, I'm a moron.

If she brings it up I can always point out that her company offered her 150 Microsoft shares in 1987 or a cash bonus. I said to take the shares - DOS is the dominating PC OS, PC are getting less expensive and very popular, the development tools are good, and the Office software is getting popular. She wanted to take the kids to Disneyland. She won. A quick internet search says the stock is worth about 95 times what they were worth in 1987. Close July 31, 1987 $94. Adjusted value .27. Today's adjusted value 25.56. So, 150 * $94 * (25.56/0.27) = Today's value: around $1,334,800. I sleep on the couch when I use that, but I never lose a 'best judgment' argument.

Ideas, like idioms, are a dime a dozen - I wouldn't touch one with a ten foot pole.

A women is not a good source of criticism if she wants to sleep with you. Oh, yeah.. like others have pointed out - he is, like me, a member of Slashdot. She'll tell the truth.

Just as Windows 7 still can not copy more than one file at a time between directories without possible problems (abort on a locked file fails the copy and there is no return to original state ability, very large collections can take hours - Linux can handle this very well) I'm sure Office 2010 Excel is still limited to 65536 rows (I miss Quattro) and Word completely screws up with constant re-pagination that takes forever with large documents containing heavy graphics content.

Please give me a version that works for what I need to do. Not a version with mostly useless features that no one uses and features that are useful buried in impossible to find new places in the menu structure (it's a menu - not a 'Ribbon').

I switched to Open Office.

The $18 million dollar price tag is very reasonable. $500,000 for the systems analysis, design documentation, technical documentation, hardware and software design documents, load balancing Web servers, database servers, programming, testing, and deployment. $200,000 for 1 year of support, training, and operations until the passover to the government department that will take over operations. The rest ($17.3M) breaks doen into standard goverment overheads:

$5 million for contracts to idiot nephews/nieces/in-laws.
$300,000 for hiring mistresses as consultants.
$5 million for waste, mismanagement, and failed design. This is usually due to the project being sent to an overseas firm instead of hiring locally.
$50,000 for the single expert consultant that comes in at the end and fixes the mess in the last month.
$6.95 million for the trips, cars, jewelry, bags of cash, hookers, and cocaine.

This is meant to be a joke, but let me go in with a team of accountants and investigators after it's done and I will find at least a few examples of the above.

The best example so far has to be the Canadian Firearms Registration System - $2 billion and it still does not work.

Well said. I like to program solutions for problems I have that do not exist. An example is that my bank can allow downloads of transactions in several formats including Quick Books format but none in a format directly usable by Excel. I wrote a utility that converts the file from QIF to CSV by dragging and dropping the QIF file onto the dialog box (I like a minimal interface). There are a lot of open source project out there looking for collaborators. Also, you could create your own open source project and solicit contributors. A Fire Fox add-in as an example.

This has been done in Canada for years. Although it was started with a bar code ear tag with a registration number rather than RFID it allowed a cow to be tracked from birth to market shelf. With RFID in place since 2005 the process is even easier and probably faster. http://www.cbef.com/cattle_identification_system.htm

Albeit true that there is a cadre of self proclaimed hackers in America that forsake all and any form of maintainability in the code they write this is generally not true of professionals that are trained at places like MIT, Waterloo, CalTech, or BCIT. My experience as a gun for hire project saving consultant is that generally the absolute crappiest of source code comes from overseas out-sourcing (although, in all fairness, the worst examples I've come across are made in America). It's not because the programmers in India, Vietnam, Romania are bad - some, if not many are outstanding. It's because the managers are forcing poor work habits to increase productivity (and profit) - they are not paid for comments and proper variable names, only for the lines of code.

Professional computer programming is only about 50 years old. As a profession it is virtually brand new and standards, except for core, common sense axioms, are mostly short lived fads ("Scrum" is about the most inane yet). Even the basic tool, programming language, changes every few years. LISP, Clarion, Delphi, PL/1, FORTRAN, C, C++, Java, and now C# were and are touted as the standard to work from. I was first taught assembler and then COBOL (shows my length of time in the trenches).

A new kind of computer engineering degree is not needed an established set of standards is required. When a body of standardization is in place and true universal standards are established, then the quality of coding will become uniform. I do doubt that this will happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this.

I installed the Win7 Beta on a netbook as a test. It works surprising well (Vista did not, XP or Linux far better than Win7), except the video is screwed up for high end graphics applications like those silly new games that require the graphics capacity of a combined Pixar and Dreamworks production. One more more thing: Use mofo or some other less offensive term. The rest of us are able to maintain etiquette even when anonymously corresponding on line.

Quit. You're not doing yourself or anyone else any good and eventually you will be fired.