I ask in ignorance, why would I design the GUI in obj-C when I have X-tools/interface builder to do all that for me? I just connect the dots, right?

Interface Builder generates a bunch of boilerplate obj-c code for you. But anytime you need to add your own references etc or do anything other than simple stuff, you have modify that code. It's not as easy to use as C#, VB or Delphi because it exposes all the plumbing of the GUI.

Have you actually used objc? It involves writing tons of boilerplate code for the GUI (compared to MS .net GUI code or even Java). Even the smallest mistake in your manual reference counting code means strange errors/crashes down the line. It is also very low level like C which means a lot of time wasted in low level details which is great for systems programming but not your quickie $.99 iOS app.

There's no reason to use a language more difficult than Java/Python unless you really need the performance.

In retaliation, we the people should demand that the government ditch all Microsoft products and go open source!

And how does that solve the problem? Since open source does not pay its developers (in most cases), developers don't get paid whether MS outsources or if open source products are used.

So it's telling us just what we already knew? Interesting.

Really? I didn't know until now that Ruby was slightly faster than Java or that Python is only slightly slower than C#. This is referring to the graph in the "Which programming languages have the best runtime performance?" Crap study.

This is at least a $100m loss, likely closer to $200m-$250m

I was so wrong thinking a game like this requires only 50 developers. Here's what they spent/used for WoW:

Austin GDC 2009: Frank Pearce explains what it takes to craft 7,650 quests, 70,000 spells, 40,000 NPCs, 1.5 million assets, and 5.5 million lines of code; some 4,000 employees, 13,250 server blades, and 75,000 CPU cores keep MMORPG running.

http://www.gamespot.com/articl...

Can they really afford to write off the couple-million-and-change Titan undoubtedly cost to make?

It's probably near the $20-40 million range for seven years rather than $2 million. But that's okay since they make well over $100 million per year just from world of warcraft.

According to a post in this thread, some negative comments were deleted by pubpeer mods. The image evidence does seem pretty damning, even to someone who knows nothing about cancer research.

I'm also not sure how research papers are actually authored, especially so many by one person. Couldn't it be someone else did the actual research, perhaps grad or PhD students and he just mentored them, gave them advice and edited a few things which gave him the right to put his name on the papers? In which case, I guess claiming credit for others' work bit him in the ass.

Eh I guess you can sue anyone for anything in 'merica

Is losing a $350,000 job offer something you consider trivial? The scientist and his lawyer suspect foul play by anonymous person(s) who allegedly defamed him by posting ad hominem attacks in their pubpeer comments and then distributed those comment pages to both universities associated with him.

Any criticism of his work should be valid and fact based and that should be enforced by the site's moderators. Still, anonymity is important when criticizing someone and they should not use this as an excuse to force critics to reveal their identities.

Not sure why parent is modded down. In many cases, the company making the product using Kickstarter gets a zero-risk, zero-interest loan without selling part of its company to VCs or banks. That's a huge deal, because if the company used VCs for funding, a portion of their profits would go to the VCs. So if they made $1 million profit, perhaps $400,000 would go to VCs. With crowdsourcing, once the company has delivered the product to the backers, they get to keep all $1 million of those profits for themselves for any future batch of products sold.

Also, Kickstarter makes a nice commission by being a middleman for backers and creators. So yes, it's all about the money.

You lost me when you assigned an arbitrary number as your cutoff rather than defining the cutoff on reasonably definable measures of physical and mental health.

It's not arbitrary if you think about it. It's the age when people are least productive since they have been retired for 5-7 years and their health care costs are starting to rise, by a huge margin, statistically speaking. Mr. Bio-ethicist does not want to waste public healthcare funds to care for these people -- he wishes they were dead instead, or worse, no longer covered by state healthcare plans.

Venture capitalists have legal contracts and the all important lawyers for when the two sides disagree on whether the requirements for a phase have been met.

Right now it's completely a black box how backer money is spent. Maybe the creators should list itemized bills in their Kickstarter project page so backers can see if their money is being spent reasonably. Don't VCs also monitor how their money is spent? I'm not sure.

Wouldn't limiting the transfer of funds, via signed contracts or something, limit the risks of such a thing happening?

That's how venture capital is distributed to entrepreneurs, in chunks -- series A, series B and so on. So after completing phase 1, they get $X, after phase 2, they get $Y and so on. This is how Kickstarter should distribute funds to the creators. Otherwise, there is a chance the creators will simply take the money, stop working and give bogus status updates.

When the creators create their sales pitch web page on Kickstarter, they should show how much they want to get paid for each phase. If there are 5 phases and the creators can only deliver 2, the backers will be refunded payment for the 3 unfinished phases.

Yes, the "portability premium" IS pretty goddamn high to make AN ENTIRE COMPUTER about the size of a laptop's hard drive alone.

Sorry, I don't buy it that the premium is so ridiculously high. They took a dumb phone and added a more powerful cpu, a touch screen and more RAM -- that's about it. A laptop is a stripped down PC (you can't plug in your device card in the pci/pcie slot). And a smartphone is a stripped down laptop so they are similar but not the same thing shrunk down.

"Underpowered"? Compared to what, exactly?

Compared to a currently selling laptop, obviously. But it's priced same/higher than that laptop. Why?

Also, there's this little thing called "physics"... how big do you want the battery to be to run a device at a certain performance level for any reasonable amount of time? Do you think there's no difference between the current draw of a big stomping desktop compared to a smartphone?

Fine, don't run it at the performance level of a laptop. But then don't charge the customer the same price as a laptop. The CPU speed/RAM size vary as much as 10 times between an iphone 6 and a $1000 laptop. That's a ripoff.

Seriously, how did you get a "+5, Insightful" out of that?

Okay, smart guy, you better address all the points I'm making both in this post and the thread. Don't be intellectually dishonest, like many slashdotters, by skipping portions of text that contradict your point of view.