plutonium is not only highly radioactive, it's also extremely poisenous. You don't want this stuff in the air or in the ground water. It tends to accumulate in your bones. You'll have to spread it really very very thin to make it mostly harmless.

read TFA (realy!), makes me so angry! many lessons to be learned from it, but respect for the law ain't one of them.

Fearmongering, yes.
But not impossible.
It's not so easy to make sure that a program is a correct implementation of a mathematical algorithm or of an open standard.
A subtle bug (purposeful or not) in a crypographic algorithm or protocol can be exploited.
Writing a bug is much easier than spotting it.
Many applications and OSes get security updates almost dayly. They certainly haven't found them all yet.
Perhaps the NSA has engineered backdoors in our free software at some point, but those vunerabilities have been patched already.
Mosty paranoia then....
Rick

I looked into Chromebooks, but installing Linux on them is surprisingly not so straightforward, because these machines have a locked down bios. You can install and run linux, but every time you boot, you need to manually interrupt the boot process and give permission to run Linux. That held me back from buying one. With a normal (UEFI) bios, you can use various linux bootloaders and have a normal boot process.

RIght. You can still get small laptops (10-13 inch) sold as netbooks for around 300 dollars (or 300 euros in europe), but you don't get the value for money that you used to get a couple of years ago. All the cheap netbooks now come with harddrives, because even a much smaller SSD is more expensive. So that reduces battery life. Of course, you now get Windows 8 with it. What a laugh! So you install a linux distro on it, struggle a bit with UEFI and hardware drivers, etc.

Bottom line: netbooks are still around, but have become more expensive, less functional (windows 8) and require more work (install linux).

I'm not sure what the requirements are for models to be 3D printed. I can imagine you need a solid model to make a print, but the software that comes with the printer can probably convert a surface model into a solid model. Most objects you'll print wont be very solid anyway, but rather thin-walled hollow objects.

I'm guessing a surface modeller like Rino, Blender or Wings3d are the best option, since these a cheaper than solid modelling software and more suitable for creative design.

Solid modellers like Solidworks, Catia and Proengineer are used in industry, and may give you more control over the solidity of your model (like where supports should go and how thick these must be). For the extra money you'll get many extra features that you'll never use.

Rick

the advertisers we use ad-blockers! Aw, now you've ruined it for all of us.

Open webOS is released under Apache License Version 2.0 (http://apache.org/licenses/)

The Apache licence grants you the right to make and distribute copies, but does not require you to distribute the source code with a binary distribution.
So LG can fork the code and that code will probably not be made available, only the binaries. They own the forked code completely. It will live a separate life from Open webOS.

Also, the licence says:

"If You institute patent litigation against any entity( ...) alleging that the Work( ...) constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."

So if LG uses the patents used in webUS against anyone, say Apple, then LG loses the right to use those patents? So LG can't use those patents? That's what is seems to say, but maybe I don't get legal speak.

Rick

In Neil Stephenson's novel Anathem, the main characters take a pill that supposedly monitors their temperature, turns out to be a small, remote triggered, neutron bomb.

I might hesitate to take such a pill. You never know what else it does....

Rick.

Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, so the question is a bit silly. But the universe 13.3 billion years ago (420 million years old) was already quite big, or it could not have been forming galaxies. (I don't have numbers, but the exponential inflationary period was definitely much earlier. After that growth glowed down for a couple of billion years, and now it's speeding up again because of dark matter ).

More about measuring distance on space-time here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

OK, granted, I misread you on purpose, go for the easy mod points.

Still, do you really think talking to your computer, or drawing pictures for it, is going to make programming easier or more fun or less work? I very strongly doubt that. When programming becomes repetitive, you should find some way to automate that part; code it differently, develop a tool or invent a new language. And ultimately, it would be great if some AI would just write programs for our problems. Before that, there will be some typing. But not too much if you do it right.

If coding is like typing for you, you've never done any real programming. Coding is about thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems. I don't think that's boring at all.

Thank you. This is the truth and no mistake. Amen.

I have a Ph.D. in CS, and although I am highly respected by my colleagues, and currently involved in interesting projects, it did not help me much when looking for work. During various job interviews I got the impression that years of experience in the software business is considered more valuable than a Ph.D. When I did get hired, the interviewer actually had a Ph.D. himself, so he did see the value. If you look at CS job descriptions, a Ph.D. is almost never a requirement, except for university positions and some research positions, but those are scarce (in the current economy). So, a Ph.D. is no guarantee for an interesting job. There are lots of Ph.D.'s out there doing work that they are overqualified for.

A Ph.D. is really a training program for an academic career, not for a business career. The subject of a Ph.D. is often highly specialised or even obscure. So, unless you happen to know (and if you have a choice for a Ph.D. subject) what research area will become important at the big software companies in three or four years time, the subject of your Ph.D. is irrelevant, or even detrimental, for your career. (That also goes for university careers: its very difficult to fight your way into a different specialisation).

That said, I loved my time as a Ph.D. student and post-doc researcher. You should only do a Ph.D. if you are passionate about a subject. So, if you have the opportunity to do a Ph.D. and you can afford to do it, and you are inspired by the subject and driven enough to finish it, then go for it. But it's not necessarily a good career move.

The ISP replaced it with another weak password? What? welkom02? Why not a strong password? Strong passwords do not have to be hard to remember or type, see: http://xkcd.com/936/