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Comment TSA-certified fire containment bags (Score 3, Informative) 177

... are in our near future. I don't know why bans are the solution when we have fire containment bags on the markets. Why hasn't TSA decided to certify these things and require passengers to store their laptops in such bags? And if they don't have one, just sell them at the checkpoint for a premium? I'd rather have this than have the peace of mind of my laptop or tablet vanishing into oblivion in the checked luggage system.

Comment And [not] free it from the clutches of Vivendi (Score 3, Informative) 203

Apparently we're getting the TL;DR of the TL;DR. The real truth is this:

Following the close of these two transactions, Vivendi will retain about 12% of Activision Blizzard and will no longer be the majority shareholder. [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2013/07/26/activision-buys-majority-vivendi-stock/2588675/]

This is only a partial buy-out. While they would lose the majority reign over A/B, they'd still have a 12% say in everything they do.

Comment Always around my birthday (Score 1) 255

I swear, outside of just every few months, at minimum I get calls of frustration every year right around my birthday if not on my birthday. I wonder if they just hold out on dealing with their issues until my birthday approaches, and then they call me to say, "Hey, happy birthday! Now, can you fix my computer?"

Comment Who's the underwriter? (Score 2) 72

So who is the sucker that chose to underwrite this endeavor and expose his/her name to the public by way of collecting the funds? Sorry, I didn't RTFA as it was /.ed. I know anonymous is all about being faceless while still exposing information to the world, but a website with money behind it is kind of putting a face to the entity.

Comment Dead, Dying and Living (Score 1) 418

The problem isn't always the fact that ad-hoc support sites are used in place of documentation, but that ad-hoc support sites change while most documentation never does. There are two factors against documentation: First, these forum websites are updated regularly and so are indexed more readily; Second, software/programming documentation sites are filled with dying documents. Even MSDN is a dying resource. As soon as the next iteration of .NET is released, all documentation for previous iterations of .NET become deceased soon after. In addition to documentation being dead documents, the information in them is rarely improved upon before they do become deceased. Sometimes, the documentation is DOA with a new product because somebody didn't care to update the documentation to support the very similar, new product.

If people cared about their product a little more, maybe they'd make an effort to keep their documentation alive and in shape so sites like stackoverflow would become obsolete, at least to real programmers who don't just use documentation like it were Play-Doh.

Comment Radiate them first (Score 1) 148

Everyone knows you need to expose the mice to radioactive waste before their genes come anywhere close to resembling human genetics. After that, then you can think about doing trauma and burn research on them. However, last I heard, that research department was raided by some ninjas. No one knows quite what happened.

Comment CS is long-term, WebDev may be short-term (Score 1) 347

The value of CS is that it teaches you good theory and technique about how best to solve problems using computers. After getting my CS degree, I continue to surprise myself with how much better I understood and programmed in comparison to people who tool lesser tracks. Learning the languages is really cake once you understand a few of them.

What I did find was that my degree didn't teach me immediately marketable skills. So I crammed my electives full of telecommunication classes on topics like Unix administration, web development, and database management. That would be my advice to you. If you're in a theory-based CS program, and even in certain application-based programs, use your free electives to take some classes that make you immediately sellable.

The CS degree will help keep your education useful far longer than a telecommunications degree and your immediate skills will shoe you in the door right out of college. You'll get your web development job, you'll get sick of web development, and you'll have a CS degree to lean back on when you are fed up with that track.

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