And don't let him go to the movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

No but seriously, women are just as good as men at everything that doesn't require physical strength. Just look at the champs on the women's chess league: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

/ sarc

Well in New Zealand and everywhere else. copyright infringement is a civil offense,

Will somebody please tell the ignoramuses at ZDnet that there's no such thing as a "criminal copyright violation"?

Absolutely correct. The Medallion business was artificial scarcity, protected by insiders.

But on a broader scale the problem is that the world is awash in surplus capacity at every turn. Automation and robotics are compounding that problem at an exponentially increasing rate.

Ultimately we have too much labor and too much capacity to produce -- everywhere. This is a conundrum for economic models which require scarcity. We weren't supposed to have too much food, too much energy or too much labor. Demand was supposed to increase at a constant rate ...but of course we juiced the world with credit and now we've built productive capacity and availability that cannot possibly be met with demand. We are surrounded by business models and prices which are conceptual remnants of earlier eras when capacity was restricted. These models can only ever be preserved through artificial means, because given a natural, free-market dynamic, competition and automation drive prices south.

So it's not just medallions that are priced at unsustainable levels. Its nearly everything that's artificially overpriced. And that includes us.

> "Just that girls are able to create more complex games"

Actually, that's nice that you added your own personal take-away, but that's not what the study showed. You are turning preference into capacity.

It's also not how the study is described here on Slashdot:

"I'm a UK Study, Girls Best Boys at Making Computer Games"

That is very different from "just" saying anything about complexity.

And why is performance at a particular age relevant anyway? Is this a study of childhood developmental capacity? Because it sure looks like they're stretching to draw references to gender dynamics within the gaming industry.

"Complex stories"? "Two or more parts or conditional clauses"? Two???

"Trigger their scripts on when a character says something?"

I am a game developer. I have no idea what they are talking about.

More fundamentally: is "complexity" good?

"I'd never copy code".

"I'd use that exact library".

Those are mighty fine hairs to split.

I think you're using very negative words for a very normal part of the coding process.

For example, about 20 minutes ago I needed a function to measure password strength. Could I have written it from scratch? Of course. Did I? Hell, no. That would be a needless waste of time. I used the Interwebs and had a choice of 3 or 4 perfectly good functions within about a minute.

That's how coding works today. And if you're not making use of other people's code you're not doing it right.

Just out of curiosity are there any professional programmers out there who don't regularly copy functions from the Internet?

Part of being a contemporary coder is making use of available code. Libraries of functions are "other people's code". Languages are other people's code. Etc. it's all about other people's code.

The field of artificial muscles already has multiple competing technologies which are superior to this.

For one, the amount of force generated here is problematically low. Secondly, gold? That's going to be a problem for obvious reasons.

The future is in a combination of electroactive polymers and/or electro/thermally-activated shape-memory alloys -- both of which are cheap light and flexible.

The term PC was invented by IBM to describe the original IBM-PC.

Windows PC's are the descendants of the IBM-PC. Macs aren't. Which is why "PC" implies "Windows PC" everywhere and always in the software business unless it is prefixed by "Linux" or "Chrome".

The logic of what "PC" should or shouldn't mean is irrelevant. Language is a system of practice, not logic.

The entire argument in favor of modular phones is highly questionable IMHO. I see little evidence that this will represent a cost savings for consumers, that modular phones offer any serious advantages -- or that this is even something consumers want. It is also highly likely that modular phones will be larger, as modularity implies a component system that is by-definition less space-efficient than factory assembled.

We're in 100% agreement. You're misreading the position of my comment ;)

Anyone not woowoo pro-globalization (usually being historically-ignorant, and pro-socialist dictatorships) has already established:

1. There are massive profit incentives in the hundreds of billions of dollars for establishing a worldwide treatise system of carbon credits, which in turn will require a common, goal-seeked understanding of global warming and anthropogenic causality.

2. This doesn't mean that the world's about to end, but we aren't doing enough to prevent profound harm to your civil rights.

Carry on. ( Non-free thinkers usually do. )

Exactly. Some will say the sun's energy is indeed variable but the effect on Earth is basically invariable -- thereby calling the sun's energy a constant while pretending to account for variance.

Bad science.

Show me where it's not considered a constant. 1 study.