Visual Studio is free for students, OSS contributors, and small teams. It's only larger enterprises that have to pay for it.

Visual Studio Code is free and cross-platform, runs great on Linux (and mac), and is a pretty handy tool for working in node.js and other languages.

(disclaimer: I work in the Visual Studio team)

It's flamebait because it's xenophobic drivel, or do you really believe Polish is the most common language in London?

Whether this becomes an excuse for shrinking carry-ons is a different story, and that's how the news organizations have tried to field it. But if you look at their latest press release, they try to be clear:

The Cabin OK guideline is smaller than the size set by most airlines as their maximum acceptable for carry-on baggage. Thus, passengers with Cabin OK carry-on baggage can travel with a greater assurance that it will be acceptable across the different airline requirements. And, when travelling on a participating airline there is a further benefit: those bags with a Cabin OK logo will have a priority (determined individually by each airline) for staying in the cabin should its cabin capacity be exceeded and some baggage need to be moved to the hold.

What they're trying to say is the following: thanks in part to airlines charging for luggage, passengers often encounter situations where the plane is full and some bags are gate-checked, at no additional cost to the passenger. On some of the smaller aircraft, many "perfectly legal"-sized bags are out of necessity gate-checked. The "Cabin OK" logo is IATA's way to signal that, barring exceptional circumstances, that bag need never be checked at the gate. The idea is that the gate agent need only grab the trolleys without the logo to ensure space on a full flight.

That's (sort of) what NaN (not a number) is for in C/C++, also "NULL" is traditionally used to represent a missing/undefined value in a database.

The sad thing was there was a much better system in place, though it may never have made the transition to electronic stuff. There was a public records office, where anything official was put on file. After a fixed number of years it went into the public domain. If you have something that was sensitive you could request that it be sealed for 30 years, or 50, or 100 (some of the WW1 documents had a 100-year seal, but that was really rare). This meant that nothing strategic should ought get out prematurely, but in the end we got to read our history. People will always find a way of hiding or shredding public documents that they don't want. This just made hiding easier and less suspicious than to shredding. We got to see the real minutes of meetings, and not sanitized versions for Freedom of Information Act viewing.

We ought to bring the Public Records Office and the 20-year rule back. People will always find a way of hiding or shredding public documents that they don't want: this just made hiding easier than to shredding.

That Blair fellow is still around, I believe.

Let me "google" that for you:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=i...

Yes, but I don't know of anyone claiming that GAI will "teach" us anything, what I hear people saying is that we will teach it what to look for and how to behave. Also intelligence and consciousness are two entirely different things that may or may not be related.

AI is a tool that attempts to replicate the pattern matching abilities of a human brain, it can already find useful patterns in natural language and unformatted text faster and more accurately than any other method including traditional analysis by human experts, with the added advantage that every "discovery" it makes can be logically audited in excruciating detail.

If you were not blown away by IMB's jeopardy stunt then you're either under 30 or simply don't understand the difficulty of the problem they cracked. If you're waiting for skynet to emerge and attack before you call it "real AI" then I think you will be waiting a very long time. Besides, unconscious autonomous machines deliberately designed to indiscriminately kill humans have been with us for millennia, they used to be called mantraps, nowadays they are called landmines.

Personally I prefer speculation to the hubris in your post, at least I know that the people attempting to extrapolate today's technology did not stop thinking "decades ago".

You won't fix incompetence by yelling at it, you will simply hide it from plain view. If the Sgt Major routine actually worked for engineering projects then why do we have inspectors/testers? - Why not just hurl insults at the engineers until they get it right first time, every time?

I've been pan frying in olive oil for 40yrs, steaks, bacon, eggs, pancakes, etc, never had a problem with it smoking???

It supports ALL titles, but the publisher has to authorize it. They said during the Xbox Event that you can put the disc in and it'll install the game. So it's not a special version they are running a PowerPC emulator under the hood.

Theory: A OTP has a finite length in bits, a finite number of bits means a finite number of possible combinations, anything with a finite number of combinations is crackable by brute force in finite time (assuming time is infinite).

Practice: Make the number of combinations large enough so that the time to crack it makes cracking it impractical, eg: 100 trillion years.

Not really, just added more fuel to the fire. It was actually the worst drought in 10kyr history of the fertile crescent that triggered the "Arab Spring", akin to the dust bowl years in the US but in the food bowl of N.Africa and the M.E. It also coincided with sever drought in Australia and Russia, grain prices skyrocketed out of the reach of normal Arabs.

Two million Syrians (10% of the population) abandoned their farms and moved into the cities, and there were regular food riots in Cairo and other major cities before anyone had heard of Snowden! The Arabs didn't all suddenly log on to FB and work out they were being oppressed, they became hungry, and when people become hungry they get desperate and unpredictable. The spark that ignited the powder keg was the guy who set himself on fire in the town square, go google WHY he set himself on fire and then ponder why that resonated so strongly across an Arab world where even the "middle class urbanites" were struggling to feed their families.

The other two points are spot on. :)

At last! I've been looking for a use for my soft robot tentacle!

-- or --

At last! I've been looking for a way to lasso ants without harming them!