I logged in and your robot didn't say anything to me after saying 'Hi'! What gives?

This is true in the near-term, but in no way are these things required to make or run a web-app

Also, keep in mind that it's entirely possible for the developer community which uses these tools to maintain their own JVM if they need these things rather than it being on Apple's shoulders.

Java seems completely necessary now, but many languages that were 'necessary' for business like COBOL don't seem to be on too many people's mind now (not to discriminate, I'm sure there's still COBOL apps running and being maintained somewhere now).

I agree.

However, I think humans walking around on other planets and objects and living in space is fucking awesome.

Anything that gets other taxpayers interested in space and tech is good news to me.

I tried to use Ubuntu earlier this year on a Thinkpad and found a bunch of things lacking. I think that Thinkpads are held up around here as being a great laptop, and I really like how they look but I didn't enjoy using it so much. Unfortunately the thing worked a great deal better in Windows than Ubuntu but I'm not willing to give up a useful command line and Cygwin doesn't cut it.

• Quiet, bad speakers
• Tiny, poor touchpad, not much for scrolling webpages which is what mine mainly gets used for.
• Not the handsomest screen on the block
• Fan noise
• Unreliable sleep/standby, found that for best results I needed to put it in standby myself instead of just closing the lid.
• Problems connecting, and staying connected to some wifi networks. Found myself doing a lot of ifconfig up and such to massage it right.
• 3 hours max of battery, usually more like 2. With the 9 cell. Got more like 5 in Windows.

I am sure I could come up with a few other things. Granted there are all sorts of plusses I didn't make a list of, and I liked having a choice of window managers.

I also had a Dell laptop (from work) at the time, one of their 'high end workstations', which was around a $2500 laptop new in 2009 which was a far worse computer than my ~$1000 Thinkpad.

If someone actually builds a laptop whose industrial design approaches Apple's level in some way (Thinkpads are close...) and has decent power management, I will be a happy man. I check in on the PC BSD project from time to time as well and hope that picks up more steam.

A naval force would be a better bet at battling piracy than a bunch of nerds.

Nonsense is present on that page according to Buzz Aldrin's wiki page:

Goes without saying around here I believe...

I disagree!

I'm a recent graduate. I bet the majority of students, even those in the Linux club, would be hard pressed to write hello world in Perl without Googling. Speaking of, the culture at my school was very dictated by Google, and Google doesn't have much to say about Perl these days.

I don't think I did a single assignment in school which required me to even touch a line of Perl, and we had projects in assembly, C, etc. which I understand some programs these days don't touch so much (and focus on more high level languages, Java, etc.)

The general reaction to "I write a lot of Perl scripts at my internship" during school from peers was basically 'WTF?' followed by questions of how I dealt with the syntax, how hard it is to read, etc. I had the same reaction myself until I was writing a fair number of scripts in it. Even experienced developers at my current job (mostly Ruby shop) who never did much sysadmin stuff tend to have a hugely negative reaction to it.

The flexibility/portability thing is just awesome. It's awesome to be able to jump on just about any UNIX box and have Perl 5 there. With that and a little bash you can get just about anything done on the command line on a system you haven't had a chance to set up to your liking. use strict is great too when the programs get a little larger, though usually that means its time for a different language (if you ask me).

I'm guessing I'll never write a line of code targeted at Perl 6. By the time that is included with bare OSes and such, I'm sure they'll have a Ruby/Python/other language interpreter waiting for me. Or I'll just keep using Perl 5. Ain't broke, and such..

What's a desktop?

Sent from my iPad

i found it self deprecating

Make sure you get the extended warranty if you plan on running Flash on that internal power supply

So in my case, I've used my graphing calculator as a crutch for a long time to remind me of math identities, or to confirm that this or that is equal to 1 to make sure I'm not going on a mathematical wild goose chase. I don't know if it makes me any less intelligent that I am not great at memorizing math formulae, but it does affect my ability to perform at a high level of mathematics.

So maybe the "important part" is that I know how to use the facts when presented to me, but what if I had the depth of knowledge to remember the proofs of these "simple facts" that some might think I don't need to know via rote memorization? I think I would be more intelligent and better at math if I could juggle the low level concepts of the identities at hand as well as apply them to higher level problems. And in some way, the availability of tools to relieve me of keeping a good understanding of the proofs, axioms and identities is inhibiting my ability to know them.

I still don't blame the existence of the tool. But I think it does require an adjustment of my own approach, and an awareness of the limitation of the tools and of weaknesses I might be acquiring in my critical thinking by relying on them.

Good points though!

I would argue that anything that would fall under the category of "prescriptive grammar" has nothing to do with dumbness. And as a fluent/native speaker of the language you are posting in, I think it would be quite difficult for you to make a very egregious grammar mistake, as your brain probably wouldn't have generated the sentence to begin with. Sometimes this can happen if you are doing extensive editing and change verb tenses or some such, but it's usually not so bad. Can't imagine reading a few badly worded slashdot posts is rearranging your generation of deeply rooted linguistic knowledge such as your syntax.

With spelling, as long as mistakes are relatively minor, and don't introduce additional ambiguity into your writing, I don't see a problem with either. As we're quite aware, we generally decide what word we are reading based on context and first/last letters, with intermediate letters having dramatically less importance. Spelling is mostly convention, is a moving target over time, and is simply not very interesting.

My spelling has both gotten worse and better with the computer. Some words I was unsure about have been 'red squiggly lined' to me enough that I remember the real spelling. Other words I rely on the spell checker now to assure me of the correct spelling. Yesterday I was making a handwritten note and could not remember how to spell a word. I tried to confirm my choice by typing the letters in the air and seeing if it felt correct.

Are you listening NYT? I will buy print and web editions of your paper, as well as follow you on Twitter if this starts happening.

Australian police arrest a subject for illegal surveillance for overhearing another parties conversation while walking down the street.