For example, nothing was said about GOTOs being liberally sprinkled throughout the code. If he's working in a non-optimal language that doesn't support GOTO, he should try hacking in the functionality with preprocessor defines. Maybe even hack in a preprocessor if the language designer forgot one, or add another preprocessor if not. With a few stacked preprocessors one can even write his own (better) computer language, and what seasoned programmer doesn't aspire to have one or two of those under his belt?

Also among the business practices Google has agreed to stop is 'scraping Web content from rivals and allegedly passing it off as its own, said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz.'"

So, would there be a problem if Google scraped Web content from rivals and proudly proclaimed it was passing it off as its own?

I was thinking of this in terms of ICANN's UDRP, not American libel or trademark law.

She has a great industry reputation and everyone that knows her loves her.

That's what matters. Maybe she can trademark her name and seize the domain as being confusingly similar, but it's still throwing time and attention at somebody who clearly craves it, for dubious gain.

If the company relied on one programmer to handle everything, beware.

It's always a little amazing to see how people cheer on the leaks and cracks when they appear in a closed system, yet continue to support these closed systems with their money and attention when open systems are available.

It's just this very weird disconnect in consumer psychology. You don't have to crack a PC (yet) to do what you want with it. But you make a computer small and flat and suddenly you find yourself having to pay $1+ for every little program, from a collection of programs that somebody else has decided you shall have access to. You don't see the "fuck the man" attitude at the store, you only see it when a Scandinavian high schooler comes up with a crack for your game console and the manufacturer tells you you can't have it.

I just don't get it. How many years past DeCSS are we and banging our heads against the same wall?

Who here got to go to Comic-con this year?

Efficiency in wireless communication is something of a purple elephant, mostly due to interference concerns that aren't at issue in wired Ethernet transactions. True, wired connections will have the occasional collision (though this is largely solved by modern algorithms and operating systems) but digital transmissions over an analog medium are difficult enough when they aren't running into each other in the air. And then you have other interference introduced by microwaves, whether from devices like cell phones, microwaves, or sunspots. It's a very noisy environment!

The concept of using algebra is a unique step forward in this field. Most here would agree, if you're in a crowded cafe and trying to carry on a conversation, it's easier to shout "Pythagoreas" than to talk about squares and triangles. But with computers it happens to be exactly the opposite because they're designed to compute -- it's what they do and what they like to do. So feed it generalities and, often, it can come up with specifics, much like the Monty Hall Paradox.

The next step appears to be to move from algebraics to broad descriptions of the type of data you want to download. This is waiting on computers with a great deal more processing power and perhaps emergent AI, but there will come a time where instead of feeding a bunch of packets over a noisy channel the Internet will simply say to your computer "short film with 20-something actor wondering whether to marry now or enjoy life for a while longer" and your system will fill in the rest, completing the transfer mathematically. This is down the road a ways, but newer technology such as lossy compression for data is already available and potentially lucrative for those who are willing to think outside of the conventional box and try something with a few more holes in it.

If you think the risks of running in the cloud are less than the risks of running in a traditional data center, you're very much mistaken.

If one AWS AZ goes down I can bring up servers in a second one. If one AWS region goes down I can bring up servers in a second one. In fact to hedge against these risks I *already have* servers in multiple zones and regions.

Sure you can do that with traditional data centers. Just host your stuff across more than one, right? Do you have any concept of what that COSTS? Especially if you, say, want to add servers in multiple data centers, or move servers from one to another. Plus now you have multiple vendors, contacts, SLAs, and so son, and so forth. And heaven help you if you ever want to *decrease* your capacity. Have fun selling those servers on ebay.

Reddit and friends are suffering downtime from a single AZ outage because their architectures have single points of failure. Don't build your systems that way! If you have single points of failure it doesn't matter whether you're hosted in the cloud, in a commercial data center, or in your own data center. Conversely if your architecture is good and doesn't have single points of failure, the hosting question comes down to this: what do you specialize in as a business? If that list doesn't include "running a data center", don't run your own data center. If it doesn't include "maintaining a shit load of hardware", then don't host in a commercial data center either, run in the cloud. I think you will find that this latter category includes 99.99% of businesses.