Things like this, in face of Snowden revelations, looks like the US Gov was trying to divert attention from itself.

nor "exciting".

7 years ago, when the project started, we were focusing on Latin America community (spanish speakers can read portuguese and vice versa), so I decided to code in portuguese. Only a few people from Brasil decided to contribute to the project since then, so I guess the language choice actually helped those contributors.

Not that this choice doesn't look strange; we code in CakePHP, which is based on RoR, that specify that model names are plural, table names are singular, or whatever. We turn the pluralization off, as the english rules applied to portuguese words makes a mess. And writing a Inflector for portuguese really seems a huge work.

Also, we are required to append suffixes in english to some classes names; we end up with classes named like "AmostraController", "ProjetoComponent". Which in fact is Ok, as here in Brasil we use english jargon. People from Portugal would think it's bizarre, I guess.

My team code (variables, class and method names) and comment in portuguese. I found that not many programmers down here really know english, so our first attempts with english commentary yielded crappy, useless, unreadable comments. Even comments in our native language sometimes can be confusing, so I think that adding a extra layer of noise wouldn't do it.

Netflix has several great old films, but as a counterexample, it contains only the newer version of "Sleuth", with Michael Caine playing Laurence Olivier, and Jude Law playing Michael Caine, which I found a puny attempt at improving the original classic.

is a really old signature, isn't it?

there were in the 80's. or if you like procedural programming. I'd rather embed code on data structures, not schemas, and have a much more flexible, maintainable software design.

not to mention, if you have a web application, the what's the point of having business rules in two places? Ok, you implemented ALL business rules in the DB? great, so go get version control for that, or reuse code.

Or the rules wasn't implemented correctly, and the clients lacked the proper tests so it managed to get through till production*.

* assuming there were testing routines in their process**

** assuming there was a process

Mind if I list some useful stuff that made me use mendeley instead of bibtex:

1) it can export the whole library as bibtex

2) right click over your paper -> "copy citation as tex" -> paste it into your latex file.

3) keep the PDF together with the metadata

4) anotate the PDF

5) search those annotations

6) put DOI, PMID, ARXIVID -> get all metadata from the interwebs

7) organize it with keywords, collections

I can't believe it's better to keep a text file edited by hand than to use an user interface that automates several things. "Better", at least, in the saving-time-and-not-getting-mad sense.

what about

PRINT CHR$(4) + "CATALOG"

to invoke it from BASIC? ahh, the days.

That was the most useful comment of all till now. Please, mod it up!

The patent is about the method of diagnosis of a certain genetic condition using the mentioned gene. Couldn't find the reference yet, only Wikipedia.