They're just doing what their new insect overlords command them to.

1991, 1999, 2010. One attack every decade is "quick"?

Obligatory XKCD

The movie industry is just moving from "All is Lost" to "Dark Night of the Soul". There should be a big resurgence in the movie industry soon. That's the way the plot has to go, right?

That's nothing, a year ago in this quarter they wrote down $6.2 billion for their acquisition of aQuantive. Who the hell was aQuantive, you ask? Beats me, I guess that was part of the problem. I guess Microsoft can't piss away their money fast enough these days, so they have to take a big bath every year on some stupid decision. I predict next year's writedown will be the XBone.

John Henry won the battle, but lost the war. How is being outcalculated by a computer news? Just because it's a hard problem?

The problem with these statistics is that they don't count the victims recovered because of the alert. That's kind of like claiming that a tornado warning saved 50,000 lives because only 158 people were killed in Joplin, Missouri in 2011.

In another kind of mission creep, we recently got a Pet Amber Alert call at o-dark-thirty. Holy moly, if I actually found the lost dog they were looking for I'd probably keep it, as their owners are apparently dumber than their dog. The PAA people claim to be exempt from do-not-call lists because they're an "emergency notification service". Great. Turn your phones off at night, it's only going to get worse.

Unless you count the programmable calculator I got in 1975. I guess it had about 256 bytes of memory, so that would raise the factor to my current (2gb) pc to 8000000.

I picked 1000x because the first computer I owned had 2 mb (Unix PC/7300, a real kick-ass machine for 1987). But the first computer I used was a PDP-8 with a few K. It wasn't "mine", though - personal computers were still pretty rare in the late 70's.

I recall that on-campus movie showings back in the 80's used to flash a slide on the screen saying "NERDS - SILENCE YOUR WATCHES". Because, you know, they used to have these digital watches that would beep on the hour, back before everybody used their cell phones to tell time.

Isn't it AC#AX now that Java is in its death throes?




{cue the outraged Javascript fans to tell me Java != Javascript...too bad...}

TFA mentions $20 million in tax incentives to create 200 temporary construction jobs and 29 permanent ones. I suspect Iowa got taken here....

Some data centers are going up here in Colorado Springs, largely because of cheap electricity from the city-owned utility. Iowa also has relatively cheap power, which may have been a factor in MS's decision along with tax incentives.

The authors had the real threat in their sights, but missed it. From TFA:

The ants outnumber us by perhaps a factor of 20 in mass, and a factor of 10 million in numbers. Are we really the "dominant species", or are we just deceiving ourselves? And we're not "taking them into account"? Be afraid, be very afraid...

I guess it's time to introduce another generation to the devious genius of Ken Thompson.