Puts the Zune squirt in a whole new light, doesn't it?

The fact that you've been modded Flamebait for offering an honest, unvarnished (and embittered) opinion is, ironically, the strongest supporting evidence you could have asked for.

It's hard for some of us to come to terms with a world where much of what we do and say isn't dictated by deterministic, defined and empirically measurable phenomena. It takes a great deal of effort and learning to begin to understand what motivates people, how to deal with the vagaries and, importantly, how to get money from them.

But nothing I've seen convinces me that business school is a better place than any other to learn these things. Assuming you're a smart, agile-minded person with a modicum of dedication, most MBA programs won't challenge you in any serious way. So if you're willing to devote a year or two to really coming to grips with the world around you, I'd recommend working overseas, as far from home as you can reasonably go. It will pull you so far out of your frame that you'll see humans and their motivations in a different light. Learning how money comes from these insights is a pretty straightforward thing once you've got that.

So Mac developers are used to crappy UIs with shitty-looking APIs?

(I kid, I kid. I just get these Sheldon moments from time to time...)

Clearly, they were watermelons.

Well, I'm not so sure about that. I predicted it back in 2011. Money quote:

Ubuntu is slipping out of control. Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

That's pretty much the argument being made in TFA, but I'm not going to try to take credit for oracular powers or anything. It's been pretty obvious for some time that they were on the wrong track.

Dude, vibrate mode is its killer feature.

Yep, it would be much more accurate to say they're leapfrogging past copper - which is a Good Thing. But fibre isn't optional, not even with O3B's MEO satellites in the picture. If you look at the submarine cable map, you can pretty much see at a glance which countries are more aggressive about internet and technology in general, and which ones are being left behind. Fibre is going to be needed in most urban areas, even if it doesn't ultimately consist of FTTH.

Sure, fine, but good communication and coordination are necessary elements of law and order, from developing a cultural intolerance for corruption right down to the cop on his beat and emergency numbers.

The moral of the story is, nothing comes 'first' before communications technology, because everything you do benefits from better comms capability, whether it's knowing the market price of the grain you grow, or finding job opportunities in your city, or organising a community protest, or just using plain old wikipedia to supplement your need for basic facts.

A program?!? Nuh-uh, just put them in the same room with Triangle Man. Everybody knows Triangle Man beats Particle Man.

... And, uh, let's keep Universe Man in the wings just in case Triangle Man gets outta hand....

I'm probably going to get shat on by kids who don't know any better, but....

Use Perl. If a complex set of regular expressions is taking 15 seconds per email, then there's clearly something wrong with the implementation. I suspect you're doing too much backtracking. I've been guilty of the same in the past. In one case, simply anchoring my regular expressions to the start and end of the string reduced running time literally by two orders of magnitude. Just glom the whole message into a string and go nuts.

And before someone makes a 'write-only' joke about Perl regular expressions, I'd suggest you take a look at Perl 6 regex grammars, which provide you with the ability to lay out complex rulesets with ease - and makes them vastly easier to read.

As with any programming issue, it's horses for courses, and when it comes to parsing text with regular expressions, Perl is still at the head of its class.

Heh, shyeah it is. It's where the Indonapolis 500 is run.

Fuh, had me almost tricked there....

Besides, they haven't even begun development on space sharks, and without space sharks, what good is a frickin' space laser?

Because they want to get the stuff that's bound for your Good Friend [sic] France, and because they're not 'setting up shop', they've been there since the early 19th Century. This is just a continuation of their strategic look-in on the canal and the global traffic that passes through it. Oh, and Gibraltar's not in the Middle East. :-)

... But none of this is to say they don't have similar facilities in Gibraltar.

No, it's Egypt.

They're not spying on the Middle East; they're spying in the Middle East... on all the data traffic running through the Suez canal. And that's basically everything between Asia and Europe.

Britain have had a watch on all traffic going through the canal pretty much from day one of its existence. And they've probably had communications taps in since the very first telegraph cables were installed.

Er, the UK is home to one of the most important financial centres on the planet. It's got a huge (commercial and strategic) incentive to know what other countries are doing. And it's not just spying on the Middle East - it's spying in the Middle East on all the Europe-Asia traffic that passes through the Suez Canal. Which is pretty much all of the Europe-Asia traffic there is (Russia excepted).

And you can rest assured that at least some of the US$100 million that the NSA gives GCHQ is being used to maintain these facilities. Draw what conclusions you like.