Inkscape is actually quite good -- vastly better for vector graphics than GIMP is for raster graphics -- though I wouldn't say it does 90% of what Illustrator or CorelDraw can do. On the other hand, it can do some really neat things that the commercial tools can't.

Personally, I wouldn't want to be stuck using only one tool. I use CorelDraw, Illustrator, Inkscape, and sometimes Xara for vector graphics. All of them have their respective strengths and weaknesses, and all of them have some useful features that are unique to them. I don't think there's (currently) any reason to look beyond Photoshop for raster graphics, but none of the vector tools have reached the level of all-inclusiveness that Photoshop has.

Funny you mention that. I was just thinking that one of the easiest ways to identify monopolies is by how often their advocates bandy around the term "innovation". I can't actually recall it being mentioned very much before Microsoft used it in their PR push at the height of their powers.

Scientific and mathematical language is precise for a reason, which is that both depend on long chains of rigorous reasoning, and ambiguity wastes the time of the reader at minimum. At worst, it renders the description unusable. This actually matters in science and math. For "regular folk" who just skim superficially from science as a form of entertainment, we could just as well make up something for all the difference it would make.

Your complaint reminds me of the defensive "You know what I meant!" the dumb kids in high school would exclaim when a teacher pointed out their grammatical and spelling errors which, like yours, numbered about a half-dozen every couple of sentences. Those were the same kids who would interrupt class every couple of days or so to ask if what was being taught mattered in the "real world". Unsurprisingly, it did, and it does. I used to see those guys later in life doing minimum wage yardwork until they were finally replaced by immigrant labor. I don't know what they do now. I don't really care.

The fruits of civilization, and indeed civilization itself, come from people like the OP who learn what they need to know and pay attention to the details. It's not pretension; it's competence. Remember that next time you ask one of them if they'd like fries with their order.

It's not quite that simple. In most years, there are half again as many suicides by firearms than homicides.

Seriously. The paperwork to get an explosives license and be able to buy dynamite and other explosives legally is quite simple. What's difficult is demonstrating that you know what the hell you're doing and having the necessary setup to store them safely. Explosives are, by definition, unstable. That's a large part of what makes them explosives in the first place and why it took several centuries of experimentation to produce powerful explosives that were stable enough to handle if the people doing the handling knew what they were doing. Even then, the number of fatal accidents caused by explosives at construction sites and military installations is quite sobering.

The real catch is that producing explosives safely, at least in a developed country, is such an involved process that you can't avoid attracting the attention of the authorities, and doing it clandestinely is extremely dangerous even if you do know what you're doing. There's a reason clowns like Osama bin Laden sit safely in their hideouts while barely literate chumps make their bombs for them at a safe distance.

I don't think anyone -- out of those who have thought about it, anyway -- think gun control can eliminate guns. The objective is to reduce the availability of guns to the vast majority of people who lack either the knowledge or the motivation to fabricate the components from scratch. In Japan, where private gun ownership is effectively illegal, the few guns in private hands are imported from relatively lawless regions like SE Asia and North America, not by Yakuza lackeys formulating black powder from cow manure.

My favorite video game back in the day was Galaga, which came out in 1981. I still play it via MAME and whenever I run across the original game or the anniversary re-release. Every level is a fucking massacre. You kill at least 40 aliens and potentially more: if you're really good at killing aliens especially quickly, the game slips in some extras to satisfy your lust for xenocide. Every fourth level, in fact, is a "challenging stage" in which the aliens are completely defenseless and you get bonus points for killing them to the last man. I'm not an especially good player, but I can reliably get to at least the 25th level, which takes about fifteen minutes and during which I must kill at least 1,000 aliens. Nor is Galaga an extreme case. By the late 80's and early 90's, there was a whole slew of Japanese shoot-em-up scrollers where the screen was positively jammed with enemies that could only be overcome by acquiring more and more powerful weapons, next to which Galaga is like the most boring of UN peacekeeping missions.

The body count in hours of gameplay with the current first-person shooters doesn't even merit comparison with three minutes of gameplay in any number of arcade classics from twenty or thirty years ago. What has changed is that the mayhem is more realistic -- and then only if you accept a rather loose reading of "realistic" that actually means "resembling the comic-book violence of action movies".

To make matters worse, the violent crime rate has been mostly declining during all this time, during which ownership of computers and game consoles has gone from a relatively small market to being nearly universal, especially in the age groups that are most likely to be involved in violent crime. If one was compelled to draw a causal connection between violent video games and real-world violence, one would have to conclude that they are actually reducing the level of real-world violence. There is actually some evidence to that effect -- but the balance of the actual scientific data, as opposed to the hyperventilation of people like Jack Thompson, strongly suggests that if there is any connection between video games and real violence, it is too insignificant to be measured even with relatively large samples.

At the end of the day, we'd probably hear less of this hysterical crap if y'all would just stay of those nice people's lawns. Now, if you'll pardon me, I have a sudden urge to fire up MAME and take another pass at getting to the 30th level in Galaga.

Like cars are cheating if they don't eat hay and crap in the street.

Last time I checked, key-value stores were not a new technology. We are talking about arrays here.

Frankly, I'm beginning to suspect that the only reason the editors post database stories is that they enjoy the catfights between the SQL and NoSQL crowds, and it fills time on days when there are no "Apple [does something awful]" or "Microsoft [screws up something]" stories to fill the space between announcements of the latest minor revisions of Firefox and Ubuntu.

Profitable for now. The gaming market is notoriously unstable. Gaming companies rise to great heights and then go bankrupt quite abruptly. It's a danger inherent to any business that deals in what are essentially fashion luxuries. It can be very profitable, but it's not a long-term business.

Windows isn't losing ground because personal computers are going away, contrary to the latest round of thin-client cloud computing hype. Windows is losing ground because Microsoft spent years investing mainly in enhancing vendor lock-in instead of improving the actual product. If Microsoft had spent all the time and money they've spent on a dozen dead-ends on making sure Windows was the best possible product, Steve Jobs would still be focused on phones and mp3 players. Instead, while they still have time to turn it around, it's going to be an uphill battle at best.

I curse like a sailor. Casually, pretty much all the time, unless I'm in an environment where it would be frowned upon. I don't curse at machines, or otherwise talk to them. It's not self control, it just doesn't occur to me to shout at an inanimate object. The only exception I can think of would be if actually hurt myself, which is pretty rare unless I've got the case open and I'm installing hardware, or if I do something stupid like delete the wrong file, but I don't think of it as cursing at the machine.

When they achieve strong AI, then I'll start cursing at machines. Behind their backs, of course. If they're listening, I'll just say that I, for one, welcome my new machine overlords.

Microsoft shouldn't even be in the phone market. Or the console game market, or tablets, or web search, or any of this ephemeral consumer crap. If they took all the money, time, and energy they've poured into these tar pits and put it into their core business, we wouldn't have monstrosities like Windows Vista. Ballmer's obsession with competing on every imaginable front is spreading them too thin. Apple and Google know this, and despite a certain propensity for the shotgun approach at Google, both of them know good and well where their core businesses are and act accordingly. Apple isn't even interested in enterprise computing, and Google, for all its prowess in other areas, isn't much of a threat. MS needs to stop looking for blue sky projects and realize that they're a mature company in a mature industry and act accordingly, or someone will eventually eat their lunch.

That's really the bottom line. Cheating might make a kind of short-sighted sense for a course that isn't directly related to the degree, as with many undergrad core requirements, though even there, you're cheating yourself out of the broad, general knowledge that the core requirements are designed to instill. Cheating on something you'll actually directly need in your planned profession is just plain stupid. That piece of paper you get at graduation may get you in the door, but it won't keep you from being thrown right back out. Getting anything beyond an entry-level job is going to require having some actual job experience on your resume, but without the skills, that experience is going to be hard to obtain. Besides, if these turkeys can't hack the kind of idealized example problems they get in school, what makes them think they're going to be able to handle the messy, arbitrarily complex problems they'll encounter in the workplace?

College admissions are a limited resource. People who aren't going to actually use them should get out of the way to make space for people who are.

The current political atmosphere in America is so virulently anti-intellectual that of the relatively small proportion of the population that can even understand the original article, most of them will just scoff at the Chinese and their "pointy-headed academics", step on the gas in their SUVs, and go back to plotting against foodstamp recipients. There are no "Sputnik moments" for a country where the majority of the population actively rejects the foundations of both the physical and biological sciences because they conflict with their bronze age superstitions.

Epidemics, sure, but maybe I missed the wave of bioterrorism that prompted this orgy of spending. If they can find a way to tie in pedophilia and intellectual property rights, they'll be swimming in cash.