Did you mean recursion?

Well, for my 2 cents, I've been working on a project by myself for the past 6 months, starting from scratch, and it's up to about 85,000 lines of code, and I would classify that as medium-scale. It all depends on what your perspective is I suppose.

But, like you said, a well organized 85k lines is a lot smaller than a poorly written/organized 40k lines.

It. Can't. Be. Automated.

You might as well be comparing effectiveness of recycling aluminum cans and mining for new aluminum. Yeah, the mining operation is going to produce more aluminum per square mile, but does that matter?

What really matters is what the resulting cost is. I have no idea which is more cost effective, I just know that you are looking at the wrong thing. Also, I would surmise that it's is much more likely that we will switch to ethanol _and_ electric (i.e. hybrid vehicles) than switch to electric all together.

Catholic birth control?

Your analogy is flawed. "Should your neighbor be able to build his own chair exactly like yours?" is the question you should be asking.

The difference between your chair and a photograph/essay is that the chair is tangible property while the photograph/essay is intangible property. Now, if you write a book, the content of that book is yours and cannot be taken by someone else who claims it as their own. The individual copies of that book, however (if you choose to sell them) are not yours. If you don't want to distribute copies of your work, fine, but that's not what this is about. Once you start distribution, you can't say "Well, I take that back, I don't want the public to have this work after all."

It's much more likely that the supercomputer is capable of 1.6 billion processor hours per year (or month?) and IBM is gonna be using 1.5% of that capacity. When IBM is done, that 1.5% will be freed up and can be used for something else.

Not to mention that if you are going to shell out for the hardware anyway (i.e. buy a PDA), you could just buy the smartphone outright and not get a 2 year contract...

If Joe User cannot create a password that has less than 12 characters, then the Sysadmin *established* (with an 'e' on the front) a policy that is being *enforced*. He doesn't just go around to each employee and teach them what kind of passwords they should make, he tells the system what kind of passwords will be accepted and how often they expire.

What would happen if a solar power cell was hacked? Would you be able to send energy to the sun? Just because something can send or receive something, doesn't mean it can do both. This reads brain waves and sends updates to twitter. It does not receive updates from Twitter and send brain waves.

A Sitemap?

Alright, so here are a couple of facts.

1) Data is an infinite resource.
2) Transmission capacity is a finite resource.

You are not paying your ISP for the data you receive. The data is not owned by your ISP, it's owned by, for instance, Google. What you are paying for, is the transmission of said data from Google to you. As you can see above, transmission capacity is not infinite. How do we measure this capacity? In bytes per second. So, basically, you can charge by Bytes, you can charge by Seconds, and you can charge by Bytes/Second.

Back in the day, you connected to the internet and you were charged by how long you were connected (back in the dial-up days, before unlimited). That model doesn't work any more. Now you are connected to your computer all day, and you computer communicates with servers in the background, even when you are not on.

Right now, ISPs are charging by Bytes/Second. The problem with this model is that ISPs give 5000 people a 10Mb throttle on a 1Gb pipe (i have no idea of the actual numbers, i'm just saying that they oversell), since they know that each of those people won't be on the internet all day long. So when 1000 of those people are all online at the same time, you get much less than the 10Mb they promised you.

The model I am in favor of is charging by Bytes, and just let the data flow as fast as it can at any given time. You can use as much bandwidth as you can get your hands on, but you will pay for it. ISP will have incentive to upgrade their pipes, because the bigger the pipe, the more data can flow through it and the more money they make. Bandwidth hogs will pay their fair share.

My point: If I make a vague statement about something that could mean either A or B and A is obviously wrong, then it's pretty safe to assume I'm talking about B. So don't bash me because you assume I'm talking about A. (replace "I" with "sopssa")

First of all "as old as the wind" is just an expression means "really fricken old". It's obviously not meant to be taken literally, so get off your high horse.

Secondly,

Just because a solution exists, does not mean you have solved the problem. Think of it this way. You are looking through your telescope at night up at the stars and you notice a new star you have never seen before. You look at all the star-charts you can find and realize that no one has ever documented this star. You've just discovered it.

But you are saying that you did not discover the star, since the star already existed. Of course the solutions already exist for these math problems. However, discovery is the act of documenting an observation (ie, someone has to say "this is the answer"), so while they exist, no one has yet discovered them.