It doesn't show that the official is anything but... it shows that the official believes the American public is anything but.

Yes and no, I think.

On the one hand, it is a good thing to prevent yourself from constrained thinking. I work with someone who thinks exclusively in design patterns; it leads to some solid code, in many cases, but it's also sometimes a detriment to his work (overcomplicated designs, patterns used for the sake of patterns).

Unlearning all we have figured out in computer science is silly, though. Use the patterns and knowledge we've spend years honing, but use them as tools and not as crutches. I think as long as you look at something and accurately determine that a known pattern/language/approach is a near-optimal way to solve it, that's a good application of that pattern/language/approach. If you're cramming a solution into a pattern, though, or only using a language because it's your hammer and everything looks like a nail to you, that's bad.

I do have a kindle in there actually, yes.

I already have all that covered. I have a very well stocked survival bag (the list of contents is very long, but it's a surprisingly reasonable weight). I am quite pragmatic :)

Well, it has built-in GPS, so I could load it up with maps, survival guides, etc... but who am I kidding? It's more because I'm an engineer and I think it would give me +5 sanity.

It's going in my emergency bag. Looks like a perfect emergency and/or post-apocalyptic laptop.

Brilliant! We can make people exercise less and remove their healthcare at the same time!

"Eclipse requires about 3 megabytes of memory"

Hah! My current instance of Eclipse, with a handful of relatively small Maven modules open, no build in progress, is using about 800MB. If you look at help.eclipse.org you'll also find:

"By default, Eclipse will allocate up to 384 megabytes of Java heap memory"

I'm not so sure I trust the credibility of this author.

Totally true. My first computer only had 16k available. Now that I have 12 gigs of RAM I have 786432x the amount of memory I need, so everything is always fast!

The idea of DRM winning or losing is a bit too black and white here. I'm not against DRM; I'm against *bad* DRM. You've probably seen one of the images showing the difference between watching a pirated movie and watching a paid DVD/blu-ray, showing that the pirated viewing experience is far better. Similarly, most early attempts at DRM resulted in a far worse media/game consumption experience for paying customers. That's what I'm against, and when that proliferates with complete acceptance I will consider the war lost. Services like Spotify, Steam and Netflix get it right, though. Yes, they use DRM, but they found a balance where the paid, rights-restricted solution is actually more convenient than the pirated solution. Most common use cases are easy, and I'm happy to pay. In my opinion, when the legal option becomes nice enough to use it doesn't matter if it includes DRM, and I don't blame content distributors for doing so. The issue of DRM is really pretty different from the issue of rent versus own, though. If you rent a digital item it necessarily has DRM, but DRM isn't the issue there.

Often the detection of sarcasm relies on understanding of popular opinion on a topic. I don't think we'll have any magic bullet algorithm to detect sarcasm until we have hard AI with a far-reaching corpus of current knowledge. Take these two sentences: "DRM is the best. It makes everything so much easier!" and "The iPhone is the best! It makes everything so much easier!" Ok, algorithm. Pick the one containing sarcasm...

Actually the rules are very clearly posted and are in no way confusing.

It's much like if I owned a popular jewelry store and told you that you could sell some of your products through my storefront if I took a 30% commission. Then, when a customer comes in to my store you whisper to him "psst, you can get this necklace 30% cheaper. Just meet me at my own private store and we can do business without the owner of this place getting his cut." Customer is happy. You're happy. I, the store owner, am not. I gave you a customer through my own distribution channel and you tried to sidestep giving me what you owe me for that.

Damn, people are so entitled these days.

I'm sorry... are you trying to tell me that natural selection conditions don't exist now because thousands of years ago tribal humans had social selection as well? I don't understand how your comment relates to what we're talking about. To reiterate, my point is that the conditions for natural selection existed then and exist now, but are simply different expressions of those requirements. Not all humans managed to reproduce then and not all humans reproduce now. Sometimes it's social, sometimes it's a pressure introduced externally (disease, a truck, etc.).

Well... yeah. Same was true thousands of generations back when we were getting eaten by wild animals instead of hit by trucks.

What do you think is happening any time someone gets killed by disease? Heck, even when someone is run over by a semi. Natural selection will shape us forever unless we conquer death itself.