He lives about two blocks away from us and actually donates to a local arts organizations I volunteer with. I've seen his email and address in the members database; I wouldn't even dream of taking advantage of that information though. I'd heard he lived here for years; and it was just cool to see it there and know he was a real tangible person donating to the arts.

Even though he lives so close I've never seen him once. That's ok though; I feel lucky just knowing that he's around (and it gives our much maligned rust belt city a little bit of cred for being the wonderful place that it is - Watterson *wants* to live here - I don't think you can get much more awesome than that).

I visited the woods hole facility over the summer, and they truly run a top notch operation (keeping these vessels in one piece at that kind of pressure is insanely tricky - what they're doing is amazing). I'm really sorry to hear about this loss; I'm sure it's going to have a significant impact on important research they're doing.

Everyone says the same shit about tromaville, but gratuitous gore is the perfect place for social commentary.

Because, you know, how could the open source community have developed code with the exceptional quality of a product offering like, uh, oracle forms for instance?

is because /. hasn't completely turned into the total crap fest other news aggregation sites have, right? If you give me a way to stick with the old design, then ok I'll keep sticking around - but I'm really not impressed with the direction this is headed.

I disagree, I don't buy Samsung products for this very reason, and I haven't bought an Apple product since our iPad 1 got upgraded to a version that barely works (with no option to downgrade - bastards). I don't have the time to protest crap companies, I just don't buy their crap.

There are three things that people really care about in an employee, quality work, meeting deadlines, and a pleasant attitude - and you only really need two out of those three. If you do good work and it's on time people will put up with how unpleasant you are, if your work is good and you're easy to get along with people will put up with missed deadlines, if you're on time and always a pleasure to be around people will put up with work that's not as good as everyone else. Ideally you want to shoot for three out of three, but sometimes you have to settle for less.

Wow, I actually want the new xbox less than I want a Wii U now...

What are you doing? You were my escape plan all during the Bush years - where am I going to go when the right finally tanks the US?

Because of bullshit biased crap like this showing up on here. Seriously, a WSJ article, on slashdot? Let's start posting Fox and Huffpo articles too! Let's just turn this whole wonderful site into a steaming pile of political horse manure. I love it.

I guess the good news is that I have a real impetus to get a lot better at Gimp now...

You know, because, as long as you have a "secure network" it's ok to have remote power shut off spanning an area as big as southern california, amiright? Who would want to (or even be clever enough) to hack a system like that?

/S

Which is probably an old guy way of thinking of it, but I can't get the image of thousands of irreparably cross eyed consumers filing a class action lawsuit...

This is such bullshit. Women *were* the first programmers b/c it was a natural transition from touch typing to writing code. You know, women like the one who created the Liskoff Substitution Principle!? You know, Barbara Liskoff? Women were some of the most significant innovators in the field!

The reason women aren't in programming anymore is because there was a massive campaign to make programming a male dominated profession in the 60's and it's just stuck since then. It's a shame that you have such a bigoted, short signed, idiotic attitude about women. ( ...or even intense thinking? what the fuck is wrong with you and the idiots that modded you up as "insightful"?)