I suspect that if a bacteria managed to create an enzyme or whatnot that could break down one kind of plastic that it might not be too many mutations away from similar types of plastic. And if bacteria could figure out one they could probably figure out them all.

Plastic has lots of energy (try burning it) and thus could be a food source in and of itself. Thus there could be a bacteria that is eating it. Where this is disturbing is that we like to put useful plastic things into the water such as fibreglass boats. Could there be a bacteria evolving that will start corroding our plastics?

Also the fish that eat it may now have a gut bacteria that will break it down.

Whatever the truth turns out to be I suspect it will be fascinating!

I think that there should be more exposure to CS, CE, EE, CE, ME, etc. But not full on long term courses for any but a few faithful. It takes a certain mindset to enjoy computers and engineering; many people don't have this mindset so foisting it upon them is probably bad news. But for those who like it they like it a lot. I would have loved way more time in the computer lab during my youth.

What I would have much preferred instead of a rigorous course that actually might have put me off CS; especially if taught by a bad teacher or two; Would have been a computer club/technology lab where we would be given the tools and tutorials to better understand what we liked and could do.

Then when kids go to university and are learning fairly abstract concepts they would be able to regularly have "ah ha" moments where they could realize that this abstract knowledge could have solved problems they had back in the lab.

Now I would like to see a bit more tech ed as (hard to understand for slashdotters) but there is a huge percentage of the population that simply has no idea what happens to make a light switch turn the lights on and off; let alone how the hell a 3 way light switch works.

For instance in my children's schools they have chemistry labs that look like they were awesome 30 years ago. But now they are art rooms because of the great sinks and the fume hood is good for stinky art. So again nothing outside of a textbook(other than me) has ever shown my daughters how soap works.

So before schools should make some foolish large attempt to impose their interpretation of CS they should look at the entire sci-tech teaching issue.

Simplicity of dependencies are the only way I survive C++ development. For instance I was just playing with OgreSDK, and it depended on my having a specific version of CMake installed in a specific way, in a specific directory. That's fine, oddly enough I can live with that. But how long before I combine Ogre with something that requires something different about the CMake installation?

So, for instance I like the Crypto++ library because I can cheat and just slam it into my multi-platform codebase without worrying about keeping it separate. And seeing that over 50% of my code needs to run on 4 platforms I have become very sensitive to this kind of crap. I consider a platform specific #ifdef's to be a personal failure (even though they are lightly sprinkled through my code).

I somewhat like boost with its mostly header only stuff but that is not without some consequences. POCO is cool but I find that having a single codebase that is multiplatform is an IDE configuration nightmare.

So what is my favourite solution? I would say that libraries have many virtues but that in the end any fights with them can be horrific. So I am going to go with my present favourite for multiplatform dependency goodness; and that is Cocos2d-x; it isn't perfect but the nice combination of it being a library and part of your code base results in some of the fewest compilation problems that I have ever had.

I would say that its primary cost is when you go to upgrade to a much newer version of the library. Basically you have a fight on your hands. But that fight is once in a blue moon. Whereas I find some other libraries are a non-stop fight, sometimes with no resolution.

It generally isn't a positive indication of how wholesome and wonderful a person you are when you sue one of the greatest achievements of the internet. If twitter, facebook, yelp, and even slashdot went away, there would be a loss but the loss of Wikipedia would be an epic loss for the internet.

Also it is not the threat of a win that is a problem but Wikipedia's budget could be trashed by even just fighting a suit like this. So I hope that this guy gets horrifically Barbara Streisand'd to show that the cost to his reputation for suing Wikipedia will far exceed whatever gains he hopes to have.

If you have ever met a lawyer who works with cops you will have met a very frustrated lawyer. Some cops understand and can apply the rules. Many others do not have a clue and couldn't apply them anyway.

I know one lawyer who was telling about their many years of working with cops and what was interesting was that they much preferred the local cops as they knew the routines way way better. But the grander more respected police force was borderline useless when it came to i dotting and t crossing. Plus this lawyer would do their damnedest to keep the latter off the stand unless there was no alternative at all.

So I suspect that with this technology that some may have bent the rules and will get away with it. But I suspect that others didn't even know which rules shouldn't be broken and are so guilty that they are more guilty than the people they were trying to catch. Hopefully through the abuses of these people that the whole program is shut down.

I have clients who have basically thrown their money into a facebook toilet; and I also have clients who have reaped huge benefits. The key for the ones where it worked was that they knew exactly who their customers were and very carefully measured the results and could then compare the value they got from facebook as compared to all other media including billboards. Facebook was the hands down winner and was more than 100x cheaper than things like radio on a per customer generated basis. On a side note billboards were far less effective but the best of the traditional media.

But that only applied for a few narrow products. I don't think it would work very well for a high commitment product such as a car. I would not be surprised if the car companies have tried facebook and spent more in advertising per customer generated than they got back in profit per car. For instance I would recommend facebook for a TV show on tonight, and as a reminder to listen to some radio show. But it would require highly targeted advertising. So for Game of Thrones it probably isn't too hard for them to nail GOT watchers on Facebook with pinpoint accuracy and to make sure the ads were even episode specific. But for NBC to remind people to just watch NBC in general, probably a waste of money.

So basically I would dismiss anyone who makes any generalizations about social media advertising as either being good or bad. It is a very specific tool that is very good for a narrow range of jobs.

But they were saying confidential informant, not electronic spy gizmo.

Perjury anyone? Shouldn't there be a whole bus load of policemen going to jail? I am fairly certain that any of us would be going to jail if we deliberately falsified documents going to a judge for something as serious as a search warrant.

This would be an excellent exercise in eliminating a whole swath of police who don't respect our rights. I would also hope that they put them in general population so that they can encounter first hand the monsters that their injustices have created.

Quite a few of my parent's friends and my relatives were professors of this and that. I thought they were the coolest people ever. They were so much more interesting to talk to and came very close to inspiring me to an academic life (the path not chosen for me). But in all those cases they fit that classic profile of having enough money to have the Volvo, the good house, and quite a bit of travel.

But if they had been forced to live like grad students I can certainly say that I would have been far less inspired to follow in their footsteps. While I didn't take that path, how many people who would are being dissuaded now?

I have a simple view as to what the problem is. Science money has two serious political problems. One is that it takes longer than an election cycle to create result, which themselves are often not initially sexy (think of how unimpressive the initial quantum discoveries were, but how much impact they eventually had). Also science often involves giving money to groups of already employed scientists who then spend the money in a myriad of different ways. Whereas giving money to a military contractor provides a bunch of fairly blue collar jobs and loads of kickbacks from the companies.

But even worse this creates a feedback circuit. If you are a math whiz and are looking at your various options then business school should be a snap. Then you can follow in the footsteps of the Ferrari driving cool kids on Wall Street. If this actually works you will inspire another generation of whiz kids to follow you. But quite simply few nations can build greatness from banking. There needs to be something to bank.

Basically if you go to most schools (especially impoverished ones) and ask the kids what route would you recommend for becoming really successful they will first say sports star, then rapper or other entertainer, and then things like banker, doctor, or lawyer. But engineer, scientist, inventor, or even building a manufacturing business just won't be on those kids minds.

This is well emphasized when you look at the classic map of top paid collage official in various states and it is almost always a sports coach.

The crazy thing is that a few schools have managed to master that connection with turning students/professors into businessmen and they are mindbogglingly successful. Not that money should be the only motive for science at least if there is some there it will inspire generation after generation of people who will propel civilization forward.

In many communities you will find that the major dealers for a given brand are owned by the same family. So you cross town for a better price and oddly enough it is identical.

I have a bonkers fast machine with SSD, gobs of memory, CPUs on fire, etc. Yet running the android emulator is go off and make a sandwich time.

I do 100% of my testing on actual devices which is not at all how I work with iOS. With iOS I only occasionally test my code on an actual device as there are occasional differences between the simulator and the actual devices.

Also the android is all about settings, settings settings, instead of asking me if I have a keyboard, GPS, etc. What I would like is a list of the most popular phones. Then I could try out my code on those very phones. Also it would be great if someone had a problem with my app on a specific phone and I was able to quickly select that phone and try out my code.

I get a feeling that the emulator was not so much aimed at developers of apps but aimed at hardware and OS developers who need this magically perfect emulation. Whereas the iOS Simulator is quite clearly aimed at people who are developing apps. Which oddly enough would be 99.999% of the potential audience.

I don't know any of my tech friends who are breathlessly awaiting 4K monitors. If I go to staples to replace my monitors some day and see that the 4K one is $50 more than the regular one, then OK I'll happily buy one. But it if it is $200 more then, no, I'll wait.

I am not saying that 4K is a stupid idea, or that I hate 4K, if it turned out that one of my present monitors had a switch on the back that would switch it to 4K I would be delighted, but when it comes to budgeting my money there are a huge number of things that would make my workflow a whole lot better that I would rather spend my money on. 4K is nice but just not needed. I think that I speak for most people who aren't doing video editing.

But I suspect that for the next 3-5 years that I am going to be reading various tech blogs and they will breathlessly review the latest 4K monitors as they drop lower and lower in price. But again the spread between regular and 4K will have to be pretty small before I will make the jump.

A 4K TV on the other hand would be pretty cool and I think that Netflix has some programming 4K ready so I would probably make that leap long before a monitor.

Here is a good example of stupid. My natural tendency is to start later in the morning and work most of the day, stop, then work until around 3am.

Yet when I go to bed early and start work around 6am I am uber productive. Often noon rolls around and I have done at least a full day's work.

On a side note I have learned to not surf anything until the end of my work day. This would include slashdot, reddit, etc. Not only are they time burners but I think some part of my brain is then spending the rest of the incorporating what I have "learned" from these sites instead of focusing on the task at hand.

I 100% agree with what you are saying. So why aren't we using IPv6? Why does my ISP issue me with only a 32 bit address? Why does my server host only give me 32bit addresses? Plus all the little bits like the default settings in IPTables are 32bit?

To me with all this hardware and other networking bits are ready to go but there seems to be no more forward motion. Seeing that nobody has argued that IPv6 is in and of itself bad then it strikes me that some group has dropped the ball; but which group? Again as I use various major networking APIs etc they all almost have either ignored IPv6 or they don't seem to take it seriously like they know that it isn't coming.

I find it interesting that 25% of people in the poll have chosen "When we build a new internet" as the answer as to when IPv6 will arrive. I suspect some are joking but that others, like myself, have a gut feeling that the entire internet needs an overhaul. I would first look into what group of "gurus" with supposedly awesome credentials are supposed to be pushing IPv6 and I suspect that once you look under the covers that it would turn out to be OpenSSL all over again.