Well, we sure didn't get into it to write boring business applications except a few in the dotcom years who quickly moved on when it went bust. As I remember it though, there were many who just wanted to play games and only a few who wanted work with code and I don't think pushing them to play more would have brought them over. Of course you needed the opportunity, but there are a lot of games that are mod-friendly if you're so inclined. I'd sure encourage and test if tweaking a game peeks their interest, but if it doesn't I wouldn't try with more game time.

Oh, my, but I bet you'd squeal like a pig.

You're a whiny little punk with nothing intelligent to say.

But, hey, you can tell all the other whiny little punks at your playdate tomorrow how tough you were on the intertubes.

I'm sure your mom will be impressed.

Childish little asshole.

I can't imagine it is really a big water treatment issue since they have a different density than water and you could separate them with settling tanks and skimmers.

I dare you to tell us the cost of fitting tanks and skimmers into every sewer in California. Or every other body of water it flows into .. like apparently 471 million plastic microbeads are released into San Francisco Bay alone every single day.
Filtering the inputs to San Francisco Bay would be ridiculously expensive. Outlawing this plastic crap makes far more sense.

What you describe is theoretically possible, but utterly absurd in reality.

It's not a nothing issue. It's huge amount of crap dumped into waterways which acts like silt, doesn't break down, and otherwise serves to give people whiter teeth (or whatever the hell it's used for).

California has decided that's a dumb idea.

Wow ... calibrating the sights to cross the streams. Only really wee streams to cross.

Or is it more analogous to the beam hits an object (hence the guy)?

That actually makes sense, thanks.

Pew pew!! Way cooler than lasers!

Bullshit, bullshit

Tech Seargent Chen please report to the bridge for plot exposition.

It sounds so good, and it's the LHC ... but I honestly have no idea of what it means.

Depends. My bet is that it entirely depends on the background of the "someone" you've taken.
- english speaker ? mostly used to litterature and philosophical logic ? yes, maybe as you list them.

- background in mathematics ? The order will probably be reversed, with probably Haskell, C and Fortran near the top. And probably APL topping them all. And the guy complaining that most of them still miss support for greek alphabet.

some people are used to see things written down in plain text, other are better used to see things written with symbols.

plain text has the advantage of being a little bit clearer for a person who happens to be fluent in the language which was used to create the language (say hello to dialects of Logo and Excel macros translated into various languages). Otherwise it's completely useless (most of the language you mention are based around english. useless non-english speakers. when I was a kid, I started learning to code in basic before I knew english).

symbolic notation has the advantage of being more compact (requires less typing, quicker to read)
cf. the well know geeky joke of "add 1 to cobol giving cobol" vs "C++"

And well, Perl, let's forget about Perl. It's a write-only language.
The only language your cat can write legal code in just by walking across the keyboard. :-D

(Disclaimer: I used to code a lot in Basic as a you kid. Started C a bit later, and learned english about this time. I code also regularily in Perl, C++, awk, php, 386 assembler, etc. I know bits of R, javascript, python, FORTRAN, did some Logo in french in school as a kid, etc.)

Huh. Apparently, you're right. You can be a 50-something politician and have an affair with the 17-year-old daughter of one of your law clients, get a plea deal to misdemeanors instead of a felony, and it's okay as long as you come out with it a couple of years later, present your new baby, and talk about your ambitions to be a leader in the state senate. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Related question: What smart phones out now are (or can be reasonably outfitted to be) closest to a dumb phone, considering reliability, simplicity, and battery life? I don't especially want to give up a swiping keyboard, a decent camera, or podcast playback, but I do miss being able to go 5 or more days on a single charge.

So, you want a dumb phone, but you want it to have smart phone features, and a huge battery charge, and lots of doo-dads and stuff ... just like a smart phone?

Well, good luck with that.

What joking? I wasn't joking.

I totally think delivering ass-whoopings to MBAs and CEOs for corporate malfeasance would solve a lot of problems.

Because it would be better than this "non est mea culpa" shit we have now where CEOs issue some drivel apology and have no consequences.

I'm not joking at all.

Well not very likely.

That did work for the openmoko because the neo 1973 and neo freerunner (i have one!) have been designed from the gound up with an open hardware approach.
They have been designed to be easy to open, easy to hack, easy to replace parts.
Thus upgrade kits like gta04 were likely.

That does work now for the N900, because they are a little bit older generation, back at a time when case were a bit bulkier, battery was replaceable, etc.
There are also a lot of them out in the wild. (Basically, for a long time the Maemo where *THE* definite platforms for geeks to go, N900 was the most popular, and there were only 2 others before).
You could make a Neo900 upgrade kit that is more or less practical.

That won't work with modern smartphones:
- first they are absurdly compact and small (just to have a "better number" on the check list. not that it's actually usefull, specially when the end users will enclose them in an over-priced after-market case anyway).
- they are often very hard to dissassamble (both because of the previous point, but also because it makes them more resistant to moisture etc. if they are in an enclosing never designed to be opened)
- some don't even have removable batteries.
- to make quick buck these companies tend to launch one new model every 6 months (yeah, imagine a replacement borad for iPhone. iPhones are popular, isn't it ? except that there are a dozen of them by now)
- also most of these companies aren't targetting geeks in the first place (unlike nokia maemo platform) and thus aren't likely to be held by users actually able to use an upgrade kit.

I suspect that the Jolla's sailfish phone is the only probable next target for an upgrade kit.

But in general, the case is the least problematice in smart phones.
It makes more sense to 3D print a new case around an existing board, rather than try to fit a new board inside an existing phone.

Usually, the screen is the most complex, instead.

I envision that one day there will be a series of tubes that give us access to this type of information from nearly anywhere and not a severely limited number of physical locations.

Yeah, but then they'll charge access for it, and the copyright cartel will insist we're not allowed to see anything without paying them a trillion dollars.

Hey, wait a minute ... that's exactly what we have now.

Missing codecs: AAC, H.264, MP3
Missing plug-in: flash

So either patents or not their code, if you got a good solution for that I'm sure Google would like to hear it.

I don't think you have to come up with that many conspiracy theories, Mozilla's "problem" is that they won. They broke Microsoft's monopoly, made HTML/CSS properly standardized and together with KHTML/WebKit/Blink some 80% use an open source renderer though many use it in a closed source binary. Microsoft would be laughed at if they tried any new proprietary extensions and for the rest the implementation details are all in the open.

Their problem can be summed up in two words: "Now what?" and it turns out they didn't really have any other goal in common than slaying the dragon and now the dragon's dead. Some UX designers get to make an art project. Some cowboy coders thinks more releases is better. Some will do anything to get away from the reliance on their biggest competitor. Some security nuts get to go overboard. Some want to go after Android/Chrome OS with Firefox OS, but this time they're not competing against proprietary and neglected shovelware and barking up a tree Ubuntu has made essentially no progress on.

Let's face it, Mozilla mainly won because Microsoft was trying to keep the web from competing with local applications so they could sell Windows licenses, they got to the head of the pack and grinded it to a halt. They didn't want to compete, they wanted to put a spanner in the works for as long as possible. It annoyed many and gave Firefox enormous amounts of goodwill even when it didn't work properly, out of spite for Microsoft people kept using it and pushing for sites to support it. They don't have a clue on how to compete with someone that puts up a fight, which is their second biggest problem.

The footage would then be automatically uploaded to storage, either locally or in the cloud, over-redacted for privacy and posted online for everyone to see within a day.

For court purposes, there can't be any redaction.

Because as soon as you start snipping out bits, you lose context and some of what actually happened.

The full video must be available for scrutiny ... or you'll get the 5 seconds which supports the police version of events, or which has been edited to alter the sequence of events.

Part of the reason people are starting to insist on body cameras is we don't trust the police. Because increasingly the police are not trustworthy, and don't know or care what the law says.

Which means all of this raw video should be held in escrow where the police have no ability to alter or delete it.

If the police hold it, and have the power to edit it ... suddenly it becomes a less trustworthy record.

So when the police start claiming they need to redact it, they better have the ability to provide the un-redacted version for court proceedings.