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Comment Re:Unfounded rumor - Read the official facebook bl (Score 1) 260

I'd just like to point out here that I've never been a member of facebook, but I've seen more than one slightly humiliating picture of myself in a completely drunken (but conscious) state. One was on someone's page who I knew in real life, the other I did not know at all. Where does that put me?

Comment Re:Pascal (Score 1) 634

C++ gets a lot of hate on the Internet but I think it's quite prominent in the business world. I work in a VxWorks/C++/Corba/Windows realtime (vxworks side) environment and Java simply wouldn't do it for us, and C doesn't offer the OOD which is the point of our project. It's actually working right now. The big problem with C++ to me right now is not the language itself but the way that the files are handled and how compilation is done and our reliance on gnu make.

Pitfalls:
Dynamic dependency generation causes make resets!
Make / C++ can't tell the difference between an interface change which requires rebuilds and an internal change which should require no rebuilds.

We ARE using java to build the dependency chain amongst our C++ files. Is that odd?

Comment Re:electromagnetic pulse bomb (Score 1) 158

I'd always heard that it's very easy t obuild a device capabile of an EMP out of a simple circuit with a large inductor given that the inductor's voltage is given as V=DA/DT, that is, the voltage is the inverse of the change in current, which means if you have a large current going through an inductor and you cut it to zero very fast, there's some sort of electromagnetic kaboom. A reasonable home experiment might give you 1A going to 0 in 1/1000th of a second, which should give you a 1000 volt spike, but I think with a bit of finesse a device could be made to deliver a change from 10 A to near 0 to 1/1000000th of a second, or 10,000,000 v, but is that still not an issue? Sorry if I'm rattling but I'd actually curious.

Comment Re:free software and open source (Score 1) 634

Maybe it's unfair to the entire economy as a whole (and I do agree that capitalism is getting us 99% there) but I think that fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders should not be law. A shareholder should hold TRUST with a company that the company is operating in their best interests given the shareholders' own voting records within the company. Making it a law that a company should have to try to maximize their short term gains is eroding the foundation of our society. It becomes the single duty of every business not to do whatever it was created to do, but to create value for its shareholders, and a good chunk of the time this is going to be completely impossible.

In Microsoft's case, they've taken the law at heart and I can't fault them other than calling them cowards. Does anyone have any ideas why so many businesses go public and subject themselves to this nonsense? I suppose funding would be one thing but such as the case of google or anything where VC is raisable I think it's unnecessary to go out and seek public funding only to sacrifice the rest of the company's history until it's eventual downfall at the face of it's own shareholders.

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