Very much alive and narrating epic symphonic metal music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93SdirnzTw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8_xl0nhvls&feature=fvwrel

That's one cool dude.

A majority of programmers are employed in developing business software (e.g. inventory, benefits, medical, insurance), government service and policy software (e.g. dmv, food stamps), and cots software (e.g. Windows, Office).

Logic is important. Discrete math is important. Stats is important. You can be a successful programmer without formal knowledge in these areas, but formal knowledge in these areas is important to be an excellent programmer.

But continuous math just isn't important even to being a successful programmer for the majority of career paths. Yes it comes in handy, and yes it opens up opportunities for you that you wouldn't otherwise have, but it just isn't critical. It won't make or break your career.

Given that most professional programmers aren't going to have more than 4 years of post secondary education, better to use that time for what's most important. Those who want to pursue an academic computer science career or a career in a science or engineering field can go to a research institution or double-major in math, biology, physics, etc.

It's pretty simple. Hardware vendors make sure their hardware works with Windows. Most hardware vendors don't care whether it's easy for people to make their consumer hardware work on Linux.

So what do you do? You do exactly what Windows consumers do. You buy your system from a system builder, only one that certifies their systems for Linux, i.e. you pay money for someone to make sure that your flavor of Linux works on your hardware, so that you don't have to do it yourself. These aren't old systems. They are current gen systems.

I don't have any affiliation with any of these vendors but it was easy to find them:
http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html
http://www.system76.com/
http://www.emperorlinux.com/

Look, look with your special eyes:
https://demos.mozilla.org/en-US/#dashboard

I don't know what to do here. I don't even know what I'm looking at here. I move the mouse around the screen and things glow and whir and slide, but none of it makes any sense to my mind. HTML 5 apparently means "Hey now I can do that crazy shit I used to do with Flash, right in my HTML."

Yeah, and now instead of that crazy Flash shit being isolated to a little box of your page that I could disable, now your entire page is rendered a confusing mess of utter unusability to anyone over the age of 30.

When will web site designers learn that people don't come to their websites for their crazy Flash shit or really anything they do. They come to their web site for their CONTENT. Content doesn't mean what your web site designer does. Content means what's between the covers of a book. Content means a video. Content means user discussion boards.

Great technical browser implementation, guys. You're doing good work, but this crazy Flash-like shit shouldn't be the poster child for your work.

Why is interoperability so important? You're putting the cart before the horse.

Let's figure out where we can go and where we want to go, and only then worry about standardizing to let competitors and the little guys play.

But why should we wait for competitors and the little guys? Let's go now. Let's standardize later once the state of the art is a commodity.

I'm going to disagree.

If sticking to a small set of Microsoft endorsed products is what it takes for them to deliver that kind of integrated experience, then I want them to go for it. Because the alternative is not being able to offer it at all in the next 3 years.

Everyone's still trying to figure out what the right ecosystem of devices, products, and services is. Until that comes together, and in order to innovate, big companies or tight networks of partners are going to have to deliver top to bottom ecosystems themselves and not worry about whether Manufacturer X or App Developer Y are going to come to the party. Don't wait for Sony and HP to agree. Don't wait for Walmart's house brand television to support your vision.

If Microsoft can offer this, then I'm happy to go out and buy a Microsoft phone, tablet, laptop, htpc, router, and cloud services.

But right now Apple looks nearest. Although Aitrix looks like the start of something important.

This is wildly unexciting. Want to build excitement about an OS, Microsoft? In my opinion at this point in MS's life the best thing is to go back to the playbook and lift some ideas from Apple.

Launchpad: An overlay of application launch icons right, sorted how I want them, just like on your mobile device. Not buried in menus or folders. Proven interface. Just give me a touch screen in my macbook now.

More Gestures: Unlike Windows that ships to most users on 2nd and 3rd rate hardware with a USB two button mouse, OS X ships on high quality hardware with an amazing multitouch gesture pad, or available to desktop and home theatre users via the bluetooth magic trackpad. Windows will continue to be built for the least common denominator hardware until MS gets a clue.

Air Drop: Finally. Transferring files between devices without cables and without a fucking "Sync Wizard"

Built-in Version Control: Finally. Integrated RCS for your documents at no cost to you in a consumer OS. Yes, its been done on Linux but never this end user friendly and never this well integrated.

Resume on Reboot: Finally. Done right in a consumer OS. Yes it was done on Unix 20 years ago, but application support for it on Linux was mostly allowed to fall into disrepair over the years where application state really wasn't saved as part of your session. No more spending 20 minutes to get all applications and windows back how they were after work after rebooting for a security patch or turning it back on after being packed away for a trip.

Mission Control: Better than Expose, task bar, and alt+tab combined. No MS, stacking task bar windows is not an improvement.

MeeGo apparently just wasn't ready to go. They had years to ready maemo/meego for the mass market with apparently little to show for it. Maemo SHOULD have been Android. Give up on C++/QT already guys. The clear path forward is a sandboxed, garbage collected environment for standard "app" development, with low level access for game development.

Anyhow, I'll still get what I want out of it. They're going to put out a MeeGo geek toy by end of 2011. If selling WP7 to the masses is the price of being able to do that, then that's fine by me.

The point of the submission isn't that rope is replacing rail. Rail can do 7 times or more than the capacity cited in the article:
http://www.ugpti.org/pubs/html/dp-170/pg4.php

The point is that seeing how our engineering forebears across the ages moved stuff around by elaborate rope and pulley systems, is freaking cool, and so is the fact that it's still incredibly useful in specific applications today.

Building, deploying, and maintaining satellites in space, primarily from resources in space, is the best possibility I can think of as an industry that could be self sustaining and based in space while still providing the major economic benefit to the homeworld needed to bootstrap it. Sending satellites into space is so expensive today that valuable and potentially profitable services aren't mass market viable due to the cost of transporting people and things into space. Example: satellite phones. Imagine if there were a self-sustaining space-based satellite industry. In 100 years our descedents could be born in an asteroid-based, moon-based, or space-based sattelite complex colony.

We should start building up space-based industrial capacity from what's already available in space, which means rebuilding nearly from scratch. We should treat it as a variation on the sci fi theme "how would we rebuild modern industrial capacity in a post-apocolytic world after a massive depopulation event?" It needs to become self sustaining.

We should mine the moon and asteroids for raw materials, and build from there. I mean from the basics. Let's start by mapping out the asteroid belt exhaustively and identifying sources for all of the materials we need. We need to smelt ore in space. We need to start large scale biomass creation and harvesting in space. Because right now the moon is the most accessible source of water we know of in space, the moon is a critical early component of this.

Given the choice between establishing a foothold of the human race off of Earth, and eliminating poverty or cancer, give me space any day.

So I can appreciate that this announcement sounds like News for Nerds, but can someone why it Matters that Cassandra can support 2 billion columns?

The article basically says "because you can't execute SQL you need lots of columns". OK, great, why would I want that? The article doesn't tell me. The Cassandra website sure doesn't tell me.

Oracle 11 supports up to 8 fucking EXABYTES of data in an RDBMS that I can execute SQL against. What Cassandra puts in columns, I put in rows.

I've scoured this thread like all the other ones on Cassandra for the killer feature, for the "you can do this with Cassandra that you can't do as well with an RDBMS" and I can't find it.

The best I can come up with is "I want to store lots of indexed data, I don't care about transactional integrity, and I don't want to pay Oracle". Is that it? That's fine if it's it, Oracle doesn't come cheap and that can be a deal breaker for new companies, but I just wish someone would spell out that this is the justification for Cassandra's existence.

Let's do the math.

The US Mexico border is 1,969 miles. Stationing on average 4 guards per mile gives us 7,876 guards. 4 shifts to give us 24x7x365 coverage gives us 31,504 guards.

31,504 guards would give us 4 guards per mile of US Mexico border, 24x7x365.

Assume generously that each guard costs us $150,000 / yr for pay, benefits, equipment, logistics, training, and administration.

BOTTOM LINE: For a price of 4.75 billion USD per year we can have 1 well paid, well equipped guard stationed on average every 1/4 mile along the entire 1,969 miles of the US Mexico border.

No, that doesn't include facilities and infrastructure to support the operation, but building guard towers, barracks, and administrative buildings is one of the few things that the government excels at.

Like government make-work programs? This is among the best I can think of in terms of jobs created per $$$ because it puts real people on the ground doing what real people do best. Rather than giving billions to some contractor who will employ 1,000 people, we are CREATING 31,504 NEW JOBS, and they are good hard working outdoor jobs, in the service of our nation, that most Americans would be proud to do and to pay for.

Personally I would like to see open borders and see us eliminate the uneconomical policies that drive us to fight the free flow of people and ideas, but that's not going to happen, so let's secure the damn thing.

Are you listening Obama? Do you care about jobs?

Then authorize Blackwater (Xe) and Dynacorp to go after these scallywags in exchange for bounties put up by shipping companies. Pay out $100,000 an ear.

It will stimulate the economy, create jobs, and provide gainful employment for ex-military facing challenges reintegrating into the domestic laborforce. I see no downsides. It will cost the taxpayers nothing.

Then the next time these pirates approach a merchant vessel, they'll see a gunboat coming around the stern of the ship flying a US flag and ready to kick ass and take names.

It will be the economic gift that keeps giving. Just wait until the movies start to come out. "Pirate Hunter", "Pirate Hunter 2: With a Vengeance", "Rambo V: Arrrr!". America could become known worldwide as the finest mercenary exporting nation since the middle ages.

I'm sorry but the line you're claiming is so clear just is not. Yes there are some weapons that are primarily intended for self defense and some that are primarily intended for hunting, but naive approaches like you advocate are the reason we had politicians in the 90s banning one rifle because it had a black stock that looked like "scary" to a bureaucrat but putting essentially the same rifle with a nicely finished wooden stock. The line is hazy at best.

What this man accomplished could have been accomplished with a pump action or semi automatic shotgun, which are both very common hunting weapons and home defense weapons.

Or take the m1 garand, the primary service rifle of WWII and korea. It's a simple semi-automatic rifle. It's essentially equivalent in capability to a modern semi automatic hunting rifle.

A shotgun or rifle is easily modified to be concealed under a coat or loose clothing. Shortening the stock and barrel will compromise accuracy, but that doesn't matter when you're a madman targeting a crowd at close range.

So where do we draw the line? Bolt action? WWI was fought primarily with bolt-action rifles. Even a bolt action rifle can do an enormous amount of damage. Fuck, Kennedy was assasinated with a bolt action rifle. Single shot? It only takes a single shot to kill a person. Initial reports at that the congresswoman was shot at close range.

No, if you combine mental illness and firearms of any kind, you will have dead people. If you then expose that individual to radical political rhetoric, you'll have dead politicians or a dead mentally ill individual or both. Mental illness needs to be identified and treated and those who are mentally ill need to be prevented from possessing firearms. Even the NRA agrees with this.

And let us vote None of the Above. If None of the Above wins, a do-over is called and the parties need to come back with candidates who aren't hacks.