Comment Re:A truly ridiculous idea. (Score 1) 166
Leave the computer on Earth.
Put an orbiter in the asteroid belts as a relay antenna, half way there.
Much less energy than lowering it softly to the moon surface.
Comment Impossible to introduce a new procedural language (Score 2) 193
No. Programming languages need two things to become mainstream. First they need a very extensive library of support such as windowing, network, and about 50 other topics. Second they need a compelling reason to use the language itself. The compelling reason could be that the language is so nifty or elegant that it is worth the effort. In procedural languages it is hard to imagine anything better than what we have. In non-procedural languages there may be some new ideas yet to be thought of. Another compelling reason for a new language is marketing suits. Some company has a very cool new product and in order to lock you in they invent a new language to program it. Laaaaaaaaame. Only Microsoft would be stupid enough to try that again (C# was a case in point where they still had the muscle to pull it off.) Google could do it for a special search language but are not that silly.
Comment Rels 1 and 2 (Score 2) 735
Rule 1: Always do what is best for you. The company has no loyalty what so ever to you. Individual managers may have loyalty but the 'company' has none.
Rule 2: Never burn your bridges. Leave on the best good will terms possible.
Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked 90
An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."
Youtube Pulls Original "Rickroll" Video 97
@VentureBeat writes "Youtube pulled the original 'Rickroll' video Wednesday night. Don't worry, after a lot of email about the loss of such an important piece of cultural history, Youtube put it back up, saying that they're never gonna say goodbye to the video that's had over 30 million views."
App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million 202
An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.:
"There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers."
A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.
