For the sake of argument, in Australia we (mostly - in Sydney area) still call them mobile phones. But we have American TV, so we understand 'cell phone' also, and many other americanisms, and stuff from other languages.
On the other hand, I do not see what the intent was pointing out that cell phone is am American term. Either way, it was understood, right? There's lots of words for, say, 'sex' too, that often vary by locale, however most people seem to relish knowing as many alternatives to that term as they can, rather than insisting their local name is the only correct one. (Aussies locally claim 'root' as our slang term, among others)
I guess as an Aussie who has travelled the world a fair amount, and speaks a smattering of other languages (none very well, mind you) I recognise that the 'English' we speak here in Australia has so many words and terms from so many other languages that it's idiotic to argue which word label is best, and to ignore languages idiosyncrasies except when directly discussing language itself.
Sure, if you don't understand the word/term used, ask a question, but if you do understand, what is the gain in patronising the other uselessly, and possibly (depending on perspective) inaccurately?
When I lived in the USA, I occasionally called them 'mobiles' but the consistent blank looks from the Americans I was talking to taught me to call them 'cells' while I was there, even though I had to pause every time I used the word in a sentence, as it was always 'mobile' in my head.

But nice to see a discussion about eye colour turn into a "My english is better than your english" competition :)

This.
Best description I've heard of the industry in a while.


And to the other replier AmiMoJo saying that young children don't know what cost/benefit is.... They might not yet label it as such, but let me assure you, from the day anyone starts making their own decisions on things, which starts very early, you learn from every decision about the reality of cost/benefit, even if not called that, and kids happen to be pretty good learners in general. You can bet they are all about getting the most benefit for their cost, even if they're not the best at evaluating the bigger picture. (Plenty of adults who are bad at cost/benefit also, but everyone is always considering it, even if not labelling it as such.)

I think there's been a lot of saying it has to be 50-50 and not much seems to care about what the kids themselves want, just about showing the numbers.
Also, just cause we now have larger ratio of female gamers doesn't necessarily correlate with female developers.
I think (though ignore this if you like, not providing any references) that it's games like "Stardom Hollywood" and "Candy Crush Saga", "Farmville", "Hay Day", etc, that are bringing in a larger 'female gamer' population. The so-called "hardcore gamer" population is still predominantly male, which I mention as it's usually the so-called "hardcores" that tend to step over to the actual development.
I do agree that it should be as simple as "Make programming available to kids that want to study it" and "Ensure they get a good solid introduction to it so they can decide for themselves", but don't force them to continue/discontinue just to make your numbers look good.

Ran out of mod points, but I'd give this an insightful flag, as while the impact might not be measured exactly, I think there's definitely truth in that, and ignoring it would be counterproductive.

Perhaps I'm having trouble recognising a serious problem when faced with one, but with the current state of wages being: Hollywood Reporter Wages Article I'm not seeing what this piracy problem is all about.
I don't see anyone in Hollywood making minimum wage or less..... especially not losing money because of piracy... Something as simple as a bad poster design is going to be worse for their profits than all those nasty pirates...
Meanwhile, seems everyone who is complaining about how bad piracy is is making a minimum wage with a few zeros (or more) appended to it, and is bitterly disappointed that they aren't making just a few percent more. The industry is positively thriving. Hard to care.

Yeah, my first thought on this was "how accurate would it be if you a) stripped out comments, and b) ran through a code formatter (many code editors auto-formatting to a standard on the fly)"

I think including comments is basically cheating, as they're super distinguishable. You can tell what code I've worked on cause I consistently type "teh", spell words like "colour" with my local spelling, etc. But recognising just the actual code itself, that's more impressive.

Oh, I'm all for more transparency, but I'm not politically minded enough to be sure my ideas are that great, however:
Just using the USA and Google for this example, the amount of money Google should be allowed to invest should be directly proportional to it's number of US Citizen employees.
I figure it'd be a good way to have the amount of sway a company can pull tied directly to their involvement (via employment) to the US economy in the political scene.
Yeah, no doubt it's flawed, however I wouldn't like to see a situation where no matter how much a company is giving to it's government, etc, it has an artificial capped limit.


As for if a drone kills someone I know, I'm going to be blaming the person who instigated it/directed it/pulled the (remote) trigger.
And if it wasn't any person, but some sort of accident, then I'll treat it like I would any other accident.
It's exactly the same as if a car killed someone I know. I'd blame the driver, not the guy who wrote the program that allowed the engine to fire efficiently enough to achieve the speed to achieve killing impact.

This could almost be modded informative, despite the malice in it, but I'd be interested in some references for the statistics.
Just really how many Police Officers die as compared to other professions (and probably need to sub-categorise the police, so we're just looking at beat-walkers and response units here, not including undercover or other higher risk categories, or the desk-bound low risk categories)
I mean I know there's more to it that simply the statistic: cops and garbage men are equal in my opinion, they both provide a service to the community, however Police do have a little more training and equipment to help them to stay alive, that goes hand in hand with the increased power and responsibility

Am I missing something here?
Criminal types could use it to find police?

Really?
Because it's so hard to find police otherwise?
I can think of ways to locate police from simply reporting suspicious activity at a location to... oh, Im thinking of ways far faster than I'll be able to write them down, and won't bore anyone, however:
Crowdsourced information on an app (that anyone including the police themselves can feed with misinformation if they like) doesn't seem like my "go-to" resource if I'm some sociopathic cop killer.... (assuming to be a cop killer you'd be sociopathic, but the same applies to the non sociopathic wanna be cop killers if they're out there too)

(emphasis mine)
irreplaceable? I'm not sure this word means what you think it means.....
However the area around the white house being effectively the same thing as military airspace is accurate enough :)

And here I am watching House of Cards which... ahh ok.... no spoilers :) Worth a watch if that sort of thing interests you, amazingly well written.

I'm trying to figure out what the odds are that someone within the government or FAA arranged for a drone to be found there purely to give them the media attention to push their agenda forwards....
Or as the seed for a honeypot, as drones over the whitehouse they already have covered.
(I mean, I would not be at all surprised that there's some DARPA weapon that fire some emp device that would be able to take out any small size electronics with negligible risk.... Not like drones can also manage the weight of reliable emp shielding.)

Well, sure, all big companies pour money into the government in their efforts to shape policy. I don't see this so much as a bad thing in and of itself, it's on a case by case of what the company is trying to achieve, and while there's plenty of idle speculation and guesses and conspiracy theories about what Google is getting for their money, the factual stuff I've seen is pretty consistently in tune with what I'd be doing if I were a not-evil google-type company.
If you start a company that is at the forefront of an industry, constantly pushing the envelope, and world recognised (and supported by userbase) and funded enough, you'll might find yourself dumping some money into politics as you're in a position to know how things should be shaped... That's not 'evil'. That's 'doing business and improving society (or attempting to).

You note that google provides infrastructure to the military. The military buy lots of stuff from IT infrastructure to weapons to vehicles to clothing to food to ... well the list goes on, probably very few goods and services the military doesn't use. If anyone "providing" a product or service to the military for money is evil, well, evil musn't mean what I thought it did.... And just about everyone I know is evil, including myself.
And...

OK. That's a fantastic one. let's cover a couple of quick things first:
Drones killing people == evil
Sure, it can be, but it might not be also. Unless you are of the belief that every killing is evil, in which case, you're gonna have to go down the rabbithole of lesser evils, because sometimes there's a person who is going to kill several other people, and killing them has to be considered as an alternative to killing x others. That's kind of the whole job of the military, making those kinds of decisions. You know, wars and stuff.
someone providing something that is used by someone else for killing
Well I kinda covered that earlier, but it should be pretty obvious who is responsible for the evil. Not like Google's going "Yeah, you can use our stuff in your drones, but only if you make sure and kill a bunch of innocent people with it"......
Oh I could go on, but who's going to bother reading this far :)

Ahh hey, I'll cop that. I no doubt do sway to an elitist attitude when it comes to this topic... I started off decades ago with html, and back then there was a lot of endless discussion and opinionating on what was and wasn't programming, and now I can program in more languages than I can remember to list off.
I was trying to lay things out from a more basic perspective, as I know not everyone interested in this topic would be able to follow if I get too specific, however yeah, this is a discussion, I'm a little elitist at times, though, as I saw on a sig earlier, I am 100% right at least 50% of the time, with no more than 50% deviation :)

As for being a dick, well, yeah, to be honest I was aiming for a little bit dickish on that post :)

I have read it. Google rep showed up with a (probably unwelcome) government shadow. Doesn't mean that Google == Government. If they did, we'd never hear about any of these goings on. Google (and many other companies, and individuals) are often required to comply with governmental directives, on a daily basis.

It seems like half the people posting here today believe that Google is giggling and sending private data to the government willy nilly, when the case is they were legally required to, have constantly pushed back where possible against this kind of request, actively help campaign for better consumer protection, and, as soon as they legally are allowed to, inform the public of what teh government is making or trying to make them do.

And as noted, it's not just Google, Microsoft also, in a big way, and many other companies of all sizes.
The common thread here isn't Google and it being evil. The common thread is the government.

btw, I'm not a Google fanboy, or an any company fanboy. I own machines running windows, osx and linux and android. I use chrome firefox and... well I only use others when I have to actually, but if you want to be calling out evil companies, there's some real actual targets like big pharma, tobacco, etc. Google is a veritable choirboy compared to them imho. As is MS and Apple too. They make profits by making life better for us, big tobacco, on the other hand....... All the evil that seems to come out of these big tech companies is pulled out legally by the government, almost always against the companies desires.