Like "alcohol-related' accidents, where the police are required to check a box if either driver, whether to blame or not for the accident, and whether or not either is actually impaired, if they had a drink earlier in the day.

Same goes here, I suspect, padding the numbers because somebody was having a conversation at some point in their drive, and considered "involved" even if the driver who had the call wasn't to blame for the accident.

All this does is serve the personal agendas of "safety experts" who have decided to tie their career to an issue and doggedly pursue it, regardless of the facts and rational analysis.

Can it be a source for distracted driving? Certainly... but having a hands-free conversation is no different than having a conversation with a passenger, perhaps even less so, since you are less likely to take your eyes off the road when the other person is not in the car with you.

They used to have Romulan Ale and Klingon Blood wine, among other things.

Sad that a Michael Jackson show replaced the Star Trek Experience at the Hilton in Las Vegas. There had been talks of reviving it Downtown, but I guess that never materialized.

I was told OS/2 was the choice for ATM operating systems!

Can OpenFL handle something like Stage3D and wrappers like Starling?

I've used Haxe in the past, but found it lacking in support of things like sound and sprite animation for writing mobile games.

More likely Jango Fett detonated a concussion missile to try and kill the Jedi on his trail.

...what could possibly go wrong? Because, that simply can't be asked too many times, right?

Ugh.

It will actually turn out that this virus will simultaneously cure cancer and all known diseases in humans. They'll call it the Ponce de Leon infection as it also stops and even reverses the effects of old age, and will result in a sharp drop in mortality rates and a rapid increase in population.

Eventually, the Earth's population of humans will outstrip its ability to support them.

Then the real carnage begins.

What pisses me off is that Google goes to areas that are already well serviced by other vendors, and taking FOREVER to roll out. At this rate, they'll manage 10% coverage in the US by the turn of the next century.

Abstracting functionality across different hardware platforms is still not a hack. If different algorithms need to be used to get the same results on different browsers, it is still not a hack in the definition of the term. I guess if you want to be lazy in your use of the term, it can be described as just about anything... but no, it's not actually a hack. It's a bit sad that the precision of technical language has deteriorated so much in the internet age.

I described hacks. Hacks are unconventional workarounds that effectively break the standards/restrictions of whatever medium you are working in to achieve a goal. Exploits are a hack, using functions completely contrary to their purpose, in an effort to accomplish something the system is not supposed to accomplish (for example, causing a buffer overrun that in turn triggers code to operate at a higher privilege level). One might hack a hardware system by crossing specific wires. We might patch compiled binary code to overcome the limitations imposed by the original author's design. A hack might employ a combination of features on a hardware chip to exceed its capabilities.

jQuery.js is a collection of routines... some of them have quite a bit of code behind them to perform standard tasks that have to be done in completely different ways between two platforms. This is not a hack. It's just more javascript code. That javascript code is not doing anything that the javascript compiler or the DOM for that browser platform isn't allowing them to do. It might fall back to a safe failure mode.... but it isn't magically executing low-level assembly to re-write how the browser works or renders. In some cases, it is just unifying the misguided approaches two different browser development teams interpreted some ambiguous HTML or Javascript specification.

Now... I suppose the OP could just have written code specific to the Panasonic's implementation, but why bother? If he writes jQuery, he can easily port that code... or use other people's code. A good developer tries to not write more code than they have to... design is the important part. We don't build new car models every year with completely new wheels engineered for them, do we? Likewise, there is a WEALTH of javascript code out there and a lot of it works with jQuery. Why should he spend an extra few weeks creating custom code for the Panasonic's platform if he doesn't have to? Worse... why should he forgo leveraging other code that might use jQuery as a base? That's not using a hack, it's using a LIBRARY.

What is being hacked? What exploit is required to make jQuery.js operate? How does it modify the javascript language to work?

jQuery.js is just a library of script routines designed to make a javascript programmer's life easier, like every other library out there, whether it's for C++, ActionScript, C# or assembler. It's not a binary... it is a collection of javascript functions.

Calling it a hack seems a bit ignorant of what hacks are. I've written hacks... patched XBox XDK libraries so I could get my Media X Menu to access extra hard drives in the system... interrupt routines loaded from DATA statements on my old C=64 that allowed me to display more sprites on screen than the hardware was supposed to display, or to do cool things with the borders. I've written multi-tasking kernels with assembler interspersed with the C code so I could directly access or manipulate hardware in embedded systems. Those are hacks.

At worst, you might call jQuery.js a kluge... but even then, jQuery.js works pretty well and doesn't require you to jump through hoops when making small changes (which kluges tend to do). ...so it's a library. A handy collection of useful routines developers can leverage so they do not have to write all that code again. Nothing more.

Well, 10 years is fine, maybe a bit longer, but more importantly, 'supporting works' should be submitted with the government to maintain the copyright... in other words, software source code would have to be submitted to the government and kept in the Library of Congress, made available when the copyright expires.

Let's call this a measure to protect the heritage of technology.

The side issue is trademarks. I don't have a problem with trademarks not expiring (i.e., nobody could make a Mickey Mouse movie, though the copyright might have expired on Steamboat Willie, for example).

In that light, you'd be able to, say, use Duke Nukem code to make a new game after the copyright expires, but you wouldn't be able to make money on the Duke Nukem character. The repository would give open source a boost, though there would be problems with the tools themselves.

I think the copyright period should be extended if the work is receiving "active and significant" support - i.e. the application or game is receiving regular enhancements and not abandoned.

Seriously, who writes this stuff? I remember a minor earthquake we had in Michigan in the mid-80s. Why would they suddenly stop? Geological activity occurs over geological time scales, which is to say, thousands, even millions of years.

Reminds me of a time when I went to access expertsexchange.com on the job, to get a quick solution to a coding issue I was having, back around 2000... the web filter classified it as "sexually oriented" and it took me a minute to realize how the name had parsed out.

You can now get to the site via experts-exchange.com, though it is far less useful these days.

I've been using TVMobili on a Kubuntu machine I have set up as a media server. It's not free... you can pay a one-time fee of $30 or $1.50 per month - but you can try it out first, to see if you like it. I've found it just works for everything I've thrown at it, I mostly use it for playback on my Samsung plasma smart TV (AllShare feature), handling MKVs, MP4s without a hitch, as well as the usual formats and containers. It can also do transcoding, and it has a web interface (My server sits in our basement).

I have streamed to iOS and Android devices, too (with the right media player clients).

...AMD GPUs, apparently. I haven't tried it yet, but I've been waiting to get it set up on a gaming rig I built for our living room.

Why do I think they ordered those parts from the most expensive sources possible?