Largely because of the first-sale doctrine, which codifies property rights sanity: if you sell me something, it is now mine, not yours. I can do whatever I want with it. Use my spatula as a screwdriver? Use a thermos bottle for a hammer? Watch scenes in a movie out of order? It's none of your business. I bought it. It is now my property, and I'm free to do with it as I please.

(Averting pedantry: of course that doesn't involve violating copyright. Straw men will be ignored.)

They didn't specify the attack, but a DDoS attack (part of this group's MO) is notoriously difficult to counter because it relies on the lack of security of the user community rather than the company itself. They use, say, a half million computer bot network to flood the target servers with requests. While you can theoretically block request flooding, sheer numbers can still overwhelm systems.

Can't recall gameplay, but most major sports had games (football, baseball, basketball, hockey). I also remember the color overlays for the TV. My age was in the single digits when I played this console, so I don't remember much (and certainly don't remember when it came out - played it maybe mid-to-late 1970s).

Not to mention the forced prison labor market. Felons get to learn "valuable skills" (for third world countries) and make products to sell at full value while getting paid a pittance. Refuse to work? No problem, 3 months in solitary will cure that, or you'll just go nuts. Really, the prison system is just slavery by another name.

Most often I have heard of that with "three strikes" laws.

It may be possible to intern with a company first to prove you are a changed person, but yeah, hard to break in, especially with any established company. There is an effort to "ban the box," but until that takes root, employers will ask if you have a criminal past.

  Another option would be to try contracting. My brother's contracting company (electrical engineering) requires a proven skill set, but I doubt if they do any background checks. The hard part, of course, is proving you've got the skills (they hire extremely skilled workers in a very narrow category of electrical engineering). I know another company that does web design and they occasionally hire contractors, as well.

Hell yeah, I'll admit that I am King of the Geeks. Talk nerdy to me.

OK, OK. I'll double-check with a calculator that's not "bc" before publishing. I've done enough physics work, though, to trust that 1) calculations showing explicit conversions are almost always correct, and 2) calculations that don't almost never are.

Like when Bell Labs developed C to write Unix? There's a long tradition of major companies coming up with new languages to scratch an itch. Thank God is hasn't died. How boring to live in a time when we'd decided that there was nothing left to innovate?

For nontrivial math, I don't always trust Google's interpretation of the question to be the same as mine. That page is a little short on details of what it's actually doing. On the other hand, WolframAlpha is really good about showing its work. I just always forget that it's there.

In either case, yeah, I like doing it the hard way. Or as I call it, "learning" or "practicing".

Moore's law describes the number of transistors in a package, not linearly their size. Doubling the number of transistors means that each one has to be 1/sqrt(2) as big as the old version, and that to-the-11th would be about 1/45th as large, not 1/2048th. That's still pretty dinky.

On the forums and from personal experience I can tell you there is a crash bug with Windows 8.1 64 bit with nVidia cards during cutscenes where framerates drop to near zero. Worst thing about it is it's random. I wasn't able to reproduce it with Windows 7 64 bit also with an nVidia card (albeit older laptop card).

Fortunately, I was reading the forums and there are fixes coming. They know about nVidia framerate problems, random sound dropouts (in fact, they are looking for 60+ hour saves that have this problem) and many of the crashes.

We think it's great because, among other things, it has first-class functions and a very high code:boilerplate ratio. This lets us write very concise, readable, and maintainable code.

Eww, no. I've never seen good Python code that asserts types because it's not the idiom for you to care. For instance, suppose you write a function like:

def get_contents_of(obj): return obj.read()

In this case, obj might be a file, or a web request, or a string (via the StringIO interface). Who knows? Who cares? As long as obj.read returns something, it works. BTW, this is supremely nice for unit testing when you don't really want to hit an SQL server 1,000 times in a tight loop.

Now, you could write something like assert isinstance(obj, file) to guarantee that you're only dealing with file objects. Of course, that lays waste to the whole concept of duck typing and people will laugh at you for doing it. So dropping that bad idea, you could write assert hasattr(obj, 'read') to ensure that the object has the needed methods. But why? Python gives you that check for free when you try to call the method. Let it do the heavy lifting and concentrate on the parts of the problem you actually care about.

Yeah, that would be terrible. You almost never use them in Python like that, partially because Python tends to have a vastly shallower call stack than, say, Java (largely because you don't need 10 layers of abstraction between bits of code thanks to the duck typing we just talked about).

I think it boils down to you not knowing idiomatic Python. That's OK. I'm ignorant about lots of things, too. But I think you'd find that you enjoy it more if you stop trying to write C or Java in Python, because that almost never works out well.

I agree, but remember that Python is interpreted in exactly the same way that Java is: both compile high level code to bytecode and run it on virtual machines. PyPy selectively uses LLVM to compile that bytecode into assembler for some enormous performance boosts, much as the Java JIT compiler does.