Not to mention SMS is not reliable. SMS messages are not guaranteed, they are delivered on a "best effort" basis. Your mobile network is free to drop them on the floor and not retry if your phone moves out of signal range, the network is congested, or any other reason they feel like. This is particularly prone to happening when messages have to go across network boundaries.

Obviously the person who wrote the summary was under the mistaken belief that SMS is designed to be reliable, just like lots of people believe that email is designed to be instant...

And depending on how it goes about it, I may have no problem with that.

Learn Ruby. It's what Perl 6 should have been — the good stuff from Perl, but cleaned up.

Then you can either go the devops/sysadmin route — both Puppet and Chef are written in Ruby — or you can go the Rails or Sinatra route and head towards web services development.

So yes... it is theft. Suggesting that it isn't is just a specious rationalization used by people who don't want to feel guilty about it.

Like the US Supreme Court, for example.

But I was wondering if some slashdotters could share some constructive real-life experiences of planning a transition to a relatively offshore-proof career.

Well, how good are you at giving blow jobs? The oldest profession is unlikely to get offshored.

BSD got its automatic live self-defragmenting code from OS X. Then there's libdispatch/GCD, LLVM, and so on.

Yeah. I was there at the time, writing patches for the Minix kernel... Linus specifically wanted support for 386 protected memory and virtual memory. AST wouldn't do it, because it would mean Minix wouldn't run on 68000-based systems like my Atari ST. So Linus went away and hacked together his own 386-only replacement kernel over a weekend.

ROGER CARASSO died last year while on vacation. I think that is more worthy of a thread on Slashdot.

He didn't lose his job merely because of his beliefs regarding same-sex marriages.

He lost his job because he spent money attempting to get laws passed which would prevent people, including his employees, from getting married. That made it hard for him to be a leader for those employees, so he resigned his position.

If he had merely had opinions, there wouldn't have been an issue.

But hey, don't let the actual facts get in the way of a dishonest misstatement of the situation.

They were offered horizontal promotions.

They were given the opportunity to excel in a more external capacity.

They were reverse rehired.

while there were various decent, proprietary, dialects that let you actually write code that did stuff, *standard* Pascal was as much use as a chocolate teapot

And that's still a problem today. There's no standard for OO Pascal, and the ANSI Pascal standards have been moribund since 1990.

That's why I abandoned Pascal (and Modula-2): I didn't want to get locked in to a single vendor.

More to the point, Android is an open source and freely redistributable platform.

There was no GPL purge.

Thanks, Baghdad Bob, but I've been monitoring the purge for some time.

Samba is no longer used in Mac OS X.

Apple got rid of it as part of their GPL software purge.

Yup, NSA has full access to Skype, with their cooperation.