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Comment Re:rename it "placebopathy" (Score 1) 668

Don't know about US law but here, when something is sold as medicine, it must be tested for side effects and the benefit/risk ratio analyzed.
Homeopathy gets away with it because it has no harmful side effect (in fact no effect at all). If it did have an effect, it would have been much harder to pass the regulations.

Comment Re:How the fuck is it "hijacking"? (Score 4, Insightful) 80

Firefox may be open source software but the name "Firefox" and the logo are not.
So you can freely change and redistribute Firefox but if you want to call it Firefox, you need Mozilla's permission. Only if you decide to call it something else, like "Iceweasel", you are free to do whatever you want as long as you respect the copyleft.

Comment Re:Most influential individual economic force... (Score 2) 323

If you craft your definition of "most influential individual economic force" carefully, then yes, Linus can qualify.
But consider that without Richard Stallman and the GPL, linux wouldn't have been what it is now.
And to stay in the tech world, how about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
And political figures like Vladimir Putin.
Or maybe Osama bin Laden, just look at how much has changed since 9/11.
But even though it was in 1983 so that it doesn't qualify, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was perhaps the most influential man in the history of mankind. By correctly identifying a false alarm, he may very well have prevented an all out nuclear war.

Comment Re:Can I swap the d-pad & left joysticks? (Score 1) 99

Apparently, the 0F point was selected because it was the temperature of a harsh winter in Fahrenheit's town, formalized as the freezing temperature of some ammonium chloride solution. In other words, it means nothing practical for most people.
32F is freezing water temperature, OK, why not, but I find zero more convenient.
100F is horse blood temperature, probably the only thing that makes sense. IMHO, human blood would have been better but that's a decent high point. The trouble is that it is harder to experimentally measure than boiling water.

So I agree that in a preindustrial environment 100F may be more convenient than 100C but setting the zero point at freezing water temperature makes much more sense to me.

Comment The most cross-platform is C (Score 2) 173

Seriously, if you want to write something that works in any platform, write it in C, C++ is a second but still valid choice.
When people design a platform, one of the first thing they do make it run code written in C. It is also the language of choice for everything UNIX : Linux, BSD, GNU, etc... It is well standardized too : sure, it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot but if you code properly, it should work on any platform. And as an added bonus, good C code is also valid C++ and ObjC.

Comment Re:Canary in the pixel mine (Score 2) 336

Video game industry is a bit special. It has nothing to to with H1Bs and suits.
Working on video games is the dream of many young developers. They would sell their soul just to be able to work on the games they love... and companies are all to eager to take on the offer. But don't blame it solely on big names because if you decide to roll your own or join a small team, that's even more work for even less pay.
When I left school, in the early 2000s, several friends tried the video game industry. They all came back and are now doing "boring" stuff with a decent pay and schedule, and it was before the outsourcing boom.

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