I'm thinking $7800 may have been a lot cheaper than what the pension and hefty administrative salary would have cost for the new extra government employee that would have been hired instead. Even if it were a low wage admin position it would have costs well over double and state bureaucracy syndrome would have been on display many times over by comparison. Just's a different point of view, I could be totally off from reality and not realize it, but I think what they got for $7800 and in the time frame that it was executed, that was a pretty good deal.

But I figured you would need to see the un-encrypted version in order to gather enough attention span for a ./er that matters to recognize the actual problem. I'm not sure whats up with your encrypted stories, but I could not find a simple answer in 3 seconds or less, so like the average user I'm going to go Google or Bing search the title of this article and read about it elsewhere.

I partially agree with where you were heading with this post. Kind of like voting though, not everyone is always enthusiastic about coming out to vote against some other guy; but to go out and vote for THEIR guy when they have one, all for it. What I'm getting at is that in the ./ community, if not the world community, when Europe collectively does anything, if its even remotely good people go 'ooh ah, nice good job europe'. In the world community right now if the US so much as leans over to fart, its an atrocity on a long list of other atrocities against mankind. The US Government is the epitome of big government democracy: By the people, for the children, and corrupted to the core. I think at minimum most people at this point expect anything coming out of Washington D.C. to be some form of doublespeak.

I was just thinking to myself the other day it used to be every year if not most certainly every other year I found myself dropping anywhere from half to a full grand on upgrades pretty consistently. Its been at least 2 1/2 years now and I'm fairly certain an i7 930, 12g tc ddr3, 2x 6870's, and a SSD blow those recommended specs out of the water. It feels silly posting those specs too as if its some kind of boast, I can only imagine anyone else who builds their own rigs is probably in the same boat. I think the last hardware I'd bought was in 2011 I paid something around $100 for 16gb (4x4) for a spare box, just because it was so cheap. Wild speculation perhaps: While I'm not a game programmer, I have been doing a lot of mobile web interfaces over the last 2 1/2 years. Its been a general observation at least in my area of expertise alone that efficiency is king. I wonder if the explosion of mobile and tablet development has had a similar effect on game programming practices? I base this observation on the near complete death of flash in web interfaces on mobile devices, it wasn't so much about transfer time (as that would be irrelevant here, too) as much as it was about what kind of local resources it took to render the page (flash plugin on mobile/tablets is sluggish at best). The general side effect on desktop versions of web interfaces has been trimmed down markup and much more efficient/optimized CSS/JS (on sites that are properly developed in a mobile first fashion). I can only imagine with all of the recent development of games on the ipad for example have somehow resulted in more efficient practices bleeding into the desktop game development world. Maybe a ./ game developer could chime in?

"Try to imagine if syphilis did it with cancer and got full blown AIDS." Brickleberry I believe season 1 episode 2?

Do we really have to start source and fact checking ./ postings? Rubbish. Stuff like this hitting the front page are the beginnings of the end of ./ credibility. Those of you posting stuff to this site should consider that as well, unless this was some kind of malicious act with that very kind of reputation destruction in mind, in which case good job mission accomplished.

I can't even remember the last time I got a virus within 24 hours of it being revealed as existing. Once upon a time I recall seeing a Monkey A virus back in the 90's. If I recall, AV software wasn't even what revealed it, it was something I found on my own trying to fix someone else's busted box. I'll be keeping MSE installed. I've found many of the free AV programs to be cumbersome and slow, and quite frankly annoying about 'protecting my system' and 'staying updated'. Stay out of shady places and avoid file sharing except when necessary and it won't be a problem. Kind of like not raw dogging dirty hookers freely, common sense behavior if you don't want to catch the Cannasyphiliaids virus.

Sorry for the wall of text, I did put some line breaks in that! Also worth mentioning, have your kiddo look into stuff like LESSCSS or SASS. http://lesscss.org/ You won't see this stuff out of the box (maybe some limited support with plugins) in any modern WYSIWYG, but its awesome. Most modern websites are leaning JS/jQuery heavy too, which was part of why I made a decision to switch over to Eclipse and give that a crack. Aptana Studio can be added as a plugin, and it makes IMO 'HTML5' development that much easier. See http://www.aptana.com/

I've used probably a majority of most web tools (WYSIWYG's too). I started out back in 99 building my first website using one of AOL's tools even. Dreamweaver before it was owned by adobe, bluefish, notepad++, expression web, etc. About 5 years ago I found myself ditching even Dreamweaver (mind you, I used the WYSIWYG editor of this for maybe a month when I first started, and then stayed in coding view only for the rest of that time), and moving over to Visual Studio for web development. I specialize in front end, and VS is not a front end geared tool. Now days I'm using Eclipse with Aptana, and Git to the moon. It doesn't matter what languages you know, how fast you learned them, what order you learn them in. What matters is how you utilize that knowledge and experience to make your next project better. How do you make the next one better? Learn best coding practices and optimization techniques. How do you learn best coding practices and optimization techniques? Well you can start by ditching the WYSIWYG's, permanently. They're rubbish in the professional community. Also worth mentioning: I do my fair share of hiring. When I'm not hiring for assistance on my own contracts, often the companies and clients I do work for will ask for my recommendations. If you walked in and told me you used Dreamweaver and liked the WYSIWYG, I'd probably laugh at you, then about you as you walked out the door. Give it 5 years and add an extra 2 years of debugging and correcting some BS someone else created using a WYSIWYG, and you might then know what I'm talking about. The only time a WYSIWYG editor should be used IMO, would be a case of something like TinyMCE in the admin side of a CMS for derp-face end users. Even then, they never seem to be able to find the paste-from-word tool to strip out mso bullshit. Your best bet is to learn to code and forget WYSIWYGs even exist.