Video games have been shown that they can improve the brains ability to distinguish objects in low contrast and to track multiple objects simultaneously in other pilot studies. ( http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_bavelier_your_brain_on_video_games.html ) I suspect the game time contributed significantly to the positive results, but as the TED talk explains, we still are trying to understand which game aspects are the good and which are the bad.

btw... how does one get involved in a study to play video games? and can I get paid for it?

Funny that the USA is so quick to attack China about state sponsored cyber warfare while we are holding the Struxnet smoking gun. I think the US just needs to deny better.

Being a good software engineer is not something you can teach so please stop trying and wasting money producing a ton of mediocre coders that will flood the low end dev markets. Being a good engineer is mainly dependent natural ability and requires that ability be developed by years of practical experience. Professional sports figured out a long time ago how to farm this kind of genetic talent; it's simple you start our with programs targeting kids as they enter grade school then progressively weed out kids as the years go on in increasingly competitive groups.

This is old news as anyone who foolishly bought a 48GB-60GB SSD because they didn't want to pony up for a 120GB+ one found out with Windows 7.

I find it disturbing the increasing audacity of large organization who get caught with their hands in the cookie jar and put it off as "I know my hand is in there, but I'm really not going to take a cookie." It reminds me of the Instagram "Sign over the rights for us to sell your pictures, but we're not going to sell your work."

Interesting they chose the Ides of March.

I think this is more just an indicator of mobile device usage. Apple's tooting their own horn, but I'm sure the android numbers are respectable which could mean closer to 65+ billion app downloads and growing at 2 billion+ a/month. The developer number is meaningless but makes Apple look charitable.

When I consider the communication skills myself, and most developers I know; we probably should work mastering communicating effectively in one spoken language first.

I think the Westboro Church is a bunch of insensitive asshole douche bags, however I don't think the answer is to form hate groups against the hate groups.

I salute you, noise is most likely the best way to protect yourself. I do the same from time to time also. My main point is the effective use of time, if you can easily be invisible by all means be invisible and I sincerely hope you can stay that way. But once the helicopter spot light is on you, it might not be worth the effort to get back into the shadows. But that is for each of us to decided.

They already have or can gain easy access to all that information. The govt already has a ton of info on you, tax records, dmv, etc. Business do also (you prolly get junk mail every day addressed to you.) It's a fact of life, it sucks, but thinking you can erase or hide your digital or paper trail is foolish. If you want to protect privacy spend your time fighting to protect it, don't waste it trying to hide.

There is a really good tech talk that touches on this. While McAfee seems to thinks this is a good thing, I believe it will most likely be a painful journey.

http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs.html

with and using are excellent error handling mechanisms that have no clutter and clearly define the protected code. Most exception handling is little more than logging what went wrong since many exceptions really don't have solutions that can be coded for. The main thing we are trying to do in these situations is write out some data so we can debug and clean up any messes (open connections for example) we have laying around so the things don't get worse.

AWS seems like the real key to the success here, not the use of open source software. While I think it's great that NASA took the open source route, I've read nothing to defend the position that this would not have been successful with non-open source software:

"A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility."

Even the article praises AWS more than the open source software mentioned, it's main source of content appears to come from the linked article with information about the open source pieces of the stack added.

The real problem is two things. People either not understanding the quality of the tools (software) they are using, or willingness to use "good enough" software and gamble against a catastrophe. Given the financial market's track record, it's most likely more of the second. If I have no idea about how to judge the ripeness of fruit and I make a pie that makes me sick because the apples were rotten, how can I blame the apples?

That being said, as a developer I can honestly say about 99% of the code I've seen is not Scottish. (It's CRAP!)