I don't think it's that unreasonable. My MacBook has two RAM slots. 8GB of RAM from Newegg is about $80 and 16GB is about $150. Given that you can't start with 8 and then later add more - you have to replace what's already there - I tend to go with 16GB right from the start. If it saves me an hour of grief over the course of the three years I'll be using it, then it's more than paid for itself.

...or programming, like a huge chunk of the Slashdot community. A text editor and a few terminal windows don't chew through RAM, granted, but I've never had so much memory that a compiler didn't wish it had more. I'm also running a lot of local daemons (RabbitMQ, Cassandra, Mongo, Redis, etc.) so that I can run a full test suite without Internet access and all of those want their pound of flesh.

My company laptop has 8GB of RAM. The fact that swap is on an SSD is the only thing that makes it a comfortable development environment.

Not really. There are some fields of endeavor that are incredibly, inherently, irreducibly dangerous. Space travel is one of them. There's not much of a gap between, say, a 25% chance of fiery or icy death and a 100% one. It's certainly not the same as the difference between driving to work and taking flight in a space shuttle.

Have you ever listened to an astronaut? To a person, they'd all return to space in a heartbeat if asked. Their motivations have very little to do with personal prestige - they just want to return to the stars.

There's no place for instinctive response here. My instincts are that climbing into a tin foil capsule on top of a fuel tank filled with 5 million pounds of kerosene and LOX is insane. And yet people have worked out the risk-reward calculations and decided that hey, this is a good thing we should do.

Well, other than collect data on the effects of deep space travel on human physiology, and the ever-present "anything a robot hasn't been specifically designed to do".

Then use any of the other millions of reasons why human space travel is something we need to start figuring out and practicing.

The hell you can't. What that's saying is "we refuse to honor the wishes of educated, rational adults to make decisions we wouldn't". I guarantee that all of the Mercury astronauts knew there was a good chance they were going to die during each mission. They knew the failure modes, the risks, the potential ways they might get splattered across our planet in fiery ashes. And they still wanted to go! I cannot understand how it could possibly be unethical to explain the dangers and still give candidates the right to say, "yeah, I know I'm not coming back. For personal pride, for adventure, for my country, and for humanity I choose to go anyway. Now step aside and light this candle."

I'm thinking the submitter is so busy submitting articles that he doesn't have time to read them, or even to comment on anything else.

I'd always thought MySQL was NoSQL to begin with. "Datatypes? Integrity? What geezer wants those! LOL! We're webscale!"

(I love NoSQL DBs like Cassandra for the right applications. I haven't ever found an application for which I'd love MySQL.)

My Apple Wireless Keyboard is almost identical to a Model M: the keys are in the same basic arrangement, they're squarish, each key's label contrasts with the plastic of the key itself, and they have many of the same non-alphanumeric keys (shift, delete, etc.). They are clearly infringing.

There are only so many ways you can make the thing and still have it usable by people who've practiced on others with similar features. In short: form follows function. This seems utterly obvious and doomed to be smacked down.

I think it'll reach the same level of "settled" as interracial marriage. A few holdouts will still bitch about it or turn up their noses, but everyone else will wonder what the big deal was about and get on with their own lives.

According to the EEOC, that's not even remotely OK, even for private employers.

It could be argued, yes, but down that path lies madness: "my boss campaigned heavily for Obama. I don't believe he will treat me, an open Republican, fairly."

Again, I disagree with Eich. I'm am not defending his (to me) awful opinions. But I've known plenty of people with shitty opinions who nonetheless treated those around them with dignity and respect. If he acts on his beliefs, then it's time to react.

Yes, although he should anticipate being watched like a freaking hawk for any transgressions. According to The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

Today, according to the U. S. Government Manual of 1998-99, the EEOC enforces laws that prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or age in hiring, promoting, firing, setting wages, testing, training, apprenticeship, and all other terms and conditions of employment. Race, color, sex, creed, and age are now protected classes.

Ironically, your straw man's right to be a racist prick is protected by the law. Note that he has no right to bring his prejudices into the workplace.

I agree. I was answering the question in the summary, "should private beliefs be enough to prevent someone from heading a project they helped found?"

Of course not. Unless those beliefs become workplace actions, they should not affect someone's employment.

First, I'm absolutely 100% against Prop 8. I'm not gay; I just don't think I should have a say in the relationship between two consenting adults.

That said, I'm absolutely 100% for Eich's right to have an opinion I disagree with. If he were acting on his opinion in an official capacity, sure, release the dogs of PR war. But if he maintains a nondiscriminatory policy, even if he may personally not like it, then that's about all you have the right to ask of him.

Remember, sometime it'll be our turn to have an unpopular opinion. Would it be OK for our companies to fire us for them, even if we don't bring them into our workplaces? That's not a society I'd like to live in.

7. No locks and eventual consistency. I work at a company which answers about 40,000 HTTP requests per second, average, 24/7. Some techniques that make sense at small scale ("lock this object, read it, update it, release") would bring the whole thing to a grinding standstill at larger concurrencies. Learn the tradeoffs between ACID and eventually consistent databases and when each is more appropriate.
8. CAP theorem and why you can't just code around it.

We'll be seeing each of these becoming more and more important as the standard abstraction programming model moves up from transistor logic to assembler to virtual machines to distributed computing.

Presumably Cogent knew this when courting Netflix as a customer. How is Cogent's arrangement with AT&T (and every other individual ISP on the planet) any of Netflix's concern?

For various reasons, I'm stuck with Comcast. I don't know and don't care what agreement they have with Telstra when I'm emailing stuff to my friends.