I agree that Rails is a fad. But touting PHP as better is... odd. PHP is a dismal language, with horrible coding practices and duplicate commands (some are bad, some are good, who knows which is which). Using a library, you have no idea what code they used... did they use the old string routine that's vulnerable to buffer overflows, or the new one? Why does PHP even KEEP the broken commands, it's insane!

Ruby is good (despite performance issues), PHP is bad. I'll take any framework built around Ruby over any framework built around PHP.

This could be a thing, but would be uninteresting with a hitscan game. When your shots are point and kill (headshot from extreme range) then computer reflexes trump interesting play. But if it's only slow moving projectiles it's possible more interesting gameplay could result.

I rotate my screens vertically at work (where I don't watch videos, I work on documents and sites, and horizontal space is often a waste). A square screen is a similar trade-off, but I find the utility of choice that rotation offers probably outweighs the value of a square form-factor.

This is bullshit. That's why 'communication skills' are part of being an awesome programmer... otherwise you're just a lone wolf. Read through the open source Quake code and tell me it's unreadable... being a rockstar (such as Carmack) does not mean making horrible code.

To be perfectly blunt, I think you have never worked with a rockstar programmer.

I'm not trying to say 'anyone not hiring a rockstar is wasting money'. Instead, I'm saying that programming is very difficult, and those the right mix of communication skills, technical experience, and plain intelligence are extremely rare and valuable. They have been there, written that, and groked the algorithm. They don't just know the library, they recognize the functions they are traversing from the debugger output. There is an incredible amount of time wasted looking stuff up, and if you have internalized that knowledge you can just code instead.

I am not a rockstar, but I've worked with one. In his particular domain (coding multithreaded, networked, redundant communication systems) he was a god. Outside that area, he was merely very good. The value that intelligence and experience brings to the table is underrated. I can see why Agents can bring value by finding jobs that fit with the skills of their clients.

There is a reason that alternatives to WIMPs are listed under Alternative Theories in Wikipedia. Claiming that the collective brainpower of most scientists has not focused on that particular theory is disingenuous.

This is unnecessary. All they need to do is add in the 'under penalty of perjury' wording to submitting a DMCA request. A DMCA rebuttal has the threat of perjury associated with it, but the DMCA takedown does not. It's asinine. A few very expensive lawsuits would quickly reign in DMCA abuse.

While I agree that something is odd with gravity, the certainty that many scientists seem to have that it must be an exotic particle or form we have not discovered seems misguided. It could be something exotic and new that doesn't fit with any previously discovered science... or not. Dark matter just fails Occam's Razor in my opinion.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist either... just that I think we need to be more open to alternative theories like this. I'd love to see this particular question answered in my lifetime.

"We apologize, but it seems that the system was malfunctioning between the times of 7pm and 11pm last night. This was a temporary outage, but sadly the history relevant to the event in question was lost. We greatly regret the losses incurred by the families attending the bat mitzvah, and we promise that our standard investigative procedures will determine whether there is any culpability by the officers. Pending the results of the investigation, our officers have been placed on paid leave, as they have suffered tremendous trauma due to the tragic situation."

Your comment implies 100% efficiency. That is not achievable. If we hit 1% efficiency, it will still be a breakthrough of monumental proportions. Regardless, consuming the deuterium from 6 metric tons of sea water for a year of power is still pretty damn good.

There are a lot of comments here about how this is futurist doom & gloom. And it certainly could be. But the difference between the doom of the past and the doom of now is that we now have working, commercial examples of the robots that could replace humans. It was theory before... now it's just a matter of economy of scale and refinement.

CGP Gray did an excellent piece on this already.

To be perfectly honest, databases make sense when you access thousands of records multiple times a second.

Computer configuration is accessing a couple dozen records multiple times a day. There is NO performance reason that this can't be done with the same text files we have used for years.

Please note: I'm only addressing the last sentence of your post. I do agree that existing tools handled dynamic configuration poorly. I simply take exception that 'dynamic' must automatically mean 'database'.

I fail to see why the poor / stupid child should be prosecuted. What does that solve? Who are you then protecting?

Not quite. See, they were not selling. They were advertising. This is similar to Harley taking their new electric motorcycle around to events to show it off. There is no law against letting people drive your car. People who liked it enough could drive to buy it in the next state over.

I claim that I had photorealistic, real-time voxel graphics running on an iPhone 2 seven years ago. I just didn't release it for... reasons. Until they release a demo that runs on someone else's hardware, it's just a worm on a hook for investors.