Yeah, hacking. You know, that thing you do to underbrush with a machete. And about that subtle from the sounds of it.

Scott Adams predicted this many years ago, and I still agree with his analysis.

I believe the action is question is more proximal than the medial influence you infer.

Pshhh! That's what *they* want you to believe.

I got through about 2.5 years of college before I was too poor to continue. I lucked out, got a job doing exactly the type of programming I wanted to do (custom automation control systems) but making next to nothing doing it (about $15k/year). Eventually being poor got old and I took a job with a "real" company making $60k. Six months in they bumped me to $68k and took me on as a full time employee.

Eventually I went back and finished my degree (BS in Comp Sci). I lost my job at almost the same time I finished the degree (I wasn't willing to move then the company did). That's why I know that the degree gave me a 10-15% bump in pay.

I learned almost nothing in college about programming. To this day I am of the belief that it is a certificate attesting that when told to do something silly you have the fortitude to actually get it done. Oh, and maybe you have the ability to learn new things...maybe. In the end I'm glad I got it, but only because of what it means to other people. Directly to me it means almost nothing.

So, you want Google to provide a service where you can pay them not to do something to hurts you? That must be a totally new concept. No, wait...

This is why I asked about his opinion on the Money vs. Speech question. If he honestly believes money isn't speech then it's now a constitutional issue, since the Supreme Court has essentially decided Money == Speech. If he believes money is speech then legislating a restriction on money won't (now) pass constitutional muster. In either case legislation appears to be a losing proposition (long term at least).

I'd love to hear your opinion on the debate over Money as a form of Speech. Should expenditure of money be protected as a form of expression or restricted as a form of coercion (just like some forms of speech are)? How are speech and money similar and how are they fundamentally distinct?

So the ability for one app to provide extensions that other apps can use to render specialized content?

Flash support in 3..2..1...

This, right here, is the point. I can type in text in just about any editor ever created. But navigating through a pile of code I don't know, to find how it's structured, its call chains, what data belongs to which subsections? That's where a good IDE provides true value to me.

I use SlickEdit because it has the most functional code navigation I've found. Ctrl-/ and a sub-windows shows me every reference to a symbol, in a tagged list showing each reference, by file, and information about where it was referenced (in what scope) and how (defined, declared, called, assigned, read, other). Click on one of them and I'm taken to that reference. Ctrl-. and I'm taken to the definition of the symbol my cursor's on; Ctrl-, and I'm back where I came from (to an arbitrary depth). I use this to navigate through unfamiliar code following through call chains and data structures. 20 years ago I used grep, a text editor and a whiteboard (foo.c:782, foo.h:94, foo.c:122, bar.h:15, qux.s:343), but never again.

I don't get it...are you trying for a revenge kill via saccharine overdose? If so: impressive work. I think I'm diabetic now.

The average of 101, 101, 101, and 97 is 100, but 3/4 of the sample is above the average. Also, since it's an extremely large sample size and there's a relatively large number of people who are exactly average intelligence, the number of people below (and above) the average will be less than 50%.

Or, in a pinch, a full service gas station.

Parent: If you're going out do you want your red coat or your blue one?
Child: It's June here in Texas...
Parent: So, the Red one?
Child: Um...No?
Parent: OK, blue it is.
Child: Nevermind, I'll just stay inside.
Parent: Well, then you should do your chores.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QrnwoO1-8A&list=TLtms-Tz7YPQk

Given this demo from two years ago using a single hacked Kinect I have to believe that the technology is only going to improve. As long as the camera isn't occluded the 3D point data can be used to map sections of the 2D image onto a mesh created from the 3D point cloud. Then the camera can be virtually re-positioned and the scene rendered. Most of this is pretty easy using commodity hardware rendering engines.