Like others have pointed out, you can't patent ideas either.

Computer Science is a bit complex in that sense. Theoretical computer science is pure math, without a shadow of a doubt. At the same time, practical computer scientists need a whole array of skills to do their work.

But in the end everything produced by your work -- all software -- is mathematics.

Yet these are not the parts which get patented.

What gets patented is math.

There is! But it's exceedingly hard. I have more than 10 extensions in Firefox active right now, and I still can't totally eliminate them, especially since there is no decent substitute for youtube.

Most of which have Twitter/Facebook/Google integration, running their APIs and javascript. And thus tracking your every move. They've put their filthy paws on seemingly every single site in the universe.

There are quite a few discussion forums and online communities which have stopped working for me unless I allow Google (or Googleapis or analytics or somesuch) to execute scripts on my computer. Same goes for Amazon (cloudfront).

Yes. Until you get to the payment part. Then you need to log into Amazon, Google, or PayPal, in about 90% of the cases.

One of the biggest is run by Google, the others have Google and Facebook tracking bugs tracking your every move

True, but we've had those all along. And many are moving onto Facebook. Or running their whole business on Google Docs. For sure they are running Google analytics and probably Google ads too.

Including all of your browsing history being handed over whenever asked. Who has your entire browsing history? Google and Facebook. They likely have all your email too.

This one is actually quite cool.

You can certainly do research without Microsoft or Google scholar. It's just that you hit the Elsevier and ACM paywalls next.

While it is true that there is so much more contents out there than there used to be back in the dialup days, the Internet is much more of a product nowadays.

Have you actually TRIED surfing without using Google or Facebook or Amazon? It takes about 10 different browser extensions to curtail all their vile malware spyware stuff that is leaping at you from every corner of the internet. Install Ghostery and marvel. And when you think that you've covered the cookies and scripts and supercookies and DOM storage and ads and the rest, they fingerprint your browser and then you have to fake that as well.

Surfing without Google and friends requires daily effort, lots of computer know-how and discipline.

Just think -- how many source files you can have side-by-side on this baby :)

Many programmers already use two monitors side-by-side in a multi-head configuration, so I don't see why this would be any different.

Actually, Germany is somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of the percentage of renewable sources in the electricity mix. The problem is that they also consume a lot of electricity (industry and population), so their consumption really matters in absolute terms. That's why it is an important country -- if they can pull it off, it means that other large industrial producers like France and the UK also can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union

Keep in mind that that report is 2 years old now, and many countries like Spain and Portugal have invested additional resources, with Portugal passing the 50% mark this year.

Vim will automatically scan through all the header files you include and autocomplete that. It will also autocomplete from all the files you have open in your current session (other tabs, other buffers).

Try it. Open a dummy c file with nothing but int main(). Try autocompletion -- nothing. Then add an #include stdio.h, save, and it will autocomplete from there.

It won't understand your code (e.g. class hierarchy) and be very intelligent about it, which means that you might need one or two extra keystrokes now and then, though.

I program mostly in C/C++. I haven't tested this with Java and other languages.

This whole discussion is fucking bizarre. It turns out that there are many people out there who think that if you are not running a 1435 TB monstrosity of an IDE, your only alternative is ed. Just use an editor from this century, FFS. Emacs, vim, Kate, Notepad+, anything modern and targeted at programmers.

Personally, I use vim:

Code completion? Check
Syntax highlighting? Check
Brace matching? Check
Search and replace w/ regexp? Check
Language-specific auto indentation, retabbing, reindent, etc. Check
Multiple files open in tabs, with easy switching? Check
Language-specific auto commenting? Check
Filesystem navigation? Check
Code folding? Check
Scriptable? Check

I do understand that full-blown IDEs offer some additional functionality: integrated build system, CVS integration, debugger integration, stepping through errors, etc. I don't find these useful personally, but I understand that other people do, and that's OK. Vim and Emacs can also do most of those, but if you are so dependent on all this, then a large IDE is probably something you'll be more comfortable with, and that's OK.

On the other hand, vim has its own advantages -- it doesn't tie you to itself (you use standard tools like CMake and Mercurial/git), it's lightweight (somebody in here suggested increasing the memory available to the VM to 2 GB so Eclipse runs faster WTF?!?!?!?!?), it's fast, and it is unbeatable at keyboard shortcuts. Yes, many IDEs offer configurable keyboard navigation, but it's an afterthought, none of it is as efficient with keyboard as vim. I don't like using mouse for editing.

So in the end, it's up to you to decide. Personally, I'm an editor+shell guy, and I honestly don't feel that I'm missing out on anything. Each to his own.

Actually, it's already underway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

Sure, and I'm not dissing other distros, but Gentoo is simply so much better in those areas, IMHO.

Just try asking a technical question on an Ubuntu forum, and on a Gentoo forum. The Gentoo guys are so good at pinpointing the cause of your problems and offering solutions that it's sometimes scary. Writing/adapting an ebuild is a lot more convenient than building a package for any distribution, anyone familiar with python can do it, including automatic git pull and adding custom patches. And when it comes to flexibility, source distributions are king, and this will never change.

I have used RedHat, SUSE and Debian extensively, and have dabbled with Ubuntu (mostly against my will) and stuff like Knoppix. It's those three points that have kept amazing me with Gentoo. Though it's true that other distros have caught up somewhat and that Gentoo has slipped some.

KDE works properly. That's an advantage.

But optimisation of binaries is not the point of Gentoo. I wonder why this myth still prevails.

The advantages of Gentoo over other distributions are 1) documentation and knowledgable community, 2) flexibility, 3) easy mixing of hand-compiled stuff with the package management stuff.

The disadvantages are 1) compile times 2) although the distro tools are excellent, it's still considerably more complex to use than most, 3) breakage is more likely, so it takes more maintenance than most.

As with ANY distro, it comes down to what you want and what is important to you. I was a happy Gentoo user for 8 years, but finally I switched back to Debian because I simply don't have much time now, and Debian is a joy to run. I still think that Gentoo is brilliant.

It's not that tools like DreamWeaver are ALWAYS the wrong tool -- they can be useful for graphic designers with little computer knowledge -- but your son is a programmer, a tinkerer, who uses advanced editors, likes to understand stuff he builds in detail, and is not afraid of programming and editing by hand. I'm willing to bet anything that he will create better looking, more reliable, more standards-compliant and more correct webpages in less time if he learns the basics of modern HTML/CSS than he would if he mucked around with DreamWeaver and the like.

I'm not a web-developer, but I have a fleeting knowledge of HTML (most of it from early 90s) and CSS (most of it from early 00s). My girlfriend is a designer and asked me for help with a web page she is developing. Nothing complex, but quite meticulously laid out, lots of pictures, hover-effects, menus, and the like. It took her many weeks of hard work to produce the GIMPed designs for me to work on. In less than a weekend, I had it running in all major browsers using nothing but vim, and this includes looking up most of the needed stuff on the internet. The code is clean, reusable, validates (both HTML and CSS), and works in all major browsers (I might need to add some IE6 workarounds, but I probably won't bother, let it burn).

So anyone who is a coder should be able to pick the basics up in a couple of days, and this will be infinitely more useful in the long run than learning the quirks of a Web design program.

Most Chinese live in big cities (more than a million inhabitants) and have access to government scholarships if they score well on the university entrance examination (gaokao).

The scholarships are a pittance, and many students have to work part-time to get through university, but their universities are loaded with brilliant people.

China is a developing country and many people do live in poverty, but there are likely more kids with (real!) Gucci bags in Chinese cities than in the US. You have no idea how fast the place is developing.

Intel and AMD both support OpenGL 3.0 using OSS drivers. And it's stable.

Not GL4, though.

If you mean open source drivers included in the Linux kernel, then: everybody.