If the feds come to me with a valid warrant to decrypt my phone -- I'll do it -- rather than risk contempt of court. Their warrant better say what they are looking for.

Anybody else wants to look at it -- they can suck it.

Police & other government agencies have been snooping on suspects' phones for too long, without a warrant, and that is in direct contradiction to this:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

That is the fourth amendment to the constitution, and it remains the law of this land. No, you cannot search my phone without a warrant.

Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

Microsoft has been successful because of their American engineering talent.

If they want to go, they should go. G'bye!

The ad hominem! I'm so proud of you.

They did have the first iPod, no doubt. But as far as the first portable MP3 player, no. Try PJB100, invented by Digital Equipment Corporation.

They did have the first iPhone, but that was not the first smart phone, no. Sorry again. Palm.

They did have the first iPad, but that was not the first tablet computer, not by a long shot. GRiD was first.

Oh yeah, that GUI they claimed to invent and sued Microsoft over? Yeah, not theirs, either. Xerox. Sorry.

Apple is a marketing company, not a technology company. They have brazenly stolen others ideas and (quite successfully) marketed them.

Enjoy your lock-in.

They've caught up with last year's Nexus 5!

Don't use random hot spots. It's like safe sex, only for your computer. Stay away from sketchy connections.

What is cool? Programming isn't cool. Programmers aren't cool. Being a guitar player in a great band is probably cool. Being a chick magnet might be cool. When has being a Java dev gotten anybody laid?

The only people who care about how "cool" a language is are posers. A professional developer is going to choose the tool that is going to let him/her build what he/she wants with the least fuss. For a lot of today's applications, that tool may well be Java.

What's uncool is a skill that won't get you a job. Java can get you a job, help you buy a car, a house, live your life.

working "short on time" with "wife and children around" "in a recliner" does not sound conducive to quality code.

Late 1989, on a VAXstation II/GPX running VMS 5.0. Not exactly a desktop workstation, it was a desk-side box as big as a 2-drawer file cabinet. That newfangled DECWindows came out and killed off the old VMS GUI "VWS". Right about that same time the VAXstation 3100 came out, a true desktop VAX workstation...

The early versions ran a "desktop" called "XUI", which was replaced with Motif in 1991.

Another commenter wrote that the performance has not improved that much since the early 90s. My current desktop Linux box has the equivalent CPU horsepower of 10,000 VAXstation 3100s, but it boots to the login window only about twice as fast. Progress?

Michael Jackson, and Hitler?

What utter bullshit!

This is like mining Facebook to decide who the best rock band ever was! Think there's any bias?

My vote goes to Gutenberg. You want to talk about inflection points in human knowledge? Gutenberg, and then Tim Berners-Lee.

Jeff

Sun stood on the shoulders of giants.

That 68000 processor that Sun used? Modeled after DEC microprocessors. That ethernet wire they connected to? They don't call it Digital-Intel-Xerox Ethernet for no reason. That "new thing" unix Sun used? And the C language? Built on DEC PDPs. Your terminal emulator? Emulates a DEC terminal. USB? A consortium, including DEC. That X-Window System sun used after NeWS tanked? Yep. Came from Project Athena, sponsored by DEC. MIT & IBM.

One of the many reasons that DEC died was that many people in the company were blinded by the brilliance of VMS and the layered products, and could not understand why anyone would want to settle for less. Digital had stuff in the 80s and 90s that the rest of the industry caught up with 10 or more years later, and in some cases, have still not caught up. The problem was that DEC's stuff was very, very expensive, and very proprietary, and DEC was out-marketed by other vendors selling supposedly "open", and certainly cheaper unix based solutions (See "snake oil".)

You're not very old, are you?

There were a lot of Sun people who celebrated the demise of Digital Equipment Corporation.

Well, what goes around comes around eventually. Sun got theirs, let them rot in pieces. They never made the impact that Digital did.

(and no, I'm not bitter about Sun. I'm waiting for HP's turn. It's coming...)

I was in Detention in 7th grade.

My teacher had a book "101 Basic Computer Games" on her desk. I was bored. I opened the book. I read the BASIC source code, and I thought "I can do that."

That was in 1975 or 1976. The rest is history.

not fiber. point to point laser and microwave links.

I believe you are referring to ultra-low-latency trading.

They prefer microwave links to fiber because the microwave signals propagate faster through air than light does through a glass fiber. Light travels through glass fiber at about 65% of c, which is also pretty comparable to the velocity of a electric signal in a transmission line (.65 to .75 c) (which is where Admiral Hopper ties in)

Microwave signals propagate though air at damned close to the speed of light, and the microwave signal paths are direct by necessity. That means the path can be significantly less than half the distance a cable (electric or optic) and the speed about 50% faster.

Optical paths are also used, they are by laser through the air. This has the same direct path, near c speed advantages as microwave.