Or three (I saw it on Friday).

From the other clues, I had the first 3 letters. The only think that made sense to me for the 4th letter was "E". I thought "well, I guess that kind of makes sense, though that's a really awkward way of phrasing it". It wasn't until later I realized that was the wrong answer. When I found the correct answer I was a bit surprised. Not being a big fan of crosswords, I didn't realize they did that in answers (trying to be vague in my reply, so as not to spoil it for anyone).

Whine whine. Your typical slashdot "google this google that...blah blah blah...do no evil...now give me my +5" post. Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that asking you to sign up for google+ qualifies as EVIL? My god, the bar for that one has really gotten low lately. You've offered me a decent service for free while only very slightly inconveniencing me....EVIL!!!!!!!!11!!!1!!!!!one!!!

Google does a ton of things in the last decade that benefit users, or at least myself, greatly:
1) youtube - Great place for me to host videos to share with my family. They're all private URLs so not publicly searchable, and I know pretty much anybody that I want to share the url with can see them, even on a tablet or phone. And if google wants to do some video datamining of my 3 year old daughter doing something cute, who the fuck cares.

2) maps - Nevermind that it's not even 10 years old. Most of the best improvements (street view, real time traffic, predictive traffic, navigation, public transit) were all created in the last 5-6 years. All accessible from my android phone. It's amazing how useful this is. In 2004 I visited Chicago for a weekend and used only public transit. As a tourist, I remember how nervous I was using it. I had the maps, trying to figure out what bus to take to where, and what connections I need to pick up and seeing how they all timed up. Nightmare to me. I visited there again this summer and unlike last time, I didn't plan a thing as far as how to get here or there. When I needed to go somewhere, I just put in the location and it showed me all the options for bus or rail. In 2004, I didn't go anywhere without knowing exactly where I was in relation to everywhere else. This time, I couldn't tell you shit about where I was, as I didn't need to know. Just followed a few simple instructions and I was where I needed to be

3) google+ - yes, some of us actually use it. I can't stand facebook. You have little control over what you see, they're always breaking your privacy settings, and it's filled with crap (half the "posts" are some score or achievement somebody in farmville or some other crappy game). Google let me control exactly what/who I want to see, and they've always been pretty good at not "breaking" privacy options.

4) gmail - even this is less than a decade old (launched in 2004), but I'll give you a break there. But still, tons of great improvements in UI design over the last 5 years. There has been cool enhancements, like the Google Talk feature

5) video chat - text chat has already been pretty easy to do among different os and device options, but video was a different story. Even 2-3 years ago, I remember trying to do video chats between android and ipad. So very few options. The ones I did try were all buggy (ex: some devices the video would be upside down), and blatantly missing support for obvious features (like rotating displays). The ones that worked halfway decent quickly made themselves annoying after some updates were released. Since google got serious about this in the last year or so, this is has become a piece of cake

6) voice - Thanks google. With the help of a $40 obi device, I haven't paid a penny for my home phone service in 3 years (sadly it looks like that may be coming to and end in the next 5 months or so). The abilty to ring mulitple phones (and use your contacts to control who rings to what phones) is awesome. The spam call detection is fairly good (looking at my history, google has saved me from a ton of useless interruptions)

7) android - I had an i-device, and it always drove me crazy. I've been much happier since moving to android. And all of the above mentioned features are accessible from it.

I'm sure I could go on, but despite your typical troll response with the "do no evil" buzz-phrase in it, I've found much of what google has done to be immensely beneficial to me. Perfect? Hell no. But FAR ahead of most everything else that's been offered by others so far. And I haven't paid a penny for any of it (except my nexus 4)

I'm neither defending nor criticizing the president, but that statement was clearly a bit of hyperbole, and you'd have to be an idiot to take it at face value. Why do I say that?
1) The statement was made about plans that existed prior to the ACA going into effect
2) One of the major problems that the ACA was created to address was the fact that insurance companies could (and routinely did) cancel people's policies for any reason at all.
3) Laws cannot be made to retroactively force people/companies to do something.

So I think the point was, there was nothing in the law that could cause you to lose the coverage you had. However, there was no way to prevent insurance companies from cancelling policies on their own whim before the ACA went into effect.

But you've got to admin that's a damn funny phone number for them to have. And hey, I guess it works, because before I had no clue what the phone number is (don't care, because I've got good insurance through work). Now I've got it memorized and I'm sure I'll never forget it.

Actually, unlike Microsoft and Sony, all Nintendo has to do is sell the system and they've already made a profit, even on launch day.

As far as selling games goes, well let's take a look at the top selling games across all consoles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#All_Consoles

If we disregard Wii Sports (since it was included for free) and all previous generation consoles, then we have the following:
Mario Kart Wii
Wii Sports Resort (some of these were included, but some were purchases separately
Wii Play
New Super Mario Bros Wii
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Wii Fit
Wii Fit Plus
GTA V

That's 5 or 6 top sellers for the Wii (depending on if you count Resort), and only 2 for the competition. Looks like they aren't hurting too bad. But what about just the overall total of all games sold for the console, worldwide?

http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Software/Global/

Wii: 901 million games
360: 826 million games
PS3: 749 million games

Yep, that is indeed an odd form of success. Most hardware sold (with none of it sold at a loss), and most games sold. What a total failure.

Oh, and since you said you didn't know the answer about the tie-ratio:
http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie-Ratio/Global/

Wii: 8.99
360: 10.48
PS3: 9.35

So yeah, they are on the bottom of that metric, but still very respectable...only 4% lower than the PS3 and 15% lower than the 360. Not bad at all considering all those system supposedly sitting unused on shelves.

Assuming you and the GGP are the same AC...moving the goalposts a bit now, huh? You said, when referring to the volt, that you should get 1000 mph out of THIS CONFIGURATION. Well guess what...THAT configuration has a 16kwh battery array, not 60kwh or 85kwh as the model S does. Now suddenly you are talking about adding the volt's engine to an array the size of the model S. Guess what...not you've got the inefficiencies of having to do the power conversion, plus you have the weight of the huge battery array, plus you have the weight of the ICE, plus the weight of the gas. Oh...and lets not forget about costs. Instead of a $40k or $80k car, you're added all of this expense and complexity together, so you are now probably talking about a $100k car. Yeah, I'm sure that's going to sell great, even if you could get that mythical 1000 mile range out of it.

See...again, you've moved the goalposts. The configuration we were talking about WAS a hybrid solution. That's what your 1000 mile range figure was based on...what a configuration like the volt has should get. Now you are saying "oh yeah, well hybrid IS going to suck". Well guess what....if it's not hybrid...if it's purely electric, then you DO NOT HAVE AN ICE in the car to recharge the battery. So how exactly do you "charge the batteries 3 times" without having an ICE in the car?

You're all over the place here. It seems like you just have a hatred for GM and/or the Volt and it's causing you to just start spewing garbage without even thinking about what you are saying. Let's be real here. The Volt is far from perfect, but lets have some reality in the criticisms of it, and not just go spewing garbage that makes no sense.

Wow, not sure how you get +4 with utter crap like that. You thing that setup should be sporting near 1000 miles? OK, lets see about that. Presumably, you don't think that the model S has a pathetic range, so we'll use that as a baseline for what you think a car should get. The modelS gets 230 miles off a 60kwh battery. So that means the Volts 16kwh battery should get 60 miles. So yes, the Tesla makes more efficient use of the battery. But lets get back to that 1000 mile figure. So we've got 60 miles from the included battery. That means you think it should get 940 miles from the included fuel capacity. Well, it has a 9.3 gallon tank, so apparently you think it should be getting 101 MPG? Sorry, but even the best production motorcycles don't get that high. For production cars, the best ones only get about half of that.

So I think about 500 miles would be the absolute tops you could hope for in a really efficient car with those specs. Granted that's a bit better than its actual 380 mile range, but it's a far cry from your BS 1000 mile figure. If you are throwing out fantasy numbers, why didn't you just say 5000 miles?

Why is it at all sad that, after 20 years, I've forgotten the implementation details of a specific algorithm that I've NEVER had to implement (other than as part of the learning process back then) since it's already been implemented in the standard library of just about every language or API that I've ever worked with (and that implementation has probably been done better than I could do it, because it has likely been done by someone who has studied sorting algorithms in much more detail than I ever did)? What does that have to do with forgetting how to program? I rebuilt an engine in high school, but I don't remember how to do it now. Does that mean I've forgotten how to repair my car, too?

And how does it work? Well, I could tell you now, since the curious part of me went and looked it up on wikipedia to refresh my memory the second I finished making that post. And you might think that's fine, since that proves I can actually do it, except for the fact that, had I first ran into Jane Q. Public in an interview rather than on slashdot, I would have failed that requirement at the time.

But to answer your question with the knowledge I had at that time, the only part of it I could remember is that divide and conquer is part of it. But I couldn't remember how it dealt with getting values sorted between the left and right halves (doing a rough sort before dividing), nor anything about the pivot point or how to select it.

I'm sad to learn that, by your standards, I'm not currently a programmer, but merely a hack just out of high school, as I couldn't write a quicksort to save my life. Ironically, though, 20 years ago, when I WAS just out of high school (and WAY less experienced/skilled), I apparently was a programmer back then because I could and did write a quicksort at that time.

Or, maybe you're just really bad at expressing yourself.

Why should nobody intend to do it? I do it from time to time, and I intend it. If the subject I'm capturing is naturally vertical, and I don't intend to view it full screen on an HDTV, why should I waste all that space and resolution capturing stuff I don't care about on each side? I'll shoot it portrait and capture the subject that I am actually interested in with as much detail as possible.

Then you end up with a much lower resolution, which is very undesirable.

But to use a square sensor, you give up a lot of resolution. A lens is circular. People generally prefer photos that are rectangular rather than square. Well, for a given circle diameter, you can fit a wider 2:3 rectangle in it than you can a sqaure. That means for a given lens size, your 2:3 sensor will capture more detail than a square sensor which you crop down.

Because it would be sensor space that would rarely be used. It's not that common that people would hold in portrait but intend to shoot in landscape. And then on top of that, I don't know that it is technically possible to manufacture a plus-shaped sensor. If not, then that would mean either there would be a lot of the sensor that is completely unused (which means wasted cost of manufacturing, and possibly wasted battery life if it's not possible to keep portions of the sensor powered down), or you'd have to shrink the square sensor down to fit inside the circular lens (which means your effective sensor would be lower resolution). Neither of those are ideal trade-offs for somethings that might be used 5% of the time.

A violent assault sure seems a hell of a lot harder to me than simply following someone around and wait until they touch something you can pull a print from without the person even realizing it.

But it's not problem free. So you have class X, which implements interfaces A and B. Interface A has function Foo, so class X implements function Foo. Everything is fine and dandy. Now it's the future. Interface B has been upgraded to also have function Foo, and given a default method so as not to break existing code. If you recompile it, as you said, it will work just fine since you've got an implemented method, thus no conflict. So now you pass an object of X to a function called DoSomethingWithB that expects a B object as a parameter. In the upgraded library, that method takes advantage of the fact that B objects now have a Foo function, so it calls it. Except that the implementation of Foo in X that gets called is one that was designed to only deal with calls intended for objects of type A. Unless A.Foo and B.Foo have the same intended purpose, it's gonna fail until class X is upgraded to deal with the new B.Foo. And like I said, how does the code even know if the caller is trying to call Foo on an A or a B object? That's important because, if the purpose is different and the naming similarity is just coincidence, then you are going to need to do different things in each case.

So, first of all, that means that default methods doesn't 100% fix the problem it was intended to fix. Namely that existing code would break if new methods were later added to interfaces, as that existing code would not have an implementation. It's still possible that adding new methods to an interface could break existing code, but probably a lot less likely. I assume they'll take care in future releases to make sure they don't modify existing interfaces in such a way as to break anything using the standard library, but that may not hold true if you use any code libraries from a 3rd party.

The other thing is, I don't see how this is a whole lot different from just allowing multiple inheritance but requiring the derived class to override to resolve the ambiguity up front (rather than the C++ method of letting the caller resolve the ambiguity). And I'm actually curious how Java will allow this to be resolved in the derived class. If you implement interfaces A and B, which are completely different from each other and both implement method Foo for completely different purposes, then using the C++ method, it's easy to call object.A::Foo when you are trying to treat the object as an A, and likewise for B. But with java, will the overridden function C.Foo be able to know when the caller was treating the object as an A vs a B? If not, then it's sort of difficult for the class to know how to properly resolve these sorts of conflicts.

So java now supports default methods for interfaces? In other words "we now support multiple inheritance". Or at least that's pretty close to it. I thought the logic was that multiple inheritance is messy when you have diamond shaped inheritance, or two parent classes that have the same method names, so java only did single inheritance, but then allowed you to do interfaces to sort of simulate multiple inheritance (except you had to write all the code). But with this change, it seems the same as multiple inheritance, with the exception that interfaces cannot include (non-static) variables, only methods. Am I correct here, or am I overlooking something?