Sony, you can't release this thing in theaters, and the same will probably be of brick-and-mortar retail. Your reputation is going in the crapper because of the awful things your executives say in email. Release the movie on a torrent. Let people watch it online. For free. It's not like these idiots aren't going to eventually distribute all of your dirty laundry anyway. Show us you at least have some dignity, if not class.

Clean(er) coal is still mostly an idea, not yet commercially implemented (at least when talking about carbon sequestration in the US). A pretty good article is at National Geographic. It mentions that there is a plant under construction in Kemper County, Mississippi, that should capture more than half of its CO2 emissions and redirect them to an oil field. The project has suffered from cost overruns and delays (new tech, not horribly surprising). Besides sequestration, there is work being done on "gassification" (turning coal into a gas and cleaning it before burning it) and improving the combustion process itself.

Of course, you still have to get the coal, which can be nasty (see mountaintop mining and this article about environment impacts of coal mining).

Even as we are trying to sequester half of the carbon we generate when generating power from coal, the permafrost is melting, and according to that article, this could release about 190 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

So, yeah, we can use coal better, but it will cost a lot of money, which probably isn't going to happen without regulation and, subsequently, the recovery of any investment via higher prices for energy. Higher energy prices will doubtless generating much gnashing of teeth during an economy that, at least in the US, seems stuck in a slow, very slow, recovery. With the US Congress very likely to go to a Republican majority next month, the chances of any kind of CO2 regulation are slim.

You set up a background image for elements in CSS, with the appropriate media queries. What do we need another new tag for? If you are building responsive sites, you should be managing it in CSS anyway. Embedding CSS type media queries into a document tag is about the same as including embedded styles instead of classes. It makes for ugly and redundant HTML (okay, HTML itself is redundant, but stating that would be redundant... er...).

Here is a 419 (Nigerian scam) back-and-forth. It is quite a bit funnier...

In the B2B space, a lot of code gets written to wire up databases to front-ends of some time, and most of the time it involves an RDBMS. Unfortunately, with all the reliance upon ORM frameworks, developers often can't write or diagnose decent SQL to save their lives. We have a good chunk of Oracle code written by a large integrator, and there are innumerable cursors, one after the other, where a simple SQL join would have done the job much more easily. In Microsoft land, people are leaning way too much on LINQ, with transaction integrity and locking effects as distant afterthoughts.

On the front-end, things are even more chaotic. Whatever Javascript or UI framework you are using, there is always something newer, more "efficient" and inevitably more buggy if you don't take the time to learn to use it properly. Something like Angular is very cool, but very different, and there is a lot of front-end time to learn to use it properly in a production site. Unfortunately, in B2B space, we don't always get the time we would like to learn how to use the latest "hotness".

Abstraction for abstraction's sake is a killer too. Templates, abstraction and such re-use techniques get way overused. Yeah, it might be nice if every single block of code was reusable, and we could arbitrarily stub in test data for every possible call, but the complexity isn't always worth it. Setting up three levels of abstraction to make a class library call that was already abstracted accomplishes nothing. People that code this way never had to worry about stack or heap.

Maybe I'm old, maybe I'm yelling "get off my lawn", but I truly believe that, for especially internal, B2B applications, a focus on fundamentals would make life a little easier to manage.

Not sure I get what you are saying... Is it that Putin is sitting in his easy chair, munching caviar, laughing about "those crazy kids", and that he is above instructing his former colleagues at the FSB to check things out? What are we supposed to base Putin's indifference (or altruism) about this purloined user data? The lack of a Russian Snowden? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

A unanimous decision, authored by the most conservative voice on the court (Thomas) with a concurring opinion by one of the most liberal (Sotomayor). If this were the beginning of April, I would say this story was a prank. Yeah, it doesn't completely kill software patents, but it does seem to mortally wound the "business process + software = patent troll profit" problem that is plaguing software development. This is a good day for the judicial branch. It's a good day for the USA.

Health insurance != Health care costs. Health insurance is largely an American problem. You can argue its merits versus single-payer, but in countries like the UK and Canada, health insurance is largely seen as a queue cutting mechanism, and most people get on without it. Costs are going up everywhere, but per-capita, the US has among the highest cost in the industrialized world.

I don't understand how forcing people to buy private insurance is destroying the market, although it is certainly distorting it (types of plans are way more regulated than they ought to bbe). You can argue that forcing the purchase of insurance is beyond the powers of the federal government (which I agree with), but it's pretty far from single-payer socialism. States can set up their own exchanges, and choose whether or not they want to take the federal money for Medicaid expansion. I fully agree about the state of oligopolic competition with regards to medical insurance, but that is hardly a recent phenomenon.

Somehow you read my post complaining about subsidies (agricultural and Medicaid) and taxation as an endorsement of Obamacare, I'm not sure how you got there. If you live in the US, unless you are rich enough to have tax shelters sufficient to keep you from paying federal taxes, you are helping to pay for health care of those aren't paying for their own healthcare, you are helping to pay subsidies for corn farmers, and you are, in fact, one of "us". Like it or not, you are helping to pay for that person stroking out that has been living on snacks and fast food.

Yep, no obese people in my family either. I work and have health insurance (I'm in the US, it's a big deal here). And yet, I still care. Why? There are unpaid hospital bills in the amount of $41 billion. Except those bills really aren't unpaid now, are they? You might want to let the obese die, but doctors operate under the Hippocratic Oath and cannot turn people away from the emergency room because they are obese or poor. High insurance premiums and, of course, our friend taxes (which fund state-level Medicaid entitlements) are how the costs get covered. Prices rise because insurance (public and private) will only pay a portion of actual costs.

There is a "we" in US. Your federal taxes fund the subsidies to the corn syrup producers so politicians in the Midwest can remain relevant. The crop space used to grow subsidized corn used in corn syrup and ethanol make you more dependent upon product brought in from South America (not so bad, but does make our food supply vulnerable to political instability in that region) and food products from China (ask Fido how that's working out for him). Market distortion is a problem, and it affects all of us.

Do they put a time limit on how long you can cache items?

I have an Onkyo amplifier (mid-range) and an LG BlueRay player (low-end). A few months back, the Onkyo no longer could connect to Rhapsody (yah, I know, Rhapsody, but the wife likes it). Onkyo knows about it, and basically says "tough" because it's an old model (~ 4 years). I can use Chromecast, but it's an annoyance, because now I have to have a phone or tablet around to listen to music. The BlueRay player no longer shows images for Netflix in its bundled application. I can use Chromecast, but again, it's annoying. It's apparently in neither company's interest to update the firmware (which is updateable on both devices) to fix these issues, because they believe I will go out and by a more recent device (if I do, obviously it will be from neither of these companies).

The whole concept of integrated A/V appliances continues to underwhelm me. Fortunately, I didn't drop extra coin for a "smart" TV, but it seems that it's how the market is moving.

I dunno... I think since the Server 2008 days, Microsoft server OSs and application stack, such as IIS Microsoft SQL, plays pretty nicely in the SMB space, and are reliable and decently priced. You can throw up the servers and sites pretty quickly, and as long as you aren't talking about thousands of current transactions you're going to have good success, even without huge amounts of specific training. We run both Microsoft (mostly custom applications) and Oracle (mostly e-Business Suite) and when I compare the difficulty of managing the two from a server and updates point-of-view, I am shocked that Oracle gets away with what they do. Even Oracle's database, arguably their best technology, takes constant tweaking and tuning to perform fewer transactions than Microsoft databases. Granted, a lot of this is due to the poor coding of Oracle's EBS, but still...

It's when you have to scale the Microsoft stack out (when you get big enough to think about words like "enterprise") where it all sort of starts going downhill. Your standard server and SQL licenses have to be upgraded to their enterprise brethren to get real load balancing and fault tolerance, and it's not an incremental cost update, it's balance sheet altering. Your in-house team likely aren't going to have the expertise to stand up clusters and such, so your consulting and/or training budgets go way up. And eventually somebody gets convinced that Sharepoint is a must-have, and then your days of smooth sailing are forever over, and you start wondering if open source really would have been much worse.

Heh, Carrie Fisher might have a shot at pulling off a reverend mother superior. And, if you put Idaho Duncan in a stormtrooper uniform..

That is all.

Good luck with that given the power of their union.