And there goes another grad student's research thesis up in smoke. CS departments need to have more courses that distinguish between abstract theory (raw algorithms) and software engineering (practical effects of choosing specific languages and features). It's clear the authors of this are in an ivory tower where every string type is the same type of construct in every language.

Yeah, even Florida requires the actual text of the proposed amendment to be put on the ballot.

It's a sad reflection on society that "right to work" laws and non-compete contracts are touted as engines to grow the economy, while things like a living minimum wage are denigrated as class warfare. When your middle class is disappearing, you actually get more economic bang for the buck when the money goes to consumers rather than investors. The fact that consumers have more money to spend creates true investment opportunities due to increases in demand. Giving incentives to investors when business opportunities are limited by lack of demand just throws money at get-rich-quick schemes.

Yeah, where are my OffTopic moderator points when I need them...

Though I have to admit there's a considerable "muslims go home" movement in the US as well. I may be misunderstanding this though, the people espousing that viewpoint tend to misspell "muslim".

Not to mention Japan...that's one of the big reasons they have population aging and decline. They don't have the immigrant flow because their society is so closed.

of a bunch of politicians who were soap-boxing about freedom of the press and "je suis Charlie" engaging in this kind of censorship. All speech is free, but some speech is more free than others. I don't think there's anyone alive who is in a position to form an unbiased judgment of whether a terrorist site, a porn site or Charlie Hebdo is more offensive. Offense, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder.

It also makes a lot of Prenda Law's copyright subpoena tactics legal.

of this is copyright law. Remember how Prenda Law lost so many cases because they couldn't prove who was in and out of a particular legal district? Poof, problem solved. Check for MPAA/RIAA donors.

Agreed. The "blue platypus" requirements on the tech ads are, in many cases, just to provide cover so that they can bring in an H1B person because "nobody fit the job requirements". This ignores the fact that he H1B import doesn't fit the original requirements either.

Don't blame Dice though. Any company smart/unethical enough to do this is also smart enough not to admit it, even in an anonymous survey.

Not even bothering to read the whole article, let alone the comments. Until a court decides whether the work is or is not in the fair-use domain, all else is speculation and hot air.

They're still selling millions of copies of 1.x each year, plus all the pocket editions and console editions. And some people shell out $15-20 a month for a Minecraft Realms server. There's an insane revenue stream here for them even if they never do release a 2.0. That's why their original acquisition announcement said that they expect to recoup their investment sometime in 2015.

I'm sure there will be a 2.0 release sometime, but if we're going to be speculating, cynical and sarcastic about MS, remember that they are experts at milking cash cows like Minecraft.

Even if you accept the premise that new jobs will be created by the new technologies, there are still risks.
1) The new more-demanding jobs will be beyond the intelligence and abilities of a larger and larger portion of the population. What happens when the computers and robots are smarter than the average bear/human?
2) Even if a person is capable of performing one of these more-demanding jobs, the new jobs will demand that they spend more and more years in training and learning. Without a significant increase in human life-span there will be a point of diminishing returns where a live person spends so much time learning and training that they don't nave enough time to actually work and earn money after that.
3) If the technologies keep accelerating, it's very likely that the machines will become flexible enough and smart enough that they can learn any task faster than a human. Even some "creative" tasks are really just applications of logic and reason (science). At that point the alternatives are between a) a massive redistribution of wealth so that all people share in the bounty created by the robots, b) we ban artificial intelligence or c) if there is any spark of human creativity that is beyond the capabilities of robots and computers, that will be the last refuge of human labor..

But even if we all become painters and singers and mimes, poverty will still be real: 90% of everything created by people is crap. So the creative society is still likely to require a massive redistribution of wealth.

I suppose another alternative is a massive depopulation of the human species on earth. That can easily be accomplished if the struggle for wealth distribution devolves into war.

Not to mention that the "Chinese supersonic sub" could bring about the downfall of the Virginia class and all the fancy big-data detection technology. Short of a super-sonic sub, the detection technologies aren't that far-fetched - detecting an exoplanet hundreds of light-years away has some of the same signal processing issues, and look at the improvements in that area.

True this. If you look at how ethernet works, there are 3 possible sources of digital "noise" that the cable contributes to.
a) dropped packets - if the cable is physically damaged or otherwise defective.
b) long latency times combined with out of order delivery of the packets. A very long cable would have to cause this, combined with poor buffering on the receiving device.
c) bitrot/data errors. - long cables and poor quality cables.

A $10k cable vs. a $10 cable won't do anything about any of these. Even if you pre-suppose that the $10 cable is worse than the $10k cable for each of these scenarios, the protocol mitigates for all three of these. If the bitrot is so bad that error correction isn't able to fix it, it's treated as a bad packet and falls into category a) and b) to re-transmit.

HV line are aluminum because the weight of copper would require more poles to support them. So aluminum is cheaper to build/maintain. Copper is more conductive than aluminum over a broad spectrum of frequencies, including 60 Hz.