I created an easter egg in a product called Fourth Shift Edition for SAP Business One (http://findaccountingsoftware.com/directory/softbrands/fourth-shift-edition-for-sap-business-one/) maybe 5 years ago that rendered an interesting sequence of John Conway's game of Life (starting from the acorn state) while displaying names of developers in a marquee. Trying to remember how to access it... I think it was just typing "LIFE!" while looking at the about dialog. I work pretty efficiently so it was hard to keep me busy at times. The easter egg was a (self-inspired) way to do something interesting related to the software I was working on for a couple hours while waiting to see what came next... and I thought it might someday briefly amuse someone too accustomed to nothing but business all day long. (The software is for ERP.) I showed it to my boss and a few coworkers who, if I recall, all had positive reactions... or at least no negative reactions I'm aware of. I'm not sure if anyone would have expressed a negative reaction to me if they had one because I feel pretty well respected there. I'm not sure anyone who knew about it is still with the company. Maybe I should tell a couple support people about it in case they feel like using it as a diversion while researching a solution to someone's inquiry, especially since it's Easter time. :)

This reminds me of a classical line: "there is a world market for maybe five computers"

• Surveillance & Patrolling (public, intelligence services, military and private)
• Transport (think of those Pizza delivery SLAs going down to 10 minutes or Amazon)
• Leisure
• Emergency Services Support (Search & Rescue, Disaster Evaluation & Reconnaissance, etc.)
• Gardening, Crop Spray-ing, etc.
• IT Infrastructure Support for massive events (think wireless at a concert)
• Scientific measurements for weather/pollution/etc.

OK, the spooky thing is that I read your comment, looked at my clock, and it said 2:10

No, it's more appropriately celebrated than any typical holy holiday. It's a day of humor and jest whose purpose has not been lost. And celebrating it has more real and lasting effect than a typical holiday. What better way to lighten a spirit for a holiday than laughter? Nothing compares.

Am I reading the wrong article? The article I read doesn't contain the word "Fractal".

The mere fact that you appear to be putting people who use certain technologies on a scale from "less-smart" to "smart" directly counteracts your assertion that complexity is subjective. If complexity were subjective, you would have simply referred to C++ users as "familiar with C++" and Ruby users as "familiar with Ruby" not put them on a scale from Ruby==less-smart to C++==smart. But since you use the terms "smart" and "less-smart", you imply that there is an absolute scale of complexity which can be measured in the smartness required to understand it.

Yeah, at least with major league OSes like Windows we never have to worry about decade-old bugs. And Windows 8.0 was the model of usability.

All fine and good when there's no clean-up to be done. However, if you're in an error handler after opening a database connection, creating a temp file, and allocating a block of shared memory, now you've just leaked resources all over the place by skipping all the clean-up. Or you have to duplicate all that clean-up in this and every subsequent error handler within the function.

Sorry for using layman-speak in a geek forum, but I tire of picking all my nits before posting :). The point is that any particular value or set of values might be considered infinitesimally likely in an unknown and possibly infinite domain. We only have one universe so we can't very well figure out how many other possible values could have existed for all the conditions that support life in this universe. And we can't very well say for certain that none of these other possibilities would have ever resulted in conscious life. It's the anthropic principle.

The reply (with which I agree) is that it's silly to calculate the probability of life out of context when you don't know what context(s) allow life. Take a simpler example. Assume I tell you to pick a random number between 1 and a quadrillion. You pick 709,108,554,989,243. Taken out of context someone can ask, "What are the chances that this exact number would turn up, one in a quadrillion!? They're so slim, this can't be random!" In fact you could have picked any of a much larger set of numbers and the same could be said about all of those. Calculating probabilities on an unknown domain doesn't work.

Even if the statement is that their policy hasn't changed, that doesn't say that their policy allows VPN access, according to a CNET article:

"We say very specifically that VPNs violate the terms of our service, and we believe very much so that anybody who licenses content should get paid for their content," he said. "We hear a lot in every market about this, and what we tend to find too is that, after launch, these issues drop significantly."

-- CNET

The reason it might still be working for many is that they are not using updated software that might be checking IP addresses internally, either innocently for other reasons, or to specifically start enforcing this policy in a limited scope.

Would you please point to a study that states that fracking wells have a higher incidence of water contamination than normal classic oil or gas wells? Traditionally Romanian gas exploration has used hydraulic fracturing. The only difference is that we are now drilling deeper, as well as horizontally and we can exploit more from an existing deposit. To give you an idea: right now, out of all the electricity produced in Romania, only 39% is carbon producing (coal, heating oil, gas), the rest is non carbon producing (hydro, wind, nuclear, photovoltaic, biomass). You can see the real-time information on http://www.transelectrica.ro/w... . You an also see historical values http://www.transelectrica.ro/w... .
Romania has gone through a complete overhaul of it's energy sources in the past 20 years. We have an installed capacity of 23GW with a power usage between 4GW (low point in summer) and 9GW (max point in winter). In the past 10 years we've added 2,5GW of wind turbines (completely absent until then), and 1GW of photovoltaic. Since we still need gas (for now) and have ample reserves, why should we import from our "old adversary" instead of using our own?

Changing your legal name for anything except marriage is much harder in some states than changing it for marriage. The process seems streamlined for marriage because it's so common, but is sometimes prohibitively difficult and/or expensive in other cases. I see this decision as Facebook wanting to be like one of the "easier" states and be available that way to people in all states regardless of how hard it is to change your legal name there. Kudos if they can accomplish that goal without significantly compromising the integrity of peoples' identities in other ways.