I ended up at a startup run by adults, actually in Silicon Valley. Contrary to the usual stereotypes, we do value experience and actually have a lot of engineers who are over 40. We have hardly anyone in a "management" role, so many of them had to make the transition from management back to actual development when coming to us. In fact, its only been very recently that we've hired any notable number of engineers who didn't already have some post-college work experience under their belt.

Of course we function by having a relatively small number of good people, rather than a large number of mediocre people, so all that experience really does benefit our environment.

Well in New Zealand and everywhere else. copyright infringement is a civil offense,

Will somebody please tell the ignoramuses at ZDnet that there's no such thing as a "criminal copyright violation"?

Here's a bunch of wife-friendly consoles

Why yes, I am single. How could you tell?

That reminds me of some research paper I once had to do during high school. It was an involved project with multiple deliverables over the course of several weeks. Typed was fine for the final submission, but they wanted us to turn in a hand-written rough draft first.

I typed up my rough draft reasonably quickly, then spent the next several hours painstakingly transcribing it to that "hand written" form.

Absolutely correct. The Medallion business was artificial scarcity, protected by insiders.

But on a broader scale the problem is that the world is awash in surplus capacity at every turn. Automation and robotics are compounding that problem at an exponentially increasing rate.

Ultimately we have too much labor and too much capacity to produce -- everywhere. This is a conundrum for economic models which require scarcity. We weren't supposed to have too much food, too much energy or too much labor. Demand was supposed to increase at a constant rate ...but of course we juiced the world with credit and now we've built productive capacity and availability that cannot possibly be met with demand. We are surrounded by business models and prices which are conceptual remnants of earlier eras when capacity was restricted. These models can only ever be preserved through artificial means, because given a natural, free-market dynamic, competition and automation drive prices south.

So it's not just medallions that are priced at unsustainable levels. Its nearly everything that's artificially overpriced. And that includes us.

> "Just that girls are able to create more complex games"

Actually, that's nice that you added your own personal take-away, but that's not what the study showed. You are turning preference into capacity.

It's also not how the study is described here on Slashdot:

"I'm a UK Study, Girls Best Boys at Making Computer Games"

That is very different from "just" saying anything about complexity.

And why is performance at a particular age relevant anyway? Is this a study of childhood developmental capacity? Because it sure looks like they're stretching to draw references to gender dynamics within the gaming industry.

"Complex stories"? "Two or more parts or conditional clauses"? Two???

"Trigger their scripts on when a character says something?"

I am a game developer. I have no idea what they are talking about.

More fundamentally: is "complexity" good?

This matter is completely subjective - even when there is an actual school policy about such things. I have dealt with teachers who would complain to me about my child not "marching with his right arm up when told to do so"... incidentally that was a teacher who was unable to command respect from my child, and likely others.

write a more concise, coherent, and far more correct article than anything that ever comes out of Bennett Hasselton's keyboard...

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/. bs=1024 count=10

For the love of the FSM, put in a filter so that we can click "Don't want to read any more of this author's drivel"...

Sadly, you are still in Texas.

"I'd never copy code".

"I'd use that exact library".

Those are mighty fine hairs to split.

I think you're using very negative words for a very normal part of the coding process.

For example, about 20 minutes ago I needed a function to measure password strength. Could I have written it from scratch? Of course. Did I? Hell, no. That would be a needless waste of time. I used the Interwebs and had a choice of 3 or 4 perfectly good functions within about a minute.

That's how coding works today. And if you're not making use of other people's code you're not doing it right.

Just out of curiosity are there any professional programmers out there who don't regularly copy functions from the Internet?

Part of being a contemporary coder is making use of available code. Libraries of functions are "other people's code". Languages are other people's code. Etc. it's all about other people's code.

The field of artificial muscles already has multiple competing technologies which are superior to this.

For one, the amount of force generated here is problematically low. Secondly, gold? That's going to be a problem for obvious reasons.

The future is in a combination of electroactive polymers and/or electro/thermally-activated shape-memory alloys -- both of which are cheap light and flexible.

Turn to Google and look up "king tides."