FTA: "Apparently Warner Bros. takes IP rights seriously only when its own IP rights are involved." Doesn't everybody?

If the terrorists had a missile that could track the beam back to it's source? Kinda like reverse painting a target?

The years spent playing Starcraft will pay off!!! OTOH, the Koreans will take over the world.

If you shake it up and down, yes. Sideways - not so much.

D(c)/D(s) = 2.7014. I'll stick to the old fashioned way, then...

Agreed. We are moving towards a skills-and vocation-based learning model, when we once were theory and concept-based, from which the skills may be developed. We are learning 'click here, do this' to get results fast, when we should be learning *what* we are doing, so that we can develop the 'how' on our own. Knowledge and experience (bad) versus intelligence and wisdom (good). Long term growth are lost for the sake of short term KPI padding. Too many times I've had to deal with 'I don't know OoO because I learned Office' or 'I can't do X because it's not in the software I'm using'. I'm not advocating OoO, but I'm saying we should be working on learning Word Processing, from which we can use both. Anybody who has sat through a Powerpoint with stupid animations but has very little to say knows this.

I used to think this this limit existed - for home use, I hit a wall at full HD video streaming - you'ld only use ~30Mb. Some mention torrent packages - but the actual utilization of this package would still hit the same limit, making the download process redundant. However, if distributed computing (REAL cloud computing - so memory, processors, applications and data are essentially 'out there') becomes real, 1Gbps would get very slow very fast. For now, just give me a game that utilizes realtime streaming of application binaries, and high quality assets over the Net and I'll be happy. Other than games, I'm at a loss as to what these monstrous home applications could be. Anyone?

But yeah, I'm a 'wait and see' on Thunderbolt.

I've been goind through the comments. The problem, IMO, is that the PTO seems to be granting patents without considering the definition of what a patent is, and how one is granted. Yeah, I'm saying the lawyers have lost their way - sue me.

IIRC, the applicant has to show a development or innovation that is not obvious to a normal (or average) practitioner of the craft. The 1/10 argument actually SUPPORTS the patent application, as only 1 out of 10 thought it was obvious. Whether they though to do it first or not is not the issue - it must be non-obvious. Other engineers may simply have not done it as it was not commercially viable.

I'm all for patenting, for example, specific expressions of carrying out encryption. The problem is, that the PTO seems to be allowing patents for the act of encryption itself - this I have a problem with. The former protects the effort put into the expression (and hence the artists work) without preventing improvement and further evolution of the idea, but the latter kind of patents are killing innovation by doing just that. If it's THAT obvious to do, it should never had been patentable in the first case. It's particularly bad in software, where ideas and incremental evolution of ideas is at the root of development. It seems overly broad patents are being granted every day. I mean 'look and feel' patents? Really?

...the consoles may very well become portable. It may already be feasible to put an HDMI out on an iPad and give it wireless bluetooth controllers. On the road, just use it as a portable gaming system - no tradeoff for performance/ portability/ style of play. I'd be very surprised if that screen on the Wii U's controller, and the sheer SIZE of the thing doesn't also include at least a processor of sorts to enable this very thing.

Sorry. Meant to add that in older technique the programmer would have to XOR the older character, effectively erasing it, before drawing the new character to the buffer. This would also involve two operations, both to the video buffer.

Load the sprite to memory, draw the sprite to the video buffer, blit the video buffer to screen.

Data centers are utility rooms and serve a utility purpose. Aside from the showoff trips for the clients, they are probably factored as such and will be closer to a boiler room than an office. Ever see a nicely decked out boiler room?

I believe the degrees that focus on technical skills and theory are not what the OP is commenting about. I've noticed there's a huge number of 'degrees' out there that are based on Operations, and not Engineering and Technical Skills. These typically have buzzwords in their titles and should be classified as such (Operations), and not confused with the 'pure' science and technical degrees.

In my country, the local universities churn out a number of dodgy-sounding 'degrees' such as Management Information Systems, Business Information Systems, etc. I actually have no idea what these are, but there's a preoccupation here with sitting in a desk in an office, versus doing the work. They sound 'managerial' and give the freshie a skewed viewpoint in that they expect to be leading teams of engineers and IT departments, all the members of which could probably talk them under the table in a technical conversation.

Seriously, I'm presently looking for great engineers to grow my practice, but everyone I talk to seems to want Google pay without Google technical skills. They want to be project managers and team leaders, yet confess they're 'not very technical' in the phone interview. They also have no answer to my follow up on how they expect to lead a team without understanding the work at hand. I've believed that great engineers manage themselves, with a good eye on the realities of the project and the customer interests. The 'project manager', if not having engineering background, is most likely redundant. No, please don't give me the 'engineers don't have time to manage themselves'.

My question to everyone is this: At what point did the engineers allow themselves to become the grunts of the industry?

The theory does help when writing code, though. At least the code doesn't look like a bunch of cut and pasted examples. It also helps in optimizing and what CS people refer to as 'elegant' solutions to complex problems. I'd say the theory helps one become a better, more 'complete' coder than one is, without it. I don't think the OP is grumbling about the lack of coding experience. See my other post for my take on the matter.

I agree. This will happen about the time technology can do a full physiological reading in seconds over thousands (millions?) of markers and tie that to a huge knowledge system - probably not in our lifetimes. At this point, doctors will only elicit symptoms (such as discomfort levels, but this will eventually also be quantified and handled by machine) and key the 'soft' data into the system.