It's easy to go faster than light. All you do is construct a magic tube that's really really long. You fly that tube at (say) 0.75c. Inside the tube, you fly down its length at 0.75c and before you know it - you're going faster than light.Of course, no one can see you doing it, so you're not breaking any laws.

It's sort of how Warp drives work, only I've dumbed it down for the level of brains in TFA.

In my experience, IT gets zero priority elsewhere in the business. It's rare you'd ever get a really clear business case for work, and so it's rare you ever get any traction from elsewhere when you need it.

As an example, say you've got $pileofshit software that's umpteen years old, not used by very much and all the people who ever knew anything about it have left. Probably the "best thing" (for different views of "best") would be to schedule some dev work over the next few months/quarters to get rid of the legacy and move over to new stuff. That would give the remaining users of it the benefits of whatever replaced it, and gets rid of a management headache for the IT folks. Seems pretty reasonable, right? Well, not so much once it goes out "to the business". You'll get comments like "well, it seems to be working, right?", "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and "we've got higher priorities right now" etc, without anyone thinking about it in any depth at all. A more enlightened view would be to say "get rid of the legacy and it means the IT folk can be more nimble", but I've yet to really see anyone ever think like that.

It could be that all the IT departments I've ever worked at all just talk techno-babble to the rest of the organisation and so no one understands our awesome wisdom. It might be that I'm a perfectionist that expects every last little scrap of a problem to be eradicated. Or maybe, just maybe, the rest of the organisation just can't quite meet IT half-way and think outside their own little bubbles because "IT is too hard"?

So it seems to me that if an organisation has a problem with its IT department, it should probably look at itself as much as it looks at IT. Just as your finance people can't keep track of the money if you never keep any receipts, your IT department can't do every single thing you ask without question. If they're not doing what you need, you're not "working" them right.

The army said something wasn't bullet-izable? ;-)

It's also a contradiction of sorts.

If a god created every detail of the earth and universe around it, then that same god has created the environment for us to live and learn in. Thus, that god is responsible for people becoming more atheist in the western world, and people learning about (very convincing) science that contradicts the bible or whatever other texts. Thus, no matter what the creationists do, they cannot change the ultimate outcome.

If on the other hand, god simply created the building blocks for life (perhaps god pointed his finger in empty space and created the Big Bang?) then it gives way for all that free thinking and whatnot. It also makes the "beauty of a sunset" more of a coincidence than a specific desired outcome (and so doesn't look a lot like 'intelligent design' as it's generally defined). In this world, creationists can have an effect, but by definition their belief system is inaccurate.

Or then again, the FSM might have just farted out the universe by accident and it just so happens that we grew out of the smell of last nights curry.

Back on topic though - Google and all the others use various sources on the Internet to build 'graphs' which they use to tweak the search results. Wikipedia is a major source of such information, although I suspect other sources are gaining traction because of the vandalism that occurs on there.

If you're going down that route, then maybe Drupal might work out too? It needs a RDBMS, and is used for some pretty large scale stuff here and there. It's got some OO, but isn't hell-bent on it (yet), and is relatively easy to pick up (after an initial 'hump'). It means you can still use your front end skillz, you might still get some Perl time if people have some backendy stuff to do, but PHP isn't hard to learn from a Perl background.

That said, almost every place I've ever worked in has some surprisingly large and important Perl knocking about (even if the 'official' language has moved to to Python or Ruby or something). There's still perl-with-sysadmin work around, although maybe people aren't quite admitting it on the job spec.

...so it can do more of the recognition tasks it already does (like voice search, face recognition in photos, and others) in the phone without having to send them off to "the cloud" for processing. "Lighter" tasks such as predictive text and so on can be done faster (and consume less power), and so have more room to be better, if done in dedicated hardware.

So in terms of tracking, this could/should lead to less, not more tracking.

When will the PHBs realise that the golf course is not a 'reputable source' for software?

Just how scared of home invaders, carjackers and muggers are you? Where I live all of these things happen occasionally, but honestly, it's not something that I would think most people here would consider very likely. Thus, our need to 'defend ourselves' is close to zero because the threat of that sort of crime is close to zero. If where you live it's not close to zero, then I'd ask why not, and what could be done to address that problem?

Is that the Windows after Windows 10, or is it the Windows after that?

...or maybe they're helping expose the morally-bankrupt twats what work in the security services? If everyone thought less of the 'intelligence community' than they do of their local estate agent or lawyer or whatever, then maybe, just maybe we'd bet the intelligence community we want rather than one that's way too big and way too intrusive and has it's head way too far up its own arse.

Worse - if you're using Adobe SiteCatalyst analytics (and probably others), you need* to create a domain below yours for the tracking to go to (basically, create a CNAME to their server somewhere in your domain). That means Adobe get to see all the cookies you set in the root of your domain (and I'll bet you don't set all your cookies to just your website or webapp). If you're not very careful, that's just about everything you know about your visitors also going to Adobe.

Ghostery/Adblock or similar are the way to go - the site you're visiting might not really want to know everything about you, but whomever they partner with sure does.

* I say 'need' because this is how I've seen it done. There may be other, less intrusive ways, and possibly different levels of contract with Adobe that demand different infrastructure.

My thoughts exactly - why don't MS just return "not activated" for all the activations from this IP?

On another note, how come one IP is able to activate a bajillion copies of Windows? I tried re-installing Windows on an Asus EEE pc (not using the crappy pre-load) and my god, it was hard work. It's got a key on a sticker on the bottom of the PC, but even then I needed to phone some automated crapfest and type in about a thousand numbers into my phone and the computer to activate it. Whatever the person/people on that IP are doing, can they please publish it so that us ordinary, legitimate customers can benefit, please?

Do Californians tend to take their smoke alarms with them when they move house? I ask because where I live we don't tend to do so - if the place you're moving to doesn't have one then you can choose to get one (or not), but once fitted, they tend to stay that way. A lot are battery powered, but all new renovations and new builds have to have mains powered ones that are linked together (just a modicum of building control regulation ensures this). It strikes me that this isn't all that different to having a smoke alarm fitted to your ceiling. If his plan works out, then why couldn't it be added to building control regulations as smoke alarms are where I live?

My only problem with the "until death" thing is that legally, everything else I do whilst married is partly due to my wife, and so would be part-owned by her in the event of a divorce. Thus, if I write a new 'happy birthday' song, it's in-part down to her. She should get some benefit if I die the day after I write it. I'd agree that a bazillion years of benefit is too much - I'd imagine 10-20 years should be plenty.