Also a customer and agree that the Deposit@Home program they have is amazingly useful. I hate getting checks from people, but it is nice being able to deposit them from my desk in one minute.

Also agree that they are probably the least evil company in the banking world. I use them for nearly all of my services (banking/loans/insurance) and they always have the best rates and the best support.

I thought the same thing... why is one implying the other? What the hell is the "[...]" that makes the two connect. Maybe Jon Spaihts loves writing about humans?

I bought a dog today [...] North Korea test launched a missle!

First thing I thought about when I saw this article was the CODC "The Cow"! I can remember staying up late reading the hundreds of text files they had on their site. Everything from phone phreaking, to atm hacking, to religion slamming, to top ten lists of humor. I think it is about time to go spend some time reading those texts again.

I've been following C++0x for a long time now, and have been looking forward to it, but now I'm not so sure I'll ever use it. I was looking forward to Concepts more than anything and with that gone, it seems like a extremely minor upgrade. Also, even when the spec does come out, how many years before we can trust that most compilers can use it effectively... two, three? Then after we've been using it for a while, how long before books come out that tell us that we've been using it all wrong and we have to start over (ie: the Exceptional " " and Effective " " books from Sutter and Meyers)?

Okay, so I can use C++0x well in 10 years, okay I'll probably be so burned out by then I'll be a manager, or I will have convinced someone to let us use D for embedded work and something managed for everything else.

Thank you for mentioning erlang!

Erlang is growing, albeit it is still a small community, but we are growing! Check out github.com for a ton of erlang projects going on. There are some really stellar ones that are making news like Powerset or Nitrogen. Just reading the developer blogs, you get the impression that most developers coming from languages like C++ and Java are almost shocked how easy it is to write scalable and reliable software in Erlang.

I've since picked up erlang and am trying to convince my boss to let me put some erlang apps in our product. For the time being, it is open source erlang projects for me.

The Reapers are remote controlled. The Global Hawk, which was mentioned on /. yesterday is fully autonomous, but carries no weapons.

Fully autonomous attack drones have been considered, but from what I recall when looking at the DARPA requests and planning was that there will not be an autonomous attack aircraft that can actually fire a missle or drop a bomb without a person there to push the button. They might find the target and get themselves into position, but the plane can't actually decide on its own to fire the weapon.