It costs money to keep the old stuff up and working, and then you're going to develop new, more accurate stuff and put that on line and keep the whole thing up and working with Perl and duct tape? And of course you have your super-accurate counter-measures system going too. What do you think put the Soviet Union out of business. Unworkable and stupid. I can think of a dozen better ways to wreak havoc for less money.

No energy left.

It's so shot full of security problems that it's virtually a malware writing language. The promised code reuse. Code reuse? 30% of Java programmer time is spent maintaining legacy code because of changes in the language and libraries. Single framework. That's a laugh. It's so shot full of security holes it's virtually a malware writing language.Write once, run everywhere? What a laugh. 99.9% of the stuff on the web is Javascript. Performance? It stinks. Period. C++ is better and Linus Torvalds says "C++ is a horrible language." Java is C++--.

I do computer science - discussing work over beer is fine, but designing software - that requires a clear head and some caffeine. I like the saying "Mathematicians are machines for turning caffeine into theorems."

I firmly believe that a good portion of the H1-B positions in this country are fillable by people too skilled, too experienced or - virtually the same thing, too expensive. If we actually need someone with a skill from another country, we're going to bring them over here, give them on-the-job-training and experience, then give them a green card, let them become citizens and stay here as part of the American work force. The "I can't find anyone here to do the job" requirement is a joke. No one in required to prove anything of the sort. Work in Engineering for 30 years and then try to find a new job. ER hiring standards are not based on anything even close to factual evidence. It is pure prejudice.

An F-16 engine is about 65% of an F-16 by weight & volume. It's a single engine plane. It's an engine with wings and a chair tied to the top. Can I put on a set of coveralls that say "Al's Jet Engine Repair", drive with in with a 1987 flatbed truck, borrow a forklift from a line mechanic, load 'em and drive away? How stupid is the Israeli military? Not very. How corrupt is the Israeli government? Very. Most Israeli's think so. Is everyone afraid that some higher up was responsible and doesn't want to know? Israel may have it's precarious position compromised by the greed of its own people. Take everyone on duty that night and put their feet in a tub with a chironex fleckeri, commonly known as a sea wasp, a species of box jellyfish. They will tell you everything they know and make up what they don't. Sort out the facts and do the same at the next level. When you get to the top, recover the engines. After you do or if you don't, take the top guys out in the desert and shoot them. Don't bury them. Let it be known that they were shot, not buried and and animals are currently splitting up the bodies based on how big and how mean the animals are. Doing this once should put an end to this bullshit.

Governments should know everything but we know nothing. That is the most dystopian thing I've ever heard. Over the entrance to the CIA are the words from the Bible "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free". Maybe the government can keep a few secrets, such as how to make a nuclear weapon, but as little as possible should be secret within the government. On the other hand the government needs to go before a judge and present really good goddamn reason why they should know anything at all about me. I have nothing to hide but that's beside the point. You really piss me off, Mr. Police State. Your buddies Hitler and Stalin have croaked. I bet you feel real lonely without them.

Gosh, I am so sorry.

You're an idiot.

If you take me on as a subcontractor, your ownership of my work become even more tenuous. If you hire me not to build your boat but to build an engine for it, unless we have a contractual agreement to the contrary, you are buying engines from me. - "Anybody with a typewriter can sue."

If you hire me to write a computer program for and you do not specifically state in the contract that product of my work belongs to you, I own the software and you merely have a license t use it. Larry Wall, creator Perl, was working on a contract and created Perl to simplify the job. When he was done, he put the floppy with the first version of Perl on it into his pocket and walked out. He has never been sued.

Fight however can mean a lot of things but first of all it means strategy. Sun Tzu said that the epitome of excellence in warfare is to win the war without fighting a single battle. Barring that be smart. Forget what you learned from movies. Remember what you learned from playing Go. At the signing of the Vietnam Peace Treaty in Paris, essentially a surrender, an American general confronted a Vietnamese General and said "You never defeated us in battle!" The Vietnamese General replied 'That's irrelevant now isn't it?"

If these two companies didn't see digital photography coming at them like a bus they were stupid. It was get on board in a big way or be roadkill. I'm a darwinian capitalist. No business gets bailed out. When the banks tanked the government should have bailed out the bad mortgage holders, not the banks. Like the FDIC - insure the citizens, screw the businesses. They want to make money? Don't screw up.

If someone pays you to make something, it's theirs. If you do it on your own it's yours. If you develop a tool to make the thing you were hired to make, the tool belongs to the workman...especially if it saves the contracting party money. Otherwise, on a time and materials contract you have no incentive to be creative.

It's the same concept. If drive manufacturers add more actuators, the algorithms need to change. Unless you make a lot of assumptions, a read is queued and the thread blocks. Meanwhile the next task queues a read. Unless you are doing priority queueing and probably even then, you have no idea where the sector needed for the next read is. No point in defragmenting the disk unless it's some single threaded, single user system. So you do the reads in an order that is most efficient for the passengers (tasks) and the elevator (performance, energy efficiency, etc).