This is true and good, so long as you're interested in making software that can be done entirely with existing technologies. As soon as you hit the brick wall of "but there isn't anything in the standard library that does this," you need the old graybeards who spent their entire careers making the standard libraries you rely on.

Speaking as one of them, the pay and hours are both good and it keeps me on the cutting edge of some fascinating technologies.

The common idea is that we over-40s who've been doing this professionally for 25+ years can't adapt to modern software dev practices. Quite the opposite, really. Mostly we're kept so busy that we don't have the time.

None of this is meant to disrespect what the younger generation does with (as you say) "connect the dots library calls". That code needs to be written, and it's best if it's written by smart people who care about their work. :)

Terrible. It insulted my intelligence at every opportunity. To pick just three:

1. A hard drive that's been at Ground Zero of a Chernobyl-level event, exposed to hundreds of sieverts of ionizing radiation, extraordinary extremes of temperature, a hydrogen-oxygen explosion with such tremendous overpressure that it blew the containment dome, and seawater pumped through the building as a last-ditch effort at cooling the core, is still somehow so readable that it just requires a classified forensics program to recover it fully.
2. The main bad guy's ultimate plan involves speculating on the future of a commodity that isn't exactly rare.
3. Targeting nuclear reactors in the U.S. and China as a practice run for the real attack is pretty stupid, as the practice run is so devastating that it guarantees an immediate and vigorous reaction from two world-power countries known to have active cyberwarfare programs, thereby announcing your presence to exactly the people you want to keep completely in the dark

This movie insulted my intelligence at every turn. I have a long (and spoilerific) list of all the what-the no-they-didn't good-Christ moments I saw in the movie; if there's interest I'll post them here.

The photon has zero rest mass, yes.

E = mc**2 is a nice popularization; it's also wrong. It's actually E**2=(mc**2)**2 + (pc)**2, where p is the momentum. When momentum is zero, you can usually simplify this to E=mc**2, but a photon's existence is defined mostly by its momentum. Since m is zero for a photon, this means the energy of a photon is given by entirely by E=pc.

Hope this helps!

So, the NJ State Senate Majority Leader admits that New Jersey's law, which would make smart guns mandatory within three years of the first commercially-available smart gun being sold anywhere in the United States, can be reversed... if only the NRA will agree to stop obstructing the sale of smart guns within the United States, which they do specifically because of the New Jersey law?

I don't see the problem. The NRA is obstructing a law that goes against their stated interests, and New Jersey is promising to reverse that law if only the NRA will stop obstructing what that law regulates?

For the NRA's stated position, see here. Particularly:

NRA does not oppose new technological developments in firearms; however, we are opposed to government mandates that require the use of expensive, unreliable features, such as rigging a firearm so that it could not fire unless it received an electronic signal from an electronic bracelet worn by the firearm's lawful owner (as was brought up in Holder's recent testimony).

That's their stated policy, right there.

Not quite. Courts have been willing to hold businesses liable for damages due to foreseeable criminal acts, yes, but so far no court has been willing to hold businesses liable for damages due to acts of war levied by a foreign state.

That's a pretty big jump to make, incidentally.

The risk is not that the courts might hold the theater chain responsible -- the courts wouldn't, on the grounds that the theater chain isn't responsible for protecting their clientele against acts of war from a foreign nation-state. The risk is that the lawsuit would be filed and it would cost the theater $20 million or more just to get the courts to dismiss all charges.

That $20 million is probably considerably more than they would make from screening The Interview, so the logical business case is to not screen it.

It's sad, but ... the real problem is not that the courts might hold the theater liable: it's that in our current system, getting sued is, in itself, its own punishment.

The NRA does not object to smart gun technologies, and believes that people who wish to be allowed to buy them should be allowed to buy them.

The NRA objects to smart guns becoming mandatory, because the technology for smart guns is nowhere near mature.

The number one desired trait in a firearm, moreso than caliber or capacity or anything else, is reliability. The reason why Glocks are so popular isn't because of caliber, capacity, or aesthetics -- all of which other firearms do better. It's because a Glock is as reliable as gravity. If you chamber a round and pull the trigger, it goes boom. If you don't pull the trigger, it won't.

I have personally seen a Glock get thrown into a bucket of wet, goopy mud and left there for fifteen minutes just so the mud had the opportunity to permeate the whole of the firearm. At the end of the fifteen minutes the owner pulled the Glock out, shook it precisely three times to dislodge mud from the barrel, and fired one hundred seventy rounds through it in the space of about five minutes, just one magazine after another after another... just to prove the weapon was reliable.

Do you believe the current crop of smart gun technologies are equally reliable? The ones I've had the chance to play around with definitely aren't. They can't even agree on whether they need to fail safe or fail deadly.

Note the word "energetic". Earth's matter is not particularly energetic when compared to an active fusion reaction or the angular momentum of a neutron star. Likewise with gas giants.

A neutron star is a gravitationally-bound sphere of neutrons, not plasma, and yet it's still a star.

I would respectfully suggest that a good definition of a star would be, "a gravitationally bound collection of energetic matter engaged in largely Brownian motion." That covers everything from brown dwarfs (D-D fusion requiring substantial energy to initiate) up to hypergiants and neutron stars. (Even a cold, dead neutron star possesses enough energy to dramatically warp spacetime -- there's a lot of energy there to be tapped.)

This definition would also exclude black holes, as a singularity isn't really "matter" per se -- matter requires volume, and a singularity has none of that.

It would also exclude galaxies and accretion discs, as those are not engaged in Brownian motion.

You can thank wave-particle duality. In the quantum world, if something has an existence as a wave, it must also have an existence as a particle. Sound waves have a particle analogue: phonons.

Also remember: in quantum mechanics there's no such thing as a vacuum. Virtual particles spring into existence constantly, making it possible to interact with vacuum in a number of really surprising ways.

This just seems to be written around the culture of tech startups, there are plenty of small family businesses that are not there to become huge megacorps but to run a shop or make things on a small scale.

This is the actual article that caused Intel to pull out of advertising at Gamasutra.

This Slashdot writeup is incredibly shit, because it's not linking to the actual article that caused Intel to pull out.

Ask yourself why Intel would continue advertising in a site whose chief editor wrote that.

I don't even think it had to do with gamergaters "pressure", other than that they brought attention to it.

Some years ago after being laid off from one programming job, my old CS prof from college suggested I stop by to interview with the Epic recruiter who was visiting the campus. I was told to block out about four hours time, and that it would be a very in-depth technical interview. It turned out to be nothing of the sort: it was maybe ten minutes of talk with a human being, and hours and hours of filling out a badly-written "technical exam". Allegedly it involved seeing how well the taker could think about programming languages and programming language concepts by giving us a toy language to write a parser and compiler for, but ... holy toledo, was it a stinker.

First, the language was defined in plain English. There was no BNF. When ambiguities of English occurred (as they always do), the Epic rep was unable to give any resolution as to what the language was supposed to do. My protest of, "Well, if you don't know what it's supposed to do, how can you expect me to write a parser or compiler for it?" fell on deaf ears.

Second, certain mathematical operations were supposed to be supported ... but the language was vague: they were supposed to have their "conventional" meanings. But some mathematical operators are defined sort of vaguely: for instance, it's not really well-defined mathematically what the modulo of two negative numbers are. As a result, different programming languages tend to implement it differently. (For instance, C++03 says it's implementation-dependent, while C++11 has a strict policy on it.) How did they want the modulus operator implemented? They had no idea.

Ultimately, when it came to writing a parser and compiler for their toy language I decided to do it the right way as opposed to their way. Instead of having an ad-hoc thing, I turned the exam over and started writing a formal BNF and lex/yacc rules on the back of the pages. I took the full four hours to do the technical exam, turned it in, told them that my work was on the *back* of the exam and not the front, and walked out.

Six weeks later, not having heard a thing from Epic, I sent them a politely-worded email saying, "If I'm going to spend four hours on a Saturday on an interview for Epic, I would appreciate the courtesy of being told whether I would be receiving a job offer or not."

A week after that I received a one-line email: "We regret to say that we're going with other candidates."

Anyway. That's my experience with Epic. Take it for whatever it's worth. I didn't think much of their interview process, and they sure didn't think much of me.

HTML5 is, indeed, a programming language -- at least when paired with CSS3. You can implement Rule 110 in nothing but HTML5 + CSS3, and Rule 110 is known to be Turing-complete. Ergo, HTML5 + CSS3 is capable of any computable process, and is a full programming language.

It's a horrible programming language, but hey, when has that gotten in the way of widespread acceptance?

At OSCON 2006 I was sitting in one of the green rooms (the spaces set aside for speakers before presentations). My laptop was open and I was happily hacking away on a project. As I killed a bug and checked the code back in, I muttered under my breath, "Python, I love you. You make the hard stuff so easy."

I noticed a few seconds later the room had gone utterly silent. I looked up, and sitting at the table across from me was Damian Conway, tapping away on his own laptop doing his own thing. I blinked a couple of times and suddenly noticed the entire room was expecting a Perl-vs-Python argument to erupt.

Damian looked up from his work, noticed everyone was looking nervous. He looked over at me, I gave a "I don't know what's up with them, uh, help?" look and a shrug.

Damian then looked back at the crowd and grinned. "Listen, the only thing I love more than Perl is well-written software, even if it's written in Python." He looked back over to me. "Kill a bug, didja?" I nodded. He gave me a smile and a thumbs-up, then returned to his code. I returned to mine, and after a few seconds the room let out his breath.

I love Python. But the only thing I love more than Python is well-written software, even if it's written in Perl. :)