Have a look at this post from Sebastian Delmont on google plus. I found an excellent eye-opener to whats out there related to GIS tech that you can "roll on your own". If you are doing simply radial distance calculations than as mentioned the Haversine forumula is your friend. I added a radial search to a dealer locator for an online store in under a day with some python and a bit of time to geocode and cache all the address data via google.

Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups

I said this when it came out and I'll say it again - where is the real demand for this from these people the author is quoting? I've yet to come across someone itching to create apps but with no desire to learn development. Those people who do want/think they want/have a need for an app have just zero interest in spending the (however small) effort doing it themselves and prefer to lean on techy friends.

With all that computation power being used I can't help but think about projects like Folding@Home and think it's a bit wasted on the sort of margins you'd be getting back - even at the optimistic high end (which don't factor in power costs).

This is to do with Europe, not the United States.

I can't help but feel lucky to have met computers back in the 80's and to have spent my time using something "simple" like the C64 with BASIC and then moving up to PC's learning various languages and growing my interest more and more to then eventually be sat a linux workstation coding in Python for a living. Many of the ids I know through family no longer look at computers with the same sparkly or excitement of those early days.

I feel incredibly lucky to have got in at a point where I could experience relatively low spec & power computing and see it progress to the state it is today. I get the feeling that a lot of people getting into computers these days as kids don't get that sort of exposure and so don't get so bonded to learning about them. There was a good chance you could understand the schematic of a C64. Look at a die of a modern i7 and it's more modern art than anything that's going to make sense to a kid.

I definitely feel that in some way we lucked out in getting to experience computing the past 30 years.

The posted url now 410's. here's a link to the article on PC mag and the wired source too...

possibly the most important of all the languages at this point in time

Not so sure I'd agree with that summary - I don't doubt the importance of JavaScript to the modern internet but I'd be more inclined to consider the C's of this world as the main foundation of the industry.

the app has no intention of using fake Facebook profiles. Instead, a real woman will communicate with you through your cloud girlfriend's profile

Even if users know that the cloud profile is a fake I'm willing to bet that if there's real women behind the profiles (and people will know this given that's what the CEO has just said) someone is gonna end up getting taken in and their bank account drained. Which is kinda sad. In fact the very notion of this "service" making anyone happy astounds me.

I'm often having to remind users in the office that a simple reverse lookup on our IP and there's the company name sat right there, a few clicks and you've got the building address. Go onto linked in and you've probably got half the employees full names. A lot of people forget just how much information you can get from work IP's. It's not CSI style VB GUI interface level but if you're about to go make some stupid edits on wikipedia don't do it from your office connection.

And this just goes to show just how hard it is for even the best minds in the industry to grasp.

The guy sounds a complete douche but I'm not so sure posting a status update could be considered the same thing as "tried to hire a hitman". It sounds more like the usual passive aggressive comments shared between friends without realising that the police will take it completely seriously and charge you with it. The lesson is, as is ever more clear each day, expect your social network trawled for evidence if you're ever in trouble and take heed of privacy settings. I wonder what would have been made of it had his status update been completely locked to friends only?

Isn't losing an entire willing bomber + explosives with no target fatalities a much bigger cost loss then? You'd think they would've forseen this sort of thing. Someone needs to draw some use-case diagrams I think.

It seems rather dangerous to have it set off with any incoming SMS. You'd think they could've invested in the time to hook it to at least only respond to a particular number.

I've become so used to the alt.binaries being polluted with either passworded inner-rars or corrupt/scrambled files that I'm now used to just grabbing the first couple of rar's and extracting them just to make sure. I'm not too surprised to hear this. What does surprise me a little is the amount of people that continue seeding this crap on BT. Do they not open the damn files as they come down? If only for a cursory glance to confirm.

When the draft spec for a technology that moves so fast and has so much widespread adoption is still deemed several years off I don't know how anyone can take their recommendations seriously. We're already at a level of fairly good interoperability amongst the core browser engines for the base features we need. If developers and designers took any notice of this then we'd probably all be still building sites with tables.