What? I pored over the article and the US BLS link in it to find the source of these statements. Aside from a pull quote that appears as an image in the article but isn't even in the article itself and is unattributed, could someone find me the source of this statistic?

Because I'm a software developer in the United States with a Masters of Science in Computer Science. All of my coworkers have at least a bachelor's degree in one field or another. And my undergrad very much so started with a sink-or-swim weed out course in Scheme and then another in Java. Yes, they were both easy if you already knew how to code but ... this article almost sounds like it's written by someone with no field experience. Granted that's a low sample set, I'd like to know where the other half of us are. Everyone keep in mind that a Computer Science degree is a relatively new thing and there very well may be elderly coders doing a great job without technically a degree in computer science.

The only way I can see the misconception spreading is that people who use Wix to drag and drop a WYSIWYG site (for you older readers that's like FrontPage meets Geocities) erroneously consider themselves "software developers".

You founded 4chan. Care to elaborate on any of the undoubtedly countless times shit has gotten real?

You know, things you wouldn't tell WSJ when you were seeking solvency but are juicy crazy stories?

We're super big fans of C&Ds here and I would like to know what happened with your C&D to Moot.it. How did it come about and what was the resolution?

Canvas (site, not the HTML5 element) and DrawQuest were killed earlier this year. I used it briefly in its beta form and thought it was a neat idea. Any chance you could elaborate on why it was shut down? The e-mail I got was brief and vague -- were you facing copyright issues? Monetization problems? Image space issues? Care to spill your lessons learned?

But we are at Dice, sir:

[Querying whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
[whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
Domain Name:SLASHDOT.ORG
Domain ID: D2289308-LROR
Creation Date: 1997-10-05T04:00:00Z
Updated Date: 2014-03-14T22:12:11Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2015-10-04T04:00:00Z
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 69
WHOIS Server:

Referral URL:
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Registrant ID:tuE8gFbzWFO9qSj2
Registrant Name:Host Master
Registrant Organization:Dice Holdings, Inc.
Registrant Street: 1040 Avenue of the Americas
Registrant City:New York
Registrant State/Province:NY
Registrant Postal Code:10018
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.8557527436
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email:hostmaster@slashdotmedia.com

Pros: Today's article has more content than the usual Dice front page linkage. Great article if you're not a programmer but feel stymied by the wide assortment of languages out there. Although instead of hemming and hawing before making your first project you're better off listening to Winston Churchill and sticking your feet in the mud: "The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter -- 'Paralysis."

Cons: It barely scratches the surface of an incredibly deep topic with unlimited facets. And when one is considering investing potential technical debt into a technology, this probably wouldn't even suffice as an introduction let alone table of contents. Words spent on anecdotes ("In 2004, a coworker of mine referred to it as a 'toy language.'" like, lol no way bro!) could have been better spent on things like Lambdas in Java 8. Most interesting on the list is Erlang? Seems to be more of a random addition that could just as easily been Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Dart -- whatever the cool hip thing it is we're playing with today but doesn't seem to quite pan out on a massive scale ...

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

I think in a few years we'll all be having a good laugh about how Oculus doomed themselves with this move. I think there are enough people on this planet like me who are 100% distrustful of Facebook and anything they have to do with anything. I have long size made the vow that Facebook and its affiliates get zero dollars of my money and zero seconds of my attention.

We keep reading articles about how Facebook is on the way out, its core userbase of young hip twentysomethings is evaporating quickly, and soon its largest remaining userbase will be the octogenarian set, etc. The bubble is about ready to pop, and I predict (maybe we can have a good laugh at this in a year or two as well) that Facebook is very quickly going to go the way of Myspace, Livejournal, etc.: Namely, they still kinda-sorta exist but nobody save for a very small core few actually give a fuck, and neither of them are exactly cash cows.

Now slap a friggin' hardware keyboard on it and we'll talk. What's the point of yet another stupid buttonless bar phone? It's got a lot of pixels and a big fat processor so it has miserable battery life and absolutely zero usability improvement. It's like putting a solid gold screen door on a submarine, then. Put a Wacom style digitizer on the thing like the Galaxy Note while you're at it, please, so we can accurately poke at hilariously tiny controls and icons on the screen. I don't care if doing so makes the damn phone .0005" thicker or whatever.

Am I the only one who's noticed that our culture has seemingly started to revolve around SMS and Twitter yet somehow at the exact same time everybody started dropping keyboards off of phones? What's the deal with that?

I think it's a conspiracy. (Okay, okay, so the only 'conspiracy' is copycattingthe buttonless design popularized with -- but not invented by -- the iPhone. But still.)

Show some cojones! Have the courage to do something different for a change. I'd love a phone with a billion and three pixels available on the display, but I'd also like a phone that I can actually type on, select things, draw on it, etc. with all those pixels. If all you're doing is tapping and sliding and swiping and poking ineffectually at a million-pixel-wide but only physically 2-inches-across virtual keyboard the damn thing may as well be 320x240.

That's a case of two American chamberings being kinda-sorta incompatible with each other, largely owing to the fact that the "military" 5.56x45 is in reality a modified version of the already existing civilian .223 Remington, beefed up with a hotter load and heavier bullet. The Russians didn't enter into this one, or anyone else's military -- Us Americans did it all to ourselves. The .223 was a pretty weedy cartridge for war use at the time of its adoption in Vietnam, so the designers cooked up a more powerful cartridge of the same size that'd fit in the same gun, and then modified the gun to handle the higher pressures and heavier bullets they used.

In reality, this was never intended to present a problem. The military "should" be using the hotter 5.56x45 loads in their rifles, and civilians "should" be using .223 Remington, but as things go they all got mixed up in the ammo chain and you can buy surplus (and commercial!) 5.56x45 and stick it in your .223 deer rifle and vise versa. Now you can buy guns with mil-spec receivers that are made to accept the mil-spec ammo, which leads to a couple of manufacturers selling mil-spec civilian equipment and others just touting up their stuff as if they wish it was mil-spec (and their customers wish it was mil-spec) but it isn't.

Again, the short version: Forget the whole thing and just buy something chambered in 6.8mm SPC instead.

Both anecdotes are wrong, but both stem from an urban legend about the Japanese Arisaka rifle (WW2) which allegedly was deliberately chambered in .31 caliber so it could fire American .30 caliber munitions but the Japanese cartridge would not fit an American M1903. This legend is also false, but it endures, and every time there's a new generation of military rifles some dolt starts repeating it again for no discernible reason. I imagine you heard your story from one such dolt.

The American AR-15 and its variants (M-16, M-4, etc.) are chambered in 5.56x45, AKA .223 Remington. The Russian AK-47 and its equivalents (including the AKM, etc.) are chambered in 7.62x39, which is a completely different cartridge with a completely different size. The 5.56x45 is a much longer cartridge, for a start, and also thinner. If you dropped one in the chamber of an AK like a dummy the bolt wouldn't even close all the way. It would be impossible to fire the gun out of battery like that, but if you somehow managed it the casing of the 5.56 would surely explode because it is not contained by the walls of the chamber. You couldn't even begin to fit a 7.62 in an AR-15's chamber. The cartridge is too fat. I think you'd have trouble fitting it through the ejection port, and you can forget about jamming one in the magazine. It just ain't gonna happen.

Likewise, the modern Russian AK-74 and its variants are chambered in 5.45x39, which is superficially similar in concept to the American 5.56x45, but is still a completely different size. Again it is a shorter cartridge and this time with a smaller diameter bullet. A 5.56x45 cartridge will be too long to chamber in an AK-74, and too fat for the bullet to fit down the barrel. A Russian 5.45 round dropped in an AR-15 would just rattle around in the chamber. Again, if you managed to set it off somehow it would just explode in place, because the casing doesn't fit the chamber properly.

I think some of the confusion comes from the fact that you can modify an AR-15 variant rifle -- by way of a major parts swap consisting of replacing the barrel, chamber, bolt, and attached upper receiver assembly) to fire different calibers, up to and including Russian 7.62x39. The vast majority of upscaled AR-15's are actually chambered to accept .308 Winchester (AKA 7.62x51) which is again a totally different cartridge than 7.62x39 Russian. Don't get confused by the 7.62 in both of them: The .308 Winchester is longer and stouter than the AK cartridge, and plain old will not fit in an AK-47, and vise versa.

The only result of making your rifle's chamber half a mil bigger than the enemy's ammo so you can physically fit his cartridges but he can't fit yours has no effect other than allowing the enemy's ammo to explode in your gun's chamber. This has no practical advantage at the expense of making your gun woefully unsafe to fire with the wrong ammunition in it, which you purposely designed it to be able to accept.

TL;DR: Guns do not work that way. People are confused enough about firearms as it is, so don't contribute to the problem by perpetuating falsehoods like this. It only leads to some redneck dim bulb trying to shoot a 7.62 out of his .223 deer rifle, maiming himself, and therefore causing some politician to pass a law about it that makes life harder for the rest of us.

Did "we" vote on this? Let's look at their members list: Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Csico, Comcast, Cox, Google, Huawei, HP, Intel, LG, Netflix, Verizon, Yahoo!, Zynga and ... The Walt Disney Company. Seriously, are we really so daft that we sit here scratching our heads wondering why a consortium of those players and THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY ended up including DRM? REALLY? There is a bill known as The Mickey Mouse Act in regards to excessive copyright that was passed into US law. And we're wondering how Disney might have influenced DRM as an option in a standard ... they're on the list, folks! Pull your heads out of your asses!

And those are just the companies I recognize that have a serious amount of money to be made on DRM (hello, Netflix?!). If I examine closer, there are much smaller players like, say, Fotosearch Stock Photography and Footage that sound like they would gladly vote for DRM in order to "protect" their products/satiate content owners.

If you read the "Summary for Policymakers" PDF document linked in the summary, there is no talk of "total quantity of emissions tolerated" or any of this trillionth ton idea. Instead it appears to be talking about . In fact, it appears to reside solely in that New York Times article that very clearly says:

(emphasis mine) So to answer your question: The trillion tons is an estimate of what we would need to burn in order to hit an internationally agreed limit that would likely produce the worst effects of climate change. The number of tons we burn is even an estimate. It's all estimates because we don't have parallel Earths where we can keep controls and change one variable to see what happens. If you don't accept the ability of making estimates with levels of certainty, there is no way to make any statements about the effects of putting carbon into our atmosphere on a global scale.

I suppose it would appear that way if you only get your information from The New York Times and throw away everything they're actually saying.