I wish I had known about this book three years ago. Built that system, went through four releases, and moved on. God bless whoever has to maintain it now. But my biggest performance issues were from underdocumented 3rd party vendor APIs - black box JARs that did whatever the hell they wanted to, and a bunch of headscratching from the vendor when the damn things locked up.

"They" are working very hard to assassinate Assange's character... which might be good enough in this day and age.

Mod point worthy. The vast majority of this discussion has been about trying to find technical means of skirting the edges of the rule, as if that would have any bearing on how the rule gets enforced. If the Kuwaiti police don't like the looks of your camera, they'll take it, and you insisting that there's no "reflex mirror" in it won't mean jack.

All of the same benefits of Bluetooth, plus the WiFi congestion and interference headaches we already enjoy just to get Internet access???

Where do I sign up???

*rant off*

I see a lot of references here to a "bell curve", aka a Gaussian distribution, which doesn't apply because poll results aren't drawn from a continuous spectrum. The discrete distribution that probably describes what most people meant when discussing what "ideal" results look like is the binomial distribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution

We will have flying cars when cars can fly and navigate themselves. Ordinary people will never possess the degree of skill and training necessary to operate flying vehicles, especially when there are millions of them in the air.

All the examples cited in the summary are products. Broadband internet is a service. The hardware required for broadband internet access has certainly gotten cheaper. But why does he think the service would get cheaper? I can't think of other examples of services that get cheaper over time unless there is punctuated technological advancement. Broadband gets more or less continuously faster, but no punctuation. Other services like power, water, telephone service, cable television, these have all gotten more expensive. Why would broadband service be any different?

You know, you could do your part to prevent this by participating in Firehose moderation. http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl

That's exactly what I mean. Most people don't think of driving as an enjoyable activity, it's simply a chore or method of getting them from one place to another. The democratization of transportation afforded to the public by the invention of the automobile has had a hugely positive impact on society and civilization, notwithstanding the small # of people who enjoy and prefer to drive manual transmissions. And I am one of them.

I'm sure a lot of people said the same thing about automatic transmissions when they first came onto the market. Some people still feel that way. Just because you've mastered a more difficult way of doing something doesn't mean it can't be improved by simplification and the assistance of technology. Note that I am not endorsing any particular technology, just making a broader point.

Perhaps because QUERTY keyboards are designed to make your keystrokes alternate between left and right hands, the period is always typed by the right hand and the following space is typed by the left hand. I have no explanation for your "between words" right thumb behavior. *shrug*

I doubt any accredited four year college or university could show that 80% of their graduates got jobs in their field. There's no mechanism for requiring that graduates stick to their field of study, and many find happiness doing other things, even if their income over time is reduced.

You might be interested to know that the federal government (under the guidance of HHS) is funding and fostering community support for development of an open source health information exchange framework. This includes the software to run the system that health care providers (think hospitals, insurance, HMOs, etc) can install and run, and administration of the network backbone to connect them (also known as the NHIN).

http://www.connectopensource.org/about/what-is-CONNECT

sure... with the right guns, you can get all the money, food, education and health care you want.

I wish I still had my mod points from yesterday, and I don't use them on ACs often. Titles are irrelevant. He didn't say anything about having a staff to manage - he might be the only person at the company who's capable of that kind of software development AND responsible for managing their network, desktops, phones, etc. And he may have no authority to hire anyone else. Sometimes you get stuck in a situation where you have to do what you can.