Unless you can give me all of Apache.org in Pascal I am not interested because it ewill mean lower quality applications that take 10x as long to develop because you will have to reinvent the wheel.... again and again and again.

If you are in management, then I imagine you agree with my post.

If you want to play with research languages and esoteric forms of programming, then don't get a job in industry, and stick to academia. No one in industry uses Pascal, D, Go, or any of these languages du-jour on Slashdot, because they lack some combination of robust libraries, performance, online knowledge bases, or all 3.

Almost all business applications and consumer-facing applications written in industry today are done in 5 languages

- Java, because of it's incredibly rich library set under the Apache project.
- Python, for anything that does not need to be compiled
- JavaScript, for Web development and Node.JS development
- C/C++, for performance oriented applications, or used with a cross-platform toolkit for Windows/OSX applications
- C# Applications that are Windows platform exclusive
- Objective C (and now Swift) Applications that are OSX/iOS exclusive

Before you villify me, yes I am not retarded and I know that you can compile and run C# applications on OSX and can compile and run Objective C applications on Windows. The truth however is, no one in industry actually does this. If you write an application you want cross platform, you do it using a cross-platform toolkit.

I often feel like everyone on Slashdot is a mix of two people

- Old 50+ year olds used to the good 'ol days when you would write your own stack from scratch whenever writing an application

- 20 year olds fresh out of (or still in) college who yell "squirrel!" at everything new and shiny

The truth is, that 75% - 90% of the business applications that make the world go 'round, and make nearly every startup today go 'round, are based on Java or some complimentary technology like Node.js with Java bindings. The reason for this is simple: The Apache foundation. There are SO MANY amazing enterprise-class Java libraries available via the Apache project that there is little to no reason to ever write your own. The mantra where I work, and it should be where EVERYONE works, is before you write any plumbing code at all, check Apache first. People who roll their own plumbing code INVARIABLY end up with subtle errors they did not think of or subtle problems that will manifest themselves in 2 or 3 year when they try to scale.. and all these problems were likely already figure out long ago.

When building a woodsheed, do you cut down the trees, mill the lumber, and forge the nails? Of course not, you take advantage of modern economies of scale so you can focus on the REAL building project, not the building blocks. The same is true for any halfway competent software developer.. The days of people writing their own libraries for DB MVC, for configuration management, for network access, for parsing libraries, for thread pools.. these days are gone, and thank god. The less you have to worry about the low-level plumbing, the more you can focus on the real business problem. And furthermore, the more people that make use of a low level plumbing libary, the better and more secure and stable it becomes, for everyone.

9% of 2.2 billion users means that there are over 220 million users posting content.

That is an interesting definition of "almost nobody".

Why is 1oz of gold worth $1262? Because people said it must be, not because it's backed by anything which made it worth that much.

This is how pricing works. There is no item or unit or work in the universe that has some kind of intrinsic price. Items are worth what the market will pay for them, period.

The risk of the "potential danger" of someone cracking into Chrome's update mechanism and pushing out a rogue update, is exponentially over-weighed by forcing client endpoints to always have the latest security patches - so I totally disagree with the premise of your post. It is far, far, far better for the security of the web as a whole to ensure browsers always have the latest security updates. The near-forced auto-update mechanisms of Firefox and Chrome are some of the best things to have ever happened to web browsers from the point of view of security.

Finally, Chrome *DOES* provide a way for administrators to lock down to specific Chrome versions, so your post doesn't even have a leg to stand on.

The difference here is all the attempts at Oak Island, including the first discovery of the pit in the early 1795 had multiple witnesses and were fully documented thereafter. And it is not as simple as "well someone found it earlier and filled it back in", because if that was the case then all of the depth marker platforms would not be there.

Sorry if I seem a bit passionate but I have been fascinated by Oak Island ever since I read a book about it as a teenager. The most interesting thing I find is even with all the technology and engineering prowess available today, there is still not a way to just dig this hole up. For example, these guys on this show have literally spend millions of dollars on this - and they are engineers trained in deep well drilling - and they are still no further ahead. Tens of millions have been spent over the past 100 years trying to dig up this hole and deal with the spillway booby-trap.

Oak Island is actually very interesting. The more you read into the history and find all the weird stuff going on, the more it seems like there has to be SOMETHING down there. The intricacies of what has been found to date preclude it being some sort of prank.

The whole DRM thing is pretty much a non issue. No major music outlet (Google, Amazon, iTunes) has had DRM on their tracks for years. Even streaming providers don't use DRM anymore. That whole ship sailed a long time ago.

If one is going to buy the physical media version of an album, why WOULDN'T they get the Vinyl?

I would have liked to see the study also exclude smoking.

If the number is as high as 65% including the smoking, I would think that after removing that it would be way higher - like on the order of 80% or more.

With the government.... could be a great new revenue stream for the cities if they would get their heads out of their ass.

Google Talk / Hangouts are also XMPP based as well, although they have pretty much closed it off to all outside clients.