If they did that then you'll get the usual crowd of yammerheads complaining about gentrification as the prices increase and start driving the less well off out of the state. Since no one wants to tell them to pound sand you just end up continuing the same unsustainable policies again and again.

The same drug companies that brought us things like Oxycontin, etc. that have turned out to be as bad (if not worse) than what they were supposed to replace?

They don't give a damn if someone dies, it's all about the publicity and the public relations. And the money. Let's not forget about that.

Vista was also a resource hogging monstrosity that had issues running on a lot of older hardware. With more and more computers being ultra-portables or notebooks that don't have exceptionally powerful CPUs in a desire for better battery life, a flat UI that isn't trying to display a ridiculous number of intensive effects is going to provide a better experience.

Now whether this is a well-made flat UI is certainly open to debate, but I won't miss the style-over-substance approach that seemed to plague UI design for so long.

Not necessarily. If a company is willing to pay a higher salary they'll have a better selection of candidates and will over time have better workers than their competition. If that allows them to provide a better service than their competitors it's going to result in more revenue generated.

Look at a store like Wal-Mart and then something like Costco and tell me that one doesn't have employees that are more enjoyable to interact with. Guess which store is more likely to get my business.

The extra publicity will probably generate some business on its own, but it's definitely possible that some long-term gains will come from this as well.

This is definitely true. I had a relative who spent several years working in the oil fields after dropping out of college. He easily was making enough money in one year to completely pay off all his student loans and other debts that he had racked up.

During the recent downturn he was laid off and was more in debt after several years of hauling in six figures than he was when he first started working out there. You tend to see the same thing with lottery winners as well where they can suddenly have millions of dollars, but in a few years will be penniless.

Fortunately he's managed to find work again and I hope that the last few years have been enough of an educational experience that he doesn't piss everything down his leg again.

The underlying problem is that it's possible for a single person to essentially "own" an article and reject any changes they don't like and perpetually block anyone else from contributing. This has led to a large collection of petty fiefdoms across the site and many of the local lords getting cozy with one and other so that if anything does get run a little further up the flagpole it still has a chance of being outright ignored or buried under bureaucracy and rule lawyering.

Wikipedia needs to change how their system works to allow for more collaboration and participation. I'd suggest a system where anyone can propose changes that are collected over a period of time until a group of individuals can work together to create new revisions of an article. Have other teams that are devoted solely to improving the grammar or readability of articles and others that are just looking to fact check the existing information to recommend removal of fallacious information. Perhaps even go so far as to assign people randomly to different teams and articles to mix it up and prevent the same kind of agenda-driven article ownership that we see so often now.

The problem is that there isn't a single American company responsible for all innovation so everyone is trapped in this giant prisoner's dilemma where any company that does outsource gets a temporary competitive advantage and any company that drags its heels for too long on the issue isn't likely to remain in business because the other companies can drop their prices in response to reduced labor costs.

The only solution is to get even better at innovation to the point where it elevates the rest of the world to a similar standard of living as quickly as possible. There are a lot of barriers to that, but I suspect that in the long term most of the cheap labor in China, Africa, etc. is going to be replaced by machines anyhow.

It's probably still going to be a rude awakening for a lot of Americans (and other Westerners in general) when the open taps of cheap credit get cut off and not everyone can have all of the new shiny toys as often, but I think that we'll come out okay in the end.

Honestly any IDE worth a damn should convert a tab into a configured number of spaces. A space is a space regardless of what's being used to display or edit the code. If everyone is using the same IDE, it probably doesn't matter, but if you've had to deal with a mixed environment, it winds up creating all manner of unnecessary headaches. A tab is open to interpretation and if mixed with spaces could end up looking heinous on some other IDE. We have so much storage space now that no one is going to squabble over a few bytes of extra space taken up by a source code file. If you're dealing with some kind of system where it needs the source code and space is limited, it's likely that you'll pre-processes the code to strip out white space anyways.

If you work alone, it's not a problem, but get enough people together and inane differences in coding style can rapidly devolve into petty wars of passive aggression. No need to let differences in choice of IDE/editor add fuel to the fire.

I suspect that we could stand to devout more resources to education. Even people who aren't exceptionally bright can likely teach at a primary school level, especially if they special in a topic area that they're good at. If the future is going to have even fewer low skill jobs, it's more important than ever to improve educating the next generation to fill the jobs that haven't been automated.

If we ever do reach a point where everything can be automated, or at least everything necessary to sustain human life, I suspect we'll have to move on to some other economic system that fits with the times.

Good luck with that. It's a well known fact that underage individuals will answer truthfully to questions about their age and that they would never consider swiping an adult's credit card for age verification. Never mind the large number of sites based outside of the UK that could give bog-all about some idiotic local laws, or even those sites that have a mix of adult and non-adult content.

Parliament should really stop thinking of the kids.

Mostly because of the pedophilia scandals, but also in general as well.

Pair programming isn't on the face bad and there are several aspects to it that are good, but it has to be implemented properly.

A lot of the early research on using it in an educational setting (see publications by Laurie Williams or Charlie McDowell ) found that it works best if you know the students who will be using it can already program individually. Otherwise you tend to get cases of severely mismatched abilities where one person does most of the work and the other just coasts by. So you also need a reasonable approximation of each student's ability so you can arrange pairs based on that. There's also other research that looked into pairing based on personality or other attributes that found some results to indicate some approaches are more preferable than others.

Using it right out of the gate when you don't have a good gauge of the different ability levels of the students could be detrimental in some cases. If used correctly, pair programming can be beneficial for students and teacher alike, but here it looks as though they're trying to use it as a solution to cut down on the amount of work they need to do. There are probably better ways of approaching that problem.

What leader wants to admit that the problem is crummy infrastructure? It's basically admitting that they're bad at their job or too incompetent to keep things maintained properly.

Blame it on something that can't really be proven definitively and it takes the heat off.

Information is inanimate and doesn't want anything. If you believe otherwise feel free to post your banking information and medical history because apparently that wants to be free as well.

Please, won't you think of the information?

He probably should have molested a bunch of kids instead. Then the BBC would have kept the entire incident covered up.

One would think that if you were to comment on such an obvious omission, that you would have explained it yourself.

Short answer: It's a tabletop gaming convention.