Knowing when not to use templates, virtualization, [insert favorite c++ function here], etc.

Basically knowing enough about programming and problem solving with a particular language to tell a need from a want. Needing to use some language feature vs wanting to use some language feature. And being mature enough to stick to needs rather than indulge wants.

Or to state things differently ... all the features have a time and place, and its probably not all the time and in every place.

I could be missing something, but frankly everything I read in the summery seems like reasonable changes to me.

Someone who actually is known to have purchased the item, yea, their review should be worth more than random Internet person #4827341

A review from last month is probably worth more than one from two years ago. The product may have changed.

There is nothing that an anonymous person can say about someone that I will take seriously without evidence. So, if an anonymous person says that candidate X is a pedophile, but offers no evidence, I will take it as the ranting of a liar, and candidate X has not been harmed in any way, beyond registering as a person who has angered some random anonymous coward. On the other hand, if candidate X takes it upon himself to waste the court's time with crap which endangers the anonymity of legitimately fearful critics of policy everywhere, I suddenly believe candidate X is an ass, unelectable, and possibly even a pedophile.

In industry, whatever tool or system you're dealing with, you're going to either use something that is either imported or exported or has to be compatible with something that is imported or exported. Thus you are guaranteed that there will be SI units somewhere in your process and it is usually just easier to go with it for the whole process, as is done in the military, NASA, and most US engineering firms. In addition to being internationally compatible, it is also a damn lot easier to use. Sure, if you use no unit but feet, pounds and seconds in your calculation there is no unit conversion that needs to be done, but as soon as you go into the range where you might think in miles or ounces, it becomes fairly difficult to reconcile intuition with units unless you do some fiddly calculations. Whereas a native SI user knows intuitively how long a Km and mm is in the same way an American might recon a mile or an inch.

So you may say: "why don't I buy a 2 pounds of apples, then walk a mile to work where I use SI to design parts and trajectories and what not?" Problem is, if you're thinking in non SI, then non SI units tend to sneak into where they don't belong. The Mars Climate Orbiter for example fell out of the sky because Lockheed used pound-seconds instead of newton-seconds in a calculation.

Considering how much success other countries have had switching, I'm always surprised at America's feeble efforts to do so. I think it is just something to do with Americans natural paranoia about as you say a "New World Order" or whatever else that prevents it.

don't forget CCTV. mustn't forget the omnipresent CCTV (roads, streets and buildings). also, you aren't allowed to withhold your passwords from police, there's even less police/secret services transparency than in the US of A; your kids will probably be taken away if you discipline them in public or if you go to a doctor with any kind of genital problem (UK children are not allowed to have genital problems).

oh and the sweaty armpits on tube (mmmm yummy), yobs who'll knife you if you complain about their loud music at night (wo'd ya say to mee?) and among the highest rent and property prices in the world. however, it's a good place to live if you're a member of any oppressed minority (race, sexuality, religion) as with so many minorities present nobody gives a shit about that anymore.

and if you happen to speak the most common language of london - polish, your life will be much cheaper (plumbers, carpenters, builders, car servicing, etc). the first thing you should do when you move to london is get a polish friend. i kid you not, they're 100x more useful than your local "citizen's advice bureau".

"Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth."

Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.

Instead of spending $68 Billion on a single high speed rail line between 2 cities that are already linked by several adequate transportation options, maybe we should use a fraction of that money for water projects? Moving water to where people live is a simple engineering problem. Why not solve it instead of being a victim of the weather?

The stores which own the legislatures of both Illinois and Texas should simply order them to change the laws.

You can buy all of the government some of the time, and some of the government all of the time, but . . .
it takes a lot of money to buy all of the government, all of the time. So that option is only available to very large companies.

Not necessarily. Any child who has a parent who would immediately think 'is that a logarithmic spiral' rather than 'how in the hell am I going to clean this mess up and how much is it going to cost me' is pretty much assured to wind up really fucked up.

The point is that a 100MW nuclear power station is a perfectly good substitute for a 100MW coal power station. When it's mid-winter and the big game is on, and everybody is running heaters, lights and TVs and goodness knows what else, either of those plants will put out 100MW unless it's shut for maintenance. Not a problem.

But a 100MW solar station is useless as a replacement, it will produce only a fraction of the power, because "100MW" is peak, not mean or median output and the solar station produces its peak output for a few hours here and there, not regularly and certainly not on demand.

A 500MW solar station is a replacement, so long as it's coupled to a 100MW medium term energy store, just as pumped storage. But the headline power of that plant is five times as much.

So when "solar surpasses coal" that doesn't mean what it appears to, for example if you had 100 years of building the same capacity of solar as coal, you might think half the power generated would be solar, right? No. More like 10% would be solar. Only when there's 10 times as much solar as coal are you actually producing more power with solar than coal.

Not because solar is "bad", it's just _different_ and that matters.

That's not the point. The point is that Google(in theory) will allow an app to block ads that display within itself, but not other apps installed on the device. Thus, an adblocking browser is ok because it only affects the browser itself.

You can't just go posting other's source code on the web without permission. There are other, better ways to deal with this asshattery.

When they embed it in your blog ... fuck 'em.

They modified his blog with code, which means it's now his code.

Or are we pretending that when corporations do shit like this it's OK?

I read this as "assholes embed code in pages, and then whine when that code gets made public to point out that it's happening".

No sympathy. Not even a little.

The recent release of firefox 38.0.5 on june 2 has been below the radar of many news sites, including Slashdot, because it was only a "patch" release.

However, 38.0.5 included real feature changes, meaning the inclusion of a proprietary web service. I not just hate that firefox added a proprietary web service prominently to its browser, also they smuggled this in in a patch release, avoiding press attention.

Firefox isn't a randy bitch dog that every dog inside the SV startup neighbourhood springs on, its a major web browser which respects its users. At least it was until 38.0.5.

I accepted that they added the social API, I understood their EME changes, I've thought firefox hello was a good addition. But for 38.0.5 pocket integration, I'm heavily disappointed by mozilla.