That's a selfish and willfully ignorant position.

Selfish because you care more about your tax dollars than about the future of the planet, and willfully ignorant because you're not only not interested in studying the issue further, but you oppose research and education because it will come out of tax dollars.

You're free to have that opinion of course. Just saying you shouldn't be proud of it.

I mostly agree with you, but Skype outperforms everything else. It has a competitive advantage in being a trade secret.

Have you been to the South?

"Liar" means something too, and I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

... And worms have nothing to do with whether or not the code is interpreted or compiled.

"other than a modified 'httpd' file,"

It's completely invisible, as long as you're blind.

The point is to be able to reach them on and *off* duty.

"would this be the sort of national infrastructure concern that we would want to mandate that the cell companies install extra capacity? You know, in case of emergencies."

In Canada a telco exec told me that the government mandates Bell to provide priority service to emergency responders' home landlines. It'd be interesting if telcos could register emergency responder's cells in a similar way. May or may not be technicallly possible with current technology, given all the phones are trying to reach the towers at the same time, whether or not they'd be able to talk.

But then, for all I know, maybe they already do. Any emergency responders care to comment?

"Oh... I guess the people running UNIX servers will have to install a non-native layer to allow the Wayland folks access. That's just nuts. ?

That's a pretty flimsy straw-man. Of course you'd install an X Server on Windows.

What settings are you using for X over dialup?

My use case includes sound, printing, the clipboard and preserving state when disconnected.

VNC will preserve your state, but your performance is gone and you still haven't solved sound, printing or the clipboard.

X11 might give you the middle-button buffer, but not the clipboard.

"Same thing with the housing bubble, which some were observing as a bubble in 2003, and it took all the way until 2008 before it finally popped. "

Still hasn't popped in Canada.

The market can remain irrational for a very, very long time, especially if the government puts gas on the fire. Some say that Canada dodged the bubble... we'll see what happens.

The point is that you can't predict these things when you're in them. Sometimes it's a bubble, sometimes it's the opportunity of a lifetime. Sometimes even if it's a bubble, the government intervenes and makes it bigger. Then when it blows, they take from the people who were prudent savers and investors to bail out those who rode it high.

Not that I'm bitter.

After the .com bubble, the jobs got outsourced to India.

If you weren't in the job market to catch the y2k bug, you were cutting your teeth in a down market. Some programmers slogged it out making crap wages, (esp. Web Developers) many programmers never got a gig and jumped into IT, only to see massive outsourcing to Brazil, many got burnt out and jumped to a different field. Eventually some programmers got on the new wave of mobile app development.

When the daily innovation slows in the app sphere, I expect we'll see similar. For now, there's a big market in making "custom apps" for various companies, but they're little more than glorified websites optimized for mobile devices. As mobile devices grow in capabilities and apps grow in complexity, companies will merge, the size of development teams will grow, PHBs will take the fun out of programming, then they'll start "saving money" by sending jobs to whatever country is paying the least.

That said, nothing is forever, and there is always a good job for the best developers. Always.

How do you touch-type on a touchscreen?

"What Microsoft just never got because they are the bottom feeder ..."

Some of us use MS products because we need to get work done.

... and Starbucks is fine, especially in Europe, where the typical cup of coffee is smaller than a Starbucks short cup.

That said, MS missed the mark. No question. Ballmer is a flaming idiot who won't give up until he succeeds at *something*, or destroys the company trying. He's doing a good job of the later.

But it is like a hairdryer in that the waste product is heat.

Heat your home with your bitcoin rig and you won't be wasting the energy.

For that matter, a wifi-enabled GPU-heating element hair dryer would be pretty cool.

Don't worry, if the driverless car has a problem, you can drive your driverless car through your Google Glass.