Making a zip gun requires almost no technical expertise, and they are quite effective.

You don't pay for any of the Android stuff, you pay for a device which can run it and then you get it. Sure, you can easily pay for software, but you're not paying for the basic functionality. All of that is gratis. At worst you go to goo and get the gapps for your device, and maybe twiddle build.prop such that you can actually use the store, and then google will happily treat you the same as any other user.

Since you're not paying for Android, Android is not a consumer product. It's not like Windows where you can get it free or you can pay for it; you can only get it free. Perhaps there's some for-pay Android-on-PC efforts by now, I'm not sure. But community replacements for official software stacks are generally donationware and nobody has harassed me for money yet.

I'm substantially more upset about the Mycon, who are occasionally hostile no matter what you say to them. Watch those spores...

Oh hell yes. Only a complete idiot would test this in a residential setting first. No. You find a nice big chunk of desert or some other remote place the little bastards are, establish a way to monitor the population, and then release your pheremone bomb. True to scientific form, have an adjacent area with a similar population and environment, under the same type of observation at the same time.

I was suggesting only what the weapons of mass (ant) destruction would be, say nothing of the safety considerations or unintended consequences. To my knowledge, nobody's done this kind of thing yet. It would need to be fully researched and the effects understood before molding it into a commercially-available product!

Not far from the truth. Many prisons use electronic locks on all the doors, which is in turn connected to a network and controlled through a server in the control center. You can build a card reader/writer from a tape head, and use the microprocessor inside the graphing calculator to read and amplify the pulses. You can also connect the GPIO pins to, say, the controller IC inside the door lock. A few hours of being left unattended, and using just that graphing calculator, engineer not only my own escape, but the entire facility.

Think it's a bit 007? It's already been done. Security researchers have already built mockups of the exact same hardware used in prisons today and discovered that with only basic electronic components, a prisoner inside his cell could access the lock mechanism and free himself.

Diatomaceous earth also works wonders. Get a bag of "food grade" (yes, it's often mixed into the food you eat) DE and sprinkle around the baseboards where they're coming in. Avoid "pool grade" for your lung health.

It works like moon dust works on astronauts: it's sticky and microscopic and gets into the joints and cuts up the ants, resulting in their eventual death by dehydration.

Sam

your 4G doesn't use 2,496â"2,690 MHz?

to kill that java server EE off?

COBOL on the other hand has well designed base of apps that have stood the test of time and still process the most important financial transactions

bullshit, recession lasted at least into 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2011/10/08/the-2008-recession-never-ended/

even now the real unemployment rate is over 22% by the traditional measure abandoned during clinton years http://shadowstats.gov/

I agree, Java / EE is just warmed over c++ and makes for the most bloated set of pigware known to man.

Let's not weigh the mature base of COBOL apps that is moving our money and processing our insurance claims with that rubbish

So then why only question those amendments? Why not assemble a constitutional congress and reevaluate the entire thing? Congress has the power to do it, I think it is probably time they do so. That would probably settle things pretty quickly, as it would encourage the conservative southern states to team up and leave the union so that the north can prosper.

I for one don't expect that this country as we know it will last more than another 20 years. And I would much rather see it dissolved peacefully than violently.

Agreed. For more than one reason, and from personal experience. I've had both, a crew of code monkeys and a small but incredibly efficient team of well paid but also very good programmers. To say that the latter were vastly outperforming the former (for less money in total, too) is an understatement.

Two people doing each 50% of work will not compensate for one person who could do 100%. Simply due to a lack of information. One person has, by design, all the information that person has. This is not true for two people who should do this one person's work instead. They have to synchronize and exchange information, and that invariably fails at some level as we all know, where you either lose efficiency by having to design an interface between these people or, lacking this, lose even more efficiency when their interface just doesn't work out.

In the end, you're better off with FEWER, but BETTER people than you could ever be with a truckload of code monkeys. Yes, even if they cost a multiple of the monkeys. A billion code monkeys with keyboards will never write the better OS.

And that's what's wrong with the USA today. Working simply doesn't pay anymore. Not working and having others work for you does.

In earlier days, we called them spongers and leeches, but in today's world where everyone needs a title, it's CEO.

Good managers are very rare.

So we're told. Yet, the distribution of good and bad managers is almost exactly the same as good and bad line workers.

most of them are worth the money because they can generate share holder wealth.

Share value increases most when jobs are cut. Any idiot can cut salaries and jobs to get a quarterly bump in share price. The success of US corporations has more to do with corporate consolidation increasing pricing power than it does brilliant management.

We have a system where management success means the failure of everyone else who works for the company. Instead of an economy that is based on widespread prosperity, we have one based on prosperity for a very small group who succeed in a system whose rules they set, and misery for everyone else.

We actually have some historical experience with these situations, and it never, ever ends well for elite.

Anyway, more on topic, I hear there is a shortage of talent in the Bay Area. Although...since there are only so many LGBT software engineers who are good, software engineers who are good but who don't understand cost-of-living, single and straight software engineers that are good but don't understand that California girls are trained from birth to be cocaine-snorting psychotic leeches who will rob you blind (true story), etc.

Sounds like someone can't get a date.