In the original series you had an Asian as the helmsman. In interviews,Takei has talked about how revolutionary that was for the time. You had a Russian handling weapons systems, during the cold war just a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And you had Uhura, with an interracial kiss with Kirk, the first interracial kiss in television history, while the Civil Rights movement was still being fought. The producers were ready for a firestorem of controversy, but IIRC just one redneck called in, and said since it was Kirk the kiss was OK. Uhura was praised by Martin Luther King Jr, who was soon to be assassinated.

I think you don't realize the atmosphere in the 60's, and how revolutionary it really was. And that's not talking about the episode where the half white half black aliens fight each other because one is black on the left side and the other is black on the right.

Sadly no mod points today...

There are a lot of jobs unfilled. There are a lot of people looking for jobs. There are a lot of jobs that remained unfilled because the people offering the jobs dont't want to pay anything close to a living wage, much less benefits.

I hate to sound like an old man (get off my cyberlawn) but there used to be days where you'd sacrifice your life for a company and they'd reward you with stability. Now you sacrifice your life for two companies (because you need two jobs to make ends meet) and they reward you with raiding your pension for e leveraged buyout.

Remember that Info over carrier pigeon can make you real money.

He had info, lied about it to make people go the other way, then cleaned up, based on info from pigeons.

I still think he doesn't get the Ecosystem thing. As iOS/Android developers make apps that make money on phones and tablets, the pool of developers gets bigger. There are more people with skills that can make enterprise apps. Then more enterprise apps.

I see in Chicago a lot of stores/restaurants that have iPads as cash registers. In the Apple store, I can pick up a dongle to make my phone take credit cards. These are pure business apps. If Blackberry feels they can give away these beachhead apps into small businesses without it affecting their long term prospects, they're in real trouble.

And the Bold, a hybrid touch screen/physical keyboard machine, broken at core points.

Something as simple as scrolling is broken: Scrolling on the touch-nub or whatever is old style, as if you're moving a scrollbar... swipe up to move the page down. Scrolling on the screen itself is new style... swipe down to move the page down.

They also broke simple things like how key navigations work in the OS changed between OS6 and OS7. The letter N for Next used in mail used to mean Next chronologically. Now it means Next in list, which in a descending order sort is opposite of what it used to mean. At least on a Mac you can config these navigation issues and slowly get used to the change.

I do hope the Blackberry machines do something good. They've had execution and design issues for years, and they missed some good delivery targets (whether you want to call it Holiday 2012 or End Of Fiscal 2012, they could have sold a lot more if they had some ready in November/December). I think having some alternatives to Android/iOS is good, and Blackberry may have a better shot than Windows Phone.

I've got a work BB Bold (OS 7.x) and have extensive experience typing on both an iPhone and Android keyboards. The haptic buzz on the Android helps a bit actually. Both keyboards are a bit of a pain, but are both solid phones. The Blackberry is a decent keyboard attached to a horrible OS. It's slow, and the native web browser horrible times ten.

So, IMHO, the Blackberry gets instant usage on the keyboard, and the OS seems worse and worse as you go on. The virtual keyboards get more useful as you get used to the typing. I haven't tried BB OS 10 yet. But the point being, I'm a typical user, meaning i've been "burned" by a bad Blackberry experience, and would not get another device.

it seems strange* to develop BTRFS as a GPL file system with ZFS-like features while ZFS is mature and reliable

To be honest, there are many projects that are just this - a rewrite of working code just because the license doesn't match what you want. BDB => GDBM for some reason pops in the mind first. Usually it's mostly a waste of resources as it takes time to build up the feature set of the copied code and avoid the bugs that were revisited because they ignored the design of the copied code. I'm still waiting for my FSF Skype clone.

My guess is that humans want to be architects, not maintainers. It's fun to be bold and create "new" things with the partial safety of it following a known framework than go and try to fix that annoying bug in someone else's code that only shows up on Toshiba hardware with the 2976G chipset and NOT the 2976F chipset and when Obama wears a red tie. This is not of course all of it, there are some legit license reasons for some forks, but underneath methinks this is always a secondary reason.

Back when Joel spent time on writing, Joel Spolsky of Joel on software had an interesting method for doing time estimates. His point was to go into a deep level of detail. Instead of handwavy "code the GUI" the only way to really get anything remotely close to a real time is to estimate everything down to at least half day, if not lower granularity. It's not the "oh you feel the time better" as much as to think of EVERYthing you need. If you go to a lower level, you may remember that dialog box that you didn't think of at the 25,000 foot level.

It would be interesting to see if anyone ever used it to improve their estimates. Even he "disavows" it now, preferring the method in his software tool. But I like the "the world is a big place, are you sure you're thinking of everything" that the older method pushed you to.

Hofstadter's Law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

I predict a huge number of The Daily WTF posts about poorly written, slow, "designed" by someone who really didn't get the problem domain, in about 6-12 months.

Iran had control hardware, very sensitive very "this is the future of the entire regime" compromised by Windows Malware. If anyone had motivation to keep some controllers malware free, it would have been the centrifuge operators.

Granted, there were multiple vectors not just Teh InterWebbs, but if you think the IT "department" in a dentist's office is better skilled than the secret service around a nuclear program, I'd assume you're misguided. Most offices wouldn't even have a specific person, just the guy that knows how to trigger Windows Update.

But, the offices I've seen are actually pretty networked. The value of computers in a doctor's office is that each exam room has a computer and can check records from a central data store. The idea where you can say "hey, unplug the wire and never plug in any volumes" is way past.

I think you're oversimplifying a bit.

But enough people watch the Simpsons to keep it on the air.

For this year....

The Simpsons have been on so long that the economics have changed. When the voice actors asked for more cash, Fox realized they have so many episodes for syndication that it's more cost effective to say no and stop paying for new episodes, just start milking the syndication cash cow.

Though not too surprising (a production company balking at any increase at all in production? Really?) I always thought that there are actually so few bodies doing the voices (they overlap characters so much) I thought they might keep going.

This is actually a revival of old tech from the 60's and earlier. I remember some Internet company (mercifully stomped by the dotcom bust) that wanted to sell you some USB attach-y thingy that could generate scents.

The whole thing is to get asses in theater seats and not in front of your 60" tv at home.

So.. there was this college student named Linus. He wanted to play with UNIX. Licenses too expensive, forget that. He looked at BSD (back when there was really just the BSD). It was in a lawsuit, so he didn't want to mess with that. So he started his own. He called it Linux.

Then he had to pick a license. The BSD license was already a well established license. But he went with the GPL instead. Why? Because he was worried about Freedom-as-in-speech and all that? No. He was being very pragmatic.

When you use the GPL, you get to see a lot of the cool stuff that people play with. Interesting changes and forks get pulled back into the main source. That might spur other people to new ideas, which then need to get folded back. He's not hard core about licenses, he's hard core about being able to see things folded back in.

One thing I never see discussed is how license affects those mechanics. Forget the my-free-is-more-free-than-your-free wars, what does the license do for adoption and code sharing? As a general broad swath, BSD may be better for code dissemination, but does BSD-vs-GPL mean anything for code movement?

And remember that this isn't black and white. The Cathedral and the Bazaar was a comparison of two GPL licensed code bases, the Cathedral being gcc (at the time, not the newer egcs forked line which took over gcc) with Linux as the Bazaar model.