But "0" being "absolute 0" is what sets it apart.

Well, sort of. There's also the Rankine scale. On it, 0 is also the absolute lowest temperature (0K = 0R), but the units are the same size as Fahrenheit degrees.

The only place I've seen it used is in old rocket propulsion texts and similar non-SI thermodynamics stuff.

Sure, (almost) anyone can code, just like (almost) anyone can string words together on a page. That's a bit different from being able to write a readable story (let alone novel), or construct a useful program.

I wouldn't trust an architect who didn't know how to lay bricks, but even less would I trust a bricklayer to design a house.

That said, to paraphrase Heinlein, everyone should know how to lay a brick, hammer a nail, write a paragraph and code a program; specialization is for insects.

Twitter was given a subpoena, not a secret warrant, so there was nothing preventing them from notifying the account owners. And they lost that appeal.

Which phone is that? Motorola already announced Lollipop 5.0 support for the Moto X, G, E and Droid lines

Phones with 512MB can, however, be upgraded to KitKat 4.4, which reduced the minimim required RAM back to 512MB.

More speed is great, I'm sure users will be happy.

The dual rendering engine, less so. I know backwards compatibility is pretty important to Microsoft, but now they have twice as much web-facing code to maintain - all the legacy IE MSHTML stuff as well as the new EdgeHTML code - and thus twice the zero-days to cope with. Perhaps this is the lesser of two evils, but it's certainly not ideal.

What are the chances that a vendor that declines to update 4.3 to 4.4 would be willing to do an update for a 4.3.x if Google bothered to do it.

I think it smells bad, but trying to target users with vendors holding back 4.4 but willing to do another 4.3.x update is tricky. This is why google moved toward moving stuff in a more modular fashion: to get the ability to update relevant portions without demanding the vendor get in the middle.

I have the opposite problem: Qt isn't C++ enough for my tastes. As a general rule, you can't program both in Qt and in modern C++ in the same program. Not without an insulation layer, anyway.

Indeed there is, and it is an extremely influential language. Java 1.0 is pretty much Modula-3 semantics with a C syntax.

Go to a friends house and turn on their flat-panel TV. 99% of the time, it will have frame-rate interpolation turned on; which basically means that any content they see on that TV will be at 60 or 120 Hz. Even movies shot at 24.

More and more often as I do presentations to executives, they don't understand why my TVs look so "juddery" compared to what they expect -- it's because at home they're watching everything at 120Hz.

So no -- most people are happy with high frame rate most of the time, and that percentage is getting larger quickly. I am a big 24fps fan, but I believe the days are numbered.

No, we are not doing things that are artificial at all -- we are making things that could be far more real.

The Dolby Vision TVs will have reasonable controls to set brightness and contrast, but one of the selling points to the studios is that we will strive to maintain the artistic intent of the original. The blacks will be black, the whites will be white, and there will be an unprecedented (but realistic) amount of contrast.

It turns out that in high dynamic range content creation, the most important thing is not that the picture be brighter overall; but that there is an increased range between midtones and highlights. In current production, skin tones are set to about half the maximum brightness in the scene. This means that the brightest things in the image (say, a glint off of a chrome bumper) can only be twice that bright; where in real life it's more that 100 times that bright. So, leaving the midtones about where they are, and giving brighter highlights makes the image look better in a way that you have to see to understand. Or, you can just look out the window.

As the article states, two of the most important changes in this standard are high dynamic range (HDR) and wider color gamut (Rec. 2020) images. I have been working on this with Dolby Laboratories for the last few years, and whenever we bring in movie directors, cinematographers, colorists, or studio executives to see our ridiculously HDR wide-color-gamut display, their jaws hit the floor. The ability to reproduce the dynamic range and color gamut of real life is breathtaking. One of the studio executives, when asked if she could see the difference said "Do I look like a potted palm?"

You will see the difference, and you'll be able to see it from across the room. HDR and wide color gamut combined with UHD resolution is a revolution.

I know this sounds like a sales pitch (ok, it is!) but I've been working in the film business for 30 years before I started working on this; I know what creatives want, and this is it. I spent that time working on CG visual effects, and I think that HDR will have a comparable impact on filmmaking that VFX did.

The Dolby Cinema theaters opening in the next few months will have similar extreme dynamic range and wide color gamut. They look astonishingly better as well.

Wait and see. It's coming, and it's not far away.

It is perfectly consistent to say that C++ is a "elephantine, feature-laden monstrosit[y]" compared to C, but still prefer C++ to C. Nobody is disputing that it is feature-laden, after all.

Stepanov said it himself: Simula-style inheritance is unsound.

Look Eric, the internet, like electricity, will fade into the back of people's minds and everyone takes it for granted. Until . . . it fails. When the electricity is out for only a couple of hours, you become keenly aware of how much you depend upon it.

Comcast pledges to keep the internet at the forefront of people's minds.