Actually, if you look up the Second Congo War , you'll see we've entirely skipped a genocide of at least 3 million in Africa. Maybe 5 million.

Syria must be seriously broke by now. In comparison to Syria, Israel's economy is doing fantastically well. I think the only payment Syria could make would be to let the Russians have military bases on Syrian soil, and expand Russian naval presence on the Mediterranean.

On Deep Background:

A Russian ship is currently visiting Israel, which has many ex-Russian citizens.

Russia has also received title to a large tract of land in downtown Jerusalem, purchased in previous centuries by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The most effective way for Obama to help the Syrian rebels might be to persuade Netanyahu to announce support for the Assad regime, and that the Assads are actually (but secretly) a Jewish family.

Let's say two different programs, A and B, do the same thing, and they each have 6 bugs. If program A has twice as many LoC (Lines of Code) as program B, then program A gets the higher score! Program A has half the error density of program B; But program A is clearly inferior, as it uses more memory, uses more disk space, probably runs more slowly, and is harder to debug.

I can easily fatten up any program to use more LoC, and not just with newlines, with real code, that might even be executed now and then. Coverity could, I suppose, counter my sabotage with a code-coverage tool to find the bloat, but there are sneaky ways to fool that, too.

It's entirely possible that some event happened around 6000 years ago that changed (all or some) of humanity. Perhaps there was a genetic change that made human minds more sensitive, or possibly even a Divine Intervention altering the souls of the then-existing naked apes. This event could have made people "More human".

I am not aware that any physical evidence has turned up to support this hypothesis. Yet.

A while back I had several full-body CT scans on an emergency basis. They found what they were looking for in my liver and it was treated. But I was forbidden to have any X-Rays of any kind for two years after that. So when I came down with bronchitis and pneumonia, the doctor had to play it by ear (literally, he just listened to my chest). All is well, now. But lowering the X-Ray dosage of CT scans is very worthwhile.

============== Mon Mar 5, 2012 10:45 ==============
Iran's concrete is defensive. It's their ballistic missiles that are offensive. Look up the Shahab and Sajil ballistic missiles.
It's lying to the IAEA that raises suspicions. It's Iran's claim to have the right to dominate the entire Middle East that frightens the Sunni Arab states. And Iran's constant cries of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" tell us a great deal.

The phrase that was translated by Iran's official English website as "Wiping Israel off the map" was made clearer when they put it on a banner attached to a ballistic missile in a military parade.

If Israel or the US wanted to attack Iran, they've had 31 years to do it. Iran's nuclear weapons program is not defensive.

1. Read everything Douglas Crockford has on his JavaScript website. Use his jslint program. Down the road, read the code of his jslint program, I suppose. Buy and read his book. It's also available for the Kindle. Read the whole book twice. Basically, the lesson is don't make JS try to be Java, it only causes headaches.

2. Get a good JavaScript book for the language itself, this listing of JavaScript book reviews recommends the Wrox book, but I haven't read it, I use the 6th edition of the Flanagan book. See the link.

3. It's a language that, along with HTML and CSS, needs you to have a great memory or a good IDE that will prompt you for the allowable names. You can get a version of Eclipse pre-built for JavaScript, and you can get the Active State Komodo Edit program, both free. They say the Komodo IDE is even better, but it's expensive and probably not as complete as the (free) Eclipse.

4. You can get a version that runs on your desktop like a shell or perl/ruby/python will, but it isn't necessary. I know you can easily get a version of Mozilla SpiderMonkey that will do that.

5. Don't use the double-equals comparison operator, it's too confusing. Use the triple-equals operator ( "===" ), it's a pain to type but it's more straightforward.

6. Be wary form whence you copy. There's a lot of terrible code out there.

7. Use jQuery after your first two or three practice web pages, and after you've got CSS under control. This means also get a good CSS book. I guess start with the 'Lie and Boss' book, even though it's old.

The report says the data were not faked.

Was he ever accused of faking the data? The main accusation that should have been investigated is whether Mann (and the other climate scientists in his group) deleted emails to frustrate a legal Freedom of Information Request.

The scientific criticisms are different from the procedural questions.

Procedural
Is it okay to delete emails to frustrate an FOI request?
Is it okay to suppress the raw data that went into the analysis in a scientific paper?

Scientific
Is the "Hockey Stick" valid?
Do galactic cosmic rays influence global temperature by stimulating cloud formation?
Do climate models violate the laws of Thermodynamics?

.NET was written in anticipation of Itanium. Instead, the growth area is mobiles, pads, pdas and such, which use an eclectic mix of chips. The .NET option of generate-code-on-install doesn't apply to mobile apps, where the app store only has what the platform can use. And the big CLR doesn't always fit.

Apple is making a mint on hand-helds, and now has about 70 billion dollars in cash for a rainy day. Apple is huge. The comeback of the integrated hardware-software combination (Apple) changed the marketplace.

Now the Nokia-Microsoft deal is all about putting .NET on phones, so
1) That story is bogus or
2) .NET is making a comeback there, or
3) .NET will bankrupt Nokia.

For rich text effects. Bold, code font, italic, decent looking quote of previous mail.

We need a read-only mounting of a stick that can run software. I'd use it to bring anti-virus software (et cetera) over to computers I want to repair. If I can update it with the last anti-virus signature file on a good machine and then safely bring it over to the sick machine, running all kinds of portable software there. I'd also like to be able to boot from a stick — for the same purpose.

So we need a read-only button on the stick to guarantee the stick doesn't get infected from the sick computer. Does this exist?

I can do this with a CD or DVD, but a stick is more convenient.

Regardless of what the Qt developers do, the toolkit is very good and available. You can just use it to build your software and let the rest of the world jump in a lake. The worst that can happen is that Qt development will be slow and steady.

There were actual reasons that COBOL was more used than, say, ALGOL, although they both became available at the same time, and ALGOL was the better language.

JavaScript is a medium-quality language, with less utility but roughly the same number of flaws as C. What makes it so terrible are the broken tools, broken and old browsers, amateur coders, dumb DOM, and so on.

And what makes all of this worse is the inescapable monopoly it has over client-side web coding.

Consumers buying desktops have brand loyalty to Windows because they know how to operate it. But they don't like it.
Those same consumers buying phones aren't going to jump in because the phone runs some version of Windows. So it's just a cost.

What MS might do well, though, is integrate the phone with their game platform, Xbox. But that's a marketing gamble. The biggest selling apps for smartphones are music/entertainment, and games. There's no platform loyalty there, and only a little game loyalty. No lock-in for developers or consumers. It will never be the cash cow that Office and Windows have been. Likewise with maps and directions based on GPS.

There's a high-price market for a PDA+phone that helps the busy people schedule, manage contacts, and shop, but outside that market, it's all very cost sensitive.

The way ears and fingers are constructed, there isn't much of a market for a phone with a full keyboard, splitting the market. And voice input is still not capable of bridging the gap.

I think in the long run, hardware costs will dominate, software features will converge thru imitation, and it's the wristwatch business all over again.

MFC is bad, and C# is good, for opposite sides of the same reasons. MFC is a C++ wrapper around the Window API intended to "Give access to the API". BUT: Any really good C++ programming framework for Windows programming would also be a system where the applications would be portable to another OS! Oh Heavens! There are good C++ frameworks that allow that sort of portability. GTK and QT come to mind. They avoid being Stamped with the Windows API. No baloney about "Giving access to the API". Enter C# and .NET: Here, quality is not the enemy of Microsoft, but the friend, since only minimal development of C# apps can work on outside of Windows. It's very nearly a captured system. So they produced a very nice language and a very nice set of runtimes. The quality binds the coders to the OS, and the code is nearly as unportable as MFC: The best of both worlds, for Microsoft. If you're a young software developer, go with Ruby, it will improve your mind. Either that or Erlang, to master concurrent, multi-core programming. But if you need to make more money in your current career path, perhaps your wife is pregnant; take courses in management instead.