I agree: Lua is absolutely one of the best things to be teaching high school students. You can either sit entirely in the Lua language itself, or you can learn to extend the capabilities of the VM and interface with outside libraries and frameworks.

I think the big elephant in the room is more to be found further upstream, in the area of manufacturing. Worrying about software hacks is one thing - not having the faintest absolute clue exactly *what* is inside the chip package is something else entirely. Think its an accumulator bank? Oh sorry, maybe we forgot to mention the harmonic bundles associated with wave guidance within the interstitial distances of the rapidly blinking transistors .. yeah, those can be read from space. With a satellite (or 12).

The game is over folks, or rather .. the game is on, depending on how you look at it. Until you are capable of investigating and participating, directly, in the sub-assemblies, you will always have a weak back door. Either we, ultimately, become able to assemble our own chips on the desktop, or there will always be a power class: those who can build such devices, and those who can only be ruled by them.

We need to evolve to adapt to this new threat to the species, and instead of seriously *resisting* its effects on our being, we - the true power - direct the feature to our favour. If, out of the NSA catastrophe, we gain a "New Internet" wherein *everything, everywhere* for 15 years, was available to everyone, then we'd have indeed a new era in the human species. A truly evolutionary step, made by mistake - perhaps.

Anything wrong with this? Started where your trend lines start, 1970; showed unsmoothed; and divided the two trend lines at 1998.

Goatse. Lemon Party. Tubgirl.

Classify Indians as black.

I'm in the process of standing up a new cloudy little provider and we don't count hours or minutes. Is that so wrong?

The assumption is that the Internet is open 24/7 so why should we be marking time when we know you want it 24/7? We would rather cultivate the developers and geeks as customers. We'll soon have one portal for instant gratification but we're also happy to hand-craft VMs in a private place for you too. And it's built around CloudStack4 so it should feel familiar to many.

Come talk to us while we're young and dumb, before we figure out that our prices are too cheap. 20Gb/s out to the net, BGP/4, IBM BladeCenters for hardware, and we also rent bare metal. Anything from 1vCPU/512MB up to 336 CPUs and 10.5TB of RAM in bare metal if you're willing to pay for it.

http://www.blinkinblox.com/

Disclaimer: Yup, its a commercial plug. I'm pretty much both the King and the garbage man.

Maybe he wanted to see Mt Everest, close up.

Having been very close to WinAmp and the AmpDev team in general in its infancy (circa 1996-1999) it's good to see that someone else is taking an interest. When AOL/Time Warner bought it for $100 Million in 1999 we all knew the direction it was going: large, corporate, and stupid. Let's face it, AOL bought WinAmp for the community that came with it. It should be no surprise that they did nothing memorable with it. And I can't fault Justin for taking the money and running.

I remember well the Stupid Factor being turned up to 11 when AOL ditched FreeBSD for SunOS/Solaris when they moved the hardware off of its "home" network. They practically ended up doubling the hardware to accommodate a (much) less functional OS. I could see the downward spiral start months before that happened. So they bought it for $100 Million and they're selling it for $5-10 Million. Good job, guys. Way to build shareholder value. Go, Team! ...Still, you beat Microsoft to the punch.

The TAP/WinAmp Memorial Hot Tub still lives and I use it every day. And I still use WinAmp every day, just not a CURRENT version. ( I still keep the pre-brain-damaged versions around despite some known security issues.)

That little pieces of it survive here and there is a nice reminder of what was, and what could have been, and what still might be. We'll see what Radionomy does with it. I, for one, will be happy to give them a chance to become relevant again.

Good luck, guys! Whip that llama's ass!

The OEMs should be profiting from their own app stores .. profits being driven from their customers. That they don't get this yet is hugely disappointing .. appstores - and naturally, software updates - are of huge interest to "next-gen" cell users .. but the carriers just don't want to get into it.

I suppose its because of the draconian US laws about content delivery over telephone networks, in the end, though ..