Which phones with 128MB or 256MB of RAM run a modern version of Android?

It is quite well settled scientific fact that those who find themselves at a business disadvantage due to the existence of facts they don't like will immediately lobby for legislation to overturn these silly facts in the interest of being pro-business.

Short of that, then the next best thing is to create a controversy. Since it is a creative work, shouldn't the controversy be copyrighted? Or even better . . . patented to protect the idea! Or maybe the observations underlying scientific advancement should be made privately owned, or subject to a government auction. I wouldn't have expected anyone to take these suggestions seriously twenty years ago. But today? Who knows?

MP3 is a robot from star wars? Even my older relatives know what a MP3 is. My grandmother, who doesn't have a computer, wouldn't even come to the conclusion that it's star wars related unless someone asked her "is MP3 the name of an audio format or a robot from star wars." I'm going to guess that this is similar to what happened when someone recorded himself walking around a campus asking "Is Obama a Keynesian (yes, he is)" and people were smugly saying that no the President was born in Hawaii.

Wow - I'm not sure you should be using the sample of bad existing code as an argument against PHP and FOR perl. Yikes.

> The federal government has no constitutional authority to mandate this technology.

Friend, you use such strange words. What is this 'constitutional authority' thing you speak of?

The overlords have always had the authority to do anything they please. It has been this way since the ancient time of the great change that came after the falling of two towers.

In addition to making it Opt-In, or even Opt-Out, there is no reason that the government needs to hold the switch to remotely disable a phone. If the purpose is as stated, then only the carrier needs to be able to remotely disable a phone, and only on a one-by-one basis.

So make sure that the bill makes it illegal for anyone but the carrier to remotely disable a phone, and then only with the express permission of its owner. Make it expressly illegal for the government to have direct access to the kill switch. Make the kill switch implementation be such that only a single phone can be disabled in a single manual operation -- no mass remote disabling.

Also, if they don't already do this, mandate an industry wide blacklist of IMEI's (or some other un-alterable baked -in number) in case the phone can be loaded with a new ROM image. That way at least, the phone can never be activated.

Why not extend this to WiFi only tablets as well? The manufacturer, and any manufacturer designated party (eg, Google?) can remotely disable a non-phone device if it ever phones home and has been registered by its owner as stolen.

> What they want to do is be able to shut down everyone's line of communications just in case the hoi polloi get too uppity.

Actually, a more effective way to do that is to have a way to shut off communication at the towers. This would preserve the ability to send out mass propaganda to still working phones in the event of an 'emergency'. Also, I hear that there is some value in the metadata. Also the phones are tracking devices. It might be more effective and valuable to fake busy signals, and other communication interruptions rather than to outright kill smartphones.

> What they want to do is be able to shut down everyone's line of communications just in case the hoi polloi get too uppity.

I wonder if dumb-phones would have the kill switch? I don't see them, or maybe I just don't notice, but I hear that a lot of people use dumb-phones.

If 500 seniors graduate in CS from a typical state university system in a year, but only 100 can actually function as an intern or junior developer upon graduation then you have 400 people who should probably have never made it past year two of their program. In my alma mater's case, we were weighted heavily toward testing because the alternative was that only about 30% of our CS students would graduate. Our valedictorian, an excellent test taker, couldn't even teach herself Python when she had a whole week or two to learn it and write up a presentation on it. Yet with a 2.5 GPA I managed to do Smalltalk. Go figure...

A similar thing is happening with managers. A lot of the PMPs I've worked with are no better or in fact worse than the non-PMP managers I've dealt with.

Firefox OS is trying to fix much of this.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firef...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
The Web is the most successful platform of all time and we're leading the pack on bringing a the Web platform to mobile in a way that's integrated rather than fractured like the existing app store models.

The cost of living and working is substantially higher in NYC, Chicago, LA, DC, etc. than in their suburbs. It makes no sense for a company to move into NYC where the costs are so high when it can provide incentives to live and work 1 hour away where the costs are much cheaper. Everything from building costs to payroll costs will be lower and the people just as happy or more so because the lower pay will correspond with lower cost of living and stress.

Suburbs do have their own public amenities, so his argument is completely fallacious in that respect. I'm sure plenty of residence of Fairfax VA would find it hilarious that businesses that choose to locate there as opposed to downtown DC are "avoiding public amenities like restaurants and transit."

Fukushima is a serious nuclear disaster. It's a very situation that we should all be concerned about. But this should not lead to any pause in our appetite for nuclear energy.

What people often fail to appreciate is that even coal fired powerstations release quite large amounts of radioactive material in to atmosphere. Coal fired powerstations burn about a million times as much material as a nuclear powerstation per joule of energy produced. Some of that material is radioactive. That stuff isn't been sealed in a container in burrried in a mountain, it's being blown up chimney stacks along with the rest of the rather unpleasant stuff.

Don't believe me? Reflect on this passage taken from this (PDF) document:

The EPA found slightly higher average coal concentrations than used by McBride et al. of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively. Gabbard (A. Gabbard, “Coal combustion: nuclear resource or danger?,” ORNL Review 26, http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview... 34/text/colmain.html.) finds that American releases from each typical 1 GWe coal plant in 1982 were 4.7 tonnes of uranium and 11.6 tonnes of thorium, for a total national release of 727 tonnes of uranium and 1788 tonnes of thorium. The total release of radioactivity from coal-fired fossil fuel was 97.3 TBq (9.73 x 1013 Bq) that year. This compares to the total release of 0.63 TBq (6.3 x 1011 Bq) from the notorious TMI accident, 155 times smaller.

So far, there has not been a single confirmed death due to Fukushima accident. In comparison, there were 20 deaths in the US just mining for coal in 2013. This is not to mention all the deaths being caused by cancers and other health problems being caused by breathing polluted air.

If we're ever going to get on top of this climate change challenge, nuclear must be leading the charge. Nuclear is a safe, non-polluting technology. Modern designs are fail-safe in every sense of the word. The newer designs can even cope with a loss of external power (like Fukushima experienced) yet still stay safe.

This is the 21st century. The technology is mature, sensible and safe. Really, we should be looking to retire every coal fired plant as a matter of urgency, if only to reduce the amount of radioactive contamination of the atmosphere!!

How do they even know that they'll be able to target North Korea in this way? North Korea's systems are likely crude, home-grown solutions compared to Iran which used Siebel systems and stuff like that. North Korea is by comparison one Chinese power change away from being functionally embargoed by every other country on Earth. This strikes me as something akin to the Independence Day ending in reverse.

Honor Harrington? The first 67 books in the series were okay -- the ones that took place when Harrington was still a mere human. The last 589, however, have been a bit of a stretch. You know, the ones where she becomes a master space-yachtsman; a martial arts master; acquires a bionic arm; a bionic eye; an elite cadre of crack-shot martial arts masters bodyguards; a super-intelligent, super-empathic, telepathic, vicious pet "treecat,;" when her friends, relatives and everyone around her acquire these same "treecats;" becomes CEO of a planet-spanning multi-billion dollar corporation, fabulously wealthy Duchess of a land on a medieval planet, and High Admiral of the galaxy's most formidable space navy, close confidant of The Queen -- all the while boning the Prime Minister (while the PM's wife looks on approvingly because, well, she's Honor Harrington (see above)).

A few problems:

- What about circular reactions?
- Is SQL really that right language for encoding business logic?
- Triggers are kind of an anti-pattern.
- What about atomicity? What if I need the whole reaction chain to work or none of it.

I'm afraid there more questions than answers with this proposed pattern.