Just to expand on this - standardized testing makes the class curriculum adapt to teach the test, plus takes a number of days away from teaching to administer the tests. Want to teach about some important history event or some mathematical method you taught last year? Too bad. It's not on the standardized test and you don't have the time to put it in there anymore.

OK, I'm wondering if I'm just doing this wrong. What is everybody using their phones for that takes advantage of data transfer rates that high? I can't figure needing more than 1 or 2 mbps to stream cat videos on youtube or load map tiles in google maps, and my own phone streams Pandora well enough even over EDGE (strange things happen to cell phone signals in my office building). Am I missing out on something fundamental about the smartphone experience that really benefits from a 100mbps LTE network?

Y'know, the thing I liked best about being on Sprint was the shitty coverage. Somebody calls that I don't want to talk to? Oh strange, my phone never rang. Damn yous Sprint!

I'm OK with contracts like that being legal - just look at it as a way to keep ahead of the folks who are too lazy to save themselves that money! People are awful good at convincing themselves to consistently overpay for an "unlimited everything" plan "y'know, just in case I need it." I crunched the numbers on my pre-paid plan and figured I'd need to go over on my minutes by about a factor of three to make the cost line up with the unlimited contract plans - and my call history had never, ever been that high. So just like you, I'm $30 a month for the same text and data rates, and a handful of nationwide minutes, plus the benefit of starting with an unlocked phone right off the bat. Never going back to a contract plan again.

Popular enough for over a million and a half plays on Pandora alone in a six month window - which by my math comes to a hair over a tenth of a cent per play. So that puts her in... I don't know, what income bracket makes about three grand a year?

Mod parent... Ironic?

Getting somebody's password is far easier than breaking in to their house, has far less dire consequences, and can be done remotely (with even *lower* risk of consequences).

I'm certainly not arguing against being able to resell games you've purchased, I'm just trying to point out that there are some hurdles that would need to be overcome.

How do you know he's not talking about bit torrent?

'Cause the police have so much time available to look for your stolen game - they're gonna hop on tracking down that IP address right away. Fact is this is not a trivial problem to solve.

Shut up, girly man!

Somebody mod both of these guys up! Tunnel vision is tunnel vision - whether you're focused strictly on what you're coding and to hell with what it needs to do (or whomever needs to maintain it), or you're focused strictly on a process audit and to hell with what you're actually coding - you're not doing anybody any favors.

If it helps change the sad state of racial equality in the states, then sure.

Oh I love it when you talk dirty

Ah, but Facebook isn't a software company, it's a data company. They don't sell software, they sell eyeballs. When the product is the community you build, the software isn't very important. Look at an actual software or integration (hardware and software) business and I think you'll see a drastically different approach to software design. Where I am it's practically law that you don't open an editor until you have requirements and have worked out a preliminary architecture. The requirements will change and the architecture will adapt to those changes, but what's faster: Reverse engineering a pile of kludges or looking at a design and saying "Oh, we need to make this change here."

I can't malign beer as a "lubricant" of sorts to get creative juices flowing when I'm trying to solve a problem (or to loosen me up to tumble down a mountain when I'm pretending to snowboard). But when actually programming? Hell, if I try to program after just one beer I only want to take a nap.

All that said, I still really love beer.