Chrome has had it for a pretty long time, Chromium doesn't (issues of non-freedom with the viewer plugin).

always having exact change for any transaction requires a good amount of acrobatics, especially if you live in places that still have penny-ful prices.

Laws don't work that way. If you distribute something in a certain area, you must abide by their laws (at least concerning usage).

While they are more reactive than proactive on that front unluckily(or luckily, depending on your standpoint), it's not as if the reaction treats exactly one case.

body scanners can stop more than just shoe bombers in principal. It's very much a unit-test philosophy: When you get a problem, make a test , and with some luck the test will have more coverage than just one specific thing.

Obviously doing nothing is not really a solution either. While locked cockpits stop a lot of things, it doesn't stop explosions from causing problems.

Fair use is when the usage is limited, notably concerning the "value" of the IP.

If Google takes Yelp reviews wholesale and puts them into search results, they're effectively reducing the value of the post, since Yelp will not get a click. Granted, there are arguments about discoverability and the like, but it's not some trivial fair use.

As someone who has had to deal with ADD for his entire life , I can assure you that it is not just a pharmaceutical ploy. I can barely write this sentence , and I have already been distracted three times. When I was in middle school, I was prescribed Adderall to deal with my ADD, and my concentration capabilities shot up immensely (going from 90 minutes to do math homework to 10). In high school I stopped taking it, and forgot mainly about it ( I moved to a different country at the time, and was having problems with the language and culture).

Now in the "real" world, I realise how handicapping this affliction is, where I'll take an hour to write a 2-sentence e-mail, and where I can't read through a research paper without taking a break every 2 minutes. Unfourtunately I now live in a country where Adderall is illegal, and the country I lived in before doesn't recognize ADD/ADHD in adults. There are people with worse problems, but it's still extremely frustrating to have the attention span of a goldfish.

As an aside, the best way I've found to deal with the problem is to say things out loud as I do them, I think that somehow the speech centers of the brain help with concentration (though I still tune out quite frequently in conversations). I'm less than comfortable about doing that with my coworkers though.

It would be nicer if, in these situations, people would gravitate more towards a std::sort or equivalent but consider the following: - People are used to sorting taking a while. All you need to do is display a spinning wheel gif that appears after you click "sort" and people won't really care in many situations - Businesses aren't all Google/Facebook/whoever. If you are working on giant databases, then obviously you should be trained for it. If you have a text file with 100 phone numbers in it, who cares how long it takes to sort, it'll be negligeable compared to the initial file read. - Computers have so much disposable time anyways, that a lot of "inefficient" ways of doing things are probably the better choice anyways , in respect to maintanability. I do think that it's a good idea for smart people to be available to write some code, but even if v1 is badly written by beginners, a well designed systems will have ample tests that would allow you to see "oh look, this guy is using bubble sort instead of timsort" , and allow you to iterate on it. Easier to optimized working code than make optimized code work.

I agree. Despite what we want to believe, it's not as if the act of coding is in itself a skill that requires 5 years to learn. Especially considering that a large majority of code is not necessarily going into Google, but into some enterprise software where bubble sort is fine, and they're running on such fast machines anyways that it doesn't need to be using bit twiddling tricks to win a handful of cycles per second.

I think what we need to move more towards is getting CS people out of coding and into becoming software architects. Most software can be easily divided into (relatively) simple chunks, and if you have enough skills put into actually building software, instead of writing code (which is probably the least important part of the process), then the divisions become trivial.

We'll always need the super-skilled programmer to work on the single blocking function that eats up 90% of CPU time, and requries intricate knowledge of all the subsystems involved. But most of the time the code itself is just a translation of pretty simple ideas. Anyone with enough time and motivation can absorb the knowledge necessary to work on them. Think of all the Excel spreadsheets in the world, and how many people who would never say they are programmers actually build complex systems in them, because programming in itself isn't hard. What's hard is building something that is clear and maintanable.

CS grads, who do have (if superficial) knowledge of many different systems, have the knowledge to do the very sort of big picture design that is necessary to building maintanable software. We need to get these guys out of the workshop and into the design bureaus, because they are the ones with the knowledge necessary to become the architects of software. Much like how architects don't build houses, software architects shouldn't be relegated to writing code.

A well-designed system might have many small parts that can be hard to maintain, since it might've been written badly. But if the system is well-designed, the intent of the code will have been set on the outset, so you could rewrite it. And if it's small, a person with enough courage and time could decipher it. But the inverse situation is a true nightmare. A single "genius" programmer might by himself write the most amazing subroutines the world has ever seen, but if the general structure is incomprehensible, then the program will be maintanable.

Let's get CS grads out of coding, and into places where they're really needed.

>US Federal law only applies to US citizens I believe federal law applies in any area of US jurisdiction. Being a foreigner does not somehow preclude you from this. Pretty sure the UK ( or wherever assange was at the time of the crime ) isn't in that area, but espionage is espionage, I don't really think that the locality of the crime matters to the legal system. I don't see why the US couldn't ask for extradition.

maybe they thought they didn't need 30 police officers to arrest Madoff, while they would for a guy with one of the biggest gun collections in the country (assuming).

While web browsing and all that jazz might be relegated to phones and whatnot, even simple things like word processing (things "real people" do) become frustrating without a decent amount of screen real estate and stable input methods. While something like Surface answers (barely) this, it's really "just" a laptop with a flexible keyboard and a touchscreen. Even the most technologically inept person realises that a keyboard is pretty useful for fast typing. I use "the cloud" all the time for personal things, but there have been a few times ( my wifi decides to stop working or my ISP decides to stop working or Dropbox decides to stop working) where I've welcomed my local fallback. Imagining that we're going towards a no-storage future ignores the problems our current infrastructure has.

Google already has video recognition filters in place. Granted it's not nearly as develloped as their music recognition but it exists.

Yelling out generalities doesn't make you any righter.