The only thing that could possibly improve the NFL is the introduction of edged weapons. Football, basketball, baseball are all sports that require one ball. Auto racing however, requires...

He wouldn't doff his hood? Was he wearing a cape with a hood or a hoodie? Hoodies in the UK are the outerwear of choice for adolescents with criminal intent. Jedis in polite society always doff their hoods whilst indoors. This guy was a pretender.

Do Caucasian Sikhs in training count?

The real motivation for all conferences is to make $$. Anyone who organizes a conference with any other purpose in mind is misleading himself. The goal is to get all the 'experts' and other loudmouths to show up so that everyone else thinks it's important to be there. It's just like a rave, sans MDMA.

6) Take out the internals of a dead laptop, replace with 10 solid fuel rocket engines, 9v battery and necessary fuses. Use the screen latch to complete the fuse circuit. Direct engines such that laptop flies away when screen is opened. 7) Make a dummy laptop with a 9v DIY siren in it. Once the screen is opened, the siren stays on until the battery dies. include extra batteries wired in series. 8) Seal a few thousand live fleas inside a dummy laptop such that when the screen is opened, the fleas are broadcast locally. Hungry fleas wake up and eat thief. Fleas can survive 9-10 months without food in most climates. Most of my ideas involve filling a dummy laptop with something unpleasant.

I've open sourced projects to gain users. In this instance, it made sense because the market for selling services was just as big as the software market. And most companies that needed the software couldn't figure out how to set it up and run it without some training and consulting. At least not effectively. They COULD do it, but we could do it for them better, and much faster. It was very generalized software with a large audience and a wide user base. There was enough competition from Microsoft, Oracle and IBM that we knew we had a large market, and that going open source would increase the number of users and pace of development. So we had both commercial licensing and open source licensing, all using the same code. There was no reason to hide any of the code, it wasn't clever or original or better than anything else, it just performed well and was easy to use. And was cheaper to run than any of the competitors. I don't see any reason to open source the core functionality of your code. If you are having trouble getting customers, giving it away isn't going to improve that situation. You have to compete and win, that's all. Or at least win enough to be successful.

Can a cannon ball be skipped over water like a stone? I'm gonna say this myth is confirmed.

The article is pure opinion, biased by a few limited experiences. I've been working for 7 years with two contracting firms based in India (not infosys). We also have a large development office in South America where the time zones line up with our global HQ. You can't really expect good results from contractors of any origin if you throw projects over the wall at them. It doesn't matter where the developers are from. This is just as big a problem with IT consultancies from the US. How many engineers have looked at contractor code and said "That is beautiful and extremely easy to maintain", rather than "we need to rewrite this ASAP"? I've never heard anything like that no matter who the contractors were or where they were from. I've worked with Anderson Consulting, Computer Associates, and Thoughtworks over the last 10 years or so. No full time developer wanted to keep any of the stuff the contractors produced without significant rewriting. We don't use our contractors and IT consultants this way now. Most of our offshore contractors can be expected to meet our coding standards after a few weeks of working in our codebase. Cost-wise, we don't spend less per developer for contractors, and we probably spend more in logistics and communication costs than we would for a full time hire. But we can size our workforce according to our needs on a year to year basis, and this is extremely beneficial to full time workers here in the US. We might not hire as many US workers as we could, but we also don't have massive layoffs.

Oracle Portals! You want bindings? Check. You want unnecessary abstraction? Check. You want portlets? Check. You want to empty your pockets for Larry Ellison? Check. Any 20-something neckbeard can write a Rails app. Most teenagers and hackers kluge up a PHP app without much trouble. You can't spit without hitting another 'extremely mature' PHP framework. But it takes real balls and lots of money to create an Oracle Portals app that sucks anyway and makes you all want to commit suicide. Why do you think you need a web framework? What exactly does this small web based business do besides process a few forms? It doesn't matter really. Talking about it and asking /. a bunch of vague questions won't get any work done. In my experience, frameworks are the source of most evils. The pyramid of sand has no internal scaffolding.

Well, people in the USA want fair wages for their jobs. In countries with no minimum wage or extremely low or unenforceable minimums exist, people will do whatever they can to survive. People are not crying for jobs they don't want. They just want the money they spend going to American workers, not to Asian and South American governments and conglomerates who do not pay their workers fair wages.

Let me axe you a kweschun: Are you some kind of for-en-er? China then turns the weakening dollar into massive reserves by manipulating their currency. This is a bigger problem than spying, but spying is part of the whole US-China problem. The big problem will come later when US companies/govt. make us completely dependent on China for food. That's a scary situation which we should be working against now. Ban Chinese manufactured imports. That includes everything Apple makes in China. See what that does in the long run for the US economy.

Fingernails or cat's claws stuck caught in wool, like a wool jacket or tweed. This makes part of my brain hurt bad. The idea of it.