OOXML and the continued, though as yet unactioned, threat of patents over Linux both come to mind.

Microsoft is still every bit as evil as it once was. The chief difference between now and the 1990s is that its market, at least on the consumer side, is shrinking. For now that means they're forced to live with major open source projects like Linux, but I refer you back to Ballmer's patent threats. If it really goes down to the wire, you don't think Microsoft would try to litigate Linux out of existence? After all, we already know it bankrolled SCO's attempts.

Microsoft has never been, nor shall it ever be, a friend to open source. It hates it, fears it, is forced at times to cooperate with it, but you don't think there's a day that goes by that its executive don't wish open source would shrivel up and die?

There's no change in sentiment, simply in ability to act on the sentiment. The mere fact that they're sending out their latest psuedo-FOSSite quisling demonstrates that Redmond is the same as it ever was.

At least once a year, Redmond sends one of its shills out to declare Microsoft's dedication to open source, and it's always a variation on the same theme.

All I can say is "fuck off you treacherous dog, Olivier Bloch."

Low-level programming is a specialist issue. Maybe it's time to turn C programming over to people with real EE degrees, or who can at least use an oscilloscope and wire up an Arduino. At the application level, who has time to manage memory by hand any more? EEs and mechatronics people, and OS and compiler developers, need to learn C, but most application programmers today do not.

The emphasis on Java isn't unreasonable. The pure-interpreter languages (Python, Perl) are too slow for large server-side operations. (If it's 3x as slow, you may need 3x as many server racks. That costs.) Java is memory-safe and goes reasonably fast. Go may become an alternative, but it's a little too weird to go mainstream yet. C++ has turned out to be a mess. It adds hiding to C without adding memory safety, an unfortunate feature combination unique to C++.

Realistically, a CS degree today needs to cover machine learning, which is all about calculus and matrix math. There's less need for discrite math and bit-pushing.

I have classic CS training - all that stuff in vol. 1 of Knuth, automata theory, optimization of logic gates, formal methods, proof of correctness, etc. It's just not that useful any more. Mostly I write Python and Javascript.

Is it deeply wrong that I originally read "WORKS4ME" as 'worksame' due to excessive IRC leetspeak exposure in my youth... and yet it still kind of made sense?

'Cause depth is the enemy of progress.

Or at least marketing.

Um, yeah, I don't believe you for even a quarter second.

1. Nobody who runs a wind farm would refer to wind turbines as "windmills". Seriously, that's like a third-grade level mistake. This is a windmill. This is a wind turbine. Nobody in the industry would ever call a wind turbine a windmill, they'd get laughed at.

2. The typical bat in the US weighs about 10 grams. Even if we assume that the "trucks" are only pickup trucks that can haul 2 tonnes and your use of the plural only means two - about the lowest possible way we could interpret your "truckloads every year" comment - that would be 400 thousand bats per year. Your mere 700 commercial-scale wind turbines (less than 2% of the US total) would have long ago driven to local extinction any bats in your area.

The reality, of course, is that estimates for all bat deaths from wind turbines in the US combined range from about 30k per year to 800k per year. All combined.

3. Your "destroys the health of operators and technicians" line puts you solidly in autism-vaccine cookoo land.

Just ignoring your grossly inaccurate description of wind power availability, or the concept that a wind farm operator is going to hire someone who despises wind power with a red-hot passion to run their facility.

Maybe now my e-mails to Tutankhamun will quit bouncing.

Yes. I was merely giving a couple of more mainstream examples to show that the "100 years no change" thing is utter bullshit - which it is even if you consider the transmission lines alone.

If that company provides good enough and cheap enough batteries for a lot of people to use nothing but rooftop solar all day and night - yes it's certainly going to deliver a shock to the worst run power companies that only survive due to a local monopoly. There's still plenty of little Enrons in the mix.
It's got to the point where price gouging in some places is enough to drive people to spend the large capital cost for solar panels plus storage and go mostly or completely offgrid, which then makes the utilities scream because they are being exposed to the cold winds of capitalism and making less monopoly profit! Poor babies!

The technology of power transmission hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years

HVDC is the biggest and most fundamental change but it's still rare. However substations are also full of plenty of things granddad would not recognise.

They did it to all sites hosted by Freedom Hosting. Most notably, they did it to Tormail -- not a kiddie porn site, a webmail provider.

So don't post the review until you've received your deposit back. Problem solved.

Of course you can also argue that a "bad" review is different from a "fair" review, even if the fair review described goods and service that other people may not want to pay for.

Of course, you could believe that Adam Smith missed something there

Adam Smith spoke of "goods" and "bads" but only one gets mentioned. There is supposed to be no downside to unfettered capitalism so long as it's not getting inflicted on you by a competitor - if it is then you get the government to step in and block those evil people that didn't go to school with Washington insiders.

Rants aside there seems to be at least three promising post-infection Ebola treatments that researchers have been testing on animals or are about to test. One is similar to the post-infection rabies vaccine in some way. If one of the works out well I'm sure "big pharma" will pick up the work from that publicly funded project and spend the money to develop it into a product. That's still a considerable sum even though their role these days is mostly product development while the public is footing the research bills.

Turns out you need some decent CPU power for that sort of stuff so ereaders that can handle complex PDFs have only been coming out for the last couple of years - and they are still slow for some PDF files. They don't have the processing power of an iPad or the top end android tablets.

The Boox is very good with PDFs and can even do CBR format.