Kind of like how the ARM platform is a total flop that no one uses, right? Open Hardware is basically doing what already happens with customization of ARM today, except people wouldn't have to pay ARM Holdings for the privilege. Also, AMD and Intel use compatible instruction sets despite very different underlying architecture. (Even Transmeta chips from back-in-the-day could still run the same software.)

Openness and experimentation DOES NOT necessitate incompatibility. Closed designs don't necessitate it DOES have compatibility (e.g. vendor lock-in). If a new design does become incompatible when people expect it not to, then that design naturally won't get widely adopted.

The entire issue is overblown. Let openness allow technology to evolve and improve. Standards and compatibility will arise when the market demands it, and variation/deviation/special-purpose will also arise when the market demands it. That's the way it's SUPPOSED to be.

The system of "credit" is the system of debt. You mostly only need credit whenever you're about to get yourself into debt, otherwise it really has little purpose. The ideal consumer is someone who makes the creditors rich, and must be seen as a worthy investment. The consumer must be:

1. Willing to get into lots of debt

2. Willing and able to pay back that debt with tons of interest (for the rest of their lives)

That's the gravy train for creditors. It's a corrupt system where getting more rich simply requires being rich already so you can loan money/assets, then soak up interest payments from other people's debts forever while you sit on your ass.

If you aren't going to participate in that bullshit, then they'll look for easier prey (a.k.a. people who aren't a "credit risk"). One of the best things you can do for yourself is get off the debt train. Don't be suckered by this scam of an economic system, and instead be thrifty as an alternative to being in debt. That's what people have been doing for thousands of years because the smart people realized that being debt free = freedom.

I think that was the point being made: it's not about the physical motion of "swiping", the problem is that the pattern is forced to be a contiguous line at all.

Whether I tap two corners and it adds the middle point automatically, or whether I swipe from one corner to the other, it doesn't matter because the problem is the same: this strategy reduces the total possible count of unique patterns.

The better implementation would be for the pattern to be detected as a sequence of activated points, where those points don't have to be part of a contiguous line, and the same point can still be reused later in the sequence. Really it would be better if each point simply flashed briefly when activated rather than using a line, because a line pattern is easy for someone across a room to be able to recognize. At the same time, while a tap on a point activates it, swiping motions should still work too, in case people still prefer their pattern to be contiguous.

Both preferences accommodated for, yet the total possible unique combinations goes up. Problem solved.

ARE YOU LISTENING, GOOGLE?

R, IIS, MongoDB, JQuery, Oracle, BigTable

That's what I most associate with Enterprise web development. Feel free to substitute IIS with Intercal.

If I had only two bullets and was locked in a room with Comcast, ZOMBIE Hitler, and ZOMBIE Osama Bin Laden... I'd shoot Comcast twice.

FTFY

This can really be condensed to only three, since some are redundant if you know the underlying cause. It's not like a research study is needed if you know people with successful marriages. The factors they chose that have an impact really only reflect the relevance of the following factors:

1. Taking marriage seriously. Eloping or skipping a honeymoon says "I don't want to invest much in this." Even those with moderate income can have a modest wedding and inexpensive honeymoon instead of going all out. Any indicator of not taking the marriage seriously is a negative, no matter what form it takes.

2. Genuinely valuing the other person for who they are. Hence, this means to not be a gold-digger or care more about looks. Also, dating longer is just an indicator that "finding the right person" is the attitude the person is taking, which means they want the person as a person to be a good match. By contrast, looks and money can be identified immediately, so it doesn't require a long time to get engaged. Desperation is also not a good reason for marriage, and desperation doesn't need a long time to get engaged.

3. Having a deterrent for divorce. Rich people, church-goers, and people with lots of people at their wedding have a lot of people to pressure you to stay together because you lead *public lives*. You don't get a private divorce, you get public embarrassment. Rich people have an additional deterrent in that it's a lot of money to lose if your ex-spouse wants to take you to the cleaners.

For varying degrees of "works":

1. Gun supporters argue that gun control laws are mistakenly focusing on the tool, not the motive (where motives are tied to actual causes). It's all a moot point if someone isn't trying to commit murder. If someone *is* intent on committing murder, then if they succeed with a knife instead, then gun control had no effect on saving innocent lives. Innocent lives were still taken due to the fact that the issue is the motive, not the tool. All you've succeeding in doing is disarm a law-abiding *citizenry* while retaining a heavily armed government (which isn't affected by such laws).

2. Reduction in the use of guns and subsequent increase in the use of knives doesn't mean that criminals can't get guns or that *no* guns are used overall, it merely means that there are cases where they saw no need for it in order to commit the murder. If the situation really warranted a gun, then they'd still just get a gun through illegal channels.

3. It's always shaky ground to compare gun crimes between countries, because again the point of gun supporters is to focus on the cause of the motives for crime instead of focusing on the tool. For example, European countries bordered with other European countries is a different problem than being bordered to Mexico (which in turn is chained to South American black markets). Much of gang violence and inner city violence and poverty is tied to the socioeconomic effects of the illegal drug trade. If a European country doesn't treat drug use as a crime (rather than a public health issue), or if recreational drugs are legal, then they have no 21st-century-Prohibition black market like the U.S. The U.S. teaches about Prohibition of the early 20th century, but not the lessons. Cultural goals also differ. You have to ask just how much you're willing to give up in order to have a perfectly safe world.

4. Statistics and damn lies, etc. One set shows guns up, crime up. Another says guns down, crime down. But yet others say guns up, crime *down*. Still others say guns down, crime *up*. So the question is this: does that mean the debate is at an impasse? The answer is NO. Guns are logically demonstrated as *not* the primary cause. How does this logic work? Like this: If the claim being refuted is "more guns equals more murder, less guns equals less murder", then it is *not* required to show that guns improve the situation *everywhere* you go. It is only required to show *one* instance that exists that refutes the claim. Those situations exist, therefore that means that the primary cause or causes are *not* guns. Other causes are the real causes. Perhaps guns are enablers as secondary causes, but in practice nothing anyone cares about will be solved by band-aids: the primary causes must be addressed first.

No. I don't know why so many "geeks/nerds" are confused about this. There's no grey area here. "Calculators" (e.g. adding machines) existed before the modern digital computer, so it's not about mere *calculation*, it's about whether or not (given enough time and memory) the language can calculate ANYTHING that can be calculated. It must be TURING COMPLETE (i.e. one means of universal computation amongst others such as Lambda Calculus).

It's not about mere basic arithmetic, it's about whether or not symbolic computation is possible. The litmus test is whether or not you can write a simulation of a universal Turing Machine within the computer language. If so, then it's a computer *programming* language. If not, then it's some other language such as a markup or *cough* stylesheet language.

Yes, computer languages can eventually be promoted to computer *programming* languages with additions to the language. For example, SQL used to only be a query language that is now a programming language due to recursive queries and a language for stored procedures (SQL/PSM) officially added to the spec.

Then programming languages are further divided into general purpose vs domain specific, etc. Simply, that theoretically equivalent computational power is not the same as equivalent practical power.

In the CSS3 calculator example, it's just a hack that uses the experimental calc() function of CSS3 for simple arithmetic and some hard-coded (finite) elements to manipulate. If you actually try out the "calculator", you'll notice it's not even a fully functioning calculator, much less possessing the computational power of a real programming language. If that's not clear enough, then let me put it this way: can you write a potentially infinite loop (i.e. indeterminate number of iterations at the beginning) in CSS?

http://nelsonfarm.net/issue.htm

I would go through the trouble of going down the list, but Google already exists.

The summary makes it sound like volcanoes are the explanation for greenhouse gases, which is completely false. It doesn't say that at all. Actually, it's the opposite.

RTFA and you learn (as quoted from the .PDF supplied by the article): "According to a new Berkely Earth study released today, the average temperature of Earth's land has risen by 1.5 C over the past 250 years. The good match between the new temperature record and historical carbon dioxide records suggests that the most straightforward explanation for this warming is human greenhouse gas emissions." (Emphasis mine.)

The .PDF article explains that human CO2 contribution, volcanic activity, and ocean activity (e.g. Gulf Stream and El Nino) are the biggest contributors that are needed to match the graph of temperatures over time. But volcanoes follow the drops in temperature on the graph, not the rises in temperature. Contributions from solar activity exist but were determined to be negligible. They explain that CO2 doesn't prove to be responsible for the warming, but is by far the best contender. As stated by the scientific director, "To be considered seriously, any alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does carbon dioxide." So denialists can't simply supply "common sense" alternatives: the alternatives must match the data at least as well (or better) than CO2.

"I like to ride my goat while swabbing the deck. And that is NOT a euphamism for anything." --Hetalia

The most important part of the summary. Discuss...

People claiming that they can make "a sound every 2.5 seconds" don't get it. It's is not the same as a single continuous waveform oscillating at 0.189 Hz. There is a big difference between a continuous waveform at that frequency versus some joe blow making a click at 3 kHz for 250 ms duration every 2.5 seconds. No, it is not a set of pulses.

Don't you mean "Moore's Law", not "Murphy's Law"? Murphy's Law hasn't had a major effect on processors since the Pentium fdiv bug.

No, developers should NOT be sued. I'm quite frankly tired of hearing this drivel. COMPANIES or their UPPER MANAGEMENT should be sued (depending on the type of company) because THEY are the ones truly responsible and accountable. "They get paid the big bucks for a reason." Unless the person is a very crappy developer, most devs I know actually WANT quality control and the time required to write software properly. It's almost always management that tells them no, that "time to market" with something that vaguely resembles a product is most important, no matter how angry at the result the customers will be. Until the people with the actual power to change company decisions are held accountable for their decisions, nothing changes. So why are we wasting time persecuting the people with little power and who actually agrees with us?