The problem with your argument is that fair use is not a right. Instead, it's a defense against infringement. Even if something is within the boundaries of fair use, no one is required to respect that...it only protects you from being liable for infringement. So when someone (or some machine) denies that fair use, there's nothing legally wrong with doing so.

The problem isn't (yet) with the definition of fair use, it's with the lack of protection of fair use as a right. For the purpose it serves, fair use is defined well enough...it describes enough to explain the intent and purposefully leaves the interpretation to judges and juries. To protect against cases like the one in the story, we need to first make it against the law to deny fair use...then we can worry about more explicitly defining what is and isn't fair use.

That's the thing that's not mentioned in the story...when faced with the proposition of extending our lives, they don't indicate which part of our lives would be extended. If you narrow the choices to 80 or 120, the answer for many people would depend on whether you spend that extra 40 years as a creaky, wrinkled older person who's taking 10 different meds to stave off death or whether they somehow figure out how to extend the 20s, 30s and 40s to give you the extra longevity.

The way that science has previously approached increases in longevity has been to try to understand and prevent the final disease or malady that finishes us off. Increasingly, that won't be enough. We'll need to concentrate more of our efforts into combating aging and keeping people young longer rather than just alive longer.

Basically...more time in my 20s and 30s? Yes please. More time as a cantankerous old man opining about how great life used to be before all the young 'uns started playing on my lawn? I'll pass.

While I agree with what you've said, there's one piece that I think is necessary to make hand coding work. If you've got a client like the kid in the story has, use a rapid mock-up tool like Balsamiq to create mock-ups that the client can ok before you start coding by hand. Hand coding produces the best results, but it's also the slowest method. If you go through many iterations before you get to a finished product, you'll waste a lot of time using hand coding alone. It's better to reach some semblance of consensus/accord prior to writing the code so you can limit the number of iterations you'll have to go through. The client will always have feedback and will always need additional revs of the design before they're satisfied. But okaying the skeleton ahead of time can limit the number of revs that need to happen.

Also, as others have pointed out, hand coding in Notepad is very different than hand coding in an editor that can do content assist and has integrated documentation. I know very few good developers that have wasted their time memorizing the DOM and JavaScript to the point where they don't need reference. Switching between the editor and a browser sucks. Use an IDE that will help you type less.

Sounds like WebOS...developers wrote WebOS apps in HTML/JavaScript too. By all accounts I've heard, the software was excellent and peopled loved the OS. Yet it didn't exactly take over the mobile market or even "win big." I wish Mozilla the best of luck with trying the same play ~3 years later, but I'm not betting one red cent on them (or wasting any of my time developing apps for their OS.)

It's also incredibly misleading. If they'd named it correctly, it would be NoACID. That's the real issue at hand...making a different CAP compromise. The programming interface is really not that big of an issue. Yes, it's different, but as programmers we should be able to adapt to both fairly easily. What really is important is how to achieve high scalability. People have rightly zeroed in on the fact that if your application can tolerate eventual consistency, that problem can get a lot easier than the ACID-compliant data stores. The fact that those data stores all use SQL is more of a coincidence or a byproduct of the history of how databases developed rather than a fact of life...you can have a non-ACID SQL database and you can have an ACID non-SQL database.

The whole article is wrong-headed as it only examines the programming interface which is, for the most part, unimportant. A valuable discussion of the topic would have examined what an ACID-compliant database would need to do to achieve the kinds of scale that a non-ACID database can and would have looked into the kinds of application logic that would be necessary to cope with the eventual consistency situation in non-ACID databases. Instead we got a primer on how to use both types of databases without any why, when or gotchas.

Get a balance exercise ball to replace your chair. Keep your chair for the first couple of months as it will take some time until your back is strong enough to sit on one for the entire day. In the end, the working position is just as comfortable as a chair but you spend a large part of the day working your core (not strenuously, but it adds up.)

These are the ones that many people in my office have (adjust size according to your height.)

No, it's because any AP with an SSID of Romney will not respond consistently. Then again, any AP with an SSID of Obama is heavily compromised and, even when given full power, does almost nothing.

No, it isn't. Everyone parrotting what you've said invariably lives away from the tech centers of the US and is, essentially, complaining that they can't get a tech job in an area where there aren't tech jobs.

Meanwhile, back in Silicon Valley, San Francisco or any of the other areas where tech companies cluster, we have a serious lack of talent available to us. We've had open positions for well over a year that we just can't fill. Our offers are not low, or at least they wouldn't be if we could find anyone we'd want to hire. And our list of qualifications isn't long...know how to program in Java and have some clue as to how to solve problems. You'd think that anyone willing to pay $120k-$150k for someone with those attributes would have plenty of takers. You'd be wrong.

It may not be fair that you have to move to get a good tech job, but that's how the industry works. But it doesn't mean that tech companies are scheming to hire foreigners and screw Americans.

I see people making this kind of complaint and then I see the endless parade of unqualified applicants for our developer positions (some of which have actually managed to get offers, despite my protestations) and I almost never see anyone capable of meeting our meager requirements. Those requirements, basically, boil down to 3-5 years of Java and the ability to solve a few rather simple problems. The ability to speak English has even been relegated to a "nice to have." For that, we're willing to offer $120k-$150k/yr and a sane 40 hour work week.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like slavery to me. My experience indicates that you're right in one regard...there's no shortage of people who want jobs. What there is a shortage of is people non-delusional people who've taken the time to gain the relatively small amount of experience to justify giving them that job.

Rather than looking for work there, try to find US companies that offshore work to China. Failing that, try applying with a firm that works with US companies, though don't expect to be paid much above what they pay their locals.

My employer has an offshore team in Beijing. Most of the developers there speak pigeon English and would welcome a native speaker to help improve and we'd welcome someone to help bridge the language gap that can be quite difficult over Skype and such. I'd look for companies like us and inquire about whether we'd be willing to hire you to work in the China office. If you've got a good Java background, I'm sure we'd seriously consider hiring you to work at our China office. We might require you to train for a couple of weeks in SF first and come back for a couple weeks a year, but I'd hope that wouldn't be a problem for you. As a bonus, you'd likely not have to deal with getting a Chinese work permit, though you should probably confirm that.

If you're interested, respond to this comment with some way to contact you and I can send your resume to HR.

Some of us downloaded them because we didn't want to wait the years it would take before HBO aired them. Mind you, I downloaded them from Amazon on my Kindle and actually paid for them.

It's one thing to have to wait a week for a crack-on-tv show like Lost and an entirely different thing to have to wait a week for a show based on a book that's been available for years. Besides...the show has become a bad parody of the book...they're making lame changes for no good reason and generally rushing through everything while simultaneously adding bizarrely-long bits of dialog that weren't in the book.

BMI is an good indicator of health, not a good measurement of it. Someone with a BMI in the healthy range is very likely to be a healthy weight. Someone out of that range needs more accurate (and more expensive) tests to determine whether they are over or under weight. For the CS grads out there, BMI is like a compact Bloom Filter...yes, you get false positives, but it's still a really useful data structure if you understand its purpose.

And it's precisely because doctors are too busy that something like this makes sense. It's been the case for a number of years that doctors have been less able to keep up-to-date with the latest information on prescription drugs. Between the rate of release, marketing from the pharmaceutical companies and the various medical studies, it's ton of information to process. Doctors either choose to concentrate on a very limited subset of available drugs or they fall woefully behind. Pharmacists are, in my experience, much more able to keep up, since they only have to care about the medication side of the equation.

For what it's worth, I'm not talking about experience as a patient. In a previous job, I worked for a PBM (prescription benefits management) company and was in charge of integrating a third-part drug database into one of their web products. I attended conferences with doctors and pharmacists and both seemed to echo the sentiment that keeping abreast of both medical developments and new drug therapies was almost impossible. The conclusion that I reached was that it makes sense to decouple the diagnosis from the prescription process. Doctors should be free to recommend or prescribe specific medications, but they should prefer to simply supply a diagnosis and allow the pharmacist to prescribe the proper medication given a patients allergies, other medications and insurance.

This seems like a sensible step towards that.

Similarly, the judge is much less likely to have any personal stake in a legal decision on the issue than someone who has been studying and developing APIs and languages for decades.

As a software developer, it's occurred to me how cool it would be to have a chance to serve on the jury in this case. I think it would be an amazing opportunity to learn about the legal issues involved in my chosen profession and a chance to get a deep-dive into one of the technologies that I have to use on a daily basis. I'm not sure which way I would end up deciding...despite the prevailing pro-Google opinions on this site (some of which I agree with), Java is licensed the way it is for an important reason. By producing an implementation that only supports a subset of Java's functionality, Google has forced developers to target a "lowest common denominator" subset of the Java's feature set. As a developer, if I distribute a software library, I now have to consider whether I want it to work on Android and possibly ignore better ways of implementing functionality to support that platform. That decision sucks and is the reason that Sun wrote the license the way they did.

But in all my internal deliberations, I'm entirely cognizant that I'm in no way impartial. I'm constantly thinking about how it affects me, even if it doesn't represent a bias towards one side or another. There's a reason why experts testify at cases rather than decide them. It may feel frustrating to people who feel like they know better, but I firmly believe that unbiased and ignorant is superior to biased and informed.

That's bullshit. There has been just such a method and it's been common knowledge for quite some time. You simply need to include a check with at least 3 zeros between the leading non-zero digit and the decimal point. If you actually want them to do more than look at the opinions expressed in letter (i.e. care), add more zeros.