If you're going to be pedantic I'll join :)

You are, in fact, an American. The US is a federation, meaning power is granted by the federal government to the lower states. So the government of the US determines whether a state can set a legal drinking age, or whether that is up to the US government itself. The European union is a union of sovereign states. It is the sovereign states that determine (together) which powers are granted to the union government. That's quite a big difference.

Another way to determine your nationality is to check your passport. Mine certainly doesn't say European Union like yours says United States ;)

I think one concern is that allowing Oracle to control MySql is in a way asking the fox to guard the henhouse. If the solution is to wait for a fork of MySql, then you might as well force Oracle to divest MySql directly. Else you've effectively allowed Oracle to kill of the MySql brand.

Another thing is that Oracle formally announced the merger two weaks earlier in the US than in Europe, effectively making sure that the US authorities would be first to publish their verdict. As I read it in the newspaper, that is not the normal procedure and it may have irritated the European Commisioner. Mrs Kroes has a reputation for toughness so the current powerplay will like do little.

That doesn't make sense. Assume you don't report the future crime. Then you're in violation at that moment, even before the crime has been committed. But how do you prove that in court before the crime has actually been committed? You can't since the criminal act itself has not yet occurred.

Now if the crime is actually committed, you can't be guilty of knowing about a future crime and not reporting it, since the crime itself is now past and no longer future.

Some disclaimers:
- if *planning* a crime is criminal, then you might be liable to report knowledge about that. but again the crime is not future then since the planning itself is (partially) past and that is the criminal act in question.
- if you're a foolproof fortuneteller, then I guess you could be convicted of knowledge about a future crime with the help of another foolproof fortuneteller. Off course it would be simpler to just have the witness foolproof fortuneteller inform the police beforehand but I digress.

dude where is this heat coming from? From sunlight, right.

Where did that sunlight go before they started converting it into energy (as proproped by this plan)? Exactly, it warmed up the environment.

See it now? You're not adding any heat in this case, so there's no negative impact on the climate.

oh don't sweat it. It gives your fellow /. readers a warm feeling of "hey I've been here a while... and apparently so has this guy!".

And don't forget, (even Picasso hated to finish work)

Hasn't your sig been the same for several years now? Are you *still* working on that movie? Wouldn't it be time to expand the description to include 'slow going' ? ;)

wouldn't your solution restrict you to circular lenses only? not very fashionable i'd say...

So what you're saying is that developers should become better at:

- eliciting requirements
- designing simple, usable software

The prevailing mood on /. seems to be that users should become better at expressing their requirements. I find that baffling; it's like walking into a restaurant and having the chef come up to you to ask how many teaspoons of cumin should go into your dish. User's don't have requirements - the whole concept was made up by developers in response to complaints that they were developing sh*t software. The focus on requirements is a symptom, not a cure. Instead we should focus on empathizing with users: what is it they are trying to achieve and in what context are those goals embedded?

[blatant self-promotion] my company actually works that way, with considerable success (measured by happy clients)[/]

Well the difference is you're paying for your model trains with your own money, whereas the scientist is being paid with *our* money. Big difference.

The same goes for the difference between a business man focused on the bottom line and a scientist. The public never complains about companies performing useless research, they complain about government paid scientists doing useless research.

Strange that the other replies praising your post didn't pick up on this. (I wonder whether they're scientists...).

I have actually, and your comment does not hold true for government in general, luckily.

What you and the OP seem to have lost somewhere along the way is the realization that you are spending taxpayers money and you have a moral obligation to do so sparingly.

How is this a bad thing? If you can spend less to achieve your objective, why wouldn't you?

It is unlikely North Korea is looking for a fight. They don't stand a chance and are very well aware of that. Up until now they've used their nuclear program to leverage negotations with the US, nothing else. There's no point in them starting a nuclear war (or any other type of armed conflict for that matter) since they are sure to lose.

You could compare North Korea to an well-versed spoiled kid: enough of a distraction to annoy you and get you to do stuff, but too little of a threat to actually take any serious action on. Let 'em be and worry about Pakistan instead.

If you can do it faster and for less RAM in a different language then you owe your users to do so.

4GB (yes Gigabyte) will cost you $75 nowadays. If you let your choice of language be determined by 30MB extra memory usage, you're optimizing the wrong variable (unless you're targetting a memory constricted environment of course). Better select the language that lets you write code the quickest. Considering the lack of refactoring support for C++ mentioned in other posts, I'd say C# should be a lot faster to write code for.

try Resharper. It'll fix that code completion for you, and do tons of more useful stuff.