You missed GP's point.

Yes, I'm pretty sure I did.

A guy basically walked into an airport and started shooting, and half the comments on slashdot are bent on discussing the description of the weapon used, how he got it, whether or not it was legal, what kind of magazine he was using, what kind of firing pattern he used, and/or how he acquired the weapon.

I doubt any of that shit mattered much to the shooter, and even less to his victims. So yeah, I don't really get the point.

In which case I'd have to wonder why someone would go through the trouble of procuring an illegal firearm for themselves ... simply to use it in a manner that any legal (and easily obtained) semi-automatic rifle would suffice for.

I might be going out on a limb, but I'd suspect that the details of local firearms laws aren't exactly high on the list of concerns for someone planning to shoot up an airport.

It doesn't need to be much more complicated than "what do I have and what can I get?" although I suppose he might have gone to the trouble of personalizing his weapon like that guy who shot up the Navy yard a while back.

This is a great hack if your intent is to hire a large number of people to pass counterfeit bills at many machines in the same day,

This would be a great hack if your intent was to demonstrate the simplest and least detectable attack against an anti-counterfeiting device, which is a logical follow-through on the "need a few minutes alone with the machine" attack.

I don't find the money-making angle particularly interesting, myself, nor (apparently) do the people who came up with the firmware hack.

The next step in the attack process I'd like to see is a design for a counterfeit bill that'll trigger a bug in the firmware causing it to pass the bill. No need for pesky access to the machines in advance.

It's still better than a SlashBI or Slashdot TV submission.

Granted, it's a low bar.

Since when did copying an existing work become innovation?

Ah, but it's not just a copy. It's a copy of something "on the Internet" and/or "in a browser", which according to the US Parent Office is almost certainly innovation.

Devices running iOS sell at a premium, to people who don't mind paying more for goods they consider superior. Of course people with extra money will be able to buy more advertised products! People who are more cost-conscious will tend to gravitate to Android, and will also likely be more wary of advertising.

Or, perhaps, people who are easily influenced by advertising tend to buy iOS products.

Its not what I'd want in a personal phone - but for a company with people on the rode who need to check secure documents, central calendars, and corporate email there is a market for them.

That's kind of the problem, though. When a corporation issues someone a mobile phone, there's a certain desire and expectation that they're going to be carrying it pretty much all the time.

When that person owns a personal phone that they perceive as "better" than the Blackberry, they start to leave the BB in their jacket/in the car/at home/at the office more and more often, effectively undermining the reason it was issued in the first place. After all, who wants to carry two phones?

So yes, corporations would prefer that phones work a certain way, but they definitely would prefer that they have a presence on the phones their employees actually carry. There's a huge market there for whoever comes up with a feasible way to balance all that.

What else do they need to do before we decide to stop tolerating their shit?

Run out of oil.

What possible reason is there for this?

I get this feeling that Samsung's using this sort of thing as a way to drum up business for their display components side. Rather than just banging out a reference device and showing it to device makers (and competitors), they're going the extra few steps to crank out a finished device and put it on the market.

The HP Way died on a dark winter's day in 1999, when Bill Hewlett experienced a failure of willpower reminiscent of the fall of Isildur, and failed to drown Carly Fiorina in his swimming pool.

Well, that's perfectly understandable. If her effect on the pool water quality was anything like what she did to HP, he'd have been stuck with 30000 gallons of toxic waste in his backyard.

If Microsoft's demand for MSOffice doubles, they might need a bit more bandwidth but there is no real spiderweb of increased jobs. They just allow more downloads or print more copies.

Well, that's a gross simplification. There's no spiderweb of increased jobs for a manufacturing surge to directly meet the increased demand, but corporations that get massive bumps in revenue do tend to invest a large chunk of that revenue into jobs, office buildings, sales networks, etc, however indirectly they may be tied to the product undergoing the new level of demand.

It's also worth pointing out that if the demand for MSOffice doubles, then implicitly the number of users (i.e. jobs) has probably increased significantly. So you're looking at an overall increase (or maybe just reallocation) of wealth happening that enables people to demand a lot more MSOffice licenses.

No... if it's perl, there's more than one way to do it, and usually a few more ways to do it wrong. Conservatively, I'd say they've got at least six or seven problems.

I don't know if that's really good advice anymore.

I'd say that the ability to think at least a couple levels deeper than the abstraction provided by the interface you're using is critical. You may not have to think down to the machine level, and you almost certainly can't outthink the compiler (although you will learn a lot about efficiency using a non-optimizing C compiler), but you should have at least a sense of what things are hard or easy for a given language/system, how those things go wrong, how to diagnose failures, and how to fix them. That, in my opinion, is one of the most fundamental differences between actually programming versus just operating a computer, and that's something you can really only get from grasping how things work under the hood.

Concurrent programming isn't hard especially if concurrency was taken into account when the system was designed. Adding concurrency to a non-concurrent system though is a huge, difficult and trouble-prone process. Especially once bit-rot has set in and you find 10 different ways of getting at the variable.

This. I find it utterly baffling that in this day and age (and I mean in the last approx 15-20 years when multi-threading support in commercial operating systems has been available, if not quite perfect), there are still computer programmers who have trouble grokking it.

I was talking to someone about how they were saying the next version of a rather large Java application was going to be a lot faster.

me: How's that going to happen?

him: Because they're going to add multi-threading.

me: Why in the world didn't they make it, a large Java application, multi-threaded in the first place?

him: They said they were kinda new to Java and multi-threading is really hard to get right.

me: (once I picked up my jaw) They're about to discover an entirely new level of "really hard"