I hope these spectators like endurance sports. My natural language processing models take between 2-7 days to create. While I set the model creation going and have a few beers, watch TV etc, they can sit and watch a terminal with an incomprehensible progress report going on.

"Wow! He's completed 87% of the tokenisation! He''ll be shooting to score any week now!"

Never mind, as long as they pay.

So let's see if I have this straight? The marketroids are saying that, by their default, I want to hear all the crap they are paid to push and unless I explictly say, "get lost', they'll continue to bug me until I collapse under the weight of junk product info?

Did Bill Hicks have a great point?

You missed out on that one! You had a golden opportunity to a) get some new equipment, and b) get some time to do all those niggling little things that manager's demands won't let you attend to.

What I think I would have done is written a 2 page report detailing a strict (but already known) set of success criteria and how it would take 5-6 months to implement and test Lye-nux. Maybe 2 months at best if I pull out all the stops and they don't interrupt me with stupid problems. Meanwhile, I can devote time to really improving the system and then present them with a report showing improved performance from a project that a) came in under budget, b) came in under cost, c) exceeded all targets. Suddenly I'm the golden boy and everyone is happy.

At least until one of the managers finally figures out that it was a quick job but of course they pass success upwards so their bonuses depend on you doing well. My guess is they'd stay quiet.

It depends on the sport. Check through winners of the longer tours (TdF, Vuelta, Giro) and you'll find that cyclist's peak age is late 20s early 30s. Lance was at his peak when he was winning. Interviews with the people around him (before his cancer and before any of this scandal) said that he could be winning the big tours from 27 onwards.

Given that getting a large number of regular users is a core part of the business requirements for design then yes, it is bloody well designed. Even with ~10% of fake accounts, it has a lot of real eyeballs which explains the successful (from a Zuckerberg PoV) IPO.

...To the Right Hon. Theresa May, MP from the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Religious Justice.

You have been flagrantly displaying bare shoulders, forearms and legs in public in the UK and are in breach of our decency laws. We hereby apply to have you extradited to Saudi Arabia so that you can receive a summary trial with the sentence of being publicly whipped.

Don't be silly. He's far too talented for that. Maybe if we gave him a frontal lobotomy first though...

But the point of a decent UI is that someone shouldn't have to post to /. to get a solution to a UI problem.

It's confusing to me when I read about students being taught how to use Word and Excel in computer classes. To me, that's just (very!) basic business computing literacy, not computer studies or science. I did an O-level, sitting the exam in 1985. My teacher (IIRC, a former COBOL programmer) taught us this: A high level language (BBC BASIC) A low level language (CESIL, supported by ICL) Flowcharting (yes, even had the stencil) * Inputs and expected outputs * Writing code on paper * * all done before going anywhere near a keyboard. Imagine that - 15 & 16 year olds learning the basics of UML, unit testing, and planning with high and low level languages. And now it's how to format documents and do mail merges on Word. This is why business should *never* get to dictate curricula.

Yeah, it's odd isn't it? Pirates of Silicon Valley ended up with a giant Bill Gates on a screen looking down on tiny Steve Jobs like he would an obediant, well-trained puppy.

And since then, Jobs went on to business mega-stardom and Bill Gates became a genuine hero by trying to rid the world of lots of nasties like Malaria and Polio.

And that the quality of content is what the readership comes for...

Which of course implies this: Crap comments - crap commentators - crap articles.

Actually the US had concentration camps when they invaded the Philippines many years before. It could also be argued that the Indian Reservations were an early prototype.

I'm thinking of getting a domain with GD just so I can dump them too ;-)

Yes, it's much better to work in the private sector where things are booming...

I can sell you a Babelfish if you'd like. It's not like those goddam Limeys don't not speak proper English nohow.