... a friend today got an assignment that has to be five pages, double spaced, times new roman 12 pt with 1 inch margins, and I thought that was a curious anachronism. So maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. :)

I'm not sure I care. I had classes with lots of fancy tech, and classes with next to none where everything was done on paper. It made no particular difference to how good the class was, or what I got out of it.

Occasionally there's a good reason for it (submitting 50 pages of code by printing it out really makes no sense at all), but in my experience most of the time the technology costs a lot of money and doesn't really add anything of value. If the prof actually wants to teach and knows how to do it, the class is going to be good even if he's using stone tablets. If he considers teaching to be that thing he has to do in between research projects, it's going to suck no matter how much tech you throw at it.

They could probably get better outcomes if instead of spending the money on tech, they spent it on instructors who want to teach so the professors that don't can go do the research they actually want to do instead. Everyone is happier that way.

Every iOS 6 release has had some kind of new bug like this in it, and it's getting ridiculous. I'd like to be able to use the damn phone without worrying that the next update (needed to fix one problem) is going to cause two new ones.

Javascript is about as elegant as an oil tanker. Considerable effort has gone into tools and libraries to make working in it suck less, but it's hard to wipe away the problems inherent in the design.

The only differences between economists and fortune tellers are the uniform and the pay scale.

Also, this poster is perfectly accurate: http://www.despair.com/economics.html

Unlocking your phone is also against the law, maybe we need a trillion dollar fine to discourage it?

Red light cameras discourage running *yellows*, out of the fear of running reds and getting a ticket. They dramatically increase accident rates: http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/825583--red-alert-lucrative-cameras-spark-crashes-injuries

The other side effect is that they never bring in the money that's expected, and so yellows get shortened to catch more people running reds. They're a good deal for the companies selling them, but don't do anything for safety.

According to an article here a couple days ago, online ads are more dangerous than porn. Considering how many flaws there are in Java, all you need to do is get some code on any website someone visits and you can root the machine. The idea that the Twitter user was doing anything inappropriate at all is just speculation.

"Old" as in from two days ago?

Or maybe it's another unpatched Java flaw being used. Those are a dime a dozen.

Someone inside Twitter's network had Java enabled, and got attacked. Hackers are now inside Twitter and can start poking around.

Windows is far more secure than Java these days. There isn't a lot of active "load a webpage and your computer is owned" exploits going around, unlike for Java where it's a weekly thing.

Yeah, and overnight all the PCs in the world vanished like magic!

Probably to make sure the creators of FlashBlock still have something to do.

There was an open beta on the weekend where discussing feedback was allowed and wide open. They even had a public forum for it: http://answers.ea.com/t5/Feedback/bd-p/Feedback

In fact DRM complaints were probably #2 on the complaint list... a mile behind the city sizes being absurdly tiny, which was the #1 complaint.

The weekend beta was open, and the feedback forums are public: http://answers.ea.com/t5/Feedback/bd-p/Feedback