All the data is in one place, and everyone has access to it? That's the perfect tool for privacy. Let's make data randomizer plugins/extensions for all major browsers that puts meaningless garbage in there and by all means, there you go advertisers, you can use all the data in this superb sandbox! It's all yours! Take it, I insist!

Wow, I have been thinking of something like this for a long time, a clean start over with a simple way to make simple pages that aren't full of trackers and crap. It turns out it actually exists! Thanks for sharing it, I'm goofing with it and it looks quite fun. I hope it has some degrees of success, or at the very least, becomes a home for people to share their passion/projects/stuff for fun like we did in the 90s.

Nowhere in the article does it say that natural gas is not "cleaner" than other fossil fuels. Actually, the string "clean*" hasn't been used anywhere in the article. The person who wrote the summary seems to confuse the concepts of clean energy and greenhouse gas emissions. Natural gas burns clean, it emits CO2 and water vapor, but you don't get all the crap that comes with other fossil fuels such as sulfur and arsenic. So, yes, natural gas is a clean energy when you use it, but the article finds out that its use and its extraction process emit a lot of greenhouse gas, making it it equally as earth warming as coal in the end. Don't confuse the two concepts.

Natural gas right now is useful in cities and other densely populated areas because burning it doesn't substantially reduce air quality. If you are going to burn fossil fuels anyway, you'd rather be burning something that burns clean. It's the only reason its considered cleaner than coal.

Never said carbon wasn't good at making hard stuff.

They are not fossils, these organisms live today and they make a large part of phytoplakton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . They make their own shells called frustules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Plenty of organisms use silicon, diatoms first come to mind, but they use it mostly for protective shells. Silicon is good to make hard stuff, carbon is good for everything else. There's really no puzzle here.

It will only take a few weeks before someone figures out how to mod it and load custom software on it. It's going to do a lot more than play those 30 selected games.

In a universe of nearly infinite size (from our perspective at least), there's bound to be other more advanced species somewhere. Many of them too. If it was possible to collapse the universe with tiny black holes, one of them would have already done it and we would not be here to talk about it.

Uuuuh... are they just remaking Brutal Doom in a modern engine?

I get what you mean, but these parts of the interface are extremely clunky. But even worse than that, they migrated all their tools to an ActiveX interface that relies on Internet Explorer... and it really isn't all that stable, randomly stopping to work (you have to restart ArcGIS when it happens).

But even worse than that, it requires IE to be set at the default security level, which is not all that secure. Since I don't use IE, and want to minimize the risks to my lab machine, I usually set it to the maximum security level everywhere, which in effects disables big parts of it. While not as ideal as completely removing the software would be (if it was possible...), it reduces risks considerably. But wait a second... you guessed right. ArcGIS will just not allow you to use any of its built-in tools when you do that. How wonderful. Who's the genius that thought it was a good idea to have such a large piece of software being dependent on the worse web browser ever in existence?

So while I agree with you that "updating" interfaces can go too far (yucky gnome 3 is a good example), in this case, an update is badly needed. But I suppose they will be forced to do it soon enough, with MS supposedly discontinuing IE and touting their new browser that is possibly not just a fresh coat of paint...

I'm not surprised with this. GIS is almost a mono-culture that has been dominated by ESRI since forever. Their software costs in the thousands, yet crashes all the time and a lot of the included tools just don't work. Some parts of the interface have not changed since the 90s and they keep building on this dysfunctional foundation. Working with ArcGIS is a pain in the rear, yet for a lot of what ESRI software does, there is no alternative. Whenever I can I code my own stuff (using GDAL http://www.gdal.org/) and do all I can in QGIS (http://www.qgis.org/), but for a lot of tasks, you are stuck with ArcGIS and other ESRI tools. The market is more than ready for a new player that will make reliable software (whether commercial or open source, doesn't matter to most as they are used to pay through the roof for ESRI software anyway).

I think they played way too much Ticket to Ride. There's no bonus points for the longest route in real life.

Actually, to be politically correct, books are not "tree killers" or "dead tree" editions anymore, they are now referred to as "carbon sequestration editions."

Why... regular expressions of course! I could have saved myself endless hours of dumbfounded confusion!

Unless you apply for a very specific project that needs very specific knowledge, knowing a language well is not going to help you much. You need to be able to show that you have a good logic, that you are able to solve problems quickly and efficiently. Most of the time, this can be done in many languages, and most projects have different parts done in different ones. Knowing the syntax to one language doesn't help you much when you have to code in another one. Logic on the other hand works everywhere. Good thinking is what is needed to find good solutions to problems... and many languages can be used. Sometimes, a specific language will be better than another one, that's where good thinking and logic will be useful. You can always refer to Google for syntax examples, and good thinking and logic will help you filter out most of the crap and find the good examples.

When I'm helping HR decide on who they hire, I always ask the person we interview logic questions, ask them to find solutions to problems I've encountered in the past and see what they come up with. If they find a working solution it's good. If they propose a solution I've actually put in production and I think was the best, it's even better (compatible thoughts, good for team work). If they find a solution I consider better than mine, then it's excellent.

This, of course, doesn't tell me how good they actually are at implementing them, but I can always coach them, and if they do have good thinking and logic, they will eventually become good at it. Though frankly, those who showed good thinking in interviews were usually the fastest learners too and I rarely had a problems with people hired using this technique.