The browser has never been a good platform for development -- http is stateless, slow and insecure. Ever since we've started, we've been working around deficiencies in the platform. The only thing that could be described as "good" about it is that everyone has a browser.

So now a near-universally deployed platform that you can target for real development. Should it be a surprise that we do so?

Yeah! Because what's better than one Dyson sphere? TWO Dyson spheres! Or perhaps at some point your civilization gets to the point where building a Dyson sphere is the equivalent of a baking soda volcano elementary school project. "Oh look! Little Johnny made a Dyson sphere! Isn't that just the most adorable thing?"

And it should be legal for guys in wingsuits to wrangle drones for fun and profit. I'm sure the new sport this would create would be a blast. Also, wingsuit drone slalom. Yeah...

That headline should read "Media Company Facebook is Telling The World that it's not a Media Company".

Oh yeah! Mid 40's here and have been skydiving since 2012, and really gearing up on flying a wingsuit out of the plane for the last couple of years. Funnily enough life's been pretty awesome since then, so I'm in no hurry to rush into BASE, much less Wingsuit base, which seems like it has a ridiculously high fatality rate. I know three amazing wingsuit pilots, one who was my AFF instructor back in 2012, who have gone in this year. I think they were all trying to fly that ridiculous run in Charmonix. Cave diving and surfing the waves from collapsing glaciers in Alaska are similarly hazardous and awesome. There is no shortage of potentially deadly hobbies to get into!

Given the blatantly false hype on the game right up to the day before the launch, I'd say the refunds are preventing a much more expensive class action lawsuit that could very easily be won by the players by just running the trailer footage alongside the actual gameplay footage. What was promised was not delivered, and the only reason you had as many preorders as you did was due to the promises of the developers. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it and pissed off again, maybe I'll pen a letter to the FTC asking them to look into it!

They're really the only people who actually want to do Government contracts. For everyone else, it's just too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it.

Since it's, you know, those guys, I'm sure their IT solution for NASA involves Citrix somehow.

Easy enough to say but last time I checked if you want to do anything with the current VR headset boom, you're pretty much going to have to use Windows. Steam's OpenVR initiative makes it sound like you don't, but a few months ago when I checked their Linux examples wouldn't even build.

Is there every any particular need to limit them, though? A couple decades ago it was uncommon to have more than one sound device on a machine. Now it's unusual not to have two or three. Designs and requirements change over time, and having to factor out singleton behavior that was never really necessary in the first place is kind of a pain in the ass. You could easily just create those things with thing factories when the program starts up, and pass them around to objects that need them. No artificial limits, and you don't have to factor out singleton behavior when you decide you want two things where you used to only have one.

I've found that design review boards are becoming increasingly hostile toward singletons, too. There was a narrow window where they'd at least consider one, back when people started talking about design patterns. These days it's next to impossible to get one approved, even if there's pretty good justification for it. You can always design around the need for a singleton, and usually the system design will be better without them.

I've yet to see a computer science professor with particularly excellent code, either. I run across assignments and example code from courses on a regular basis that fall into the "Never, ever do that" category of programming. Case in point, a relative of mine recently had some questions about a CS programming assignment. Part of the assignment description talked about design patterns and predictably went straight for the Singleton as an example. I'm pretty sure that's the only pattern that about 90% of programmers ever actually learn when reading about design patterns and it's so abused in the industry right now that you can basically never get one past a design review board.

Anywhoo, back in the '90's I worked for a company that was getting a B2 Certification for its operating system. My job basically consisted of reading the entire AT&T C standard library code, finding potential security flaws, writing tests for those flaws and then writing a report with the tests which would be delivered to the NSA. I found the remote buffer overflow in the AT&T telnet daemon a couple years before the same overflow was discovered in the Linux telnet daemon. So the NSA basically outsourced the hard work of finding all those exploits to the companies that were trying to get security certifications. It took three or four guys just a few months to go through all the stuff we had to look at. I'm sure we missed a bit, but I was much more confident in the security of their OS at the end of all that. Too bad they eventually went out of business, were acquired by IBM and their products were killed. You know, progress!

Indeed. And so this discussion is the delightfully quaint discussion about how we'll eventually balloon to the moon of our times! Oh yes fuf fuf fuf I'm sure we'll be ballooning to Proxima Centauri in no time! *adjusts his monocle*

That's true! I haven't booted back to windows in months and have mostly been mucking around with Factorio and Stellaris lately. There's a pretty decent library of Linux-Compatible games on Steam, a much better situation than a decade ago when Loki was trying to make a business model off porting them. I haven't seen levels of hype like the one in No Man's Sky since Spore, and we all know how THAT turned out. So I was planning to hang out for a bit and watch some gameplay videos before making my mind up about the game. I'm guessing if I bought it, I might get a couple hours out of it and then get bored. I paid $20 for Factorio and have over a hundred hours in on it so far.That's more than worth my money to me. Plus, I'd have to boot back to Windows, so fuck that.

I'm probably going to have to break down and set up a Windows machine for a VR rig I want to build in a couple of months. It doesn't seem like any of the VR headsets support Linux particularly well, although I'll check again when I'm actually doing the build.

He didn't like working with the NSA and keeping all the secrets secret. He doesn't like working with the Wikileaks guys and keeping all the secrets public. There's just no pleasing that guy.

We're just easing into the world where no secrets can be kept. There will be some discontent as the proles start to see how the sausage is made, but whenever they realize that all the machinery is that dirty, things should settle down a bit. It's pretty much a universal truth that anyone who actively seeks power should under no circumstances be allowed to have that power. They're all fucking scumbags but we'll keep voting for them or the wrong scumbag will get it. I mean, what else could we do? Have a draft like Jury Duty? "Congratulations, you've been selected to serve 6 years in the Senate. Here's a six digit salary and a page. Try not to fuck it up!" It would never work because reasons!

Fucking small boys is a favorite past time of Muslim extremism. Perhaps a picture of him with a rent-a-boy would increase his appeal with that demographic.

And before you guys get your panties in a knot, I don't even have to google to know those guys don't have a monopoly on little boy fucking. It's apparently impossible to make it to adulthood without being raped by someone, no matter what country you live in. Maybe you get raped by your priest. Maybe you get raped by a US Senator. Maybe you get abducted and raped by some random stranger in a windowless van. Seeing as how no one has come forward by now (And they always do,) I'd guess Trump is probably in the minority of people in the top 1% who didn't get there for the sole purpose of fucking children whenever they want to.

Seems to me there must be a sum of money upon which you could live comfortably for the rest of your life. Around 8 or 10 million, you could probably make more on interest and investment income than most Americans do, and why go for more after that? But I suppose that's why he's a billionaire and I'm not. I'm pretty happy just doing what I'm doing. I wonder if he is. As Sarah Silverman says, all the penises in the world won't fill the hole in your heart.