Could you put together a device that ZFS'd up a buttload of old ram chips? The cost of ram doesn't seem to have much to do with how much ram storage is available on earth as much as it's speed and utility in today's hardware. Could you build a device that was essentially a huge ram bus for old chips addressable over ... I dunno a pcix or agp bus? Agp might not be good, but something that had big i/o in both directions. Someone please do this. I have tons of old ram sticks that I paid waaaaaay too much for back in the day, and I'd like to be able to claim that they weren't a waste of money. :)

If I could hurt the banks by doing something as simple as closing a facebook account I would. Closing a bank account just means I have to open another one somewhere else. Also, me closing my account hurts banks a LOT less than me deleting my profile hurts facebook, especially since I'm subsidizing banks when I pay taxes whether I have an account or not.

You want big cat piss. This is the best deterrent I've found. It smells really bad though. Trade-offs. Effective, inexpensive, no-smell. Pick any two.

Gerrymandering has turned the electoral college into a joke.

Way to shit on a project that isn't even targeting you as a user. Maybe wait for a mature version to evaluate before setting up a straw man to knock down.

How much downtime is caused (money is lost) by patches that break things versus how much money is lost when machines get hacked? This isn't a windows only issue. I've seen Debian security releases break things too. They're a bit easier to rollback, but the problem is fundamentally an ROI or EV problem, not a technical one.

Or they're hiding what they charge for transaction margin. They could be making much more for doing much less, we simply don't have the data.

8.5 million is a small price to pay for that level of control.

JavaFX (Applets 2.0) has awesome potential, but they pretty much said "screw you" to Linux which means I won't be early adopting it and neither will any of my co-workers. That said, they're already so far behind on install base that all Flash needs to nip this in the bud is release a browser independent runtime and a nicer web service binding api and there will be no practical reason not to choose it. I would like to see someone write a browser in Flash for some reason. So you could browse while you browse.

Not that it matters now. Sun has already lost. They have zero desktop adoption and aren't going to get any, because they treat their biggest evangelists and early adopters like crap (flash for linux? sadly, yes). As a developer, I haven't been using JavaFX at ALL. No browser adoption, doesn't run on my chosen platform, doesn't show any interest in making my platform a priority. Why the hell should I write an app that requires yet another 30 meg download?

I get all the vendor lock in, it's not open source so it's evil arguments. Save them. This is about Sun totally missing the boat, and doing nothing to fix the problem.

Discrete math, autonoma theory, logic (truth tables, conditionals, boolean logic) that sort of stuff is more important to a good grounding in computer science than programming (all that on just a chalkboard). If the knowledge base is strong, the languages will reveal themselves as tools to solve those types of problems with. The language is just a construct for realizing the application of the theory. If the math and logic concepts aren't understood, you basically have a tool that you don't know how to use. Which is not bad. You're still better off than where you were, but now you're banging in nails with a socket wrench. Instead of learning what a bolt is, what it's for and how to tighten it, and then given a socket wrench.

On second thought, anything but Java.

So, why stymie that process with a new bureaucracy that simply funds the big record labels?

Because the record labels donate more money to policy makers than you do.