Cause java itself isn't as platform independent as it claims to be. Good luck trying to get your GUI to display correctly on every supported OS. All cause they don't use a standardised library like GTK or Qt really.

Mine was never locked to begin with. You actually have trouble finding a locked phone over here...

You forgot to mention Ruby and Java have some of the worst syntax possible really. Inconsistent use of capital letters is the main problem really. To give an example of what I mean (yes I know it doesn't actually occur like this, but due to lack of any particular name popping up in my head this will do to show the problem): throwException and ThrowException. The issue with this is that you'll run into "method does not exist" and you'll be looking all over your code except to the capital letters of the particular function, cause it follows the same naming scheme as the one above it. Think again!

And I don't see why you would want anything to run on the JVM anyway now that I come to think of it. It's only as crossplatform as Sun/Oracle made it. They have to spend months to port it to a new platform since it's written in C/C++. Hence why the claim that it can outperform an application written in those two is a joke unless the developer was drunk at the time he wrote his code, and even then. Stick to standard C/C++ and use a general GUI library like GTK or Qt and your application will be just as portable, you have your freedom of syntax, good development tools (no need to stick to annoyances like Eclipse, Netbeans, ...), etc. .

It's really annoying to print out all those handouts in pdf format often with useless slides in them that you don't need. Really a waste of paper. They should be forced to distribute the original presentation file for that simple reason. I'm expecting my printer to start telling me to start inserting a new tree soon.

I developed a printer that uses natural pigments combined with a small water pistol that is aimed using an array of 50 servos by an atmel avr microcontroller. The entire setup is placed in a cage with butterflies that is fitted with several optical sensors. This will then write the data on the wings of butterflies (obviously encoded with Rijndael 128 bits). Using statistical probability and the grid of optical sensors it can then reconstruct the data. If a piece of data needs to be removed it can either be overwritten or destroyed using a laser also mounted on 3 axis rotating platform.

Try one of the newer laptops with an i7 and a good graphics card, runs like a charm :D

Laptop should last 3 hours, and have another battery for that so that's 6. Made my own battery pack for router & modem that'll last about 100 hours (a bit more actually). UPS will last a half day with all the current batteries hooked up to it. And as last resort there's still laptop car charger and generator.

Duke Nukem won't allow you to censor him, he'll just kick your ass.

I find the description of cheating some people use here is rather questionable. You have two types of copying something from the internet. (And I'm specifically talking about engineering from this point onward)

The initial problem is the way things are done. We usually get projects in engineering. Not exactly things you can copy and paste of the internet. But you can take the idea, or you can take the text describing the idea. The former is acceptable, the latter isn't. Yet in many cases in the US the former is also deemed cheating from what I've seen on slashdot. While it's essentially the same as paying a visit to the university/college library and reading through several books. The thing is, you still have to understand the idea, apply it to the specific situation and figure out if it works. On the other hand if you copy a few lines of text simply mention where you got them from and mark the part you quoted. Obviously stealing entire works is totally unacceptable.

Another thing I don't get is how they consider having the question databases is cheating. Over here a lot of the tutors actually encourage us to share the questions of the exams with other students and to argue and debate about them. As such we have a forum that now spans back about a decade and we constructed a list of just about every possible question for every subject combined with the answers and logical reasoning behind it. But nobody in their right mind can possibly learn all of that by heart. If you still manage to learn all of it by heart you'll pass the exam no matter what since you learned the entire course anyway. But it is a useful tool to prepare for exams and tests. Not to mention that students often have their own tricks or insights into certain things that a professor just won't be able to explain.

Over here its at the lecturers discretion. For some classes (mainly those related to programming or IT in general) its allowed to use a laptop during lectures. On the other hand you really don't need to pull out your laptop during something related to math (they already complain about calculators there in fact...). I think that's the best system for it. Cause in some classes you really are better of using a laptop. Listening to somebody talk about a programming language for several hours without being able to actually try it out isn't very productive. And sure you might check facebook or slashdot once in a while. But if you weren't using a laptop you'd find some other way to keep yourself occupied. Like drawing, playing games on your phone, ...

Great, a ruby fan boy... Where did I claim porting adds new features? I'm saying porting is one of the reasons Perl became so wide spread. Additionally Perl 5.x still receives updates so I wouldn't call it old either. And Perl is a mature language that won't see much changes anymore at this point, get used to it. If you want new and shiny Perl really isn't the language for you. If you want powerful syntax, the ability to quickly write code that will still perform well then Perl really is the primary choice. Perl can in fact beat Java in performance on certain areas to give you an idea about just how damn fast it is. Ruby isn't even close to either in terms of performance. And sure many things in the CPAN archive are filled with duplicates. But again lets look at the quality of the code. Writing something in Perl takes a lot more skill than writing something similar in Ruby as such the code produced by the average Perl "programmer" is statistically going to be better. Again something you will have to accept. And Perl code will never look nice, again get used to it. Perl is a contest about how much you can put in a single line. Ruby is something people use to mess around in. Whenever a project becomes serious they have to start stepping away from Ruby cause it becomes a hassle to maintain the code. Performance drops like a brick and scaling becomes rather complicated compared to languages like Perl, PHP, Python and others. For all its flaws I'd still rather write things in Perl than in Ruby; Cause in the end of the day I know if I need to quickly do something Perl is up to the job every single time. I have yet to run into a case where Perl failed to deliver the results. Ruby and Python on the other hand...

Ruby might have the quantity. But does it have the quality of Perl modules? I seriously doubt so. Many Ruby programmers aren't nearly as experienced as the Perl folks. Ruby will generally be used by people who think it's cool cause of it's "OO-ness" (Don't ask me why that's supposed to be a huge advantage, but that was somebody's pro-Ruby argument once). Perl on the other hand is often used by experienced system administrators. At that point you clearly see a difference in target group. Additionally Ruby isn't as nearly wide spread as Perl. Keep in mind Perl is one of the first things that gets ported to a new platform along with C/C++ compilers and other tools meaning it'll always stay ahead of Ruby no matter how it gets.

Well, quick google search indicates you need about 300kg to knock somebody out. In other words about 3000 newton. So lets leave acceleration out of the question at first and simply look at the pressure required to generate such a force. Lets assume the jar has a 5cm radius. So the surface area of the lid would be about 0.0078 cm^2 in other words (don't have a calculator at hand so could make mistakes on the math). And since pressure is force on surface area we can assume it'll take about 3.8 bar of pressure. Its not impossible for the glass to contain that pressure. But I really doubt the lid would stay on the jar. And we all love F=m*a right? Well yeah, to apply that amount of force it'd need to be accelerating at 300000 m/s^2 ... So yeah, this is pretty stupid, I think they left out some piece of information in the story.

Before anybody shoots me for this, read it first. Learn COBOL, and this isn't a joke either. Most old financial systems are still written in COBOL and there's still a demand for COBOL programmers cause of that. It pays well, quite some job opportunities, .... Obviously there are moral issues with promoting COBOL and its usage. If you don't want to go down that road go for C/C++ and X86 assembly. Skilled assembly programmers won't be lacking a job either most of the time.

Not to mention that anybody that has ever gotten any form of jaw or orthodontic surgery where a material other than titanium was used should never be put in a MRI scanner...