I always thought that having one long list of stored procedures in a database was kinda silly. It lends itself to coming up with creative naming conventions to keep things organized. I wish that MS would implement namespaces within the stored procedures so that I could organize them in some manner.

PCjr was my first machine, with the parallel port on the expansion car and an extra 64k in RAM. That machine started my trip to becoming a programmer. :-) Fond fond memories. It may have been the first PC machine with 3 audio channels AND 64 color mode. Only my friends with Commodores (and later Amigas) had better graphics.

Last year I was dropping my daughter off at a friend's house. The friend's dad met me at the door and we chatted. It was the first time that we had ever talked about anything. Literally just met the guy. In our conversation, we mentioned an app that he just started using (and was in fact using when I pulled up). It's an app that I would never use since it was about Golf and I don't play or care about golf. Before I pulled out of his driveway I checked Facebook. I kid you not, an ad for that app was on my news feed. I'd never seen it before, ever. Somehow they correlated his installation of the app, with my account, and showed me something that there was a chance we discussed. Twilight Zone stuff, I tell you.

Ditto, Essentially. I was that 10-year-old that read every single page of the GW BASIC manual no fewer than 5 times each, even though I was actually coding in another version of BASIC. Moved onto Pascal as I matured a bit and picked up some assembly when I just couldn't get it to do things fast enough for me. I studied the "PC Interrupts" reference almost every day so I could get access to the coolest parts of the OS. Moved onto Java in college and settled back into the web languages when I started coding for a living.

I must be missing something obvious. If it's a 4 digit PIN, and they can make a copy of the memory, can't they create a multiple virtual instances of the device and test the 10000 PINs somewhat in parallel? I guess the hard part is "make a copy of the memory". I know the spy movies make it simpler than it is in reality, but it would seem that there must be a way to do that. Even if it's expensive and time consuming to copy the memory, it's got to be cheaper and faster than taking Apple to court.

<quote>Actually I think you are missing a completely different point. You don't have to speed up connections to match the speed of non-vpn traffic, you just have to slow everything down so that you can't be sure which is VPN and which is normal. </quote>

So... Comcast really had our best interests in mind after all?

Sorry. I posted that while not logged in. I've reposted it while logged in.

Let me see if I get this straight: 60% of the people who live in Georgia had their identity information given to 12 organizations that have forwarded it to who-else-knows? I live in Georgia. If this is true, I'm incredibly pissed. I don't care that this article singled out a single magazine, as so many other have posted. That doesn't matter. What does matter is that 60% of the people living in an ENTIRE STATE have just had their identities compromised. If I'm misunderstanding, someone please point out my flawgic (flawed logic--a word coined by my amazing girlfriend). I'll be signing what Class Action Lawsuit that comes around. As of this moment, presuming that that article is properly fact checked, this situation is a complete screw up that the state needs to address.

That's how I read it... the growth stopped growing. But, it may not be sensationalism. In business, in this sector, the flattening of growth could be a strong indicator of company future success (unless there's a paradigm shift, of course).

This kind of argument is very annoying. Whenever somebody tries to charge for content, somebody else will copy it and distribute it for free. So, it's almost impossible, in the long run, to charge for content and continue to make a profit. All that's left is creating a better "wrapper" for the consumers. It takes time and energy to do that, and people don't want to enter a credit card to experience a site, so there really aren't a lot of options left.

A bit more detail: nuclear batteries used to power probes like Voyager used plutonium-238, which is available via the US and Russia. Bottom line, the ESA would need to rely on it's supply of americium-241 to create the next generation of batteries. The conversation about using the stockpiles of americium-241 to create batteries really started in earnest (media coverage-wise, at least) in 2012, which was after this probe was deployed.

I read something a few months back that really struck me. I don't recall the source, so I'll try to paraphrase to the best of my ability. The basic tenant is that punishing a crime with the intent to get back at the offender is nothing more than revenge and is not the intent of the rule of law. The rule of law is to 1) remove violent and disruptive individuals from society, 2) discourage others from perpetrating the same crime.

In cases with violent and disruptive components, such as assault and drug dealing, it's very clear that incarceration is the best option. For non-violent crimes, such as IP theft, money laundering, etc, it's not really so clear. Since the intent this time wasn't to remove the individual from society (which I think we call can agree wasn't necessary in this case) that means that the judge somehow A) determined the value of the stolen film, B) decided that 33 months was the amount of incarceration that would discourage others from stealing the same "value" of property. The judge ruled out public service, ruled out probation, and ruled out fines as an acceptable deterrent to future offenders. While it's easy not to agree with the ruling, it takes a very good understanding of human psyche to know when a penalty is enough to discourage OTHERS from committing the same crime.

If this were for my company, I'd want to do two things with the hardware. First, use it to back up the cloud environment. Maybe not the applications, but definitely the data. Disaster recovery is always paramount in the corporate world.

Second, I'd want the hardware used to try out some new software, techniques, file systems, media servers, etc. It's never too late to learn new skills, and what better to learn on than servers you don't mind wiping if they get messed up. Using them to mine bitcoins is far less valuable (in a corporate environment) in the long run than using them to learn new skills, and exposure to new software.

I was thinking the same thing... this is what Facebook did as a social experiment in a way. Personally, I'm supportive of Facebook's experiment as it added to the scientific body of work about social manipulation. In my opinion there's no expectation of equal "news" coverage on a social site, website, blog, TV station, or anywhere. As long as there are other options available, I say that "news" services can run their service without editorial oversight by the Government.

You mean, kinda link a limo service does now? In other words, there's already a "private club" service that let's the wealthier and frequent fliers get whisked efficiently to where they are going.