nobody31

A lot of which are already shot on things like the Canon 5d - but yes it's good news

Except that Lucent have no real reason to put firmware in a fiber switch to read your email as it goes down the tubes.

A company that makes all it's money from targetted ads - might

It's also part of crazy Hollywood acounting. The more you can charge against the film the better, that's why flops like Titanic and Empire strikes back still haven't made a profit

You don't want the film company to actually own anything because then the people owed money might have something to go after

so we are shooting a $500M movie, $star$ is costing us $250M of that and the advertising budget is another $300M

Can we see if we can get a deal on the camera rental?

We will end up with a whole bunch of pyramid schemes advertised on lamp posts that use this as a way of separating idiots from their money

Where does it say on harvard.edu that they wont kill students and harvest their organs?

Edit: Oh sorry forgot that people in the land of the free don't have a human rights act preventing Google reading their email (not sure about harvesting organs)

It does however tend to color your judgement about how professional and reliable this service is. If they risked their future on the stability of the Somalia domain registry - just so they could have a quirky domain name.

Calling yourself slashdot is funny if you are a geek site - worrying if you are my pension fund.

dupe - http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/two-decades-...

It fails when a certain proportion of the filament has evaporated. The evaporation rate is pretty constant, assuming either a getter or large enough bulb that the evaporated tungsten doesn't change the environment. So you would expect some form of bell curve distribution around the design lifetime.

Bath tub curves tend to come from large assemblies of reliable components

So on one side you run a T-test to see if the correlation is significant.

On the other side you have the ability to phrase it as a question in the same language as Aristotle.

Yes it was different in the middle ages, it has changed now. Only 10% of UK government ministers went to Eton and only 70% to Oxford and Cambridge so the power of the old-boys network is disappearing.

Presumably the greatest minds in computer science sat down and decided that silverlight was the optimum technology

Or perhaps they were suspended over a tank of piranha by an evil laughing Bill Gates somewhere in the basement of http://cs.stanford.edu/info/gates

Or perhaps they just out sourced the web design to the cheapest company who happened to use Silverlight.

Yep - you know it's the "end of days" when you look back on Microsoft as the hey-day of freedom in computers!

See the shiny aluminium laptop - don't worry about not being allowed to own the stuff on it - look shiny.

We have a funny logo some days - just enter your kid's details here for marketing purposes - look funny logo.

competitiveness only matters when you have competitors.

So if you are an engineering company and you work like this you will be destroyed by countries with more meritocratic hiring systems.

If you don't have any competitors because you work for government or in a sector like banking where you are protected from foreign competition and all you competitors hire on the same system - then you will do fine (for now).

Can we spot any English speaking countries which might be an example of this?

Successful go to elite college, successful only hire from elite college, therefore to be successful you go to elite college.

Of course this system eventually breaksdown. But for Eton school it's worked since 1440, for Oxford since 1096, Cambridge since 1284 - but eventually it will break down.

>Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly.

Half a mil so that when you apply for a job at $MEGA-CORP or in government the hirer says "Oh you went to %SCHOOL%, same as me" welcome to our management fast-track program, followed by promotion and VP-dom.

As opposed to "Oh you got a CS degree", well programmers get to sit in this cubicle and get paid $50k until we outsource the whole thing to India.

ICBM's use inertial and (in the case of Trident) star mappers.

The reason they don't use GPS is that you would (hopefully) only start throwing ICBMs around if you are in "nucular combat toe to toe with the Rooskies" - and the way you know you are in a proper war is that all your GPS satellites have just been destroyed by the other side.

Depends on the desired outcome.

For self destruct systems you probably want all three to agree before going bang - while for an emergency escape system you probably want any one of three to be sufficent to deplay.

Money back if not entirely satisfied!

But you don't need all that stuff any more - you have garbage collection !

Nice that the prospect of some competition is stirring things up!

The Beagleboard was nice but at $150 - unless you REALLY needed the small size you could buy an old laptop for less and get a screen/keyboard/disk/network/PSU

Same reason you can't be a mechanical engineer without having taken a shop class.

You can sit in front a CAD and FEM package all day - but if you don't appreciate how the things will actually be built you aren't going to be a really good engineer.

Mr Stallman recently said that although he regretted Mr Job's death, he wasn't sorry that the creator of the walled garden of locked down consumer computing devices was no more.

This caused some discussion along the lines of Mr Stallman :

1) should be hunted down and killed for mentioning the sainted Mr Jobs

or

2) is the only one with the courage to stand up and say what he believes.

(delete as appropriate)

If ONLY cs undergrads knew everything in code.

I'm still trying to teach some of them that a memory copy isn't instant.

I fed a game of Dwarf Fortress into Perl and my computer became self aware

Generally buying national map data is expensive in europe.

The naming of streets is also quite complex, if the street has been there for 1000years then it's likely that various of layers of government aren't quite in synch with what they are calling it.

so if google maps just uses a free public domain source it might not match what the city council or the post office use

Microsoft don't ship a C compiler

Adding C99 features to their C++ compiler would be nice be probably not cost effective for them

I meant Best (member of the set of) long articles!

Calibre can pull from news sites and format to epub then donwload to your ebook readr IITC

The best long (56page) wired article is the famous Neal Stephenson piece on fibre optic cables http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Hospitals tend to notice clusters of people dying of radiation poisoning - at least in places with hospitals.

In places without hospitals - I'm sure the contents of a lot of these machines end up being dumped in the 3rd world, to be 'recycled' like most toxic waste