brentashley

= 0.1 quantitative easements, and will provide 1000x more boost to the economy.. What are we waiting for?

How can this guy get all the way through this article without mentioning that not only is Nathan Myhrvold "former CTO of Microsoft", but that as owner of Intellectual Ventures, the most powerful non- practising patent troll in existence, he is perhaps the world's biggest example of what is wrong with the patent system and why ideas, innovative or not, are almost impossible to turn into reality without the threat of litigation.

The fact that he would avoid mentioning this shows that anything else said in this piece can be assumed to be utter bullshit and spin.

As was softbuilder, I was motivated to ABORT before the last paragraph - thanks for persevering for the team!

Reminds me of the Monty Python killer joke sketch where the joke is translated by a team of people line by line.

The list of languages covered made me look at the date on the article. I was almost certain it would be pre-y2k.

Sounds like a blinkered enterprise Java-centric worldview to me. To have ASP as the only scripting environment listed is just plain crazy in 2012. If you're going to include scripting at all, where are Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Javascript? If you want to talk about the productivity boost from high-level languages, you have to include these.

"But most of all, having a draft might, as General McChrystal said, make Americans think more carefully before going to war."

As if "Americans" will suddenly have a say in any decision to go to war. Congress is demonstrably not even required in such decisions any more.

I'd like to see a chart of that 200 years of debt accumulation.

Apparently, "Error establishing database connection.".

I dropped out of my Electronics Engineering Technology polytech course in 1982 after working part time for a couple of years with electronics and microcomputers and finding I was learning more valuable things at work than at school. At the time I thought I'd go back and finish, but I just kept on going, learning as I went along. Now with over 30 years on my resume, whether I have a degree is a question I don't often get, but if anyone is hung up on it, it's a good filter.

I have to say it's jarring to hear Ron Paul referring to "6000 years of human history" as though that is the totality of human history. While I still support him fully because everything he has to say wrt government and foreign policy is sound and principled, it's really difficult for me to reconcile this one thing.

There is a wide range of quality in PHP code, and it depends mostly on the coder.

If your team uses simple php pages with inline code and a rats nest of includes like newbies did in 1999, it will be a disaster.

If they have progressed beyond that, you will have a range of experience from mediocre to excellent.

If your team has good coding conventions and practices and uses a modern framework (I use Yii on a current project and find it of high quality), they can write a solid maintainable app in PHP.