celticjames

I agree that style of Picasso is cubism and this process isn't able to replicate that. But I assume it's an early experiment to show what's possible now.

Roads are subject to wear and tear. Higher traffic means more wear and thus more repairs. Repairs for most roads come out of municipal budgets. Municipal budgets are paid for by property taxes. The homeowners bought that road. So who's got an entitlement problem here?

I couldn't get it to work because my region is Canada but my speech language was set to English (US). I had to install the speech recognition pack for English (Canada). In a way I sort of flattered that Cortana recognizes my distinct cultural identity.

Nice emulator, but I'd love to have the real thing, a genuine old-school monochrome monitor, the kind that you used with a Hercules graphics card. Those monitors were so easy on the eyes. You could stare at Pascal all day. Figuring out the details of making it work is one of my 'someday' projects.

In google's case, you can print out a set of auth codes for times when you don't have your phone.

"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. " -- Nathaniel Borenstein

Gmail has a feature that lets you see what IP addresses you have logged on from. (Look for the little link at the bottom right.) Would LinkedIn's IP show up there if they are using your google password? Has anyone ever seen this behaviour?

I used to teach English to non-native speakers. All of them wanted to learn English with an American accent. I think they are actually doing themselves a disservice because they fail to understand the subtle differences of class status an accent signals. A more British inflected accent is an easy way to signal higher education and status to an American. They go a bit gaga for British accents. It's also easier to fake a British accent.

After reading your comment, I did some googling to find something that could convert an existing spreadsheet into code. I found a few commercial solutions that turn Excel into C++ or Java. I think the idea is that Excel becomes the prototyping tool for non-coders. That seems like a better idea than treating Excel as the final product. I feel like there's a new paradigm for both spreadsheets and programming in there somewhere but I need a bigger brain to see it.

The stories in the post all have repeatable bug conditions. If you read bugs submitted for something like Chrome or Firefox (or any big complex program) you see a lot of trying to figure out what state triggers a bug. There's a lot of, "I can't repeat it. Works fine for me." It's almost impossible to deduce what causes a bug because so many possible states can exists at any given moment.

The way a lot of bugs are eventually solved is not by asking what caused them, but when they started. It's often the regression testers who find the source. You keep going back through the nightly releases until you find one that doesn't exhibit the bug. At that point you go to the commit logs and there is your problem.

It does seem like an odd oversight that Chrome allows you to block plugins per site but not extensions. If you click the green lock in your address bar now, you can see the option to block all plugins. It stops java and flash, but allows extensions like adblock, etc to keep running on the page.

How do other people keep databases in sync between multiple developers and the production server? Source code is easy. Source control and code merging are mostly straightforward.

But in something like wordpress, a lot of what gets displayed to the end user is in a database. Aside from page content, widgets and other configuration often ends up in a database. It's not unusual for themes to keep css, javascript or php in the database. (Every time I use a theme that allows me to put PHP into a database I feel like I've failed as a programmer and the gods of MVC will smite me.)

So developer X adds content to his dev copy. Developer Y adds content to his copy. Meanwhile, the client or end users are adding content to the production copy. Using a shared development/staging server somewhat mitigates this, but not totally. You can't just git merge the sql together. (Can you? I mean, sure you can merge two sql files. But is the end product actually usable?) Is this a solved problem?

There's a great sci-fi novel, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a post-oil world where tightly wound springs are used to store energy, as we do now with clocks. One of the subplots deals with a character trying to develop a material that can be wound tighter and more compactly without breaking. Or explosively unwinding. I'm not an engineer or physicist, so I've wondered, what is the theoretical limit for storing energy in a spring. Sci-fi stories usually do a bit of handwaving with nano/bio/quantum-tech to make magic materials, but what is the real science? Cars and laptops powered by springs sounds plausible (and awesomely steam punk) to me.