Just a few words from Cory Doctorow (Someone comes to town...) I think are appropriate right now. "You've read all of these?" he asked. "Naw," Alan said, falling into the rote response from his proprietorship of the bookstore. "What's the point of a bunch of books you've already read?" The joke reminded him of better times and he smiled a genuine smile. Firstly, I was able to look up that quote easily because Cory Doctorow puts all his books on his website in a multitude of different formats. Also, it points out what I hate about books. There's so many books out there that I rarely read a book twice, even if it's good. So, there are a bunch of books I've already read, sitting on my shelves. I love eBooks because they take up almost no space, and you can forget about them after your done. You don't have to worry about if you have enough space before you buy one.

VB.Net still has the old background compiler, so you still get notified about errors as you type. It's one of the reasons why I still like working in VB.Net over C#. VB.Net isn't a popular as C#, but it has almost all the same functionality, and personally, the background compiler makes it a joy to work in. I don't know why MS hasn't implemented similar functionality in C# yet.

In response to @Sadastronaut, some countries do limit political contributions. Canada has very strict rules about campaign contributions. Basically no corporate, union, or non-incorporated association may donate any money. Zero, Zilch, Nada. Also, Individuals may only donate $1200 in any one calendar year. Sure there's probably people who ignore the law, or find creative ways around it, but it's there.

As badly designed as this bill is, to the fact that even with all the stuff they proposed, it just won't work, and piracy would still be rampant, I don't hear anybody suggesting any alternative solutions to stopping Americans from accessing copyright infringing sites which are located off of American soil. Sure you could go after individual users of the site, but that would be way too troublesome. It would be like going after the casual drug users while completely ignoring the huge drug cartels. The cartel could always find more customers. They could try to work it out with whichever country the site is located in, to get the site shut down, but many of the countries that host these sites couldn't care less about the pirate web sites. If the bill was exactly the same, except that "copyright infringement" was replaced with "human trafficking", most people wouldn't be against it. And sure, copyright infringement isn't as serious as human trafficking, but they are both illegal. And I'm sure we all wouldn't want PayPal et al providing payment services to human trafficking sites, and we wouldn't want Google paying AdWords revenue to human trafficking sites, and many people would probably go so far as to say that the DNS for human trafficking sites shouldn't even resolve. So, badly written law, really shouldn't be passed, because yeah, the way it's written, sites like StackOverflow could get taken down for a very small copyright infraction*(see rant below). However, nobody seems to be coming up with any other solutions either. *Not that I personally believe it would happen, takedown requires a court order, and the judge would take one look at the site, and know that it isn't a pirate haven. The content in question would probably be taken down before the judge had a chance to even look at the site. A judge would have to be completely out of his mind to block a legitimate site in this matter.

People were doing multiple video cards a long time ago with 3DFX cards. Back then, SLI stood for Scan Line Interleave. Instead of interleaving frames, they would interleave individual lines of the same frame. Amazing how little things change.

@Kieran, I also find the same thing. Often just writing out the question leads you to the correct answer. However, once I've written out the problem, even if I've already solved it, it's often beneficial to post the question. Firstly, because others can now benefit from what you have already learned. Even if nobody knows the answer, you can just post the solution you came up with. Also, you can get solutions that others have come up with that you didn't think of. Thirdly, sometimes someone else will post the solution you had already come up with, and it's just a little bit of extra reassurance that you were doing things right.

I think Jeff just has a case of "too much money". Most home users don't have the money, or most certainly don't want to spend, $500 (OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB, newegg) every 6-12 months because a drive fails. It's not about the backups, because a 500 GB spinning platter for backup is cheap, and you should have this anyway. Sure if you have tons of money, or your employer is paying for the SSD, then go right ahead. But failing this often is just not an option. $500 would be 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a complete new system. I don't want that failing out every year.

Personally, I think communication plays a big role in programming. But understanding what you are doing plays an even bigger role. It doesn't matter how good of a communicator you are, if you don't understand what you are talking about, you will completely fail at trying to work as a programmer. While I understand that there are many good programmers who just lack communication skills, I very rarely find one who has such bad communication skills that they can't get their point across, If they know what they are talking about. While communication skills can help make a good programmer better, they can't make a programmer who has no idea what they are doing any better.

The reason that Palm Graffiti worked is that it used the limited vocabulary approach. However, I think that for handwriting recognition, this is probably the best approach. Make the user learn a new alphabet, in which all the ambiguity is removed, and which can actually speed up writing, because you can actually make the letters simpler. It's much easier to write a letter T, or A on Graffiti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29), because they are reduced to a single pen stroke. my only problem with the Palm was the lack of friction, causing it to have an unnatural feeling, quite different from writting with a pen on paper.