Famous British philosopher Andrew Zaltzman put it like this: if you leave a man alone in a room an electric socket he will eventually try to stick his dick into it.
BASIC only ruins you if you have no intellectual curiosity. BASIC was my first language and with each new language I’ve learned since I’ve always been excited at the new possibilities and paradigms it opened up.
Thank god I'm self employed and decide myself when and what to exercise. I can't imagine having to dance to the pipes of these corporate clowns. 18 people being scrutinized by their bosses collectively lose 150 lbs (25 of which are accounted for by 1 person)? I can't say I'm impressed.
Exactly, the money you safe on hardware you'll lose on support issues. If I were still a student I'd probably be running a hackintosh but my time now is too valuable to dick around with such a setup and afaik there are no firms offering support for hackintoshes.
When the kids got a Wii I bought some Wii points just to get the browser. I used it once. An app that requires me to sit pretty much exactly in front of the tv to be able to control it just isn't all that useful to me.
220 billion doesn't sound all that big to me. Let's say there are 100,000 firms that use Cobol, that would mean 2.2 million lines of code per firm. Since even a fairly trivial report coded in Cobol is easily 1000 lines (source: ran wc on my old Cobol directory), this would be the equivalent of about 2200 simple reports per firm. This is a very low number considering there is bound to be more complex transaction processing code, lots of (even more verbose) code generated by code generators, and the tendency to have lots of tweaked versions of the same program.
It is ok as long as only friends read it, "Haha, look, Johnny used a swear-word, he's such a witty guy" they'll say. But there may come a day that someone who doesn't know you reads that comment, without knowing you and your colorful personality and reading it completely out of context her first impression of you will be that you're a cantankerous old fart and she'll hook up with that dumb html-"programmer" instead.
I definitely do not discard it. Another solution that sprang to mind is that the softness of the hood makes it possible to put some kind of airbag(s) over the engine. Though this probably has a rather complicated set of problems (when to fire it, how to time the firing, can the required volume be inflated in time, etc.).
Cute, but in this form it will never be allowed on European streets. If you hit a pedestrian they will smash their head right into the engine block, so it is never going to pass safety standards. Still, the idea is nice, does anyone have any stats on how much weight this safes?
