Seconded. It takes a while to get used to some of the fine details of Play, but it's very much worth it.

Best of luck, Rob, in whatever endeavor you end up undertaking.

I spent a bunch of time researching this and figuring out "how you get the most work out of programmers."

What it comes down to is that there are no shortcuts. Treating your programmers well is the best way to get the most work out of them. That doesn't mean pampering them, but 10 hour days are just going to hammer them if kept on for more than two weeks.

Here are the blog posts:

http://tersesystems.com/2007/08/16/getting-work-out-of-programmers-part-1

http://tersesystems.com/2007/08/20/getting-work-out-of-programmers-part-2

Good luck.

For more information on this model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASR-33_Teletype

Looks like it's a 32 bit app, not an x86_64 app. Not good if you're running a pure 64-bit environment.

The entire 240/ block is reserved. Is there something wrong with those IP addresses?

Ah crap. The command was to lie down on the ground, not to get back in the car.

As for the source, it's direct from Dr. Watts himself:

"So what it came down to, ultimately, was those moments after I was repeatedly struck in the face by Beaudry (an event not in dispute, incidentally). After Beaudry had finished whaling on me in the car, and stepped outside, and ordered me out of the vehicle; after I’d complied with that, and was standing motionless beside the car, and Beaudry told me to get on the ground — I just stood there, saying “What is the problem?”, just before Beaudry maced me.

And that, said the Prosecutor in her final remarks — that, right there, was failure to comply. That was enough to convict."

He was told to get back into his car after the officer had just punched him in the face.

It doesn't surprise me that he'd be confused and disoriented, or that he'd be slow to comply. Try punching someone in the face some time. It hurts.

The really sad bit is that under these laws, you could not only punch someone in the face, you could pepper spray them, kick them in the nuts while they were down, and then tell them you wanted them to stand up and empty out your pockets. Don't do it because you're screaming and in pain, or trying to run away? You're committing a crime.

Correct. They were really anti-MIG weapons. They work by getting near the target and blowing up, using the explosion to damage the target without having to actually fly into the target directly (which is a much harder problem at those speeds). They were able to find and explode near SCUDs just fine, but SCUDs are really just big heavy bombs not fragile jets, and the Patriots don't have the punch to effectively damage the warheads inside the SCUDs.

So they started moving to impact weapons instead of close range explosive weapons. Unfortunately that means actually having to hit a target moving very very quickly and dealing with wind, air pockets, etc... The real world success rates of this type of system are woefully unproven. Extremely stacked tests still fail way more than you'd like.

SCUDs and SCUD like missiles are cheap and easy to build, so launching a thousand of them isn't a big deal. Take an insanely expensive anti-SCUD missile with a 50% hit rate (which is generous btw) and you're still letting 500 warheads hit your city, assuming you HAD 1000 anti-SCUDs in the area, which seems unlikely.

Even Java took a long time to have decent IDE support. Most of these other languages are relatively new, and are still definitely in the "early adopter" phase of the usage curve. I do think Scala in particular has a good chance of adoption, as it's fairly easy to start working with it as if it were Java with type inferences and first-class functions. Also, the next release will have features that specifically make it easier for IDE integrations to be written.

I don't think there necessarily needs to be a big corporate backer- look at Ruby for example; it has a number of small corporate backers, and a wealth of open source developer support. Scala is beginning to get more high-profile usage, Twitter being the biggest name. It has a well written, well defined specification, and a pretty active community around it, with mailing lists, IRC channels, conferences, etc. Being a JVM language, I think it will be easier to sneak into the back door of a lot of corporate projects.

Agreed on F#; it does seem that it would flounder without significant support from MS, but I generally don't hear about companies using it as I live in a JVM world, and don't get much exposure to .NET stuff.

Although Java-the-language has stagnated a bit (I don't know if JDK 7 will ever be complete, due to all the feature cramming), but there's been a lot of activity during the past few years on other languages that run on Java-the-platform. Groovy and Rhino (Javascript) have been available for the JVM for quite a while. JRuby is actually faster than "native" Ruby for a lot of real-world applications. The Lisp-like Clojure language has a lot of fans. IMO, Scala is the most interesting out of all of these, with a very sophisticated type system, as well as functional features that the cool OCaml and Haskell kids seem to love.

All of these alternate languages can use the wealth of libraries available for Java, generally on all platforms on which the JVM runs. For example, I know of Scala apps that can run on Andriod, which is close enough to Sun's VM.

"some aftermarket 3rd party batteries do not meet the rigid safety standards Panasonic uses."

It would be interesting to see what standards they refer to. Is that a trade secret?

I've been VERY pleased with the reliability and speed of my Drobo. If you don't want to spend the time rolling your own, dealing with linux raid drivers and related issues, etc... Just get a Drobo.

As a citizen, I'm scared of McCain and what he's liable to do, and I'm not scared of Obama. I'm going to vote based on my opinions, not guessing what our "enemies" might be scared of.