It is, in the same way that Australia was treated as an extension of the USA during the "negotiation" of last "free" trade agreement between our nations. The result? Australia ended up with a DMCA-wannabe and extended copyright terms or lost other trade items. I particularly like the "Australia's IP laws will be substantially harmonised with the world’s largest intellectual property market, and a global leader in innovation and creative products." arse-kissing exercise. I'm sure that any Canada-EU equivalent will contain similar gems in English and French!

http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/negotiations/us_fta/outcomes/08_intellectual_property.html

CouchDB is ACID compliant for document transactions.

Or can it actually handle a transaction involving queries and updates over multiple entities/rows?

I realize this is a fundamental feature of relational databases, but NoSQL databases are decidedly not relational. If we look to CouchDB again, the document is the transaction. All of your "rows" and "columns" are stored within the document. You can be certain that all of your entities contained within the document will be saved in a consistent state.

Again, CouchDB is not a relational database. If you need a relational database, I would recommend using one. With that said, there are many applications that do not benefit from relational systems and are much more appropriately implemented on NoSQL databases. It is all about choosing the right tool for the job.

I agree. I'm a huge fan of digital post-processing - like what you said - just for changing the colours etc. I dont do any cut & paste or any modification other than getting the colours to look right and also some sharpening etc.

I often delve into creative/artistic photography - it combines my passion for computers and photography and technology in general.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/

Just replace blades with cores...

I quote myself: "(I presume they are in some kind of can; no shielding at all would be plain stupid.)"

So yes, you did miss that.

I have a literature major in my undergrad degree.

I'm happy to go toe to toe in a nerd-off with any CS grad.

Trust me, we book nerds are not only the most introverted of the nerds, but also the most annoyingly verbose.

When the current reviewer gets promoted to rating PornTube

Maybe, maybe not. Are you using traditional or simplified characters? Someone from Taiwan speaks mandarin natively, but may not understand simplified characters, since they still use the traditional set there (a Taiwanese girl sat next to me in my Beginning Mandarin class, her sole purpose being to learn simplified characters). Similarly, someone from China is almost guaranteed to speak Mandarin, but will not be familiar with traditional characters unless they are highly educated in a field that requires them (history, etc) or spent additional time learning them on their own (also, keep in mind that the PRC government grossly exaggerates their literacy rate).

Many Kanji (Japanese characters) are also simplified, but not in the same way as the Chinese simplified set. Additionally, Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, so while a Japanese person might recognize the characters, the sentence is so grammatically different that it's unintelligible. Japanese typically don't use kanji alone anyway, frequently adding hiragana to indicate pronunciation and verb conjugatioons (which don't exist in Mandarin).

I have no direct experience with Korean use of Chinese characters, but my understanding based on conversations with South Korean friends is that it's similar to what the Japanese have done.

Similar examples about Microsoft's behavior gets a "so what?" response, while for Google it gets a "they're so evil" response.

When your reputation is ruined, you can act without shame.

If you could give them the experience of working 50+ hours a week to come home to a screaming brat, and have your money earned already spent before you even get it, just to take care of the child, the population growth would fall real fast.

For the problem of population growth in general, that's obviously nonsense. For the population to grow, people must be having on average more than 2 children, and guess what that means? Barring twins the first time out, they already have a kid and thus know exactly what kind of burden it is! So what exactly are you planning on teaching them?

For teen pregnancy, which isn't an issue of population growth but still, this is still not going to help. The problem has never been that teens want children, or don't know they don't want children, to any significant extent. The problem is that teens want to fuck. And you can't educate people out of their instinctual, hormonal urges.

The only thing teaching them about the burden of parenthood can accomplish is to make teenagers more likely to use proper birth control. But that's not "abstinence education" then is it?

My prediction: when the $100 barrier is broken and laptops are in the supermarkets, the impact of this on the internet will be comparable to that of AOL.

"Untrue. Microsoft has always said "we'd rather people steal our product then use a competitors product.""

Of course they prefer to be "stolen" that way since they don't lose even a dime with that.

Microsoft can say all they want, that won't make it any more true.

Are you sure that if somebody effectively managed to steal their product (as in they were not able to sell it to anyone else since now they don't own it, nor use it as a basis to produce their next product line, since then they won't be able to put their hand on it) they still would prefer that to somebody using a competitor's?

Remember: copying something without its copyright holder permission is quite a different thing to steal it.

But it's NOT easy to carry around - it won't fit in a pocket, so it'll mean one hand always full, or carrying it in a bag. If you're going to do that then you may just as well carry a netbook or other small laptop or tablet with more functionality at a lower price point.

If you want a device you can easily carry around and share (!?), then the it's overpriced and underspecced - bad value for money.

At current exchange rates it's nearly 400 GBP. Alternatively I could buy a Dell Mini 10v for just over half of that and install OS X more or less without modification. And then I could run whatever software I like without Apple vetting it first to decide whether or not they deem it suitable for me to run that software. And that's the clincher - the software issue! Shame really...

My understanding is that the capacitive and resistive tech gets a bit hard to implement for larger screens, so they all use infrared in one way or another (a camera with a filter is pointed at the screen (the back or the front) and then various techniques are used to get brighter illumination at points where something is touching the screen).

There is brief discussion of it here:

http://wiki.nuigroup.com/Multitouch_Technologies

I used to program anything serious in assembler until, say, 1991. Then I moved to C++/Pascal, but always hand-tuned critical parts with Assembler. Around 1995 I realized compilers are doing better job in optimization of those critical parts then my hand-crafted assembly code. I think currently it is only useful for SIMD instructions and similar cases where it is hard for compiler to figure parallel data manipulation with specialized instructions. With ongoing improvements in compilers, those will go away too, right? Or is there anything compilers definitely cannot figure out?