If you're blaming capitalism for their student loan issues, you're barking up the wrong tree. The major issue with student loans is that they're guaranteed by the federal government. This is a tried and true way to increase the price of something, massively, and that's exactly what we've seen with rising tuition costs. Government loan guarantees have nothing to do with capitalism - they're central economic planning.

Blaming capitalism for student loan debt is like blaming Iraq for 9/11 - a classic case of "someone hit me, I'm gonna hit somebody by god!"

They need to select a few featured daily modes and offer some reward for doing those. Rotate all the modes through this, changing the list on a regular basis. That will concentrate the player base while still allowing people to experience variety.

I don't know if using GMail is up this guy's alley, but if you click the "Spam" button on these, they will disappear quickly.

This is a real head-scratcher. Perl's regular expressions have been the gold standard for a long, long time, being borrowed by many other languages. How on earth did someone get the impression they were bad?

Although I share your distaste for JavaScript, the string concatenation example is exactly what I'd expect. You process the operators from left to right, coercing the right-hand argument to the type of the left.

Same here. Most PCs are fine for modern games with just a couple of upgrades. Grab any $1000 computer and put in a new graphics card, power supply, and SSD and you're good to go for 99% of games. And by "new graphics card" I mean whatever Nvidia card is one generation behind.

It's fairly simple. If you are being interrupted, ask people to stop, or to do so only at particular times. If they won't, then bring it up with management. If management won't support you, you need to find another job, because that's the only way you can get a positive working environment. One programmer will find it exceedingly difficult to change the culture of a company that doesn't value focused work.

The issue with Microsoft, Facebook, and increasingly, Google, is that they have no intention of respecting their users. People feel locked in to Windows and Office, and would gladly jump ship due to Microsoft's abusive attitude, if only they could. Network effects keep a lot of customers stuck there. If people felt good about Microsoft, they'd use Bing and be happy.

The same goes for Facebook. They could have treated their users (note I don't say "customers") well, and they wouldn't face such a challenge from upstarts like Snapchat. But if Snapchat offers any way to reduce dependence on Facebook, people will jump for it.

Google is increasingly alienating its users in the same way, with the attempt to force Google+ down our throats being only the most egregious recent example.

I hope the next big innovator will be a company that learns how to treat people with respect. They will wipe the floor with these jerks, and good riddance.

Just don't advocate that solution on Ars Technica - they'll tar and feather you.

This is because the cars are still in the testing phase. Nobody is allowing cars to operate autonomously on public roads yet.

A good night's sleep, frequent breaks, and rest periods. Whenever I switch to a new task, I methodically clean up after the last one - close terminals, browser tabs, diagnostic programs, everything. Sometimes interruptions are avoidable, and I have to open a ticket for something, but I make the quickest note possible so I can get back to my task right away.

How would one "go" plain text, exactly? Start using telnet for remote logins? Stop hashing passwords?

Anyway, I didn't change my practices. I had already assumed that all of my web and email traffic should be treated as if it were completely public.

IMHO, a removed line should count for 10 times as much as an added line.

Rather annoying that it's called a "first amendment" right. It has nothing to do with the first amendment. If anything, the ninth amendment is a better justification. The very best justification is that there is no law against it.

> Isn't this the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl?

Yes. As the submitter said.

> Should the summary read a bit more like 'averting a worse nuclear disaster than Chernobyl'?

No. Basically, all their efforts failed, so it was as bad as it could have been. And it was still much less severe than Chernobyl.