It looked like they had fixed it when I previewed. Why in the hell do smart characters work in preview but not posted? What's the point of previewing when slashdot's retarded code will fuck it up anyway?

For a version that hasn't had slashdot's garbage generator shit all over it, go here.

Slashdot's lack of smart quotes are one of my banes. Why does the infant Soylent News that uses slashcode not mangle smart quotes like Slashdot does?

Damned Dice...

What I meant is that even though movies can indeed be thought-provoking, they demand no imagination on the audience's part.

Agreed completely. I do need a cheaper printer, though.

But books and movies are completely different. If "Mars, Ho!" were a screenplay, it would have to be written completely differently. If it were a movie, the opening scene would be the withdrawing addict killing the bouncer. In the book, this shows up halfway through.

Movies are completely passive, you're spoon-fed everything in a movie. With literature, it's almost as much the reader's imagination as the writer's. It would be a boring book indeed that described every aspect of everything.

In a movie, everyone sees the same couch. In a book, everyone who reads it sees a different couch.

Likewise, these different mediums demand a different approach to getting the audience interested.

The inside of the book jacket used to be the place to hook people on the content - but with the move to digital, "What's a book jacket, gran'ma?", which is eventually going to become "What's a hardcover?" I for one welcome the demise of those pretentious not-to-be-touched hipster coffee-table books.

I used to think so, and thought the only reason I prefer physical books is because I read thousands of them before ever seeing a computer, but have changed my mind since publishing "Nobots" and "The Paxil Diaries". First was my 28 year old daughter's reaction when she saw a hardcover of "Nobots". "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!" Even though she grew up with computers in the house, she's not impressed with text on a screen. Perhaps because she grew up with them.

What cemented this for me was site stats. More people have paid for physical copies than have downloaded the free e-books. The vast majority simply read the HTML on the web pages.

If physical books die, it will be the publishing industry that kills them with stupid moves and policies, much like the music publishers have trashed sales of their physical wares.

Agreed. With "Nobots" you had to get a few chapters read before it starts to make sense, but a woman who read it told me "it usually takes a chapter or two to get me sucked into a book, I was hooked on that one in the first paragraph."

OTOH "Mars, Ho!" has a Mise en scene (which slashdot's lack of unicode prevents us from easily spelling correctly), its first chapter. Different stories take different approaches.

To anyone who thinks laws apply to the internet. It wasn't a rebuttal to your comment, it was an addition.

Stop feeding the trolls.

Your data protection thing can't possibly work. Your country's laws do not apply to me any more than Sharia law does.

There is no more of a way for your government to make me take something down than I could issue a meaningful DMCA takedown to you.

The internet is international. Your laws are meaningless there, as are mine.

True, but it was trivial to take, say, Sinclair BASIC and convert it to Apple II's BASIC. If you knew one dialect, all the rest were easy to write in.

Effective visual editing of templates; HTML template editing but much more like a good UI editor

I've always used a text editor for HTML since automation always seemed to produce bloated, unreadable (if not edited by hand) garbage, whether AOL's, Netscape's, Front Page, Word Perfect, or Word.

However, I discovered recently that you can get very good HTML from Open Office, but the way to go about it is really convoluted thanks to Oo's retarded menu structure. Under "file" towards the bottom of the list, nowhere near "export" where it should be, is "view in browser". Saving the web page from FoxPro produces excellent, readable HTML. However, I didn't run it through the WC3's HTML validator.

Professionals with years or even decades of experience have enough trouble writing secure software.

And just where do these "professionals" who can't write secure software get these years or decades of experience??

It's even worse when they use "beginner-friendly" languages like PHP, Ruby (with Ruby on Rails), and JavaScript. These languages are totally shit, and end up promoting buggy, insecure code.

I don't know PHP or Ruby, but javascript is in no way "beginner-friendly". I'd been coding in BASIC, assembly, xBase (various dialects), NOMAD, and a couple I can't remember (I'm getting old) for well over a decade when I needed javascript.

Javascript is crap. Often useful and necessary crap, but still crap.

When these amateurs try to write code in any sort of a business or professional setting, it usually ends up being the IT department or professional software developers who get to maintain the crap code in the end.

It's true that someone who thinks he knows what he's doing but doesn't can really screw a project up, an idiot I worked with who thought he knew dBase almost cost us a ten million dollar Federal grant by removing some columns in some tables in an application I wrote. I was able to make it work anyway.

Asimov got it right in Foundation; those who know little and are aware of their ignorance aren't dangerous, it's those who think they know but don't that are.

But I was mostly self-taught, only taking classes after I'd been programming for years, and few of the classes taught me anything I hadn't already learned from reading hundreds of books on the subject and practicing.

And we can't forget how these half-assed amateurs often start "contributing to" (a.k.a. destroying) open source projects. Thanks to them, we have disasters like GNOME 3, where instead of trying to make efficient, effective software, they just ended up trying to make a shitty, half-assed copy of their warped understanding of OS X.

It's not that they're shitty programmers, it's that they're shitty designers, and the professionals at Microsoft are no better; Windows 8, anyone? And whose code is the least secure? Yep, your fellow professionals at Microsoft with their warped "understanding" of UI, just like the GNOME devs.

We shouldn't promote the idea of them getting involved with software development. We should discourage it!

No, we should develop easier to use tools. The languages and compilers you professionals are writing suck donkey ass.

Even if Macs weren't so expensive, something cross-platform, like BASIC, would be better. I learned BASIC on a TS-1000, and after BASIC, learning assembly wasn't that hard; I was hand-assembling machine code for that TS-1000. I had to since BASIC on a 1 mHz Z-80 that powered the entire machine was just too slow for games.

Oddly, the company that brought BASIC to most was Microsoft; they didn't write Sinclair BASIC but they wrote the BASIC for most other computers of the time. GW BASIC on the IBM PC was still good. They have a bad habit of taking an okay or even excellent program like BASIC, FoxPro, or Windows 7 and trashing it completely.

Visual Basic is a convoluted joke.

And you hit the nail on the head with syntax. Shit like curly braces are IMO incredibly counterproductive and stupid.