I could not agree more.

Let's face it, Perl is an abysmal language by itself. (Yes, the regex engine is good, but that's about it IMHO.) Add in CPAN though, and you've got a massive wealth of libraries to use. The pain becomes worthwhile.

Surely the advantage of optical cables though is that although the speed of a signal through the cable may be slower, you can carry many more simultaneous signals through a single cable by just using different frequencies of light?

I can read maps. I've used maps for navigating whilst driving, and also walking and orienteering. One very useful technique I was taught when map reading was to rotate the map to match my direction of movement. Doing so makes the map much easier to comprehend.

Having a GPS showing a 3D POV map (or a 2D view where up is your direction of travel) is common sense. The translation of a 2D map into a 3D POV map is essentially a prerequisite step in properly understanding the map. Removing the need to perform that step means significantly less processing required to interpret the map, making it less of a distraction.

For my part, I greatly appreciate having a POV map on my GPS. It means that when I'm driving fast down twisty-turny country lanes I can glimpse at the GPS for a tiny fraction of a second and instantly know which way the road is going. I can react and prepare accordingly, and won't get caught out by unexpected sharp bends.

As for your assertion that people that cannot read maps have no spatial awareness, I don't think that's really true. Sure, they might not have a particularly well developed sense of spatial awareness, but it really just means that they haven't learnt how to read a map.

I must admit I haven't read Hunger Games, but what you're saying reminds me very strongly of my experience reading The DaVinci Code. That was in my opinion a truly dreadful book, but back in 2004 it was the "must read" book of the year.

You're right - people like these things because they're "cool", and if you've read the book then "you're in the club". Marketing plays a big part, hyping up a book to generate sales, getting book clubs to push it. It's nothing more than fashion.

In the case of Brown's crud, I think the reason why it was marketable, and why it became popular is that the plot is quite intriguing. (The writing is disastrously bad, and Brown's "style" of cutting action at completely arbitrary points to swap to a different plot-line just for the sake of generating artificial suspense I found incredibly irritating.) Had the plot been dull, then it wouldn't have stood a chance.

A big part of the success of such books is that most of the people that read them only read fashionable books. They've not read anything that's genuinely good, so they can't tell how bad they are. Since they don't know any better and have enjoyed the plot, they'll rave about the book, which perpetuates the myth that it's a "good" book. It's highly unlikely that they will expand their reading to any decent authors; at best they will read other books by the same author, keeping them away from genuinely good reading material.

This meme that you cannot create on tablet computers has to die. It's really not helpful, and just shows a profound lack of imagination.

The best selling iPad app of all time is Pages. A word processor.

Lolz. "Jehova's Witnesses" and "more sane" right next to each other. Thanks for the laugh. I needed that. :-)

(I'm very thankful that my family escaped from that cult before I was born...)

Meh - Huxley stole the line from Shakespeare... I'm not quite so sure that he'd have disapproved. ;-)

What are you talking about?

Apple didn't pull Carbon in Lion. The Carbon API is still there. Carbon-based apps still work just fine.

What they pulled was Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator. This means that you cannot run PowerPC-only Carbon apps on Lion. Intel-compatible Carbon apps still work fine.

It's significantly less than 1% right now.

Firstly as has been pointed out elsewhere, the beta is only available in a restricted set of countries right now.

Secondly the beta doesn't currently support devices with MIPS CPUs, which counts out several low-cost Android tablets.

Sorry to be a pedant, but back when Apple launched the iPhone, they did say that it ran Mac OS X, and made a big point of it. It was sometime later that they decided to say it ran iPhone OS (and much later still iOS).

Referring to the iPhone's OS as OSX was always confusing, as is the naming of the UI layer (Cocoa vs Cocoa Touch), especially since they are incompatible APIs. It was definitely a good thing when they stopped saying the iPhone ran OSX.

Heh - I was a big Acorn fan, and always felt that they were a bit like the UK's version of Apple. Part of that was the underdog thing - by the time I was aware of what was going on Sinclair was dominant in the UK home market, the IBM PC was around and Apple was starting it's long decline. I wasn't aware of Apple's prior dominance with the Apple ][, since that machine was an also-ran in the UK.

Acorn, like Apple, produced higher cost, higher quality products, whilst Sinclair, like Microsoft, aimed for the mass market. During the 80s those parallels were pretty strong - right up until Sinclair got things badly wrong with the QL and his drive to make electric cars, spending a fortune to produce the Sinclair C5, two pretty spectacular failures. Whilst Acorn outlasted Sinclair by a decade, Sinclair sold many more computers than Acorn ever did.

I don't really see such a strong correlation of personalities though. There's parallels between Gates and Sinclair (the nerdiness), but also between Jobs and Sinclair too (the control freakery, and visionary thing). There's some parallels between Hauser/Curry and Jobs/Woz - with the partners fulfilling similar roles within their organisations on their founding, but the ages around the opposite way. There's also some similarities between those guys and Gates...

Your guarded talk is amusing.

Lyonnaise de Garantie in my opinion must, empirically, be a bunch of crooks.

I don't see any other way of explaining their actions here. Were they not crooks, they should feel no need at all to stop potential customers from asking the question "are Lyonnaise de Garantie a bunch of crooks?", since their potential customers should be quickly come up with the answer "no".

The fact they were so desperate to suppress this question carries the clear implication that they believe the most likely answer that potential customers will come up with is "yes". By taking this action they themselves seem to me to be saying "we're crooks".

Their use of lawyers is in my opinion an attempt at bullying to get their own way - the actions of a bunch of crooks.

Besides which, they're an insurance company. As such in my experience they are by definition crooks - exploiting and overcharging the weak, vulnerable, and needy.

I'm not even remotely embarrassed that we have a Queen in the UK, and given the reality of the political system here (which was copied in whole or in part all around the world, including in the USA) I don't see why I should be embarrassed. The point is that under our democratic system she is not a ruling monarch at all, but merely a geo-political figurehead with a ceremonial role and no political power, hence the quotes that L4t3r4lu5 placed around "ruling".

Indeed, it would be folly to remove the Queen of her title. The Queen, and the rest of the royal family, are responsible for attracting many millions of tourists to the UK, all of whom spend money here. They are the major attraction for most tourists, even though most tourists will never actually lay eyes on them. If you removed them we'd get significantly less tourism (why else would people want to come to this dull and rainy place) and the economy would likely tank.

Indeed. The Falklands are UK territories.

The Malivinas are what Argentina claims are theirs... of course that happens to be the same place.

IMHO the ongoing sectarian war in Iraq would have been a much better and stronger justification for going to war in Iraq.

That case was never even remotely attempted to be made by Bush or Blair. It was not presented as a justification, or a factor in the decision making.