True story. You're welcome.

Answer - There is no section that says that. It's true that some Mormons once slaughtered a group of passing settlers. It was unequivocally a bad thing to do. It can be slightly better understood (but not excused) by understanding the circumstances. Mormons were quite paranoid of outsiders, since they and their families had been driven out of several cities, raped, and murdered. There was hysteria about Johnston's Army coming into the territory, conquering it, and again raping and murdering people (this was right in the middle of the "Utah War"). In the midst of that hysteria, one group of people went completely nuts and did some horrible, inexcusable things. At first, they told Brigham Young that Indians did it, and Brigham (probably reluctant to believe that some of his own people could do something so heinous), believed them. A local grand jury also failed to indict, again probably reluctant to believe that some of their own could do something so heinous. Years later, federal prosecutors came in, and when it became clear that John Lee and his friends had in fact been responsible, the church excommunicated them (which is the worst penalty a church can or should be able to levy). Years later, Lee was convicted by an all-Mormon jury and shot, and Brigham Young opined that Lee got less than he deserved. There have been some efforts to implicate Brigham Young as a co-conspirator, but it takes a lot of winking at the actual evidence to get there. Many people believe that he made mistakes in how he handled the situation, which is a more supportable proposition.

Bringing up facts about Mormons is fine. But if you're going to do it, learn the whole story. Don't just parrot some anti-Mormon sound bite you once heard from somebody.

Citation.

Perhaps, but I think that's a little extreme. I am, rather, in favor of a more reasonable copyright term. (I would not have upheld the current copyright term if I were on the Supreme Court, since "life of the author" is not a determinate time.) But even then, if they never publish the source code, copyright doesn't come into it. All you could do is copy the game binary, so you would still have to reverse engineer a game server. That's the problem with the DMCA. It reaches over traditional copyright boundaries and prohibits people from doing things like implementing something on their own, which has not copyright implications.

That's not a bug, that's a feature. They don't lose their copyright just because they stop running a server. This is just an exemption that wouldn't let them sue gamers for DMCA violations when they reverse engineer their own servers.

That's a poor analogy. This isn't a request for a blanket copyright exemption for abandonware. This is a request for a DMCA exception that lets people who already legally own a copy of a game to continue playing it by circumventing DRM and running their own servers.

There are legitimate grammar and usage debates, with cogent arguments on either side. But the Oxford Comma is the One True Way. The best argument I've ever heard against it is, "Well, it saves a few drops of ink on the printed page." Anti-Oxford Comma heathens should be drawn, quartered, and burned at the stake for befouling the language.

This is an important distinction for patent claims. If you say "A widget comprising a, b, and c," that means the widget includes a, b, and c, and anything else. If you say "A widget consisting of a, b, and c," that means it includes only a, b, and c (which is why you never see "consisting of" in a patent claim, except in Markush groups).

I guess you would have to ask the many, many Slashdot posters who regularly mock the Bible, including the GP. (That said, there are plenty of books I hate, so it's not inconceivable.)

Um, did you read the page you linked to? Because it definitely supports exactly what I was saying. Whether you believe the Bible was divinely inspired, it was a near-contemporary account. The fact that a little blurb on Wikipedia mentions that some early-20th-Century archaeologists think Molech might have been made up is hardly conclusive evidence that Molech is "obviously" an invention of the Jews to denigrate their enemies. But regardless of what you think actually happened, the author of Chronicles was definitely saying, "Manasseh was an awful person because he sacrificed children to Molech." That's a far cry from the GP's original thesis of "Manasseh was an awful person because he did the equivalent of reading Harry Potter."

Yeah, I know you think it's clever and edgy to make fun of people who read the Bible, but if you're going to do it, at least have some basic understanding. The passage you're referring to, in which Manasseh's evils are enumerated, includes "he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom." This is a reference to Molech worship, in which people literally burned children to death in the arms of golden idols. Surely even for an edgy, clever Bible-hater, that's sufficiently abominable to call him evil.

Um, you realize that C came out at almost exactly the same time, don't you? Granted, I wasn't programming anything in the 1970s, but I know enough history to know that the Unix kernel was already being ported to C right around 1970.

"Lacks" is a strong word; it's just not inherent. Back when I used to write software in C and C++ for money, I would religiously put "}//end if" to make sure I could keep track of which braces went where. If I needed even more context, I would put " }//end if(var1 == var2). It's not that hard. Like many things in C, you have plenty of rope to hang yourself if you really want to, but you can also make it tidy and sensible if you care to. C is not your friend, and is not your enemy.

C is like an M1 rifle. Sturdy, proved in battle many times over, occasionally finnicky, and ready to put a high-powered round precisely where you aim it without apology. Whether you aim at your foot is your business.

Welcome to my life every time Slashdot posts one of their misinformed anti-patent rants. (Signed, a patent attorney.)

Which, in concentrated form, can form a black hole that can devour a whole planet.

Sure, if you're an SI purist. But everybody knows that in an insulated nerd environment, you can normalize to teraSpocks, which have a much greater Apparent Coolness in context.