C is a statically compiled language, so you can't really build a system like SLIME for it. SLIME needs to be connected to a running VM that it can push code to dynamically. C wasn't designed with that capability in mind.

What doesn't work?

Visual Studio doesn't support any programming language with macros, unless someone has made a Boo plugin whilst I wasn't looking.

Or did you mean keyboard macros? Because you don't need to write any code for that, either. Now, I don't think Emacs is as quite good as Vim for defining keyboard macros, but it's certainly better than Visual Studio.

I can think of plenty of features that SLIME has, but VS does not. However, I can't think of any feature in VS that is not matched by either Emacs itself, SLIME or some other extension.

Could you explain why you think VS is better?

Anyone that claims Visual Studio is a useful IDE hasn't used Emacs SLIME :)

Henry VIII planned to assassinate Louis XIV?! The plot thickens!

I don't think you understand what socialism and communism are. Patents are a form of government regulation. Socialists and communists are not about small government; quite the opposite. Rather, eliminating patents would be a minarchist or anarchist action.

I'm just took one of the examples on their page. Presumably their system is smart enough to work out the mimetype of the file, but I agree that it seems rather brittle and ambiguous.

Probably. There's no difference in length between:

get the last item of line 2 of URL url

And:

open(url).readlines[1].split(",").last

I guess the former is easier to read, but languages that have a lot of "magic" in them tend to be pretty bad at scenarios the developers didn't think of. Which will inevitably turn out to be something you want to do.

Yes, I realise all that. I was just pointing out that all functional languages use "recursive style", as ls671 puts it.

Well, all functional programming languages use recursion, so "recursive style functional programming languages" is a bit redundant :)

I'm not sure what you mean by "recursive style", but the biggest commercial users of functional programming languages tend to be companies behind high-traffic websites that need to handle a lot of concurrent requests. Facebook developed their real-time chat application in Erlang, for instance, and Twitter uses Scala to handle its message queue.

You really think they don't want more user data? You don't seem to understand how important good data is when trying to predict what a user wants. More data usually beats better algorithms.

Goodwill? Well maybe, but I suspect that they'll also be storing all that lovely user data about people's surfing habits. Airports have a lot of different passengers going through each day, so they'd get a good cross-section of the population. Also, as network traffic on airport wifis is predominantly from personal laptops, perhaps there will be less clickbots/spambots to screw up Google's statistics. They could also tailor their advertisements more effectively, showing people ads for local businesses in and around the airport, for example.

The problem is that it is technology and economics that is affecting their ability to sell their products.

The content industry make their money by selling copies. This worked in an era when making copies was expensive, or required expensive equipment. But now, the cost of copying is approaching zero. Economically, it's hard to make much of a profit off something that can be had for nothing.

The only way they can continue with their current business model is to attempt to hold back technology with legislation. But this is only a temporary solution; eventually there will be enough bandwidth to stream movies anonymously, and someone will create a P2P client with a nice easy interface. Whether this is right or wrong, technology tends to be rather amoral.

The content industry needs to find a way of making money off content that doesn't involve selling copies. This is by no means an insurmountable problem. However, it will require a large shift in the industry, and I'd be surprised if many of the current big players survive.

Abusive? I believe the worst I've done is to phrase questions with a certain rhetorical edge, and then only in response to the occasional less-than-polite tone that crept into your posts.

First, this is Slashdot; I am not exactly the most impolite poster you'll meet. Second, if you want a more polite tone from me, then be more polite yourself. For instance, instead of saying "Whoooosh", you might say "Sorry, I don't think we're quite on the same track". Then I might be a little less sarcastic in my response.

But when the content industry does that to many people, suddenly it's not childish?

The term "piracy" did not arise from a legal document or an official government notice.

Just because something is a tactical maneuver, does not mean that it is not childish. A child may call another names in order to elevate their own social status. They may not be able to articulate their reasons for doing so, but merely because they are obeying evolutionary instinct rather than rational thought, does not mean that their actions are not tactical.

I think you're underestimating children, and overestimating the content industry :)

Piracy might have once been a good phrase to use, evoking emotion and fear. But since then the content industries have gone through several cycles of rebirth, and the word "pirate" could now be taken to mean "the people who will succeed us". This perhaps isn't the message the current content industry would like to put out.