Right, got it. Everybody is stupid, except for you.

Well, that's about right, however, that's also the problem. In a professional setting, you expect support, and not just "when and if we feel like it". NEWB in this case may not have ever even heard of a message board or listserv. Someone says "support is here", he goes there, no one answers.

      NEWB doesn't know or care about the theory of open software, building relationships with the list members, doing research on the code base, etc. He found a problem and wants it fixed, and wants someone to fix it or help him fix it. There's no trouble ticket number, tracking to closure, or in fact any reason to think it will ever get fixed.

          What does he do? He has a problem, someone at his work is going to expect it fixed, or at least get a schedule to get it fixed. It gets fixed on the whim of someone who decides to do it, or not.

        This is the problem with open source. It's for geeks by geeks, anyone else will have no chance of ever tracking down a problem, or even getting basic functionality assistance, because by design, no one person or group will take responsibility for it. This may seem to be a minor problem to you, but I assure you, it is the biggest issue by far for anyone outside the cult.

Particularly the STFU NEWB part. This is exactly the reputation open source software has.

Most of this is boilerplate leftist gibberish, but now we define an amendment that conforms with the last 20,000 years of human history and doesn't mention homosexuality at all "an explicit attack"? Do you know how utterly foolish you sound? Or have we decided that making utterly non-sequiter hateful blather is automatically true regardless of the *explict* lies it contains?

So, just let me get this entirely straight. A man was hounded out of his job for not having the "correct" beliefs*, and when someone objects or defends his right to an opinion, he, too, is "intolerant" (and according to the downmodded post, a "closet homophobe)? This is your definition of tolerance?

          Scratch a liberal or "advocacy group" and you see the same rotten core you saw in 1933.

    And the terrible crime here is that the man contributed to a *successful* change to the CA constitution, after a previous *successful* propostion to the same effect was defeated by the same pack of "tolerance" bullies?

I have been writing and reviewing various forms of scientific and embedded processor code for, well, a damn long time. I have seen A LOT of crap spaghetti code. All the very worst examples were C++.

F77+extensions, usually DEC extensions. Very very few people ever used strict F77 with no extensions.

        Some of the issues this causes are irritating bordering on unnerving. This we we discovered that g77 didn't care for treating INTEGER as LOGICAL. Used to be that there was no other way to specify bit operations, now it is precluded. Everybody's code has that, and there's really nothing intrinsically wrong or difficult to understand about it, but it was technically non-standard (although everyone's extensions permitted it) and it won't work on g77 - maybe only with the infamous -fugly flag.

Why not?

      Actually that is a serious question, for these sorts of applications there seems to be no significant downside.

Given that there is absolutely no evidence for aliens over last 4.8 billion years, I think we are due.

Dear God Almighty, SpaceX is not doing jack-shit R&D. The R&D was done 50 years ago, and documented in extraordinary detail by others.

It isn't hard. I think the only issue that anyone has had with it was the column restrictions, and the important development there was interactive computing and a decent text editor, not a new language.

    Bear in mind, also, that most people haven't ever attempted to write in original FORTRAN. Most have seen nothing earlier than FORTRAN 77 and that was tremendously easier and far less irritating than FORTRAN IV. I am old enough to have written FORTRAN IV on card decks, the "good old days" sucked for the most part.

    I always found BASIC to be far more irritating to program in anything more than trivial applications.

      I don't think the language is the problem, it was all other things that where difficult and mostly solved in the 60's and 70's.

      FORTRAN is certainly still in use for Real Programming. I haven't seen a way to use BASIC- in the way it was originally conceived - in 25 years.

That's a much better argument than the the one I was commenting on (made by MS lawyer), but hardly a trump card.

      The FBI (or any other agency/court) can certainly argue for a subpoena for data given to a third party. Whether they ever actually get it or not is another story.

    Party A hands Party B an envelope, and says "store this for me". Party B happens to store it in a foreign country. Said foreign country happens to have a law that requires people holding information for others to protect it.

        Later, Party A is taken to court and the envelope is argued to be evidence in the case. Party B can certainly be served in a US court and required to produce the envelope. It doesn't matter whether the foreign laws happen to preclude you from having it, Party B can still be held in contempt.

        It doesn't even have to be a foreign country - it's fairly common to hold US reporters in possession of information germane to a case in contempts, and that is argued to be a violation of the US Constitution. The US constitution certainly (or at least should) trumps the laws of a foreign country in a US court.

      US courts are absolutely NOT required to consider foreign law in order to act. If it is an action in a US court, they are compelled to follow US law, period. If MS ends up caught between a rock and a hard place, tough shit.

      While the information itself may not be in the jurisdiction of the court, MS certainly is. The only place that foreign law might come into is if it is a treaty provision (in which case it is indeed US law) or when/if someone tries to forcibly acquire it, i.e. attempt to execute a search warrant to take it without MS assistance. That probably won't fly, and is a flagrant violation without action in the foreign court. If a foreign court refuses to allow the information to be released, then they may never get the envelope, but it can certainly be requested and Party B can certainly be punished for not responding.

      There is nothing new here.

The search warrant analogy is completely spurious. An American court cannot compel a search of a foreign property. But they can certainly compel an American company (or individual) to produce information owned by the company that happens to reside in a file folder in another country, or be liable for contempt of court.

      Sensationalism, thy name is slashdot.

      Brett

I expect I know how the mods will treat this, but - who cares? Why bother to clean it up at all? It will clot up and have negligible impact, and no one lives there.

Electronic readout of on-board film processing was not a new idea, even at the time.

        Brett