Au Contraire - the susceptibility to cold was perfectly understood by the engineers.

Management is another story, but the engineers knew what the consequences of launching in conditions that cold would be. (see Roger Boisjoly)

The fact that the guy you replied to didn't realize the submission meant exactly what it said - microtransactions are, in and of themselves, neither good or bad. They simply are. It's how the developer uses them that determines if it's good or bad.

But people don't work that way. Once some "thing" that is not inherently "good" or "bad" has a "bad" association in someone's mind, that thing is "bad". Never mind that the next instance of "thing" that they meet may be used in a "good" manner - they've already internalized the "thing == bad" rule and will blindly apply that to every other instance of "thing" that they meet.

...So an Apple iPhone Engineer walks into a bar...

I have four words: "Games and Legacy Apps"

That explains pretty much every windows install I'm personally aware of (including my own)

Either people want to play their games or they have to use/support legacy apps for a business that it doesn't want to take the time, expense and risk of replacing.

I'd be interested to see what you've got. I got it "running", but only for certain lengths of time - it inevitably crashes every 15-30 minutes.

Not for DOS-era games, but the ones that came just after that (Dungeon Keeper 2, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Need For Speed 4, etc)

I've spent a lot of hours trying to get those games running reliably in a Win7 environment with no success (compatibility mode, virtual machines, etc).

Not to detract from your overall point, but Minecraft enters Beta in 5 days:

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2175441966/minecraft-beta-december-20-2010

Carry on

You also missed that private schools get to select students to avoid all the problem students that suck down lots and lots of resources in the public school system, so Private Schools can more efficiently use their resources.

Don't kid yourself, States rights went the way of the Dodo when the Union States went along with the federal government's plan to override the other states exercising their rights to withdraw from a "voluntary" union - that cemented the Federal Government as the higher power. Any protestations to the contrary since then have been empty wind and useless wishes.

I have 4 year old twins, one is ADHD and one is not. We spent a year working our way down the list of possible solutions before we got to the point where it was either medicate her or let her fail. No it wasn't just personality or low tolerance for an active kid.

The Therapist's office was set up as a diagnostic tool - 120 linear feet of shelf space, all at kid level, just CRAMMED with toys. My son would pick a toy, play for a bit, pick another toy, play for a bit, etc.

My daughter was a ferret on crystal meth, bouncing from point to point, rarely stopping long enough to even TOUCH THE TOY SHE WAS LOOKING AT.

She's on medication now (not ritalin, but I tend to forget the name of it) and she's still a very active 4 year old. But the meds take enough of the edge off her fidgets that she can actually stop and complete tasks if she wants to. We're still doing therapy to help her learn habits that will let her succeed in school and life.

When we got the diagnosis (two separate diagnoses, actually) I was dead set against medication - lucky for my daughter's therapist, she indicated that medication was a last resort or I would've walked out of her office then and there. But after a year of trying various non-medicinal treatments with zero success, we finally tried medication.

Anyone who says all ADHD diagnoses are just "kids being kids" needs to pull their head out.

"But don't come to me to tell that bug free complex games are *impossible*. That's bullshit."

Certainly not - you're absolutely correct.

But are you prepared to pay what it would cost to buy a game comparable to today's triple-A titles that has gone through the engineering and process necessary to ensure that it's bug-free?

Yes. Done at the server. By an admin who answers to a manager who answers to someone who answers to someone who answers to the Mayor. Are you telling me that Menino doesn't know what's going on? "Hmm, those hundreds of emails from yesterday are gone ... I wonder what could have happened."

You know what else is open source? Knives. Used to stab people to death. And many people find that a good thing. Surely it must be.

It's not like knives don't have many other uses. I mean, I can use them to cook, put them on a motor and cut the lawn, open boxes.....the possibilities are endless!

My number comes from the book The Three Trillion Dollar War 2008 by Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, both of whom are American economists not dependent on government funding for their research.

    The point is there is a finite supply of money. Money spent on the war is money that not available to manufacture fuel-efficient vehicles. And since the money has already been spent on the war, there will be no development of American fuel-efficient vehicles on the scale needed to sustain American prosperity at 20th-century levels.

  Talk is cheap.

According to TFA (and I have also read this in the Boston newspapers many times over the years) Menino simply does not use email. So in his case there's nothing to save or delete.

I should say that in itself that doesn't mean he's hiding something. He is, after all, almost seventy. My dad doesn't use email either.