Whoosh? Just trying to be funny and failing as usual.

I'm a professional game developer and a life-long gamer, so perhaps it's fair to say that I've got as vested an interest in videogames as most. I've got fond memories of many "saving the princess" games, which of course she takes issue with. Is that really worth such outrage?

I'm fine with having our industry challenged from time to time. For example, there are worse things in gaming than a "save the princess" plot device, but let's face it, feminist issue aside, it's a horribly cliched trope that could stand to be re-examined. Even if you don't agree with her, I think she raises some interesting points of discussion. I'm watching some of her videos right now actually, and am actually finding them fairly interesting. A direct quote from her video:

It takes a certain moral fortitude to listen to criticism of something you care deeply about. Game developers deal with this all the time when a reviewer writes a scathing review of the game you just spent the last two years of your life working on, or when gamers casually dismiss the problems you've spilled blood and tears to solve. It's really hard to put your ego and indignity aside and ask how you could have improved your product rather than lashing out at the one criticizing your work.

It's not like I'm really expecting the general public to restrain from criticism and outright name calling, but I seriously wish it wouldn't devolve to the level of death threats.

Large government-sponsored programs have a notorious history of exploding far beyond predicted budgetary constraints. We'll see in another few years or so if that prediction, turns out to be accurate. History is on my side, unfortunately.

Even so, I'll go ahead and concede the point. Fine, let's say the new health care program has zero impact on the budget, or perhaps a negligible effect. I should also have not used the phrase "with no regard to how the government is going to pay for it", because obviously that's not true, as the budgetary effects were studied by the CBO. Better?

It's completely besides the point I was making, which is that the fact we've had record deficit spending for many years demonstrates we simply don't have excess money to waste. I don't believe the government's deficit spending is a partisan issue. It's pretty obvious that unless we eventually reign things in, we're going to be in real trouble later down the road. You don't agree?

Did you not even read my post? I'm agreeing with you about the military spending - it's a massive part of the federal budget. I'll even quote myself for your benefit, so you don't have to do all that pesky reading before typing up a reply.

And how exactly is meme investigation "basic research"? I'd really like to know how cutting frivolous grants like this will damage future meme propagation on the internet. I'm perfectly fine with federal dollars being judiciously spent on science which may have a real impact on our society or fundamental technology, or even of our understanding of the universe. This isn't it.

A million dollars is a tiny percentage of our federal budget, but that doesn't mean we should be pissing it away when we don't have a lot of excess money floating around.

"Social science" is an oxymoron. Science is not a field. It's a methodology, and social sciences fail miserably at applying that methodology. It's undoubtedly an interesting academic exercise, but let's not pretend it's something that it's not.

One could possibly make the argument for spending money on social research like this were we not currently in a long-term deficit spending pattern. As it is, we simply don't have the money to waste. Just because a million dollars is a tiny fraction of the federal budget doesn't mean I shouldn't care that the government just pissed away a million of our tax dollars on something that is virtually guaranteed to have zero real impact on the lives of the people that funded the research.

Oh, it's absolutely relevant. I don't care if I get modded off-topic. I've got plenty of karma.

Quite frankly, this sort of stuff is insane when we're continuously running a massive deficit. No one likes to hear this, but we really need to crank down the government spigot at so many levels it's no longer even funny. We simply don't have the money to be spending on what I'll generously term "discretionary" research. It's not just grants either, which admittedly take up a very small portion of the budget.

The military budget is out of control. Yes, we live in a dangerous world, but we need to ask the rest of the civilized nations to help share the burden a bit (and this is coming from a somewhat conservative hawk), or perhaps scale back our overseas adventures. Our social program expenditures and pensions are ballooning even worse than military spending. We just passed another hugely expensive entitlement (health care reform), but with no regard to how the government is going to pay for it without crippling increases in taxes, deficit spending, or inflationary money printing. The NSA is spending billions to harvest and process all the data on the internet passing through the US for questionable benefits and even more questionable legality.

The federal government has demonstrated time and time and time again that they can't be trusted to balance the budget in a fiscally responsible manner. It's always more politically expedient to pass the buck to the next generation, and when the time comes to really tackle the problem, it's going to be really painful for everyone. Federal spending money is power, and that power is apparently just too damned addictive to resist. It would be best to deal with it as soon as possible and in a responsible manner over time, just like with any debt incurred.

A few other nations have been hopping on the constitutional balanced budget requirement. Maybe it's time to join them? I haven't quite made up my mind, but I'm definitely leaning towards support right now. A number of Keynsian economists argue against it, saying that it's best to allow deficit spending in bad economic times, but seeing as we never seem to STOP deficit spending in recent years, it's hard to make that argument with a straight face.

I'm not sure how well you know C, but... you can't turn a pointer into something more than a raw memory pointer. This would flat-out destroy all sorts of code that relies on that behavior, both in C and C++, and not necessarily badly-written code. The behavior of memory pointers is a part of the language contract, and you can't change it without breaking the language. For systems programmers with large, legacy codebases, they'd never risk turning on such an intrusive feature because of the simply fact that it would break compatibility, nor would they wish to pay a global penalty to apply protection for some very specific vulnerabilities.

In my own code (which is C++, not C, but the point still applies), I'm actually performing my own low-level memory management in order to improve efficiency - it's pretty much standard practice in the videogame industry, at least for large projects. Anything the compiler tried to do in terms of mucking around with allocations, pointers, or arrays could very well break code, and wouldn't help in any case. For instance, it's pretty common to allocate a big block of memory and to pass off small chunks of it to structures instead of performing an OS-level heap allocation for each one. In this scenario, a pointer has no explicit type at all, and any inferred type can be malleable to such a degree that it could never really be analyzed either at compile time or runtime.

When discussing a "no-brainer" feature like this, I tend to assume that other people (compiler writers) have already thought of this idea and rejected it for very pragmatic reasons. I'd imagine no one wishes more than C programmers that they could flip a magic switch and have a lot more protection, but I just don't see how it could realistically happen.

High-strength industry standard encryption, properly implemented, is currently believed to be completely unbreakable. It's extremely unlikely any government agency can crack modern cryptography, as evidenced by the lengths they go to in order to try to regulate it (historically), or circumvent it at the source. You can't *prove* it's unbreakable, of course, but we've seen zero evidence to the contrary, with many, many people looking, so I won't be hypocritical and say "it's unbreakable", but "for all practical purposes, it's unbreakable".

I can't think of worse advice than "security through obscurity". You definitely want "off the shelf" solutions, because those solutions have been vetted by many experts - some friendly, some hostile - all trying very hard to break that security. The quickest way to create a security disaster is to roll your own security solution. Remember WEP?

I'm guessing the reason drives don't have multiple read-write heads is because that would significantly increase the cost of the drive and potential for mechanical failure, to the point where you're probably better off simply getting a second drive and using RAID as you indicated.

The row of read heads probably wouldn't work - at least for simultaneous reads - because the distance between them wouldn't properly align at different angles of the arm as it swung across the platter. You'd need to design an arm that tracked linearly across the drive, adding weight and complexity. Even if you could do that, the real benefit would be if you could get them to read parallel tracks. I'd imagine that the multiple magnetic heads would tend to interfere with each other if placed that close (you couldn't stagger them or you'd have alignment problems again). If they're placed far apart to not interfere with each other magnetically, then they have little benefit, because the odds of them aligning on multiple chunks of data across the drive that a client wishes to access would be much lower then, largely negating the advantage.

In theory, I guess that creating an array of read heads spread out across the arm but activating only one at a time (whichever is closest to the cylinder being read next) might be a way to improve latency. I can't think of a reason offhand why this wouldn't have been tried except that the added complexity might have a negative impact on reliability, or perhaps the increased weight of the arm would tend to negate this advantage. Or, it might be difficult to re-align the arm to arbitrary positions as opposed to the predictability of a single read head.

Generally speaking, in such a mature industry that's obsessed with squeezing more performance out of their hardware, it's probably safe to assume that engineers have already thought of and rejected such ideas as being impractical for some reason or another.

You know, people say stuff like that all the time, but all it proves is you're not a programmer that developers speed-critical applications. Guess what? There are lots of people who are. Game programmers (me). Simulations programmers. OS / Kernel developers. There are some situations where fast is never fast enough. You're thinking like a desktop developer who writes business applications that are probably not that demanding of the CPU. Get a faster processor? I wish! Not possible for console developers, or when you're running software in data centers with thousands of machines. Those are real problems, and they require highly optimized code, not more hardware. Most programmers have no idea how much the constant push for efficiency colors everything we do.

Just today the other day I was looking at a test case where a complicated pathfinding test scenario bogs pegs my 8 core CPU when a lot of units are on-screen at once. That's not some theoretical problem, and telling users they need some uber-machine to play the game is a non-starter. I either need to ensure my game design avoids those scenarios or I'll need to further optimize the pathfinding systems to allow for more units in the game.

That being said, I agree with your complain about C's fundamental insecurity, but it's not so simple as adding in a compilers switch. For the most common and checkable types of bounds problems, or library functions that can cause problems, Microsoft's C/C++ compiler already does what you've suggested to a degree (not as certain about GCC). The big problem with bounds checking in C is that arrays are simple pointers to memory. The compiler doesn't always know how big that free space is, because there's no type or size associated with it. It's possible in some cases to do bounds-checking, but not in many others. It's a fundamental difficulty with the language, and it's impossible for the compiler to check all those bounds without help from the language or the programmer.

You know, I was around during the transition from WordPerfect to Word, and from Lotus 123 to Excel. Both of those products were held back by their legacy DOS codebases, and were extremely slow to transition to Windows, which is where everyone started moving, of course. When they finally did release Windows products, they were horrible. So, no, WordPerfect and 123 just lost out to competitors because they couldn't keep up with advances in technology - simple as that.

I'm not sure what what had to do with Linux being a closed software vendor, though...? I agree that being open source is certainly one of it's strengths.

We'll have no way of really knowing how reliable these things are until they're field tested by a few hundred thousand people in real-life situations for a few years. I wholeheartedly agree that the driver should be allowed to take control, because there's no way this could make things any less safe then they already are right now. That seems like a very logical decision to me. Once the first few generation of cars have demonstrated that there's no practical need ever for a manual override, then we can consider removing it. Laws and regulations can be changed, after all.

Software people are used to rapid innovation and giant leaps forward, because if the software crashes, it's annoying, but it's not like anyone dies, right? For other types of engineering (aeronautical, automotive, structural, civil), it's best to move forward incrementally and cautiously, because the established rules and lessons are often learned at the cost of human lives.

It's not that I don't like change. Nearly every version of Windows improved the usability in some way. After I upgraded from Windows XP to 7, it only took me a few days to get used to the new interface. It was a usability upgrade. I'll take that sort of change any day. Hell, I'm apparently one of the few who will admit that I like MS Office's ribbon UI.

Windows 8 suffered from designer-imposed tunnel vision, trying to force desktop PCs to use touch-screen gestures and full screen interfaces, which just makes no sense at all. It's simply a worse paradigm for keyboard and mouse users, and was just a half-assed design compromise from the start. Sure, I could get used to it if I really wanted to, but why would I want to when I really love the way Windows 7 works?

Windows 9 might be worth a look, because it seems like they've taken the criticisms to heart and are actually listening to their customers again. Honestly, it's what Windows 8 should have been all along. Change is fine, so long as it's an actual improvement.

It has little to do with "indoctrination" of people, but familiarity is something of a factor, of course.

More critically, I think, Microsoft established a very large software ecosystem that Linux was never able to match as a relative late-comer, and catching up was nearly impossible without a critical mass that Windows enjoys. The simple reason people use Windows is because of the massive ecosystem of products available for the platform. Linux has some fine software, but there are many, many times the number of applications available for Windows, some of which are pretty damned specialized and are simply not available on other platforms.

There's a reason Linux is able to complete so well in other areas. In the server market, for example, the job is largely about serving up standard internet protocols, and so a free product is a huge win with no compatibility-related downsides. In the small-form device market, the open and free nature is also a big win, where margins are very tight, and vendors want to be able to customize their offering.

But the desktop relies on software written for specific platforms, so the ecosystem is everything. Microsoft has been extremely effective at courting third-party developers with excellent tools, services, and documentation. Windows has also enjoyed excellent long-term binary backward compatibility, which is hugely important for business software and the businesses that use them. So, to me, it's not hard to see why they've maintained their domination on the desktop.

Really? That hypothesis doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Larger and stronger at a younger age would seem to be a good survival trait, not a bad one. It doesn't seem like the benefits of parental protection instincts for young children would outweigh the negatives of being weaker and smaller, purely on the basis of survival traits. Besides which, I don't think parental protection instincts necessarily disappear when a child reaches adulthood. Talk to my mother if you're not convinced.

Still, it doesn't seem as simple as the brain using up too many nutrients either, for the obvious reasons you describe. If it was regulated by diet, then it seems we should be able to adjust growth in the same way, and that doesn't happen - although long-term growth is certainly affected by diet. It's certainly true the brain is an "expensive" organ in terms of nutrient consumption, but I think there are other regulating factors as well which we just don't understand yet.