Dweller: I've done a lot of research in this area. Some time ago I was exploring the idea of using laws and financial incentives to coerce or "force" developers/companies to implement best practices and canvassed a few hundred firms to get their take. The overwhelming response was that they didn't think it was a good idea, some thought it would drive them out of business, stifle competition, etc. Then I came across the full green paper from Dept of Comm. before reading this on /. In light of what happened to Sony etc, I wonder what would be the response now, if I asked the same questions again?

bacuun - its a window manager with some real cool visual effects like rotating cube, wobbly windows, etc.

Wowsers, on the face of things, I would doubt that, since C is by design faster that C++. I guess over time though with a little optimization here and there we might gain speed improvement in Compiz. I used to use Beryl with Knoppix years ago before it became stable. I had to manually configure conf files a couple of time. I changed to Compiz when I switched distros. Compiz used to crash at first but its pretty stable on my system now.

I understand, but for speed I expect that C++ still outperforms Java, and while C should outperform both of them, C doesn't feature encapsulation, polymorphism and all the other goodies that OOP provides. Why would you want to break encapsulation? Apart from one article I saw in the ACM journal about a year or so ago, every other paper I have read showed that OOP programming was more effective that programming without it (except for those few highly specialized areas where you have to use specialized languages).

This is a good move. I found it surprising that C was still more popular than C++, given C++ benefits. See http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html.

I went against my earlier decision to wait a few weeks after the official release, and upgraded the night 10.04 came out. For the first time since I'm using Ubuntu from 7.04, nothing broke! I mean - network, virtual box, mail everything still worked. My only problem was getting use to the placement of the control box on the left instead of on the right. In terms of speed, I haven't seen any visible improvement in startup, but shutdown occurs in way less time than 9.10. This is the best Ubuntu yet!

This link http://www.devtopics.com/20-famous-software-disasters/ has a listing of some of the most famous software failures in history. I thought more of these would have been listed in the original posting.

[That the world is round has been known since antiquity. "The world is flat" is sort of a meta-myth: a mythical belief that people used to believe a myth, when in fact they didn't.] Yes, you're correct. This was written approx. 2163 years before Christopher Columbus was even born (c.712 BC)- Isaiah 40:22 states "KJV: Isaiah 40:22. It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
" in my bible.

If you build an AI which has emotions and is functionally indistinguishable from a human in terms of emotional response, I will be very impressed. You haven't done that, though, have you? Nor has anyone else. Call me when you do. (Better give your great-great-grandson my phone number.) This is what the turing test is hoping to determine, but so far no (AI creation) has been able to pass it though some have reportedly come close. When considering if passing the Turing test is proof that "computers can think and reason in exactly the same way people do", it interesting to note Searle's conclusion compared to Turing's in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test. And by the way, I'm a real human, not an AI.

[The "no polynomial-time algorithm" bit is only true if P!=NP. And to the best of human knowledge, it happens to be the case that P!=NP.] Actually, we don't know for sure if P!=NP (though most experts in the field of computational complexity beleive this is the case), and no one has been able to prove or disprove that P==NP.

-- Have you played pac man C.E.? best pacman ever. I've played countless pac man variants but the best pac man ever is Neil Roy's Deluxe Packman. Great sound and game play. My kids and I spend hours competing against each other, and sometimes my wife joins in too.