A lot of this comes down to sex vs gender.

Sex is your biological status: what organs and hormone levels do you have, and how have they developed? Sounds straight-forward, at least at first.

Gender might be defined as a social role and group identity you take on which is influenced most significantly in most people by their sex. So most people pick from one of the two massively dominant genders, wind up pretty content about it, and have organs matching everyone else in their camp.

But what if you have testes and breasts? And hormone levels pretty much in between the standard man and the standard woman? You might end up legally forced to adopt an 'official' sex based on your chromosome data or what went on your birth certificate, perhaps, but does that help you pick a gender? Does that actually reflect your sex? Probably not. Do you identify more with another sex? What about another gender? If you want to change over, how much will you do and what changes are possible?

The organs you have, the hormone levels you have, and how you feel about them all affect what sex you become and what gender you select. People who aren't comfortable being a traditional man or woman and sleeping with the opposite are simply trying to work out all the permutations and nomenclature now that they're somewhat more free to do so.

If a given person is polite about it and doesn't expect you to memorize a bunch of fluid terms to use for them or coddle their sexuality more than you would anyone else, just let it be and don't worry about the variety of possibilities. They'll work themselves out and they aren't likely to affect you. If they're a dick or an irrational activist about it, and there's plenty of those also, just ignore them and/or fight to keep them from defining your life any more than you're allowed to define theirs.

You can look into the definitions in any Women's or Gender Studies website; or you can ignore it for now and simply be a decent human being to the people you meet, ignoring their chosen combination unless they step on your own rights.

Don't you remember the rules of Slashdot polls? "If you're using these numbers for anything important, you're insane."

Of course, there was one poll that was for something very important, and thankfully it worked out well. Ahh, the memories.

The other point I'd make is that there are some /. users in the process of resurrecting old-skool /. in a different venue, so Bruce could give it a try, but I don't think he needs to: one way or another the user base will be giving a big goodbye to Dice.

Also, it's worth noting that this response from timothy was written only after a fairly serious effort to replace slashdot.org with something better (as noted in both our sigs). The suits are thinking something along the lines of "We're going to lose to a competitor! Do something!" and decided that we'd trust timothy more than some PR flak. Of course, the fact that they'd think that indicates to me that they do not know their community - timothy is actually one of the less-respected "editors".

Bernard Marx, perhaps?

I concur: They should have simply put in the OMG Ponies! design and been done with it.

<SEAN-CONNERY>
I have to ask you about the Penis Mightier.

Gussy it up however you like, the question is does it work?
<SEAN-CONNERY>

Of course, no democratic leader would ever make that mistake, right? How soon we forget ...

What the ISPs really want is all the benefits of being a common carrier without any of the responsibilities. And that's exactly what they got with the Net Neutrality ruling. Given that AT&T is in the running for the top campaign donor in the country, it's unlikely that will change anytime soon (Seriously, it would be easier to list the politicians not on the take from AT&T).

Also, if the government didn't force me to give any of my money to those people, then I'd be rich.

(Seriously, a lot of people think that this is the only effect of government programs designed to help poor people, even when they know people who are benefiting from those programs.)

There's another argument here as well: If you've made a really successful game, but the copyright is going to run out before you retire, you'll be more motivated to make a second successful game because you know your gravy train is going to dry up. And yes, that works for all kinds of copyrighted things: For example, many one-hit wonders happily call it quits because that's good enough, rather than trying to write more hits.

That's not entirely true though: There is such a thing as objectively bad code. Bad code takes forever to run, has security holes a mile wide, is extremely verbose and repetitive, makes unwarranted and undocumented assumptions about how the universe interacts with the code, and of course has no automated tests whatsoever.

Now, when you discover this, the right approach is not to rewrite the whole thing, but instead to isolate and fix one small part of the problem. Fixing that one small part of the problem usually goes like this:
1. Create a complete (with 100% case coverage) and passing unit test suite for the one small piece. If there's a bug in the program that makes correct unit tests fail, first verify that it is in fact a bug in the program and not your tests, then make the smallest possible change to make the tests pass.
2. Write the new and better version that satisfies all those tests.
3. Put the new version in place in a test environment, and manually poke at it for a while to ensure that everything that relies on it works properly.
4. Then, and only then, make it live.

If you're a contractor who's just started, there's also a polite way to bow out or reset their plans: "After evaluating the situation more closely than I was able to during contract negotiations, this is not a task I am capable of completing to your expectations. I have put together this estimate of what it would take to do what you asked for. Would you like me to continue with the goal of meeting this new estimate, or would you like to find another contractor that might be able to better suit your needs?"

Doing A does not preclude doing B. In fact, they'd probably enjoy it if someone volunteered to do B.

My guess as to why they did A is:
1. There's the "ooh, shiny" effect that makes donors to the project know that their money went to what the grant applications said it was for.
2. The people who put it together probably believe (with good reason) that they might have expertise in fitting the maps together, and the goal of the project was more to make use of that expertise to make things more coherent than it was to simply put the maps online.
3. The maps are almost definitely available in their library to those who want them. They may even already have simple digital scans of the book available since it's public domain.