The last meaningful America's Cup races were held in the late '80s. Somebody squinted hard enough at the 12-meter rules and entered a multi-hull. Now it's just a matter of who spends the most money on a carbon fiber boat with a wing sail. This is a sailing race of fundamentally unseaworthy vessels. It would be literally be safer to cross an ocean in a dinghy than in one of these monstrosities.

Come September, do yourself a favor. Watch Deep Water on Netflix. Read any book on Ernest Shackleton. Read any Lin and Larry Pardey book. You'll finish all three before the America's Cup race is over, and you'll know more about sailing than watching every second of the America's Cup races.

I have a late 2008 15" MBP on Mountain Lion. It's fine.

Upgrade to the maximum RAM you are capable of. (A good practice at all times.) Mavericks will be a different beast, and it's well worth waiting to see on a 5+ year old machine, but you're probably fine.

It's actually fairly common for construction projects to run into changes. While nobody requests to turn a shed into a skyscraper, large changes that touch many disciplines occur quite regularly.

The difference between AEC and programming projects is a long history and legal framework that deals with these changes. Projects are given a budget, and that budget is often paid out at milestones--design development, 95%, construction documents, etc. If the owner requests a substantial change, or if a change is required because of unknowable circumstances, the budget is either revised or the work is value-engineered to fit--and this reality is reflected in the contract signed at the beginning.

The problem with programming projects is that there are not very many really good programmers, and programming is not suited to throwing more warm bodies at the problem. AEC is plate spinning, while programming is juggling. You can hire a bunch of folks to help keep the plates spinning, but you can't just send in somebody to help juggle.

If you don't like the 2nd Amendment, perhaps we can interest you in gutting the 1st Amendment?

Come come, now, we can all agree that those evil GUNS and evil VIDEO GAMES are ultimately culpable. Let's all come together and blame things that we don't like.

'Merica.

Auto-documentation is good stuff nowadays. Everything changes so much, and so quickly, that enforced documentation standards lead to better understanding of the underlying API or intent.

(As an example, why is PHP so popular? It's not because it's beautiful, or elegant. It is, however, very accessible, largely due to good documentation.)

Good comments--that are not prescriptive for whatever autodoc tool you use--are invaluable, but bad or marginal ones do more harm than good, especially in interpreted languages. You can condense 4 lines of comments into a 22-character, well-constructed function call/local variable and accomplish the same goal.

Although they're not on the slate for next year. :(

This is the answer, more or less. For small-to-middling forums, reducing spam is pretty easy. A few volunteers to delete the ones that get through suffices for the rest.

It breaks down to 1) keep out easy drive-by spammers, which means registration with a valid email address and some kind of barrier to detour the smarter bots (ReCaptcha and the like); 2) filter posts through Akismet or similar method; 3) have a community large enough and engaged enough to want to zero out spam posts.

The third step is the hardest, and has nothing to do with spam posts.

Do I get to register preferences about what messages I will want to receive, or will some wanker with authority decide that for me? The last thing I want is for the person who decides which messages are important being of the same mindset as the nimrod who thought passengers at an airport need to be reminded every 5 minutes exactly what the list of banned items on airplanes are - again and again and again and again while you wait for your flight. (What's really dumb about that recorded TSA message is that it interrupts other PA messages that are NOT repetitive and thus should have higher priority. What's more important - the message that is identical to the one you heard 5 minutes ago and will hear again 5 minutes from now, or the message that's unique and you'll only hear once? You should never stifle the one-off message with the repeated one, and yet that's what airports do. (I just returned from a trip where I heard my name on the PA trying to tell me something and it got interrupted like this and I never found out what it was about until it was too late. It turns out I had gotten a standby slot on a flight, but missed the chance because the PA system was designed by morons who think recorded repeated messages take precedence.))

Anyway, I don't want the same sort of moron deciding what messages come to my phone (or worse yet, which ones are allowed to interrupt a phone call) without my say-so.

I don't think the concern is an after-market cracker doing it. I think the concern is that if it can be done after-market then that proves it can also be done by the original manufacturer of the hardware. I don't put it past OEM's to make backdoors for themselves.

The alternate universe you live in is interesting. It would have been nice to see this IE 6 that actually had a better look than its contemporary competitors. It's too bad that the only IE I ever got to see was the ugly-looking one that existed here on earth where the rest of us live.

No sympathy here. They get what they deserve. These are the myopic idiots that didn't care about the detrimental effects of vendor-tie-ins when they were hurting OTHERs with this garbage. They get no sympathy from me now that it's come full circle to bit themselves in the ass.