Ascended. As in Nethack? If so, props to your wife, and to you for marrying someone so awesome.

However, I think you are missing something here. If you were talking CoD or DotA or EVE (less so EVE) you'd have a point about hardcore gamers shunning women. It seems they do. However with games like, nethack, Dark Souls, etc. (some people in DkS2 actually communicate and could be construed as being capable of shunning, not so much Dark Souls), since they are single player games I don't think you can possibly argue that the players of those games shun women. Couldn't it be that women tend not to like those games, say, for cultural reasons? Could it be, as another slashdotter suggested, it is a matter of women shunning other women who play such games?jj

Ascended. As in Nethack? If so, props to your wife, and to you for marrying someone so awesome.

However, I think you are missing something here. If you were talking CoD or DotA or EVE (less so EVE) you'd have a point about hardcore gamers shunning women. It seems they do. However with games like, nethack, Dark Souls, etc. (some people in DkS2 actually communicate and could be construed as being capable of shunning, not so much Dark Souls), since they are single player games I don't think you can possibly argue that the players of those games shun women. Couldn't it be that women tend not to like those games, say, for cultural reasons? Could it be, as another slashdotter suggested, it is a matter of women shunning other women who play such games?

This is a ruddy work of beauty.

Where are mod points when you need them. Very much this. The effect described by the parent post has happened in other industries, and will continue to happen until people become more wise.

That is not what sysrammer is saying. He is saying that the republicrats (not to mention the insurance industry) were stonewalling and attempting to cause delays, and that the demipubs were in danger of having the delay ending up in the same stasis field the patriot act is in.

So what he is saying is that the political theater needed to be disrupted in order for things to progress at all, even if the reality of things wasn't pretty.

I don't know, I don't think that guy from devshed defended his case well. In some cases he completely misses what the fractal article was trying to say. He says that the settings in php.ini that the fractal design article mentions are not problematic. He even says that the intransitive == operator is merely a result of loose typing and there is no legitimate issue there.

And it gets worse:

Silently failing is bad. Failing catastrophically is preferable to random program behavior. That's the assumption behind what the original quote is saying (which may be explicitly stated in other parts of that article).

So yeah, I think the main purpose of the "hardly" rebuttal is to reinforce why the fractal of bad design article is correct.

That would be true, if the "normal" behavior of drivers was reasonably safe.

it isn't.

Changing the conditions of the road is a band-aid fix. It is important to reduce accidents and fatalities by fixing the road. However, if you want to reduce the frequency of accidents to near-zero of any task where injury-causing accidents can be the result of human activity (and given the population of the roads in my city, we need to), you need to make sure people are not engaging in unsafe behavior. Dangerous situations can often be resolved by safe behavior -- I'm not saying safe behavior will help you inside a tornado or anything -- but unsafe behavior is unsafe so long as there exists an unsafe mode of failure.

What I'd really like is for vehicles to be near completely fail-safe, but we'd need to give them rails like trains or something. Merely making the road more "normal" is probably necessary here, but that is completely powerless to actually stop people from dying or getting seriously injured.

Another alternative

In the long run, we are all dead.

Governments have never worked for any real length of time in history. They have all collapsed.

Firstly, not being able to release in-house tools is a complete non-issue.

Secondly, if the programs are loosely coupled, the GPL, especially GPLv2, is very forgiving of proprietary code and GPLed code working together. You just have to mind your manners and know the rules. For the GPLv3, here are some basic rules from the GPL FAQ:

Furthermore, the system library exception may prove useful sometimes as well, though that is less common.

In conclusion then, while there is a kernel of truth hiding very, very well around what you are saying, it is largely FUD. From the GPL FAQ again:

Finally, although far less importantly, if you suppose that the GPL is violated by your project in some subtle manner (just don't copy code, mkay?), chances are, it doesn't matter unless you are doing something particularly malign. In general, someone else will have to find some way to prove you violated the terms of the license. Furthermore, generally organizations like the FSF provide an ample chance to fix noncompliance, even deliberate noncompliance. I highly doubt there is a recorded case of someone being made sorry for using the GPL in good faith.

Working as intended. If you use something that is GPL, you have to be sure to give it back, usually for free. When your business model depends on not giving up the entirety of what you made for free, the GPL is dangerous. Now the GPL is by no means an insurmountable obstacle to building non-free-as-in-beer software, but you have to watch your step. This is intended and necessary for what the GPL tries to do. I *like* the GPL because it prevents my code from being supplanted by proprietary derivative code. I *like* that the GPL does this. This is a feature, not a bug.

That said, it is probably just as well this debugging software is not GPLed, because watching your legal steps requires resources (and there are significant penalties for screwing up). In the case of a debugger, you have to watch if it falls afoul of the "output is mostly code" clause. "Probably not" is probably not a good enough answer.

What you say is true, but to throw a small wrench into that, even though mining and manufacturing don't create ISK, they do create value, increasing the value of every ISK in existence. Without that sort of thing happening, the value of ISK would not-so-gradually inflate into valuelessness.

IANAE (I am not an economist)

Dwe warship Dogar and Kazon!

Unvanquished is a successor to Tremulous a free, open source game that was originally a quake 3 mod (but has been its own standalone game for quite some time). It is an asymmetric FPS, aliens vs humans that has some similarities to Natural Selection, but has been around much longer and is much better balanced.

Tribes Ascend is a good free-to-play FPS based upon the original Tribes series. Jetpack skiing with explosive discs is fun.

Dwarf fortress is a surprisingly detailed simulation game about dwarves, who build fortresses. So yeah. Losing is fun.

EVE Online is an MMO that is unique in having an impressively detailed economy, and largely lives and breathes by player-directed drama. It also boasts some rather good parody songs like this one.

Do be aware that some similar sites may already exist, or in the case of technocrat.net, have already existed.