Why not just let the users do the job? Cheaper, faster and easier...

And subject to massive trolling by malicious users...

Which is segregated by sex. You *must* have one man, and one woman. You can't have a man in the woman's slot, you can't have a woman in the man's slot.

How about rock-paper-scissors?
[X] physical skills involved
[X] some kind of scoring system
[X] objectively declare winner
Ticks all your boxes!

And guess what? It's a sport!

Most people use Google mail by simply accessing Google's servers via web. Since the email is stored on Google's own server, they can delete it. Now, if it had been *me*, they'd have been SOL, because I have all my Google mail forwarded to my private IMAP server, and it's out of Google's hands. But the average Gmail user, yeah, Google would be able to kill the mail.

I've never encountered any sort of computer drawing tool that wasn't excrutiatingly painful when compared to paper and something pencil-like.

From which I can infer you've never used a really decent graphics tablet + stylus. It's the standard tool of the many, many artists who have given up physical media to go digital. Of course, it's not a convenient thing for everybody to use in a meeting.

Bandwidth isn't like water or electricity. You either use it in the moment or don't. You can't save it for later.

So, you don't have caches in your world?

It's really about data, not bandwidth. Just like your utilities connection is about water or electricity, not pipes or wires.

In fact, that's what this *article* is about--the TV should've saved data for later, but didn't.

"[Object-oriented programming] is both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature"

This sentence makes no sense to me. What are objects if not modules? And surely one can have independent objects run in parallel.

That's good, right?

Can someone explain to me why all these program manpage references have e.g. "(1)" after them?

It's the manpage section. Section 1 is general commands, for example, while section 3 is library calls. Thus, if you want to see the man page for the printf command, you can say "man 1 printf", while if you want to see the man page for the printf system call, you can say "man 3 printf".

I might start using ./ a lot more now.

I suppose you could say you learned about ./ on /.

How exactly is 1500-15000 worth of equipment 'hobbyists'? /blockquote

I can think of several hobbies that can rack up those kinds of costs. Flying model airplanes leaps to mind.

Great Wall of China... Mongols. I rest my case.

Yeah, that worked real well.

It's not just branching. You also run into difficulties when a following instruction needs to use the results of the precending one.

So what was C written in?

C. At the beginning of the tool chain, there'll be a bootstrap compiler written in assembler, but full production C compilers are written in C.

"Secular decline" is sometimes used to describe a long-term trend of overall decline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...