At the university I attended, it was the standard language for all the courses that involved programming or software design. That may have been because the head of the computer science department was on one of the committees that designed it. This was about 20 years ago. I was aware that it's still used for real-time applications, particularly military and aerospace, but I'm mildly surprised that anyone still cares about it enough to develop a new version of the standard. I applied for a programming job at a defence company that used it, circa 1995, but haven't had anything to do with it since.

I wouldn't describe it as complex, particularly, but it is pedantic and verbose, requiring you to prove that you know what you're doing. You have to spell out a lot of things that other languages assume by default or leave up to the specific implementation. For example, there's a statement that explicitly does nothing, like NOP in assembly languages, so you can say things like "if condition then do something else null; end if;" so that it's clear to the reader that you definitely want to do nothing if the condition is false - you didn't just forget about it. Another quirk is that if you want to mix AND and OR in a Boolean expression, you have to use brackets to show what order you want things evaluated in. "x or y or z" is fine, as is "x and y and z", but "x or y and z" is a syntax error - you have to write "(x or y) and z" or "x or (y and z)". The reasoning is that other languages differ as to whether the two operators have different precedence or the same precedence, so you might expect it to evaluate one way and find that it evaluates the other way.

Fun fact - Oracle's PL/SQL, the language in which you write triggers and stored procedures for the database, owes a lot of its syntax and semantics to Ada.

Also, if we're wrong about how the moon was formed, the worst that'll happen is that someone has to rewrite a few astronomy textbooks. If we're wrong about humans making the planet hotter (which I don't believe we are), that means rich people don't need to spend a lot of money reducing the amount of greenhouse gases they dump into the atmosphere. Maybe that's why "giant impact deniers" are rather rarer than climate change deniers...

I gave up before I got that far. My point was that if their search was no good, it didn't matter whether they were a pirate site or a legitimate one - either way, I didn't see them posing any danger to my earnings.

Another indie author here. I saw the hysteria in one of my Facebook groups last week and decided to see for myself. I searched lendink for my name and saw my three books listed. One of my titles is available only for the Kindle at the moment, so I thought I'd ask to borrow it for the Nook. That should determine whether they really were just matching up people to borrow books, or were pirating them.

Before they'd let me borrow a book, they wanted me to offer one for someone else to borrow. I pretended to have one of my own titles to offer. They asked me for the author and title so they could do a search on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but then seemed to ignore the author and just bring up the first match for a search on the title. One of my books has the same title as about ten other books. The others have "and" in the title, which most search functions ignore. So the site wouldn't let me offer my own books to be borrowed. Meaning that regardless of whether they were pirating or lending, they weren't very good at it.

I suppose for some indie authors, it's easy to believe that the reason they're not making megabucks is because everyone's pirating their book. Easier than believing it's because of Sturgeon's Law...

Agreed. (Posting to undo a moderation that I fat-fingered - sorry!)

I was thinking of that when I wrote my post. I wish I could say I was surprised that the minister didn't read the bill...

They're going to have to, aren't they? Since otherwise that's an obvious place for criminals and terrorists to hide their communications.

...let's give them data. I foresee a Thunderbird plugin that randomly sends email to random addresses, to give the government more chaff to sort through. Or you could set up a virtual machine and let it become part of a botnet. Last time I checked, it wasn't illegal to allow someone else to use your computer for spamming...

If you've written a book and want to give it away, perhaps you shouldn't distribute it (only) via a site that's used mainly for hosting or linking to pirated books. There are plenty of "show off your writing" sites that you could post it to, or you could spend a few dollars for your own hosting.

ALGOL 68 allowed whitespace in identifiers. There's a reason most later languages don't...

GSM has a fixed maximum cell size - 20km radius at first, later extended to 35km. CDMA doesn't have a maximum. GSM does because it uses time division multiplexing - several phones can transmit and receive on the same frequency, and they take turns. The further from the tower your phone is, the longer the signal takes to travel back and forth, and there comes a point where your transmissions spill into the next slot, reducing call quality for whoever's using it. If you get to that distance from the tower, it will just drop the call. The maximum cell size is a tradeoff between how much equipment the network needs to serve a given area and how much spectrum it would have to use.

In densely-populated places like most of Europe, the maximum cell size isn't really an issue - there aren't many places where you can leave one settlement and travel 20km without entering another. Australia and North America, on the other hand, are much more spread out, and the number of GSM cells that would be needed to provide acceptable coverage to rural areas would be too expensive for the likely revenue from them.

...plus a 12K JPEG of me and a 60K JPEG for the background. No Javascript or Flash, because I'm not doing anything that needs them. The site as a whole is probably around 200 megs, but most of that is photos and files to download.

What, exactly, does a lamp or light switch compute? A useful definition of a computer is anything that's Turing complete - see here. Changing your own light bulbs is probably already illegal if you're not a Registered Electrical Practitioner...

Good points, and if they actually were my publisher, I wouldn't have (as much of) a problem signing an exclusive agreement with them. But they're not my publisher - or I don't consider them as such, anyway. They're a retailer. If they were my publisher, I'd expect them to do some of the things a publisher traditionally does, like exercising some discrimination over what they publish and making some effort to market the books to readers. One of my books that's eligible for the programme was uploaded the day before, and had sold two copies at the time I received their offer, so I don't think they're being in any way choosy over who they invite.

I'm an indie author (see sig) with a couple of books on sale at Amazon, among other places. On the one hand, Amazon already accounts for about 90% of my sales, so I wouldn't be giving up much revenue by offering a title there exclusively, and it wouldn't take much borrowing to make up the loss. On the other hand, everyone and his dog will jump on this programme, so that $6 million pie is going to be cut into a lot of very thin slices, to the point that the likely reward doesn't seem worth what I have to give up in order to participate. If someone manages to challenge Amazon as an ebook retailer, I don't want to be locked out of them. On the gripping hand, I've seen what companies do when they become monopolies, and I've no desire to help build another one.

Bricks-and-mortar libraries don't tell authors and publishers, "We'll stock your books if you promise not to sell them anywhere else." Then again, no library is anywhere near as big or influential as Amazon...