pffft. someone who was way to eager to give up his email address to some random web site in 1998. =P

well, i do remember gnome 1. it was no panacea.
more like "barely usable" and "ugly as sin".

i agree that they {unity/gnome3} uselessly through away years of good UI engineering work. and i understand the need to move to clutter. but moving to a new framework is tough enough - don't try to re-invent the whole desktop paradigm while you're at it.

but what do i know? i'm sure a 4-digiter will swoop in here and save us from our delusions. =P

it's because i do trust the free market i want (good / common-sense) regulation. good regulations makes markets more free, not less. this is why we regulate "not throwing a brick through your competitor's storefront".

likewise, how robust do you think the air-conditioning equipment market would be if you're electric company was free to cap your Carrier-brand AC compressor's electricity usage but leave cap-free their own home-brand compressor? (like how netflix usage is included in your data cap but at&t's u-verse movie streaming is cap-free...)

i don't think you know what "isn't much more than" means.
clue: it includes "a little more", as in "packt is a little more than a vanity press (but not much)".

=P

one of their recruiters approached me last year to write a book on numpy. which was curious to me since while i've used it (and posted some very minor public code using it), i'm not a contributor, nor involved in the community in any way.

some googling led to some fairly consistent stories:
very little editing work
very low sales (rep told me 1000 copies would be considered successful for a sequel)
don't expect more than your initial front (~$3500, which isn't even a front; they pay it out over the different chapters you submit)
if they can they get multiple authors writing in the same category at the same time (which means you're basically competing against your own publisher)

needless to say: didn't want to sign my name to anything like that...

hell yea!

but you can motivate a person who wants to create today and doesn't expect to be a corpse tomorrow.

here's a pointer: don't use javascript. =P

i don't know those specific tools, but it sounds like your solution to poor commenting is to write the same code twice in two different languages. =P

have you ever met a software engineering person who writes actual code? we had a whole software engineering phd program where i went to grad school and most of them couldn't open a socket when needed. (literally - we shared classes with them) nor have i met them on the job. (over a decade of full-time work at this point)

i personally believe there is no right way to write software, anymore than there is a right way to write a novel. you just have a lot of wrong ways to use as obstacle avoidance, and some "worked for me" suggestions that you have to evaluate for your current project.

i assume you have a skill in something. let's call it skill X. as an expert in skill X, you presumably have a job employing skill X that takes some non-trivial percentage of your waking hours every week. and furthermore you also presumably dedicate the remaining non-work hours to some combination of hobbies, personal life, family, etc.

now, are you, as an expert in X, willing to sacrifice a all (or at least a significant portion) of your non-work waking hours reading slashdot comments, fark, random blog entries, etc. in the hopes of by chance running into a proof of faster-than-light travel? despite the minentired-bogglingly overwhelming odds it'll mean you'll spend your every waking non-work hour in vain?

no?

cry baby.

sailing vessels cannot go faster than the wind when sailing directly downwind.

it doesn't matter what the second number is. sans the moon and possibly mars, virtually everywhere in the universe is inaccessible by man at any price.

it makes no sense to send people into space... until we know of someplace we can permanently stay.

robots are faster, more accurate, more durable, can stay out there virtually indefinitely, and are 3-20 orders of magnitude cheaper.

from a scientific perspective, low-earth-orbit (the only place we're sending people) just isn't that interesting. virtually all space-related scientific data comes from unmanned probes and robots.

until we're talking about settling another planet/moon, people in space are just tourists. so why is the government funding it?