ASL (American Sign Language) is a full-fledged (i.e. forgein) language. You can learn to speak it poorly by just transliterating your english into signs, but it doesn't even use the same word order in all cases. Just signing along with what you say in English doesn't make you fluent in ASL.

Erasing accidental flamebait mod

Well, if someone is reading a bunch of hate speech I might be made uncomfortable by that. A page with images of cross-burnings and hangings and the like could very well make me uncomfortable to be there. Yet that does not justify censorship. There's lots of things in the world that will be upsetting to someone. Pornography happens to be upsetting to a larger number of US citizens than most things, but, as always, unpopular (and politically dangerous) speech is the only kind that really needs protecting to begin with.

Some important distinctions to make are between coding, design, and production, all of which are parts of the experience. Maybe the point of graphical programming environments isn't only to cater to the pure programming experience you're talking about, but also to give people the opportunity to experience the fun of designing, and seeing their ideas come to life.

As a kid learning BASIC on TRS-80, I did not care in the least about coming up with a clever algorithm. Deciding what to make, creating it and seeing it work was the fun part. For some people, the clever algorithm may indeed be the only fun part of programming, but for me (even now, as an adult and a professional programmer) there is a lot of satisfaction to be had in the design and production parts of the job. Coming up with clever algorithms and solutions definitely is fun, but so are the other parts.

You're essentially arguing that the process itself is all that is, or should matter to people, but I think that misses an important part of any creative enterprise.

Also, as a kid, that sense of "wow, I just made this computer do something it didn't before!" was a pretty rewarding feeling. I think new programmers probably still get some of that.

I'm prepared to believe that the wireless companies do their own gouging of customers, but cramming is about third-parties charging your account. What this settlement aims to do is hold the carriers responsible for those third-party charges. And they should be held responsible, but this isn't quite the same thing as the carriers just charging you random amounts themselves.

I use QT and love it too, but it has some serious drawbacks, from my perspective. The biggest is that it requires a wonky special compilation system. You either have to use the build system they offer (qmake) or you have to manually run their generator yourself (moc - though if you were a masochist you could learn to write out the files moc makes yourself and avoid using it).

I compare every IDE to Eclipse, because that's the best IDE I've seen for any language. But I've never found that CDT, the C++ plugin for Eclipse, is any good. It fails to work out of the box for me and is a pain to configure (but I haven't tried it in a few years). QT Creator, while usable, is really an immature product. There's no support for refactoring, the UI is unintuitive and awkward (for me, at least) and there's lots of little issues with it. Plus you're committed to MingW, which can be a problem depending on what libraries you want to use. Codeblocks is a pretty good IDE, but it doesn't have a QT plugin, so you're left with the problem of dealing with moc files. Visual Studio has a plugin, but it only works with the paid versions.

All of this can be dealt with (and I do) but it's annoying.

So is mine!

Playing sports well does take a lot of mental acuity. Not the same variety that goes into writing good code, but mental acuity all the same. I think it's entirely likely that even if you weren't a physical wreck, you would find it impossible to compete mentally with a professional team-sport athlete in the context of that sporting event.

There's a quality often revered to as "vision" but doesn't actually refer to the athlete's ability to resolve fine detail optically. It refers to having a brain that very quickly sees opportunities, calculates trajectories, and anticipates the movements and intentions of 9-14 other players. If we stuck your brain in a robot body capable of matching their physical abilities, you would still be too stupid (in that domain) to be better than merely good.

Watching sports is another activity entirely, and while some of it certainly is cretinous, jingoism for people with only a couple neurons to rub together, it's entirely possible to be a nerd, an amateur athlete, and to enjoy watching a sport. There are a lot of interesting complexity, strategic decision-making and other highbrow elements even if you disregard the entertainment that is the spectacle of human physical excellence. Personally, I enjoy seeing a guy jump nearly his own height. I think it's neat. I wouldn't watch nothing but that for hours on end, but it seems a little silly to disregard displays of phenomenal ability out of hand.

A lot of people assume that the point of any MMO is to gain levels, items powers and build a character over time, to defeat big monsters, and that anything that detracts from that is bad. Alternatively, you could make a point of a game that isn't about attaching yourself emotionally to some glorified ProgressQuest, and whose interest is the conflict. There's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of the combination of varied builds, fast leveling, player lootings, permanent death, and meaningful in-game factions. Lots of people like quake, and lots of people like MMO style pvp. So what you do is you make a game that combines the interesting aspects of experimenting with a reasonably complex character skillset system, which is something people like about PVP in MMOs, with the action and general painlessness of dieing in Quake.

The other thing wrong with PVP in MMOs is that it is very rarely balanced well. It's often the case that there's either NO pvp or unlimited pvp. A system that allows pvp within a certain power range (as determined by levels, for example) is a way to make it so that PVP doesn't devolve into griefing. Most of the real griefing problems come from letting people of maximum power freely attack those of minimum power. By restricting it within a range that creates at least a reasonable baseline of parity while allowing freedom to fight otherwise, you avoid the stupid kind of pvp which is not fun, and you get a fun style of competition using the RPG style combat mechanics.

I play a mud called carrion fields which works on this model, but it's still a mud (and combines roleplay with the pvp focus I described, which will be a turnoff to people who want pure quake-style action). I've always hoped to see an MMO which applies the same kind of rules, but so far I haven't seen any.

That right there is why your anecdotes are irrelevant to a discussion about what regular users do. Regular people would just laugh at you (Or smile politely while trying not to laugh) if you tried to explain why you use Dvorak. The very idea of someone being *proud* of using a certain keyboard layout is laughable even to me, and I understand what you're talking about.