Great referral, thanks.

I liken it to the Y2K issue. For years, experts were saying "hey, get ready, all our dates are going to be foobar". I remember seeing the warnings somewhere around '90-'92. And started coding for 4-digit years.

Anyways, it was all ignored or given lip-service.

Finally, in '98 people started taking real notice. In '99 we had a consultant & vendor free-for-all. Even applications that had nothing to do with the date had to be upgraded to "Y2K Compliant versions".

So, how is it similar to AGW? Well, the time scales are different: I started hearing interest in CO2 and warming sometime in the late 80's, right after we quit worrying about another Ice Age around the corner. But the pendulum swing was just as pronounced: comments and warnings for years, then all of a sudden, everybody (hey we can make money from this) jumps on the bandwagon and it's another free-for-all.

But fun, I'll bet. Anyways, the caveat about "administered professionally" comes into play here.

Support Your Local Bartender or Mixologist

ouch

qft

I don't know, I think Godwin's law is legal, if not tolerated, world-wide.

The Rat Park link is an interesting read.

I think one reason is that when Company A has a product and strategy (and/or lockin) that works, Company B often has to try a different path to differentiate their product, or have to do things differently because of patents, whatever. Often that different path is not optimal, but the optimal path is not open.

sr

I'll call your skip and raise a toast.

I imagine the same thing can be said for alcohol.

sr

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"

A few thoughts come to mind:

1) I imagine the same thing could more or less be said about libraries. After all, the vast majority of books in a large library go unread at any given time

2) Eventually our current nation-states will grow old and die. The cultures that replace them might find it useful to destroy whatever archives that they can find, or it might happen by warfare or accident.

3) LOCKSS. Lot's Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. Too bad the Library of Alexandria didn't have a redundant offsite backup location.

sr

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
J.R.R. Tolkien

Remember when getting Slashdotted meant that *another* site had problems?

Your last place would have found greenbar printouts useful.

I've seen 3 or 4 attempts to make the nested logic correct and/or readable. The statement with the goto's was easy to understand. Immediately. I think it proves the point that sometimes goto's have a place, and actually may be a better solution.

Absolutely. It took me about 5 seconds to understand the snippet with the goto's. The one with brackets is just ugly, though indentation would have made it clearer and easier to match up the brackets (which of course, the OP may have done and /.'s editing tools failed to render). I imagine that a bracket mismatch could provide for some debugging hilarity, just as an errant goto. Both get the job done, though. As long as the goto logic is nice and tight, it can provide for both hard- and meat-ware efficiency.