I wouldn't have a problem with these long terms if there was a requirement to renew every 10 years or so. What pisses me off is the works that no longer have commercial value, you can't even find the "owners" without spending many thousands, and yet still I'm a felon if I copy them. That makes no sense. Set a 10 year renewal with a modest fee,

The year 2000 called. They want their "obvious" back.

Operator overloading is not "discouraged" in Python. Rather, you're encouraged to use it to make your objects "Pythonic" (i.e. support a similar range of features to a built-in python object) and to make sure the semantics are basically the same. Eliminating operator overloading from languages entirely is one of the things that makes Java suck so much and so frickin' verbose, in my opinion.

Westboro Baptist Church has nothing to do with Jesus, "zombie" or otherwise. You do realize that there is no Christian body of any size, anywhere, that supports them? That they are a standalone congregation of about 40 people, most of whom are related to Phelps, who make their living by stirring up controversy and suing for their civil right to do so?

Don't even consider them Chrsitians. It's a business scheme.

Evidently, the law has nothing to do with "common decency." But it should. If they would enforce laws designed to keep society functional, we'd have a much nicer place to live and far fewer school shootings in the first place.

Intimidation. Duh.

Fine, so long as the copyright lobby agrees that "taxed media" means "copyright license for whatever I download." Oh, wait. They don't do that?

<quote>
<p>Perhaps you live in a country that does not have as much of a problem with guns and drugs as the US. Different situations require different measures.</p></quote>

Or, perhaps, GP's country just isn't as hysterical about such things as the US.

The school added lots of requirements to that, including that she visibly display the badge to show people that she had been brought into line, and that her parents publicly support the badge program.

Talk about Gestapo tactics ...

Google has $47B in cash, Verizon's market cap is "only" $118B. I'd imagine AT&T's market cap is lower. Surely they could finance buying one of the major carriers. Shoot, sprint they could buy outright with $30B case left over.

Why wouldn't they just buy a network?

YEah, but they're like the scary, creepy Halloween clowns, with long, pointy teeth.

Indeed. I used to work for a state university, and we had equipment that was purchased under a special grant that never allowed us to get rid of it. We had to periodically inventory this equipment separately, with ridiculous consequences if we couldn't find some of it. This was around 1995, and we literally had original IBM XT's stacked up in a warehouse, and the only thing we did with them was to periodically inventory them.

I actually regard the fact that someone could say this as a great example of why computer science education is broken. The reality is that there's a tremendous amount of REALLY BAD code out there, written by C.S. Majors and non-C.S. Majors alike. I'm minded of one case where a self-taught perl programmer in a company I worked for absolutely could not figure out why his code to convert a few megabytes of data was taking days to run. Turned out he was appending to a string in order to add a few bytes to it, and every time he did it perl was copying the string to a new location. Simply by "pre-allocating" the string we cut the run time down to a couple of hours. This would have been obvious to him if he'd ever coded in C, or taken a data structures class. But he hadn't. Things like data structures, algorithms, and most importantly security are hard. They can't be taught in a trade school, because people in trade schools lack the necessary background. In the case above, I tried to explain to the guy the whole concept of "big O", and quickly discovered that he didn't know what a factorial was, nor a logarithm, and was a bit sketchy on the concept of geometric expansion. Please don't dump more half-trained programmers on us. We don't need them, and those of us who do understand information theory (with or without degrees) will spend way too much time fixing their errors. I'm not saying everyone needs to be a CS major (my B.S. is in Philosophy, my masters is in Theology, and my Ph.D. is in New Testament.) I AM saying that there should be a requirement to learn some basic skill before you're allowed to write code for a living.

Don't be surprised if, when you use science to attack people's religion, they start to hate science.

Am I the only one who, upon reading the words "first post", thought this article had something to do with Natalie Portman, hot grits, and somebody's pants?