Would you prefer the Red Guard as an easy way to make the point?

Of note is that you didn't actually have a meaningful answer.

I hope you do pay due respect to the fallen Waffen SS troops.

I find that worship is a perfectly accurate word to describe the "support the troops" cult, for example. So no.

With under 50 comments per spoof, you'd think those responsible would get the message that very few are interested.

But apparently not.

Oh well. See everyone tomorrow, when the site is over this.

Agreed. I'm definitely not saying that there are no genuine brilliant "rock-stars" in these fields. Even in my field, boring old network/desktop support, every once in a while you find someone who just seems to be really good at diagnosing problems quickly, making intuitive leaps to conclusions that frequently turn out to be correct, or quickly assessing which risks to take. There are also people who are kind of amazing at dealing with users/customers, where someone will call in completely and justifiably pissed off, and the tech will listen and talk to them, and in the end the caller is satisfied.

Those people may have, to some extent, earned the right to "be a cowboy". However, the people who have earned that right are much more rare than the people who think that they have. And what's more, those people would often do better to color within the lines most of the time, and save "being a cowboy" for the relatively rare situations where it'll pay off. Sorry if I'm mixing metaphors.

So my point here is, even with those young, smart, motivated programmers who are working like coke-addicts, they might be making some big strides and getting a lot of things done. Still, at some point you want to take that flashy application and make it stable and reliable, and then a bunch of coke-addicted cowboys aren't going to succeed.

"But sir, that's the old wheel with a fresh coat of paint."
"Right, giant hammer for you then!"

It was an April Fools prank taken waaaay too far.

A patent promise doesn't specifically forbid certain behaviors - it merely gives a legal guarantee that the patent holder will not sue if certain conditions are met. In the absence of such a promise, the patent holder can sue in more cases. I just don't see how no promise can be better than an explicit promise, no matter how meager. So long as you know (or can reasonably assume) that someone holds a patent, it is a threat regardless of the license, unless it contains its own patent promise.

No. She said "What the hell are you planning to do with that knife?"

Sorry, I thought I had been clear.

I wasn't talking about regional control of distribution by publishers, I was talking about arbitrary interference with materials intended for the end user, where the end user is interfered with by bad actors, most notably, government busybodies.

I own a literary agency and deal with copyright and regional issues a great deal more often, and in more ways, than most people. But that isn't what I was talking about, as it seems like a non-issue to me -- as long as we have nations and varying costs of distribution, we'll have some effective form of regional controls. So I had gone off on what I thought was an obvious tangent. Apparently not.

Only if you're an international douche bag of the highest order. Occupying the lowest stratum of moral behavior is what damns organisations to fighting themselves as much as they fight real enemies.

I think it'd make an even better April 1 story. After all, we've been through this a bunch of times.

Perhaps Dice outsourced the /. April Fools jokes to Trevor Noah.

I could have put up with the bad acting if there had been a good script and a story that made sense. Rewatching some of the original Star Trek is like that: the acting is wooden and the sets are obviously cheap, but there's some fantastic dialog and story telling in there. Hint for writers: if your script relies on everyone in the universe being stupid at the same time, it may be realistic but it's not going to be enjoyable (unless it's a comedy about stupidity).

It's not just the teeth. You particularly notice this if you compare US and UK TV. I find it really hard to tell the actors on US TV apart, particularly the female ones who seem to mostly conform to 2-3 stereotypical appearances. The same is true for the young male ones, though at least there are some older male roles that have distinctive appearances. There are very few ugly actors. Compare this with a BBC drama, where there will be a whole range of physiques.

I find it harms willing suspension of disbelief when watching US shows. I sit there thinking 'really, everyone in this low-income school has a personal trainer and stylist? And these people manage to have perfect hair as soon as they wake up or after running through the mud?' Actually, the UK isn't immune from the last part: Sean Bean in Shape has magic hair that is immune to mud, gunsmoke, and everything else the napoleonic wars can throw at him. No matter how dirty his face and uniform get, his hair always looks as if he's just come from the hairdresser.

Or we could realize that attitude won't keep industry in the US.