Reputation aside, I seldom have any trouble with non-emergency calls from my AT&T iPhone, and the landline is only useful if you're at home, preferably in the same room as the phone.

Well first of all Linus has never been overly concerned with market share, just building a technically damn good kernel so I doubt this will have much practical influence on his work. It's got to be frustrating though, Linux works on massively huge and complex servers. It works on the smallest mobile and embedded devices. But a regular desktop that from the kernel's side is rather simple, one CPU and usually one GPU and pretty much no exotic devices (from the kernel side all USB devices look the same, for example) and no absurd limits being pushed in any direction.

I think the last real significant desktop feature was when they increased interactivity by changing the default time slice from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz and that was in 2004 or so. Heck, I would say it was at least as ready as the BSD kernel was when Apple created OS X in 2001. It's quite telling that the one thing Google did not want to rewrite when they made Android was the kernel. All else they ripped out and replaced with Apache licensed code, but not that. Well that and a bunch of Google proprietary APIs, but that's another flame war. I think I'd feel just the same in his shoes.

The problem with 4e is it dropped everything else. The fixes to combat make it much more accessible to a new generation, and that's great, but a D&D session shouldn't play like an MMO. You need just as much richness in the setting, in open-ended exploration, in diplomacy, in absurdly over-engineered traps, and so on. 4E got some pieces very right, but it's too tightly wound IMO - too much focus on combat, and especially on well-balanced combats. It's a poor system to accommodate cleverness and tactical elements not captured by player abilities.

4E adventures tend to be a set of very-well-balanced encounters all very level appropriate for a party, but that loses much of the charm of D&D. 4E is poorly suited mechanically for "crazy plans that just might work" to take on foes far out of the party's level range (unless they're scripted into the module). E.g., the party wants to kills a group of foes far more powerful than they, so they gather intelligence by diplomacy, intrigue, and seduction, discover a good time and place for an ambush, arrange to blow up a cliff face to drop an avalanche on the foes as they walk past on a marrow path, then attack before the dust settles. Pre-4E, it's fairly natural for a good DM to figure out how that all works and run a fun session around it in a way the players find fair. In 4E you have so little to work with for any of that, unless it was part of the script.

They're solidly in the realm of the legal in the US because of USC 17 512(d):

If they don't respond to DMCA notices they fail condition (C) and become liable. This has been established legal history since way back when web pages used to link to illegal MP3 files, perhaps longer. It's not true in the general case, just because you point them to other website that might contain something illegal won't get you into trouble. But pointing directly to infringing content and claiming you aren't liable because you're not the one hosting it doesn't fly.

What drugs are you on really? You make as much sense as saying that because this knife didn't come with an EULA not to behead unbelievers the manufacturer supports what the Islamic State is doing in Iraq/Syria. I've never to my knowledge bought or owned anything that has a political agenda as condition for use and newer will. I do care how they were produced (no child labor, animal testing, destroying the rain forest, social dumping or so on) but I'd never buy a car that had the gall to tell me where I could and couldn't drive in the EULA. So are you nuts, a troll or just trying to kill OSS? Because you make RMS look pragmatic.

I think he was just pinging me for the ideas, which do predate my efforts and is certainly fair -- I started my whole "object" approach to c in 1985.

Of course, the whole point was to avoid using compiler tech that generated code I didn't intend it to generate, and in that sense, I got what I was after.

I wish I could still write my code in assembler, though. I was never more at home than when churning out 6809 or 68000 code.

Since that's not actually a license, I pick lightsaber. Not as clumsy or random as C++. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

Thanks, looks like very interesting reading. Bookmarked it.

I just don't see the broken-rules problems in RP-land ...

Old school RP is a tiny corner of the gaming world, and really well served by rules-light RPG systems, I think. Risus is great IMO for anything where you don't need "tactical simulation rules" (hmm, TSR, someone should make a game company ....), or one of the many Emo Goffpire games. I just see the broken-rules problems in RP-land that plague the tactical world.

Here's the problem: it's boring to be in an encounter where you have nothing to contribute. And bored players make problems for games, one way or another. With social encounters, most players can enjoy what's going on even if they're just arguing about what the charismatic rogue should say, but it's different in tactical combat, where too great an imbalance in ability to contribute can ruin the game.

All I can say is: that just isn't true of every game system. It's horribly, horribly true of 3.5, which is the fundamental problem with 3.5. If careful min/maxing gives you a 20% combat advantage over a naive build, likely at the cost of non-combat stuff, that's not going to be a problem. Heck, it could be 50% more powerful without hurting the game if the DM is willing to shape encounters a bit (not ideal, but workable). But 3.5 is so bad that some classes simply can't contribute except in carefully contrived encounters, while others (with expert play) won't have any challenge without equal contrivances. Heck, 3.5 has infinite HP builds, infinite damage builds, and so on, though that stuff is less worrying as its so blatant.

I always liked that part, though I'd say it's a bit of a 3.5 flaw that you have to do that awkward dance to realize what's likely a pretty clear and sensible character concept (just not one of the D&D archetypes).

Cool - I haven't used VS for C++ since they grew up and added C99 support - I really should try it out.

If that is true, why do the wheels need skin in the first place? I doubt anything on that mission is there for decoration...

They offer that service separately, and I use it all the time: DVDs - but for most people that's a corner case. The problem most people have with Netflix (myself included) is the tiny amount of streaming content in the first place. Even with the DRM they can barely get any content owners contracted. The studios just have recto-cranial inversion over streaming in the first place - the DRM is just a distraction from the real issue.

In both cases - content owners and big ISPs, you've got abuse of government-granted monopolies. The real issue is our alleged democracy selling monopolies in the first place!

Overage fees are nothing but pure evil. They did use to offer capped DSL and my cell phone data usage is still capped, I ran into it this summer as I was watching videos at the cabin but it doesn't have overage. What happens is at 80% I got a text that I'm getting close on my cap. At 100% I got a new text saying my quota is now up, I'll now either get very, very slow internet connection the rest of the month like enough to check email and barely browse the web, or I can pay up for additional quotas. Back when they offered capped DSL it was the same there.

The biggest benefit to a flat rate connection is that it's flat rate. And particularly today when you got phones and tablets and laptops and consoles and smart TVs and whatnot that all like to go online keeping track of your aggregate data usage is not easy. Overage fees are like the credit card model offering you 30 days free credit. How to do they make money off giving people free money? Because people slip up, get unplanned or unwanted expenses and then they nail the suckers. It's just begging to exploit the people who think they can save a few bucks a month.