I'm fully expecting an economic collapse to hit Dubai eventually, and this air conditioned paradise will turn into a blast-furnace hellhole.

Heh. I expect that the 'normal people' as referred to in the original article would find their use for the hammer in this analogy to be more on-par with their needs. They need to occasionally program something so that creation will do something for them.

To your other point, I had to do some maintenance on some 10+ year old perl today on a legacy system. I used vim, and while I'd never worked in perl before it was enough like C that I was able to make do. The script just does some network monitoring and presents an up/down list on equipment and is only about 150 lines long and reads from a 1500-entry flat-file, but that I was able to just jump-in and work on it without experience and that it needs little more than mod_perl says a lot for basic, normal-people languages and development environments.

The thing that bugs me the most is having to use node.js and ruby packages when there are Debian or Ubuntu packages for the same thing. I don't like it when there could be a situation with multiple, competing package managers writing the floor out from under each other.

It also doesn't help that this solution was chosen because it's free, but the vendor that wrote it doesn't even offer paid support, they want you to use their cloud-based solution and this is the hook to get you addicted so that when it breaks, since there's no documentation worth referring to, one basically has to throw them money.

Well, to expand on your analogy, when nail guns were new, they were huge, heavy, hard to operate, and required investment in hoses, and for most jobsites, an expensive gas-powered air compressor. The nails were also much more expensive as they required special rolls/loaders, and those input mechanisms were completely proprietary. Even today, the good nail guns that will last for a long time are not cheap, the gas-powered air compressors are still expensive, and the and the nail rolls/loaders are often still proprietary. One can easily get $2000 into a system right now just to hammer-in nails.

By contrast, a hammer, ranging between $5 at Harbor Freight Tools to $80 for a top-of-the-line deluxe framing hammer forged from olympus steel and quenched in the tears of angels will drive in almost any conventional nail that one needs, and unless abused will probably last as long as the owner will.


I'm working with some web software at the moment. It's the kludgiest amalgomation of crap that I've seen in quite some time. It's got OS library dependencies, but they need to be newer than one stable distribution's version, but older than another stable distribution's version, so one has to use unsigned third-party repositories for those. Then for Ruby on Rails and for Node.js it needs two other sets of proprietary repositories, and it needs specific versions of packages from those repositories too, not default, and it installs some redundant packages that were already covered by OS in slightly different version. Then once you go to put it in it requires MySQL for some of the dependencies but the main program itself only runs on PostgreSQL, so you're stuck with two DBs running, one doing almost nothing but required to be there.

This is sickening. This will make it almost impossible to do OS updates, and will cause all manner of problems if those third-party repositories ever go away, or if the developers for them stop maintaining those specific versions. It's dangerous and stupid to do this.

One can draw an analogy between this and supermarket club cards, where you *can* buy groceries without one, but, it is 25% more expensive.

Yes, an I'm sure that Oliver Clozoff of 1060 W Addison St, Chicago appreciates all of the junk mail from Kroger and Safeway.

I'm glad that my cars are pre-OBD-II.

But really, it comes down to that they can raise your rates when they want to for any or no reason. The only thing stopping them is competition from others that want the same revenue source.

When I had heard that the Russians were calling this kidnapping, I was doubtful -- but now, not so sure. We really do exact our justice anywhere we want to, don't we?

What happened to extradition treaties and such? When did it become "stuff them in a van and drive!"?

i expect that the United States already had notified Maldives and gotten approval for extradition, long before he was arrested. After all, they indicted him in 2011, so they had plenty of time to determine his whereabouts and travel patterns. They might have anticipated that he would go through Maldives, so they arranged a hearing with their government to seek his extradition on his arrival on their soil. When he landed they intercepted him, arrested him, and the US government took custody.

Had this been, "stuff him in a van and drive," I doubt that it would have even been reported, or that it would have been reported so quickly, or that they'd have said something while he's only as far as Guam as opposed to back to the mainland US.

What kind of bizarro world are you living in?

Yes, and I don't think that its choice of name or acronym is terribly good either.

Cumbersome. Zeus is short. Ares is short. Cronus is short. Even Posiedon is only three syllables, but Aphrodite at four is getting a little long and doesn't roll off the tongue the same way.

Well, there can be an argument for 'futurists' to attempt to come up with better ways to do things without a definitive need or even much of a want, but there still needs to be an actual benefit to the change. This windowless cockpit idea has few positives compared to the current status quo, and as airline accidents have demonstrated, has plenty of negatives.

If they want some fancy augmented reality system for pilots, then perhaps the motion-tracked helmet idea that the military is working on for fighter pilots makes more sense. Something that can be worn that can give the pilot the outside-the-visible-light-spectrum data that a pilot could benefit from, but could be removed when the thing stops working to go back to VFR.

I think they should name them something besides GPS. Maybe Ares Positioning System so that it could just be called Ares.

Though such a Roman->Greek naming scheme might not work so well for Venus...

First, this isn't NASA or the United States at all. Second, there well could be applications for differing landing systems for different applications, both for from-orbit landings and for terrain-to-terrain hops to traverse large amounts of territory or to bypass obstructions or other impassable terrain.

If the ESA will pay for it then I don't really care that much. The idea sounds a little silly given the atmospheric density on Mars, but if they can make something work or can learn and use this knowledge to work on something else that works well, all the better.

Or the Make-a-Wish Foundation felt that what they were doing was fair-use. Remember, while they dressed the kid in an off-the-shelf costume, they called him "Batkid", not "Batman", and had DC tried to kibosh the whole thing they'd have looked like monsters.

Media companies struggle with this. There have been fanclubs that have received glowing endorsements from marketing departments while simultaneously receiving cease-and-desist letters from those same companies' legal departments. On the one hand letting the fans run wild with sanctioned merchandise and games and other enthusiasm brings value, but they have to be careful with derivative works and other uses, but if they step too hard then they'll be seen as douchebags and will alienate the very people that make them all their money. The best thing that they can do is to offer enough things with their IP on them for legal sale (look at Thinkgeek as an example of what's available) and the fans will probably be sated without resorting to IP violations en-masse.

I suspect that some read it as,

"In their defense, if they don't work to protect their trademark, then everyone will be getting their murdered children DC's logos on their headstones..."

instead how I wrote it. Dropping two short words and swapping two others takes the black humor completely out of it...