One thing we've noticed is the other side: it's often cheaper to just buy the movie, watch it at home (home-popped popcorn) and throw away the disc afterwards than it is to watch it in the theatre.

Home movies have gotten so much cheaper than theatres that this is feasible for most movies. We still see the odd one in the theatre, but that has gotten quite rare over the years.

All the entries should be judged on the merits of the entry, not on the plumbing of the creator.

If you don't want 12-foot-tall penis light sculptures, don't approve them. It doesn't matter if that was coded by a boy or a girl.

Simple.

And not sexist.

Without any regard to the religious organisation. As long as any group can qualify for tax breaks of a similar nature for a similar sized tourist attraction with similar business plans, and expectation of tourist dollars spent in-state, regardless of the religosity or lack thereof of the attraction, then they are supporting tourism for tourist purposes.

(And I say that disagreeing with Ham's interpretation of the Bible.) (And disagreeing with the whole concept of selective tax breaks - if you have spare cash, spread it around by lowering all taxes, not just certain ones.)

Really, it doesn't matter if the brain lacks free will. We necessarily must presume it does for our legal system to have any effect. It doesn't matter whether you're a thief or a diagnosed kleptomaniac, either way we need to find a way to keep you away from the personal property of others. Sure, the methods used may change, but we've determined (whether through free will or some reasonably complete facsimile thereof) that this is not acceptable behaviour in our society, and it must be caught and removed.

That really depends on your experience level, like in anything. Reading a wiring diagram is arcane to the uninitiated, but once you know what symbols represent what types of circuit pieces (including resistors, capacitors, diodes, FETs, etc.), they are both syntactically succinct and easy to read because you can tell what goes where at a glance, you don't need to read and parse a lot of text.

Same thing in Perl. Once you actually learn it, it becomes easier and faster to read than, say, Java, because there's less skipping over of absolute boilerplate. The more I use perl, the less patience I have for trying to find my way through the verbosity that is Java.

There's a good reason for not reading beyond the first couple sentences in this case.

And that's not just to avoid the standard lack of editing around here: "assuming you tune they [sic] system along the way" ???

You tell that to the President of (what remains of) Ukraine. Ever since Obama has said "Yeah, well, don't cross this line. I mean it!" Putin has known exactly how much he can get away with.

Do you think that simply because you omitted that common attack vector that it's magically not going to happen?

Rate limiting, et al, has a singular primary purpose: to make things hard enough that an attacker doesn't get the password hash. Anything else is pure gravy.

Once the attacker has the password hash, the next defense is a strong password. And that's where we need to focus the entire debate about passwords vs passphrases vs biometrics vs telepathy. Assume the attacker has your password hash. This worst-case scenario is reality all too often. Yes, throttle password attempts and all that, but if your server has Sarah Palin or Barack Obama on it, assume that someone, somewhere, will deploy sufficient resources to getting that password hash through some zero-day vulnerability. (If your site is just discussing hooch for local rednecks in Bumfuk, Virginia, then the passwords are likely safe, regardless of how insecure the system is.)

Clang warns about bad variable names? I need to switch!

This.

Real science is always open to upending. If they weren't willing to listen to critics, they'd be called a religion.

Excersise for the reader: are there any other scientists not willing to listen to their critics?

I'd suggest the penalty be based on the savings, not the cost.

If the illegal is simply indentured, unpaid servant, the penalty goes to zero? Instead, I'd suggest asking a local union (just for kicks, mind you) what the going rate is for that work, subtracting the actual pay, and using that as your basis for penalty. If the illegal was paid full union rates, I could live with "no penalty" - they've been penalised enough, I suppose.

I used to be a huge fan of C++.

All those negatives you cite seem to me to be advantages. Because when you know how to use them, they become powerful forces for good. Sure, there's plenty of room to shoot your foot off, but there are some things you can do in Perl that a stricter language wouldn't let you do.

I've put that bullet through that approach.

I've grabbed the precise versions of everything that we're going to use, checked into our version control system, complete with a full build-from-scratch setup that will build perl from source, with the exact options we need (or at least the exact same options every time, not sure if we need threading, for example), and the precise list of CPAN modules that we are using, along with standard patches to said modules where required (some of them don't support AIX as well as we need). Upgrading a module will require a degree of regression testing, etc.. And all developers will use exactly the right levels of everything as the level that is going into production.

I'm a huge fan of CPAN. It has issues, such as some crap code, but yet it remains one of Perl's greatest strengths. Like anything else worth having, it provides sufficient rope to hang yourself with, so you do have to be careful, putting the onus back on the developer to find a mode that works for them. And yet, to fulfill corporate requirements, I'm using precise levels of code. There's no reason why you can't have the best of both worlds.