Because it is *new* and promising and interesting. No one claimed *perfect*.

It's a common lament on /. but if you don't want to hear about stuff until it's on the shelves in your local store stop wasting time reading /. and other information outlets, else stop whining when you get an early heads up.

Really.

Tell me what potential life-saving breakthrough *you* made today, please.

Put this way your point sounds more reasonable I think, though I still believe that the "praise in public, censure in private" rule of thumb is key, so I'd be less keen on making the whole thing public.

Anyway, I agree that this stuff is hard.

Rgds

Damon

Few of us are that driven by rules to the exclusion of social mores. And attempting to run a group that way will exclude those who aren't, I suggest, which may be a useful set of people for all sorts of contingent and correlated reasons (eg people with especially good empathy and outreach and comms skills).

Rgds

Damon

And changing our entire frame of reference twice a year in some places at vaguely similar but not the same dates, to me does not meet that test.

We have things called computers and calendars these days with which we could adjust the running hours of our businesses, schools, etc, *if necessary* to the seasons.

My local graveyard manages it.

I run as much as possible on UTC.

Rgds

Damon

Just because *you* don't get SPAM doesn't mean that it isn't a problem in a number of ways.

I get 10,000+ SPAM attempts per day. I;d have to give up well-known and memorable emails addresses to begin to trim it.

Legit inbound and outbound mails get lots in the SPAM wars, eg people miss important mails of mine, and I miss theirs.

SPAM traffic also wastes bandwidth and power in my networking equipment and servers; visible and significant for a partly off-grid system for example.

SPAM filters are a poor fix for a pernicious problem that has destroyed what was a wonderful communications service. I was using email before SPAM existed.

Rgds

Damon

The reductio ad absurdum is obvious.

Sad, and I suspect, just lazy.

Rgds

Damon

But you're not powerless to influence the subject of this debate, you're just throwing in the towel for no good reason it seems to me, and are therefore actively avoiding getting the best outcome, which is negligent.

Do you bother to vote?

Rgds

Damon

It must be lovely to be so cool and detached about such things. Do wars and pandemics and poverty also induce belly laughs in you?

Rgds

Damon

Hi

It is a silly demand because the scarcity is artificial and unless you are a fisherman (and possibly not even then) it is by no means an essential.

We can all just make up demands for things like 10t of precious metal each that might also be highly desirable because of how we happen to price them, but artificial scarcities are not meaning for a discussion.

Rgds

Damon

And I'd like two entire universes please.

Just because you can make a silly demand, doesn't make it anything other than that.

Rgds

Damon

Well, your sig "I am a crackpot" leads me to hope that you don't actually believe the mental contortions in that item!

Rgds

Damon

Confirmation bias is strong even when people try to avoid it, but I have once or twice even here on /. said words to the effect "thank you for that explanation I didn't have a clue" and "yes, I take your point".

It can happen, just not often, and changing an opinion is often a slow and gradual (and sometimes embarrassing) process, unlikely to be visible in the course of a single response.

Rgds

Damon

One of the reasons that I have not run my own forums, even as one of the first people with Internet connectivity in the UK for example, is the horror of dealing with that effect. I sincerely believe most people around me to be decent human beings, with some rougher edges exposed when not talking face to face.

But what is it that happens with discussion threads?

Rgds

Damon

Possibly I *could*, but as it's running on our custom hardware writing the emulation would be ... time consuming.

But being able to bootload over serial with all the compilation (etc) happening on the laptop is still a huge boon. I still have burnt in my memory the sound of the grind grind of the floppies compiling and assembling on CPM, and with my one contact with Bill Gates (by telex) because of a boneheaded misfeature in the Microsoft tools... %-P

Rgds

Damon

The key virtue, such as it is, of the do { ... } while(false), better wrapped up in a macro, is that it makes it harder to get the nesting wrong by accident, which is critical.

With goto there is no such safety net.

But I think we're agreeing furiously.

Rgds

Damon