The US Government is, however, wrong. (a distinction which may not change the outcome, but which is, I think, very important).

This, 100 times over. TOC should not be enforced by any criminal court in any country. Civil courts is a different matter. Breaking actual criminal laws is a different matter. Those criminal laws, however, should clearly spell out the crime and should not leave its definition up to anything a random person or company wants to throw into a TOS.

Well, maybe a little more than that... "Scary large thing! Hide! ... Hm, is this food? Scary large thing! Hide! Hm, is this food? THIS IS MY TERRITORY! Hm, is this food? I SAID THIS IS MY TERRITORY! Hm, this must be food. THIS IS oh, what a nice cloaca you have! Scary large thing! Hide!"

Thank you. i thought it was insulting to see columnists touting Twitter or Google+ as some answer/way forward for consuming information. They don't even begin to remotely serve the purpose that Google Reader did. And even if I could create a Twitter which managed to show me every article I was interested in from my current RSS collection, none of those other social sites do the tracking of what you've read, and what you haven't, so that you can make sure you don't miss things from sources you want to closely follow. How dumb to tech writers think we are that we'd see any sort of equivalence between those different platforms?

If I put a big truck on the highway and someone else comes along and opens up the doors because I didn't lock them, and everyone knows that it was, in fact, someone else who opened the doors, I would not be liable, at least not 100%. I agree that people ought to take responsibility for protecting their posessions, but I don't believe failure to secure things perfectly should lead to liability for others' damages.

Nice, someone actually analyzing facts and figures. Wait, we don't do that here! RTFM! You're only supposed to read the title of the article and then pick your side and hammer anyone on the other team! Geez, you almost lulled me to complacency there, with your looking-at-things-rationally!

Actually, I don't think it's true that the religious part of the argument doesn't come in to play. These nurses aren't making an argument from science. They're making an argument from religion, and then (after that turned out to be controversial) trying to find science to provide justification for their religious stance. So, while I do think we should discuss and clarify the science, there is no justification for the nurse's position or action.

I think it's admirable to go commenting in a second language, so kudos, don't let your detractors get your goat. :) (another fun idiom for you). And I agree with some other people, "escape goat" is one of the best mistakes I've seen, really gave me a good laugh. Not at you either, I just think it's a great phrase, and there should definitely be something which is called an escape goat. Thanks!

I mean, sure, maybe they couldn't use it as a stinger, but that doesn't mean it couldn't still be used as a weapon against US interests. If it has explosives in it, how would this stop anyone from repurposing those explosives if the missile ceased functioning as desired?

Perhaps the amount is scandalous, I think any particular case is difficult to judge. My point is you can't take a single point in time and make that judgement. Maybe they replaced old Apple IIs with new computers the year before he made his offer, and they'll keep using them for 15 years. Maybe not (sure, probably not). At any rate, everything has to be new at some point, just because someone/district/etc has something new doesn't mean they always have new things.

So..."I had it rough, the school district should continue to suck and give future generations the shaft"? Were they supposed to chug along with Apple II's until you came riding to the rescue? Also, are they never supposed to buy any new computers? Bear in mind that if they ever do, any older computers someone tries to donate shortly afterward would, likely, be "too old".

Yeah, it's pretty bad. I kept suggesting to Nick Denton (when he deigned to join in the comments) that they should really take a look at the /. commenting system as a way of achieving what he said he wanted (greater inclusivity, good discussions). He never responded...and I'd get that, if he came up with something even remotely usable, but the commenting system there is insane, and not only is it insane, every time people start to get used to it, they completely change it yet again.

Gawker has standards?

Maybe arglebargle isn't understanding the purpose, maybe they are...I can't really say. I'm quite certain I do understand the purpose...but having a purpose and being the best way to achieve that purpose aren't synonymous. I think the "best way" would be the one which most reliably prevents the abuses you mention while best limiting collatoral damage from the policy. Returning to the OP, when talking about the author's motivation for writing a work, there can be no more authoritative source than the primary source. A secondary source would necessarily be *less accurate* than the primary source. A policy which fails to recognize those sorts of nuances is not doing a good job of limiting collatoral damage, regardless of how pure its purpose might be. To me, this whole issue with the "no original research" policy reminds me of the "Zero Tolerance" policies that you often see lambasted. The similarity being that in both cases, little to no leeway is given for discretion, there is no consideration of context or nuance. And so we see an author being unable to verify that their inspiration for writing something was X; and we see kindergarteners suspended for having GI-Joe sized miniature weapons in their knapsack. In neither case is the true purpose really being served. Instead, people are abdicating thought and debate to policy, attempting to absolve themselves of responsibility for dealing with a world that is not full of bright line distinctions.

To the latter point, that verifying people are who they say they are is difficult, I concur. Verifying that sources are reliable is difficult as well. Wikipedia editors seem to believe that the latter is at least worth a reasonable effort. If the case merits it, why would the former not also be worth a reasonable effort? For example, if you have a professor at a university who wishes to address some aspect of an article about them or their work (such as what inspired them)...would it really be that difficult to verify the source? Most, if not all universities seem to have public directories available, many professors have web pages on their departmental web sites. Wouldn't a quick email to the listed address for the professor suffice to ensure that the source has been reasonably verified? Certainly not conclusively...but Wikipedia can't possibly have "conclusive" as its standard. Even the standard you have for the article you refer to, "peer reviewed", doesn't "conclusively" establish anything, it just gives a good chance that the information is as accurate as our current understanding allows.

Scala does indeed have some of what I want...but some number of those features would require VM support to really properly put in place. Without VM support, you could perhaps emulate some of them at the language library level, but you're not going to get the true performance that you would have if the VM were intelligently doing many of the optimizations at a lower level. And I don't think many of those things will end up in the JVM b/c Java's too beholden to backwards compatibility...and since the primary language won't ever support those features there's little motivation to add extra complexity to the VM to support them. I do think the JVM would make a reasonable starting point...people have put a lot of work into developing a number of features which would continue to be very important for the next generation language, and if some of that work can be reused, it would certianly help jumpstart such a project. I do think there's not much point without VM support. A next generation language isn't going to be viable if it exposes nice features but they are slow/expensive. And that, I think, is one big reason why uptake on Scala hasn't been better than it has. I'd have dig around to find it again, but last I saw, there were several significant benchmarks for which Scala performed much slower than Java due to aspects to how the language is designed. Google's little paper notwithstanding, most benchmarks I could find in just looking around (such as the Computer Language Benchmarks Game http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ ) have Scala coming in a bit behind Java...but well behind it on the high end. I think the next paradigm...it will have to offer more than Scala does, and do it with top-flight performance. There needs to be a real clear benefit which goes beyond appealing to CSey types and which can be used to make a compelling argument to business folk why they should let their development team(s) run off and use something new. I think several of the features I lay out would really help the language get even closer to C++ performance for a variety of computational tasks...still not as good as tuned C++, but maybe close enough that for an even broader category of problems, the extra productivity made possible by the higher level nature of the language would make it the way to go.