I mean, you get 4 programs on your harddrive for the price of one -
1) SecureROM
2) Games for Windows LIVE
3) Rockstar Social Club
4) An early Beta version of some game

Sounds like a great deal to me.

If anything Perl is just being relegated to what it's _really_ good at, and that's UNIX automation tasks and quick throw-away scripts, and _sometimes_ smallish applications. There's really no better language for these types of things.

I actually prefer Ruby for that sort of stuff, but maybe that's just me. ;)

He's announcing it way too early. He has practically nothing to show. There's only one tiny code example that I can see to gauge its merits.

When he announced it on his blog a couple of months ago it he said it was in progress. He is still experimenting with the syntax and semantics of the language, so I think it is currently mostly interesting for those who want to discuss ideas and experiment themselves.

Ioke is cute, but there's just no really good reason for such a strange syntax

I'm not sure Ioke is the language for me, but I think it is interesting that he is experimenting with syntax and trying out new things. He has blogged about his reasons for using space as the method operator, and the consequences.

People who come up with "l33t" ideas like this need to be put on maintenance programming of code written by others for six months or so.

I've worked with Ola. Trust me, he's done plenty of maintenance programming over the years. :)

Crichton's point is it doesn't matter how many people *think* he's is wrong about climate change, it only takes one person to *prove* him wrong. Science isn't consensus, and nothing has been proven.

Yet when deciding what to do about potential problems, we have to take consensus into account....exactly for the reasons you state - that we can't know things with absolute certainty.

Now that the Republicans are out of the White House, expect the climate change crisis to conveniently fade away from the public consciousness.

US centric much? This is a global problem, discussed all over the world.

A HACK? Your opinion is wrong. Crichton was thought-provoking and insightful, and he was a gifted story-teller

No, the GP had it right. He was a hack, wrote thinly disguised straight-to-Hollywood scripts, and will soon be forgotten, your fanboy hissyfit nonwithstanding.