The trouble with a language giving tons of rope to hang oneself is, on a team project, there will always be some coders who will in fact hang themselves, and in doing so hang the whole project. That's why C++ is OK for small/one-coder projects, but Java is the language of choice for big teams. Of course the whole project can also be hanged by the designers and architects...

Do we need to make that trip to the mall RIGHT NOW ?!!???
or can it wait

"We add liquidity to the market." There, now we can do any corrupt crap we want to.

One of the examples of boiled frog syndrome is how we've become accustomed to suckier and suckier traffic as population growth, development, and rising consumption have put more and more cars on the road, which are driven more and more miles per year. This has happened as the political will to undertake large infrastructure projects has dissolved with the rise of small government ideology. Essentially no cities that had their major growth after the 1950's are able to provide a functioning transportation system. We've been distracted from this fact by cars getting more comfortable and more entertaining, as music systems and especially cell phones became a major source of relief from the tedium of traffic jams. If all cell phone use in cars is banned, watch for the lack of good rush-hour transportation to come to the front in local politics.

The reaction-time problem for bows or guns can only be solved by the individual ethics of the hunter. I'm sorry for hunters that botch the job, regardless of the type of equipment used. Patience matters. A poor sense of respect for the environment has degraded many fishing sites too. A substitution of technology for patience, skill, and a knowledge (and therefore respect) of game is the hallmark of the shallow hunter. This loss of depth (reverence?) is the hunter's loss, not just the prey's.

Surely most ads are at 'the grey borders of "truth"'. "Coke adds life" -- yeah, right. The marketing for pharmaceuticals and plastic surgery can't be expected to follow higher standards than the rest of society, can it?

People in all societies get their ideas of what's necessary, and what's enough, and what to buy, by looking at the people around them and comparing it to their own situation. The don't use any kind of empirical or absolute measure, unless they're chronically hungry or in similar dire straits.

That's why I set my 80-year-old mom up with Linux. All she does on her old hardware is browse, email, and a bit of writing. She finds Ubuntu desktop in classic mode easy to use, after XP, and LibreOffice Write easy to use, after an old version of MS Word. In contrast, the newer MS desktops and the tool ribbon of newer Word releases are beyond her comprehension. Trust me, we tried. What Mom *doesn't* do is battle with viruses, compatibility switches, and bloatware. Mom doesn't really get it that she's running Linux. It just works, for her. And for me, with minimal support issues. Even better, the Ubuntu LTS releases give us prompt security fixes (at least compared to MS, and that's before they de-support an OS), and a clean and easy upgrade path. Her hardware and software cost over the last decade has been essentially zero, as all of the software she runs is free, and I upgrade her hardware for free with a cast-off 5-year-old computer when her's is about 10. Linux is a great solution for much of what XP is used for.

Why did Steam need their own distro?

By definition, weapons of mass destruction are rather indiscriminate in their effects, killing innocent civilians. They're can only be aimed approximately. AGW of course is only a WMD metaphorically, not literally, as it didn't arise with the intent to kill, even if it does.

The stagnation of design in the factory-built market was caused by a few jury decisions to hold manufacturers liable for crashes, not by government regulation. The liability problem made USA manufacturers stop introducing bold design changes. The "51% rule" holds that if the customer builds an airplane himself, then he's the manufacturer and assumes liability. This has caused all of the interesting design progress to show up in the kit plane market instead of in the factory-built market. (Two examples are composite construction and canard wings, although both features are available factory-built from non-USA manufacturers.) Government regulation has helped bring new pilots into the fold with the recent introduction of the Sport Light Aircraft pilot's license.

Separate from the airplane price issue, though, is that that geeky guys that might have become private pilots are diverted today into electronics and software. "Tech" used to mean airplanes.

And one of the ten words always seems to be "meh".

By the time the drone has enough collision-avoidance to keep from crashing into everyone else's drones (probably using some kind of identifying beacon), it will be better to have the drones form a mesh network to transmit views from different places, than to have each drone fly to a point of interest to get their own (redundant) view.

It's not "them" that causes such a guilt-ridden and indecisive state. Settle down, boy!

> ... scripting isn't programming.

Well, it *could* be.