Hey chill out man. It's far from clear that the GP is not a website developer. I mean, probably not, but it's not implied by the content of his post.

If you are one, then I don't understand your objection to what he wrote. Presumably you too would like 100% W3C compliance to be the norm, and not have to bother with all that IE-specific shite. If you can write standards-compliant code and the latest IE copes with it OK (and earlier IE that don't are in the ridiculously small minority that you can ignore), then I think you would both be in agreement that it's not a bad thing.

If you're implying that this will never be the case and IE will always be both obtusely non-standard and absurdly market-relevant then I think your position is reasonable but I personally don't think both of those conditions can remain true indefinitely.

I used to do web development back when IE5 was a thing and almost nobody used Firefox or saw the point of web standards. Have we come a long way since then or what?

And in the UK, we supposedly have regulations already. Thing is, there is no way to legislate against how fucking annoying an advert is.

So, at the start of commercial break, I hit the mute button. The five minutes of peace and quiet really helps to preserve the mood of whatever I'm watching, and there are several ads which I have absolutely no clue about, as to what they are for or even what the fuck they are trying to convey about it. And that's the way I like it.

Basically, it's my first line of defence against meme pollution.

Fuck Oracle.

The way you assert it to be, it may very well be in practice, and it may very well have been upheld by the courts. But the courts have upheld a lot of laws for a long time before they were overturned, and no law, military or civil, is special in this regard.

But more than that, the situation with Bradley Manning is also clearly wrong. The requirement to obey lawful orders goes hand-in-hand with the responsibility to only give lawful orders, and that carries all the way up to the top: the commander-in-chief (i.e. the president).

Where does his authority come from? The constitution! He also swears to uphold it, and he literally has no authority to command anyone to disregard it, in whole or in part.

Or else, if the US really is about fetishizing military discipline to such a crazy extent, then fuck it. But I don't think so.

It's not like you'd completely can the theory of relativity anyway, even if neutrinos can go slightly faster than we thought possible. You'd just refine it a little. But yeah, let's see if anyone else can reproduce the result or spot a flaw in the experiment.

5 years to irreversible change seems oddly precise, on the timescale of the global climate.

Is this like in films where the hero is asphyxiating, drowning, dying of poison or a disease, or the ship's computer is counting down to "failure of life support systems", and if they are rescued 5 seconds before the deadline they are *completely fine* but 5 seconds later they would be *completely screwed*?

'Cause like, I think that word "irreversible" is representing a continuum of changes with varying consequences, durations and costs to either returning the system to a state we like or more likely adapting ourselves to it.

Unless they mean we have 5 years left before peak oil fucks the economy so hard that all possible technological countermeasures will be out of reach, and we just have to wait a couple of centuries until the coal is gone too and half of us have starved, when things will start getting back to normal.

Yeah, fuck that.

(this comment intentionally left blank, because 'nuff said)

What's more important though, BASIC (and assembly, once newbie gets accustomed with it) is closer to the way non-programmers think about programs

I am in perfect factual agreement about that, but I ascribe a different value to it :)

So, not very useful then. I mean why choose BASIC? Or at least, why restrict it to BASIC? Would probably be a good learning or hobbyist machine if it had Python/Scheme/Ruby instead.

I mean, I loved my ZX Spectrum and the old BBC Micro, but in retrospect this was in spite of BASIC, not because of it. Nobody knew any better then.

And how do MS disavow any unfortunate search results as not in any way defamatory to the celebrity whose "personality" is being impersonated?

Ironically, just before I clicked to read this article, Virgin dropped my broadband connection, so I had to bounce power on the modem before I could come here to find out why *other* people are leaving Virgin.

I'm leaving because they are just not good value for money any more. New customers get a reasonable deal for TV, broadband and phone. Existing customers get the shaft. And if you want to reduce what you're paying by taking a lower TV package, you actually would pay *more* because of the way they structure their "discounts".

The only way out is to drop them altogether. So that's what I'm doing. I can get cheaper broadband, and there's better entertainment out there on the web than on the dozens of shitty cable channels Virgin provide.

Hence, the National Socialist/Jew reference was valid

pace Godwin, of course.

Download it if you are interested in the contents.

I'm not a lawyer, but since this is slashdot, I'll stick my neck out and suggest that if the text is in the public domain, you are allowed to do what you like with it.

Even if it was obtained by criminal means, that's entirely and only the responsibility of the person who committed said crime. It's not like receiving stolen property, since the original files are still there therefore nothing has been stolen.

The restrictions on making copies that copyright imposes do not apply, because the material is out of copyright.

someone with a strong engineering background and technical vision, surveying the field and calling the plays

...would (unlike Bill Gates) immediately see that the way forward is Open Source software and Open Standards. On the OS side, Windows would become an API wrapper on top of a BSD Unix kernel. The Office team would drop their ridiculous OOXML format and use ODF.

It's not like they couldn't compete that way: Microsoft Research hire a lot of very smart people. It's just that currently, the Windows and Office code base is a huge pile of shite that the smart people don't want to waste their life cleaning up, whereas present management seem to view it as a valuable asset rather than the giant sunk cost it really is.

I do, you know. Although I acknowledge your slightly longer experience, most of what you offer here is nostalgia, not evidence. I contend that you derived considerable satisfaction mastering programming in spite of BASIC's serious flaws. Respect for that, but I disagree with the conclusions you draw from it.

I think LISP back then was an objectively better language for both learning and development, and the 'basics' that BASIC (especially early BASIC) taught were pretty much wrong-headed. It's not just GOTO: it's the lack of functions and any kind of parameter passing other than global variables.

Maybe HP2000 BASIC was a structured language like the later BBC BASIC and didn't have those limitations? Whatever. You've since moved onto better things, and I bet you don't really want to go back to it.

Go find something else to rant about

Sure will. :-)