If the intelligence agencies were smart, they would offer to match anything you were able to con out of known terrorist groups. The scam artists of the world would de-fund ISIS in about a year, all without firing a shot.

No, post-release runtime factors in heavily.

On the contrary, development time goes up with the number of developers. The scope and complexity of the project can increase, which may or may not be a good thing. In the Unix-like world, it often isn't. Backwards compatibility and dependency avoidance are more important.

So what? I had a gigabit home network back in 2001...

It's nowhere near special enough, though.

Perhaps, but that's not what they're working with, since this is the original source. This language and it's horrible style was obviously invented in a day when the size of your variables and source files was actually a real consideration, and machine efficiency was prioritized over programmer efficiency. It looks like assembly language for distributed databases.

That's precisely the opposite of what most large-scale enterprise systems need nowadays. Computers are incredibly powerful and cheap and programmers are very costly, so modern languages should (and do) reflect that reality.

All the reports and studies that have been published regarding climate change, and the only thing that you talk about is a tweet by a non-scientist. You worry about the lack of evidence, and yet make claims of fraudulent behaviour on a massive scale without a shred of evidence. With all the leaked emails and all the hundreds of thousands of participants involved you think that we would be swimming in a deluge of frank admissions from people who are disillusioned with that their choice of profession turned out to be one big lie.

But no, there is nothing except heated debate about the choice of specific words, oft-repeated but long-debunked "holes" in the theories, and vague idea that we should follow the money - but only for those scientists that you don't agree with (because you don't need to concern yourself with the brave scientists who dare to challenge the establishment, but who just happen to have links to mining industries or conservative think-tanks).

So feel free to keep saying "fraud" and "scam" of often enough and it might easily replace the need to back up your ludicrous claims with evidence. Like Nero, you can keep fiddling while Rome burns.

He's actually a perfect example of how well slashdot's moderation system typically works. Oddly enough, he's demonstrating the exact opposite of what he's intending, especially since no one is joining him in his angry little crusade.

Anyhow, back on topic. It seems like we might as well expand the regular internet's capacity to transfer this much data. Streaming video has a practical limitation beyond which there's no point in increasing resolution or fidelity. There's also finite amount of video you'd need to stream or download (essentially, one 24-hour HD stream per person), beyond which you're going to venture into a fairly extreme outlier. So, I think the notion that capacity needs to increase forever seems flawed. Just like most computers are far more powerful than needed, at some point, bandwidth will far exceed what a typical user needs in day to day life. At that point, occasional transfers of very large amounts of data by researchers, universities, or corporations won't be a problem, because there will be a lot of headroom for those sorts of burst transfers.

Still, for the short term, this seems like a smart idea for universities. Until consumer pressure or competition forces expansion of the national network, I think this makes sense. I'd imagine the investment is largely a one-time cost, with maintenance being far less expensive over the long term. The only question is whether the investment will pay off before the commercial internet capacity and costs are equivalent. Given how sluggishly things have been evolving (compared to other regions), I'd say they're probably making the right decision.

Disney's attempt was a pretty flagrant abuse of the law (definitely the spirit of the law, if perhaps not the letter), as was Edison's, and occurred precisely *because* it's actually difficult to find highly trained workers in the US that will work for peanuts. So, I'm not so sure that's a great example. The solution to H1B abuse isn't to unionize, but to fix the H1B laws.

The ability to move from job to job has enhanced my earning power and career opportunities, personally speaking. Each move to a new company was also accompanied by a better wage, better company and working conditions, better benefits, and more responsibilities. Yes, I've been laid off as well, and that's never fun, but in general, I think not being tied to a union has been a positive thing for me.

Reasonable frequent migration between companies is also a good source of idea and methodology cross-pollination. I've seen people that stick to a single company for most of their career, and in my opinion, their thinking often tends to be the most rigid - less able to adapt to new and better ideas. Granted, new isn't always better, but it's almost inevitable that *eventually* a new and better way will be found for doing almost *everything*.

Wow... I mean... wow. This is the definition of a "write-only" language. I'm pretty sure you'd need external documentation just describing what these routines do, because it sure as hell looks like you're not going to derive it from this encryption disguised as source code. I thought perhaps you had chosen some particularly horrible section, like maybe it was a data definition of some sort. Nope, after sifting through a bunch of code, it pretty much all looked like that. My brain hurts just trying to parse and make sense of some of that code.

Is it any wonder that, with a language like this, it can't be easily extended and upgraded to meet demands? Yeah, okay, it's understandable now why they're tossing the whole thing. Open source or not, I can't imagine there are many people today who are able to extend or even maintain this monstrosity in perpetuity.

You'd be better off choosing as an example something other than a piece of software that a significant percentage of businesses on the planet pay for and use with no significant problems whatsoever. It could be argued that MS Word may be one of the most successful pieces of software in history. There are plenty of examples of terrible closed-source, proprietary software. Why not use one of those?

Look son, we're a tolerant crowd around here, but you go spouting that Commie Pinko crap off in some placers, yer likely to get yer head sawed off by some good ol' boys.

Stick to the Bible, son. It's for the best.

we'll just run out of fresh water source instead from everything going to almonds and stuff.

Unless we all stick to a small subset of vegan food...a small subset of a small subset...may as well shoot ourselves at that point. But then we'll need billions of bullets...ugh.

Text is attractive because it's a least-common-denominator and *universal* format. However inconvenient it may be to parse and organize, you can write a reasonably simple script to do it, and you can pipe it through just about any command to transform or process it in whatever way you want. With text, you never have to worry about a black box of a file, because it's always human-readable, and thus more amenable to hacking.

The downside for log files is that text-based formats are incredibly inefficient as backing stores for any substantial amount of data. And as a configuration format, it's incredibly difficult to write front-end configuration software for scripts, although less so with regular formats like json or xml. Once the configuration is in a script, automated management of that configuration pretty much goes out the window - you're essentially committed to maintaining scripts by hand. This is not a problem for system administrators or advanced users, but horrible for normal users and GUI systems.

There are legitimate points on both sides, and which side you come down on may depend on your primary use case.

Maturity isn't really about age, but of total development hours. Popularity matters, because it helps to attract contributing developers, and more can be done in a shorter amount of time. Because of it's popularity, I think it's probably fair to say that Linux has matured faster than FreeBSD. As a counter-example, GNU/Hurd has been in development for fifteen years and is still not ready for prime time at version 0.6.

Step 1: wait for Uber to come to town
Step 2: let them build some momentum and drop some cash investing in scaling up
Step 3: act outraged when cab companies complain and promise to shut them down
Step 4: drop a lot of fines on them to absorb even more of that phat US VC cash
Step 5: repeat step 4 until the taxi companies, Uber or citizens force your hand into either legitimising them or actually banning them.

This seems to be the tactic of my home town (Brisbane, Australia). Last I saw we'd fined Uber $1.7m, all while pretending they can't be stopped and letting them operate (they just announced they're hiring more staff).

They'll have to provide a better licensing framework at some point - where I am now in Columbus, OH they seem to have a great one - but in the meantime it seems their plan is just to keep fining them to see if they're going to blink first.

As a Brisbaner I love the idea of us taking all that money. As someone that actually wants to go to places though and not be at the mercy of the taxi companies, I hope they negotiate soon and build a framework that takes into account this new age we live in.