It may not be all that unusual for you in Canada to still have snow on the ground at this time of year. In contrast though the last couple of winters in Toronto have been highly unusual to basically be essentially snow free.

Here in the UK, it's very unusual for us to still have snow around now. In contrast Easter weekend last year in contrast was unseasonably warm and people were having barbecues. Normal for here is about half way between the two.

The point is that climate is a global thing. Just because you're having a fairly normal winter in Canada doesn't mean that the rest of us are.

Apple will have no response to this, and nor should they.

This is exactly the path that Apple have been telling companies they should follow if they wish to sell media outside of the iOS app store.

Amazon are simply following Apple's own guidance.

I know it's a controversial opinion, but modern JavaScript is OK.

All modern browsers support the ECMAScript 5 version of JavaScript. That includes a number of useful additions to the language.

IMHO the most important addition is strict mode. That disables some of the most egregious features of the language, making it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Strict mode can be enabled for a whole file, or on a function-by-function basis - you just need to include the line "use strict"; (including the quotes) at the top of the file or function. As it's just a string it will be ignored on older JS interpreters making it backward compatible too.

I think that the problem you have is that JavaScript doesn't match your experience and/or expectations of how a programming language should work.

The scope rules of JavaScript are actually very straight forward. The problem is that most languages have block-based scope. JavaScript instead has function-based scope.

As for proper "object/class" support, well, classes are just one way of doing objects, and not the only way. JavaScript has first-class support for objects. It's inheritance model however is prototype-based, rather than class-based. It's a different paradigm, but no less valid.

Your experience and expectations of how a language should work (probably based on experience writing C++, Java, or any number of other languages) say that scope must be block-based, and object models must be class based. Those aren't the only solutions though.

Are you really based in the UK? Because you don't seem to be talking about the country I live in.

Yes, here in the UK we do still use miles for road distances and miles per hour for speed. People still talk about their own weight referring to stones and pounds. The only other imperial hold-outs I can think of though are recipe books (the only place in my 39 years I've *ever* seen a "fluid ounce" mentioned), and the good old pint of beer.

Besides that we're metric. All the food and drink I buy from the shops is (officially) measured in grams and litres. Yes, sometimes those measures do match older imperial measures, so you may see 454g (a pound) or 568ml (a pint), but that's becoming less common. I buy litre cartons of milk, not 2 pints. Weights of people in the medical profession these days are kilograms.

It's been illegal in the UK for some time now to sell food measured in pounds and ounces, or liquids in fluid ounces. The only place you might be able to buy a pound of potatoes these days is a street market, where most of the time if you ask for a pound you'll actually get sold half a kilogram.

Huh? What are you talking about?

I'm a UK citizen. Yes, we measure driving distances in miles. For weights of people, colloquially, we do tend to still talk about stones. For liquid measures we still buy pints of beer.

That's about it though. Outside of road travel I almost exclusively see metres and centimetres. Weights are all exclusively grams and kilograms, which includes weights for people in medicine. Liquid measures aside from beer are all litres. People talk about "pints" of milk, but the cartons are sold with litre measurements on the packaging. The only time you hear "gallon" referenced is when people are talking about fuel economy, but fuel can only be bought in litres.

Yes, there's still luddites about that insist on using imperial measures, but they're a minority, and they're dying out.

Really, besides keeping miles for road distances, and thus speed too, we're very metric.

If I had mod points today you'd have got them, as yours may be the most insightful post I've read so far in this debate.

The tendency we have to observe intelligence as a single metric is IMHO the root of the lack of understanding many have with respect to this subject. You rightly point out that there is a difference between innate ability, and social acuity. I'd say those are both aspects of general intelligence. They can be broken down further, as you hint at, and indeed there's other aspects of intelligence too. Ability in a subject itself must at least be split into knowledge of the subject and the capability of reasoning.

With schooling there is a great emphasis on grades, and studying hard. This tends towards rewarding those that have knowledge of subjects, and less towards those with the ability to reason. It's a simple fact that people who are not engaged in a subject don't take in as much knowledge. Those that are good at the social acuity thing will tend to engage more in classes, if only to please their teacher. Grading at school is about measuring knowledge, and the ability of students to perform in exams. It fails to measure the potential of a student to excel.

People as a whole look at grades as a measure of intelligence, the be-all and end-all. This is especially true of parents, but it is also true of many professionals in the education sector. A student with poor grades may indeed be thick, but it may well instead be an indicator that they have failed to engage with their schooling. There's a tendency by all however to just think that the student is less intelligent.

Speaking as a British citizen, one with two small children (aged 7 and 8), my take is that my government is acting like a bunch of morons. They're allowing themselves to be led by the Daily Mail - a newspaper that has a long track record of spouting an ultra-conservative line that includes rabid xenophobia and plain and simple hatred of a significant proportion of the UK population. This move is not about making a rational choice, it's simply all about securing votes - the Daily Mail's readership are exclusively Conservative party voters, David Cameron's party.

I'm strongly against net filtering. Implementing mandatory filtering is the thin end of the wedge. It will not be long before there's complaints and campaigns by the likes of the Daily Mail complaining about inappropriate material that is not being filtered. How long will it be before Wikipedia gets banned? That site is packed full of very adult material that some will find objectionable. And what about the BBC News covering stories about pedophilia? And all the swearing in YouTube videos? Google searches can link through to objectionable material, complete with previews, so shouldn't that be banned too? Even without such encroachment into areas that rational people can see as being innocuous, filtering still ends up being a blunt weapon, filtering out sites that deal with issues such as contraception and abortion since they fall under the label of "sex". If kids can't do research into such things then the problems we have in this country of teenage pregnancy can only get worse.

As an example of such blunt filtering, I recently used a wifi network at a local church that had filtering enabled on their connection. They wanted to prevent childrens groups that met there from accessing things they deemed as being objectionable material. The end result was that almost every single link off of the church's own website was blocked. They saw the light after a few weeks and disabled the filtering.

If this move happens I will be opting out of the filtering. That in itself makes me nervous - some people will assume that because I've done that I must be a bad parent. That sadly is exactly the kind of false conclusion that an average Daily Mail reader will reach.

You know what tho?

The Episode 7 you just described - that's still better than any of episodes 1-3 that Lucas made.

It's not quite everything, exactly...

The BBC is running 26 different HD channels covering the games right now, 24 purely dedicated to the olympics (and another 24 simulcast in SD).

That's enough channels to let them cover every session of every event, and that's what they're doing. Of course many sessions have multiple athletes competing at the same time in different parts of the same arena, like badminton or gymnastics. With (usually) only one channel covering the session it's thus not quite everything.

Very nearly tho!

The BBC didn't ever use Silverlight.

That was ITV.

Unfortunately the BBC are now only covering half of the Formula 1 season live. Last weekend's race in Hungary, for instance, wasn't live on the BBC. Indeed, they couldn't even be bothered to put it on an HD channel, in spite of the fact that right now they're running 26 HD channels (24 specifically dedicated for Olympics coverage together with their 2 pre-existing HD channels - at the time of their race broadcasts there were probably 10 channels going free). The rest of the season is edited highlights on the Beeb - live only on Sky, a subscription satellite channel, part owned by Murdoch.

The BBC's live coverage of F1 is still good, but the evidence seems to indicate that they don't really care about the sport any more.

tvcatchup.com is clever and blocks access from various VPN networks it knows about.

Same applies to several other UK internet TV services, especially those run by broadcasters. The BBC are rare in not doing this.

I've just looked through a bunch of the games I've bought from Steam on my Mac.

Of the dozen or I looked at, only one of them was using cider, that being GTA Vice City.

Of the rest, one was using Mono, and the remainder were all first-class ports.

You are rather ignoring the fact that the author of the opinion piece has written a ton of open source code, released under a very permissive BSD-style license.

The guy is not against open source at all. Far from it. He's built a business on it.