There are good reasons and bad reasons for hiring inexperienced programmers. The bad reason is that they're cheap and willing to put up with a lot of crap. The good reason is that they haven't picked up very many bad habits yet. It's usually easier to teach someone good habits than it is to persuade someone to unlearn bad ones. If you're willing to put in effort in terms of mentorship and training, and then make sure that your work environment encourages them to stick around so you reap the rewards, then hiring inexperienced programmer can be a good idea. I can think of a very small number of companies that do this, but they tend to do well. Of course, this requires that you also hire some good, experienced programmers to bootstrap the process...

NT 4 ran on MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha. The Alpha version included FX32!, which allowed you to run x86 binaries, in many cases faster than on any shipping x86 chip at the time. Very few places, however, actually needed 64-bit CPUs at the time, and so there wasn't much native code available. If there had been a demand for 64-bit Windows and no x86-64, I am certain Microsoft would have delivered something. Remember, .NET was originally conceived as a contingency plan for making Windows applications architecture-agnostic in case Intel failed to deliver with Itanium...

50-60 year-olds are more mature than teenagers. That should come as no surprise. Do you think those 50 year olds were as disciplined thirty-five years ago as they are today?

Well as simulation, AD&D was pretty bad. But as a role playing game it was fairly good.

Realism is an illusion in tabletop gaming. What produces that illusion is having to make choices that have consequences that play out. There's a certain *rhythm* to a game that's working well. It goes like this: decision (attack the creature), immediate result (creature is not surprised), string of action rounds, second decision (run away), result (party gets through the door) then problem (how to secure the door?).

Adding detail to a system in terms of a broader selection of alternatives at each point does add something to the game, but until you master all that detail it bogs the rhythm of the game down. Later editions of D&D seemed to me to be fine for people who'd played continually since the original AD&D, but bogged down the game for people who wanted to play casually or were coming to it new. I think from a *design* standpoint the subsequent changes narrowed the appeal of the game.

That's not to say I'm against making things more complex. For example played under house rules that added a decision after the initiative role; you could take the initiative or you could cede it for a bonus on a counter hit. It didn't slow the subjective pace of the game because it was a simple decision with immediate consequences.

It also helped that the (region 2, at least) DVDs of Babylon 5 were cheap. At launch, play.com had each series for about £20. £100 for the whole set, spread over a few years (I think they released one series every 9 months) was a simple choice for anyone who enjoyed the series. They now sell the entire series (5 seasons) for £42 - £1/disk. In contrast, the original series of Star Trek is £41 (for 3 seasons, 23 disks) for £42, and TNG is £111 (7 seasons, 49 disks), although you can get them for about £70 if you buy one season at a time. I was actually quite surprised by the TNG prices, as they were about £35/season last time I looked - at launch they were almost twice the price of B5. The BBC seemed to be having a laugh when they released Blake's 7 on DVD - something like £2.50/episode (I remember paying about £6/episode to get about half of them on VHS as a teenager, but it still felt overpriced).

I disagree. I want to watch enjoyable and entertaining shows. Writers, producers, and actors want to produce things that they enjoy working on and they want to get paid. There are two possible business models:

• Studios produce something I want to watch
• I pay them money.

Or:

• Studios produce something
• TV networks buy it
• TV networks sell advertising space on it to cover their costs
• I (possibly) buy something that's advertised on it, which justifies the purchase of advertising, which justifies the show.

Now, from the perspective of a studio, do you think the business model with zero or two intermediaries between the people who want their product and them makes more sense? Which is more likely to result in long-term funding for their project?

I may have an exciting investment opportunity for you.

No, relativity says that all mass in the universe acts on all the other mass, even though the effect moves at the speed of light which is pretty slow over most of the vast universe, but most of the mass has already curved space by now since it has existed for so long. Newton's gravitation also says that all masses act on each other. Both of which models support my point that every point in the universe is affected by gravity, and there is nowhere that is "absolute zero gravity" as the comment to which I replied claimed.

Your point is irrelevant. The point, to which you replied, is that using Mint instead of the user doing what Mint did to Ubuntu, saves time.

You just tried to move the goalposts again to your point. And then you tried to "just saying" your way into moving them again into disagreeing that installing Mint saves time over installing Ubuntu and changing it yourself. Moving the goalposts again. And moving them into just being wrong.

You don't even know what you're arguing about, and you're wrong on what you want to argue about. Helping you perpetuate it is distasteful. That's all the help from me you'll get.

It clearly matters who is president of America Inc. As I pointed out, Republican presidents of it are intolerable, while Democratic presidents of it suck, but are tolerable. There's plenty of other supporting data. Like the GDP and the stock market each growing faster under every Democratic president than Republicans, since Eisenhower. Of course we can always do better. Then there's the warmonger record, which Republicans dominate (except are roughly equal on Vietnam, which is now just a middling war). It's absolutely false that the two parties are equivalent. And when there are only two on the ballot that can govern, let alone win, we have to be honest about which one is an unacceptable choice.

Of course America was designed for the Congress to primarily determine how much the country sucks, and Republicans are the source of most of the suck. If we call them "Conservative" (and its "Libertarian" flavor that's really "corporate anarchy"), we can include the Democrats who make the case for equivalence. This is the problem. But it's far too easy, because it's wrong, to say that it doesn't matter which party rules. When Republicans rule, all but a few suffer and pay for it. When Democrats rule, far fewer suffer.