Realism? In a game that has magic swords, dragons, and fireballs?

Original Dungeons and Dragons was decent - the attribute bonus rules were uniform ( +0 for 9-12, +1 for 13-15, +2 for 16-17, +3 for 18), the attack and armor rules were relatively straightforward, skills were simple, hit points were simple, saving throws were a bit odd. It wasn't a flexible game, but it was by far the easiest for newbies to learn.

Every edition since then, from AD&D1 through 4th edition, added flexibility plus complexity. AD&D 1 and 2 had different weapon damages based on the size of the opponent you were hitting, and different weapon classes (piercing, slashing, crushing). AD&D 1 and 2 also had different attribute bonuses for different stats, and multi-classing, and all the oddness of the saving throws mechanics from original Dungeons and Dragons.

3rd edition and 3rd edition revised simplified: multi-classing, saving throws, attribute bonuses, weapon damage types, weapon damage factors based on the size of opponents. Then they complicated the hell out of things with feats, more complex skills, and the interaction of different class abilities in multi-classing. Five steps forward, anywhere from three to fifty steps back depending upon who you ask.

4th edition simplified skills again, reduced the relative impact of feats, simplified the magic rules, and rewrote the multi-classing rules to be less flexible and less easy to understand but easier to control (e.g. it made it harder for players to discover combinations that gave them an unfair advantage relative to the other players in the group). 4th edition also gave each class a set of choices of a series of special abilities, which makes for great flavor, great fun, but yet again tons of added complexity.

I had forgotten that a lot of skilled Perl users use "perl -e (commands)" with piping to get things done. You're right, that's extremely handy and definitely not something you can do with Python.

I think the perl6 windmill is worth tilting at - at worst it makes the people jousting more knowledgeable about writing interpreters and virtual machines, and gives ideas to the general community that improve other existing languages. That includes Perl 5, I understand some of the features in Perl 6 made it into Perl 5.14 and 5.16. If we have to wait another twenty years before Perl6 is rock solid, so what? Barring an unfortunate accident, I'll still be writing code then.

As a linked topic, at my day job I work on Java. I don't have many opportunities to use Perl 5 for more than toy scripts to accomplish simple tasks. But I find the general mentality of the Perl 5 and Perl 6 community refreshing - a good mix of brilliance and practicality. My personal experience with the Java community is that there is intelligence and innovation around the edges but a lot of stale repetition and over-engineered solutions that choke on their own complexity in the mainstream. If I could figure out how to transition from Java development to Perl development without taking a 20% pay cut, it would be tempting.

While I want to be able to use Perl6 today, writing software is not going to go away any time soon. If it takes another ten years for Perl6 implementations like Rakudo to be feature complete and another ten years for it to run as efficiently as Perl5, that's fine - developers twenty years out will have one hell of a fun and productive new tool at their disposal, and they can use it from then until the collapse of civilization.

If you have a family, you can have two cars - one electric car for most driving, and another combustion engine vehicle for long trips.

Otherwise, if electric cars become a lot cheaper to buy and remain cheaper to fuel, you could consider using an electric car for your local driving and renting other cars for long trips. It certainly doesn't make sense now, but if the 2020 equivalent to the Nissan Leaf or Ford Focus Electric costs the inflation-adjusted equivalent to $25,000, it might make sense then.

I think the real hope might be improvements in the range-extended hybrid technology pioneered by the Chevy Volt and the Fisker Karma. The Volt gets an average 35 mile range electric, and then a relatively disappointing 35 miles per gallon on gasoline. But if GM improves that technology to the point that it reaches 60 miles purely electric and 40 or better miles per gallon on gasoline, it's probably the closest you can get to a perfect compromise.

But superior battery technology has been one of the holy grails of engineering for over a hundred years. This isn't some minor technical problem that can easily be solved if Toyota or Mercedes decides to sink an extra billion or even five billion dollars into the right kind of research. If it was within reach, we would have electric cars with a 600 mile range and 10 minute charging time available at some price point, even if it was for a million dollars apiece.

That "long run" in which electric can't be beat may be a hundred years away or longer.

This sounds a lot like Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition engine technology - check the wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneous_charge_compression_ignition Honda, General Motors, and a number of other companies have been working on this for years, and I doubt Exxon has bought them all off.

More likely the nifty technology that works just fine at certain operating temperatures, atmospheric pressures, and engine speeds has problems outside those ranges which are difficult to manage. From the wikipedia article, the General Motors version of the engine has to switch to conventional spark ignition at certain speeds.

I understand that. But we're talking about CEOs of Fortune 500 companies - they get paid tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year precisely because they are supposed to be the unparalleled geniuses of the business world. Steve Ballmer's path from 2000 to today looks like something a multitude of reasonably bright people could have followed.

While Ballmer is a classic example of this, most modern corporate executives have the same problem. The RIM executives, as mentioned above, probably saw the doom of Blackberry as early as 2005 or 2006 and were not bright enough to stop it. The CEOs of Aol, Nokia, Yahoo, Chrysler, General Motors, and MySpace were all paid a fortune for their ability to be dramatically smarter than the average MBA, and they all failed to deliver. And of course worst of all there is Wall Street, where tens of thousands of people were paid hundreds of millions of dollars to devise financial instruments that caused a massive recession - and most of them are still employed in the same industry.

Steve Ballmer has done just fine for a bright middle manager. But he's been paid to be the brilliant visionary leader of one of the most powerful companies in the world, and I don't see him apologizing to the board of directors and offering to pay back his executive compensation.

Consider their relative positions in the market. RIM was successful, but then the market started to shift with the iPhone and Android. The RIM CEOs needed to keep or grow Blackberry's market position in a fight with two competitors that both had far more money, developers, and public brand awareness than RIM itself. They should have done better, they didn't deserve their millions of dollars in compensation for total failure. But the task was difficult.

By contrast, in 2000 Microsoft had massive public awareness, a tremendous pool of intelligent talent, and a horde of cash. RIM had carved itself a happy corner in the phone market and then two juggernauts from other corners of the tech industry moved in and blew it out of the water. Microsoft was and still is one of the juggernauts, it should have stayed at the leading edge of the industry in some areas and set the curve in others - under a better leader, maybe Zune would be alive and iPod would be forgotten, Windows Phone would be alive and iPhones a niche product, Bing the leader in search, Hotmail the most popular free email service, and Windows RT tablets more popular than Android or iPads. And look beyond that, I'm using iPod, iPhone, iPad, Google Search, and Gmail as examples because they're what I know - but under good leadership maybe Microsoft would have innovated in some other completely unexpected way - a Kinect on every television, or the equivalent of the Ford Sync voice-controlled entertainment system in most cars by 2006, or pioneering the self-driving car, or whatever.

I realize that Apple releases some of the changes they make as open source, and taken as a whole it's a lot of code. But the monetary value of the source code Apple releases is insignificant when views as a percentage of their annual income. They could fund an industry-changing amount of free software, and they choose not to because their entire business model is built around steering customers towards their proprietary software. I'm grateful for the code they have released back to the community, but that is clearly not a major priority for Apple as a company. Contrast that to Red Hat, which spends a significant portion of its annual budget developing code that gets released back to the community.

A company can take a project from open to proprietary if it's easy to locate all of the contributors, or if the project has required developers to assign copyright of contributions to the project. A lot of free software projects have neither, and I like that - you couldn't release the Linux kernel under a BSD license even if you wanted to, because it's impractical to track down every contributor who still has code in the active kernel and get them to agree.

And while companies like Apple and Microsoft shy away from working with or on projects with a GPL license, it works just fine for other companies and volunteer projects. Hence Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc... The GPL isn't winning the hearts and minds of the huge firms, but the truth is that while we would love to have their money and their resources, the GPL exists mainly to make it hard for them to exist. If Apple and Microsoft have to constantly struggle to convince consumers that their offerings are technically superior to software they can get for free, then the GPL is working as intended. It's a rising tide - proprietary software companies have to keep moving to higher ground to prove their worth, as soon as they rest on their laurels the baseline (software consumers can get for free) surpasses them in quality. And no matter how they would like to push the water level lower, they can't stop the ocean.

You can fix bugs in either one. But other people and companies can also fix bugs in either one. With BSD the people and companies can choose whether to share the changes when they distribute new binaries based on the changes. With GPL they have to share the changes when they distribute new binaries based on the change.

Yes, there are cases like FreeBSD and WebKit where most of the useful changes are passed upstream to the parent project. But it's overly optimistic to assume that this model will always work or even that it usually works. Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and Sony, just to name a few, take what they can use from BSD licensed products and then do their best to steer people away from using the upstream projects and towards their proprietary offerings. That's great for them but bad for everyone else.