Yes. And I've stopped buying PC games. Funny thing about that.

Believe it if you want to. It's not impossible that it's true, but they also aren't noted for being honest with their customers.

I find it more likely that when there was a surge of bad PR, they changed their mind about what they were going to do, but I don't have any proof. And all they're offering as proof is their "honor and good name", of which they don't have much.

Be warned: They have designed their products to allow them to arbitrarily remove things that you have already purchased. Now ask yourself why.

But if they're doing reasonable de-duping, then only the first person to click on the image will register. Everyone else will hit the cache. To avoid this every email would need a separate link to the picture.

While it's true that Communism has the same relationship to communism that the Libertarian Party has to libertarianism, and that Marxism is something yet again different (and never, ever, tried...probably impossible to try), the distinction that you are making between economics and politics is an illusion.

It is true that there are some elements in economics that are based on physical reality. They are a small minority of the elements on which there is ANY disagreement between, say, Marx and Keyes. Or even Marx and Ayn Rand. Mostly economics is based on political theory, and is not actually subject to experimental test. (Well, not most. Most places where there is any disagreement.) Even the Nihilists agree with most evidentially based economics. But most statements propounded as economics are either politics or theology.

Well, Lisp *is* quite awesome. It's got a few problems that turn me off to it, but had it become popular early, they would have been fixed. (Some of it's documentation. Some of it's name usage. Some of it's naming conventions. I hate names like *This-is-a-special-variable* which, including asterisks, IS a valid Lisp name. And whether the case is significant is a compiler switch.)

The problem with Lisp is that the libraries were never properly developed and standardized. JavaScript is something VERY different. I don't know it, and can't say for sure whether it's good or bad as a language, but it sure isn't Lisp. And I can say that standard JavaScript would not be readily adapted to the projects I typically work on. (I make heavy use of files.)

Many parts are ambiguous. E.g., prototype inheritance. It has a lot going for it, but nobody has been able to come up with an efficient way to implement it. Not to mention the problems that arise if you want to inherit methods from different ancestors. Python has a decent answer to that. So does Eiffel. Neither will work for prototypes, though.

P.S.: You *can* do prototypes in Python, but nobody does them. OTOH, it's a bit of extra work, so possibly if they were easier they would be more popular. Equally likely, however, prototypes are an idea that sounds better than it is.

Well, for my purposes lacking file access is something that makes it unusable. I can understand why they don't have it, being as it was designed to be used in web pages, and mixing in file access has unpleasant security implications...unless you design it very carefully. But it still makes it unusable for my purposes.

(Yes, a third party library could solve this problem. If I were interested enough. But I really prefer a compiled language over an interpreted one, even if I don't like C or C++.)

automated Trucks + automated warehouses + automated factories.+ web store

The Potato installer was terrible. At that time, Red Hat had a decent installer, and Debian was a masochistics delight. I once figured that it took me a day of interactive time (not counting waits where I did something else) to get Debian up. Red Hat was up in a couple of hours.

The next time I looked, Debian had totally changed their installer, and was better. (I think that was about the time grub was pretty much debugged.)

N.B.: There never was much to choose between Debian and Red Hat on the basic system. Red Hat was better with interfacing to Novell networks, but not hugely.

OTOH, apt-get was far superior to RPM. I'm not certain that it still is, but as I don't like LILO and don't want to prevent my disks from being read by other partitions (SELinux...don't remember the package name), I find Debian preferable, so I haven't kept checking. A few years ago YUM had improved enough that it was nearly comparable to apt-get, especially as one could have a synaptic front-end on either.

More like some parts of the design are many years old. Probably some parts are decades old. Right now they're more interested in getting something working than in optimizing the design. And once they get it into production, they'll be rather cautious in making changes.

Not only is mankind not fit for such an authority, but most individual people aren't, either. I'm the only one that I can think of...and you'd probably disagree with that.

Yes. If not this year, then next year. (I'm not ruling out last year, either. Anything since GPS started being required is suspect.)

I notice you decided to post that anonymously. I don't disagree with your points, but if you don't dare to critise openly on Slashdot, you're unlikely to be effectively pushing for Open Government.

There's a certain amount of evidence that ordinary people put in positions of power (i.e., where their actions don't have personal adverse consequences) will over time, and not that much time, turn into sadistic bastards. Not all of them, by the way. Only about, IIRC, 1/3 of them. But that's far too many.

The only conclusion I've been able to come to is that societies need to be so designed that with greater power comes greater consequences for the misuse of that power. But in all of history I haven't found such a thing. Only rumors of it. (Like "Somewhere in Asia there's the fabulous kindom run by the most Christian monarch, Prester John, who...".)
Perhaps India came close to that with their famous Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka, but that also seems largely mythical. One of the closest, most reliable, examples I can think of is Count Dracula (i.e. Vlad the impaler). He was a homocidal maniac, but it is reported that during his reign (paraphrase:)"A virgin with a bag full of gold could ride across the country without guards, and without fear of molestation." Not exactly the kind of government that one would like...but his subordinates were unwilling to do anything that might offend him.

Well, the Scottish police are good guys. I'm not so sure about either the UK figures or the EU figures. They seem to be basically well meaning, and able to justify their actions to themselves, but... outsiders may frequently have a hard time accepting their justifications, and with good reason.