It is nothing of the sort. They went a long way toward throwing away the tremendous gains of the 2009 "new" Start Trek movie.

The first movie took great pains to give them a brand NEW Star Trek world with all the possibilities that implies. It breaks all necessary ties with the past, and gave them a new start.

So what did they do? They made the second movie a blatant derivative of "The Wrath of Khan".

With all that possibility, they came close to throwing it all away. As it is, it was WAY too similar to that other Khan movie.

Pardon me, but I go to movies to see new things. This wasn't it. My rating: FAIL.

No, it isn't. My comment has nothing to do with trying out new stuff. I try out lots of new stuff... that's how I learned about all the stuff I was commenting about.

My comment was about people who put stuff out there they think is new, when it isn't.

You missed my point.

Of course new stuff is built by people who genuinely wanted to improve on the old stuff. And that *IS*, as you say, how we improve.

But the fact is that most of them fail, and many of them -- many that I've seen in recent years, at any rate -- fail because they did not know their history. If they did, they would have known that it had been done before and failed then, too. Often for very good reasons.

If you're trying to improve something, make sure it's an actual improvement, yes? Rather than a reversion to something that we already knew doesn't work well.

This.

In recent years I have seen so much change for the sake of change, it sometimes disgusts me.

Let's get something straight, folks: Change is only good if it's an improvement. Otherwise, change is BAD, even if it's just as good as the old thing. There are a number of reasons for this.

First among those reasons is that change has definite costs involved. Whenever you change something, people have to learn new ways, use something differently, etc., etc. If anybody can find some kind of major change that doesn't have a cost associated with it, I'd be delighted to hear about it.

Second, things are usually the way they are for good reasons. There are generations of people who came before who tried different things and arrived at their ways via hard-won trial and error. Changing something "just because" probably means you don't know your history and, as they say, will likely be doomed to repeat it.

When I think a change is GOOD, on its own merit, I am happy to jump on the bandwagon. But I don't drool over things just because they are new or in fashion.

This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?

It's kind of ironic. Microsoft took much of Xerox PARC's human-computer interface research, and continued it for decades. Resulting in some VERY effective UI.

Then, inexplicably, they turned around and just threw most of it away, with the ribbon interface and then Windows 8.

To be fair, Microsoft has not been the only one lately to do "new" things that are actually quite old (tried many years ago and discarded for good reasons). Apple's recent "dumbing down" of their desktop UI to make it more like iOS is another, though less drastic, example.

You know the saying: those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it. I only wish THEY would also the only ones who suffer because of it.

I am concerned that you are confusing Mr. "bagelbrush" with facts. Please go easy on him, as past evidence suggests that he does not take such efforts well.

There are lots of measures of a code's "maintainability", with interconnectedness being just one of them.

More to the point, that's what code tests are for: to make sure changing one thing doesn't break another. Talking about the "health" of the code base without knowing about test coverage or effectiveness is pretty damned meaningless, regardless of "interconnectedness". My view is that Ali Almossawi's paper is therefore a waste of dead trees.

It appears there was a typographical error in my [i] tag.

BULLSHIT!!!

Not that Mythbusters didn't do that, but Mythbusters is a TV show. They don't have either the money or time to do a real study on this.

This is not about safety. It is about control.

Some years ago, the State of Idaho did a thorough, double-blind study of drinking and driving. Their conclusion was that at 0.10% BAC, the vast majority of drivers were not affected enough to significantly impair their driving. "Significantly", using measures of driving ability like driving straight without weaving, reaction time, and so on.

They changed the legal BAC to 0.08% anyway, even though there was no evidence that it would make anybody safer, for no other reason than pressure from the Federal government, .

Since when has "management based on fear" ever been a good way to run a department?

If you are really so afraid that you will buy expensive equipment that is probably unnecessary in order to keep your job, then either:

(A) you should lose your job, you coward. Or

(B) you are in a toxic workplace and need to find another one right away.

Hahaha! I don't often recommend a mod up for an AC, but this is one of those times.

"Flamebait"?

Wow. Somebody must have been really pissed off at me today. I don't see how that could possibly be construed as "flamebait".

Yes we are. Software is just an implementation of algorithms. And an algorithm that isn't implemented in software is... a manual process?

I only used player piano rolls as an example, but it's an important one. At issue was that courts have ruled that the form of the work, or the media in/on which it appears, is completely immaterial, as is whether it controls a machine.

"On the internet" is simply a form of algorithm or software. Or a medium in which it appears. Therefore it should make absolutely no difference to patentability.

Most of them operate that way, but it is my understanding that in some circumstances algorithms can also be patented.

I agree with you that most business methods should not be patentable, and I don't believe ANY algorithms should be patentable. Ultimately, they're just math.