They do.... Heinz Packaging Innovation

I'd mod you up if I had the points. This whole debate reminded me of what I saw at the Apple store last weekend. The 13" MacBook Pro comes only with a glossy screen. The 15" model (which is targeted more at the likely PC Pro reader)? It comes in matte.

The problem is that people have fun playing with different types of people. For me, the underlying issue is that team-based games are frequently ruined by the constant issue of joining a team with a group of people who I'd rather be playing against than playing with.

Players rating other players based on fun is a good idea, IMHO. I'd rather they match teams based on such metrics (similar to how Netflix or Pandora decide what you may prefer in their offerrings), than to see a price incentive. Combining this with a system that matches teams for competitive play would help the fun factor immensely (particularly if you're an old fart like me with molasses reflexes).

Besides, Valve games, being episodic, have the price-to-fun ratio built in already to some extent (don't like it, don't buy the next episode). The initial cost is still prohibitive in some cases, and sale prices for old games help this somewhat (common on Steam).

I sense and share in your frustration. I think the problem isn't that everyone is doing a crap job; rather, the problem is that it only takes a single person doing a crap job to bring a perfectly good machine down. Considering how many people have their code running on any given machine, it isn't surprising that crap gets on there.

Also, I think there's another hidden issue that comes into play, that being the task of designing a really intuitive API is also not easy. Abstraction is inherently imperfect and carries a subjective penalty in that the audience is teased into assuming they fully understand something they do not (or else there'd be no need for abstraction of course). The deeper down the rabbit hole this goes with higher and higher level abstractions, the more these penalties are manifested.

There's hope though... Resilient systems are not only possible, they've been built in many forms. While they may never be perfect, one should hope that they will eventually get out of the way.

Reminded me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger

Very poor I'd say. Parentheses already have a purpose in mathematical notation. I would solve 4 + 3 + 2 = () + 2 like this: 4 + 3 + 2 = (4 + 3) + 2 by the Associative Property of Addition

Maserati Driving Gloves The only acceptable solution really.

Besides this being a very nice piece or work in Computer Science, it appears the point of this study is that in order for a software device to be considered "secure", it needs to stand up to exploits that have yet to be discovered at the time of release. This is, of course, seemingly impossible to do since undiscovered exploits are, well, undiscovered.

Return-oriented programming defeats security measures like DEP, but there are other measures that may be effective against attacks of this sort, such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Stack-Smashing Protection (SSP). Of course, these measures weren't yet invented when the voting machines were created according to the very best security practices of the time. The lesson is there can be no guarantee that employing the very best security measures we know today will stand up for the lifetime of a device. Very interesting implications...