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If you're trying to determine what the file type of a file is from an extension on the end of its name, you're engaging in industrial archaelology, not computer use. You can rename any file to have any 'extension'; consequently this idea is completely broken. The idea that you deal with this misfeature by hiding it just compounds the error.

This exact same topic was covered in Frontline's special on North Korea over a year ago. Their point of contact was Jiro Ishimaru of Asiapress who was sneaker netting USBs over the border. They even took a video of people trying to watch on a tiny screen and having to shut everything down whenever they heard someone outside.

The documentary also touched on humanitarian issues as much as it could using a secret camera. Sad stuff. Great thing to watch. Occasionally you can catch it streaming on Netflix but it seems to not be available right now.

The Web is in the mess it now is because Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Netscape, back in the day) has gone through so many iterations of deliberately trying to create subtly incompatible variants of HTML. Creating a browser which is backwards compatible with that mess simply perpetuates the mess. The new browser should simply refuse to render non-conforming legacy pages at all - that would force web site owners to clean up their act in short order.

Not actually true. Ultra-orthodox Jews do not (yet) have to serve in the army.

<sarcasm>After all, the ultra-orthodox never provoke any trouble with the Palestinians, so why should they contribute to defence?</sarcasm>

Speaking as someone who's been following this story as it developed, it seems to me that the data that has been 'lost' is data the high heid yins of Scotland's police were very eager to lose. They'd been acting beyond their remit - and probably beyond the law - and they knew it.

So I suspect someone with scrambled egg on their hat took that programmer into a quiet room and said 'you will make an unfortunate error this afternoon, or we'll be sending the boys round'. I'm pretty sure the government suspect the same.

Heads will, I suspect, roll - and I don't think they will be the heads of programmers.

I can't say five good things about Windows, and I've worked on every version since Windows 2.0.

Dammit, I don't think I can say one good thing about Windows.

Those of us who actually worked on NeXT will never touch MacOS X with a barge pole. I still have nightmares about that steaming pile of shit.

It was 1993 for me. And I moved to Linux from, guess what, BSD. I've never gone back and I don't plan to.

Yes, I really have been using Linux as my main operating system for more than twenty years, and I still haven't found anything better. And Linux, in 1993, was just a reimplementation of UNIX, which is forty years old. Software evolves so bloody slowly!

Yep, that's the only option. There's nothing between doing nothing and that option. It's all we have. And if anyone starts to talk about mitigation strategies, planning ahead of time or devoting a single cent of taxpayer money toward preparing for it, we are just all going to have a meltdown and throw a tantrum with teabags on our hats. Thank god we have these strawman arguments for what these ivory tower Oxford elitists are telling us to do: eliminate the human race to protect the human race. I cannot believe they would actually come to that conclusion but there it is, right in the article. Those environmentalists will have us starving in mud huts by the end of the month if we just sit by and let this academic report go unabated and without criticism!

*tortured sigh*

> I'm guessing that's how most kids on the minor end of the spectrum feel

I'm guessing that's how most kids feel...

> A moderate amount of time to himself is fine... it seems to "recharge his batteries" for more social interactions

Isn't that the definition of "introvert"?

Scheme doesn't have unreadable syntax; that's a category error. Scheme does not have syntax. That's the difference. What you're editing is the raw parse tree; and that's a significant part of what makes Scheme (and other homoiconic languages) so powerful.

From the article:

From that they got 100 million lines of Java code and tossed out simple methods (those with less than 50 tokens).

Good coding style is to decompose your problem thoroughly, so your methods will be very small. Indeed, using this methodology, the more you refactor the greater proportion of so called 'chaff' you'll get.

I'm not arguing with the general propositions that

• Java is an extraordinarily prolix language, and
• These days, most Java is exceedingly poorly written

But this study doesn't show it, because it arbitrarily tossed away the better-written code and then analysed the remainder.

My experience is that freelancers - at least those with a good few projects under their belt - tend to have higher coding standards in the first place, and are more adaptable to different coding standards than permanent staff. Good freelancers are used to, and skilled at, learning and adapting to new stuff.