Some extra info popped up online just a few days ago - a SCADA consultant posted this a few days ago. It's slightly terrifying, though someone with more SCADA experience than me would have to verify its accuracy:

More here: https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/16696-FACT-CHECK-SCADA-Systems-Are-Online-Now.html

From the Wikipedia article:

If there wasn't so much evidence, Wikipedia's editors would likely delete that article for being so implausible. If I weren't a UK tax-payer, it'd almost be funny...

Well, if you want to write an OS, a critical real-time system, or a high-performance scientific data analysis suite, then no, .NET is probably not for you (although .NET 4.0 and its parallel processing additions certainly improve matters there). But if you want to rapidly develop enterprise business applications (or indeed webapps - everyone here appears to have overlooked the massively popular ASP.NET), then .NET's pretty damn good.

The strength isn't really in the idea of the CLR or whatever - that's an implementation detail. It's the huge framework of ready-made classes that accelerate development. Sure, there are plenty of PHP frameworks and so on, but with .NET, and C# in particular, you've got a massive library ready, tightly integration tested, and virtually guaranteed to run on anything from Windows XP up... oh, and I've rarely found a .NET app compiled for Windows which wouldn't run without modification under Mono.

As I suggested in the subject line, it's a matter of tools for the job. I regularly do C#, Obj-C, C, JavaScript, Perl and the odd bit of PHP and Java, and C#'s my favourite for headache-free development. It's not perfect for *every* job, but for the ones where it works, it works very well indeed.

I am quite startled that this made it to the front page of ./ - you'd have thought we'd have worked past basic misunderstandings of the scientific method on this site, of all places.

It's a choice - that's market economics for you. The models exist, and thrive, because demand is there, or at least there are enough people who are willing to sacrifice conventional ownership to play the game or use the software.

Welcome to the modern world: you don't like the product, don't buy it! Buy something else, something which does suit your needs. Or, if that doesn't exist, build it yourself, or help start an OSS project to do it instead. And, if all of that is impractical or impossible to finance, then you've probably found the reason why no-one else is doing it that way.

Of course, there is market momentum, the incumbent's advantage, monopolistic misbehaving etc, but that's what regulators are for (when they're left to do their job properly). However, "the cloud", downloadable content and subscription-based RPGs exist because there's a gap in the market. Think you can do better? Fill it yourself!

Rant over...

...if Stallman is worried about it, it's probably worth using. Chicken Little indeed. One supposes that there might come a day when RMS realises that nobody gives a flying fuck.

As Bruce Schneier is fond of saying, security is a trade-off. Software and information licensing is a trade-off, too, and cloud users are clearly happy with that trade-off. Having worked in web technologies for some time, I've had many "but someone else will have our data!" conversations; people are not stupid, and if they choose to keep their data elsewhere, it's because they consider it worth the up-sides. Duh.

1. As other commenters have said, they are dumb pipes - that's how they pitched themselves (when they were getting established) and that's how consumers see them. Now they're trying to renegotiate the tacit contract on which the "Internet age" was established. I call bullshit.
2. 2) This is the media lobby, with its broken business model all over again. Whilst it's understandable that execs are panicking over their capacity problems, that's the point: it's their capacity problem. Short-sightedness on the part of the network planners - one supposes - left them vastly underestimating the amount of data they'd need to carry, and they're trying to get the content providers to cover the costs of their mistakes. It's something akin to power companies demanding a cut of TV ad revenue, since if it wasn't for them, there'd be no TV at all!

It's the combination of these two points which makes it so noxious. We (as consumers) have been encouraged to treat broadband providers as another passive utility company, as fundamental to modern life as electricity and gas. Now they're trying to have it both ways, and suggest that at the same time, they're an active participant in content consumption and should be compensated at both ends.

So, which is it? Passive utility, to be taken for granted and paid monthly without a thought, or active content platform due recognition but with responsibility for quality of service? Something tells me that either way, consumers will not be the winners here.

I previously worked for about 8 years for a medium-sized marketing and design agency, as the lead web developer. On almost every project that passed across my desk, I seemed to be the only one spotting spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and punctuation problems before copy went to the web and to print. This was in a company of 30-ish young, university educated professionals in London.

When the programmers are copy-editing your marketing material, that should be a sign you've got literacy problems!

The weird thing was that when I sent the copy back, corrected, everyone told me I was being anal - apparently not bothered about bad copy to billboards and magazines nationwide.

I agree with a commenter above, though - I think coding does encourage attention to detail when a stray semicolon becomes important.