The U.S. Department of Science issues a public document in an obsolete, closed, propietary document format? Come on. Even the most clueless consultant in business uses at least .docx. It's even the default, ffs.

Go sell them a darned coffee machine with a "100peta!" sticker on it, they won't tell the difference.

only morons would rofl at this. your schadenfreude is not only disgusting, but shortsighted and ... well, moronic.

first, p2p is global. the impact of this is global too. we all leech and seed, and one possible immediate outcome of this new bullshit is that we might loose lots of good US seeders, at least temporarily. those are your friends, buddy.

second, what happens in the US in this regard will soon happen across the world as well (it's already in place in france, afaik). so you should at least be concerned instead of loling. it's coming after you too. that's a very good reason to stop loling and try to stop this disgrace now, before it spreads.

this said, I don't think we should go nuts about this either. wait and see. as said, such policies are already in place in france for years now and I still share with lots of gauloises. that's a good thing. it means that these policies are not so easy to actually implement as the bigmouths think, and that we can circunvent them; and they are still not as efficient on actually hindering sharing as they are in pleasing all ignorant lobbyists. there's technical aspects we can (and do) exploit (encryption, anonimization, trusted networks, etc) but most of all we should really try to end with this filthy copyright madness once and for all, on the social and political ground. i mean ... fucking stand up for our rights. spread the word. then you can lol. eventually.

this isn't about "torrent freak", it's about p2p.
it isn't about "video" either. its allegedly about copyright infringement. that is: any kind of content.
but since an ISP has no way to know if there is actually a copyright infringement going on, it turns out it isn't about copyright infringement either. it is definitely about p2p.

p2p is great. it allows people to share content collectively. but there's people who doesn't like p2p at all.
1. ISPs don't like it because it generates lots of traffic. so they'd like to cap it.
2. goverments and media corps don't like it because they can't control it. so they'd like to kill it.

there are many reasons why you would prefer p2p to those services you list, but i'd say these two are more than enough not just to use it, but even to fight for it.

come on. we all know about media corps but ... you're sure what they do is actually *stealing*?

that's a stretch. they simply make astonishing loads of money out of the ignorance of consumers and creators. that's not stealing! they're not to blame for ignorance, after all. hey they didn't even invent it. ignorance was already there and they just profit from it.

however, sometimes they actually bully people, invade their privacy, spy on them, sue them with false claims based on felonies they manage to squeeze into law whith all that money they make. well yes, that's mean. but ... stealing? come on. be nice. do some more cool stuff for us. we desperately need it. homeland security will be allright. oh wait ...

I actually agree, it was this bit (that I failed to include in the quote) that made me probably overreact:

because standards, best practices, style guides and guidelines are completely subjective decisions, no matter how backed by thorough rationale or well explained they are.

of course you can "objectively" compare code to a standard, but the result of this analysis just rates the code against that subjective set of rules, so in essence it's not different at all from "subjective arguing about code", it just dismisses the discussion by invoking higher authority. and that may even be okay and convenient in many situations but it's still far from objective.

of course my concern is the sort of "fundamentalism" in blind standards compliance i happen to witness more and more in the sw business. it ends up just serving people to cover their asses ... and this produces poor code (in my very subjective opinion! xD).

it's not helping whom?
it does. as intended.

are you implying that those criteria are objective?

sorry for being picky but that's the effect of lately having to comply with lots of this kind of best practices and style guides written by folks who read much and code little. i sure can comply, but don't call that bullshit "objective" in front of me! that's unnecessary cruelty!

(sheesh, now I'll have that nightmare again of decapitating joshua bloch with a swiss army knife)

you wanted to say whole threads.
you failed. i'll have to kill you now.
oh, wait, this stupid gun doesn't fire inside slashdot perimeter ...
lucky bastard.

as for #1 (fuzzy setup), if you fire up any text editor and a browser you have already a fully functional programming environment.

as for #2 (task focused), this is interesting and a good point, and there's already examples of scripting enabled applications. users could benefit greatly from a common basic scripting syntax available across apps. yes, that would be the vision bill gates had with VBA or macro recording, but done right. VBA would actually have been a very good idea if they hadn't wanted to mess with "professional" programming too, the result was too complicated for the average user, a plain atrocity to any serious developer and ended up being a monster that filled the world with amateur crap. however, sticking to very elementary "standard" control structures and simple interfaces to operate on app specific elements to allow the user to program simple tasks would be neat, and if done right it should be easy to enable most apps to benefit from.

as for #2 (not tech focused), that's a fantasy, probably because of having too much "technolgy" gurus around who simply can't stop writing nonsense and tossing the last buzzwords. ffs it's a market in itself. most developers don't really care that much about tech, they simply use it.

of course, literacy is always good. the catch is there is no other way to become literate than learning: teach programming fundamentals in school. bingo!

that's actually a good thing, because pulling off a moderately successful game still isn't something reserved to govmts/media moguls only, and a game is still a perfectly valid expression medium, in fact a very powerful one with the unique ability to bypass a priori filtering and provide subtle educational value regardless of user bias. i celebrate there are still content areas and distribution channels not systematically supervised, bullied and trolled by censors (apart from ubiquitous standard sick morality appeasement, that is. however, powerful ideas are not as easy to spot as closeups of genitals). gamification is already widely used to feed bullshit disguised in game concepts to the public. i find it just fair that everybody has the ability to do so.

of course, from a vendor locked marketplace what would you expect?

not in javascript:
myarray.sort(function(a,b){return b - a}) ;

that would be assuming both tell the truth, which is to assume a lot and anyway is irrelevant to the issue, which is the intent to influence public content.

the answer has already been given: seo hard and try to push the desired content up. i see no other way (that doesn't involve either courts or baseball bats)

it could be a red herring. to better control/dillute actual dissent or anger. has happened before.

it's still no.

(hint: if this bothers you so much, you might aswell ask /. to stop posting bs articles!)

Have you?