Funny thing, I was reading an article on this just the other day, talking about how object oriented programming in general and Java in particular lacked the clarity ond straightforwardness of declarative languages like my all time favorite, Visual Basic 6. Laugh if you want, I don't care, with VB6 I understood what was going on and could Get Things Done. Google "criticism object oriented programming" and dig in on the real problem.

Long before I was playing Super Star Trek in BASIC, I was playing nim on a Digicomp-1 that was my first computer. Wish I still had that thing. Maybe I'll rebuild it one day...

LOL, I see that Basic Computer Games was printed in 1978. In 1974, I was typing it in directly from an issue of David Ahl's groundbreaking mid-1970s magazine Creative Computing, which he compiled into the book several years later. David Ahl is the reason I became a geek, long before there was even a TRS-80 to play with and I had to IMAGINE what the CC program listings would do becasue I didn't have a computer to run them on. Thanks, Dave!!!

...they'd never end... Sigh. I remember David Ahl's Basic Computer Games with such nostalgia, spending my first weeks in late 1974 as a freshman typing in SUPER STAR TREK onto paper punch cards to run on the IBM360 at University of Tennessee. As a county bumpkin coming into the land of Oz where there were Real Actual Computers I could work with for the first time, I though I had Entered The Future. Little did I know that the future had only begun, and continues today. Probably will continue into tomorrow, too.

I don't give a flying frack about "The Narrative" as you obviously do. I care about having the facts available to get to The Truth. I still remember that ten seconds of footage from an actual event is more important that ten hours of crap spewed from talking heads on Fox News. It's people that listen to the latter that issue orders to destroy the former. Their priorities (and yours) are mixed up, not mine.

My point in including the final link is that destruction of video evidence critical to a major incident investigation DOES happen and as long as we are all learning lessons here from a failure mode report, that's a very timely and important one to add. Concern about "gee, it would be too tough to see on TV and against America's best interest" is totally misplaced IMHO. The guy that took the Ft. Hood video stood up and fought back with the only weapon he had, a cellphone that could record the truth about what really happened for whoever eventually would be assigned to sort through that mess. He volunteered in an instant to become a combat reporter and that makes him a hero, period. Being ordered to destroy evidence of a criminal act was not a lawful order and should have been respectfully refused and the dispuute carried up through the chain of command. Allowing evidence of military criminal actions to be supressed from the oversight of the civilian public is not a good idea.

The point of the final link is that destruction of video evidence critical to an mahor incident investigation DOES happen and as long as we are all learning lessons here from a failure mode report, that's a very timely and important one to add. Concern about "gee, it would be too tough to see on TV and against America's best interest" is totally misplaced IMHO. The guy that took the Ft. Hood video stood up and fought back with the only weapon he had, a cellphone that could record the truth about what really happened for whoever eventually would be assigned to sort through that mess. He volunteered in an instant to become a combat reporter and that makes him a hero, period. Being ordered to destroy evidence of a criminal act was not a lawful order and should have been respectfully refused and the dispuute carried up through the chain of command. Allowing evidence of military criminal actions to be supressed from the oversight of the civilian public is not a good idea.

At a price tag of $100 billion (at least) for the ISS, these experiments average over $1 billion each. Worth it? Nope.