That's debatable. The pricing model changed, and it's likely more expensive, but also clearer and potentially cheaper.

Disclaimer: I contribute to dm-appengine, a DataMapper (for Ruby) layer for Google App Engine. It's part of why people can run Ruby on Rails on JRuby on App Engine.

But I think dm-appengine alone makes a compelling case that you don't have to code from the beginning unless you've done something fantastically stupid. DataMapper has backends in everything from sqlite to Oracle, from RDF to IMAP. It's entirely possible to develop an app which targets both MySQL and App Engine. You'll probably have some porting work, but it's hardly a "code everything from the beginning" situation.

If you developed for Python or Java, there's appscale, and I'm not sure that's the only alternative. You could port your entire app as-is from App Engine to Amazon EC2, or to your own private Eucalyptus infrastructure.

Also, note that Google has made no aggressive moves against these organizations. I don't just mean lawsuits; they haven't even been passively-aggressively mentioning "We might maybe sort of have some patents on that App Engine stuff."

You might have a point here:

But Google never was completely open source all the time. I can't download the source to Google Docs -- or, for that matter, Google Search -- and launch my own competing service. I have a much bigger problem with lock-in, but it looks like they aren't doing that here.

The actual violence and abuse of children is crude and objectionable. The contortions you'd have to go through to make it not be so would rob the app of any hope it ever had of making an impact.

Doesn't matter much to me what his reasons are. I'm just suggesting that if he really wants to pretend it's a bad idea to share this information, he shouldn't have made an offer like that, even rhetorically.

It's a bit like when the Sony CEO offered to pay a bounty for PS3s found on shelves. Be wary of being so confident in your assumptions that you make a promise you can't keep. (Or, relevant but worse.)

Never said it wasn't.

What I'm saying is that he's not paranoid enough in that he assumes everyone else is equally paranoid, and that he's setting up some sort of MAD scenario.

I have to imagine this would be a good deal, provided you could make yourself reasonably secure and reasonably trust his rehabilitation. I mean, no one cares what my hardware, OS, and software I use to work are, whereas "Hey, Kevin Mitnick uses _____" would probably be of interest to a lot of people.

I'm curious if this was a slip, or if there are also problems with a "web of trust"?

The problem is that for many things, there is no test which can be performed in a vacuum and in a reasonable amount of time. Take software, for example: While there are things like FizzBuzz which can very quickly identify people who are in no way qualified, it's a lot harder to quantify whether a person is qualified.

If you choose not to perform it in a background, then you're looking at software this person has written in the past. There is the problem of possible plagiarism, but I imagine anyone who's contributed to open source has a leg up here. But what if they've only worked on heavily proprietary software? Then check their references.

What if they never did either? What do we do about those people who have taught themselves to program, but are looking for their first programming job? Are we essentially demanding that in order to get a job, you have to first learn to program, and then hack on open source for a few years until you have enough of a portfolio to get hired? Even then, if they only ever submitted patches (instead of starting a project of their own), would you trust them to lead a project? If they only ever started their own small projects, with very few other contributors who almost never did anything useful, would you trust them to work on any sort of team project?

The other option is to have the certification still be "in a vacuum", so to speak -- that is, we apply a standard test of some sort, without looking at the person's history beyond the scope of said test -- but for it to not take a reasonable amount of time -- it'd take years of monitoring the person's understanding of a wide range of topics related to the field they're entering, some directly, some much less so. I guess we call that a degree.

I don't read those as "Chatterbot passes turing test." I read them as "Human fails turing test."

Someone took an ALICE-like bot to IRC, loaded with slightly-flirtatious dialog and with a slightly-flirtatious and female name. It got hit on, and it fooled entirely too many guys for entirely too long.

I mean, Darwinia was deliberately retro, yet still fun. Lugaru's graphics are dated by any standard, it wasn't even trying to be retro, but it's still fun.

Honestly, would you rather play Crysis or something that's actually fun?

It is JavaScript code.

WTF, Slashdot. Java has never been JavaScript. Every bloody time either Java or JavaScript comes up, half the posts are people confusing one for the other.

Maybe, but I don't see that causing problems in other games. Mass Effect, for instance, allows me to select abilities, change weapons, and otherwise order my squad around while the game is paused, but it's not like I'm tempted to stay in that mode forever -- more likely, I get into that for a few seconds, then back into the game.

Plus, it has a giant threatening countdown. I wonder if that pauses while you're typing code.

And I'm not going to lie, the gameplay is what looks most interesting here:

Come on! Who doesn't want a game that lets you write code and then apply it to a game world using a gun?

The concept I got from the video was less that you'd be copying and pasting code, and more that you might have "copy and paste" as a code snippet which you could use on the actual game world.

How many times do we have to correct this?

Javascript is not Java.

And it's more Scheme-like than you think, but with an ALGOL-enough syntax that people can pick it up much more easily.

It definitely looks like they're trying to have a plot and a goal.

Put it another way: Remember the Matrix games? They were all entertaining, and they were all about real goals, just like the movies were. However, they had no actual coding or hacking in them -- one had a commandline minigame, but as far as actual gameplay, they were shooters/fighters with additional powers -- so, "hacking" the Matrix boiled down to something like Force abilities in a Star Wars game.

But why couldn't a Matrix game allow you to do stuff like this?

This. I take large amounts of disk images, and it's really not worthwhile to do this anywhere but Gigabit, so I don't do it offsite.