People today don't explore newly discovered continents in a canoe, either. Meanwhile, relevancy still exists.

I think the common error being made regarding COBOL is to insist "COBOL is around because it works".

True, it works, I'm not saying it doesn't work because that'd be ignorant. But it's not around because it works ATM -- it's around because it "workED", when it was installed, in days of Yore.

There seem to be three specific arguments for maintaining the use of COBOL:

(1) Because lots of companies are using it, (i.e.) keep using it because it's what's being used. That's why punch cards are the world's most popular storage media, of course.

(2) Because it's a perfect, bug-free language. This is so laughable I don't even understand why the people pitching this argument didn't just stick with the first which is far less ridiculous.

(3) Because $$$. This is the only valid argument, you know. You can get paid learning and using COBOL. This doesn't explain why it's the go-to choice for NEW technology and NEW code, but it explains why people would defend learning COBOL: because you can get hired to use it. Ultimately, though, this argument falls back on the first one: use it because it's already being used. If your job isn't to rewrite everything in something that's a more acceptable standard like C or, fine, Java, then I don't understand why they're paying you. Those employers, again, must be falling back on one of the other two arguments.

Oh, yeah dude totally, dude, Benjals was totally like badass, dude. BFF.

Like, dude, those glasses that he made for seeing the secret map? Gnarly.

Oh, dude, or how he caught the electrics in the jar? So for real. So badass.

I have an idea, let's go around to elementary schools and see how many kids are *still* being taught that Benjamin Franklin caught electricity in a jar, or that Washington would never tell a lie, or that the pilgrims sat down with the "injuns" at a commemorative feast.

I would be pleased just to poll how many children are still taught to say "injun" in what regions. Just to point out that some things are held onto past their time for reasons not always well understood.

Double-great, now it's time for all the responses that are all clones of:

"Oh, yeah? Well COBOL means $$$ so fat chance!"

Not that it's a worthwhile language or anything, just that it's "being used by old $$$ businesses everywhere in the Known World so better COBOL that ass before I hunt you down and strike you down in fear of change."

For real, get rid of COBOL and stop trumpeting old crap that's only around because of $$$ legacy.

Now it's time for "all you youngins' sit yer asses down and listen to MY old story! Back when things were for real, and still are today! It's still there, children, the old code in the guts of the president."

I do volunteer-work at a charity warehouse where people donate stuff to be cleaned up, repaired, and sold. A lot of it is old crap. A lot of the people who volunteer there are over fifty. Whenever some old piece of junk comes in I take the time to eyeball it and see whether it'll be worth putting out, because it's true that there was a time when they "built them like they used to", and things from a certain era tend to have long lifetimes. By contrast, a lot of things built more recently aren't even serviceable (literally, you can't get in and clean them up or repair them without breaking important things on the way in), and while "serviceable" went out of fashion as a term meaning "not going straight to a scrap heap", it was right around the same time that the market started seeing "disposable" versions of everything.

I digress. So whenever I'm about to scrap something that's just plain not going to be any good, and one of these older folks sees it, oops, it's time to hold up the show. "Don't throw that thing out, those things are better than the ones they make today". They all have to do it. It's either hide the fact that this ten-pound, steel clothes iron with the rust innards is getting dismantled and the copper and steel separated, or I'm going to have to relinquish it to the hands of somebody who feels the need to trumpet the triumphs of yesteryear, even in the face of the fact that what we're celebrating is the object's demise, the fact that no, it did not last literally forever. "Oh, well, I guessh you can shcrap it, shunny. Bon voyage, old toasterrrrr*gasp*"

What I see in comments here closely resembles all of that. People going on about how things of yesteryear were so much better and so much stronger. Or still being used today. But the article isn't about "COBOL will last forever!" it's about, "gee, everybody, time to rip all the rotten old code out of the guts of the president so he can digest the foodstuffs of tomorrow".

Don't forget "the air pollution in China is, like, crazy bad", or "let's roll".

I second that. Since women want to ensnare all men in society under these umbrella laws and ordinances that ensure men who wish to approach them have to either be willing to take unacceptable risks, or irreverent rule-breakers, then women have to learn to start making smart passes at men.

People who don't recognize that the women's power generation effectively hit the POWER-button on the dating game and rebooted it with the first-player controller in their hand must have been living in not just a fucking cave for their whole lives but the Stupid Fucking Cave, that makes you fucking stupider for all quantifiable time spent within.

And so plenty of guys are standing around with their hands in their pockets going, "Alright, women wanted something unprecedented and they wanted to be in charge and on top, so, they better know how to move right".

And wait, and wait, and ... nothing. It's a fiasco. So women, taking the new changes to society entirely and completely for fucking granted (or, as a work buddy of mine put it so succinctly just today, "they always forget they're women until it's time to abuse the fact") are left dumbstruck and don't realize IT'S YOUR FUCKING TURN, BITCH! MOVE ALREADY!

So, yeah, I think it's women's fault. They asked for this. Instead of figuring out how to grow a spine and ask guys if they'd like a drink, they seem to believe that we're all going to live under this new social scheme but that we're going to do it by replaying the mating rituals of the previous generations who were soOoOoOoOoOo wrong about everything like "a woman's place in society" and all that, just because they're afraid or unwilling to go through the motions of fulfilling what obviously need to be the new roles to play.

Meanwhile, they spend the alone time getting all introspective, and then getting power hungry, and somewhere along the line they decide to date whoever would piss their parents off the most, or whoever would comprise the most outrageous and exotic choice of partner. Just out of pure angst and boredom.

It wasn't men, per se, that made women so collectively angry that they had to have the women power movement. It was white men. Next it will be all the other colors of men, and then they'll be sick of it and will be in danger of blowing up the world but it won't matter because men will have been sicker of it before them.

But I say, cheer on, yeah, let's have women make all the moves, because at least the law will be on their side in all of that.

Or black guys. You forgot about the glorification of black men.

Their argument was scientifically unsound. There: now opinions do fly as counter-arguments!

Why would you even write an article like this?

What kind of scientist would try to make such bold, sweeping statements about men and women with the norms of society changing so quickly and in so many different directions?

Things that men used to do to woo women are considered harassment these days, did anybody take that into consideration? Just saying "nice dress" can screw over the rest of your professional career. Not necessarily the same thing happens if a woman compliments your hair or your shoes.

That's probably one of the major causes of intelligent men being guarded about women. Depending on which state you're in, having casual consensual sex can present the risk of any of numerous life-altering consequences, and I don't mean STIs. Just hitting on a woman can fuck up your job and even your college career.

Women, meanwhile, left to their own devices due to all of these strangleholds, are left with two normal options:

* Guys who break the rules -- way to go, bitch, at least now the rest of us can say you literally asked for it. Goodbye, judgement of character!

* Bad choices that women make out of rebellion or angst (or boredom) because they get sick of waiting for whatever imaginary Prince Charming who is going to break all the rules of common sense and civil statute. Like deciding maybe the guy with hereditary retardation is a good match because he's the only guy she's met who offers the long-term prospects of financial security (and she also decides she'll be voting Democrat).

Etc.

Then there are the exceptions but in most of those success stories, the relationship bears a close resemblance to a betrothal or something, where they've known each other "forever" and already don't have rules in place for each other.

Or it takes place in hippie opium dens and, by stages, in planned parenthood clinics and hospitals...

Hold, on really, whose standard is the scientist judging this all on? If asked, would he be saying that guys should be having more sex at a younger age? More sex all the time? That there's not enough sexual pressure in society? Somebody should tell whatever whack-it is to get a grip. Obviously he's throwing out completely arbitrary judgements, and besides I reiterate, where's the scientific control on the environment? You don't make startling conclusions about an experiment based on assumed static conditions when something like the temperature or pressure are constantly changing. Apparently not unless you're a crazy psychologist, anyway.

As nail-biting (for myself, anyways) as the Cassini launch was, this probe has already more than paid off for its costs and everything else associated with it. I thought it was just going to be some pictures of Saturn.

Electronic voting is bad enough. But *online* voting? You've got to be fucking kidding me.

It's impossible to secure the internet in such a way as to ensure that every connection is unique.

What a fucking moron! What a seriously goofball fuckup in the pockets of the elite.

This makes me even more certain that the world's virus-scanning-software authors are also writing the world's worst viruses.

Let's play a game. Right now, you have a choice between two things. You get to choose which one, but only one. You pick one, and you lose your chance to have the other.

So, these two things are,

(a) a cure for "cancer" (all of them? your favorite one? I dunno, just make something up.)

(b) hmm... ten million dollars, all yours. Let's call it "out the door", as in, "after taxes" or "protected in special accounts", you know, real-actual ten million dollars for you to spend.

Now I know, it makes your ancestors proud of you as they watch from your version of Heaven while you give the materialist world the finger and settle on the fast-track to eliminate population control.

And I know it makes drunk girls feel emotionally drawn to you when you say that you'd die an epileptic moron in the streets, wearing nothing but washrags and puke, with a huge grey beard, penniless (not even secretly hoarding a miserly stash of monies in a big house protected by hundreds of feral cats), if it meant that no more little, gurgling babies or big-eyed kittens,l or sweet old grandmothers with birds' nests in their hair, or Mr. Working Joe (that sledgehammer-swinging madman who just wans to bring home the chitterlings) would die of cancer any more.

But you're not fooling anybody who isn't a moron. Unless you're already situated in a comfortable and secure lifestyle with a guarantee of moderate wealth (middle to upper-middle class) for the rest of your life barring the calamitous malfunction of civilized society, you're going to say those things over and over until you get up to the actual choice, and you're going to actually choose the ten million dollars.

You're going to shake your head and say "you know, though, at the end of the day, you just hafta do what you hafta do, you know? There'll be other people to carry on the strugglez. Maybe I'll even donate some of this, my money."

The thing is, you don't have to be dishonest. You do realize, don't you, that it's a win-win situation no matter what you pick. Either way you're going to impress somebody. "Wow that guy would save the world if he was Superman!" or "Wow that guy is hard-up for ten million dollars!"

I just look forward to a world where nobody buys that stupid, driveling, bleeding-heart bullshit any more. Any inbred hillbilly can say he wants world peace, but not even his fellow inbred hillbilly brethren believe him for a second.

Why you would parade that shit in front of /. is beyond me.

The important thing is that we're close to likening posting on FaceBook to taking a shit, which -is- the reality of it.

How much thought and value do people place in FaceBook updates? Little to none. People just spontaneously update to it almost all day long.

Not that they necessarily take a shit while posting (some do) but that the two acts are pretty close in terms of how much social consciousness they actually require.

Oh, by the way, I just won three golden cookies on Tropical Bat Farmer. You know you want to play.

I highly agree. It gives the whole sandbox thing a shiny glow.

You hit the nail on the head. The tea party are the inept tools, whether some are geeks or not. Just reading that this guy decompiled into a gun-crazy paranoiac tells me he's going to be a fish out of water if he ever reached the Hill. Not just lying but political blackmail and having to do things that go against your principles, overall having to give up your integrity and even your dignity in order to remain popular.

He's not an indicator of anything more than the Republicans pulling ahead in the inevitable race to arm-up their parties with relevant personnel all too late.

The era of "just another politician -- only my super power is, I'm a Geek!" is long past. So we should expect maybe one more like him, on the other side more than likely, before every engineer who comes to congress is likely straight off of wall street (where, notably, most of our nation's bright new engineers decided to take up their careers) and is sophisticated enough to actually lie to use about being a "hacker", promoting his or her self as a freedom-loving, 2600-magazine type, when their real agenda is to smartly advance the tactics of their party to squelch freedoms and to put everything under lock and key.

It will be "one of us", a geek, who finally institutes electronic-only voting everywhere. It will be "one of us" who finally gets rid of the notion of free internet, forever. It will be "one of us" who finally eradicates piracy and makes it legal to shoot you for "hacking" in every definition of the loose term.

I don't know why geeks get so excited to see geeks getting into politics. "Oh, man, now that they have some of us around they won't be so stupid with the patents and the rights and stuff." Really? You think they're getting the political job because they think geeky things are more important than political things? If that were the case they would stick with their engineering career, not go into something that's a dead-end for people who are out to "be honest".

"Oh here comes this carpenter, he's going to be awesome because now life will be easier for all of us carpenters. I can't wait for the free nails and easier restrictions on wood!"

"What? What's that? He doubled the tax on nails and outlawed our favorite kind of wood? I THOUGHT HE WAS A CARPENTER! WHAT A LYING POLITICIAN!"