I'm reminded of the Tram Cars that traverse the boardwalk in Wildwood, N.J.. Anyone who has ever vacationed there knows well the sound of a woman calling out (via a recording) "Watch the Tram Car, please", since they've been doing that (with the same woman's voice) for at least 50 years now. Since the woman is still alive that recorded it all those years ago, it'd be a hoot to hear her voice coming out of every Prius that passes by.

I have been reading Slashdot for a long time, but I have to say that this was easily the best comment I have ever seen here. Well done.

The changes announced today seem to be little more than a delaying tactic to remove the issue of mandatory Internet censorship from the agenda ahead of the election that is expected to be announced any day now. This issue has turned quite toxic for the government; the people who are for it are only weakly so, but the people who are against it are furious and are already organising campaigns against the government on various social media.

I don't think the government can be trusted not to bring it back in a essentially unmodified form after the next election. Vote accordingly.

I'm still on 2000, you insensitive clod! I'm planning to *upgrade* to XP in the next year or so. Provided my hardware can run it, that is. Everyone knows that XP is a resource hog. :)

Sony has managed to lose my trust too. I was a very happy customer of PS1-3, but the retroactive otheros thing has put me right off. I rarely used Linux once I installed it, but that they were willing to retrospectively nuke an advertised feature of their product clearly demonstrated to me that they do not put the customer first. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do start crippling the PSN for non-paying customers.

The dumbest thing about the OtherOS removal is that it is probably not even going to help. Now that the hypervisor has been cracked enough to obtain memory dumps, it is far more likely that further hacking is going to rely on bugs that are found in the hypervisor software itself. These will probably be reachable by any application running on the system that takes user or network input. Think that every savegame loader is foolproof? How about that dinky web browser? Nuking OtherOS just pissed off loyal customers and bought them very little.

But does each astronaut have to pay extra (say another 45 million per bag) for their carry-on luggage?

I've been a professional (and quite successful) programmer for nearly 30 years, and am not too shy to admit that my math skills are practically non-existent. However, that being said, an equally poor memory has polished my *logic* skills to the point where I'm quite adept at designing and understanding computer software (particularly those written in C and assembly language). Although these days, I have the most success (and fun) writing "impossible" SQL queries.

So, I suppose the lesson here is that you can't really generalize that math is vital for computer programmers. Unless you include *logic* as math (and I never have -- it's really a very different animal IMHO). After all, that's why God created computers in the first place, right? To do the math *for* us.

You know Programming is in trouble when being "the goto guy" has become a compliment, rather than an insult.