Think they're afraid some people might start to like the idea?

I'm pretty sure I've heard that line in an old commercial from the 1950s...

...that there are two kinds of parents. The ones that blame everything from video games to rock music to whatever else they don't understand for whatever their teenage son or daughter fucks up (because it cannot be their fault, no way) and those parents that understand that they, the parents, and their peers have a lot more influence on their kids development than video games, music, TV or whatever other makebelieve items their kids might fall in love with every could have.

Be honest: What do you think would have more influence on you, your behaviour and our outlook on the world? The schoolyard bully that beats you up or the virtual gangster that sells you a virtual hooker?

And then please answer why you think it should be different for your kids. Why do some parents think their kids are stupid? It's usually the parents where I'm fairly sure their kids are way smarter than their parents think. And most likely smarter than their parents are.

That makes sense. I get a couple of 'call for papers' emails a day from dubious journals, often with such broad titles as 'The Journal of Modern Research', so it would be completely impossible for them to rate articles. The research establishment in the UK has tried quite hard over the last decade to counter this 'publish loads of crap' incentive. The old Research Assessment Exercise and the new Research Excellence Framework by which departments are assessed requires a small number (about one per year) of 'research outputs'. These can be high-impact papers, books, and so on, and in computer science can include things like published open source software (which counts as technology transfer if you can point to people using it).

And it's a completely fucked-up policy, because the hoops that a US company needs to jump through to hire an Iranian national are insane. So you end up educating a load of people, then telling them that they're second-class people and sending them back home. Guess how favourably disposed they are to the USA after that...

No it isn't. NaCl is a great proof of concept. It shows that you can sandbox x86 apps using some static analysis of the binaries and a few other constraints (it also showed that segmentation support on modern x86 chips is pretty poor and terrible on Atom). The problem is that it only works on x86 binaries. What proportion of Web use these days is (ARM-based) phones and tablets? 20%? If you make something that only works for 80% (and falling) of your customers, then that's a problem.

PNaCl is promising, but it's currently in early draft stage. It hard-codes some things into the ABI too early and misses other important things (e.g. no mechanism for exceptions, and they're very difficult to implement correctly in a PNaCl model). And, unlike NaCl, PNaCl relies on a complex compiler being bug free for security, and we all know how well that worked out for Java...

Yup. It's a pretty horrible API to and has completely insane integration with both event delivery and drawing, which made sense when you were trying to squeeze the last possible bit of performance out of a 33MHz machine without double-buffered graphics but make absolutely no sense now. It definitely does need to be replaced, the problem is getting people to agree on what. Microsoft tried to make ActiveX a replacement, but no one else adopted it. The only reason NPAPI still survives is that it's the only way of making a plugin that all of the major browsers support. Maybe now Chrome market share is enough that they can make all of the plugin makers implement a new API. Or maybe plugins just aren't as important anymore...

Hmm... you know, the legal system in China suddenly looks quite favorable. Executing managers that cut corners and poison the world... wonder why we don't get to hear THAT kind of news from there.

Give it time, give it time. Nobody considered the oil sands a commercially viable source of oil, then the barrel hit the 120s and suddenly it is.

We just have to wait until the barrel hits the 1000s. Which is far from unlikely, since we so vehemently avoid looking for an alternative to oil. After all, pretty much anyone who could decide to look has an interest that we don't.

My guess is that you weren't using Windows. On most *NIX platforms, installing either was pretty trivial. On Windows, however, MySQL had a point-and-click installer years before PostgreSQL worked reliably on the platform. For web developers working on Windows, this meant that if they wanted to install the same DB on their dev machine as on their deployment system, MySQL was a clear winner.

When I was a student, you could get a student license to Windows 2000 and Visual Studio for under £100. You can now get both the latest OS and dev tools for free under the academic licensing. You don't need to have lots of disposable income to afford free...

Your metric will end up with no computer books being available. It took about 2 days between my last book being published and it being possible to find pirate copies online, and yet people are still buying it so obviously some people would rather have the dead-tree edition, and I suspect that most of those would happily buy it at a fraction of the price in a charity shop...

Just you wait 'til they find oil.

Reading Vernor Vinge, are we?

Here the seasons go autumn, winter, spring, tourist.