> Pfffft. The only correct answer is to wake up or stop haullcinating, because there's no such thing as a
> perfectly smooth (frictionless) surface.

You must not have met many physicists... frictionless surfaces, two dimensional
potentials, spherical horses... I could go on and on. And this is during real
work, not just exam questions.

Knowing _which_ parameters you can idealize is one of the things which
separates a good physicist from a bad one! ;-)

>>> Didn't we despise Microsoft because of how successful they were?

>> Maybe you did, but my objection to them was for the multiple crimes they committed, and >>the dismal quality of their products.

>Now Apple is doing the exact same thing MS did back in the 80's and getting a free pass.

Really? Apple is a convicted unlawful monopolist? Where was this court case?
I think I missed it.

Jury nullification consists precisely in ignoring that particular instruction: that you should only apply the law and not judge the law itself. Duh. This notwithstanding, if you say you agreed with the law, and thought it had broken it, well, then, obviously you did the right (moral) thing and have a lot more info on the case than random slashdotters. Well done.

First of all, it's copyright infringement, not stealing.

And, yes --- we see a clear parallel between the
civil rights movement and the systematic criminalization of
millions of citizens for an act we regard as ethical.

If you're trying to ship quality software, you don't just _fix_ bugs,
you treat each one as a learning experience, a mini-laboratory of
"what went wrong" here. You don't just fix _this_ bug; you adjust
your processes/standards/whatever else so that this bug can never re-occur.
You also find out where _else_ this bug may have manifested; often
in slightly different ways. It's unlikely to be the only exemplar of
this type of bug in your system.

Just doing a cost/benefit analysis saying: nah, unimportant, don't fix
it is stupid. _This_ bug may be unimportant, but it may exist somewhere
else where it is important, or someone may write the same bug tomorrow
where it will be important.

Which part of "worldwide" cost did you not understand?
Or do you think the US economy is 100% of the worldwide GDP?

> For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"

Then to whom am I replying here? Not that I care. :-)

Except you got the sense wrong. It goes like this:

Tu ne va pas au party? "(You're not going to the party?)"
Si! "(Yes, I _am_ going!)"

But agree with the general gist -- this is a human language
problem, not a programmer specific problem.

Las Vegas has made card-counting a non-factor. Between high deck-count shoes, variant games with unfavorable rules ("Super Fun 21"), and early shuffle thresholds, even a player keeping a perfect count cannot create a significant edge. And the million people who show up to try their hand at it and fail far make up for the cost of the few who can eek something out anyway.

What school system in any country teaches their kids, "Hey, so... we really fucked up a lot back then."

My schools never did as far as I can remember (American here). I doubt that's changed in the 5 years since I've been outta high school.

is the design.

Meh. Check out the `series' package, by R.C. Waters, for common lisp.
Predates all this by more than 20 years.

I muse my broken-screen ibook as a "mac mini" for the
kids. Plug in a USB hub; keyboard/mouse and a screen.

It works beautifully.