When one hires chimpanzees to write code, one gets code written by chimpanzees. No language tool will make up for lack of understanding. The more flexible a tool, the easier it is to write code that is simply horrid. To turn around and blame the language is disingenuous at best and at worst, promulgates the idea that good code is easy and within the grasp of just any old person.

Anyone can play a scale on a piano. Anyone can figure out what the notes on the music mean. That does not mean that anyone can play Frédéric Chopin's Minute Waltz. More to the point, a "better" piano won't fix this.

Where did the idea come from that preventing someone from "using 'our' software" was a thing that was even possible?

In his book "Dark Sun" Richard Rhodes quotes I. V. Kurchatov as saying "The most important thing that we learned from the Americans was that the atomic bomb was possible."

Knowledge is a highly infectious virus, and no amount of governmental attempts at control will do more than delay things. It's nice that companies want to make a fortune off a piece of software, especially a piece of software that was developed in thousands of different places for tens of thousands of different purposes. The long protracted and in my opinion idiotic SCO lawsuits should have demonstrated once and for all that patenting a general idea is a colossal waste of time.

In the 1980's, half a dozen small companies and more than a few individuals spent a year or two developing Unix clones from general principles. Western Electric considered it "their baby" and went to great lengths to protect it. Their corporate mind simply ignored the fact that the first versions of Unix were written by one person in a closet, and what one person was able to do, other people could - and did - also do.

Trying to stop the Chinese or the Russians from getting "our software" is just going to cause them to find some smartass programmer to do it all over again. Worse, such attempts will mean that a lot of similar and not-very-compatible versions will now circulate around and inevitably the consumer will pay in the end when stuff doesn't work quite the way they thought is should.

Somebody tell the Senate to stop tilting at windmills and worry about real problems instead of trying to prop up corporate moguls with a business plan that boils down to selling old products to deprived consumers for all eternity.

Excuse me? Moderating this post to zero? WTF?

This is an absolutely legitimate factoid. No amount of legislation is going to make Hawaii carbon neutral, so how about writing the headlines closer to the actual intent: Make man-made emissions carbon-neutral. There's no way on Earth to capture / sequester / eliminate / do any Bleeding Thing about the gigatons of CO2 emitted by volcanos.

Any time new technologies are deployed there are problems.

Consider how many deaths have been caused by the deployment of horseless carriages? Probably over a million fatalities worldwide.

An analogy comes from software systems -- one could easily keep software in beta forever because bugs are difficult to anticipate. Only actual use will turn them up to be fixed. Similarly, airplanes. How many crashes due to unknown problems that became known only because of careful investigation of crashes.

The salient numbers for autonomous vehicles are not the number of crashes nor the number of fatalities. The salient number is the number of crashes per vehicle mile as compared to the similar figure for human controlled vehicles.

Yes, they're big news, but big news is not always informative and is often misleading.

"The Public" is deficient in their ability to evaluate risk, and the "If it Bleeds, it Leads" news cycles don't help.

Hey Donald,

If you're looking, here's a great way to get rid of stupid regulations and maybe fire a few mid-level bureaucrats.

Just change the regulation to apply only to cameras with greater than 2400 x 1800 resolution or having lenses with focal length greater than 105 mm.

Do something actually useful for a change, please.

Troll Bait.

Get lost.

It's about time someone pointed out the lack of the emperor's clothes. These Artsy-Fartsy "Clean" designs are great if you're browsing a Monet art show. If all you want to do (All!) is get information, they are slow, they get in the way, they make the site unpleasant.

And Zune? What a Role Model! Just because a megacorporation does something doesn't make it good. Consider Wal-Mart baked chickens.

Honestly, if Microsoft came out with Steaming Turd Interface, half the manufacturers in the visible universe would be touting STI 2.0 Compatibility.

I agree.

China is in the same place UK was in in the 1950's. For those of you too young to remember and who have not read, the famous Coloured Fogs of London (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London) killed between 4000 and 12000 people in 1952. Oddly enough, the cause of those events was the same then as it is now in China: burning of coal.

China is getting aggressive towards cleaning up their act. Car makers don't like it because it means that they must replace tooling which from their point of view is very expensive. Of course, having people sick from air so dirty that some people can't breathe is expensive also, but that's ok since the carmakers don't have to carry that particular expense on _their_ books. Pesky accountants, don't you know.

Many US cities had serious problems in the mid-20th century. One that has been in the US news lately is Youngstown, Ohio, as an example of a once great industrial center. Unfortunately selective memories neglect to include the fact that Youngstown of the mid-1940s was a poster child for industrial pollution (http://wytv.com/2014/10/27/mahoning-river-has-dirty-history/). Fixing things is always expensive yet somehow people always seem to prefer to create huge problem and then have to clean it up later.

The Chinese are trying to stave off much bigger problems. More power to them.

Short comment: I hate it.

Now. It's new, and I always hate new formats. So rather than post "I hate it comments" I'm going to stick with it for a couple of weeks. Then I can decide if I hate it or not.

An observation: It's a lot more "artsy" - and many sites (I withhold comment on this one) sacrifice "usability" for "artsy"

If you think things are bad now, just wait until there is no regulation on net neutrality.

The people who write stuff like this also write mission statements like:

DoIT’s mission is to empower the State of Illinois through high-value, customer-
centric technology by delivering best-in-class innovation to client agencies fostering collabora
tion and empowering employees to provide better services to residents, businesses, and visitors.

Giveth me a break.

In 1988, Diamond Shamrock paid Frontier Capital (San Antonio) to develop an automated gas pump pricing system. Included in this system was the ability to alter pump prices on a minute-by-minute basis according to time of day. Seven stations in San Antonio deployed a system that bumped gasoline prices between $0.06 and $0.12 during rush hours, 07:00 through 09:30 and 14:30 through 18:00. This system was based on Gilbarco gasoline pumps and custom microprocessor boards based on Motorola 6801 CPUs.

Development of this system proceeded through early 1990, when the decision was made to delay rollout of these systems indefinitely. In 1996, Canadian company bought Diamond Shamrock and decided not to acquire the technology developed by Frontier.

Nothing new. It's more visible now, though.

Hah! Algol was the first compiler I wrote, for CDC 6400 beast. I started life with Fortran.

Yep. Fortran. IBM 7094 computer.

My first personal computer was a PDP-11/20 with 64K words of memory, a paper tape reader, and two Linc tapes.

I used it for years.