Larry Wall made Java Perl Lingo (JPL, named after Larry's previous employer) around the release of Perl 5. O'Reilly first tried to sell it as a commercial software in the Perl Resource Kit, but eventually made it open source http://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/... in a "dumpware" sort of mode. It eventually became incompatible with newer Perl and Java releases and I want to say it was abandoned, but that is pretending people used it.

In Kent Walker's post, I can see what Google wants out of the deal: It prevents foreign governments to demanding servers and storage in their country and Google wants to keep them wherever they want to rather than where foreign nations demand them to. That isn't an issue that resonates with me.

He seems to think that I should be willing to abide by new additional copyright restrictions because they are offset by some fair use clarifications. I feel that copyright has encroached too far already and should be rolled back.

Finally he suggests the general public should have more participation next time negotiations like this occur, but doesn't say where they were this time when people wanted participation, or even access to what was being discussed? If they didn't help us participate this time why should the next time be different?

The post seems hollow and self-serving. I'm still convinced that the TPP is a bad idea.

Very few of the rear end collisions that this type of system protects against have fatalities. Even relatively few injuries compared to other accidents. What we are mostly talking about here would be reducing property damage (the car collided into) so insurance claims will go down (to the benefit of the ones collecting the insurance premiums) This will also be a boon to the companies who own the automatic emergency braking patents, as they get to license them to the other auto manufacturers.

I think there is some implicit context you have in your head that isn't quite coming out in your written content, and then you are blaming people who don't aren't getting you. If you are talking about the "transform" "transfrom" typo, that isn't an issue with all scripting languages. It depends on the language's syntax, etc. If that is the error you, then Perl with "use strict" will catch it. Many other implicitly typed languages require you to declare variables even if you don't declare their types. If the "transform", "transfrom" typo wasn't the issue you were describing common to all scripting languages, then maybe now is the describe the universal flaw of scripting languages with words rather than a partial example.

You don't need to activate the product over the internet. You can activate over the phone. I haven't looked into it closely, but I'd check if the code the machine generates includes the MAC address. Or if it still includes it if you disable the network driver. Or which MAC address it will use if you add another network adaptor (PCI or USB) which you can throw away as soon as you are done.

Oh, sorry. Was I not supposed to do that?

I don't think Applescript and Automator bridge the gap between non-programmer and programmer as slowly and as fluidly as Hypercard did. A non-programmer could start using Hypercard as a simple flat file database without programming. The sample Addressbook etc. Hypercard stacks were perfectly usable and there was a large quantity of freeware and shareware stacks that (inherently) came with complete source code. If someone had just a small wish for how it behaved differently ("I wish the addressbook had a nickname field:) many could be added through the GUI tools without programming. At some point, they may wish for behavior that involved changes in code, if they reached that point, the code had a fairly strong mapping to the concepts they had learned so far (stacks, cards, backgrounds, fields, etc) that they may be able to suss out what the code was doing and figure out simple changes. Once doing a fair amount of modification of the existing code, some may choose to strike out on their own and create something new.

Applescript and Automator seem to be more about simple automation of tasks. Which is a great power to give someone. ("Ugh, I hate doing this same drudgework every day|week|whenever_the_situation_bothers_me") but seems to me still a larger jump from non-programmer to programmer.

It did have network features, if by network you consider Appletalk. The code 'go to stack addressbok on machine "Andrew's Powerbook"' was valid Hypertalk.

Saying "PDP" instruction set makes them sound all the same. C is very similar to the PDP-11 instruction set, Unfortunately, it was produced after C was developed. I strain to find similarities between the PDP-7 instruction set and C. Most of the PDP-11-isms that people see in C are the post-(increment|decrement) instruction variations and the MOV variations that dereference an address register.

I assumed that the Russians wrote Tsar in their Cyrillic alphabet and both Czar and Tsar are transliterations.

This is why back in the day AT&T and IBM (still today) have publications like The Bell System Technical Journal, IBM Systems Journal, etc. It gives them platforms to publish the inventions that they don't wish to patent, but still show prior art.

The way I remember the sequence of events last fall is this:

1. CERN starts the LHC.
2. Lehman Brothers announces that all of their money disappeared.
3. CERN shuts down the LHC because of a malfunction.

Isn't it obvious? All of Lehman Brothers assets got sucked up in a black hole created by the LHC!