The concept of a Union is a necessary counterbalance to the power of the corporations.
In practice, Unions are at least as susceptible to corruption as any other human institution. Probably more so, because its reason for existence should be to address a grievance or injustice. Ideally once the grievance or injustice is addressed, the Union should fade into near nothingness until it's needed again. THAT is the part that fails to happen, and because it perverts its mission by remaining fully active when unneeded, and generally doing the wrong things during that time, Unions have gotten well-deserved a bad name. But the concept of a counterbalance to corporate power is still necessary, from time to time.
No, I don't exaggerate. It's just difficult, but it has been done. What I see as the real problem is that so far reaching orbit is so expensive that there is little true experimentation. As a result we keep repeating tried-and-true, which is a good recipe for heaving satellites up there, but isn't going to produce a breakthrough.
I'd like to see some sort of super tax incentive for work done on-orbit or beyond. There is essentially no manufacturing done out there today, though there have been experiments. So at the moment, as far as I can see, the only tax revenue from on-orbit or beyond activity is in the communications and remote sensing arenas. I would propose that new activities done on-orbit or beyond be free from taxation for some period. I'd restrict it in that you can't take something that is done well on Earth, simply move it up, and escape taxes. There needs to be some benefit, be it micro-gravity, vacuum, abundant solar energy, or even just getting something environmentally offensive off of the Earth. Meet acceptable criteria and no value-add, inventory, sales, etc tax on that portion of the final product.
My other pet thought is baloon reentry. Not a simple baloon, obviously something very durable, properly shaped, and probably a very shallow reentry. But such a high surface area to mass ratio that it does more slowing down higher in the atmosphere. In addition gas convection inside the baloon would carry heat away from the bottom to the top. Not very far developed, but I think there's a reentry profile that would make it work, safely and well.
I call this "The Star Trek Problem" because the public just has no respect for how difficult achieving orbit is, nor any understanding how reaching orbital altitude is practically nothing compared to reaching orbit. Our science fiction generally makes reaching orbit easy, and the hard part appears to be everything after you're in orbit, when in reality it's pretty much the opposite.
I'd rather have an honest bandwidth cap, where the rules are clearly outlined in TOS, than have secret rules, and if you violate one of the secret rules, your service gets terminated.
I'd also like to know that the bandwidth cap may well be a function of time, so I can move bandwidth or volume intensive things like my Gentoo source code downloads to the wee hours of the morning. Power companies have been doing "peak time" stuff like this for years, certainly ISPs ought to be able to.
I've been aware of ROX for years, and for some reason every time I look more closely at it, I back away. Maybe some time I should just install it and try it out. Your line, "allows you to do very cool things using just normal shell scripts" is particularly intriguing, and I hadn't caught that aspect, before.
Does it remove completely if I choose to uninstall, or does it leave debris behind? I guess I've thought of anything that does desktop icons as likely to leave debris that may cause problems in the future.
Next question... How much ROX do you use? I just checked, and Gentoo appears to have it as 17 packages in rox-base and 31 packages in rox-extra. (I'm using icewm, no GNOME, no KDE.)
>recomended procedure for disk defragmentation... just sadly funny for a server OS..
No, the sad thing is that their server OS has a filesystem where regular defragmentation is a necessity. Over time, ext3 can fragment too, but just not that fast. Further, keeping file size and lifetime (write frequency) in mind when you partition improves fragmentation resistance.
But I'd still like the Workplace Shell for a UI, and run it on my Gentoo Linux, on top of X. (native on libxcb instead of xlib, of course)
The Workplace Shell has been the only GUI that has been able to keep me away from a command line for any significant amount of time. Not GNOME, not KDE, not any of the various file managers and desktop icon decorators. There's simply something interesting about a GUI that doesn't send me back to a comfortable command line within minutes.
I glanced at some of the links, at least those that weren't/.-ted, and neither of the replacement projects really interest me. For its day, the OS/2 kernel was good, maybe it's still good by today's standards. But the Linux kernel is good enough, as are various BSD kernels. Each extra kernel means an extra set of drivers to capture modern hardware capability, etc. Maybe with infinite coders available, adding another free OS kernel would be good, but not with finite resources and an array of acceptable kernels. Similarly, X may not be the best, but xorg is truly moving it forward, finally. The voyager project throwing out X means throwing out a pile of legacy capability, as well as a pile of legacy limitations.
I just finished bringing up a Win98SE install on a dual-boot machine this weekend. Used my trusty Win98SE Upgrade boxed set, my old WfWG 3.11 diskettes to provide the basis for the upgrade, the ASUS driver CD, updated drivers from the net, and the "Win98SE Service Pack Rollup" that seems widely available with good reviews. (and checksums)
It's for games. I don't feel like funding Microsoft any further, just to play games. I know it's capped at DX9, but I'm not a hard-core gamer, it does what I want. (Basically Myst Uru at this point, though I understand WINE is getting close on that one.)
I've uninstalled Outlook Express, and install Firefox/Thunderbird, because I don't want to reboot for any sort of net access. But it's also behind 2 firewalls, has few users, and is so ancient it's no longer a target.
Heck, all you need to do is look at how long the USS Enterprise (NCC1701 - not A, B, C, D, or E) took to decay from "standard orbit" when the power or engines went out. It was always going to happen within the 1 hour episode, unless Scotty worked his miracles. Kind of makes you wonder what the heck "standard orbit" really was. The only truly significant "standard orbit" I can think of is geosynchronous, and that doesn't decay at any sort of significant rate. You'd have to come up with some really odd planetary physics to get a geosynchronous orbit inside the atmosphere - and still keep the planet Earthlike.
I wondered the same thing. There are 2 pieces to an answer to this, though probably this isn't the answer.
The ISS isn't really above the atmosphere, it's above *most* of the atmosphere. Periodic reboosting is necessary. So if you just set the paper plane outside the lock (Perpendicular to the orbital direction) its orbit would decay faster, due to its higher surface-area/mass ratio. Beyond that, a retrograde through, while not 100m/s, would certainly decrease its orbital velocity. You still might have to wait some months for reentry, however.
I suspect the more correct answer is an origami retro-rocket: Fold a paper sleeve enclosing the approximate cross-section of the paper plane, a few feet long. Make it tight/loose so that the plane can slide back an forth in the sleeve, but there isn't a lot of extra space around it. Tape shut one end of the sleeve, now called "the back". Tape an air tube so it can introduce air into the back of the sleeve. Hook the other end of the tube to an air cannister, a blast-gate type valve would be better. Slide the paper airplane into the sleeve, all the way to the back. (I suggest that the plane point toward the back, also) Take it all outside, point it retrograde. Open the valve, letting air into the sleeve.
The paper plane blows out the end of the sleeve. I wouldn't think this rig would have trouble hitting 100 m/s with the right sleeve length and fit, and right air pressure, valve type, etc. Given the design lifetime in seconds, I don't think the tape would be a problem doing its job in seconds.
Didn't say we were just starting down that road, merely that we're on it. We always have the opportunity to select a better path, just like we always have the opportunity to select a poorer one. I will say that it has become more strident recently because of the Internet. This "leveling effect" has just got to be stopped!
Apparently it's simply more important to protect ??AA profits than it is to have an open and freethinking educational system. Signs of this are all over the place, from both parties. Evolution, anyone? Anyone wonder how soon teaching that the universe is older than 6000 years will be challenged, or Galileo will rejoin the ranks of heretics?
Once upon a time, someone told us that the point of a business was to take your money, and have you feel happy about it. In other words, you give the business money, but feel that you have received fair value of goods and/or services in exchange.
The point of a free market is that if the above conditions are not true, you should be able to do business with someone else, instead.
Relate this to Microsoft as you will. But keep in mind a few things... - There are very few viable (The word "viable" can scope quite a few meanings, here.) competitors to Microsoft in many situations. - Many times their real customer is not you, but someone else - a supplier of one sort or another. Your involvement may be many-times indirect. - Microsoft has been found guilty of illegal monopoly practices in a court of law.
First you have to define "improve", and for that you need to understand the goals of the file format.
If the purpose of the file format is to keep people coming back to buy MS Office upgrades, and get their friends and co-workers to buy MS Office too, then it just doesn't get much better than the existing formats. Document the format properly and it becomes difficult to drag your feet when it comes to complying with court requests for that documentation. If the documentation doesn't exist, or if the only documentation is source code that only works with internal tool chains and the like, then it's much easier to refuse such a request.
Plus if you document a format and code from the documentation, it's much more likely that that format can be reverse-engineered and reimplemented.
For example, people have talked about writing structs to disk, for the "format". If you really wanted to be annoying, you have several structs, all expressing the same information, all differently, and put them in a union. One field of the struct might be some sort of checksum of the data, store it in each variant of the struct, and of course tweak it based which variant you're using. Then have a fun in a pseudorandom fashion picks which of the structs will be used to output that particular chunk of the data to disk... and a different struct variant for the next chunk, etc. When you read it, you have to know to check for the tweaked checksum in each possible variant/position to know which variant to use to read that chunk. Depending on how you chose which variant to use, it's even possible that 2 consecutive saves of the same data would produce different on-disk files. The read mechanism would then pick the correct variant on-the-fly, so data integrity would be preserved.
Does it store data? Yes. Is it inefficient? No, not terribly. Does it make reverse-engineering difficult? You bet.
All laws enacted by Congress shall include a provision for sunset, not to exceed XX years, after which that law will no longer be in effect.
The thought behind this being that any law that is important enough to be on the books, including things as diverse as murder, taxation, and funding Congress, the Executive, and Judiciary are all important enough to be periodically re-passed. Obsolete/unimportant laws will wither away, as they should, rather than get pulled up decades later and used in ways never imagined by their originators. The number XX would need to be strictly specified. 10 years comes to mind, but there might be better values that help insulate the law from election cycles. (Maybe XX - 20 would even be a good number, coincidentally.)
> I've come to think that the best form of government is a benign dictatorship. they can do what needs doing > without any pandering. However, it's a bit lucky dip getting a benign one:D
I would argue that there are enough idealistic and benevolent people about that it really isn't hard to find a benign dictator. I would argue that the real problems are in keeping that dictator benign, and getting a *second* benign dictator to replace him, when the first leaves the job.
>Should VOIP packets be delivered quicker? I think so. I don't mind if my email is delayed for several seconds.
No problem whatsoever with that, nor is it inconsistent with net neutrality.
Net neutrality is broken when Verizon is your ISP, and Verizon VOIP packets get better QOS (higher priority, more reliable delivery, etc) than Vonage VOIP packets.
I'll coin a phrase, "The Star Trek Delusion". You're suffering from it, as are far too many.
Space travel is HARD. Sure, the X-Prize has been won. So what, that isn't real space flight, barely even real tourism. Achieving orbit is at least 25 times harder, from a kinetic energy perspective, and that is merely LEO. Escape orbit is even tougher.
Sometimes, things need to happen that just don't make economic sense, at least not within any reasonable business cycle. Sometimes those things are SO expensive that a business can't add it in, just because it's the right thing to do in the long run.
I know a Libertarian probably can't accept this, but sometimes it's a good thing to have a government, for something besides an army to defend the country.
>because we are screwing up this planet is pretty lame.
We're not screwing up this planet. We're probably not even capable of really screwing up this planet. It's a matter of time scale... given a few million years, the Earth will recover from whatever we've done.
On the other hand, we are perfectly capable of making the Earth terminally uncomfortable for ourselves, for the next few hundreds or thousands of years.
That's not to deny the terminal inconvenience of big rocks, either.
On the other hand, the Companion to Sirius could go TypeI, or Vega could go Type2, and at that point a Mars colony wouldn't matter worth spit. (Honestly, I don't know how likely either of those are to happen, I just suggest that there are cosmic events that can toast our entire solar system - witness the recent Death Star Galaxy for an extreme example.)
I once wrote interrupt handlers and read "legacy binary files" in a dialect of Modula-2, as 2 realms that "only C can do well," and I didn't jump through terribly awkward or unsafe steps to do so. The problem was in that word, "dialect." While the language could be good and useful, the original definition was not, and apparently its inventor had insufficient interest in making it so. Hence only dialects became useful, and of course no 2 were the same.
Beyond that, there's the "common idiot" mindset that dislikes strong typing, even if there is a structured way to break it when necessary, predeclaration of variables, interfaces, and stuff like that that we'd generally be better of with if we had.
As a result, C and C++ are pretty much it, and programming languages that could help us do better, or been improved to do so, are practically dead on the shelf.
Slashdot Mirror
The concept of a Union is a necessary counterbalance to the power of the corporations.
In practice, Unions are at least as susceptible to corruption as any other human institution. Probably more so, because its reason for existence should be to address a grievance or injustice. Ideally once the grievance or injustice is addressed, the Union should fade into near nothingness until it's needed again. THAT is the part that fails to happen, and because it perverts its mission by remaining fully active when unneeded, and generally doing the wrong things during that time, Unions have gotten well-deserved a bad name. But the concept of a counterbalance to corporate power is still necessary, from time to time.
No, I don't exaggerate. It's just difficult, but it has been done. What I see as the real problem is that so far reaching orbit is so expensive that there is little true experimentation. As a result we keep repeating tried-and-true, which is a good recipe for heaving satellites up there, but isn't going to produce a breakthrough.
I'd like to see some sort of super tax incentive for work done on-orbit or beyond. There is essentially no manufacturing done out there today, though there have been experiments. So at the moment, as far as I can see, the only tax revenue from on-orbit or beyond activity is in the communications and remote sensing arenas. I would propose that new activities done on-orbit or beyond be free from taxation for some period. I'd restrict it in that you can't take something that is done well on Earth, simply move it up, and escape taxes. There needs to be some benefit, be it micro-gravity, vacuum, abundant solar energy, or even just getting something environmentally offensive off of the Earth. Meet acceptable criteria and no value-add, inventory, sales, etc tax on that portion of the final product.
My other pet thought is baloon reentry. Not a simple baloon, obviously something very durable, properly shaped, and probably a very shallow reentry. But such a high surface area to mass ratio that it does more slowing down higher in the atmosphere. In addition gas convection inside the baloon would carry heat away from the bottom to the top. Not very far developed, but I think there's a reentry profile that would make it work, safely and well.
I call this "The Star Trek Problem" because the public just has no respect for how difficult achieving orbit is, nor any understanding how reaching orbital altitude is practically nothing compared to reaching orbit. Our science fiction generally makes reaching orbit easy, and the hard part appears to be everything after you're in orbit, when in reality it's pretty much the opposite.
I'd rather have an honest bandwidth cap, where the rules are clearly outlined in TOS, than have secret rules, and if you violate one of the secret rules, your service gets terminated.
I'd also like to know that the bandwidth cap may well be a function of time, so I can move bandwidth or volume intensive things like my Gentoo source code downloads to the wee hours of the morning. Power companies have been doing "peak time" stuff like this for years, certainly ISPs ought to be able to.
I've been aware of ROX for years, and for some reason every time I look more closely at it, I back away. Maybe some time I should just install it and try it out. Your line, "allows you to do very cool things using just normal shell scripts" is particularly intriguing, and I hadn't caught that aspect, before.
Does it remove completely if I choose to uninstall, or does it leave debris behind? I guess I've thought of anything that does desktop icons as likely to leave debris that may cause problems in the future.
Next question... How much ROX do you use? I just checked, and Gentoo appears to have it as 17 packages in rox-base and 31 packages in rox-extra. (I'm using icewm, no GNOME, no KDE.)
>recomended procedure for disk defragmentation ... just sadly funny for a server OS..
No, the sad thing is that their server OS has a filesystem where regular defragmentation is a necessity. Over time, ext3 can fragment too, but just not that fast. Further, keeping file size and lifetime (write frequency) in mind when you partition improves fragmentation resistance.
I agree with most of your post.
/.-ted, and neither of the replacement projects really interest me. For its day, the OS/2 kernel was good, maybe it's still good by today's standards. But the Linux kernel is good enough, as are various BSD kernels. Each extra kernel means an extra set of drivers to capture modern hardware capability, etc. Maybe with infinite coders available, adding another free OS kernel would be good, but not with finite resources and an array of acceptable kernels. Similarly, X may not be the best, but xorg is truly moving it forward, finally. The voyager project throwing out X means throwing out a pile of legacy capability, as well as a pile of legacy limitations.
But I'd still like the Workplace Shell for a UI, and run it on my Gentoo Linux, on top of X. (native on libxcb instead of xlib, of course)
The Workplace Shell has been the only GUI that has been able to keep me away from a command line for any significant amount of time. Not GNOME, not KDE, not any of the various file managers and desktop icon decorators. There's simply something interesting about a GUI that doesn't send me back to a comfortable command line within minutes.
I glanced at some of the links, at least those that weren't
I just finished bringing up a Win98SE install on a dual-boot machine this weekend. Used my trusty Win98SE Upgrade boxed set, my old WfWG 3.11 diskettes to provide the basis for the upgrade, the ASUS driver CD, updated drivers from the net, and the "Win98SE Service Pack Rollup" that seems widely available with good reviews. (and checksums)
It's for games. I don't feel like funding Microsoft any further, just to play games. I know it's capped at DX9, but I'm not a hard-core gamer, it does what I want. (Basically Myst Uru at this point, though I understand WINE is getting close on that one.)
I've uninstalled Outlook Express, and install Firefox/Thunderbird, because I don't want to reboot for any sort of net access. But it's also behind 2 firewalls, has few users, and is so ancient it's no longer a target.
Heck, all you need to do is look at how long the USS Enterprise (NCC1701 - not A, B, C, D, or E) took to decay from "standard orbit" when the power or engines went out. It was always going to happen within the 1 hour episode, unless Scotty worked his miracles. Kind of makes you wonder what the heck "standard orbit" really was. The only truly significant "standard orbit" I can think of is geosynchronous, and that doesn't decay at any sort of significant rate. You'd have to come up with some really odd planetary physics to get a geosynchronous orbit inside the atmosphere - and still keep the planet Earthlike.
I wondered the same thing. There are 2 pieces to an answer to this, though probably this isn't the answer.
The ISS isn't really above the atmosphere, it's above *most* of the atmosphere. Periodic reboosting is necessary. So if you just set the paper plane outside the lock (Perpendicular to the orbital direction) its orbit would decay faster, due to its higher surface-area/mass ratio. Beyond that, a retrograde through, while not 100m/s, would certainly decrease its orbital velocity. You still might have to wait some months for reentry, however.
I suspect the more correct answer is an origami retro-rocket:
Fold a paper sleeve enclosing the approximate cross-section of the paper plane, a few feet long.
Make it tight/loose so that the plane can slide back an forth in the sleeve, but there isn't a lot of extra space around it.
Tape shut one end of the sleeve, now called "the back".
Tape an air tube so it can introduce air into the back of the sleeve.
Hook the other end of the tube to an air cannister, a blast-gate type valve would be better.
Slide the paper airplane into the sleeve, all the way to the back. (I suggest that the plane point toward the back, also)
Take it all outside, point it retrograde.
Open the valve, letting air into the sleeve.
The paper plane blows out the end of the sleeve. I wouldn't think this rig would have trouble hitting 100 m/s with the right sleeve length and fit, and right air pressure, valve type, etc. Given the design lifetime in seconds, I don't think the tape would be a problem doing its job in seconds.
Didn't say we were just starting down that road, merely that we're on it. We always have the opportunity to select a better path, just like we always have the opportunity to select a poorer one. I will say that it has become more strident recently because of the Internet. This "leveling effect" has just got to be stopped!
Apparently it's simply more important to protect ??AA profits than it is to have an open and freethinking educational system. Signs of this are all over the place, from both parties. Evolution, anyone? Anyone wonder how soon teaching that the universe is older than 6000 years will be challenged, or Galileo will rejoin the ranks of heretics?
We're on the road!
Once upon a time, someone told us that the point of a business was to take your money, and have you feel happy about it. In other words, you give the business money, but feel that you have received fair value of goods and/or services in exchange.
The point of a free market is that if the above conditions are not true, you should be able to do business with someone else, instead.
Relate this to Microsoft as you will. But keep in mind a few things...
- There are very few viable (The word "viable" can scope quite a few meanings, here.) competitors to Microsoft in many situations.
- Many times their real customer is not you, but someone else - a supplier of one sort or another. Your involvement may be many-times indirect.
- Microsoft has been found guilty of illegal monopoly practices in a court of law.
First you have to define "improve", and for that you need to understand the goals of the file format.
If the purpose of the file format is to keep people coming back to buy MS Office upgrades, and get their friends and co-workers to buy MS Office too, then it just doesn't get much better than the existing formats. Document the format properly and it becomes difficult to drag your feet when it comes to complying with court requests for that documentation. If the documentation doesn't exist, or if the only documentation is source code that only works with internal tool chains and the like, then it's much easier to refuse such a request.
Plus if you document a format and code from the documentation, it's much more likely that that format can be reverse-engineered and reimplemented.
For example, people have talked about writing structs to disk, for the "format". If you really wanted to be annoying, you have several structs, all expressing the same information, all differently, and put them in a union. One field of the struct might be some sort of checksum of the data, store it in each variant of the struct, and of course tweak it based which variant you're using. Then have a fun in a pseudorandom fashion picks which of the structs will be used to output that particular chunk of the data to disk... and a different struct variant for the next chunk, etc. When you read it, you have to know to check for the tweaked checksum in each possible variant/position to know which variant to use to read that chunk. Depending on how you chose which variant to use, it's even possible that 2 consecutive saves of the same data would produce different on-disk files. The read mechanism would then pick the correct variant on-the-fly, so data integrity would be preserved.
Does it store data? Yes.
Is it inefficient? No, not terribly.
Does it make reverse-engineering difficult? You bet.
I guess whether the tea is step 0 or 4 depends on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, or whether you're forward-looking or backward-looking.
Introduce a Constitutional Ammendment:
All laws enacted by Congress shall include a provision for sunset, not to exceed XX years, after which that law will no longer be in effect.
The thought behind this being that any law that is important enough to be on the books, including things as diverse as murder, taxation, and funding Congress, the Executive, and Judiciary are all important enough to be periodically re-passed. Obsolete/unimportant laws will wither away, as they should, rather than get pulled up decades later and used in ways never imagined by their originators. The number XX would need to be strictly specified. 10 years comes to mind, but there might be better values that help insulate the law from election cycles. (Maybe XX - 20 would even be a good number, coincidentally.)
You forgot about...
Step 4: Make a really hot cup of tea, to help you calculate how utterly improbable Steps 1-3 are.
> I've come to think that the best form of government is a benign dictatorship. they can do what needs doing :D
> without any pandering. However, it's a bit lucky dip getting a benign one
I would argue that there are enough idealistic and benevolent people about that it really isn't hard to find a benign dictator.
I would argue that the real problems are in keeping that dictator benign, and getting a *second* benign dictator to replace him, when the first leaves the job.
Who owns the picture if it's an ordinary scene on a street, with Fords, GM cars, Toyotas, Hondas, etc in it?
Or do the automakers all destroy each other in a M.A.D. orgy of lawyer-rama?
>Should VOIP packets be delivered quicker? I think so. I don't mind if my email is delayed for several seconds.
No problem whatsoever with that, nor is it inconsistent with net neutrality.
Net neutrality is broken when Verizon is your ISP, and Verizon VOIP packets get better QOS (higher priority, more reliable delivery, etc) than Vonage VOIP packets.
I'll coin a phrase, "The Star Trek Delusion". You're suffering from it, as are far too many.
Space travel is HARD. Sure, the X-Prize has been won. So what, that isn't real space flight, barely even real tourism. Achieving orbit is at least 25 times harder, from a kinetic energy perspective, and that is merely LEO. Escape orbit is even tougher.
Sometimes, things need to happen that just don't make economic sense, at least not within any reasonable business cycle. Sometimes those things are SO expensive that a business can't add it in, just because it's the right thing to do in the long run.
I know a Libertarian probably can't accept this, but sometimes it's a good thing to have a government, for something besides an army to defend the country.
>because we are screwing up this planet is pretty lame.
We're not screwing up this planet. We're probably not even capable of really screwing up this planet. It's a matter of time scale... given a few million years, the Earth will recover from whatever we've done.
On the other hand, we are perfectly capable of making the Earth terminally uncomfortable for ourselves, for the next few hundreds or thousands of years.
That's not to deny the terminal inconvenience of big rocks, either.
On the other hand, the Companion to Sirius could go TypeI, or Vega could go Type2, and at that point a Mars colony wouldn't matter worth spit. (Honestly, I don't know how likely either of those are to happen, I just suggest that there are cosmic events that can toast our entire solar system - witness the recent Death Star Galaxy for an extreme example.)
I'm glad I don't have mod points, at the moment.
I don't know if you're trying to be Funny(sarcastic) or Informative.
I once wrote interrupt handlers and read "legacy binary files" in a dialect of Modula-2, as 2 realms that "only C can do well," and I didn't jump through terribly awkward or unsafe steps to do so. The problem was in that word, "dialect." While the language could be good and useful, the original definition was not, and apparently its inventor had insufficient interest in making it so. Hence only dialects became useful, and of course no 2 were the same.
Beyond that, there's the "common idiot" mindset that dislikes strong typing, even if there is a structured way to break it when necessary, predeclaration of variables, interfaces, and stuff like that that we'd generally be better of with if we had.
As a result, C and C++ are pretty much it, and programming languages that could help us do better, or been improved to do so, are practically dead on the shelf.
So if you're domain-shopping, the obvious method is to build a loop like this, and tack your real request somewhere at the back end.
Then when they get wise to that, and start queuing requests, checking the first N and the last N, you need a back-end loop, as well.