Even then, maintaining momentum is of critical importance. When X.org forked from the XFree86 tree, a great deal happened very quickly. However, in the latter half of 2007, development stagnated, something that was mentioned on at least one mailing list (I can't find it now for some reason). IIRC, part of the reason was simply that not enough development time was being spent on it, because people had other things on their plates.
It made for some frustrating times for Fedora 9 users, as nVidia refused for a while to release a driver for beta version of X, and F9 was released in May 2008 without a proper release version of X.org, that project still being stuck at 1.4.99, with the 1.5.0 release not happening until September, by which time the Fedora 10 beta had already been released. F9's development plan had been built in part around the expected timing of the X.org 1.5 release expected in the very early months of 2008, and I'm sure that the failure to make that timing made for some interesting discussions inside of the Fedora camp.
I understand that the 1.5 release was an enormous undertaking as part of the attempt to get rid of cruft left over from so many years of legacy support, but it still illustrates the perils of dealing with a large, complex codebase, even with an enthusiastic community backing the fork, and even if it is the reference implementation.
(I should mention that I don't come from a coding background, but I've worked with enough programmers to understand the issues of code maintenance and enhancement. Even in a corporate environment with lots of money and people behind a project, schedules don't always stay put.)
One of the things they used to tell us in driver's ed is that 80% of drivers think they're above average drivers. I've taken that lesson to heart in trying to estimate my own abilities.
I wonder if some of the lab students fall into the trap of thinking that they knew enough, and not realizing that their earlier practices were put in place not to protect them as novices, but to protect them at all times.
It seems similar to something that I've read happens to some pilots. In those cases, a pilot with, say, 200 hours still considers himself a novice, and will carefully follow the checklist and be extremely careful to not get overwhelmed. That pilot may reach 800 hours, and think that he's got it down. This is, according to one investigator (Australian, I think) the most dangerous time to be a pilot. Once this stage is passed, usually around 1500 hours, the pilot has had enough close calls to realize that what they learned early on should be applied all throughout their career.
IIRC, this was the conclusion of an inquiry into a crash of an Australian military helicopter that killed most or all aboard when it came down too hard and too fast to the back of a ship, bounced off, and landed in the ocean. The base reason was "pilot error," but there was much more to the psychology of the situation.
And then you followed it up with "A century earlier, in defiance of the Supreme Court, President Andrew Jackson did it." That suggests that you were referring to the court packing, though it's possible that you simply had a poorly-worded statement referencing fascism, which itself is a poor choice of words, as ignoring the Supreme Court and undertaking a fascist route are fairly far apart. Not that Jackson ignored the Court at all. He simply chose to take the letter of the decision -- which went against Georgia, not Jackson -- rather than the spirit. And while the decision had to do with a Cherokee man -- one -- you said it had to do with the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
I haven't made up anything. Everything I have stated as fact can be cited. I have, however, found multiple errors in your statements. At best, your wording is misleading. At worst, you're trying to cover your tracks when found to be incorrect.
Jackson basically told the Supreme Court to get lost whereas FDR packed the court with those who would let him do what he wanted. That should be pretty easy to understand.
You accused Jackson of court packing, when he did no such thing. Ignoring the court is very different from attempting to alter the make-up of the court through legal (albeit ethically questionable) means.
The Cherokee was sent on the Trail of Tears [wikipedia.org] in 1838, but the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole were sent away before them.
Understood, but you made no mention of them in your previous post. Your accusation was that he had harsh words for Marshall after a case involving the removal of the Cherokee, both of which were not factual. There's a wide difference between 'let him get his own army to enforce it' and "the decision of the supreme court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate." The case ordered Georgia to release the plaintiff in the case and to not enforce the particular law in question anymore, not for the federal government to get involved to enforce the ruling.
Your points change from post to post, and you have gotten several key facts wrong, though you seem to be arguing that this doesn't matter. Jackson did a lot of things as president that tarnished his name in the office, and perhaps to some extent the office itself. I'm not about to defend the man. But when taking on the system, we must be accurate in the portrayal, and not fall to pointless hyperbole, or else we lose credibility as the arguments are taken apart piece by piece.
I don't understand your link between FDR and Jackson. FDR tried to get around the Supreme Court's rejection of some of his New Deal programs by extending the number of justices that the president could appoint by as many as six. Jackson signed a law extending the size of the Court, but did so on his last day of office, and only appointed one of the two new justices that would be seated. FDR's attempt was clear court packing, and he admitted as much. Jackson may not have liked the Supreme Court's rulings, but he didn't do anything to alter its make-up significantly while he was in office.
Incidentally, your reported response by Jackson was not in regards to moving Indians, but rather to a ruling in Worcester v. Georgia that Georgia state laws had no effect on Indian nations, and that the federal government was the only entity with such power, as clearly defined in the Constitution. That state law led to pressure on the Cherokee to sign a treaty exchanging land within the states with land west of the Mississippi. The treaty was signed and ratified in 1835 during Jackson's term, but the Trail of Tears didn't happen until 1838, after Jackson left office.
Anyway, there's little evidence in any case that Jackson's response was as harsh as you reported. What he is recorded to have said was much lighter, and basically that as the Supreme Court found Georgia's action to be unconstitutional, they could not force Georgia to comply; Jackson had no intentions of getting involved.
A law that has been found to be valid by the Supreme Court is not unconstitutional in the eyes of the system. It may be morally wrong, but it's constitutional, and therefore not a 'false law.' (I still don't like that name, because it implies something different from an unconstitutional law.)
Can you please point out where I said that I agree with every law ever passed everywhere?
There's a difference between technical correctness and moral correctness. If a country passes a law according to its legal standards that says that speaking out against the state is forbidden, then punishment by that law is technically correct. There are moral differences, though. Civil disobedience is all about knowing that something is technically wrong in the eyes of the law and yet believed by the participants to be morally right, thus risking punishment. In some cases, it means being arrested and getting a fine or a few months of probation. In other cases, it means death. One's willingness to risk a punishment is required to try to get things changed.
What is a false law? I understand the concept of bad law, but as long as a law has been passed legally, how can it be false unless it's unconstitutional?
The original judge's logic is understandable, even though I don't agree with it. Raich was being tried under federal law, which was seen to supersede state law in this case (a view with which the Supreme Court later agreed in an oddly split result that saw Chief Justice Rehnquist join with Justice O'Connor's dissent, and Justice Thomas writing his own dissent). Again, I don't agree with it as I support the conclusion of O'Connor that states should be allowed to experiment with new ideas, but such is the system that we have at the moment that this decision holds sway, despite the attempts of some states to revisit the decision.
I'm looking forward to it, and that's as someone who routinely criticizes the TSA for their use of obvious security theater. A few months ago, I went through a puff scanner, and while it was amusing the one time, I can see how it could get annoying, since about every fourth person made some sort of audible noise ranging from a guy's startled "Aaah!" to a woman emitting a short, sharp scream. The line was relatively short -- about 30 people -- but if I were waiting with 200 or more of my closest friends, I suspect someone would have to die. This, of course, would slow down the line even more.
I don't have an issue with it as long as one can opt out for other methods. It closes off a method by which items that should be prevented and are not necessarily detected by the metal detector (extending batons, non-metallic knives, etc) can be discovered. It's not perfect (someone above mentioned classic prison storage places), but it's better than what we have now.
Gun? Yes. Knife? Well, there are ways of making good, strong knives that don't involve the use of metal. They may not last as long as metal knives, but if your goal is short-term use, it may well suffice.
They were not, by and large, falsely imprisoned. They were found guilty and sentenced according to the law. I'm sure there are a few that are in there on questionable evidence, but the overwhelming majority of them were caught, tried, and sentenced as the system is supposed to work.
That you do not agree with the law does not make it false imprisonment. I believe that a good portion of them should be let out, and that certain uses should be decriminalized (if not outright legalized), but that's a far cry from accusations of false imprisonment.
I highly recommend that you read Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) so that you understand how regulation of trade amongst the states has been seen to work by the Supreme Court for the last 185 years. The case accepted practices that had been in place since the beginning of the Constitution's power.
One of the the primary legal reasons is inheritance law. Without it (or a will), the decedant's property is up for claim by anyone associated with him or her, be they child, wife, girlfriend, parent, sibling, friend, or business partner -- and maybe all of the above. Establishing marriage in law sets a next-of-kin in that situation that is generally not arguable. The percentage of people without a will is far higher than it should probably be.
The other is a court-recognized interest in promoting a stable society. The courts have always been very careful how they phrase this, but the state does have an interest in ensuring that families develop relatively normally, because problematic childhood often leads to problematic adulthood, which must often be addressed by the police, resulting in reduced social structure and increased crime.
They're not prohibiting anyone from producing any kind of car. GM can go back to original Humvees if they want to. They'll go under even faster, but they're allowed to do so.
However, they face significant penalties for doing so if they attempt to sell so much as one outside of Michigan. Once their trade crosses state borders, it becomes interstate, and subject to federal regulation.
Ask the gays about the freedom of states' rights as they gain the right to marry one state at a time, even though the federal government refuses to recognize them.
Most of the problems of racism have constitutional solutions that supersede states' rights claims. Gays are catching up now, and it's the ability for states to experiment that is allowing it.
I gave up on the hard drive vs. computer battle many years ago. But I am still frustrated by people saying that their Microsoft isn't working. All Slashdot jokes aside, most of them have at least four major programs running on Windows. They generally have to open the application from the Start menu or an icon on the desktop. I've never understood why they can't tell them apart.
A few years ago, I was out getting some lunch and saw a car with the California plate 31337. I didn't have time to stick around and find out who it was, unfortunately. I really wish I had now.
While I can see how a Notes-to-Exchange migration can go horribly wrong, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that the idea itself has a lot of merit. I've turned down job offers because I saw that they used Notes for e-mail. It may be a good application platform, but it's a horrible e-mail platform.
That said, I can certainly relate to your views on CTOs. More and more often, I see CTOs who have business degrees and have to call for support for even the most minor things. Business degrees are fine for CEOs or COOs, but much as I expect a CFO to have a financial degree of some sort, I want my CTO to have a technical degree somewhere in there.
The first test of a CEO is to ask about some company, and see how long it takes to bring up Gartner. I'd say that it's almost an automatic hire if they do not bring it up at all, and an automatic rejection if the first words out are, "Well, according to Gartner..."
Do the geeks think that he's good at managing them? I've had plenty of managers whom their superiors have thought were good at managing geeks, but who were hated by those they oversaw, and who were sometimes the targets of sabotage to get them out. I'd be interested in the turnover under Chopra (and one may need to look several levels lower) to see how he's perceived in the trenches.
Of course, this may be like the cybersecurity czar: a lot of work to get someone in place who then has no real power to do anything.
Centralization of these functions is not necessarily a bad thing. I work in the group that maintains the backbone network of a heavily decentralized county government, and I would love to have someone who could put in place some guidance that is heavily backed by the Board of Supervisors to the degree that someone has to provide some very good reasons when they don't follow it. Instead, we have 26 agencies with 26 IT departments, about half of whom do not care in the slightest to match what anyone else does and therefore do what they want, no matter whether it inconveniences anyone else.
I'm all for letting people do what it takes to meet their individual agency business needs, but there is plenty of room for standardization that just isn't happening. I see little reason why installations of Windows workstations and servers can't be born from a common platform, tested and hardened, but instead, most run the default installation and do any customizations themselves, if they feel the need to do so. It's a horrible waste, and I can only think that it's even worse at the state level, and far worse at the federal level.
Part of what draws me in is L4D's simplicity. Some of the fun wore off about a month and a half after release, and I stopped playing it for a while, but since Survivor mode was included, it's opened up a whole new realm of strategies. What works to get a group to four minutes won't necessarily work to get them to seven or ten minutes. Even in those cases where we have gotten gold (I have three maps where I've exceeded 13 minutes, and some of my friends have exceeded 20 minutes on a couple of maps), it was fun throughout, because the pacing worked well.
It's not a game for everyone. It's very much a pick-up game, and that needs simplicity. Depth in games is good -- it's what has me playing through the entire Half-Life series about twice a year -- but it's not always necessary. Within the couple of bones that make up the minimal skeleton of a storyline in L4D, the reason that there's little scare is that the survivors are expected to be fairly used to the situation, and even a little jaded, as shown in the opening cinematic. This just isn't enough for some people, and there's nothing wrong with that.
To address your other issues, the current SDK doesn't seem to allow for new weapons yet, though I never was even casually into altering games myself so even though I've tried some of the programs, I may have missed something. I do appreciate the tutorial that they wrote for it, and it's kind of fun and interesting getting into the basics of design and understanding how some of the mechanics work. I think I know where there are some clipping issues, for example, because of explanations of what one should *not* do in level design, but which can creep in anyway.
A launch rail just might. Of course, there's the tale in Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net of how a hacker got into the Orbital Air launch system and caused a launch package to fail to reach orbital velocity and killed a bunch of people in Nigeria. Sci-fi (and RPG sci-fi at that), but still something to keep in mind should someone ever figure out how to do it.
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Even then, maintaining momentum is of critical importance. When X.org forked from the XFree86 tree, a great deal happened very quickly. However, in the latter half of 2007, development stagnated, something that was mentioned on at least one mailing list (I can't find it now for some reason). IIRC, part of the reason was simply that not enough development time was being spent on it, because people had other things on their plates.
It made for some frustrating times for Fedora 9 users, as nVidia refused for a while to release a driver for beta version of X, and F9 was released in May 2008 without a proper release version of X.org, that project still being stuck at 1.4.99, with the 1.5.0 release not happening until September, by which time the Fedora 10 beta had already been released. F9's development plan had been built in part around the expected timing of the X.org 1.5 release expected in the very early months of 2008, and I'm sure that the failure to make that timing made for some interesting discussions inside of the Fedora camp.
I understand that the 1.5 release was an enormous undertaking as part of the attempt to get rid of cruft left over from so many years of legacy support, but it still illustrates the perils of dealing with a large, complex codebase, even with an enthusiastic community backing the fork, and even if it is the reference implementation.
(I should mention that I don't come from a coding background, but I've worked with enough programmers to understand the issues of code maintenance and enhancement. Even in a corporate environment with lots of money and people behind a project, schedules don't always stay put.)
One of the things they used to tell us in driver's ed is that 80% of drivers think they're above average drivers. I've taken that lesson to heart in trying to estimate my own abilities.
I wonder if some of the lab students fall into the trap of thinking that they knew enough, and not realizing that their earlier practices were put in place not to protect them as novices, but to protect them at all times.
It seems similar to something that I've read happens to some pilots. In those cases, a pilot with, say, 200 hours still considers himself a novice, and will carefully follow the checklist and be extremely careful to not get overwhelmed. That pilot may reach 800 hours, and think that he's got it down. This is, according to one investigator (Australian, I think) the most dangerous time to be a pilot. Once this stage is passed, usually around 1500 hours, the pilot has had enough close calls to realize that what they learned early on should be applied all throughout their career.
IIRC, this was the conclusion of an inquiry into a crash of an Australian military helicopter that killed most or all aboard when it came down too hard and too fast to the back of a ship, bounced off, and landed in the ocean. The base reason was "pilot error," but there was much more to the psychology of the situation.
And then you followed it up with "A century earlier, in defiance of the Supreme Court, President Andrew Jackson did it." That suggests that you were referring to the court packing, though it's possible that you simply had a poorly-worded statement referencing fascism, which itself is a poor choice of words, as ignoring the Supreme Court and undertaking a fascist route are fairly far apart. Not that Jackson ignored the Court at all. He simply chose to take the letter of the decision -- which went against Georgia, not Jackson -- rather than the spirit. And while the decision had to do with a Cherokee man -- one -- you said it had to do with the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
I haven't made up anything. Everything I have stated as fact can be cited. I have, however, found multiple errors in your statements. At best, your wording is misleading. At worst, you're trying to cover your tracks when found to be incorrect.
Jackson basically told the Supreme Court to get lost whereas FDR packed the court with those who would let him do what he wanted. That should be pretty easy to understand.
You accused Jackson of court packing, when he did no such thing. Ignoring the court is very different from attempting to alter the make-up of the court through legal (albeit ethically questionable) means.
The Cherokee was sent on the Trail of Tears [wikipedia.org] in 1838, but the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole were sent away before them.
Understood, but you made no mention of them in your previous post. Your accusation was that he had harsh words for Marshall after a case involving the removal of the Cherokee, both of which were not factual. There's a wide difference between 'let him get his own army to enforce it' and "the decision of the supreme court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate." The case ordered Georgia to release the plaintiff in the case and to not enforce the particular law in question anymore, not for the federal government to get involved to enforce the ruling.
Your points change from post to post, and you have gotten several key facts wrong, though you seem to be arguing that this doesn't matter. Jackson did a lot of things as president that tarnished his name in the office, and perhaps to some extent the office itself. I'm not about to defend the man. But when taking on the system, we must be accurate in the portrayal, and not fall to pointless hyperbole, or else we lose credibility as the arguments are taken apart piece by piece.
I don't understand your link between FDR and Jackson. FDR tried to get around the Supreme Court's rejection of some of his New Deal programs by extending the number of justices that the president could appoint by as many as six. Jackson signed a law extending the size of the Court, but did so on his last day of office, and only appointed one of the two new justices that would be seated. FDR's attempt was clear court packing, and he admitted as much. Jackson may not have liked the Supreme Court's rulings, but he didn't do anything to alter its make-up significantly while he was in office.
Incidentally, your reported response by Jackson was not in regards to moving Indians, but rather to a ruling in Worcester v. Georgia that Georgia state laws had no effect on Indian nations, and that the federal government was the only entity with such power, as clearly defined in the Constitution. That state law led to pressure on the Cherokee to sign a treaty exchanging land within the states with land west of the Mississippi. The treaty was signed and ratified in 1835 during Jackson's term, but the Trail of Tears didn't happen until 1838, after Jackson left office.
Anyway, there's little evidence in any case that Jackson's response was as harsh as you reported. What he is recorded to have said was much lighter, and basically that as the Supreme Court found Georgia's action to be unconstitutional, they could not force Georgia to comply; Jackson had no intentions of getting involved.
A law that has been found to be valid by the Supreme Court is not unconstitutional in the eyes of the system. It may be morally wrong, but it's constitutional, and therefore not a 'false law.' (I still don't like that name, because it implies something different from an unconstitutional law.)
Can you please point out where I said that I agree with every law ever passed everywhere?
There's a difference between technical correctness and moral correctness. If a country passes a law according to its legal standards that says that speaking out against the state is forbidden, then punishment by that law is technically correct. There are moral differences, though. Civil disobedience is all about knowing that something is technically wrong in the eyes of the law and yet believed by the participants to be morally right, thus risking punishment. In some cases, it means being arrested and getting a fine or a few months of probation. In other cases, it means death. One's willingness to risk a punishment is required to try to get things changed.
What is a false law? I understand the concept of bad law, but as long as a law has been passed legally, how can it be false unless it's unconstitutional?
The original judge's logic is understandable, even though I don't agree with it. Raich was being tried under federal law, which was seen to supersede state law in this case (a view with which the Supreme Court later agreed in an oddly split result that saw Chief Justice Rehnquist join with Justice O'Connor's dissent, and Justice Thomas writing his own dissent). Again, I don't agree with it as I support the conclusion of O'Connor that states should be allowed to experiment with new ideas, but such is the system that we have at the moment that this decision holds sway, despite the attempts of some states to revisit the decision.
I'm looking forward to it, and that's as someone who routinely criticizes the TSA for their use of obvious security theater. A few months ago, I went through a puff scanner, and while it was amusing the one time, I can see how it could get annoying, since about every fourth person made some sort of audible noise ranging from a guy's startled "Aaah!" to a woman emitting a short, sharp scream. The line was relatively short -- about 30 people -- but if I were waiting with 200 or more of my closest friends, I suspect someone would have to die. This, of course, would slow down the line even more.
I don't have an issue with it as long as one can opt out for other methods. It closes off a method by which items that should be prevented and are not necessarily detected by the metal detector (extending batons, non-metallic knives, etc) can be discovered. It's not perfect (someone above mentioned classic prison storage places), but it's better than what we have now.
Gun? Yes. Knife? Well, there are ways of making good, strong knives that don't involve the use of metal. They may not last as long as metal knives, but if your goal is short-term use, it may well suffice.
They were not, by and large, falsely imprisoned. They were found guilty and sentenced according to the law. I'm sure there are a few that are in there on questionable evidence, but the overwhelming majority of them were caught, tried, and sentenced as the system is supposed to work.
That you do not agree with the law does not make it false imprisonment. I believe that a good portion of them should be let out, and that certain uses should be decriminalized (if not outright legalized), but that's a far cry from accusations of false imprisonment.
I highly recommend that you read Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) so that you understand how regulation of trade amongst the states has been seen to work by the Supreme Court for the last 185 years. The case accepted practices that had been in place since the beginning of the Constitution's power.
One of the the primary legal reasons is inheritance law. Without it (or a will), the decedant's property is up for claim by anyone associated with him or her, be they child, wife, girlfriend, parent, sibling, friend, or business partner -- and maybe all of the above. Establishing marriage in law sets a next-of-kin in that situation that is generally not arguable. The percentage of people without a will is far higher than it should probably be.
The other is a court-recognized interest in promoting a stable society. The courts have always been very careful how they phrase this, but the state does have an interest in ensuring that families develop relatively normally, because problematic childhood often leads to problematic adulthood, which must often be addressed by the police, resulting in reduced social structure and increased crime.
They're not prohibiting anyone from producing any kind of car. GM can go back to original Humvees if they want to. They'll go under even faster, but they're allowed to do so.
However, they face significant penalties for doing so if they attempt to sell so much as one outside of Michigan. Once their trade crosses state borders, it becomes interstate, and subject to federal regulation.
Ask the gays about the freedom of states' rights as they gain the right to marry one state at a time, even though the federal government refuses to recognize them.
Most of the problems of racism have constitutional solutions that supersede states' rights claims. Gays are catching up now, and it's the ability for states to experiment that is allowing it.
The new Slashcode includes a feature that randomly changes punctuation marks on clicking Submit.
OK, maybe not, but with all the other weird things happening around here lately, can you really rule it out?
I gave up on the hard drive vs. computer battle many years ago. But I am still frustrated by people saying that their Microsoft isn't working. All Slashdot jokes aside, most of them have at least four major programs running on Windows. They generally have to open the application from the Start menu or an icon on the desktop. I've never understood why they can't tell them apart.
A few years ago, I was out getting some lunch and saw a car with the California plate 31337. I didn't have time to stick around and find out who it was, unfortunately. I really wish I had now.
While I can see how a Notes-to-Exchange migration can go horribly wrong, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that the idea itself has a lot of merit. I've turned down job offers because I saw that they used Notes for e-mail. It may be a good application platform, but it's a horrible e-mail platform.
That said, I can certainly relate to your views on CTOs. More and more often, I see CTOs who have business degrees and have to call for support for even the most minor things. Business degrees are fine for CEOs or COOs, but much as I expect a CFO to have a financial degree of some sort, I want my CTO to have a technical degree somewhere in there.
The first test of a CEO is to ask about some company, and see how long it takes to bring up Gartner. I'd say that it's almost an automatic hire if they do not bring it up at all, and an automatic rejection if the first words out are, "Well, according to Gartner..."
Do the geeks think that he's good at managing them? I've had plenty of managers whom their superiors have thought were good at managing geeks, but who were hated by those they oversaw, and who were sometimes the targets of sabotage to get them out. I'd be interested in the turnover under Chopra (and one may need to look several levels lower) to see how he's perceived in the trenches.
Of course, this may be like the cybersecurity czar: a lot of work to get someone in place who then has no real power to do anything.
Centralization of these functions is not necessarily a bad thing. I work in the group that maintains the backbone network of a heavily decentralized county government, and I would love to have someone who could put in place some guidance that is heavily backed by the Board of Supervisors to the degree that someone has to provide some very good reasons when they don't follow it. Instead, we have 26 agencies with 26 IT departments, about half of whom do not care in the slightest to match what anyone else does and therefore do what they want, no matter whether it inconveniences anyone else.
I'm all for letting people do what it takes to meet their individual agency business needs, but there is plenty of room for standardization that just isn't happening. I see little reason why installations of Windows workstations and servers can't be born from a common platform, tested and hardened, but instead, most run the default installation and do any customizations themselves, if they feel the need to do so. It's a horrible waste, and I can only think that it's even worse at the state level, and far worse at the federal level.
Part of what draws me in is L4D's simplicity. Some of the fun wore off about a month and a half after release, and I stopped playing it for a while, but since Survivor mode was included, it's opened up a whole new realm of strategies. What works to get a group to four minutes won't necessarily work to get them to seven or ten minutes. Even in those cases where we have gotten gold (I have three maps where I've exceeded 13 minutes, and some of my friends have exceeded 20 minutes on a couple of maps), it was fun throughout, because the pacing worked well.
It's not a game for everyone. It's very much a pick-up game, and that needs simplicity. Depth in games is good -- it's what has me playing through the entire Half-Life series about twice a year -- but it's not always necessary. Within the couple of bones that make up the minimal skeleton of a storyline in L4D, the reason that there's little scare is that the survivors are expected to be fairly used to the situation, and even a little jaded, as shown in the opening cinematic. This just isn't enough for some people, and there's nothing wrong with that.
To address your other issues, the current SDK doesn't seem to allow for new weapons yet, though I never was even casually into altering games myself so even though I've tried some of the programs, I may have missed something. I do appreciate the tutorial that they wrote for it, and it's kind of fun and interesting getting into the basics of design and understanding how some of the mechanics work. I think I know where there are some clipping issues, for example, because of explanations of what one should *not* do in level design, but which can creep in anyway.
A launch rail just might. Of course, there's the tale in Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net of how a hacker got into the Orbital Air launch system and caused a launch package to fail to reach orbital velocity and killed a bunch of people in Nigeria. Sci-fi (and RPG sci-fi at that), but still something to keep in mind should someone ever figure out how to do it.
Actual direction of travel is called course. A bearing is the direction from one point to another.