His point is essentially that.NET does not protect the user against untrusted code, while Java does. If you run.NET code, you have to trust the developer, because the system won't protect you against a malicious or careless developer. If you run Java code in a sandbox, you're safe, because the system will watch what's going on and can be sure of the safety of its information.
A hunting rifle is fine for some purposes, but decorating your house with them is unwise. Java, effectively, has support for making absolutely certain that the rifle cannot be fired, and therefore you can feel okay about having it on your mantle.
Of course, he's theoretically wrong; the C standard actually does not exclude the possibility of preventing programs from doing bad things, by, for example, giving a bus error if you dereference a pointer to freed memory. You could have garbage collection in C if you really wanted, because there is a limited amount you can do to pointers and still be necessarily able to use them again. It's just that C implementations almost never do anything like this, because it would be slower and more resource-hungry than Java (because Java has limitations which then permit optimizations by the system). On the other hand, it might be worthwhile having such an environment, so that you could run untrusted code by developers who expect to be trusted.
Development happens in the trunk not necessarily for the Mozilla Suite but so that all of the Mozilla projects share the parts that they should share. This roadmap, for example, is showing trunk development leading to Firefox 1.1 based on Gecko 1.8 in the trunk, which also applies to Thunderbird and presumably to an eventual suite 1.8 release not shown. Even if the Mozilla All-In-One browser isn't very relevant, the Mozilla library suite is important, because everyone who uses Firefox uses that.
The way the first round went is likely to prevent this. Partway through, it came to light that quite a number of people had been lying about the directive, and it became clear that the democratic body was against it while it was supported by unelected officials. I suspect that the reason the JURI restarted the process was not anything to do with software patents, but was more to do with the balance of power between the council and the parliament. But once this is done with in the short term, I suspect that software patents will be forever associated with subverting the democratic process in the EU and be an eternal political dead zone, sort of like it would be impossible to have a king of the US, even as a figurehead.
I suspect that the current state has a lot to do with the image of computers in the 80s, which is when a lot of the current developers got interested. Back then, computers in general were viewed as somewhat obscure and especially difficult to program, and they would only be given to kids who were expected to be interested in science and technology. At the time, girls were not commonly seen as potentially interested in technology, so they were unlikely to have computers to be interested by. Women have become more involved since, but people coming to computers later in life, I think, are less likely to write code as a hobby, and more likely to only write code for work.
So I think the 20-year time delay between when people start forming their life-long interests and when they tend to feel fully prepared to begin working on major public projects means that we're now seeing, in the OSS community, the results of Reagan-era attitudes towards gender and towards computers.
Beyond that, girls are still discouraged from getting involved in computers and scientific and technical fields in general, primarily, at this point, by their peers who aren't interested in there fields. While it is generally considered uncouth for people in technical fields to discourage girls from joining them, it is still acceptable for people in non-technical fields to encourage girls to join them (in preference to technical fields).
There is such a repository, but it is not monitored very closely, because it (rightly) accumulates all sorts of obscure notes which are useful for reference but not for informing people. There's a lot of "some hardware only I have misbehaves in some way" or "something nobody else ever tried to do doesn't work". You want this sort of information in case other people start having similar problems, but there's little incentive to fix the bug in a hurry, especially if the person found some way to avoid the problem.
The point of this list is to bring issues to the attention of people who can identify and get in touch with the people who can fix the bug. It is for communication, rather than for archival.
Or, more importantly, not requiring a lot of inappropriate things for applications that only need other things. There have been UNIX standards in the past which have specified that you need to have a web server and X, even though most people don't use both on the same machine. The worst thing for security and stability is things that are kept running but never used, because they are easy to forget to update. On the other hand, a lot of desktop code could use standardization, such that, if you are trying to use a desktop program on a desktop system that follows the standard, it will be more likely to work. (And if you try to use a desktop program on something that's not supposed to be a desktop, it can be clear that it isn't supposed to work)
You might note that you have only two mouse buttons which act like mouse buttons (i.e., it matters where you click them), and two or three hotkeys on the mouse. I think that it's worthwhile having a number of keys and buttons which are off-limits for developers but which may be assigned by users, either at the system level or at the application level. I'm personally particularly fond of the "windows" keys in Linux, which I can use for whatever I want without worrying too much that I'll be unable to use some program conveniently due to it needing them.
So I think it would be worthwhile in general having a single mouse button for clicking, and a number available for configuration by the user. (Incidentally, why doesn't she assign left and right buttons to "click" and leave the rest doing nothing, rather than switching mice? Can you not do this?)
I wouldn't be too surprised if this quarter's results were due to new acounting standards forcing them to report a backlog of unreported profit that they'd made over the years and hidden so that they could report completely predictable earnings. Analysts have been saying for a long time that MS earnings are just too regular, and that they must be doing this sort of thing. In order for it to be at all reasonable, they have to underreport earnings, not overreport them, which means that they have to maintain extra earnings. If they had to report these now, they would clearly have a report quarter.
Alternatively, Firefox could give a warning about possible security vulnerabilities before passing things off to IE. I bet masses of novice users calling up their banks worried about security risks would do more to get sites to ditch IE-specific features than anything else.
"We've already got one." "What?" "He says they've already got one." "Are you sure?" "Yes. It's very nice."
Solaris may be the thing they have of the most value to them, but it's not like the OSS community is sorely lacking in Unix-style operating systems. Even if Solaris were better than any previously-available OSS operating system (which is debateable), it wouldn't be better for developers by the amount necessary to make learning a new set of kernel internals. So this isn't a gift to the OSS community. It is, if anything, a gift to the (presently closed-source) Solaris community, because it means that even if Sun EOLs Solaris or goes out of business, they won't be completely orphaned.
Sun has some stuff that the OSS community would actually like to have, and having that released under a suitable license would be interesting.
Re:Whatever gets AOL off the net is fine with me.
on
AOL Kills Usenet Access
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Now, if we could only get them to discontinue email by blocking SMTP traffic to and from the internet...
It is remarkable to note that having Neu5Ac and lacking Neu5Gc is one of very few ways in which humans are unique. I suspect that the Intelligent Design folks would embrace the finding that humanity is different from animals in a very specific and unique way while rejecting the idea that it was a random mutation that caused this difference. If there were a creator who noticed that the creations thus far were kind of boring due to having Neu5Gc in their brains, the obvious thing for the creator to try would be to stick some handy disrupting chunk of DNA in the middle of CMAH. I mean, that's what Varki is doing in mice, most likely, and we assume that he's intelligent.
(Personally, I find the position of the scientific community a bit contradictory. We contrast evolution with intelligent design, but then consider genetic algorithms a branch of AI and award doctorates to people who mutate animals in interesting ways. Clearly evolution isn't going to pass the Turing test any time soon, but it seems to be about tied with drug companies for cleverness currently.)
It's certainly possible that the area people call "part 4" is actually random junk stuck in to fill up that section of the sculpture (the width of that portion is determined by the first two parts, and the height by the table on the right), and that the final solution to the sculpture uses entirely different elements.
If the end of the text is part 4, there's probably at least a part 5, because there's a bunch of other stuff in the installation not yet used in any solutions (including, for example, a compass that points the wrong way).
I wouldn't be surprised, from the known decryptions, if you had to stand with a candle at a certain point and notices the letters cut in the shadow cast by the sculpture at particular points. It seems to me like the bottom rows would be most likely as the letters for this, so it may be that some of the letters are important, but that there's no way to solve it by just looking at a transcript.
There has always been a distinction between conversational speech and formal speech. Someone talking on the radio or giving a lecture will use different grammar from what someone interactively talking to a few people would use. They will use expressions which are considered slang or inappropriate, and will mangle the sentence structure for purposes such as getting the sentence over with as soon as its meaning has been conveyed. Diction is often traded for speed in set phrases (e.g., saying "how are you?" will confuse people, because they expect something like "oweryu?" and enunciating the words makes it sound like you think they're sick or something). Furthermore, someone in a conversation will convey meaning through non-linguistic actions, such as laughing, nodding, rolling their eyes, and so forth.
The typed word is, therefore, a conversational form of writing. It needs a set of expressions to correspond to non-linguistic activities, which is where "rofl" and ":)" come from. Common expressions get shortened. There is also a body of slang where odd spellings are used to mean special things ("pwned" doesn't mean the same thing as "owned"; "That's the fastest computer I've ever owned" is a very different sentiment than "That's the fastest computer I've ever pwned", and, in fact, the latter would indicate that the speaker does not own the computer).
The typed word is no more likely to damage (or even modify) formal writing than conversational speech has damaged formal speech, and is no more of a problem than earlier conversational writing ("Pls type these Thx, D" as a sticky note for a secretary is is old as sticky notes). (There is a separate issue, which is that students sometimes fail to realize that formal writing is needed in some situations, but that's different from not realizing that formal writing is different.)
There is a wonderful piece of writing I've read (in an interactive fiction game, Narcolepsy by Adam Cadre, et al) in which the narrator encounters a person using typed-word expressions in speech and describes them as he sees and hears them ("Roffle!" for instance).
But the courts issue warrents, and do so on the basis of finding that it is probable that they will yield evidence. It would lead to a completely disfunctional system if, since the suspect had not been proven guilty, the court must assume that they are innocent and that, therefore, the police are unlikely to find evidence of guilt and must deny all warrents which pertain only to a particular suspect.
The article says they're planning to have UPSes, and it's unlikely that nobody from their hosting facility reads livejournal. So what they're doing is probably okay (or at least, they'll be stopped if it's not). I suspect that the button has to kill everything that can supply a lot of power, but that single-computer 5-minute UPSes aren't a big deal. The way you fry analysts is when the batteries and generators that can run a whole data center short through the person, not with hardware you can pick up at the computer store.
He doesn't say they'll wish they studied harder. Chances are that they'll think the studying they did was a waste of time, and they'll wish they'd studied less hard. He mostly advocates doing the minimum of school work and focusing on something challenging, interesting, and creative. If your school work happens to actually interest you, then you can go on in it, but of course the class will probably go to a different topic shortly, and, if you were actually interested, you'll want to keep working on the same thing.
for (ClientDetail c : Client.get().findAll())
write(c);
That is, a class can't inherit type-specific code in static methods, so you need a singleton. It's a pain, but only 5 lines per model type. Also, you can't autogenerate methods and have to use constants for fields. But this is an advantange, because you can then write:
for (Client c : Client.get().getQuery().
add(Client.MANAGER.by(Manager.NAME.
orderBy())).
add(Client.NAME.is(STARTS_WITH, "John")))
write(c);
(Which, obviously, prints out all of the clients whose name starts with "John", ordered by the name of their managers).
I'm not fond of the way most of a Rails app is in the database schema, which is generally harder to version control effectively and has to be manipulated with a separate tool. I also don't think that the JSP-like view mechanism is all that good, because you're tied to making it a web app and you have to write a mixed-syntax file. That's probably why they're only getting a 10x development speed gain over J2EE, which is not really saying much given just how bad most frameworks are.
I see some huge differences between most of today's games and reading a decent novel or non-fiction work.
I also see some huge differences between most of today's novels or non-fiction works and playing a decent game. Most things of any type aren't decent. Furthermore, popularity is orthogonal to merit; a good game (or book) is likely to be obscure.
Additionally, a substantial portion of video games are designed to demand fine motor skills rather than being educational. Few books will train your reflexes much, but you wouldn't expect them to. You could argue that culture today tends to overvalue manual dexterity and undervalue philosophy, but that's a different issue (and, if you want to argue it, you should argue against programs which involve clicking on small icons before you get into games). If you restrict the discussion to whether it would be better to read a decent novel or play a decent philosophical game, you can discuss the relative merits of the two media.
Books can get more depth, but games can get more breadth. If you have a linear plot in a game, you can get effectively the same story, although it is less satisfying, because the player will want to be able to affect the plot and be unable to. On the other hand, in a game you can explore the consequences of multiple courses of action, whereas a book will be restricted to exploring the consequences of what actually happens (while potentially suggesting what would have happened otherwise). Assuming that you include a similar amount of content, however, you therefore cannot go into as much depth in a game, because some of the space for content will be used on different parallel paths. Furthermore, the author is less able to ensure that art, unlike life, comes out in an insightful way.
Few games actually increase your vocabulary. On the other hand, few words that you learn from books are actually useful for purposes other than understanding the situations in the book. A game could easily enable you to understand and use concepts you hadn't known about before, although generally in a more functional rather than referential way than books would.
People's communication skills have definitely gotten less standard lately. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that they are any less effective. Some of the least effective communication comes from legal writing and takes an advanced degree to produce, the consensus of experts to interpret, years to get right, and still fails to be as explicit as the hastily-written notes of the authors. If anything, I suspect that the present "degradation" of English is a benefit to speakers in understanding non-standard texts such as Shakespear, Chaucer, etc, who wrote before proscriptive grammarians affected common usage.
Images and writing are effective at conveying different things and require imagination to understand in different ways. Just making a picture is trivial, but making a picture which conveys what you want to involves a lot of skill in framing it, arranging angles, choosing the style of representation, and so forth. It is similar in this way to writing a good description. The greatest effectiveness comes from mixing media as appropriate for what you want to convey (i.e., including figures in books or including voice-overs in movies).
I'm surprised that they didn't have their own little UPSes to bring the system down cleanly before. Sure, the facility is supposed to provide power at all times, even if there's a power grid interruption, but that doesn't get tested very often and isn't under your control. Furthermore, in the event that the facility's power is actually going to go out, there isn't any way for the machines to find this out and shut down cleanly.
Their theory of the law is that they own (or rather, can restrict) the code that IBM wrote. So SCO can't turn over "their" code, because they've never had it. They want to compare all of the code that IBM wrote for UNIX with the code that IBM wrote for Linux, so that they can argue that IBM's contract prohibits doing this. The judge which issued this ruling isn't supposed to rule on whether SCO's theory of the law is correct, so she can't really deny SCO's motion on the basis of it being a complete waste of time. On the other hand, the other judge could rule that IBM copying its own code into Linux would be perfectly fine if they did it, so this discovery is unnecessary.
Even in criminal cases, the prosecution only needs "probable cause" to be able to collect evidence. Obviously, nobody would ever be proven guilty if you couldn't gather evidence against someone presumed innocent.
If aging were stopped, there would be no reason for retirement at all. Or rather, there would be no reason for the government to subsidize retirement; if you saved for 55 years, you could take a 20 year vacation, but if you didn't, you'd just keep working. Even aside from further degeneration, someone who had the aging of a current 65-year-old would probably not survive many centuries, due to the decreased ability to survive random injuries, so having people live for 1000 years would mean that they would have to be youthful during that time.
Slashdot Mirror
His point is essentially that .NET does not protect the user against untrusted code, while Java does. If you run .NET code, you have to trust the developer, because the system won't protect you against a malicious or careless developer. If you run Java code in a sandbox, you're safe, because the system will watch what's going on and can be sure of the safety of its information.
A hunting rifle is fine for some purposes, but decorating your house with them is unwise. Java, effectively, has support for making absolutely certain that the rifle cannot be fired, and therefore you can feel okay about having it on your mantle.
Of course, he's theoretically wrong; the C standard actually does not exclude the possibility of preventing programs from doing bad things, by, for example, giving a bus error if you dereference a pointer to freed memory. You could have garbage collection in C if you really wanted, because there is a limited amount you can do to pointers and still be necessarily able to use them again. It's just that C implementations almost never do anything like this, because it would be slower and more resource-hungry than Java (because Java has limitations which then permit optimizations by the system). On the other hand, it might be worthwhile having such an environment, so that you could run untrusted code by developers who expect to be trusted.
Development happens in the trunk not necessarily for the Mozilla Suite but so that all of the Mozilla projects share the parts that they should share. This roadmap, for example, is showing trunk development leading to Firefox 1.1 based on Gecko 1.8 in the trunk, which also applies to Thunderbird and presumably to an eventual suite 1.8 release not shown. Even if the Mozilla All-In-One browser isn't very relevant, the Mozilla library suite is important, because everyone who uses Firefox uses that.
The way the first round went is likely to prevent this. Partway through, it came to light that quite a number of people had been lying about the directive, and it became clear that the democratic body was against it while it was supported by unelected officials. I suspect that the reason the JURI restarted the process was not anything to do with software patents, but was more to do with the balance of power between the council and the parliament. But once this is done with in the short term, I suspect that software patents will be forever associated with subverting the democratic process in the EU and be an eternal political dead zone, sort of like it would be impossible to have a king of the US, even as a figurehead.
Relax. They're only *claiming* to conform to the standard. That's entirely consistent with their usual behavior.
I suspect that the current state has a lot to do with the image of computers in the 80s, which is when a lot of the current developers got interested. Back then, computers in general were viewed as somewhat obscure and especially difficult to program, and they would only be given to kids who were expected to be interested in science and technology. At the time, girls were not commonly seen as potentially interested in technology, so they were unlikely to have computers to be interested by. Women have become more involved since, but people coming to computers later in life, I think, are less likely to write code as a hobby, and more likely to only write code for work.
So I think the 20-year time delay between when people start forming their life-long interests and when they tend to feel fully prepared to begin working on major public projects means that we're now seeing, in the OSS community, the results of Reagan-era attitudes towards gender and towards computers.
Beyond that, girls are still discouraged from getting involved in computers and scientific and technical fields in general, primarily, at this point, by their peers who aren't interested in there fields. While it is generally considered uncouth for people in technical fields to discourage girls from joining them, it is still acceptable for people in non-technical fields to encourage girls to join them (in preference to technical fields).
There is such a repository, but it is not monitored very closely, because it (rightly) accumulates all sorts of obscure notes which are useful for reference but not for informing people. There's a lot of "some hardware only I have misbehaves in some way" or "something nobody else ever tried to do doesn't work". You want this sort of information in case other people start having similar problems, but there's little incentive to fix the bug in a hurry, especially if the person found some way to avoid the problem.
The point of this list is to bring issues to the attention of people who can identify and get in touch with the people who can fix the bug. It is for communication, rather than for archival.
Or, more importantly, not requiring a lot of inappropriate things for applications that only need other things. There have been UNIX standards in the past which have specified that you need to have a web server and X, even though most people don't use both on the same machine. The worst thing for security and stability is things that are kept running but never used, because they are easy to forget to update. On the other hand, a lot of desktop code could use standardization, such that, if you are trying to use a desktop program on a desktop system that follows the standard, it will be more likely to work. (And if you try to use a desktop program on something that's not supposed to be a desktop, it can be clear that it isn't supposed to work)
You might note that you have only two mouse buttons which act like mouse buttons (i.e., it matters where you click them), and two or three hotkeys on the mouse. I think that it's worthwhile having a number of keys and buttons which are off-limits for developers but which may be assigned by users, either at the system level or at the application level. I'm personally particularly fond of the "windows" keys in Linux, which I can use for whatever I want without worrying too much that I'll be unable to use some program conveniently due to it needing them.
So I think it would be worthwhile in general having a single mouse button for clicking, and a number available for configuration by the user. (Incidentally, why doesn't she assign left and right buttons to "click" and leave the rest doing nothing, rather than switching mice? Can you not do this?)
I wouldn't be too surprised if this quarter's results were due to new acounting standards forcing them to report a backlog of unreported profit that they'd made over the years and hidden so that they could report completely predictable earnings. Analysts have been saying for a long time that MS earnings are just too regular, and that they must be doing this sort of thing. In order for it to be at all reasonable, they have to underreport earnings, not overreport them, which means that they have to maintain extra earnings. If they had to report these now, they would clearly have a report quarter.
Alternatively, Firefox could give a warning about possible security vulnerabilities before passing things off to IE. I bet masses of novice users calling up their banks worried about security risks would do more to get sites to ditch IE-specific features than anything else.
"We've already got one."
"What?"
"He says they've already got one."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. It's very nice."
Solaris may be the thing they have of the most value to them, but it's not like the OSS community is sorely lacking in Unix-style operating systems. Even if Solaris were better than any previously-available OSS operating system (which is debateable), it wouldn't be better for developers by the amount necessary to make learning a new set of kernel internals. So this isn't a gift to the OSS community. It is, if anything, a gift to the (presently closed-source) Solaris community, because it means that even if Sun EOLs Solaris or goes out of business, they won't be completely orphaned.
Sun has some stuff that the OSS community would actually like to have, and having that released under a suitable license would be interesting.
Now, if we could only get them to discontinue email by blocking SMTP traffic to and from the internet...
It is remarkable to note that having Neu5Ac and lacking Neu5Gc is one of very few ways in which humans are unique. I suspect that the Intelligent Design folks would embrace the finding that humanity is different from animals in a very specific and unique way while rejecting the idea that it was a random mutation that caused this difference. If there were a creator who noticed that the creations thus far were kind of boring due to having Neu5Gc in their brains, the obvious thing for the creator to try would be to stick some handy disrupting chunk of DNA in the middle of CMAH. I mean, that's what Varki is doing in mice, most likely, and we assume that he's intelligent.
(Personally, I find the position of the scientific community a bit contradictory. We contrast evolution with intelligent design, but then consider genetic algorithms a branch of AI and award doctorates to people who mutate animals in interesting ways. Clearly evolution isn't going to pass the Turing test any time soon, but it seems to be about tied with drug companies for cleverness currently.)
It's certainly possible that the area people call "part 4" is actually random junk stuck in to fill up that section of the sculpture (the width of that portion is determined by the first two parts, and the height by the table on the right), and that the final solution to the sculpture uses entirely different elements.
If the end of the text is part 4, there's probably at least a part 5, because there's a bunch of other stuff in the installation not yet used in any solutions (including, for example, a compass that points the wrong way).
I wouldn't be surprised, from the known decryptions, if you had to stand with a candle at a certain point and notices the letters cut in the shadow cast by the sculpture at particular points. It seems to me like the bottom rows would be most likely as the letters for this, so it may be that some of the letters are important, but that there's no way to solve it by just looking at a transcript.
There has always been a distinction between conversational speech and formal speech. Someone talking on the radio or giving a lecture will use different grammar from what someone interactively talking to a few people would use. They will use expressions which are considered slang or inappropriate, and will mangle the sentence structure for purposes such as getting the sentence over with as soon as its meaning has been conveyed. Diction is often traded for speed in set phrases (e.g., saying "how are you?" will confuse people, because they expect something like "oweryu?" and enunciating the words makes it sound like you think they're sick or something). Furthermore, someone in a conversation will convey meaning through non-linguistic actions, such as laughing, nodding, rolling their eyes, and so forth.
The typed word is, therefore, a conversational form of writing. It needs a set of expressions to correspond to non-linguistic activities, which is where "rofl" and ":)" come from. Common expressions get shortened. There is also a body of slang where odd spellings are used to mean special things ("pwned" doesn't mean the same thing as "owned"; "That's the fastest computer I've ever owned" is a very different sentiment than "That's the fastest computer I've ever pwned", and, in fact, the latter would indicate that the speaker does not own the computer).
The typed word is no more likely to damage (or even modify) formal writing than conversational speech has damaged formal speech, and is no more of a problem than earlier conversational writing ("Pls type these Thx, D" as a sticky note for a secretary is is old as sticky notes). (There is a separate issue, which is that students sometimes fail to realize that formal writing is needed in some situations, but that's different from not realizing that formal writing is different.)
There is a wonderful piece of writing I've read (in an interactive fiction game, Narcolepsy by Adam Cadre, et al) in which the narrator encounters a person using typed-word expressions in speech and describes them as he sees and hears them ("Roffle!" for instance).
But the courts issue warrents, and do so on the basis of finding that it is probable that they will yield evidence. It would lead to a completely disfunctional system if, since the suspect had not been proven guilty, the court must assume that they are innocent and that, therefore, the police are unlikely to find evidence of guilt and must deny all warrents which pertain only to a particular suspect.
The article says they're planning to have UPSes, and it's unlikely that nobody from their hosting facility reads livejournal. So what they're doing is probably okay (or at least, they'll be stopped if it's not). I suspect that the button has to kill everything that can supply a lot of power, but that single-computer 5-minute UPSes aren't a big deal. The way you fry analysts is when the batteries and generators that can run a whole data center short through the person, not with hardware you can pick up at the computer store.
He doesn't say they'll wish they studied harder. Chances are that they'll think the studying they did was a waste of time, and they'll wish they'd studied less hard. He mostly advocates doing the minimum of school work and focusing on something challenging, interesting, and creative. If your school work happens to actually interest you, then you can go on in it, but of course the class will probably go to a different topic shortly, and, if you were actually interested, you'll want to keep working on the same thing.
I'm not fond of the way most of a Rails app is in the database schema, which is generally harder to version control effectively and has to be manipulated with a separate tool. I also don't think that the JSP-like view mechanism is all that good, because you're tied to making it a web app and you have to write a mixed-syntax file. That's probably why they're only getting a 10x development speed gain over J2EE, which is not really saying much given just how bad most frameworks are.
I see some huge differences between most of today's games and reading a decent novel or non-fiction work.
I also see some huge differences between most of today's novels or non-fiction works and playing a decent game. Most things of any type aren't decent. Furthermore, popularity is orthogonal to merit; a good game (or book) is likely to be obscure.
Additionally, a substantial portion of video games are designed to demand fine motor skills rather than being educational. Few books will train your reflexes much, but you wouldn't expect them to. You could argue that culture today tends to overvalue manual dexterity and undervalue philosophy, but that's a different issue (and, if you want to argue it, you should argue against programs which involve clicking on small icons before you get into games). If you restrict the discussion to whether it would be better to read a decent novel or play a decent philosophical game, you can discuss the relative merits of the two media.
Books can get more depth, but games can get more breadth. If you have a linear plot in a game, you can get effectively the same story, although it is less satisfying, because the player will want to be able to affect the plot and be unable to. On the other hand, in a game you can explore the consequences of multiple courses of action, whereas a book will be restricted to exploring the consequences of what actually happens (while potentially suggesting what would have happened otherwise). Assuming that you include a similar amount of content, however, you therefore cannot go into as much depth in a game, because some of the space for content will be used on different parallel paths. Furthermore, the author is less able to ensure that art, unlike life, comes out in an insightful way.
Few games actually increase your vocabulary. On the other hand, few words that you learn from books are actually useful for purposes other than understanding the situations in the book. A game could easily enable you to understand and use concepts you hadn't known about before, although generally in a more functional rather than referential way than books would.
People's communication skills have definitely gotten less standard lately. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that they are any less effective. Some of the least effective communication comes from legal writing and takes an advanced degree to produce, the consensus of experts to interpret, years to get right, and still fails to be as explicit as the hastily-written notes of the authors. If anything, I suspect that the present "degradation" of English is a benefit to speakers in understanding non-standard texts such as Shakespear, Chaucer, etc, who wrote before proscriptive grammarians affected common usage.
Images and writing are effective at conveying different things and require imagination to understand in different ways. Just making a picture is trivial, but making a picture which conveys what you want to involves a lot of skill in framing it, arranging angles, choosing the style of representation, and so forth. It is similar in this way to writing a good description. The greatest effectiveness comes from mixing media as appropriate for what you want to convey (i.e., including figures in books or including voice-overs in movies).
I'm surprised that they didn't have their own little UPSes to bring the system down cleanly before. Sure, the facility is supposed to provide power at all times, even if there's a power grid interruption, but that doesn't get tested very often and isn't under your control. Furthermore, in the event that the facility's power is actually going to go out, there isn't any way for the machines to find this out and shut down cleanly.
Their theory of the law is that they own (or rather, can restrict) the code that IBM wrote. So SCO can't turn over "their" code, because they've never had it. They want to compare all of the code that IBM wrote for UNIX with the code that IBM wrote for Linux, so that they can argue that IBM's contract prohibits doing this. The judge which issued this ruling isn't supposed to rule on whether SCO's theory of the law is correct, so she can't really deny SCO's motion on the basis of it being a complete waste of time. On the other hand, the other judge could rule that IBM copying its own code into Linux would be perfectly fine if they did it, so this discovery is unnecessary.
Even in criminal cases, the prosecution only needs "probable cause" to be able to collect evidence. Obviously, nobody would ever be proven guilty if you couldn't gather evidence against someone presumed innocent.
If aging were stopped, there would be no reason for retirement at all. Or rather, there would be no reason for the government to subsidize retirement; if you saved for 55 years, you could take a 20 year vacation, but if you didn't, you'd just keep working. Even aside from further degeneration, someone who had the aging of a current 65-year-old would probably not survive many centuries, due to the decreased ability to survive random injuries, so having people live for 1000 years would mean that they would have to be youthful during that time.