Copyright infringement is not theft. The most obvious and conspicuous difference is that the former is civil and the latter criminal law. This has vast implications vis-a-vis the manner in which suit is brought, the possible penalties for the defendant, and the burden on the plaintiff. Another huge difference is that the latter involves denying the owner the use of an asset whereas the former involves unlawfully creating/distributing copies of a work. Copyright infringement and theft are not even closely related issues, and it's impossible to discuss them usefully without realizing that.
Now, these are obvious, relevant, basic facts about a topic which is important and much-discussed on Slashdot. And yet there a largish population (maybe 15% of those who express an interest) on Slashdot of people who just physically cannot learn them. Whence, then, this 'fool reserve'?
Originally I theorized that it relates to sunspot activity but later I came to feel that El Nino, peak oil, the war in Iraq, and the new 'gritty' James Bond may all play a role. And maybe chupacabra. Chupacabra's a pretty sinister beast... think about it, it's a monster named after a lollipop... what could possibly be spookier?
This simply underlines the fact that there's a huge workload of easy, routine transactions that need to be done.
In terms of total complexity, the financial world is probably something like Excel 20%, C# 15%, Java 30%, C++ 30%, other 5%.
But in terms of transactions, I can well believe it's COBOL 70%, REXX/VB/4GLs 25%, other 5%.
Modelling a CDO *is* hard, and you don't do it in COBOL. Creating a visual system to monitor liquidity *is* hard and you don't do it in COBOL. 'Transactions' pure and simple are not hard... you can do them in COBOL... they're easy to maintain because changes are of the form 'deduct 5% if broker_country_of_incorporation = finland'... and they're also a darn silly way to measure the relevance of a language.
IMHO those are more serious problems. They're enough to make it be what I'd call a Long Ugly Hastily Written Standard, which somehow doesn't really surprise me.
The thing the original article is freaking out about -- legacy compatibility flags -- isn't really an issue. The standard has to include the features offered by existing wps. Sometimes those features are undocumented, obscure, and almost totally forgotten. What do you do? Find the last remaining copy of the code, figure out exactly how WP4 buggily laid out small caps, express that all in English, and put it in the standard?? No. You put in a WP4SmallCapsCompatibility flag and if any vendor has customer that really really care about WP4 small caps, there's now a way to express in a document that WP4's behaviour should be emulated and the one vendor that cares can honor that flag.
It's called 'common sense'. Now, for a standard that REALLY machine guns itself in the foot, try SVG. Or for that matter CSS -- how the W3C gets away with those I don't know. For that matter, even the.NET standard is more annoying in that it starts off 'first, do everything exactly like a Windows PE file, just to make things a tiny bit easier for the windows loader, even though.NET assemblies are basically nothing like PE files'.
And just as with politicians, sometimes no matter what you do or say, no matter how much greater the sins of your rivals are, no matter what your contribution, there'll be pasty-faced losers sitting on the sidelines going "But but but... Clinton got a blow job!" or "But but but... Microsoft don't innovate!"
The good news is that in business, these guys don't have votes }:>
And yeah, I'd say that inventing component-based systems after the world had stagnated for years piping streams of ASCII text around was quite a step, and no, I don't really see a competitor to Excel emerging until someone takes that step. Although it would be good if they did. It's easy to dismiss OLE now but at the time, it was such a vast step -- and then when it was backed up by a highly performant component system, COM, that's when the whole thing became unstoppable. With WordPerfect, you could edit a document. With Notes, you could check your calendar. With Lotus, you could edit a spreadsheet. With MS, you could embed an image in a spreadsheet in a document in your calendar -- it was a whole nuther level of flexibility and interoperability.
And lo, they captured the market and made el dollars.
And now, back to your scheduled programme of people sitting around furiously typing about how MS don't innovate! You can almost _hear_ the sweat trickling down their necks!
Heh, yeah, that's pathetic. Incidentally, check out my largely-uninteresting page about traditional Korean architectural decoration, linked to in my.sig... and thus... pathetically... in all my comments...
The real news here is how snobbish, foppish and whiny that blogger is. Is this what the blogosphere is like?? Is it really ruled by Mac-obsessed almost-hipsters with unwise facial hair and diagonal black-and-white photos of themselves? Do they really whinge on about how they're too clever to use Vista and how their webcasting startup will change the face of the Internet (sidebar on the right)?
Is this it, after 10 years of evolution?? Nathan Barley writ small, throwing a hissy fit because the wording of the letter on a review item was vague? THAT is a blogger important enough to merit unsolicited review junk??
2 -- This article is posted solely to stir up (repetitive) discussion.
3 -- This article pretends that MySQL is a real database, even though in order to do so it has to make gigantic leaps like considering data integrity to be not really all that important in a database.
...because a Slashdot reader's take on Vista would be completely unbiased!
I don't find Pogue's take hard to believe. In 5 years of development, I'd expect them to be able to pretty things up and reorganize the directory structure. I mean, this is 5 whole _years_. The only thing in the list above that sounds like a real change is the sleep mode -- I hear good things about that. So, it's not like we're seeing hugely inflated claims here.
All I want from it is for it to be a stable baseline for development -- right now with 2k and XP and.NET 1.1 and.NET 2 mixed around it's a bit of a pain.
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the la -- hang on, I posted that yesterday or something.
Are we reaching a situation where vague, ill-defined laws that basically criminalize whatever's unpopular or unprofitable or unlucky are actually being made faster than I can quote Tacitus? In the UK I'd say we are.
Moving from C#/ASP.NET (and presumably SQL Server) to PHP/MySQL is like chopping your hands off. You can do much better than that.
DB-wise, PostgreSQL is as powerful as SQL Server in most ways, and more powerful in many.
Language-wise, you have Python, Ruby, Java and even Perl. Perl is baroque and dated and I'm not sure I could recommend using it now. Java brings with it the whole Java stack and accompanying XML hell and performance issues (yeah, I know, they don't really exist and it's all a conspiracy). Ruby and Python are fairly different languages -- Ruby is more fun while Python is more powerful and better-supported.
But to be honest, there is absolutely no reason why you should leave C# at all if that's your preferred environment (and it's certainly at least as useful a skill as any of the above). Mono is pretty darn solid and it's possible to write web components with it that are 99% (maybe 100%, I dunno, but I seem to recall I found some minor issues) compatible across windows and Linux.
My choice would probably be a Python environment backed with PostgreSQL. As it happens, I use PHP and MySQL just for the sake of keeping au fait with the 'less robust' end of the market -- if that's not an issue I don't see why you should use them. After C#, PHP is a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
The point of SI is to prevent people from suing the government for profit. That's not what's happening here -- Illinois proactively attempted to do something bad and they, not local merchants, should pay. As an occasional Illinois taxpayer, I can't say I think my money has been well spent here -- but it's Illinois' fault, not the court's.
Specifically, something to tell the CTCP stack that you're running the very latest version of everything, so that you don't get penalized by other nodes.
Of course, that would be bad news for everyone else on the network, if in fact your old, unpatched OS (which you are reporting as new and patched to avoid having to upgrade to Vista 2.5.9.396) _is_ infected. But then, that's part of the problem with including features that work AGAINST the person buying/using them.
To sum up: malicious/hijacked computers will report that everything's OK. Computers controlled by savvy users who don't want hassle will report that everything's OK. Computers that really have nothing interesting about them will report that everything's OK. There'll be a thin band of computers that really do have old OS versions but that nobody cares about enough to doctor -- these will report that everything's not OK, until they become an issue and are considered a painful extra cost of MS-based networks. The remaining 90% of all computers will have this feature disabled, thus saving all the bother at a very very low cost in security.
It's not that this feature is evil, it just comes from the wrong mindset. I think MS's misconception that it's good to start from the question 'how can we restrict or coerce customers', rather than 'how can we empower and help customers', is likely to prove permanent.
To put Joel Spolsky's pronouncements on software into perspective, it's instructive to get one of his software products that comes with a source license. After that, you pretty much realize that an 'expert' is whoever announces they're an 'expert' loudest and most frequently.
Stand by for 'Drowning in Complexity: How The Software World Forgot To Keep It Simple' from the same twits in a few year's time.
Another brilliant civilization rejected science and went into a profound decline: it was the Middle-Ages Moslem civilization.
Oh, I don't think you can say they 'rejected science'. They were a group of cultures highly based on conquest -- first the Arab conquest of what is now 'the Arab world' and then the Muslim conquest of various other areas, such as Iberia, Indonesia, and Anatolia.
Result? Warrior class took control of some societies (Egypt), others became bogged down trying to keep control of their conquests (Almohads), others bit off more than they could chew and found themselves ruled by one violent Turkic dynasty after another (Persians etc).
Wait a minute. Warrior class takes control, energy is squandered trying to occupy strongly resisting regions, country is governed by feuding families that have nothing to do with the populace......hmm, it's not _exactly_ like America. But it ain't exactly different either, if'n you see what I mean:)
Two factors contributed to the US's good position in scientific research during the last century:
1 -- The economic decline of Britain, especially the vast amount of intellectual property that Britain had to give to the US in exchange for resources to resist Hitler. 2 -- The rapid maturing and solidifying of the US commercial world, which created intense competition as the number of companies collapsed -- the result was a period during which very large entities had a very strong need to gain a competitive advantage.
Neither of these factors is with us any more. Britain (as a center of technological research that could then be passed on to the US cheaply) is long gone. The US commercial landscape has settled down and now has a much better supply of cheap labor (cheap labor competes with technological innovation to fulfil the same need). So, yes, I'd say we can expect a flattening-off of the rate of technological progress in the US. It doesn't mean there's a big educational disaster or anything.
It's a geek issue because, as skilled professionals, the Slashdot readership tends to fall into that upper-middle-class section of the curve that is most likely to get squeezed out when the gap between rich and poor widens. I'm talking about the 'rich enough to pay a lot of tax, not rich enough to avoid tax' band that basically funds everything.
So I'd say it's a trend that's perhaps more worrying to geeks than to members of the Dick Cheney class or to Indonesian sugar-cane cutters.
Article: The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth,
Parent: because the overall wealth/economy of the nation has continued to grow
Trailer-park libertarian, huh?
Just because there are enormously wealthy people doesn't mean you're prevented from acquiring wealth yourself.
Yeah, thought so. In the real world, one of the major uses of wealth is to concentrate and control further wealth. To put it bluntly, that means preventing YOU from getting it.
Quit being so classist.
It's not 'classist' to point out that wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated. It's interesting, and it's of practical value -- for example, as in investor I'm looking for areas where wealth is _less_ concentrated, because mobility and opportunity is greater when the distribution of wealth has not settled down.
Is the increasing concentration of wealth a problem? It depends what you want; for me personally it's not a problem at the moment but it's certainly something to watch, and I can see how it's a problem in some areas that are tending to pass from 'everyone's a farmer' to '0.1% of people are really rich, and the rest are now serfs' without going through any intermediate stages.
What _is_ a problem, though, at least in the US, is a public large sections of which believe it's somehow especially manly and free-thinking to support their ruling class, no matter how silly the occasion.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are practically NO hairy old idiots banging on about how great LISP is in this thread! Well done, all!
To address the cosmic imbalance caused by this sudden attack of maturity, though, let me do the job myself:
Lisp is great because it is functional (except for some stuff they had to bolt on). Lisp is great because it is not functional (except for some old stuff from the early times). Lisp is great because it is the 'classic' hacking language, free of new-fangled gubbins. Lisp is great because it contains exciting new features. Lisp is great because it is easy and intuitive, because it is so pure and orthogonal. Lisp is great because it forces you to think to get anything done, because it is so pure and orthogonal. Lisp is great because it would be easy to write a worthwhile application in, because it is so pure and orthogonal. Lisp is great because as nobody has ever written an important application in it (editor macros and 1970s random story generators are not important), it's free to be pure and orthogonal. Lisp is great because it uses tail recursion instead of silly old 'iteration', because recursion is really pure and functional and orthogonal. Lisp is great because it can almost nearly manage plain ordinary iteration, by using a weird hack called 'tail recursion'.
Lisp is great because of the Fourth Rule of the Internet:
"The smaller and more specialized a fan community is, the more fanatical and argumentative they are."
I hereby define the 'Mars Interval' as the length of time that must elapse between any given pair of random announcements, not accompanied by any funding or research, that the USA will go to Mars (or the Moon, or the asteroids, or weaponize space, or whatever).
The 'Mars Interval' was once as high as 7-10 years but recently has fallen to about two years. At the current rate of decline, the Interval may fall as low as a week, which will make for some very repetitive weekend news stories.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright infringement is not theft. The most obvious and conspicuous difference is that the former is civil and the latter criminal law. This has vast implications vis-a-vis the manner in which suit is brought, the possible penalties for the defendant, and the burden on the plaintiff. Another huge difference is that the latter involves denying the owner the use of an asset whereas the former involves unlawfully creating/distributing copies of a work. Copyright infringement and theft are not even closely related issues, and it's impossible to discuss them usefully without realizing that.
Now, these are obvious, relevant, basic facts about a topic which is important and much-discussed on Slashdot. And yet there a largish population (maybe 15% of those who express an interest) on Slashdot of people who just physically cannot learn them. Whence, then, this 'fool reserve'?
Originally I theorized that it relates to sunspot activity but later I came to feel that El Nino, peak oil, the war in Iraq, and the new 'gritty' James Bond may all play a role. And maybe chupacabra. Chupacabra's a pretty sinister beast... think about it, it's a monster named after a lollipop... what could possibly be spookier?
This simply underlines the fact that there's a huge workload of easy, routine transactions that need to be done.
In terms of total complexity, the financial world is probably something like Excel 20%, C# 15%, Java 30%, C++ 30%, other 5%.
But in terms of transactions, I can well believe it's COBOL 70%, REXX/VB/4GLs 25%, other 5%.
Modelling a CDO *is* hard, and you don't do it in COBOL. Creating a visual system to monitor liquidity *is* hard and you don't do it in COBOL. 'Transactions' pure and simple are not hard... you can do them in COBOL... they're easy to maintain because changes are of the form 'deduct 5% if broker_country_of_incorporation = finland'... and they're also a darn silly way to measure the relevance of a language.
IMHO those are more serious problems. They're enough to make it be what I'd call a Long Ugly Hastily Written Standard, which somehow doesn't really surprise me.
The thing the original article is freaking out about -- legacy compatibility flags -- isn't really an issue. The standard has to include the features offered by existing wps. Sometimes those features are undocumented, obscure, and almost totally forgotten. What do you do? Find the last remaining copy of the code, figure out exactly how WP4 buggily laid out small caps, express that all in English, and put it in the standard?? No. You put in a WP4SmallCapsCompatibility flag and if any vendor has customer that really really care about WP4 small caps, there's now a way to express in a document that WP4's behaviour should be emulated and the one vendor that cares can honor that flag.
It's called 'common sense'. Now, for a standard that REALLY machine guns itself in the foot, try SVG. Or for that matter CSS -- how the W3C gets away with those I don't know. For that matter, even the
Yeah, ok, rambling again.
"I hate two things: bigotry, and the dutch."
And now I find them combined in one handy
And just as with politicians, sometimes no matter what you do or say, no matter how much greater the sins of your rivals are, no matter what your contribution, there'll be pasty-faced losers sitting on the sidelines going "But but but... Clinton got a blow job!" or "But but but... Microsoft don't innovate!"
The good news is that in business, these guys don't have votes }:>
And yeah, I'd say that inventing component-based systems after the world had stagnated for years piping streams of ASCII text around was quite a step, and no, I don't really see a competitor to Excel emerging until someone takes that step. Although it would be good if they did. It's easy to dismiss OLE now but at the time, it was such a vast step -- and then when it was backed up by a highly performant component system, COM, that's when the whole thing became unstoppable. With WordPerfect, you could edit a document. With Notes, you could check your calendar. With Lotus, you could edit a spreadsheet. With MS, you could embed an image in a spreadsheet in a document in your calendar -- it was a whole nuther level of flexibility and interoperability.
And lo, they captured the market and made el dollars.
And now, back to your scheduled programme of people sitting around furiously typing about how MS don't innovate! You can almost _hear_ the sweat trickling down their necks!
Heh, yeah, that's pathetic. Incidentally, check out my largely-uninteresting page about traditional Korean architectural decoration, linked to in my
*bursts into tears*
The real news here is how snobbish, foppish and whiny that blogger is. Is this what the blogosphere is like?? Is it really ruled by Mac-obsessed almost-hipsters with unwise facial hair and diagonal black-and-white photos of themselves? Do they really whinge on about how they're too clever to use Vista and how their webcasting startup will change the face of the Internet (sidebar on the right)?
Is this it, after 10 years of evolution?? Nathan Barley writ small, throwing a hissy fit because the wording of the letter on a review item was vague? THAT is a blogger important enough to merit unsolicited review junk??
Yeesh.
Firstly--the bicycle (unmotored) and rider probably weigh 275 lbs together
I think I'm starting to see the problem...
1 -- This article is years old.
2 -- This article is posted solely to stir up (repetitive) discussion.
3 -- This article pretends that MySQL is a real database, even though in order to do so it has to make gigantic leaps like considering data integrity to be not really all that important in a database.
4 -- This article trolled me.
I don't find Pogue's take hard to believe. In 5 years of development, I'd expect them to be able to pretty things up and reorganize the directory structure. I mean, this is 5 whole _years_. The only thing in the list above that sounds like a real change is the sleep mode -- I hear good things about that. So, it's not like we're seeing hugely inflated claims here.
All I want from it is for it to be a stable baseline for development -- right now with 2k and XP and
Cram it, summary! Cram it wherever your species traditionally crams things!
Sorry.
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the la -- hang on, I posted that yesterday or something.
Are we reaching a situation where vague, ill-defined laws that basically criminalize whatever's unpopular or unprofitable or unlucky are actually being made faster than I can quote Tacitus? In the UK I'd say we are.
Now, PHP came along and billed itself (and in fact was designed)
I call shenanigans! No way was PHP 'designed'!
Moving from C#/ASP.NET (and presumably SQL Server) to PHP/MySQL is like chopping your hands off. You can do much better than that.
DB-wise, PostgreSQL is as powerful as SQL Server in most ways, and more powerful in many.
Language-wise, you have Python, Ruby, Java and even Perl. Perl is baroque and dated and I'm not sure I could recommend using it now. Java brings with it the whole Java stack and accompanying XML hell and performance issues (yeah, I know, they don't really exist and it's all a conspiracy). Ruby and Python are fairly different languages -- Ruby is more fun while Python is more powerful and better-supported.
But to be honest, there is absolutely no reason why you should leave C# at all if that's your preferred environment (and it's certainly at least as useful a skill as any of the above). Mono is pretty darn solid and it's possible to write web components with it that are 99% (maybe 100%, I dunno, but I seem to recall I found some minor issues) compatible across windows and Linux.
My choice would probably be a Python environment backed with PostgreSQL. As it happens, I use PHP and MySQL just for the sake of keeping au fait with the 'less robust' end of the market -- if that's not an issue I don't see why you should use them. After C#, PHP is a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
The point of SI is to prevent people from suing the government for profit. That's not what's happening here -- Illinois proactively attempted to do something bad and they, not local merchants, should pay. As an occasional Illinois taxpayer, I can't say I think my money has been well spent here -- but it's Illinois' fault, not the court's.
Specifically, something to tell the CTCP stack that you're running the very latest version of everything, so that you don't get penalized by other nodes.
Of course, that would be bad news for everyone else on the network, if in fact your old, unpatched OS (which you are reporting as new and patched to avoid having to upgrade to Vista 2.5.9.396) _is_ infected. But then, that's part of the problem with including features that work AGAINST the person buying/using them.
To sum up: malicious/hijacked computers will report that everything's OK. Computers controlled by savvy users who don't want hassle will report that everything's OK. Computers that really have nothing interesting about them will report that everything's OK. There'll be a thin band of computers that really do have old OS versions but that nobody cares about enough to doctor -- these will report that everything's not OK, until they become an issue and are considered a painful extra cost of MS-based networks. The remaining 90% of all computers will have this feature disabled, thus saving all the bother at a very very low cost in security.
It's not that this feature is evil, it just comes from the wrong mindset. I think MS's misconception that it's good to start from the question 'how can we restrict or coerce customers', rather than 'how can we empower and help customers', is likely to prove permanent.
To put Joel Spolsky's pronouncements on software into perspective, it's instructive to get one of his software products that comes with a source license. After that, you pretty much realize that an 'expert' is whoever announces they're an 'expert' loudest and most frequently.
Stand by for 'Drowning in Complexity: How The Software World Forgot To Keep It Simple' from the same twits in a few year's time.
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
When people find out what they are worth, they start demanding it.
That's their first mistake, then
Pretty soon, the entire world's IT population will be high-salaried, no matter where you go.
Copy clerk, circa 1880:
"Pretty soon, the entire world's copy clerk population will be high-salaried, no matter where you go!"
Scrooge:
"lol n00b"
Another brilliant civilization rejected science and went into a profound decline: it was the Middle-Ages Moslem civilization.
...hmm, it's not _exactly_ like America. But it ain't exactly different either, if'n you see what I mean :)
Oh, I don't think you can say they 'rejected science'. They were a group of cultures highly based on conquest -- first the Arab conquest of what is now 'the Arab world' and then the Muslim conquest of various other areas, such as Iberia, Indonesia, and Anatolia.
Result? Warrior class took control of some societies (Egypt), others became bogged down trying to keep control of their conquests (Almohads), others bit off more than they could chew and found themselves ruled by one violent Turkic dynasty after another (Persians etc).
Wait a minute. Warrior class takes control, energy is squandered trying to occupy strongly resisting regions, country is governed by feuding families that have nothing to do with the populace...
Two factors contributed to the US's good position in scientific research during the last century:
1 -- The economic decline of Britain, especially the vast amount of intellectual property that Britain had to give to the US in exchange for resources to resist Hitler.
2 -- The rapid maturing and solidifying of the US commercial world, which created intense competition as the number of companies collapsed -- the result was a period during which very large entities had a very strong need to gain a competitive advantage.
Neither of these factors is with us any more. Britain (as a center of technological research that could then be passed on to the US cheaply) is long gone. The US commercial landscape has settled down and now has a much better supply of cheap labor (cheap labor competes with technological innovation to fulfil the same need). So, yes, I'd say we can expect a flattening-off of the rate of technological progress in the US. It doesn't mean there's a big educational disaster or anything.
It's a geek issue because, as skilled professionals, the Slashdot readership tends to fall into that upper-middle-class section of the curve that is most likely to get squeezed out when the gap between rich and poor widens. I'm talking about the 'rich enough to pay a lot of tax, not rich enough to avoid tax' band that basically funds everything.
So I'd say it's a trend that's perhaps more worrying to geeks than to members of the Dick Cheney class or to Indonesian sugar-cane cutters.
Article:
The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth,
Parent:
because the overall wealth/economy of the nation has continued to grow
Trailer-park libertarian, huh?
Just because there are enormously wealthy people doesn't mean you're prevented from acquiring wealth yourself.
Yeah, thought so. In the real world, one of the major uses of wealth is to concentrate and control further wealth. To put it bluntly, that means preventing YOU from getting it.
Quit being so classist.
It's not 'classist' to point out that wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated. It's interesting, and it's of practical value -- for example, as in investor I'm looking for areas where wealth is _less_ concentrated, because mobility and opportunity is greater when the distribution of wealth has not settled down.
Is the increasing concentration of wealth a problem? It depends what you want; for me personally it's not a problem at the moment but it's certainly something to watch, and I can see how it's a problem in some areas that are tending to pass from 'everyone's a farmer' to '0.1% of people are really rich, and the rest are now serfs' without going through any intermediate stages.
What _is_ a problem, though, at least in the US, is a public large sections of which believe it's somehow especially manly and free-thinking to support their ruling class, no matter how silly the occasion.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are practically NO hairy old idiots banging on about how great LISP is in this thread! Well done, all!
To address the cosmic imbalance caused by this sudden attack of maturity, though, let me do the job myself:
Lisp is great because it is functional (except for some stuff they had to bolt on).
Lisp is great because it is not functional (except for some old stuff from the early times).
Lisp is great because it is the 'classic' hacking language, free of new-fangled gubbins.
Lisp is great because it contains exciting new features.
Lisp is great because it is easy and intuitive, because it is so pure and orthogonal.
Lisp is great because it forces you to think to get anything done, because it is so pure and orthogonal.
Lisp is great because it would be easy to write a worthwhile application in, because it is so pure and orthogonal.
Lisp is great because as nobody has ever written an important application in it (editor macros and 1970s random story generators are not important), it's free to be pure and orthogonal.
Lisp is great because it uses tail recursion instead of silly old 'iteration', because recursion is really pure and functional and orthogonal.
Lisp is great because it can almost nearly manage plain ordinary iteration, by using a weird hack called 'tail recursion'.
Lisp is great because of the Fourth Rule of the Internet:
"The smaller and more specialized a fan community is, the more fanatical and argumentative they are."
I hereby define the 'Mars Interval' as the length of time that must elapse between any given pair of random announcements, not accompanied by any funding or research, that the USA will go to Mars (or the Moon, or the asteroids, or weaponize space, or whatever).
The 'Mars Interval' was once as high as 7-10 years but recently has fallen to about two years. At the current rate of decline, the Interval may fall as low as a week, which will make for some very repetitive weekend news stories.