Wbhat you describe is classic pair programming - see the varius books on Extreme Programing. But it only works if you are in the same room. What I want is an IDE that allow the same thing if you are on different continent. The Open Source community is scattered across the world - and mostly works from home. You can't do what you desctibe between your home in (say) LA and mine in England.
I'd say "yes" - but it wouldn't do them that much good. National sovereignty is tolerated only if it doesn't cause problems to the Big Boys. The drugs people tried it with sundry Carribean givernments, and it became clear that it would not be tolerated. If a corp tries, via a foreign country, to upset the US national interests, the US would "fix" that country. Just ask Saddam Hussein.
See John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" - an excellent book - in which something like this happened. A megacorp bought an aircraft carrier to use as a base for their take ove of "Beninia" - probably Gambia.
Back in abot 1971 I saw this ship at anchor in Rio harour. i was told by my Brazilian host that the first aircraft launched from the flight deck by the Brazilians had gone down, not up - and splashed. Since then, no pilot brave enough to have a second try had been found.
The tem "Egoless programmin" is a little misunderstood, but I don't know a better one for it. It does not imply lack of pride in what you do, it implies tha twhat you are working on is a contribution to a shared project. Which means not being paranout about "my" code. Conventions and comments should always be so that another person could pick up from you at any time. CVS or such should be used so that if anybody spots a stupid mistake in your code, they can easily fix it, and your reaction is "thanks for improbing my product" not "get your filthy hands off my code".
Technology can solve that. Agfes ago I saw an ad for an APP which did a shared whiteboard on a PC - displayed on several PCs, anybody can write on it. Needs a sound channel as well.
One of my ideas for "when I get round to it" is a pair-progrsamming IDE. Two users with same display on screen, VoIP chat, multiple windows, two pointers for pointing things out. "Programmer in charge" can edit in his window(s), "Second Programmer" can browse code in his window to point things out but not edit. Roles change with a single click. Kibitzers can watch - visibly (e.g. management can "look over shoulder", but not spy) and drop in suggestions via an IRC-type window.
If one programmer could drop out and be replaced, you could get true rolling software development, with people dropping in and out as time is available. Egoless programming, many eyes on the same code. What could you do in a 60-hour round-the-world development session over one weekend?
It will never catch on though. Bosses like to have their staff lined up in little cubicles. They like to feel in control. In the minds of most bosses empire building, politics, and wanting to look like they are in charge is important. Company money isn't.
How many times has your company wasted money on stupidity because some overpaid fool thought it was a good idea??
That is the way companies were in the past. If doesn't have to be the way companies are in the future. Once upone a time all employees had timecards and clocked in and out - they still do for "warm body" type jobs where you have to have somebody - almost anybody - present. But for brainwork type jobs, successful employers long ago found that it is not worth splitting hairs over clocking on and off times. A more relaxed attitude gives better motivation, and if anything leads to people working more, mot less, hours (in most cases - and the exceptions probably aren't very productive even when present).
If it has enough benefits, companies that cannot do it will go out of business and be replaced by those that can do it. But the fact is that the benefits do not much exceed the costs. And the greater part of the benefits accrue to the employee, not to the employer. Since the usual format is that the employer has more power, they are not motivated to overcome whatever difficulties occur.
Two things can change this. The first is to give yourself some power over the company. This is uaually by having skills they cannot get elsewhere. If you are competing against other moderately skilled people for a job, they will naturally prefer the commuter to the teleworker, for reasons that have been given. However, if you have some scarce skills, and make it clear that you are only willing to telework, they may have to accept you. this may involve a bit of arm-wrestling - refuse the communting job, then call a month later and ask if they have filled that hard-to-fill post - or are using expensive cosultants and/or contractors. Secondly, you can share some of the benefits which you get with them. Yes, they get some benefits - but (empirically) not enough to motivatge them. You get a 27% reduction in your effective working day (11 hours to 8) and save commuting costs. Share some of that with them - ask for less money than the commuter.
An interesting example is MySQL AB, the company behind the excellent MySQL. They are a true virtual company: their employees are scattered all over Europe (plus some in the US), and rarely meet. Obviously, as a pure virtual company, they have had to conquer the problems from day one. But also, they have found a way of teaming a larger number of skilled indivduals in a narrow technical field than you would expect to be able to gather in any single commuting area. If the world is your fishpons, any single city looks small.
I hope they have started on the design of the replacement - presumably XScale-based. We have been told that the StrongArm is going unavaiable soon - some time like end summer.
If DRM is brought in and incorporates enough leeway for good 'ol average Joe to burn compilation CD's for his car or transfer.oggs to his portable player, I don't see it having the impact that others fear.
And that is exactly the point the article is making. The computer enforced DRMs being proposed are draconian and do not have such flexibility. In response to a system which is, I would concede, a little over lax, the big publishers are proposing, because it is technologically possible, systems which are much tighter than have ever existed: CDs which only play a limited number of times or for a limited period. They are not trying to restrict what you do to what you could do in the past, they are trying reduce the rights you get whhen you buy music/movies in the futire to less than that.
Jeeeez... that would take all the remaining fun out of driving.
But should driving be fun? I am not saying that it shouldn't be fun, but that the man purpose in driving isa to get from A to B. If you get some fun out of it - good luck to you. But not at the cost of safety - particularly other peoples safety. If safety interferes with fun, my vote is for safety every time - on the public highway at least.
If you want to have fun driving, go to a non-public track. Rent a kart or suchlike.
There is also a distinction that needs to be made in the case of Copyright that is not there in the case of tradmarks: the distinction between the creator and the publisher. In the case of Patents you have only the creator (inventor) to think about.
Most of the legitimate claims for protection are made for the benefir of the creators - original artists. And a lot of people have no real problem with this.
However, most of the pressure for Rights Management comes from publishers - and a lot of that which does come from artists comes under pressure from publishers.
Onece upon a time, publishing was a risky and expensive business. In the days of hand typesetting, it took many hours to set a book. Master copies of records were expensive items. The publisher took a big risk in investing in the production of a new book/record... Since many of them bombes, the publisher deserved a good return on those that were hits.
But the same digital revolution that has made copies perfect has cut the costs and risks of publishing a new work by orders of magnitude. Anybody can publish their own CD with equipment available in perhaps 30% of homes. And yet the publ;ishers want to hang on to the "high gain" end of the "high risk - high gain" tradeoff even when the risk has dropped spectacularly.
I don't know how to do it, but we need to reward artists (accordign tho their merits) while relegating publishers from the "risk taking entrepreneur" class to the "service industry" class.
No, I don't think so - and the article indicates otherwise. I think they will have to reveal thei proprietary code on a confidential basis to experts who will have to testify in open court on the similarities they found. A bit of code will obviosuly have to be presented for the experts to explain their methods and understandings, but not the majority. And, if their allegatios are true, they will only be publishing bits already visible in Linux sources.
"Think about if I was the CIO of a company and I'm going to be running my business on an operating system that has an intellectual property foundation that, by almost everyone's admission, is built on quicksand"
What a load of crap. He's essentially saying that closed-source code is somehow more guaranteed to be more legitimate. I'd say that the reverse is true: There's a lot more incentive to do things legally when the entire world gets to see your source code than when virtually nobody does.
You're right. With open source, you have the chance to look at the code and see if bits of it at least appear to have been pirated (e.g. changes in programming styl;e, naming conventions etc.). With propriatary, you have no idea until the person claiming theft has forced your supplier (who they claim has ripped them off) to show the souce (of the program you need top keep using) to a court appointed expert - at which point all legal hell may let loose.
And companies have a motive to plagiarise code, because they can sell it. GPL'ers don't have a financial incentive to do so - and a strong personal incentive not to. A Linux contributor who would be shown to have ripped off SCO (or other) code would be a mockery. Geek cred is valued precisely because it is visibl earned - "I wrote that - judge me by it".
He says there is "only" an honor system (and the law) to stop SCO code getting into Linux. But what comparably system is there in commercial enterprises? So GPL has law PLUS honor, commercial has law MINUS financial incentives.
Yes, aircraft designer have looked into surface effects like that, and have considered surface treating certain parts of the skin to improve flow. But the size of the "pock marks" is much smaller than golf-ball sized. IIRC, you talking about pinhead sized dimples, applied as a thin film.
It is true - exept that people have been able to mechanically reproduces the Dodo processing and germinate the seeds. This keeps getting rediscovered about every ten years, to great shouts of excitement about saving the tree species, but has been happening since the 1930s. See Douglas Adams "Last Chance to See", I think.
I was not aware that Germany had HDTV (I work for a TV equipment manufacturer). And the Japanese example proves the case made exactly. The Japanese government poured gallons of money into an official HDTV standard, paid manufacturers to develop eqiupment, strongarmed broadcasters into creating and broadcasting HDTV material. Except that this was an uncompressed analog standard, and they only ever have about 10,000 viewers. The real HDTV didn't take off (it it actually has) until com pressed digital distribution. So the whole Japan-Inc developed HDTV system was an immense waste of time and money.
Commercial companies usually refuse to release sourcee code on the basus (reasonable) that others could rip it of, despite its being copyright, and it would be very difficult and expensive to trace and sue them.
Bit in this special cas, that doesn't apply. If every suppier of voting software has to provide the source of their system, any supplier who thinks he has lost a contract to a ripoff of his own system can obtain the source code and check it. Piracy would be trivially easy to expose, and a powerful ally (the Government) under pressure to clean up the electoral system.
So the usual excuse of Commercial Confidentiallity does not apply, and and any seller hiding behind it should be excluded from the tender.
So is there any real reason to replace that with a system that is not transparent and where you have to blindly trust some tech companies?
One reason might be to reduce the cost of voting so that you could afford more votes - closer to "people power". Another would be to allow more sophisticated voting systems. The Irish voting system, as I understand it, involves some complicated arithmetic on reallocating "surplus" votes after a candidate has reached the threshold for election. The sort of thing which is trivial for a computer but would involve a lot of painstaking and error prone arithmetic for a human.
Both of which are good ideas - but never at the cost of making the voting system more opaque or less trustworthy. I agree with the principle that voting software must be veriafiable by any interested party. In paper voting, we have complicated systems of sealing ballot boxes and transporting them under supervision to prevent fraud. We need the same electroinically.
You have made a small assumption here - that this gadget runs at zero energy cost. It doesn't. It works in the frequency domain like an amplifier operatess in the magniude domain. Small signal in->powered amplifier->large signal out. This gadget is low frequency in->powered shifter->high frequency out. Great for generating strange frequencies for investigations, shifting signals into measurable domains, multiplexing many signals onto the same fibre... But not for generating energy.
As I read the article, a power source is certainly going to be needed. The dicovery is that shock waves in the photoing material interact with light being multiply refelcted inside it, so that the shoclwave couples to the photons and smoothly shifts frequency up or down. It is going to take power to generate those shock waves.
Re:Techincal Lords...
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Not as unsubtle as that, by and large. But they are all "sensible" (as seeen by the govenment) i.e they broadly agree with me rathaer than "radical" (to far ahead of me) or "reactionary" (too far behind me).
The system of an appointive legislature is, in principle, deeply corrupt. The hereditaries were actually much safer in that they were, essentially, random. Well-off random, but random. They didn't owe anything to government of any colour.
The current Lords owe something to the government. We have a long tradition of non-corruption, and it will take a while for corruption to creep in. But, in the absence of any other action, creep in it will. The current system is bad, and we need to fix the problem NOW.
The hereditaries were ridiculous, and deserved abolition. But the replacement system should have been in place at once. As it is, Tony has the HoL rigged in his favour. Whatever his goodwill, what incentive has he to move this item from the bnottom of the In Tray? None at all. If the HoL becomes effective, it will be a pain in the backside. It should be a pain in the backside - that is its job. But is anybody going to legislate to create a pain in their own backside?
Re:Techincal Lords...
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, you're a bit out of date. Only 92 of them are now the old hereditaries. All the others are Life Peers. These were until recently appointed for their achievements, and hence likley to be quite elderly. However, when they chucked out (most of) the hereditaries, they appointed a whole raft of fourty-ish, reasonably dynamic, people. One who just made the news, and looks pretty impressuive to me, is Baronness Amos, who has just been appointed a Cabinet Minister.
Re:Gotta love british humor
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
I think that "ordinary mail" means "snail mail" i.e. junk paper delivcered by the Post Office. That is not spam in my book.
Furthermore, there is always implicit information which doesn't appear in the code. For example ((today >= MONDAY) && (today could always bundle that up into bool iaAWeekDay(today), but that can sometimes make the code awfully bitty, because if you want to see what that means you have to hurtle off somewhere else to see what the implementation. OK, the IDE sould take you there, but is still breaks your train of thought.
Can I put in a vote here for Folding Editors? Make a fold out of that expression, so you normall read the comment "today is a weekday" but are 1 click/keystroke from the expansion. It is my experience that extensive use of "explicit" folding (as JEdit puts it) plus doxygen forces all the comments you could reasonably ask for.
You have got the cart before the horse. If you have got your code right, the IDE will then prettify it so that indentation matches what you said, not what you meant. The point of forced indentation is that indentation is what you meant, and the compiler had better do that.
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Wbhat you describe is classic pair programming - see the varius books on Extreme Programing. But it only works if you are in the same room. What I want is an IDE that allow the same thing if you are on different continent. The Open Source community is scattered across the world - and mostly works from home. You can't do what you desctibe between your home in (say) LA and mine in England.
I'd say "yes" - but it wouldn't do them that much good. National sovereignty is tolerated only if it doesn't cause problems to the Big Boys. The drugs people tried it with sundry Carribean givernments, and it became clear that it would not be tolerated. If a corp tries, via a foreign country, to upset the US national interests, the US would "fix" that country. Just ask Saddam Hussein.
See John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" - an excellent book - in which something like this happened. A megacorp bought an aircraft carrier to use as a base for their take ove of "Beninia" - probably Gambia.
Back in abot 1971 I saw this ship at anchor in Rio harour. i was told by my Brazilian host that the first aircraft launched from the flight deck by the Brazilians had gone down, not up - and splashed. Since then, no pilot brave enough to have a second try had been found.
The tem "Egoless programmin" is a little misunderstood, but I don't know a better one for it. It does not imply lack of pride in what you do, it implies tha twhat you are working on is a contribution to a shared project. Which means not being paranout about "my" code. Conventions and comments should always be so that another person could pick up from you at any time. CVS or such should be used so that if anybody spots a stupid mistake in your code, they can easily fix it, and your reaction is "thanks for improbing my product" not "get your filthy hands off my code".
Technology can solve that. Agfes ago I saw an ad for an APP which did a shared whiteboard on a PC - displayed on several PCs, anybody can write on it. Needs a sound channel as well.
One of my ideas for "when I get round to it" is a pair-progrsamming IDE. Two users with same display on screen, VoIP chat, multiple windows, two pointers for pointing things out. "Programmer in charge" can edit in his window(s), "Second Programmer" can browse code in his window to point things out but not edit. Roles change with a single click. Kibitzers can watch - visibly (e.g. management can "look over shoulder", but not spy) and drop in suggestions via an IRC-type window.
If one programmer could drop out and be replaced, you could get true rolling software development, with people dropping in and out as time is available. Egoless programming, many eyes on the same code. What could you do in a 60-hour round-the-world development session over one weekend?
It will never catch on though. Bosses like to have their staff lined up in little cubicles. They like to feel in control. In the minds of most bosses empire building, politics, and wanting to look like they are in charge is important. Company money isn't.
How many times has your company wasted money on stupidity because some overpaid fool thought it was a good idea??
That is the way companies were in the past. If doesn't have to be the way companies are in the future. Once upone a time all employees had timecards and clocked in and out - they still do for "warm body" type jobs where you have to have somebody - almost anybody - present. But for brainwork type jobs, successful employers long ago found that it is not worth splitting hairs over clocking on and off times. A more relaxed attitude gives better motivation, and if anything leads to people working more, mot less, hours (in most cases - and the exceptions probably aren't very productive even when present).
If it has enough benefits, companies that cannot do it will go out of business and be replaced by those that can do it. But the fact is that the benefits do not much exceed the costs. And the greater part of the benefits accrue to the employee, not to the employer. Since the usual format is that the employer has more power, they are not motivated to overcome whatever difficulties occur.
Two things can change this. The first is to give yourself some power over the company. This is uaually by having skills they cannot get elsewhere. If you are competing against other moderately skilled people for a job, they will naturally prefer the commuter to the teleworker, for reasons that have been given. However, if you have some scarce skills, and make it clear that you are only willing to telework, they may have to accept you. this may involve a bit of arm-wrestling - refuse the communting job, then call a month later and ask if they have filled that hard-to-fill post - or are using expensive cosultants and/or contractors. Secondly, you can share some of the benefits which you get with them. Yes, they get some benefits - but (empirically) not enough to motivatge them. You get a 27% reduction in your effective working day (11 hours to 8) and save commuting costs. Share some of that with them - ask for less money than the commuter.
An interesting example is MySQL AB, the company behind the excellent MySQL. They are a true virtual company: their employees are scattered all over Europe (plus some in the US), and rarely meet. Obviously, as a pure virtual company, they have had to conquer the problems from day one. But also, they have found a way of teaming a larger number of skilled indivduals in a narrow technical field than you would expect to be able to gather in any single commuting area. If the world is your fishpons, any single city looks small.
I hope they have started on the design of the replacement - presumably XScale-based. We have been told that the StrongArm is going unavaiable soon - some time like end summer.
If DRM is brought in and incorporates enough leeway for good 'ol average Joe to burn compilation CD's for his car or transfer .oggs to his portable player, I don't see it having the impact that others fear.
And that is exactly the point the article is making. The computer enforced DRMs being proposed are draconian and do not have such flexibility. In response to a system which is, I would concede, a little over lax, the big publishers are proposing, because it is technologically possible, systems which are much tighter than have ever existed: CDs which only play a limited number of times or for a limited period. They are not trying to restrict what you do to what you could do in the past, they are trying reduce the rights you get whhen you buy music/movies in the futire to less than that.
Jeeeez... that would take all the remaining fun out of driving.
But should driving be fun? I am not saying that it shouldn't be fun, but that the man purpose in driving isa to get from A to B. If you get some fun out of it - good luck to you. But not at the cost of safety - particularly other peoples safety. If safety interferes with fun, my vote is for safety every time - on the public highway at least.
If you want to have fun driving, go to a non-public track. Rent a kart or suchlike.
There is also a distinction that needs to be made in the case of Copyright that is not there in the case of tradmarks: the distinction between the creator and the publisher. In the case of Patents you have only the creator (inventor) to think about.
Most of the legitimate claims for protection are made for the benefir of the creators - original artists. And a lot of people have no real problem with this.
However, most of the pressure for Rights Management comes from publishers - and a lot of that which does come from artists comes under pressure from publishers.
Onece upon a time, publishing was a risky and expensive business. In the days of hand typesetting, it took many hours to set a book. Master copies of records were expensive items. The publisher took a big risk in investing in the production of a new book/record... Since many of them bombes, the publisher deserved a good return on those that were hits.
But the same digital revolution that has made copies perfect has cut the costs and risks of publishing a new work by orders of magnitude. Anybody can publish their own CD with equipment available in perhaps 30% of homes. And yet the publ;ishers want to hang on to the "high gain" end of the "high risk - high gain" tradeoff even when the risk has dropped spectacularly.
I don't know how to do it, but we need to reward artists (accordign tho their merits) while relegating publishers from the "risk taking entrepreneur" class to the "service industry" class.
No, I don't think so - and the article indicates otherwise. I think they will have to reveal thei proprietary code on a confidential basis to experts who will have to testify in open court on the similarities they found. A bit of code will obviosuly have to be presented for the experts to explain their methods and understandings, but not the majority. And, if their allegatios are true, they will only be publishing bits already visible in Linux sources.
"Think about if I was the CIO of a company and I'm going to be running my business on an operating system that has an intellectual property foundation that, by almost everyone's admission, is built on quicksand"
What a load of crap. He's essentially saying that closed-source code is somehow more guaranteed to be more legitimate. I'd say that the reverse is true: There's a lot more incentive to do things legally when the entire world gets to see your source code than when virtually nobody does.
You're right. With open source, you have the chance to look at the code and see if bits of it at least appear to have been pirated (e.g. changes in programming styl;e, naming conventions etc.). With propriatary, you have no idea until the person claiming theft has forced your supplier (who they claim has ripped them off) to show the souce (of the program you need top keep using) to a court appointed expert - at which point all legal hell may let loose.
And companies have a motive to plagiarise code, because they can sell it. GPL'ers don't have a financial incentive to do so - and a strong personal incentive not to. A Linux contributor who would be shown to have ripped off SCO (or other) code would be a mockery. Geek cred is valued precisely because it is visibl earned - "I wrote that - judge me by it".
He says there is "only" an honor system (and the law) to stop SCO code getting into Linux. But what comparably system is there in commercial enterprises? So GPL has law PLUS honor, commercial has law MINUS financial incentives.
So commercial software is better/safer how?
Yes, aircraft designer have looked into surface effects like that, and have considered surface treating certain parts of the skin to improve flow. But the size of the "pock marks" is much smaller than golf-ball sized. IIRC, you talking about pinhead sized dimples, applied as a thin film.
It is true - exept that people have been able to mechanically reproduces the Dodo processing and germinate the seeds. This keeps getting rediscovered about every ten years, to great shouts of excitement about saving the tree species, but has been happening since the 1930s. See Douglas Adams "Last Chance to See", I think.
I was not aware that Germany had HDTV (I work for a TV equipment manufacturer). And the Japanese example proves the case made exactly. The Japanese government poured gallons of money into an official HDTV standard, paid manufacturers to develop eqiupment, strongarmed broadcasters into creating and broadcasting HDTV material. Except that this was an uncompressed analog standard, and they only ever have about 10,000 viewers. The real HDTV didn't take off (it it actually has) until com pressed digital distribution. So the whole Japan-Inc developed HDTV system was an immense waste of time and money.
Commercial companies usually refuse to release sourcee code on the basus (reasonable) that others could rip it of, despite its being copyright, and it would be very difficult and expensive to trace and sue them.
Bit in this special cas, that doesn't apply. If every suppier of voting software has to provide the source of their system, any supplier who thinks he has lost a contract to a ripoff of his own system can obtain the source code and check it. Piracy would be trivially easy to expose, and a powerful ally (the Government) under pressure to clean up the electoral system.
So the usual excuse of Commercial Confidentiallity does not apply, and and any seller hiding behind it should be excluded from the tender.
So is there any real reason to replace that with a system that is not
transparent and where you have to blindly trust some tech companies?
One reason might be to reduce the cost of voting so that you could afford more votes - closer to "people power". Another would be to allow more sophisticated voting systems. The Irish voting system, as I understand it, involves some complicated arithmetic on reallocating "surplus" votes after a candidate has reached the threshold for election. The sort of thing which is trivial for a computer but would involve a lot of painstaking and error prone arithmetic for a human.
Both of which are good ideas - but never at the cost of making the voting system more opaque or less trustworthy. I agree with the principle that voting software must be veriafiable by any interested party. In paper voting, we have complicated systems of sealing ballot boxes and transporting them under supervision to prevent fraud. We need the same electroinically.
You have made a small assumption here - that this gadget runs at zero energy cost. It doesn't. It works in the frequency domain like an amplifier operatess in the magniude domain. Small signal in->powered amplifier->large signal out. This gadget is low frequency in->powered shifter->high frequency out. Great for generating strange frequencies for investigations, shifting signals into measurable domains, multiplexing many signals onto the same fibre... But not for generating energy.
As I read the article, a power source is certainly going to be needed. The dicovery is that shock waves in the photoing material interact with light being multiply refelcted inside it, so that the shoclwave couples to the photons and smoothly shifts frequency up or down. It is going to take power to generate those shock waves.
Not as unsubtle as that, by and large. But they are all "sensible" (as seeen by the govenment) i.e they broadly agree with me rathaer than "radical" (to far ahead of me) or "reactionary" (too far behind me).
The system of an appointive legislature is, in principle, deeply corrupt. The hereditaries were actually much safer in that they were, essentially, random. Well-off random, but random. They didn't owe anything to government of any colour.
The current Lords owe something to the government. We have a long tradition of non-corruption, and it will take a while for corruption to creep in. But, in the absence of any other action, creep in it will. The current system is bad, and we need to fix the problem NOW.
The hereditaries were ridiculous, and deserved abolition. But the replacement system should have been in place at once. As it is, Tony has the HoL rigged in his favour. Whatever his goodwill, what incentive has he to move this item from the bnottom of the In Tray? None at all. If the HoL becomes effective, it will be a pain in the backside. It should be a pain in the backside - that is its job. But is anybody going to legislate to create a pain in their own backside?
Sorry, you're a bit out of date. Only 92 of them are now the old hereditaries. All the others are Life Peers. These were until recently appointed for their achievements, and hence likley to be quite elderly. However, when they chucked out (most of) the hereditaries, they appointed a whole raft of fourty-ish, reasonably dynamic, people. One who just made the news, and looks pretty impressuive to me, is Baronness Amos, who has just been appointed a Cabinet Minister.
I think that "ordinary mail" means "snail mail" i.e. junk paper delivcered by the Post Office. That is not spam in my book.
Furthermore, there is always implicit information which doesn't appear in the code. For example ((today >= MONDAY) && (today could always bundle that up into bool iaAWeekDay(today), but that can sometimes make the code awfully bitty, because if you want to see what that means you have to hurtle off somewhere else to see what the implementation. OK, the IDE sould take you there, but is still breaks your train of thought.
Can I put in a vote here for Folding Editors? Make a fold out of that expression, so you normall read the comment "today is a weekday" but are 1 click/keystroke from the expansion. It is my experience that extensive use of "explicit" folding (as JEdit puts it) plus doxygen forces all the comments you could reasonably ask for.
You have got the cart before the horse. If you have got your code right, the IDE will then prettify it so that indentation matches what you said, not what you meant. The point of forced indentation is that indentation is what you meant, and the compiler had better do that.