America's dominance is not a passing phase that started with WWII and ended on 9/11 -- it's a phenomenon that will last as long as America lasts, or until other nations become so much like America that one can't tell them apart.
That is not true. America depends to a large extent on "soft power" which is in large part goodwill, moral leadership and ideology. Bush is pissing that away by offending everyone else in the world. If this trend continues unchecked, America will be an international pariah and that will have implications in commerce. Of course it is unlikely that the next president will be as much of a "divider, not a uniter" as Bush so a lot depends upon what happens next.
Remember that the second, more than the first, protects the rest.
What tripe. So Americans are substantially freer than all of the other countries of the world without such an amendment? Brits still have the courage and the right to criticize their PM for being a liar about WMD but Americans can hardly be bothered. The Dutch and Canadians can smoke pot without risking years in prison. Why is it that the G8 country with the most guns has the least freedom?
Oh, but we threw the second out a long time ago. That's why we have the USAPATRIOT Act and TIA. Because no one in Washington thinks they're at all accountable anymore.
I can't believe that even you believe this. Americans cannot look up from their television screens long enough to notice that their president is an empire-building liar but if they all had guns they'd be waving them in the street and he'd be afraid of them. "We'd better not pass that law. The terrorist-frightened couch potatoes are going to rampage in the street." Look, Bush's approval rating is about 60%. Not only will Americans NOT drive him out of office with weapons, they may not even bother to drive him out with ballot boxes when they get their chance. America has the USA Patriot act because Americans are willing to trade freedom for the illusion of safety.
It is sickening to me when leftists claim that every problem in the world is caused by capitalism or poverty but really this takes the cake. TIA caused by gun control!
I chose to live in the real world and use what everyone else is using and that is java.
If everyone always uses what "everyone else is using" then there will be no language progress. When Java came out I was an early adopter because sometimes somebody needs to move beyond what "everyone else is doing" (which was C/C++). I've since moved on to Python.
Having the same number follow you from your desk, to anywhere in the campus, to anywhere you can get a VPN connection (WiFi or otherwise), to home (over VPN) is just too cool and too usefull if you want to telecomute part time.
Ummm...I can think of a couple of easy ways to have my number follow me on the circuit-switched network. Cellphone? Call forwarding?
Some of the marketing folks were simply blown away when I showed em that they could get calls at the airport, at the coffee shop, at home, and anywhere on the corporate campus all from the same number that they used at the desk.
Sounds like these folks are easily impressed! I can even use my mobile phone at the Home Depot, the gas station and the beach. How about your wifi phones?
And to make corporations happy it greatly reduces the costs.
Well now you're talking about something interesting. Those other "wonderful features" you touted are really not particularly impressive. Why didn't you just say: "Wifi calls are cheap. Woohoo!"
With the cost of bandwidth on an unending downward spiral the cost of calls will basically drop to zero, it really won't make sense to meter them because the metering will cost more than the connection.
You are probably right that VOIP calls will not be metered at the connection level. But the bits will still be metered in one way or another. Nobody is going to give you free Internet access any more than they are going to give you free electricity (which was also going to be "too cheap to meter" according to certain pundits).
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Please don't discourage him. The editors could learn something from him. I'm sick of articles of the sort: "Foobar gets AutoFrotzing" where Foobar is an obscure kernel module or some video game and frotzing is something you would only have heard of if you had been following that module or video game yourself.
I have cracked 'secure' wep's in a matter of hours, and the more traffic going over the network, the easier it is.
It is well-known that WEP is insecure but that doesn't mean that it is impossible to send secure data over the air. It is absolutely not the case that "wires=security". If you need to transmit crucial passwords over your corporate intranet you might be smarter to encrypt than rely on the fact that nobody with access to your physical network wants to steal your data. Encryption is the key to security, not broadcast medium.
The only problem I have ever had with wired lines is bad planning. Providing you know where your workstations are going to go, and how you plan on growing, wires are just fine and MUCH faster!!:)
So you need a network drop anywhere anyone may ever want to work on their laptop (or palmtop, or wi-fi phone). Sure, if you are going to be restrictive it is easy to force people to work in the places you tell them they should work. But this can hurt productivity. Knowledge workers will have persistent wi-fi in their homes, in cafes, in restaurants (even McDonald's), in hotels, and in trains, but you're going to tell them they have to deal with wires at the office? Sorry dude, I can't help but think that you are short-sighted and will be proved so over the next few years. Wireless with true encryption will be standard almost everywhere people work.
I am surprised that this was offered. Microsoft is not out of the legal woods in Europe and a discount of this magnitude can almost only be construed as an attempt to leverage a monopoly situation. There can be no other rational business reason for this discount.
I would say that monopolies do not have to discount that much. They will use this as evidence that they are under pricing pressure just like a "normal" company. Obviously if it were not for the competition of Linux they would not slash their pricing this much.
Of course not, but it does help to show people that in reality, their mistakes can mean alot more than a few points deducted from a project.
Think about what you are saying for a second. These guys are professional programmers, probably trained as engineers (after all these dive computers are hardware) but maybe not. They are working on software literally designed to save people's lives. And you think that they didn't know that "their mistakes can mean alot more than a few points deducted from a project?" We don't know a lot about the circumstances under which this code was created but I'm pretty damn confident that a few months of "ethics training" in university wouldn't have made a whit of difference.
To show the uselessness of ethics training: most politicians are lawyers and most lawyers will have taken ethics courses in college. Does this imply that most politicians are ethical? Or do you think that maybe your own personal moral fibre and the environment you work in is more important? Think about all of the ethically-trained engineers involved in chemical dumping and safety cover-ups!
Sun is no longer a workstation or server company; they are the Java company. They are getting a lot of their business from Java these days--selling packages, selling Sun University courses, JavaOne, etc.
Do you have any evidence that they are actually making money on this stuff? I tend to think that Java is more of a publicity stunt for them. I'd be surprised if "packages, Sun University, JavaOne, etc." produce profits much less profits that cover the development R&D costs of Java. CNET says:
" There's just one problem: For all its hype and popularity, Java has made more money in direct software sales for competitors than for the company that invented it. "
" This is the paradox of Java: The very openness that made the technology popular also made it possible for competitors to profit from Java at Sun's expense."
'For years, Sun has refused to quantify the financial value of Java, but some details illuminate just how important it is to the company's server hardware, the powerful networked machines that handle chores such as stock trades or online catalog sales. "Java is a key factor in 90 percent of sales," Sueltz said, estimating that 98 percent of Sun servers used by customers run Java software.'
Undoubtedly, the server business continues to pay some of the bills,
Or maybe it pays all of the bills. There is little money in SunOne software licensing and essentially no money in conferences, training etc. Java sells hardware. That's why Sun does it. Not because it is a viable business unit in and of itself.
At what point does a GNU project turn into just an advertisement for commercial software. Can Microsoft release the source (ugly crap that it is) to GWindows 3.1 and spam it with ads. for Windows XP?
While I like ML (whole family) so much more than any imperative legacy (Java, C++, C, Perl), I see the main problem that any ML has with for modern RAD and with scripting is its static typing. And that's why I like (more than ML) Haskell [haskell.org] - it's dynamically typed and thus it's much more appropriate both for operating scripting and for big app RAD.
This sounded a little fishy to me based on my knowledge of programming language relationships. So I did five minutes of Google research. Here's what I turned up. "Haskell's static type system defines the formal relationship between types and values (4.1.4). The static type system ensures that Haskell programs are type safe; that is, that the programmer has not mismatched types in some way. For example, we cannot generally add together two characters, so the expression 'a'+'b' is ill-typed. The main advantage of statically typed languages is well-known: All type errors are detected at compile-time."
The biggest difference between Haskell and ML is that Haskell strongly separates the functional and imperative parts of the language. Look into "monads". "The monad cleanly separates the functional and imperative program components. In contrast, imperative languages with functional subsets do not generally have any well-defined barrier between the purely functional and imperative worlds."
It always bugs me at how quick people are to blame the problem for crappy coding on the language. This would be tantamount to a carpenter saying, "if my hammers weren't so damned versatile I could build a higher quality product and not break my thumb open."
No, you've completely mischaracterized the argument. Actually, the argument is: "People keep using a wrench as a hammer. Yes, you can do it but it isn't efficient and it isn't safe." C++ is not a good application programming language but that is what is is most often used for. It is excellent as a component, operating system or runtime programming language.
I'm curious whether you have any first-hand experience with these so-called HTML-monkeys making 100K+. I wouldn't be surprised if some very talented DHTML and JavaScript experts made that when they were being asked to work 15 hours a day to beat the competition at "MyManicurist.com", but they aren't monkeys any more than the server side guys. And then there are the people who don't do scripting but are really graphical designers for the web. I'm not one of these talented client-side or designer guys but what I've done of that stuff has taught me to appreciate them.
What he actually seems to be supporting is the stated (note stated, not actual) purpose of Palladium/TCPA. Signing code and verification of signed code to ensure that programs are who/what they say they are. The nature of GPL'd software makes "DRM" impossible - if your GPL'd program does X to verify that its allowed to access a file, I can write a program that does X, accesses the file, and then writes the file in a form that I can access without doing X.
Yes, but will a machine with TCPA enabled in the bios and CPU run your modified version? If not, how does it help you to circumvent that computer's DRM? The GPL absolutely does not make DRM impossible. As Linus points out, the GPL is irrelevant to the issue.
If you were in Baghdad, do you think you wouldn't be scared?
I would be scared. But I would understand that the goal is not to scare me. They day after the fall of Baghdad, the people did not cower in their houses afraid that American troops would come and kill them. Rather they took to the streets (in both good ways and bad ways) because they understood that they were not the targets. Consider if Osama Bin Laden somehow conquered New York city. Would you go to a rally in Times Square confident that his troops wouldn't hurt you?
I said: Whereas George Bush says: "Iraqis, we are not out to get you. We want Saddam."
You responded: Is George Bush trustworthy?
It doesn't matter. The goal of terrorism is to send a message. If George Bush sends a message that he doesn't want to hurt people then he isn't engaging in terrorism. If he hurts them anyway, especially purposefully, then he is engaging in treachery, not terrorism. Next you'll be claiming that when chemical companies dump carcinogens in the river they are engaging in terrorism. Why not just attach the word terrorism to everything we don't like?
Terrorism only applies to the latter because in the former the goal is NOT to scare the people but rather to attack the military. Whereas George Bush says: "Iraqis, we are not out to get you. We want Saddam.", Osama Bin Laden says: "We will kill you all indiscriminately to frighten you into doing what we want." i.e. TO CAUSE WIDESPREAD FEAR.
I am against the war, but I'm not willing to put aside my logic or common sense in arguing against it. War is not terrorism any more than apples are oranges or anthras is SARS. Words have meaning. The war could be wrong despite the fact that it is not terrorism. And terrorism is of course wrong despite the fact that it is not war.
Look, no matter how much you intellectualize it, the games that are put on shelves are the GAMES THAT SELL.
No, by definition, the games on shelves are the games that they THINK will sell. But sometimes they are surprised. In fact, they are often pleasently surprised when they accidentally make a game that girls love like Myst or Sim City. The writer of the article is describing some ideas for helping game developers to make games women will like so they will SELL MORE.
As to the object system: my general feeling, and I think the feeling of most people who've used both class-based and proto-based models, is that proto-based models are much more flexible and intuitive. You need a good reason to use a class-based model. Typically the reasons are either (1) speed or (2) compile-time bug-checking via strong typing. Both are good reasons.
You are complaining about the implementation of one Python interpreter, known as CPython. Jython compiles Python classes to Java classes. Anyhow, I don't share your impression that prototype-based inheritance is so wonderfully flexible and intuitive. After all, Smalltalk uses classes and is widely cosnidered to be both flexible and intuitive.
Python is absolutely not an experimental language. At the time Python was invented Javascript didn't even exist, and Javascript has hardly shown off the beauty of prototype-based inheritance. How many programmers do you know who have tried any of the other prototype languages? Python makes the same choice as Simula, Smalltalk and the various languages inspired by those two including C++, Java, C#, Ruby, Perl. On the other side of the issue we have what, JavaScript and Self (and several other experimental languages)?
I'm not saying that class-based is necessarily better than prototype-based. I'm saying that you need more evidence than simply asserting that "people who know" say that prototype-based is better.
Python's closure handling is broken; it can't even handle simple nested lexical scoping. This can be quite a big deal for writing fast, on-the-fly code. More damning, Python doesn't have much company here: all other related languages that I can think of have no problem with the closure handling. Java^H^H^H^HECMAscript. Newtonscript. Scheme. Ruby. Mathematica. Heck, even Java can do multiple closure nesting in anonymous classes. [BTW, Java has another closure boo-boo -- local outer variables must be final -- but that can be worked around with a simple size-1 array].
Python has closures with roughly the same restriction as Java's. So what's your problem?
Almost everyone seems to believe that the society with the fastest-growing economy is the best society for its members, but I've never seen a coherent argument to that effect. In fact, until I see something of the sort, I'm inclined not to believe it.
Greenspan is an economist talking to economists. He's talking about what he knows how to maximize. A sociologist talking to other sociologists would talk about other things.
But even an unaligned observer might find a strong temptation to choose the economic function over other social ones becauxe it is measurable. We can pretty much agree which periods of history had what economic properties: "unemployment was high but inflation was stable so investments kept their value" etc. But now try that trick with some kind of social indicator. Were people happier in the 50s or the 60s? In the 50s families were strong, but also repressed and racism was rampant. In the 60s you had all of that civil discord but people felt comfortable saying what they felt. The seventies were a right-off but by the 80s you had a return to economic well-being...but all of that greed. etc. I can certainly see the attraction of the view that we should maximize what we can measure and hope that it correlates (probably indirectly) with what we can't.
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America's dominance is not a passing phase that started with WWII and ended on 9/11 -- it's a phenomenon that will last as long as America lasts, or until other nations become so much like America that one can't tell them apart.
That is not true. America depends to a large extent on "soft power" which is in large part goodwill, moral leadership and ideology. Bush is pissing that away by offending everyone else in the world. If this trend continues unchecked, America will be an international pariah and that will have implications in commerce. Of course it is unlikely that the next president will be as much of a "divider, not a uniter" as Bush so a lot depends upon what happens next.
Remember that the second, more than the first, protects the rest.
What tripe. So Americans are substantially freer than all of the other countries of the world without such an amendment? Brits still have the courage and the right to criticize their PM for being a liar about WMD but Americans can hardly be bothered. The Dutch and Canadians can smoke pot without risking years in prison. Why is it that the G8 country with the most guns has the least freedom?
Oh, but we threw the second out a long time ago. That's why we have the USAPATRIOT Act and TIA. Because no one in Washington thinks they're at all accountable anymore.
I can't believe that even you believe this. Americans cannot look up from their television screens long enough to notice that their president is an empire-building liar but if they all had guns they'd be waving them in the street and he'd be afraid of them. "We'd better not pass that law. The terrorist-frightened couch potatoes are going to rampage in the street." Look, Bush's approval rating is about 60%. Not only will Americans NOT drive him out of office with weapons, they may not even bother to drive him out with ballot boxes when they get their chance. America has the USA Patriot act because Americans are willing to trade freedom for the illusion of safety.
It is sickening to me when leftists claim that every problem in the world is caused by capitalism or poverty but really this takes the cake. TIA caused by gun control!
I chose to live in the real world and use what everyone else is using and that is java.
If everyone always uses what "everyone else is using" then there will be no language progress. When Java came out I was an early adopter because sometimes somebody needs to move beyond what "everyone else is doing" (which was C/C++). I've since moved on to Python.
Having the same number follow you from your desk, to anywhere in the campus, to anywhere you can get a VPN connection (WiFi or otherwise), to home (over VPN) is just too cool and too usefull if you want to telecomute part time.
Ummm...I can think of a couple of easy ways to have my number follow me on the circuit-switched network. Cellphone? Call forwarding?
Some of the marketing folks were simply blown away when I showed em that they could get calls at the airport, at the coffee shop, at home, and anywhere on the corporate campus all from the same number that they used at the desk.
Sounds like these folks are easily impressed! I can even use my mobile phone at the Home Depot, the gas station and the beach. How about your wifi phones?
And to make corporations happy it greatly reduces the costs.
Well now you're talking about something interesting. Those other "wonderful features" you touted are really not particularly impressive. Why didn't you just say: "Wifi calls are cheap. Woohoo!"
With the cost of bandwidth on an unending downward spiral the cost of calls will basically drop to zero, it really won't make sense to meter them because the metering will cost more than the connection.
You are probably right that VOIP calls will not be metered at the connection level. But the bits will still be metered in one way or another. Nobody is going to give you free Internet access any more than they are going to give you free electricity (which was also going to be "too cheap to meter" according to certain pundits).
Please don't discourage him. The editors could learn something from him. I'm sick of articles of the sort: "Foobar gets AutoFrotzing" where Foobar is an obscure kernel module or some video game and frotzing is something you would only have heard of if you had been following that module or video game yourself.
Ahh, the QWERTY myth. http://www.independent.org/tii/news/liebowitz_econ omist.html
I have cracked 'secure' wep's in a matter of hours, and the more traffic going over the network, the easier it is.
It is well-known that WEP is insecure but that doesn't mean that it is impossible to send secure data over the air. It is absolutely not the case that "wires=security". If you need to transmit crucial passwords over your corporate intranet you might be smarter to encrypt than rely on the fact that nobody with access to your physical network wants to steal your data. Encryption is the key to security, not broadcast medium.
The only problem I have ever had with wired lines is bad planning. Providing you know where your workstations are going to go, and how you plan on growing, wires are just fine and MUCH faster!! :)
So you need a network drop anywhere anyone may ever want to work on their laptop (or palmtop, or wi-fi phone). Sure, if you are going to be restrictive it is easy to force people to work in the places you tell them they should work. But this can hurt productivity. Knowledge workers will have persistent wi-fi in their homes, in cafes, in restaurants (even McDonald's), in hotels, and in trains, but you're going to tell them they have to deal with wires at the office? Sorry dude, I can't help but think that you are short-sighted and will be proved so over the next few years. Wireless with true encryption will be standard almost everywhere people work.
I am surprised that this was offered. Microsoft is not out of the legal woods in Europe and a discount of this magnitude can almost only be construed as an attempt to leverage a monopoly situation. There can be no other rational business reason for this discount.
I would say that monopolies do not have to discount that much. They will use this as evidence that they are under pricing pressure just like a "normal" company. Obviously if it were not for the competition of Linux they would not slash their pricing this much.
Of course not, but it does help to show people that in reality, their mistakes can mean alot more than a few points deducted from a project.
Think about what you are saying for a second. These guys are professional programmers, probably trained as engineers (after all these dive computers are hardware) but maybe not. They are working on software literally designed to save people's lives. And you think that they didn't know that "their mistakes can mean alot more than a few points deducted from a project?" We don't know a lot about the circumstances under which this code was created but I'm pretty damn confident that a few months of "ethics training" in university wouldn't have made a whit of difference.
To show the uselessness of ethics training: most politicians are lawyers and most lawyers will have taken ethics courses in college. Does this imply that most politicians are ethical? Or do you think that maybe your own personal moral fibre and the environment you work in is more important? Think about all of the ethically-trained engineers involved in chemical dumping and safety cover-ups!
Do you really think that ethics can be taught in a lecture?
Sun is no longer a workstation or server company; they are the Java company. They are getting a lot of their business from Java these days--selling packages, selling Sun University courses, JavaOne, etc.
Do you have any evidence that they are actually making money on this stuff? I tend to think that Java is more of a publicity stunt for them. I'd be surprised if "packages, Sun University, JavaOne, etc." produce profits much less profits that cover the development R&D costs of Java. CNET says:
" There's just one problem: For all its hype and popularity, Java has made more money in direct software sales for competitors than for the company that invented it. "
" This is the paradox of Java: The very openness that made the technology popular also made it possible for competitors to profit from Java at Sun's expense."
'For years, Sun has refused to quantify the financial value of Java, but some details illuminate just how important it is to the company's server hardware, the powerful networked machines that handle chores such as stock trades or online catalog sales. "Java is a key factor in 90 percent of sales," Sueltz said, estimating that 98 percent of Sun servers used by customers run Java software.'
Undoubtedly, the server business continues to pay some of the bills,
Or maybe it pays all of the bills. There is little money in SunOne software licensing and essentially no money in conferences, training etc. Java sells hardware. That's why Sun does it. Not because it is a viable business unit in and of itself.
At what point does a GNU project turn into just an advertisement for commercial software. Can Microsoft release the source (ugly crap that it is) to GWindows 3.1 and spam it with ads. for Windows XP?
Why not? How would that hurt anyone?
While I like ML (whole family) so much more than any imperative legacy (Java, C++, C, Perl), I see the main problem that any ML has with for modern RAD and with scripting is its static typing. And that's why I like (more than ML) Haskell [haskell.org] - it's dynamically typed and thus it's much more appropriate both for operating scripting and for big app RAD.
This sounded a little fishy to me based on my knowledge of programming language relationships. So I did five minutes of Google research. Here's what I turned up. "Haskell's static type system defines the formal relationship between types and values (4.1.4). The static type system ensures that Haskell programs are type safe; that is, that the programmer has not mismatched types in some way. For example, we cannot generally add together two characters, so the expression 'a'+'b' is ill-typed. The main advantage of statically typed languages is well-known: All type errors are detected at compile-time."
The biggest difference between Haskell and ML is that Haskell strongly separates the functional and imperative parts of the language. Look into "monads". "The monad cleanly separates the functional and imperative program components. In contrast, imperative languages with functional subsets do not generally have any well-defined barrier between the purely functional and imperative worlds."
It always bugs me at how quick people are to blame the problem for crappy coding on the language. This would be tantamount to a carpenter saying, "if my hammers weren't so damned versatile I could build a higher quality product and not break my thumb open."
No, you've completely mischaracterized the argument. Actually, the argument is: "People keep using a wrench as a hammer. Yes, you can do it but it isn't efficient and it isn't safe." C++ is not a good application programming language but that is what is is most often used for. It is excellent as a component, operating system or runtime programming language.
Remember that C# and .NET are robust enough for these - the .NET IDE proves that.
Visual Studio .NET is for the most part not written using the .NET framework. It was developed concurrently with the .NET framework.
I'm curious whether you have any first-hand experience with these so-called HTML-monkeys making 100K+. I wouldn't be surprised if some very talented DHTML and JavaScript experts made that when they were being asked to work 15 hours a day to beat the competition at "MyManicurist.com", but they aren't monkeys any more than the server side guys. And then there are the people who don't do scripting but are really graphical designers for the web. I'm not one of these talented client-side or designer guys but what I've done of that stuff has taught me to appreciate them.
What he actually seems to be supporting is the stated (note stated, not actual) purpose of Palladium/TCPA. Signing code and verification of signed code to ensure that programs are who/what they say they are. The nature of GPL'd software makes "DRM" impossible - if your GPL'd program does X to verify that its allowed to access a file, I can write a program that does X, accesses the file, and then writes the file in a form that I can access without doing X.
Yes, but will a machine with TCPA enabled in the bios and CPU run your modified version? If not, how does it help you to circumvent that computer's DRM? The GPL absolutely does not make DRM impossible. As Linus points out, the GPL is irrelevant to the issue.
Agree that this is an equally Orwellian abuse of language.
If you were in Baghdad, do you think you wouldn't be scared?
I would be scared. But I would understand that the goal is not to scare me. They day after the fall of Baghdad, the people did not cower in their houses afraid that American troops would come and kill them. Rather they took to the streets (in both good ways and bad ways) because they understood that they were not the targets. Consider if Osama Bin Laden somehow conquered New York city. Would you go to a rally in Times Square confident that his troops wouldn't hurt you?
I said: Whereas George Bush says: "Iraqis, we are not out to get you. We want Saddam."
You responded: Is George Bush trustworthy?
It doesn't matter. The goal of terrorism is to send a message. If George Bush sends a message that he doesn't want to hurt people then he isn't engaging in terrorism. If he hurts them anyway, especially purposefully, then he is engaging in treachery, not terrorism. Next you'll be claiming that when chemical companies dump carcinogens in the river they are engaging in terrorism. Why not just attach the word terrorism to everything we don't like?
Terrorism only applies to the latter because in the former the goal is NOT to scare the people but rather to attack the military. Whereas George Bush says: "Iraqis, we are not out to get you. We want Saddam.", Osama Bin Laden says: "We will kill you all indiscriminately to frighten you into doing what we want." i.e. TO CAUSE WIDESPREAD FEAR.
I am against the war, but I'm not willing to put aside my logic or common sense in arguing against it. War is not terrorism any more than apples are oranges or anthras is SARS. Words have meaning. The war could be wrong despite the fact that it is not terrorism. And terrorism is of course wrong despite the fact that it is not war.
Look, no matter how much you intellectualize it, the games that are put on shelves are the GAMES THAT SELL.
No, by definition, the games on shelves are the games that they THINK will sell. But sometimes they are surprised. In fact, they are often pleasently surprised when they accidentally make a game that girls love like Myst or Sim City. The writer of the article is describing some ideas for helping game developers to make games women will like so they will SELL MORE.
As to the object system: my general feeling, and I think the feeling of most people who've used both class-based and proto-based models, is that proto-based models are much more flexible and intuitive. You need a good reason to use a class-based model. Typically the reasons are either (1) speed or (2) compile-time bug-checking via strong typing. Both are good reasons.
You are complaining about the implementation of one Python interpreter, known as CPython. Jython compiles Python classes to Java classes. Anyhow, I don't share your impression that prototype-based inheritance is so wonderfully flexible and intuitive. After all, Smalltalk uses classes and is widely cosnidered to be both flexible and intuitive.
Python is absolutely not an experimental language. At the time Python was invented Javascript didn't even exist, and Javascript has hardly shown off the beauty of prototype-based inheritance. How many programmers do you know who have tried any of the other prototype languages? Python makes the same choice as Simula, Smalltalk and the various languages inspired by those two including C++, Java, C#, Ruby, Perl. On the other side of the issue we have what, JavaScript and Self (and several other experimental languages)?
I'm not saying that class-based is necessarily better than prototype-based. I'm saying that you need more evidence than simply asserting that "people who know" say that prototype-based is better.
Python's closure handling is broken; it can't even handle simple nested lexical scoping. This can be quite a big deal for writing fast, on-the-fly code. More damning, Python doesn't have much company here: all other related languages that I can think of have no problem with the closure handling. Java^H^H^H^HECMAscript. Newtonscript. Scheme. Ruby. Mathematica. Heck, even Java can do multiple closure nesting in anonymous classes. [BTW, Java has another closure boo-boo -- local outer variables must be final -- but that can be worked around with a simple size-1 array].
Python has closures with roughly the same restriction as Java's. So what's your problem?
According to Google, Rube Goldberg was inspired by Heath Robinson. Rube was American and Heath British.
Almost everyone seems to believe that the society with the fastest-growing economy is the best society for its members, but I've never seen a coherent argument to that effect. In fact, until I see something of the sort, I'm inclined not to believe it.
Greenspan is an economist talking to economists. He's talking about what he knows how to maximize. A sociologist talking to other sociologists would talk about other things.
But even an unaligned observer might find a strong temptation to choose the economic function over other social ones becauxe it is measurable. We can pretty much agree which periods of history had what economic properties: "unemployment was high but inflation was stable so investments kept their value" etc. But now try that trick with some kind of social indicator. Were people happier in the 50s or the 60s? In the 50s families were strong, but also repressed and racism was rampant. In the 60s you had all of that civil discord but people felt comfortable saying what they felt. The seventies were a right-off but by the 80s you had a return to economic well-being...but all of that greed. etc. I can certainly see the attraction of the view that we should maximize what we can measure and hope that it correlates (probably indirectly) with what we can't.