And writing apps for those things isn't fun. You have to spend so much time caring about the parallel stuff instead of caring about the problem.
This is only a problem for the writers of OS kernels and virtual machines (JVM, CLR, Lisp, Erlang, Ruby...), and they have a lot of experience solving these problems. The rest of us will continue to write code just as usual with no changes whatsoever. If you have good language support for threads and concurrency it doesn't matter if your app is running on one processor or a thousand.
I predict that the poor and stupid will continue to breed at over twice the rate of the wealthy and educated
"I don't care about all that crap", said Michelle Davis, 18. "All I know is, I'm in love!"
I've been searching for that Onion article, but no luck. But for some refreshing cynical elitism, you can't go wrong with this classic. Cracks me up, every time.:-)
huge text boxes ? Try opening a standard text search in your favorite O.S.; then take a picture of your standard PC screen at mid range, so that the keyboard and the desk and the person sitting would be (at least partly) visible. Then view the picture on a TV , from 3 meters away. Can you read the text? I guess not. Whereas, people at home are supposed to be able to read it. Hence, the huge text box, the screen-filling-records, the no-scrolling, and so on .
But this assumes that watching them doing a database search is exciting. If it is so vital to the plot, why do they have to film it so that the desk and the person in front of it is visible? Why not do like Matrix 2, where they quickly filmed the screen as Trinity used nmap to find an old and appearently unpatched flaw in the ssh server and then did an overflow attack on it to get in. If it is NOT vital to the plot, why not have a character come up and say "I looked through all the major national police databases as you asked me, but I didn't find anything relevant on the suspect." Keeps the camera on something most humans find more interesting (humans and their interactions) and gets the plot moving on just as well.
Hence, the huge text box, the screen-filling-records, the no-scrolling, and so on .
Yes, I understand the reason for it, but it utterly breaks my suspension of disbelief. If the only way you can get your message across is by treating the viewers like they are complete idiots and/or have never used a computer before, perhaps you should rethink the scene.
Moreover, the good point of the above is that it is O.S.-agnostic. You cannot tell if the detective is using MS Windows, Mac Os, Unix, Linux, Blah-OS.... And this, in my opinion, is a good idea: we have too much product placement in TV already.
Deliberate product placement is annoying, sure. But if you are changing the movie world into something that is lacking in verisimilitude, then you have gone too far. If all cars in the film/series were missing their brand, or all shops had their signs taken down, it would do nothing to increase your enjoyment, it would just look weird.
Pick any police/detective/thriller series I've seen (American, British, Swedish...) where the officers are "searching the database". Remember to always include the following: 1) A single huge textbox for entering search criteria. Preferably filling the whole screen. 2) Text slowly appearing on screen, preferably one letter at a time with a blipping noise. 3) As the search is being performed, all records must flash by the screen. 4) If no match, the words NO MATCH must fill the screen, preferably on a multicolored flashing background. 5) A records must fill exactly one screen. No scrolling or paging allowed.
That crap was barely tolerable in the 80s, but these days? 75% of the population use computers daily for crying out loud.
You're thinking _ANTARCTIC_ ice layers, not Arctic. Arctic ice is _sea ice_ and as sea ice, it melts and refreezes and it _moves_ all over the damn place.
You are right, I was thinking of Antarctic ice, sloppy of me. However, there are other ways. We can for instance find geological evidence from lake bed sediment cores.
And ice cores? The ice at the Arctic was 9 feet thick _at its thickest parts_ back in 1958. Just where are you going to get ice cores?
Greenland, for instance. I know they are not the same, but as an indicator of the climate of the area it is an indicator, right?
We can't prove that cracks that these haven't happened before, I agree, but we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years). Even before this latest evidence came, many scientists were warning that the north pole could disappear completely during northern hemisphere summertime before the end of this century. And this is something that hasn't happened for along time. See for instance polar bears who need sea ice to hunt for seals. They evolved probably around 200 000 years ago.
There was technology throughout most of human history that recorded Arctic ice cover? Until aircraft, nuclear submarines, nuclear icebreakers, and satellites were invented, nobody was able to say with certainty whether the Northwest Passage existed or not, which was previously the domain of people like Henry Hudson. Indeed, until the technology existed, nobody could really map the icepack with any decent accuracy.
We can extract ice cores and easily date the layers.
The rest of your post is just "it may have happened before" handwaving. Ok, but it hasn't happened in a LONG time, the rate of change is unprecedented, and the possible economical consequences are enormous.
You'd have 3 servers as close in configuration as possible. One houses your production enviroment DB and the other houses your test and one for the QA enviroment. You can get away with QA and TEST in the same server but you REALLY don't want a devoloper to crash the test box or bog it down with a bad query when they're doing QA.
Seconded. I'm on a project right now where we (the programmers) have finally gotten management to allocate time for us so we can get going on doing more unit testing, integration testing and generally cleaning up the code.
We have had a few incedents where a bug caused bad data to be inserted into the database. The bug was solved, but the data remained and caused strange behaviour. I am currently (reluctantly:-) learning Ruby so I can write a script that empties database tables and inserts fresh test data. This script is started by cron every night and the JUnit tests and integration tests are then run automatically. The QA team can then do their manual test during the day on that server.
We also have one server that all developers are running their daily code against, and one intermediate server where we do test deploys before stuff is delivered for QA testing.
I can also recommend you to take a look at Apache Derby which is included in JDK6. It is small, fast, and you don't have to do a lot of setting up. A single line of code to open a jdbc connection and you are ready to go, perfect for testing.
Slashdot have several times published stories by Free Republic, and articles by right wing think tanks poo-poohing global warming. But as a previous poster said, if you are Attila the Hun, I guess everything would look left wing...
It painted a pretty good argument FOR GM food... to feed the millions who are otherwise dying because it's hard to get crops to grow in their parts of the world.
The starvation in the world is not because we don't have enough food, it is because the food can't get to the right places. This is because of wars and corrupt third world governments, so GM will do nothing to help this.
What makes me at least wary, is actions like US companies getting the patent to basmati rice, even though this has been grown in India for centuries. Or stuff like genes being inserted so that the crops grown are infertile, turning farmers from an "open source" model, into one where they have to keep subscribing every year to get new seeds.
Is this true, or have Penn & Teller hoodwinked me?
Yes, they have. Their whole show is based on triumphantly knocking down strawman arguments and claiming that this is scientific investigation or rationality. Standard far right wing tactics. Turn off the TV and do some reading instead.
I gots no love for Sun... after all Jython been out for half a decade, and Sun has shown little to no interest in it... just imagine how much better it would be if they had the foresight to support it and improve its performance
They can't support every open source project and everyones favourite language under the sun. From what I have heard development on Jython is picking up again, and it performs quite well. Perhaps Sun thought resources were better spent on improving speed and stability in the core, so they didn't lose the customers they already had.
The fact that they have hired the JRuby developers is not intended as a slight against the other scripting languages either, as Thomas writes in his blog:
1. Does the Sun move mean Groovy, Jython, BeanShell, and friends are being cut out of the picture? Has Sun chosen a winner in the dynamic languages realm?
Absolutely not, on both counts. I got involved in JRuby for one reason: Ruby was underrepresented in the Java world, and happened to be a very attractive language to me. Jython was fairly well-established and performed quite nicely. Groovy was gaining some traction and seeing an upswing in developer interest. JavaScript was scheduled to be included in Java 6. What about Ruby? JRuby didn't run most Ruby apps, had known major incompatibilities with C Ruby, and performance was very poor. Something had to be done.
As far as I'm concenrned Sun is playing catch-up with Microsoft, and this is no more than a half assed response to MS releasing IronPython
That is just ridiculous. As I stated in a previous post, the increased support for dynamic languages on the JVM has been planned since at least 2003. Even hiring these guys have been planned for a long time, how fast do you think the HR department works on a big company like Sun? The fact that Microsoft announced the IronPython support a week ago is just a coincidence.
The solution is YARV [...] Benchmarks show that it will be about as fast as Java and.NET in most situations. Slower in some situations, faster in some.
Yes, but the JVM is a moving target. By the time all those bugs have been ironed out, JRuby will have improved their execution speeds too. Lets not declare the winner until we have the finished products to compare, otherwise we are just playing the old Microsoft game of "lets compare the features of our future products with the features of our competition today".
If now, with.NET, this is the first time that Sun is thinking about adding other language compilers for their bytecode then they are way to late.
Two seconds of Googling could have told you that the JVM has supported more languages than.net for a long time.
I don't think they will ever be able to top the.NET support already there. If they think this is competing with.NET, it's to little, to late.
You do know that Java is MUCH bigger than.Net out in the real world?
More probable: Sun is going to add Ruby on rails to their JSP system, which is probably the only way they kan add anything to anything.
You really have no idea what you are talking about. Java developers could use Ruby to do fast and easy unit tests for instance. The scripting sessions at the last JavaOne showed lots of other interesting uses. Also it wouldn't surprise me if one possible long time plan wouldn't be to make the JVM the fastest, most stable and therefore the most attractive platform to run all Ruby programs.
The JRuby folk can also help iron out bugs in the JDK/JRE which inderectly benefit all Java developers/users. Also this will hopefully ease off the preassure to include everyones' favourite feature X into Java, something that in my opinion is threatening to turn Java into an even bigger mess than C++ (you know, an octopus created by nailing extra legs on a dog).
Fourthly, because there is just a slight chance that Sun will decide to make the JVM more flexible and amenable to languages other than Java.
JSR 223, a framework for "allowing scripting language programs to access information developed in the Java Platform and allowing scripting language pages to be used in Java Server-side Applications" has been kicking around at least since 2003 and is included in the upcoming JDK6 which comes with the Rhino JavaScript engine included. Other scripting people like JPython and Groovy have done great work (from what I understand, I'm not a fan of dymanic languages myself).
and maybe after it is ported to linux/*bsd and ten years have gone by, admins will actually start using it to its full potential.
Porting DTrace involves messing around in the kernel of the OS being instrumented, and since the GPL forbids mixing in non-GPL code, DTrace will never come to Linux.
I believe it has already been ported to BSD and is on the way to Mac.
I saw a demo of DTrace at Javaforum in Stockholm a week ago, it was VERY impressive stuff.
My self esteem was taking a pretty big hit there, what with my sending pictures of my erect penis to a complete stranger (which is a perfectly reasonable and intelligent thing to do, by the way), and then not getting back a reply. I'm just glad we live in a world where you can do such a thing with absolutely no repercussions, ever.
Yes, it is just awful that consenting adults can get away with things in their private life that you don't approve of. Let's put a stop to that.
This is offtopic grousing, but I submitted a Slashdot story that was rejected that I think is pretty important, namely that it is now official that Sun hires two of the main open source JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work fulltime on Ruby for the JVM, and generally improve tools support for dynamic languages.
This might get a lot of people worried ("Get your stinking Java out of my Ruby!" "Get your stinking Ruby out of my Java!", but I think this will benefit both languages, and especially the JVM as a platform.
Plus, mars is warming with receding ice caps. Maybe solar effects are what is driving our change?
The difference is that Mars has pretty much NO ATMOSPHERE, so external factors like solar radiation are the only things that can affect its ice caps.
An inferred global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend disproves man made global warming on earth? You claim to be a sceptic, but you seem to accept some claims pretty uncritically.
These numbers are for the US only. In Sweden at least, the PC is still the number one platform, though if you take all the different consoles and handhelds games taken together that is a bigger market. They people who did this article also admit that they don't count sales by, for instance, Steam.
Penny Arcade summed it up pretty well I think - "Also, when it was announced that Dark Messiah would be built using the Valve's Source engine, I said that if a publisher of Ubisoft's scale chose to deliver a title through Steam, digital delivery would quickly cease being a novelty. Well, that's happening. One sometimes hears that PC gaming is dead, and then you see something like what Valve is doing with Episode 2 and warmth spreads throughout your entire body - even if their bet is being hedged on next-gen systems. We know how good we have it. But try to find evidence of a strong PC platform at dedicated game retailers and the main thing you will find is that they have no interest in it. The games can't be traded in, and a PC gamer probably doesn't attach guides or peripherals to their purchases at the same rate, so it exists outside the philosophical continuum of their business. I'm aware that many gamers find Steam or other ethereal delivery methods distasteful, and I wonder how long they will have that luxury."
Well, as long as Neverwinter Nights 2 comes, I will be a happy gamer for a looong time.
I don't see why they can't just embed the flash directly and let the user click on it if they don't have flash, which will take them to the flash download site anyways.
Because then you could activate AdBlock and NoScript and still see the stuff you WANT to see on the page with minimal hassle, which, if enough people do it, would piss off advertisers and lose them ad revenue.
Hardly. It is one of the areas in your body with the most nerve endings in it. Take it from someone who still has one, just rubbing it between your fingers feels damn good. Also, removing it turns makes the skin on the head of your penis, dryer, thicker and more like regular skin. I think it is likely that this also reduces sensitivity during sex.
If you do it to yourself as an adult for astethic or medical reasons (phimosis), that is fine, but when you do it to kids who can't defend themselves I think it is a form of sexual mutilation.
Tell me, don't you ever shave your face and clip your nails?
Yes, and I have never needed anaesthetic while doing that, which is a big difference. If you do, that might be an indication you are doing something wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
And writing apps for those things isn't fun. You have to spend so much time caring about the parallel stuff instead of caring about the problem.
This is only a problem for the writers of OS kernels and virtual machines (JVM, CLR, Lisp, Erlang, Ruby...), and they have a lot of experience solving these problems. The rest of us will continue to write code just as usual with no changes whatsoever. If you have good language support for threads and concurrency it doesn't matter if your app is running on one processor or a thousand.
I predict that the poor and stupid will continue to breed at over twice the rate of the wealthy and educated
:-)
"I don't care about all that crap", said Michelle Davis, 18. "All I know is, I'm in love!"
I've been searching for that Onion article, but no luck. But for some refreshing cynical elitism, you can't go wrong with this classic. Cracks me up, every time.
huge text boxes ? Try opening a standard text search in your favorite O.S.; then take a picture of your standard PC screen at mid range, so that the keyboard and the desk and the person sitting would be (at least partly) visible. Then view the picture on a TV , from 3 meters away. Can you read the text? I guess not. Whereas, people at home are supposed to be able to read it. Hence, the huge text box, the screen-filling-records, the no-scrolling, and so on .
But this assumes that watching them doing a database search is exciting. If it is so vital to the plot, why do they have to film it so that the desk and the person in front of it is visible? Why not do like Matrix 2, where they quickly filmed the screen as Trinity used nmap to find an old and appearently unpatched flaw in the ssh server and then did an overflow attack on it to get in. If it is NOT vital to the plot, why not have a character come up and say "I looked through all the major national police databases as you asked me, but I didn't find anything relevant on the suspect." Keeps the camera on something most humans find more interesting (humans and their interactions) and gets the plot moving on just as well.
Hence, the huge text box, the screen-filling-records, the no-scrolling, and so on .
Yes, I understand the reason for it, but it utterly breaks my suspension of disbelief. If the only way you can get your message across is by treating the viewers like they are complete idiots and/or have never used a computer before, perhaps you should rethink the scene.
Moreover, the good point of the above is that it is O.S.-agnostic. You cannot tell if the detective is using MS Windows, Mac Os, Unix, Linux, Blah-OS.... And this, in my opinion, is a good idea: we have too much product placement in TV already.
Deliberate product placement is annoying, sure. But if you are changing the movie world into something that is lacking in verisimilitude, then you have gone too far. If all cars in the film/series were missing their brand, or all shops had their signs taken down, it would do nothing to increase your enjoyment, it would just look weird.
I was not aware of the broken window parable until just a few minutes ago, thus fell enlightened;It is a good day for me!
Enlightenment through defenestration?
Pick any police/detective/thriller series I've seen (American, British, Swedish...) where the officers are "searching the database". Remember to always include the following:
1) A single huge textbox for entering search criteria. Preferably filling the whole screen.
2) Text slowly appearing on screen, preferably one letter at a time with a blipping noise.
3) As the search is being performed, all records must flash by the screen.
4) If no match, the words NO MATCH must fill the screen, preferably on a multicolored flashing background.
5) A records must fill exactly one screen. No scrolling or paging allowed.
That crap was barely tolerable in the 80s, but these days? 75% of the population use computers daily for crying out loud.
You're thinking _ANTARCTIC_ ice layers, not Arctic. Arctic ice is _sea ice_ and as sea ice, it melts and refreezes and it _moves_ all over the damn place.
You are right, I was thinking of Antarctic ice, sloppy of me. However, there are other ways. We can for instance find geological evidence from lake bed sediment cores.
And ice cores? The ice at the Arctic was 9 feet thick _at its thickest parts_ back in 1958. Just where are you going to get ice cores?
Greenland, for instance. I know they are not the same, but as an indicator of the climate of the area it is an indicator, right?
We can't prove that cracks that these haven't happened before, I agree, but we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years). Even before this latest evidence came, many scientists were warning that the north pole could disappear completely during northern hemisphere summertime before the end of this century. And this is something that hasn't happened for along time. See for instance polar bears who need sea ice to hunt for seals. They evolved probably around 200 000 years ago.
Even the Economist, who have been global warming deniers for years recently admitted that global warming was real and was going to have severe environemental and economic impact. You don't find this alarming?
There was technology throughout most of human history that recorded Arctic ice cover? Until aircraft, nuclear submarines, nuclear icebreakers, and satellites were invented, nobody was able to say with certainty whether the Northwest Passage existed or not, which was previously the domain of people like Henry Hudson. Indeed, until the technology existed, nobody could really map the icepack with any decent accuracy.
We can extract ice cores and easily date the layers.
The rest of your post is just "it may have happened before" handwaving. Ok, but it hasn't happened in a LONG time, the rate of change is unprecedented, and the possible economical consequences are enormous.
You'd have 3 servers as close in configuration as possible. One houses your production enviroment DB and the other houses your test and one for the QA enviroment. You can get away with QA and TEST in the same server but you REALLY don't want a devoloper to crash the test box or bog it down with a bad query when they're doing QA.
:-) learning Ruby so I can write a script that empties database tables and inserts fresh test data. This script is started by cron every night and the JUnit tests and integration tests are then run automatically. The QA team can then do their manual test during the day on that server.
Seconded. I'm on a project right now where we (the programmers) have finally gotten management to allocate time for us so we can get going on doing more unit testing, integration testing and generally cleaning up the code.
We have had a few incedents where a bug caused bad data to be inserted into the database. The bug was solved, but the data remained and caused strange behaviour. I am currently (reluctantly
We also have one server that all developers are running their daily code against, and one intermediate server where we do test deploys before stuff is delivered for QA testing.
I can also recommend you to take a look at Apache Derby which is included in JDK6. It is small, fast, and you don't have to do a lot of setting up. A single line of code to open a jdbc connection and you are ready to go, perfect for testing.
How will they stop people just ripping off some of the templates from MS Office, obfuscating them slightly, and then submitting them?
Nothing, but these submissions are unlikely to be accepted, much less win the competition.
Slashdot have several times published stories by Free Republic, and articles by right wing think tanks poo-poohing global warming. But as a previous poster said, if you are Attila the Hun, I guess everything would look left wing...
It painted a pretty good argument FOR GM food... to feed the millions who are otherwise dying because it's hard to get crops to grow in their parts of the world.
The starvation in the world is not because we don't have enough food, it is because the food can't get to the right places. This is because of wars and corrupt third world governments, so GM will do nothing to help this.
What makes me at least wary, is actions like US companies getting the patent to basmati rice, even though this has been grown in India for centuries. Or stuff like genes being inserted so that the crops grown are infertile, turning farmers from an "open source" model, into one where they have to keep subscribing every year to get new seeds.
Is this true, or have Penn & Teller hoodwinked me?
Yes, they have. Their whole show is based on triumphantly knocking down strawman arguments and claiming that this is scientific investigation or rationality. Standard far right wing tactics. Turn off the TV and do some reading instead.
They can't support every open source project and everyones favourite language under the sun. From what I have heard development on Jython is picking up again, and it performs quite well. Perhaps Sun thought resources were better spent on improving speed and stability in the core, so they didn't lose the customers they already had.
The fact that they have hired the JRuby developers is not intended as a slight against the other scripting languages either, as Thomas writes in his blog:
As far as I'm concenrned Sun is playing catch-up with Microsoft, and this is no more than a half assed response to MS releasing IronPython
That is just ridiculous. As I stated in a previous post, the increased support for dynamic languages on the JVM has been planned since at least 2003. Even hiring these guys have been planned for a long time, how fast do you think the HR department works on a big company like Sun? The fact that Microsoft announced the IronPython support a week ago is just a coincidence.
The solution is YARV [...] Benchmarks show that it will be about as fast as Java and .NET in most situations. Slower in some situations, faster in some.
Yes, but the JVM is a moving target. By the time all those bugs have been ironed out, JRuby will have improved their execution speeds too. Lets not declare the winner until we have the finished products to compare, otherwise we are just playing the old Microsoft game of "lets compare the features of our future products with the features of our competition today".
Bah... I meant:
Also you could just have read TFA, or the FAQs, or the blogs.
Given Sun's past criticism, I think it's fair to ask whether they have committed to using the GPL for future JRuby releases.
Of course they will, they can't change the licence to a less restrictive one. Also you could just have read .
If now, with .NET, this is the first time that Sun is thinking about adding other language compilers for their bytecode then they are way to late.
.net for a long time.
.NET support already there. If they think this is competing with .NET, it's to little, to late.
.Net out in the real world?
Two seconds of Googling could have told you that the JVM has supported more languages than
I don't think they will ever be able to top the
You do know that Java is MUCH bigger than
More probable: Sun is going to add Ruby on rails to their JSP system, which is probably the only way they kan add anything to anything.
You really have no idea what you are talking about. Java developers could use Ruby to do fast and easy unit tests for instance. The scripting sessions at the last JavaOne showed lots of other interesting uses. Also it wouldn't surprise me if one possible long time plan wouldn't be to make the JVM the fastest, most stable and therefore the most attractive platform to run all Ruby programs.
The JRuby folk can also help iron out bugs in the JDK/JRE which inderectly benefit all Java developers/users. Also this will hopefully ease off the preassure to include everyones' favourite feature X into Java, something that in my opinion is threatening to turn Java into an even bigger mess than C++ (you know, an octopus created by nailing extra legs on a dog).
Fourthly, because there is just a slight chance that Sun will decide to make the JVM more flexible and amenable to languages other than Java.
JSR 223, a framework for "allowing scripting language programs to access information developed in the Java Platform and allowing scripting language pages to be used in Java Server-side Applications" has been kicking around at least since 2003 and is included in the upcoming JDK6 which comes with the Rhino JavaScript engine included. Other scripting people like JPython and Groovy have done great work (from what I understand, I'm not a fan of dymanic languages myself).
Good that this was finally posted on Slashdot, I was a bit peeved when my submission was rejected.
and maybe after it is ported to linux/*bsd and ten years have gone by, admins will actually start using it to its full potential.
Porting DTrace involves messing around in the kernel of the OS being instrumented, and since the GPL forbids mixing in non-GPL code, DTrace will never come to Linux.
I believe it has already been ported to BSD and is on the way to Mac.
I saw a demo of DTrace at Javaforum in Stockholm a week ago, it was VERY impressive stuff.
My self esteem was taking a pretty big hit there, what with my sending pictures of my erect penis to a complete stranger (which is a perfectly reasonable and intelligent thing to do, by the way), and then not getting back a reply. I'm just glad we live in a world where you can do such a thing with absolutely no repercussions, ever.
Yes, it is just awful that consenting adults can get away with things in their private life that you don't approve of. Let's put a stop to that.
This is offtopic grousing, but I submitted a Slashdot story that was rejected that I think is pretty important, namely that it is now official that Sun hires two of the main open source JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work fulltime on Ruby for the JVM, and generally improve tools support for dynamic languages.
This might get a lot of people worried ("Get your stinking Java out of my Ruby!" "Get your stinking Ruby out of my Java!", but I think this will benefit both languages, and especially the JVM as a platform.
You know, I have yast about had enough of this.
Plus, mars is warming with receding ice caps. Maybe solar effects are what is driving our change?
The difference is that Mars has pretty much NO ATMOSPHERE, so external factors like solar radiation are the only things that can affect its ice caps.
An inferred global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend disproves man made global warming on earth? You claim to be a sceptic, but you seem to accept some claims pretty uncritically.
These numbers are for the US only. In Sweden at least, the PC is still the number one platform, though if you take all the different consoles and handhelds games taken together that is a bigger market. They people who did this article also admit that they don't count sales by, for instance, Steam.
Penny Arcade summed it up pretty well I think -
"Also, when it was announced that Dark Messiah would be built using the Valve's Source engine, I said that if a publisher of Ubisoft's scale chose to deliver a title through Steam, digital delivery would quickly cease being a novelty. Well, that's happening. One sometimes hears that PC gaming is dead, and then you see something like what Valve is doing with Episode 2 and warmth spreads throughout your entire body - even if their bet is being hedged on next-gen systems. We know how good we have it. But try to find evidence of a strong PC platform at dedicated game retailers and the main thing you will find is that they have no interest in it. The games can't be traded in, and a PC gamer probably doesn't attach guides or peripherals to their purchases at the same rate, so it exists outside the philosophical continuum of their business. I'm aware that many gamers find Steam or other ethereal delivery methods distasteful, and I wonder how long they will have that luxury."
Well, as long as Neverwinter Nights 2 comes, I will be a happy gamer for a looong time.
I don't see why they can't just embed the flash directly and let the user click on it if they don't have flash, which will take them to the flash download site anyways.
Because then you could activate AdBlock and NoScript and still see the stuff you WANT to see on the page with minimal hassle, which, if enough people do it, would piss off advertisers and lose them ad revenue.
Nah. Foreskin is vestigial.
Hardly. It is one of the areas in your body with the most nerve endings in it. Take it from someone who still has one, just rubbing it between your fingers feels damn good. Also, removing it turns makes the skin on the head of your penis, dryer, thicker and more like regular skin. I think it is likely that this also reduces sensitivity during sex.
If you do it to yourself as an adult for astethic or medical reasons (phimosis), that is fine, but when you do it to kids who can't defend themselves I think it is a form of sexual mutilation.
Tell me, don't you ever shave your face and clip your nails?
Yes, and I have never needed anaesthetic while doing that, which is a big difference. If you do, that might be an indication you are doing something wrong.