knshaum

I did that with 'Psycho'. The publicity for the original release was full of pleas that people not give away the ending. By now, is there anyone in all of western civilization that doesn't know that Norman Bates was the killer? (If so, sorry about that.)

Yet I had fun watching it, seeing how Hitchcock let the audience _think_ that the movie was all about Janet Leigh's character, then slamming them into a narrative brick wall with the shower scene.

Spider Robinson once described having read a novel twice, once for the story itself, then again 'to admire the carpentry'. With a spoiler ending 'ruined', I tend to wind up doing that on the first pass.

"Accelerated C++" is another good one. A bigger book than K&R, but not outrageously so, and much thinner than Stroustrup's or Lippman's texts. Rather than teaching C and then layering C++ constructs on top, it starts with idiomatic C++, then drills down to the C foundations as needed.

Every desktop of laptop OS I know of comes with at least one JavaScript interpreter installed.

The real problem is the growth of phones and tablets as preferred client devices; while the JS interpreter is still there, it becomes a challenge to enter and run the code.

That reminds me a lot of ESR's "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way". Two variations of a general rule, I think: if you want someone's help, make it as easy and hassle-free as possible for them to provide it.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Seems to me (IANAL) that Apple could sue on fraud or breach of contract: if Lodsys sold a license to Apple on the pretext that the developers were covered, and then later went after those developers as if they weren't covered, Apple could claim that Lodsys either misrepresented themselves, or failed to honor their side of the contract.

Charles Stross does that in his novel Glasshouse: durations are described in kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds. (100Ksec is just under 28 hours -- a reasonable proxy for a day -- and 1 Gsec is about 31 years.) In a space-faring society, with no standard astronomical day or year, it made sense.

Reasonable point; but I think one should draw a line between things that obviously are crimes, and offenses that stretch the definition of 'crime' beyond recognition, as in this case.

Downloads from O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf, at least those in PDF format, have the account holder's name at the bottom of each page. If that's changed, it must have happened recently.

The post has been moved, and updated by members of MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering community: http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japa...

The vendor really should supply a patch.