What, did the Chinese government finally cotton onto the fact that the Lion-Easting Poet in the Stone Den was mocking them? Not sure it's strictly speaking a lengthy pun, but it's at least a related wordplay, and was a protest against the choice of Pinyin vs other choices that would have presented more distinction when writing a tonal language.
IIRC, Wikipedia used to lead with the explanation that the poem was really an exercise in slipping one past the censors to protest the choice, disguised as an "exercise in constrained writing". Now the text doesn't seem to discuss the mockery at all, unless I'm missing it, making the joke image of "an uneaten stone lion" seem strangely out-of-place.
While The Hunting of the Snark remains the greatest-ever exercise in slipping one past the censors (so much so that a non-dirty meaning of "snark" has become common!), Lion-Eating Poet was always a close second IMO. I notice Wikipedia doesn't give the obvious explanation of the Carroll poem either, but maybe that's just an elaborate exercise in avoiding spoilers, so I'll do the same here!
And now you can have nulls anywhere in your list, so you really should check for those. Even more fun with Maps, where null means "either we didn't find it, or it was null, guess which!".
I'm reminded of this every time a city I'm living in wants to spend another $30 million on another stadium. At least we've graduated to non-lethal violence for public entertainment.
Well, treating ISP "last mile" monopolies just like power company monopolies - making them a utility distinct from any content or backbone provider - would likely fit that. Imagine that: ISPs with no monopolies, actually needing to compete. It's a glorious vision.
I'd say the only platforms that really matter when languages like Java or C# are on the table are "Linux servers", "Windows servers", "Android phones", and "iPhones" (and tablets similar to the phones). If C# becomes easy to run on those platforms (which is clearly MS's plan, but we'll see) there's just no reason not to use it.
C# development is worlds easier than Java. If I can write for Linux servers with it easily, it will be my first choice for professional development. If I can easily write C# code that runs both on MS desktops and Android mobile, it will be my first choice for personal development. I wish MS the best of luck here, but they really need to hit this one out of the park - a half-assed effort isn't going to cut it.
Why should I have to use a third party library to get decent date support?
Hey now, a Java Calendar object is roughly half a kilobyte (really), surely there must be some useful functionality in there somewhere! Right? Well, I can't parse a string into a date using Calendar, I can't add any sort of "duration" object to a Calendar, though I can do "add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, -5)", so there's that.
Java doesn't support List, doesn't have a in-built String.IsNullOrEmpty, doesn't have C#'s wonderful "??" operator for null-fixing, doesn't have proper properties (is that redundant?) but here I am stuck using it.
And they fight attempts to change this because it's cheaper to stand pat.
Only in the short term. "Real" infrastructure build-outs are not the internet - changes happen over 20 years, not 20 months. Whatever looks to be cheapest long term will dominate power generation long term. If we ever get a magic battery, that will be solar for most latitudes, but we're just not there yet, neither with the batteries nor the panels. It doesn't seem that far off though. Maybe 10 years out?
and it's time they (& we) started paying for it.
Feel free to pay extra if that makes you happy (my power company offers that option - a "green power" surcharge). I'm totally happy with cheap power from natural gas, and will be totally happier with even cheaper power from solar, one day. I'd pay extra for power generated from rounding up hippies on the street and burning them alive, but sadly that's not offered.
And so? We should hate them because we hate Bill? (Silly in the first place, since MS's worst offenses were Ballmer's doing, but anyway.)
The guys who generate power for money just want money, they don't want to burn coal or anything else, they want what's cheapest. Currently that's natural gas in most places, but the moment industrial solar becomes cheaper, they'll be all over that (well, once the NIMBY fights are done, and the environmentalists stop protesting constructing the new plants (really), and so on).
Yes, and? The Electric companies have no love of coal or anything else. They'll make power however it's cheapest to make it, limited in their ability to switch to new powerplants by the NIMBY problem, and limited in their ability to improve existing plants by the crazy perverse incentives in the environmental regs in most places. Natural gas is incredibly cheap right now, and generating would switch to it completely if it were practical.
(I had college roommate who was an environmental engineer who worked for a while in this area. It drove him out of the field - you can't improve anything, even simple cheap ways to dramatically reduce smokestack pollution, without losing the "grandfathering" and having to pay more than the plant is worth to completely modernize every single component. And what's worse, the requirements for new plants weren't "get emissions below X" , they were often "you must use this exact emission control device, coincidentally manufactured primarily by someone close to the lawmaker at the time the law was made".)
People vote, and turn out strongly to vote, for issues that actually affect their daily lives, which almost never overlaps with geek-interest issues discussed on Slashdot. Most politicians live in fear of issues that the voters will actually care about, which is why they panic to be seen as "doing something" when such issues emerge.
If rooftop solar moves out of the early adopter stage and becomes mainstream, it will be a very visible political hot-potato. Local politics hinges much less on expensive ad buys than national offices, so keeping the voters asleep trumps political contributions.
Can you really not distinguish between sellers and buyers? Electric companies have no love for any particular means of generating power, they just want it cheap, and for most of them their primary concern in life is the NIMBY problem.
Electric companies, at least in some latitudes, are certainly worried about practical rooftop solar eating into their business, but for reasons that have nothing at all to do with love of fossil fuel.
yeah, there's a field with *cough* real application. A biologist that studies life in space when we haven't actually found any.
Space is a remarkably hostile environment - doubt anything lives there. Presumably astrobiologists study life as it might exist on another planet, presumably with a focus on "what to look for". Detecting life, even bacterial, on another planet would be a landmark moment in human history.
Police cars give out traffic tickets because crimes have been committed.
Where I live, a traffic ticket is neither a felony nor a misdemeanor (since you'd be entitled to a trial by jury for either of those!), it's an odd sort of administrative tax.
But, yeah, the only time you see police cars around me is giving traffic tickets, or coming by hours after a crime to do the paperwork. When I lived in a bad area, you would see cops walking the apartment complex at night, and thus being a helpful deterrent, or at least being close enough to respond rapidly. But of course those guys weren't on city time - they were working (in uniform) as off-duty security guards hired by the property owner.
0.7 did not introduce any such weakness - it was always there. Darknet was the dev team (one student, mostly, though a bright guy), giving up on that issue, at least short term, to create something that would at least work a little in very oppressive states.
But it's not less anonymous than TOR - uploads have very strong anonymity, and while on paper it's easier to de-anonymize download on Freenet than TOR, in practice we know of NSA tools that work for TOR and not for Freenet (which may just be what got leaked - who knows).
Anyhow, Freenet may never be the answer for anonymous consumption, but the question was "uncensorable", and Freenet is good at that (given downloading is anonymous enough to keep MPAA goons at bay, which is an important bar).
I doubt it could be made to work for Silk Road, but in my non-expert opinion, it would be great for typical P2P use - offending private interests, but not so much government interests (though the fact there's no way to take down content is great for Wikileaks stuff).
No doubt. That's the thing about an uncensorable network - if it can host stuff governments don't like, it's certainly going to host stuff I find appalling. That's the trade-off.
Actually, WaPo seems better over the past couple of years - they carry stories that in some way reflect badly on the Democrats from time to time, unlike most of the print press. Of course, it's possible the average partisanship of print media has become so extreme that the WaPo looks better by contrast, but either way it's not in the same boat as the New York Fishwrap these days. (Oddly, USA Today seems quite centrist these days - I still think of it as a joke, but maybe I shouldn't.)
Fuck me, I agree with geekoid. Shadowstats is worse than crap, it's marketing. Yes, true inflation is worse than reported inflation (and always will be as long as major govt programs are indexed to government-reported inflation), but the difference is small.
We so desperately need a censorproof, indelible internet.
Freenet is there, waiting for anyone to use it. It may be no more anonymous than TOR (and slower), but being peer-to-peer there are no servers to seize.
I've always wondered whether it would be reasonably fast if it became popular for filesharing, but given most people's lack of patience it's unlikely we'll ever know. At least it's a place where Wikileaks could be immune to takedown, for whatever that's worth.
I use T-Mobile, have never had a phone on money, and have a strict "never borrow money" personal policy. But it's not about the amount a phone costs, it's about a strong aversion to spending money on things that aren't really important to me.
My 2009 (IIRC) Android phone hasn't been updated since the first year, and is still running 2.somthing, I think. I should really buy a new phone one of these days (the glass has been cracked for a year now), but it seems such a frivolous expense.
There are major software-focused corporations where the software developer culture is not dysfunctional, and it's probably no accident they're many of the industry leaders (outside of gaming, for whatever reason, where the larger the corporation the deeper the circle of Hell for the devs).
Slashdot Mirror
What, did the Chinese government finally cotton onto the fact that the Lion-Easting Poet in the Stone Den was mocking them? Not sure it's strictly speaking a lengthy pun, but it's at least a related wordplay, and was a protest against the choice of Pinyin vs other choices that would have presented more distinction when writing a tonal language.
IIRC, Wikipedia used to lead with the explanation that the poem was really an exercise in slipping one past the censors to protest the choice, disguised as an "exercise in constrained writing". Now the text doesn't seem to discuss the mockery at all, unless I'm missing it, making the joke image of "an uneaten stone lion" seem strangely out-of-place.
While The Hunting of the Snark remains the greatest-ever exercise in slipping one past the censors (so much so that a non-dirty meaning of "snark" has become common!), Lion-Eating Poet was always a close second IMO. I notice Wikipedia doesn't give the obvious explanation of the Carroll poem either, but maybe that's just an elaborate exercise in avoiding spoilers, so I'll do the same here!
Fair point (and no, I haven't seen broadcast/cable TV in 10 years).
And now you can have nulls anywhere in your list, so you really should check for those. Even more fun with Maps, where null means "either we didn't find it, or it was null, guess which!".
Useful syntax sugar is the only difference between any two Turing-complete languages.
I'm reminded of this every time a city I'm living in wants to spend another $30 million on another stadium. At least we've graduated to non-lethal violence for public entertainment.
Well, treating ISP "last mile" monopolies just like power company monopolies - making them a utility distinct from any content or backbone provider - would likely fit that. Imagine that: ISPs with no monopolies, actually needing to compete. It's a glorious vision.
Gah, Slashcode accidentally half my post at least I should fix:
*Java doesn't support List<int>
I'd say the only platforms that really matter when languages like Java or C# are on the table are "Linux servers", "Windows servers", "Android phones", and "iPhones" (and tablets similar to the phones). If C# becomes easy to run on those platforms (which is clearly MS's plan, but we'll see) there's just no reason not to use it.
C# development is worlds easier than Java. If I can write for Linux servers with it easily, it will be my first choice for professional development. If I can easily write C# code that runs both on MS desktops and Android mobile, it will be my first choice for personal development. I wish MS the best of luck here, but they really need to hit this one out of the park - a half-assed effort isn't going to cut it.
Why should I have to use a third party library to get decent date support?
Hey now, a Java Calendar object is roughly half a kilobyte (really), surely there must be some useful functionality in there somewhere! Right? Well, I can't parse a string into a date using Calendar, I can't add any sort of "duration" object to a Calendar, though I can do "add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, -5)", so there's that.
Java doesn't support List, doesn't have a in-built String.IsNullOrEmpty, doesn't have C#'s wonderful "??" operator for null-fixing, doesn't have proper properties (is that redundant?) but here I am stuck using it.
C# is about 8 years ahead of Java at this point.
And they fight attempts to change this because it's cheaper to stand pat.
Only in the short term. "Real" infrastructure build-outs are not the internet - changes happen over 20 years, not 20 months. Whatever looks to be cheapest long term will dominate power generation long term. If we ever get a magic battery, that will be solar for most latitudes, but we're just not there yet, neither with the batteries nor the panels. It doesn't seem that far off though. Maybe 10 years out?
and it's time they (& we) started paying for it.
Feel free to pay extra if that makes you happy (my power company offers that option - a "green power" surcharge). I'm totally happy with cheap power from natural gas, and will be totally happier with even cheaper power from solar, one day. I'd pay extra for power generated from rounding up hippies on the street and burning them alive, but sadly that's not offered.
And so? We should hate them because we hate Bill? (Silly in the first place, since MS's worst offenses were Ballmer's doing, but anyway.)
The guys who generate power for money just want money, they don't want to burn coal or anything else, they want what's cheapest. Currently that's natural gas in most places, but the moment industrial solar becomes cheaper, they'll be all over that (well, once the NIMBY fights are done, and the environmentalists stop protesting constructing the new plants (really), and so on).
Yes, and? The Electric companies have no love of coal or anything else. They'll make power however it's cheapest to make it, limited in their ability to switch to new powerplants by the NIMBY problem, and limited in their ability to improve existing plants by the crazy perverse incentives in the environmental regs in most places. Natural gas is incredibly cheap right now, and generating would switch to it completely if it were practical.
(I had college roommate who was an environmental engineer who worked for a while in this area. It drove him out of the field - you can't improve anything, even simple cheap ways to dramatically reduce smokestack pollution, without losing the "grandfathering" and having to pay more than the plant is worth to completely modernize every single component. And what's worse, the requirements for new plants weren't "get emissions below X" , they were often "you must use this exact emission control device, coincidentally manufactured primarily by someone close to the lawmaker at the time the law was made".)
People vote, and turn out strongly to vote, for issues that actually affect their daily lives, which almost never overlaps with geek-interest issues discussed on Slashdot. Most politicians live in fear of issues that the voters will actually care about, which is why they panic to be seen as "doing something" when such issues emerge.
If rooftop solar moves out of the early adopter stage and becomes mainstream, it will be a very visible political hot-potato. Local politics hinges much less on expensive ad buys than national offices, so keeping the voters asleep trumps political contributions.
Can you really not distinguish between sellers and buyers? Electric companies have no love for any particular means of generating power, they just want it cheap, and for most of them their primary concern in life is the NIMBY problem.
Electric companies, at least in some latitudes, are certainly worried about practical rooftop solar eating into their business, but for reasons that have nothing at all to do with love of fossil fuel.
yeah, there's a field with *cough* real application. A biologist that studies life in space when we haven't actually found any.
Space is a remarkably hostile environment - doubt anything lives there. Presumably astrobiologists study life as it might exist on another planet, presumably with a focus on "what to look for". Detecting life, even bacterial, on another planet would be a landmark moment in human history.
Police cars give out traffic tickets because crimes have been committed.
Where I live, a traffic ticket is neither a felony nor a misdemeanor (since you'd be entitled to a trial by jury for either of those!), it's an odd sort of administrative tax.
But, yeah, the only time you see police cars around me is giving traffic tickets, or coming by hours after a crime to do the paperwork. When I lived in a bad area, you would see cops walking the apartment complex at night, and thus being a helpful deterrent, or at least being close enough to respond rapidly. But of course those guys weren't on city time - they were working (in uniform) as off-duty security guards hired by the property owner.
0.7 did not introduce any such weakness - it was always there. Darknet was the dev team (one student, mostly, though a bright guy), giving up on that issue, at least short term, to create something that would at least work a little in very oppressive states.
But it's not less anonymous than TOR - uploads have very strong anonymity, and while on paper it's easier to de-anonymize download on Freenet than TOR, in practice we know of NSA tools that work for TOR and not for Freenet (which may just be what got leaked - who knows).
Anyhow, Freenet may never be the answer for anonymous consumption, but the question was "uncensorable", and Freenet is good at that (given downloading is anonymous enough to keep MPAA goons at bay, which is an important bar).
I doubt it could be made to work for Silk Road, but in my non-expert opinion, it would be great for typical P2P use - offending private interests, but not so much government interests (though the fact there's no way to take down content is great for Wikileaks stuff).
No doubt. That's the thing about an uncensorable network - if it can host stuff governments don't like, it's certainly going to host stuff I find appalling. That's the trade-off.
Actually, WaPo seems better over the past couple of years - they carry stories that in some way reflect badly on the Democrats from time to time, unlike most of the print press. Of course, it's possible the average partisanship of print media has become so extreme that the WaPo looks better by contrast, but either way it's not in the same boat as the New York Fishwrap these days. (Oddly, USA Today seems quite centrist these days - I still think of it as a joke, but maybe I shouldn't.)
Fuck me, I agree with geekoid. Shadowstats is worse than crap, it's marketing. Yes, true inflation is worse than reported inflation (and always will be as long as major govt programs are indexed to government-reported inflation), but the difference is small.
*have never had a phone on contract
We so desperately need a censorproof, indelible internet.
Freenet is there, waiting for anyone to use it. It may be no more anonymous than TOR (and slower), but being peer-to-peer there are no servers to seize.
I've always wondered whether it would be reasonably fast if it became popular for filesharing, but given most people's lack of patience it's unlikely we'll ever know. At least it's a place where Wikileaks could be immune to takedown, for whatever that's worth.
I use T-Mobile, have never had a phone on money, and have a strict "never borrow money" personal policy. But it's not about the amount a phone costs, it's about a strong aversion to spending money on things that aren't really important to me.
My 2009 (IIRC) Android phone hasn't been updated since the first year, and is still running 2.somthing, I think. I should really buy a new phone one of these days (the glass has been cracked for a year now), but it seems such a frivolous expense.
There are major software-focused corporations where the software developer culture is not dysfunctional, and it's probably no accident they're many of the industry leaders (outside of gaming, for whatever reason, where the larger the corporation the deeper the circle of Hell for the devs).