Let's just say I'm hopeful, but skeptical. What I want is to use VS and C# to make cross-platform.NET apps (PC, android, iThingy) in an officially-supported way. You can do that with third-party commercial products today, and that's neat, but for MS to step up and back projects like Mono with patent indemnification and other official "it's not ours, but we fully support it" blessing would be a new world, and a happy one.
There are many CLR languages. C#, Visual Basic, "managed C++", and F#, to name a few. They all use the same "bytecode" (well, managed C++ is a weird hybrid), and can use the full.NET libraries.
F# is a functional language, so it's quite appealing to those who fap to the lambda calculus. C# is great these days for the rest of us. It finally caught up to the basic lisp functionality a few years back with LINQ (Java still hasn't), and it's nice to work in. Sure, it's odd to use "Select" and "Aggregate" instead of "map" and "reduce", but it works nicely.
Microsoft has a new boss. I'm not taking this as a sign of the new direction yet, but we should expect MS to change. Ballmer was all about the status quo (and the chair-lobbing, and the monkey dance). No reason to expect the new guy to be the same.
I think you've read one too many Gibson novels. Corruption of the US government by moneyed interests is a real problem, to be sure, but it's been worse historically without a SF dystopia.
Sure it can be computed. If you include the non-determinism of it all, you won't get the same answer as the universe does, but you'll get a perfectly good answer. Without the non-determinism you'll get the exact answer. You might not get it within the lifetime of the universe, but that's a mere efficiency concern.
I used to work with a guy who was a MS kernel hacker. He knew the debugger setup in all it's arcanity backwards and forwards, and had a lot of code knowledge there too, despite never working at MS. It was great fun to watch IT try to manage his machine through normal tools (to push updates and reboots and whatnot). He was having none of that, but he wasn't going to pick a fight with IT, instead he just ensured that the IT client tools were kept happy, that the kernel always told them what they needed to hear.
Never pick a geek-fight on a machine that your opponent has a kernel debugger attached to. Ahh, old-school hacking. How I miss the art.
Well, if the universe can do it then a simulation must exists that can do it, it's just a question of efficiency. However, that doesn't change anything in your argument. We don't know how the universe actually works, we merely have predictive models. Predictive models are great and all, but they aren't unique: for any set of data, there are an infinity of models that are consistent wit that data - and it's hard to say much about all the models you're not using.
You can solve all problems in P and NP both, eventually. There's no need for the universe to be efficient to simulate. TFA boggles me: what does the efficiency of the computation matter?
So what you're saying is "it's fine to treat this group as unpeople and send them to camps, because they're wrong-thinking people, working to destroy what makes society good and right"? The exact defense used by some in the Nuremberg trials?
You can play a few newer games too. Anything you can get on GOG will be DRM free. I always check there before Steam now: even for a $3 game, I'd rather get the DRM version if it exists.
And then they learned their lesson. They now run Good Old Games, 100% DRM free, and The Witcher (sequel something something) is the first AAA title to go DRM free on GOG.
A republic is a form of democracy. Representation by proxy is one implementation of democracy. "Direct" democracy is another. But it's all "democracy".
Thank you for your consideration, and please endeavor to be more correct in your future pedantry.
I don't believe in firing people for having opinions, as such. He donated money to a cause that sought to remove rights from people. It doesn't matter the group of people that was aimed at, I find such an action deplorable and wrong as a matter of justice. At the centre of our law is the equal treatment of all people. I really just can't abide anyone that swims against that tide.
Donating money to a cause is how democracy works in the modern world. Do you believe in punishing people for participating in democracy contrary to your values, or don't you.
It is not 'intolerant' to hold people account for their beliefs that some people deserve more rights than others. I don't give a free pass to racists, and I won't give a free pass to him.
I understand that you believe this. Do you understand that abortion opponents are 100% sure that abortion is the murder of defenseless babies? Would you support the literal lynching of pro-choice supporters to end the murder? Where do you draw the line?
Sadly, most people draw the line at "anything that happens to wrong-thinking people is just fine. We con't tolerate that shit. Anything that happens to right-thinking people crosses the line." The modern left is entirely focused on "othering", in a way that really echoes the German left in the 30s.
You can't have democracy if the vote isn't secret. It has become obvious that you also can't have democracy unless political contributions by individuals are kept secret.
So is it that you don't believe in democracy? Or that you think we need protection in the form of a plainly-written constitution that's not creatively interpreted, and that can be amended instead to increase our protection from the tyranny of the majority?
No one says democracy is without flaws. As the saying goes: it's the worst possible system, except for everything else that's ever been tried. It certainly beats the Hell out of vigilantism and lynching unpeople!
He holds a very popular, mainstream view. You support firing people who have very popular, mainstream views that you disagree with. I think that's fucked up.
There should not be personal consequences for standing on one side or another of mainstream political debates. Gay marriage, abortion, there are always issues that people are quite passionate about. If you lose the election, you don't get your way and that's the price of democracy - and it's a good trade-off. But if we target individuals for persecution, we lose democracy.
Oh Christ. Free Speech is fine. The government interfered with nothing.
The Brownshirts weren't officially part of the government either. The people who broke the shop windows of those with the wrong beliefs one night weren't officially part of the government either.
You either stand behind the right of people to hold unpopular political views (and participate in the political process to forward such views), or you accept the majority dictating Rightthink.
As I see it, the it's the Firefox devs who raised a stink about their boss. Even if I'm wrong, the board should have stood behind him. But once again the "heckler's veto" wins the discussion.
Sure, sure, no one who disagrees with you should be allowed to be a CEO, got it. Do you think he should be allowed to work for any company, or would you prefer some sort of re-education camp for those who dare to disagree with you?
Lest you think I'm trolling, I've seen calls for prison for those who continue to publically question AGW, and not that long ago there were calls for prison for those who "lied about Obamacare, e..g, suggesting is had death panels". Funny you don't hear so many people calling for prison over Obamacare lies these days, but that aside: seriously, how much of an "unperson" do you need to make someone who disagrees with you before you're happy?
They still have all the totalitarian trappings of Communism, is the thing. It's the dictatorial control of the people that bitcoin threatens, not the broader Chinese economy IMO.
All and all, that's not a bad thing... I wonder how better off the US would be if a FTC or SEC official had a say in all board meetings
Are you familiar with the concept of regulatory capture? It would get far, far worse. The power of money to corrupt the government is large, and giving the government more control of companies will be a terrible mistake for as long as that remains true.
Some of what they have is good (they invested in core infrastructure while here in the US, cars were crushed
The US manufacturing base has never fallen. Don't mistake manufacturing jobs for manufacturing capacity. Manufacturing is now coming back from Chinese workers to US robots - it's why the Chinese economy is on the rocks.
Please learn what capital controls are. You may also realize that Iceland is not a communist country, yet, it has similar capital controls as the old Soviet Union.
The 2008 Icelandic financial crash was quite possibly the largest financial collapse in history (bigger ones await us, of course, when the sovereign debt bubble eventually pops, but Iceland was a big deal). The IMF really helped out there, mostly thanks to Scandi generosity and the awesomely great decision to not bail out the banks there. If only we had been so wise.
So, yes, Iceland has significant capital controls to keep the dressings on the wounds while they heal. But Iceland's looking a lot better now, and the capital controls have perhaps overstayed their welcome. In any case, they had nothing at all to do with Communism, and it was still quite legal to buy consumer goods with krona on free markets - there weren't consumer controls AFAIK. Of course, the sharply fall in the krona meant imports fell sharply in practice, but local businesses that weren't banks kept going as always, though of course hurt by the general economy.
I wander how much stuff there would be in Walmart if China indicated they would no longer accept USD for goods, but only Euro or Yuan.
Well, a really significant (if gradually shrinking) chunk of China's economy, perhaps still the majority, is making stuff for the US. If they suddenly stopped doing that, China would implode.
China is slowly growing away from that, and the US is slowly bringing manufacturing back home (to robots, don't expect any new manufacturing jobs... anywhere, ever). As long as it's gradual, it's fine. But no one anywhere would benefit from suddenly destabilizing that, so no one will.
Communist economies are fake economies. Always. In the bad days of the USSR, you couldn't buy anything you really wanted with Rubles, but of course anything else was quite illegal. China today isn't nearly as bad, and they have a mix of genuine capitalist (owned by individuals, not the government) business and government business, so you can buy some stuff with the yuan. But they still have too much fake economy to allow people to legally buy and sell as they wish, and the black market is still a big deal and threatens government control.
Contrast that to the US, where the only large black market is for drugs, and it's arguable whether anything significant would change if the popular drugs were legalized. It certainly wouldn't bring down the government.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just say I'm hopeful, but skeptical. What I want is to use VS and C# to make cross-platform .NET apps (PC, android, iThingy) in an officially-supported way. You can do that with third-party commercial products today, and that's neat, but for MS to step up and back projects like Mono with patent indemnification and other official "it's not ours, but we fully support it" blessing would be a new world, and a happy one.
There are many CLR languages. C#, Visual Basic, "managed C++", and F#, to name a few. They all use the same "bytecode" (well, managed C++ is a weird hybrid), and can use the full .NET libraries.
F# is a functional language, so it's quite appealing to those who fap to the lambda calculus. C# is great these days for the rest of us. It finally caught up to the basic lisp functionality a few years back with LINQ (Java still hasn't), and it's nice to work in. Sure, it's odd to use "Select" and "Aggregate" instead of "map" and "reduce", but it works nicely.
Microsoft has a new boss. I'm not taking this as a sign of the new direction yet, but we should expect MS to change. Ballmer was all about the status quo (and the chair-lobbing, and the monkey dance). No reason to expect the new guy to be the same.
I think you've read one too many Gibson novels. Corruption of the US government by moneyed interests is a real problem, to be sure, but it's been worse historically without a SF dystopia.
Sure it can be computed. If you include the non-determinism of it all, you won't get the same answer as the universe does, but you'll get a perfectly good answer. Without the non-determinism you'll get the exact answer. You might not get it within the lifetime of the universe, but that's a mere efficiency concern.
I used to work with a guy who was a MS kernel hacker. He knew the debugger setup in all it's arcanity backwards and forwards, and had a lot of code knowledge there too, despite never working at MS. It was great fun to watch IT try to manage his machine through normal tools (to push updates and reboots and whatnot). He was having none of that, but he wasn't going to pick a fight with IT, instead he just ensured that the IT client tools were kept happy, that the kernel always told them what they needed to hear.
Never pick a geek-fight on a machine that your opponent has a kernel debugger attached to. Ahh, old-school hacking. How I miss the art.
Well, if the universe can do it then a simulation must exists that can do it, it's just a question of efficiency. However, that doesn't change anything in your argument. We don't know how the universe actually works, we merely have predictive models. Predictive models are great and all, but they aren't unique: for any set of data, there are an infinity of models that are consistent wit that data - and it's hard to say much about all the models you're not using.
You can solve all problems in P and NP both, eventually. There's no need for the universe to be efficient to simulate. TFA boggles me: what does the efficiency of the computation matter?
So what you're saying is "it's fine to treat this group as unpeople and send them to camps, because they're wrong-thinking people, working to destroy what makes society good and right"? The exact defense used by some in the Nuremberg trials?
*the DRM-free version ...
You can play a few newer games too. Anything you can get on GOG will be DRM free. I always check there before Steam now: even for a $3 game, I'd rather get the DRM version if it exists.
And then they learned their lesson. They now run Good Old Games, 100% DRM free, and The Witcher (sequel something something) is the first AAA title to go DRM free on GOG.
Dear captain pedantic:
A republic is a form of democracy. Representation by proxy is one implementation of democracy. "Direct" democracy is another. But it's all "democracy".
Thank you for your consideration, and please endeavor to be more correct in your future pedantry.
I don't believe in firing people for having opinions, as such. He donated money to a cause that sought to remove rights from people. It doesn't matter the group of people that was aimed at, I find such an action deplorable and wrong as a matter of justice. At the centre of our law is the equal treatment of all people. I really just can't abide anyone that swims against that tide.
Donating money to a cause is how democracy works in the modern world. Do you believe in punishing people for participating in democracy contrary to your values, or don't you.
It is not 'intolerant' to hold people account for their beliefs that some people deserve more rights than others. I don't give a free pass to racists, and I won't give a free pass to him.
I understand that you believe this. Do you understand that abortion opponents are 100% sure that abortion is the murder of defenseless babies? Would you support the literal lynching of pro-choice supporters to end the murder? Where do you draw the line?
Sadly, most people draw the line at "anything that happens to wrong-thinking people is just fine. We con't tolerate that shit. Anything that happens to right-thinking people crosses the line." The modern left is entirely focused on "othering", in a way that really echoes the German left in the 30s.
You can't have democracy if the vote isn't secret. It has become obvious that you also can't have democracy unless political contributions by individuals are kept secret.
So is it that you don't believe in democracy? Or that you think we need protection in the form of a plainly-written constitution that's not creatively interpreted, and that can be amended instead to increase our protection from the tyranny of the majority?
No one says democracy is without flaws. As the saying goes: it's the worst possible system, except for everything else that's ever been tried. It certainly beats the Hell out of vigilantism and lynching unpeople!
Sure, but it's not the finances that bother me, it's the Google panopticon. Firefox doesn't send everything you type back to Google, and that's nice.
He holds a very popular, mainstream view. You support firing people who have very popular, mainstream views that you disagree with. I think that's fucked up.
There should not be personal consequences for standing on one side or another of mainstream political debates. Gay marriage, abortion, there are always issues that people are quite passionate about. If you lose the election, you don't get your way and that's the price of democracy - and it's a good trade-off. But if we target individuals for persecution, we lose democracy.
Oh Christ. Free Speech is fine. The government interfered with nothing.
The Brownshirts weren't officially part of the government either. The people who broke the shop windows of those with the wrong beliefs one night weren't officially part of the government either.
You either stand behind the right of people to hold unpopular political views (and participate in the political process to forward such views), or you accept the majority dictating Rightthink.
He doesn't have some fringe position. He had in 2006 the same position as Obama's official position, the same as the majority of Cali voters.
So, yes, you do need to say where you draw the line if you support shit like this.
As I see it, the it's the Firefox devs who raised a stink about their boss. Even if I'm wrong, the board should have stood behind him. But once again the "heckler's veto" wins the discussion.
Sure, sure, no one who disagrees with you should be allowed to be a CEO, got it. Do you think he should be allowed to work for any company, or would you prefer some sort of re-education camp for those who dare to disagree with you?
Lest you think I'm trolling, I've seen calls for prison for those who continue to publically question AGW, and not that long ago there were calls for prison for those who "lied about Obamacare, e..g, suggesting is had death panels". Funny you don't hear so many people calling for prison over Obamacare lies these days, but that aside: seriously, how much of an "unperson" do you need to make someone who disagrees with you before you're happy?
Firefox is dead to me now. And that sucks because I want as little to do with Google as possible.
They still have all the totalitarian trappings of Communism, is the thing. It's the dictatorial control of the people that bitcoin threatens, not the broader Chinese economy IMO.
All and all, that's not a bad thing... I wonder how better off the US would be if a FTC or SEC official had a say in all board meetings
Are you familiar with the concept of regulatory capture? It would get far, far worse. The power of money to corrupt the government is large, and giving the government more control of companies will be a terrible mistake for as long as that remains true.
Some of what they have is good (they invested in core infrastructure while here in the US, cars were crushed
The US manufacturing base has never fallen. Don't mistake manufacturing jobs for manufacturing capacity. Manufacturing is now coming back from Chinese workers to US robots - it's why the Chinese economy is on the rocks.
Please learn what capital controls are. You may also realize that Iceland is not a communist country, yet, it has similar capital controls as the old Soviet Union.
The 2008 Icelandic financial crash was quite possibly the largest financial collapse in history (bigger ones await us, of course, when the sovereign debt bubble eventually pops, but Iceland was a big deal). The IMF really helped out there, mostly thanks to Scandi generosity and the awesomely great decision to not bail out the banks there. If only we had been so wise.
So, yes, Iceland has significant capital controls to keep the dressings on the wounds while they heal. But Iceland's looking a lot better now, and the capital controls have perhaps overstayed their welcome. In any case, they had nothing at all to do with Communism, and it was still quite legal to buy consumer goods with krona on free markets - there weren't consumer controls AFAIK. Of course, the sharply fall in the krona meant imports fell sharply in practice, but local businesses that weren't banks kept going as always, though of course hurt by the general economy.
I wander how much stuff there would be in Walmart if China indicated they would no longer accept USD for goods, but only Euro or Yuan.
Well, a really significant (if gradually shrinking) chunk of China's economy, perhaps still the majority, is making stuff for the US. If they suddenly stopped doing that, China would implode.
China is slowly growing away from that, and the US is slowly bringing manufacturing back home (to robots, don't expect any new manufacturing jobs ... anywhere, ever). As long as it's gradual, it's fine. But no one anywhere would benefit from suddenly destabilizing that, so no one will.
Communist economies are fake economies. Always. In the bad days of the USSR, you couldn't buy anything you really wanted with Rubles, but of course anything else was quite illegal. China today isn't nearly as bad, and they have a mix of genuine capitalist (owned by individuals, not the government) business and government business, so you can buy some stuff with the yuan. But they still have too much fake economy to allow people to legally buy and sell as they wish, and the black market is still a big deal and threatens government control.
Contrast that to the US, where the only large black market is for drugs, and it's arguable whether anything significant would change if the popular drugs were legalized. It certainly wouldn't bring down the government.