You've no doubt had much occasion to experience this shittiness in
your 20 years of experience, but nevertheless you see, the reason I
am objecting here is that the example that springs to your mind
of a perl oddity is one of the things that in point of fact never
causes a single problem, and it seems peculiar that you can't
come up with a more cogent criticism, particularly when one takes
into account your 20 years of experience.
I've been a perl programmer for decades, and the number of hours I've spent debugging issues with automatic type conversion are in the single digits, and the number of problems I've encountered with string-to-numeric conversion is literally zero
How nice for you. You must not be writing very interesting or complex software.
On more complex software you tend to use an object system that
does additional type-checking for you (usually "Moose", "MooX" or
possibly "Mouse"... like I said about lack of standardization...).
But I'm completely serious about this point: the perl culture has never been
fanatic about the way it does things, and there are any number of
issues where it was decided that things were too loose and needed
to be tightened up: string-to-number conversions are emphatically
*not one of them*. They don't even throw a warning, not even
running with "use warnings" on (you heard of strict and warnings,
right? In your 20 years of experience?).
There's something profoundly weird about the
strong-typing-or-death fanatics... they've got a bad case of
obsessive compulsive disorder and using a string as a number
drives them up the wall, even though it *never* causes any
problems. Verily, not even you in your 20 years of experience can
cite a case where it caused any problems for you.
My understanding is that it used to be the fastest dynamic
language around, but some others have caught up to it-- it's not
something I care about really, I just know it's fast enough I
don't need to think about the issue.
I more interested in the fact that it's unicode support is
better than almost every other language.
Perl has a much weaker type system, allowing expressions like (3 + "3"). That affects both efficiency and correctness of programs.
I've been a perl programmer for decades, and the number of hours I've
spent debugging issues with automatic type conversion are in the
single digits, and the number of problems I've encountered with
string-to-numeric conversion is literally zero, and if you were
burned by something like that in production, I'd ask you why you
weren't writing tests.
There are indeed some odd issues you need to deal with when
working with perl5, but they almost all revolve around a lack of
standardization. There's something profoundly weird about perl
critics, they continuously just *make shit up* to fit their
narrative...
Presumably, they were working on a code base smaller than a linux kernel, and saw no technical advantage in subjecting themselves to git's incoherent user interface.
We're talking about hype driven choices here, git is a fine example of the software industry going crazy with a fad and dropping a productivity bomb on itself for six months while trying to figure out how to make the fad work.
America isn't a direct democracy and never was. It's a constitutional republic. You vote to tell your electoral college member how to place their vote (yes there have been faithless electors, but it has been rare).
Rare, but nevertheless allowed, and built-in to the system for a
reason (and I keep wondering who invented that phrase "faithless"...).
Once again, if you guys want to change the system, feel free to
try for that, but quit pretending the system is something
different than it is.
Flat isn't necessarily a problem, but having no borders at all could be.
I'm not gonna argue about that one. I insist on using a
light-on-dark color scheme myself, and half of the time those
clevely designed buttons are literally invisible. I often make a
guess that there's something to click on in a blank space that I
see, and just try it experimentally.
I'm a perl programmer, almost by definition I don't get hired by
places that insist on chasing the new shiney.
The tendency of programmers in general to be as trendy as a bunch
of teenagers has not been lost on me, however (like I said, I'm a
perl programmer).
Somewhat more disturbing is a tendency of perl-culture in general
to be a bit faddish... one year it's inside-out objects, the next
year it's the Moose family, one year Module::Build is the
greatest, the next Extutils::Makemaker has made a comeback and no
one wants to hear about anything else, one year ORM are the bees-knees,
the next it's the NoSQL fad, then it suddenly dawns on people you
don't really want to try to do schemaless data...
Obviously the phones just need to look around and track the people in the immediate environment, and report it back to their central control.
It's a safety feature.
(They could also summon a hit-man to take out phoney-drivers
before they kill someone-- but I must not think bad thoughts,
even if I am a cyclist who's tired of looking to the right and
seeing the guy passing me too close staring down at a little
glowing box.)
The top finishers are chosen by the Electoral College. The
question is, would "republican" electors choose Hillary? What if
a bunch of them pick Ryan over Trump?
What he is advocating will result in nothing less than civil war, and that's just foolishness.
Letting Trump take office is starting to look like a formula for
race war, and while you're thinking
about long term consequences you might ponder the implications of
letting Russia get away with messing with a US election.
Don't like the system, than change it, don't cheat it, change it.
And if you don't like the system then you could change it,
because the system we have at the moment allows the electors to
vote their conscience.
If there's any purpose at all to the electoral college system,
it's to cover for weird, exceptional cases like a winning
candidate taking office with record disapproval numbers after
losing the popular vote by at least 2 million.
And I never said otherwise. Just that if you go complaining about Diebold it sounds like you're out of touch... the jargon is DREs, not that that helps much (since no one knows what that means).
Me, I just say "need paper trail".
... like a demographic preference for e-voting over paper...
Yes, I've often wondered about that possibility, if say, people
with head-out-of-ass demand decent voting systems, then you might
be looking at correlations between regions with head-up-ass and
voting for a certain political party.
The thing to remember though, is these kinds of scenarios are all
just made-up speculation until someone actually investigates what
happened.
Arguably, recounts and audits are some things you can do to
investigate.
Different states have different rules, and some do have automatic
recounts, but they're triggered only if the election is a near tie.
Here we've got results that are close, but are outside of the
margin that would trigger automatic audits.
(Note that this is what you'd expect, if someone were falsifying the result, to
defeat the automatic checks.)
By the way, snopes doesn't think much of James O'Keefe, either.
But that just means they're working for the other side, and not to be trusted, right? Just like everyone else who tells you something you don't want to hear.
It has been proven. It just gets ignored because voter fraud, en masse, generally goes in favor of Democrats.
Wonderful, you actually linked to a James O'Keefe video...
and the great "proof" you've got is a blurry out-of-focus
closeup of someone claiming to be a Democratic operative...
O'Keefe is famous for making shit up and faking his video
"evidence".
As Bob Garfield from NPR (see the wikipedia page on O'Keefe):
"So let's just recap for a moment the ACORN scenario. You lie to get into â" the offices. You lie, subsequently, about the lie you told to get into the offices. You edit the pimp shot into the trailer to create the illusion that you were somehow wearing it during your sting. You go on television wearing the same pimp outfit and let interviewers observe, uncorrected, that that's what you were wearing when you confronted the ACORN employees. If your journalistic technique is the lie, why should we believe anything you have to say?"
So your source literally has no credibility, and the thing you're
claiming to prove is a near impossibility: to get people to vote
as someone else on a "mass scale", you need names on the voter
roles that you know no one else is going to try to use.
The reason the various electronic vote-rigging scenarios are so
scary is if you could get them to work they'd be easy to
scale up just as far as you like, with minimal risk of detection.
... the number of polling stations to match (something you obviously haven't done based on the long lines to vote)
I would guess you know this, but those long lines are generally
the result of a Republican in the state-level Secretary of State
office intentionally shorting Democratic districts of the
equipment they need.
(Yeah, I know, how do I know it's intentionally, it
could be an honest mistake... the same mistake,
year-after-year, over-and-over)
Tip: Diebold doesn't technically exist any more.
If you invoke their name in these discussions it, uh, doesn't
make you sound like you know what you're talking about.
Though I realize you said et al.
Actually, it's a little hard to make sense of some of the
vote-hacking scenarios that are floating around just now, but it
really wouldn't hurt to check them out anyway.
Even if it isn't true that Russian hackers found a clever way
of subverting a US election, there would seem to be some value in
doing everything you can to investigate that possibility, if only
to try to reassure people it didn't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
The deuce, you say.
You've no doubt had much occasion to experience this shittiness in your 20 years of experience, but nevertheless you see, the reason I am objecting here is that the example that springs to your mind of a perl oddity is one of the things that in point of fact never causes a single problem, and it seems peculiar that you can't come up with a more cogent criticism, particularly when one takes into account your 20 years of experience.
On more complex software you tend to use an object system that does additional type-checking for you (usually "Moose", "MooX" or possibly "Mouse"... like I said about lack of standardization...).
But I'm completely serious about this point: the perl culture has never been fanatic about the way it does things, and there are any number of issues where it was decided that things were too loose and needed to be tightened up: string-to-number conversions are emphatically *not one of them*. They don't even throw a warning, not even running with "use warnings" on (you heard of strict and warnings, right? In your 20 years of experience?).
There's something profoundly weird about the strong-typing-or-death fanatics... they've got a bad case of obsessive compulsive disorder and using a string as a number drives them up the wall, even though it *never* causes any problems. Verily, not even you in your 20 years of experience can cite a case where it caused any problems for you.
My understanding is that it used to be the fastest dynamic language around, but some others have caught up to it-- it's not something I care about really, I just know it's fast enough I don't need to think about the issue.
I more interested in the fact that it's unicode support is better than almost every other language.
I've been a perl programmer for decades, and the number of hours I've spent debugging issues with automatic type conversion are in the single digits, and the number of problems I've encountered with string-to-numeric conversion is literally zero, and if you were burned by something like that in production, I'd ask you why you weren't writing tests.
There are indeed some odd issues you need to deal with when working with perl5, but they almost all revolve around a lack of standardization. There's something profoundly weird about perl critics, they continuously just *make shit up* to fit their narrative...
Presumably, they were working on a code base smaller than a linux kernel, and saw no technical advantage in subjecting themselves to git's incoherent user interface. We're talking about hype driven choices here, git is a fine example of the software industry going crazy with a fad and dropping a productivity bomb on itself for six months while trying to figure out how to make the fad work.
Rare, but nevertheless allowed, and built-in to the system for a reason (and I keep wondering who invented that phrase "faithless"...).
Once again, if you guys want to change the system, feel free to try for that, but quit pretending the system is something different than it is.
Well, like I keep saying these days: In a world where vinyl LPs can make a comeback, there may still be some hope for web standards.
I'm not gonna argue about that one. I insist on using a light-on-dark color scheme myself, and half of the time those clevely designed buttons are literally invisible. I often make a guess that there's something to click on in a blank space that I see, and just try it experimentally.
I'm a perl programmer, almost by definition I don't get hired by places that insist on chasing the new shiney.
The tendency of programmers in general to be as trendy as a bunch of teenagers has not been lost on me, however (like I said, I'm a perl programmer).
Somewhat more disturbing is a tendency of perl-culture in general to be a bit faddish... one year it's inside-out objects, the next year it's the Moose family, one year Module::Build is the greatest, the next Extutils::Makemaker has made a comeback and no one wants to hear about anything else, one year ORM are the bees-knees, the next it's the NoSQL fad, then it suddenly dawns on people you don't really want to try to do schemaless data...
Obviously the phones just need to look around and track the people in the immediate environment, and report it back to their central control.
It's a safety feature.
(They could also summon a hit-man to take out phoney-drivers before they kill someone-- but I must not think bad thoughts, even if I am a cyclist who's tired of looking to the right and seeing the guy passing me too close staring down at a little glowing box.)
Here's an idea: look at the map-- online or not-- figure out how to get there, then *store the information in your head*.
The top finishers are chosen by the Electoral College. The question is, would "republican" electors choose Hillary? What if a bunch of them pick Ryan over Trump?
You need to do a little better than foxnews if you want to talk to someone who hasn't already drunk your koolaid.
Letting Trump take office is starting to look like a formula for race war, and while you're thinking about long term consequences you might ponder the implications of letting Russia get away with messing with a US election.
You just went off the deep end there. If the electors give Hillary 270+ then she's president. Congress doesn't get involved.
You're also presuming that Congress wants Trump to be president. There are other scenarios, like they pick Paul Ryan.
And if you don't like the system then you could change it, because the system we have at the moment allows the electors to vote their conscience.
If there's any purpose at all to the electoral college system, it's to cover for weird, exceptional cases like a winning candidate taking office with record disapproval numbers after losing the popular vote by at least 2 million.
And I never said otherwise. Just that if you go complaining about Diebold it sounds like you're out of touch... the jargon is DREs, not that that helps much (since no one knows what that means). Me, I just say "need paper trail".
Yes, I've often wondered about that possibility, if say, people with head-out-of-ass demand decent voting systems, then you might be looking at correlations between regions with head-up-ass and voting for a certain political party.
The thing to remember though, is these kinds of scenarios are all just made-up speculation until someone actually investigates what happened.
Arguably, recounts and audits are some things you can do to investigate.
Different states have different rules, and some do have automatic recounts, but they're triggered only if the election is a near tie. Here we've got results that are close, but are outside of the margin that would trigger automatic audits.
(Note that this is what you'd expect, if someone were falsifying the result, to defeat the automatic checks.)
By the way, snopes doesn't think much of James O'Keefe, either. But that just means they're working for the other side, and not to be trusted, right? Just like everyone else who tells you something you don't want to hear.
Wonderful, you actually linked to a James O'Keefe video... and the great "proof" you've got is a blurry out-of-focus closeup of someone claiming to be a Democratic operative...
O'Keefe is famous for making shit up and faking his video "evidence". As Bob Garfield from NPR (see the wikipedia page on O'Keefe):
So your source literally has no credibility, and the thing you're claiming to prove is a near impossibility: to get people to vote as someone else on a "mass scale", you need names on the voter roles that you know no one else is going to try to use.
The reason the various electronic vote-rigging scenarios are so scary is if you could get them to work they'd be easy to scale up just as far as you like, with minimal risk of detection.
I would guess you know this, but those long lines are generally the result of a Republican in the state-level Secretary of State office intentionally shorting Democratic districts of the equipment they need.
(Yeah, I know, how do I know it's intentionally, it could be an honest mistake... the same mistake, year-after-year, over-and-over)
Sorry, I meant "Diebold Election Systems" doesn't exist any more. I guess Diebold is still out there, making ATMs and the like.
Tip: Diebold doesn't technically exist any more. If you invoke their name in these discussions it, uh, doesn't make you sound like you know what you're talking about. Though I realize you said et al.
Actually, it's a little hard to make sense of some of the vote-hacking scenarios that are floating around just now, but it really wouldn't hurt to check them out anyway.
Even if it isn't true that Russian hackers found a clever way of subverting a US election, there would seem to be some value in doing everything you can to investigate that possibility, if only to try to reassure people it didn't happen.