Obama supporters have been cheering this lawlessness for 7+ years, but they will panic if Trump gets elected and decides to use all the precedents that Obama set.
Bush. The Bush regime is the one that broke new grounds in
"executive orders", Obmam actually took it easy on them for a
long time before he realized the Republicans were do-nothing
obstructionists who were loyal to party but not country.
And you forgot to complain about the kill-lists and the incessant
drone attacks... I guess extra-legal killings are *good*
executive action in your world.
... anybody going along with Obama's charades on this climate action will be similarly left to swing in the wind after Obama leaves office.
You have a really low opinion of Hillary Clinton-- oh wait,
you're assuming a Republican sweep? Heh.
If Trump is elected, no one is going to be worried about looking
like an Obama-lover... it's more likely two-thirds of the country
would be trying to secede and take Britain's place in the EU.
You can also ride a bike, eat less meat, buy less manufactured
consumer crap, and take it easy on the heating and air
conditioning.
If your idea is that the tiny percentage of well-heeled,
enlightened consumers willing to experiment with rooftop solar is
going to save us from global warming, I beg to differ. The kind
of effort we need at this point isn't just a "manhattan project",
it's not even a "space race", it's more of a "world-war II
build-up", and good luck getting there in time without the
heavy-hand of government.
To be ratified, Congress must vote for the accord. That has not happened, and likely will not any time soon.
Maybe we need a new Congress. Trump is working on that one.
Treaties and accords are nice, but we can make progress even
without them. Obama's "Clean Power Plan" essentially puts the EPA in the
business of enforcing a cap-and-trade system. The hang up there
is legal challenges, not congress.
Then there are lives lost per terawatt hour produced. Nuclear gets 0.04 lives lost per TWh produced, and this includes Fukushima, Chernobyl, and deaths by mining uranium. Rooftop solar has 0.1, wind has 0.15, hydro has 1.0 (mostly due to China, 0.1 otherwise), with the world average around 47, mostly due to coal, oil, and natural gas.
That's a good stat to have at hand, where's it from?
This is the fundamental problem with nuclear. You
can try to build it to be as safe as possible, but it still has
to be operated by idiots for 60+ years.
Nah, the actual trouble with nuclear power is there are a lot of
alarmist idiots who've convinced a bunch of other idiots that
radioactivity is so horrible, horrible that absolute perfection
is necessary to deal with it, and since perfection is impoosible,
QED.
Thought experiment: if this were a plane crash caused by
substituting the wrong kind of bolts, what would the result be?
(1) It would actually kill people, not just cost a bunch of
money; (2) No one would claim it meant we should ban airplanes
forever.
I gave Pale Moon a serious try, recently, since I'm always jumping
through hoops to revert the changes Firefox keeps making to the UI.
Pale Moon is okay, but using it heavily reminded me that not
*all* of the changes to Firefox over the years have been
gratuitous designer bukkake. They did actually improve memory
handling at one point... e.g. if I've got hundreds of tabs open
and close half of them I can see the memory footprint of Firefox
decrease. Pale Moon is a lot more heavy-weight, so I've
reluctantly stopped using it as my main browser.
Instead, I seem to be gravitating toward "iceweasel", which is
essentially an alias for whatever Firefox calls it's LTS
release. It's a reasonably recent version, but I don't get
tortured by ridiculous changes quite so often.
Though just today I got this wonderfully inspiring message:
Congratulations, you just upgraded to Video DownloadHelper 6.0.0 for Firefox
Version 6.0.0 introduces a brand new user interface
Please take the time to watch this tutorial video.
I decided it was a good time to punch "Remove" on that one.
There are other video download addons (at least for the present,
before Mozilla starts declaring them unclean).
If this option actually stays permanently, I'm fine with having e2s.
That's the question with Mozilla, isn't it? Firefox is wonderfully
customizeable, but they get pissy if you don't like their
wondeful innovations... first they give you a check-box to
disable it, they they yank that and you have to mess with
about:config, then after awhile they yank that...
But remember, they're "Commited to you"! It says so right there
on the web site.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've read this week and I just read an onionish story about Trump hiring Palin and Carson to be foreign affairs advisors.
Are you sure that was parody? I'd double-check that.
It hardly matters what they're intentions are, in the past
they've put egomaniacs in charge of the UI and forced changes on
the user base at their whim.
They talk about empowering the user ("Commited to you"!) and all that jazz, but they
struggle with the concept of freedom.
If it turns out Mozilla will be nefarious about it,...
I think you're missing the problem here. It hardly matters if
Mozilla is "nefarious" or just benevolently dictating to us
for-our-own-good, I'm going to be seriously pissed-off if a
plugin I've been using for years is zapped by this.
I've already had to jump through some hoops to keep
"It's All Text" working...
... then you can
always recompile Firefox from source with the mandatory signing
thing cut out, or go to some fork.
Yes, that's what I'm looking for in the comments right now.
Palemoon isn't a bad idea, but I think they forked a little too
far back, they dropped some improvements in memory handling (it's
worth remembering that Mozilla does occasionally-- very
occasionally-- work on fixing fundamental problems, it's not all
gratuitous nonsense like tabs-on-top).
Perl you can bank your head forever and never get which magic combo of $#~ willl give yo what you want (at least that was my experience).
Bank your head, with perl!
That sound's like a good slogan. It has the virtue of
sounding-nice without meaning anything.
I see in this listing perl clocks in at #13 (#12, once you
scratch out CSS), which isn't bad going for a language that's
been "dead" for over a decade.
Perl is however, #1 in languages people are willing to admit that
they're too stupid to use correctly.
Because I understand that despite what you seem to think, the
technical challenges involved in language choice for larger
software projects are about 1% "does the syntax of language x
allow me to do y in this particularly neat way?" and 99% "how
many keen programmers skilled in language x do I have/can I
attract right now?... "
What I'm hearing here is you're arguing that the smear campaign
worked, you convinced enough of the kids that perl is not bright
and shiney, and obviously management should move on to something
that is regarded as bright and shiney so they'll have more kids
to mess around with.
The thing that folks like yourself should ask yourself is (1) am
I ready to drop my favorite technology when it's no longer the
latest fad? (Ruby programmers are going through an awkward phase
right now...); (2) when getting a project started, there may be
virtues with being fad-compliant, but are you going to tell
management to throw it all away and re-write it all when the next
fad comes along? (There are *always* guys like that around,
everywhere... and many people in management have learned to stop
listening to them...)
... so there's really no point wasting time having
the argument I imagine you want to have with me that goes like
this: me: "oh, but Perl doesn't have such-and-such a feature"
you: "of COURSE it does, you just cross the index and middle
fingers of your left hand and recite the last verse of Genesis
backwards!".
There are features of perl, by the way, that to my knowledge
don't exist in any of the competing languages, like full unicode
support, including the ability to use regexps to search for
characters in a particular unicode character class.
What I expect to hear in response is: "Oh, that crap doesn't
matter." (Uh, Unicode?); And then once the other languages catch up
I expect to hear "Look, we have that crap now too!". That's the way it goes in
the fabulously rational world of Software Engineering.
"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."
Huh? [...] in the (early) 20th century not so much.
Yeah, actually someone would notice something had happened to the
next village long before "never".
(Note: World War 1 started in 1914. "A hundred years ago" just
isn't as long as it used to be.)
When will computer geeks grasp that most of the human race actually enjoys the company of others and that there are actual economic reasons why people cluster?
Okay, so Kurzweil is betting on "the Naked Sun" scenario, rather
than "the Caves of Steel", but to be fair to him, he's at least
noticed that there's some tension between VR technology and New
Urbanism. At Kevin Kelly's last Long Now talk, it was clear that
this hasn't registered on him yet.
My problem is (and always has been) that Larry Has Opinions. And lots of those are expressed in such a heavy-handed manner: the language syntax, the intrusive keywords, the proudly gnomic and condescending tone that early on propagated down through Perl user groups, that they are off-putting...
You see, this don't sound like a technical dispute to me.
Why buy into a tool and ecosystem with warts that piss more people off than the next tool's?
Point the first: this is a non-sequitor. Once again, you're trying to
claim it's primarily technical issues with the software, and I'm
making the point that you just don't like Larry Wall. He's just
not *one of us*. Why no gentleman would take swipes at Python's
one-true-way.
If you were actually someone in management, would you listen to
someone like yourself? Why?
My problem is (and always has been) that Larry Has Opinions. And lots of those are expressed in such a heavy-handed manner: the language syntax, the intrusive keywords, the proudly gnomic and condescending tone that early on propagated down through Perl user groups, that they are off-putting...
You see, this don't sound like a technical dispute to me.
Ah, well, "local" assigns a temporary, dynamically scoped value to "$/",
defaulting to an "undef", i.e. undefined.
"English" is a module that provides alternate, more readable
names for the old-style globals like "$/".
It hasn't really caught on, so my point is that using it would be
a source of confusion for different reasons.
It is however, pretty funny that on a typical unix box a "man English" will take
you to the docs for an odd perl module.
Well, in some ways this isn't a bad thing to bust perl on, because most of us would agree that doing something like a "local $/;" is a bit of cruft we're stuck with for legacy reasons. But on the other hand, neither form is something that a beginner would know without being told, really you're going to need to be handed an example to learn it, so the actual practical difference between the two isn't that huge.
Interestingly, there have been multiple attempts at cleaning up this particular cruft but none have really caught on: the trouble is all perl programmer's understand it already, so if you do something even slightly different, like:
use English;
local $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR = undef;
You can end up damaging readability in an attempt at improving it.
The Death of Perl has been greatly exaggerated.
The difficulty of doing useful work with Perl has also been greatly exaggerated.
It is nice having folks like yourself come out of the closet on what your Real Problem is... all of that pretense about making astute technical judgements is all a cover for "Larry was *mean* to me!".
I understand you're proud of Perl 6: that's great, but I'd be
more convinced as a developer or manager of developers to take a
deeper look if you could demonstrate with examples how teams of
mixed experience and aptitude have built complex, performant,
maintainable software with it, rather than throwing ill-judged
stones at the competition...
Oh yeah? Well if you're so smart you'd tell us how you managed
to avert world war and achieve world peace in our time before you
take pot-shots at someone who's software was instrumental the
development of the world-wide web, the human genome project,
etc...
I know it's a terrible, terrible thing having to listen to
someone say something nasty about Python for once, but you know, perl
programmer's like myself have had to deal with several decades of
treatment like that, you might just suck it up and keep rolling...
"I'm fine putting it in starving nations and letting nature sort it out, but I think eating it directly is premature, since I have a choice."
We've already done a large-scale experiment. England banned GMO foods, but the United States didn't, and eats a lot of them. The major health problems that have resulted in the US because of this are...
Slashdot Mirror
Bush. The Bush regime is the one that broke new grounds in "executive orders", Obmam actually took it easy on them for a long time before he realized the Republicans were do-nothing obstructionists who were loyal to party but not country.
And you forgot to complain about the kill-lists and the incessant drone attacks... I guess extra-legal killings are *good* executive action in your world.
You have a really low opinion of Hillary Clinton-- oh wait, you're assuming a Republican sweep? Heh.
If Trump is elected, no one is going to be worried about looking like an Obama-lover... it's more likely two-thirds of the country would be trying to secede and take Britain's place in the EU.
You can also ride a bike, eat less meat, buy less manufactured consumer crap, and take it easy on the heating and air conditioning.
If your idea is that the tiny percentage of well-heeled, enlightened consumers willing to experiment with rooftop solar is going to save us from global warming, I beg to differ. The kind of effort we need at this point isn't just a "manhattan project", it's not even a "space race", it's more of a "world-war II build-up", and good luck getting there in time without the heavy-hand of government.
Maybe we need a new Congress. Trump is working on that one.
Treaties and accords are nice, but we can make progress even without them. Obama's "Clean Power Plan" essentially puts the EPA in the business of enforcing a cap-and-trade system. The hang up there is legal challenges, not congress.
That's a good stat to have at hand, where's it from?
Nah, the actual trouble with nuclear power is there are a lot of alarmist idiots who've convinced a bunch of other idiots that radioactivity is so horrible, horrible that absolute perfection is necessary to deal with it, and since perfection is impoosible, QED.
Thought experiment: if this were a plane crash caused by substituting the wrong kind of bolts, what would the result be? (1) It would actually kill people, not just cost a bunch of money; (2) No one would claim it meant we should ban airplanes forever.
cfalcon wrote:
I gave Pale Moon a serious try, recently, since I'm always jumping through hoops to revert the changes Firefox keeps making to the UI. Pale Moon is okay, but using it heavily reminded me that not *all* of the changes to Firefox over the years have been gratuitous designer bukkake. They did actually improve memory handling at one point... e.g. if I've got hundreds of tabs open and close half of them I can see the memory footprint of Firefox decrease. Pale Moon is a lot more heavy-weight, so I've reluctantly stopped using it as my main browser.
Instead, I seem to be gravitating toward "iceweasel", which is essentially an alias for whatever Firefox calls it's LTS release. It's a reasonably recent version, but I don't get tortured by ridiculous changes quite so often.
Though just today I got this wonderfully inspiring message:
I decided it was a good time to punch "Remove" on that one. There are other video download addons (at least for the present, before Mozilla starts declaring them unclean).
That's the question with Mozilla, isn't it? Firefox is wonderfully customizeable, but they get pissy if you don't like their wondeful innovations... first they give you a check-box to disable it, they they yank that and you have to mess with about:config, then after awhile they yank that...
But remember, they're "Commited to you"! It says so right there on the web site.
Are you sure that was parody? I'd double-check that.
It hardly matters what they're intentions are, in the past they've put egomaniacs in charge of the UI and forced changes on the user base at their whim.
They talk about empowering the user ("Commited to you"!) and all that jazz, but they struggle with the concept of freedom.
I think you're missing the problem here. It hardly matters if Mozilla is "nefarious" or just benevolently dictating to us for-our-own-good, I'm going to be seriously pissed-off if a plugin I've been using for years is zapped by this. I've already had to jump through some hoops to keep "It's All Text" working...
Yes, that's what I'm looking for in the comments right now. Palemoon isn't a bad idea, but I think they forked a little too far back, they dropped some improvements in memory handling (it's worth remembering that Mozilla does occasionally-- very occasionally-- work on fixing fundamental problems, it's not all gratuitous nonsense like tabs-on-top).
You know, it could be they're fixing the wrong problem.
Bank your head, with perl! That sound's like a good slogan. It has the virtue of sounding-nice without meaning anything.
I see in this listing perl clocks in at #13 (#12, once you scratch out CSS), which isn't bad going for a language that's been "dead" for over a decade.
Perl is however, #1 in languages people are willing to admit that they're too stupid to use correctly.
What I'm hearing here is you're arguing that the smear campaign worked, you convinced enough of the kids that perl is not bright and shiney, and obviously management should move on to something that is regarded as bright and shiney so they'll have more kids to mess around with.
The thing that folks like yourself should ask yourself is (1) am I ready to drop my favorite technology when it's no longer the latest fad? (Ruby programmers are going through an awkward phase right now...); (2) when getting a project started, there may be virtues with being fad-compliant, but are you going to tell management to throw it all away and re-write it all when the next fad comes along? (There are *always* guys like that around, everywhere... and many people in management have learned to stop listening to them...)
There are features of perl, by the way, that to my knowledge don't exist in any of the competing languages, like full unicode support, including the ability to use regexps to search for characters in a particular unicode character class.
What I expect to hear in response is: "Oh, that crap doesn't matter." (Uh, Unicode?); And then once the other languages catch up I expect to hear "Look, we have that crap now too!". That's the way it goes in the fabulously rational world of Software Engineering.
DerekLyons wroe:
Yeah, actually someone would notice something had happened to the next village long before "never".
(Note: World War 1 started in 1914. "A hundred years ago" just isn't as long as it used to be.)
Okay, so Kurzweil is betting on "the Naked Sun" scenario, rather than "the Caves of Steel", but to be fair to him, he's at least noticed that there's some tension between VR technology and New Urbanism. At Kevin Kelly's last Long Now talk, it was clear that this hasn't registered on him yet.
Point the first: this is a non-sequitor. Once again, you're trying to claim it's primarily technical issues with the software, and I'm making the point that you just don't like Larry Wall. He's just not *one of us*. Why no gentleman would take swipes at Python's one-true-way.
If you were actually someone in management, would you listen to someone like yourself? Why?
One of the nicer things about climate change is I can look forward to everyone in Florida having conversion moments when Miami is under water.
Of course, what they do after that is one of the worst things about climate change.
You see, this don't sound like a technical dispute to me.
Ah, well, "local" assigns a temporary, dynamically scoped value to "$/", defaulting to an "undef", i.e. undefined.
"English" is a module that provides alternate, more readable names for the old-style globals like "$/". It hasn't really caught on, so my point is that using it would be a source of confusion for different reasons.
It is however, pretty funny that on a typical unix box a "man English" will take you to the docs for an odd perl module.
By the way, the Perl 6 way of doing this is:
See: https://docs.perl6.org/routine/slurp.html:
And the same thing can be done in perl 5 with the CPAN module Perl6::Slurp: https://metacpan.org/pod/Perl6::Slurp
I look forward to hearing why Python's chained method call syntax is so much more newbie-friendly than a single, colorfully-named built-in command.
Well, in some ways this isn't a bad thing to bust perl on, because most of us would agree that doing something like a "local $/;" is a bit of cruft we're stuck with for legacy reasons. But on the other hand, neither form is something that a beginner would know without being told, really you're going to need to be handed an example to learn it, so the actual practical difference between the two isn't that huge.
Interestingly, there have been multiple attempts at cleaning up this particular cruft but none have really caught on: the trouble is all perl programmer's understand it already, so if you do something even slightly different, like: use English; local $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR = undef; You can end up damaging readability in an attempt at improving it.
The Death of Perl has been greatly exaggerated. The difficulty of doing useful work with Perl has also been greatly exaggerated. It is nice having folks like yourself come out of the closet on what your Real Problem is... all of that pretense about making astute technical judgements is all a cover for "Larry was *mean* to me!".
And they didn't fire you and hire a firm with competent programmers? I guess there's one born every minute...
wheelbarrio wrote:
Oh yeah? Well if you're so smart you'd tell us how you managed to avert world war and achieve world peace in our time before you take pot-shots at someone who's software was instrumental the development of the world-wide web, the human genome project, etc...
I know it's a terrible, terrible thing having to listen to someone say something nasty about Python for once, but you know, perl programmer's like myself have had to deal with several decades of treatment like that, you might just suck it up and keep rolling...
"I'm fine putting it in starving nations and letting nature sort it out, but I think eating it directly is premature, since I have a choice." We've already done a large-scale experiment. England banned GMO foods, but the United States didn't, and eats a lot of them. The major health problems that have resulted in the US because of this are...