Didn't Enlightenment (and Raster himself) get purged from the GNOME project because the community turned on him because of the poor quality of his code?
America is peculiar, in that unlike the rest of the world, it has the bizarre hyper-individualistic quasi-religion of virtually unlimited freedom without responsibility.
Only a truly deluded Slashdot libertarian keyboard warrior would think that giving police powers to investigate suspicious activity would somehow violate their "rights" to break the law, be antisocial, and attack the common good, as if the "common good" didn't matter. That kind of thinking is selfish and morally bankrupt.
Third-world cretins with Third-world penis envy, who have this overwhelming need to "prove" how big and manly they are.
Muslims build really tall buildings (with Western technology and engineering).
These Chinese, it seems, prefer to build big computers. It's a natural consequence of having a basketcase dictatorship run by insecure little engineering majors.
You can try and invent imaginary rights and legal rulings to justify drug use, but at the end of the day, it's dumb.
I would need a lot of convincing to understand why the police would need to get PERMISSION to use IR gear in public to find grow houses (as if the IR signature of your house has some kind of right to privacy): they do it all the time in the UK, and only bikers, gangsters, druggies and idiots would have a problem with it.
It blows my mind too. And I'm sure that plenty of ordinary people of Muslim background despair of these clowns whipping up hatred, hiding behind political correctness, and letting ordinary people be tarred with the same brush as the haters.
To be fair: I've spent a lot of time around devout Christians too, and it's stunning how often a lot of people act superior and intolerant, and fail to live up to their own ideals. There's nothing more loathsome and disgusting than hypocrites standing around on street corners letting it all hang out for the world to see.
Most right thinking normal people think that religion, if practised, is a matter of personal conscience and is completely integral to living in a modern country. Governments are doing society a huge disservice by letting hate-mongering extremists roam free to spread their poison; whether they are anti-abortionists hassling women in the streets (I've seen this too), or the EDL, or Andrem Choudhury's mob whipping up hate and trying to start race wars.
I don't think there is a difference between the freedom to practice one's religion freely, and the freedom to not practice religion freely. It's a precious freedom that needs to be actively, vigorously defended.
The Christian fundies do exist here (and I've run into quite a few militant anti-abortionists and young earth creationists). It's just that they're overshadowed by a bunch of very, very ugly Muslim extremists, who for various reasons, can get away with showing a persistent level of hatred and intolerance that would get the Christians shouted down at best, and thrown in the slammer en masse at worst.
Just last week, there was a bunch of bearded brown Muslim extremists in skirts screaming their heads off in the street at Oxford Circus, with big banners ("JESUS = SATAN") written on them. The only reason why they didn't get a hiding off anybody, because they where there in such force of numbers, that nobody dared challenge them. In the middle of Oxford Street. This is in 2012, after September 11 and the 7th of July attacks.
Britain DOES have a problem with religious extremism, and while there ARE Christian extremists, the Muslim extremists are multiplying at a rapid rate, are out there, in your face, and are virtually unassailable, because everyone is too scared of being stigmatized as an Islamophobe for not tolerating vile Islamic extremism.
There's a difference: Press TV is ugly, pro-Muslim, anti-Western state-sponsored propaganda. Very ugly, vulgar, blatant propaganda.
It was so in-your-face, their banning was only a matter of time. You can only pull the tiger's tail so much before the animal turns around and claws your face off.
In shitty backwaters like Russia, China and most Muslim countries, the state controls everything, so if something happens in a Western country that the third-worlders don't like, they go nuts, because their small brains can't comprehend that in a free country, stuff can actually go on without the government having a hand in it.
The Chinese government are simply assuming that Western governments are as vindictive, backwards and thin-skinned as they are. This just shows what a bunch of pathetic losers they are. They deserve only ridicule.
Well, if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
You're overlooking one thing: the performance of all that hardware is increasing at least as fast as Moore's Law. The knowledge on how to build reliable, robust real-time systems is improving at a lesser rate, but is otherwise progressing steadily. The hardware is shrinking all the time.
OTOH, requirement for hearing augmentation remains constant.
Surely, the gains have to show up somewhere. Obviously it's not in the price of the product these people of dubious morals are selling.
Terrorists hate countries with strong governments, and they hate countries with no government (because the Americans can fry them with Hellfire.) They go for countries with _weak_ governments -- enough to keep the Americans out, not enough to send them to hell.
Capitalists love weak governments for the same reason: strong enough to protect property rights, weak enough that they can run trusts, set up monopolies and suck the blood of the people like the bloated tick parasites they they are. Crony capitalism, as practiced in places like the US and China isn't real capitalism: it's feudalism. Real capitalism, and healthy functioning markets depends on a strong state with a strong hand to step in to level the playing field and stamp out abuses.
This is what 'small' (read: weak) government gets you: a dystopian crony capitalist hell, where entrenched monopolistic parasites are free to corrupt the political system and distort the markets.
... unless you have single-payer, in which case you get the situation in the UK, where the NHS has 90%+ of the health market, and the greedy morally bankrupt cunts in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries seethe with rage, because they have NICE testing their quack medicine and devices for efficacy, and beating them down on price with government purchasing power.
America is screwed, because they have the complete inability to rein in the parasitic oligarchs feeding on the blood of the people.
This is why the righties hate government -- the dirty secret is that rather than encouraging rent-seeking parasites, strong and effective government drives them out of business.
The world looks to America to set a good example, and America leads by example.
It's a terrible tragedy that these nutjob far right wing extremists have managed to compromise politics so badly. And that they want to win so badly, they'll obliterate America's good name in the world to do so.
And it isn't just implementing blatantly racist and illegal policies to purge 'enemy' voters either. It's setting up stings and other deceit to try and prop up their extremist loony Right lies that liberals are engaging in voter fraud.
Somebody tell me why there isn't a completely independent, non-partisan election agency in the US anyway. Only a COMPLETE fucking idiot would let political appointees run elections. It's akin to putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.
What amazes me, is that there isn't a bigger outcry about 'legacy' entertainment companies abusing the law to prop up failing business models.
Given the triumph of neoliberalism since the collapse of communism, I'm surprised at how the notion of free markets is so selectively interpreted and enforced. It seems as though even if you are a clapped-out dinosaur of a company, if you're sufficiently large, you can bypass market discipline through lobbying, special pleading and black PR against one's political opponents.
This is the moral issue -- how big, corrupt, dishonest dinosaurs like much of Big Media can get away with subverting the free market, and the political system itself to make their quarterly numbers.
Amen, script code (especially in dynamically typed languages with weak or dynamic type systems), needs to be tested thoroughly to be declared "working". Why scripters write so few unit tests beggars belief here, because that code of test coverage in those kinds of languages is vital for building robust code.
Maintenance tasks are a bit harder to outsource than greenfield development.
Not to mention the fact that it takes a different set of very useful skills to maintain and debug code, especially poor quality code. There are serious benefits to seeing what's good and bad, what works and doesn't; how to comprehend other people's code (yes, it's a lot harder to read code than write it); how to debug intelligently, and how to profile code. These skills are hardly ever taught, and have to be learnt on the job.
Don't begrudge being 'stuck on maintenance': it takes a lot more skill to read and rework old, crappy code, than it is to write new greenfield code. Just make sure that you're given enough time, resources and "creative freedom" to introduce beneficial changes, like unit test coverage and continuous interegration (I won't work for anybody who "doesn't have time to write unit tests", because it betrays a dangerous level of cluelessness.)
I learned absolutely nothing from that summary. And from what little I could gauge from it, I've got absolutely no idea why Slashdot would find this newsworthy (as opposed, to say, Freecode).
Slashdot Mirror
The summary is blatantly biased.
Now I realize that many Slashdot readers are rusted-on libertarians, but let's at least try and maintain the illusion of impartiality?
Didn't Enlightenment (and Raster himself) get purged from the GNOME project because the community turned on him because of the poor quality of his code?
A bad thermostat is unlikely to melt all the snow and ice off your roof.
If "liberty" means handing carte blanche to drug dealers, then fuck liberty.
The world != America.
America is peculiar, in that unlike the rest of the world, it has the bizarre hyper-individualistic quasi-religion of virtually unlimited freedom without responsibility.
Only a truly deluded Slashdot libertarian keyboard warrior would think that giving police powers to investigate suspicious activity would somehow violate their "rights" to break the law, be antisocial, and attack the common good, as if the "common good" didn't matter. That kind of thinking is selfish and morally bankrupt.
You guys make my mind boggle.
So when our genetic-supermen Mongoloid overlords rule the world, where will they steal their IP from then?
Third-world cretins with Third-world penis envy, who have this overwhelming need to "prove" how big and manly they are.
Muslims build really tall buildings (with Western technology and engineering).
These Chinese, it seems, prefer to build big computers. It's a natural consequence of having a basketcase dictatorship run by insecure little engineering majors.
You can try and invent imaginary rights and legal rulings to justify drug use, but at the end of the day, it's dumb.
I would need a lot of convincing to understand why the police would need to get PERMISSION to use IR gear in public to find grow houses (as if the IR signature of your house has some kind of right to privacy): they do it all the time in the UK, and only bikers, gangsters, druggies and idiots would have a problem with it.
Nearly read that as 'penile'
The Nexus 10 is butt ugly, and looks liked a cheap Chinese chrome-plastic toilet seat.
That said, if it does PDFs better than the iPad and weighs less than a real Bakelite toilet seat, I'll still get one.
I know exactly what I saw, and these guys were bonkers.
It blows my mind too. And I'm sure that plenty of ordinary people of Muslim background despair of these clowns whipping up hatred, hiding behind political correctness, and letting ordinary people be tarred with the same brush as the haters.
To be fair: I've spent a lot of time around devout Christians too, and it's stunning how often a lot of people act superior and intolerant, and fail to live up to their own ideals. There's nothing more loathsome and disgusting than hypocrites standing around on street corners letting it all hang out for the world to see.
Most right thinking normal people think that religion, if practised, is a matter of personal conscience and is completely integral to living in a modern country. Governments are doing society a huge disservice by letting hate-mongering extremists roam free to spread their poison; whether they are anti-abortionists hassling women in the streets (I've seen this too), or the EDL, or Andrem Choudhury's mob whipping up hate and trying to start race wars.
I don't think there is a difference between the freedom to practice one's religion freely, and the freedom to not practice religion freely. It's a precious freedom that needs to be actively, vigorously defended.
Is that you, David Mabus?
The Christian fundies do exist here (and I've run into quite a few militant anti-abortionists and young earth creationists). It's just that they're overshadowed by a bunch of very, very ugly Muslim extremists, who for various reasons, can get away with showing a persistent level of hatred and intolerance that would get the Christians shouted down at best, and thrown in the slammer en masse at worst.
Just last week, there was a bunch of bearded brown Muslim extremists in skirts screaming their heads off in the street at Oxford Circus, with big banners ("JESUS = SATAN") written on them. The only reason why they didn't get a hiding off anybody, because they where there in such force of numbers, that nobody dared challenge them. In the middle of Oxford Street. This is in 2012, after September 11 and the 7th of July attacks.
Britain DOES have a problem with religious extremism, and while there ARE Christian extremists, the Muslim extremists are multiplying at a rapid rate, are out there, in your face, and are virtually unassailable, because everyone is too scared of being stigmatized as an Islamophobe for not tolerating vile Islamic extremism.
There's a difference: Press TV is ugly, pro-Muslim, anti-Western state-sponsored propaganda. Very ugly, vulgar, blatant propaganda.
It was so in-your-face, their banning was only a matter of time. You can only pull the tiger's tail so much before the animal turns around and claws your face off.
In shitty backwaters like Russia, China and most Muslim countries, the state controls everything, so if something happens in a Western country that the third-worlders don't like, they go nuts, because their small brains can't comprehend that in a free country, stuff can actually go on without the government having a hand in it.
The Chinese government are simply assuming that Western governments are as vindictive, backwards and thin-skinned as they are. This just shows what a bunch of pathetic losers they are. They deserve only ridicule.
Well, if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
You're overlooking one thing: the performance of all that hardware is increasing at least as fast as Moore's Law. The knowledge on how to build reliable, robust real-time systems is improving at a lesser rate, but is otherwise progressing steadily. The hardware is shrinking all the time.
OTOH, requirement for hearing augmentation remains constant.
Surely, the gains have to show up somewhere. Obviously it's not in the price of the product these people of dubious morals are selling.
Terrorists hate countries with strong governments, and they hate countries with no government (because the Americans can fry them with Hellfire.) They go for countries with _weak_ governments -- enough to keep the Americans out, not enough to send them to hell.
Capitalists love weak governments for the same reason: strong enough to protect property rights, weak enough that they can run trusts, set up monopolies and suck the blood of the people like the bloated tick parasites they they are. Crony capitalism, as practiced in places like the US and China isn't real capitalism: it's feudalism. Real capitalism, and healthy functioning markets depends on a strong state with a strong hand to step in to level the playing field and stamp out abuses.
This is what 'small' (read: weak) government gets you: a dystopian crony capitalist hell, where entrenched monopolistic parasites are free to corrupt the political system and distort the markets.
... unless you have single-payer, in which case you get the situation in the UK, where the NHS has 90%+ of the health market, and the greedy morally bankrupt cunts in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries seethe with rage, because they have NICE testing their quack medicine and devices for efficacy, and beating them down on price with government purchasing power.
America is screwed, because they have the complete inability to rein in the parasitic oligarchs feeding on the blood of the people.
This is why the righties hate government -- the dirty secret is that rather than encouraging rent-seeking parasites, strong and effective government drives them out of business.
The world looks to America to set a good example, and America leads by example.
It's a terrible tragedy that these nutjob far right wing extremists have managed to compromise politics so badly. And that they want to win so badly, they'll obliterate America's good name in the world to do so.
And it isn't just implementing blatantly racist and illegal policies to purge 'enemy' voters either. It's setting up stings and other deceit to try and prop up their extremist loony Right lies that liberals are engaging in voter fraud.
Somebody tell me why there isn't a completely independent, non-partisan election agency in the US anyway. Only a COMPLETE fucking idiot would let political appointees run elections. It's akin to putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.
What amazes me, is that there isn't a bigger outcry about 'legacy' entertainment companies abusing the law to prop up failing business models.
Given the triumph of neoliberalism since the collapse of communism, I'm surprised at how the notion of free markets is so selectively interpreted and enforced. It seems as though even if you are a clapped-out dinosaur of a company, if you're sufficiently large, you can bypass market discipline through lobbying, special pleading and black PR against one's political opponents.
This is the moral issue -- how big, corrupt, dishonest dinosaurs like much of Big Media can get away with subverting the free market, and the political system itself to make their quarterly numbers.
Amen, script code (especially in dynamically typed languages with weak or dynamic type systems), needs to be tested thoroughly to be declared "working". Why scripters write so few unit tests beggars belief here, because that code of test coverage in those kinds of languages is vital for building robust code.
Maintenance tasks are a bit harder to outsource than greenfield development.
Not to mention the fact that it takes a different set of very useful skills to maintain and debug code, especially poor quality code. There are serious benefits to seeing what's good and bad, what works and doesn't; how to comprehend other people's code (yes, it's a lot harder to read code than write it); how to debug intelligently, and how to profile code. These skills are hardly ever taught, and have to be learnt on the job.
Don't begrudge being 'stuck on maintenance': it takes a lot more skill to read and rework old, crappy code, than it is to write new greenfield code. Just make sure that you're given enough time, resources and "creative freedom" to introduce beneficial changes, like unit test coverage and continuous interegration (I won't work for anybody who "doesn't have time to write unit tests", because it betrays a dangerous level of cluelessness.)
I learned absolutely nothing from that summary. And from what little I could gauge from it, I've got absolutely no idea why Slashdot would find this newsworthy (as opposed, to say, Freecode).
You are a libertarian douchebag, who wouldn't know compassion, morals or decency if it jumped up and bit you in the face.