Well, I guess I'm part of the idiocy then, I just bought one. I also owned the original surface book. I'm a greybeard, been doing this since TRS-80. Was linux guy for a long time till OSX was a better linux, then did macs. I only say all this to provide some context, I'm really far from being a ms fanboi.
The Surface Book devices are hands down the best computing devices I've ever owned. Not even close to anything else. And yes, I've owned and still own top-end Macs, top-end System 76 Linux boxes, etc...
Windows 10 is a delight. With WSL enabled, I have everything I want and need immediately available. The precision touchpad on the surface book is the only one I've ever used that's comparable to a mac, and works amazingly well. I set up three or for different desktops and four-finger brush between them, and three finger brush between apps in a desktop. This is better than the OSX experience.
The battery drain issue is overblown imho and experience. I played Divinity 2 dialed all the way up for hours and the battery charged, albeit slowly.
Additionally, even if you're getting a drain, it's not like it's going to ruin your day. We're talking about like 5-10% per hour or something, plugged in. I mean, you can game for a really long time at max-awesome without any problem. And guess what. When you take a break to eat lunch, the laptop will be fully charged again when you're ready.
I had the same concern before I bought it, and then realized that basically this is a non-issue for real, practical purposes. This laptop is lightweight, has amazing engineering and unique features, a detachable tablet, and can play modern games without really working hard.
Hell, I played Divinity 2 on battery *alone* for almost three hours. I've never seen a laptop that can do that. Ever.
Considering that I spend 10-14 hours a day on my laptop, the $3k I paid for this one is well worth it.
I mean, on paper the specs are great, but I've actually done projects with these things and they're seriously junk. They burn out if you look at them wrong. Additionally, they have a 1.8v gpio level, so there's basically zero chance that you can use any other peripheral without level shifting.
I've talked to a lot of other folks about them as well, they have a terrible reputation in the maker community.
And they're expensive.
So yeah, I'm not surprised. I abandoned them after a single project, like most other folks I know.
No, no. You're missing the point. Apple sales and revenues are in decline. They need to innovate, but they don't have Steve.
Conversation goes something like this:
"Crap. We're dying here. We need new ideas!" "Sorry sir, we don't have any." "Well, shit." "Wait, I have an idea - what if we take away all the really useful parts of a laptop..." "What the fuck? Are you stupid?" "No, no hear me out. Then, Mac Book Pro 2017 will have a brand new super functional multipurpose button that let's you communicate to a running process that you want to exit out of the current activity... we'll call it, the iEsc - and run marketing ads with beaches... The All New Mac Book 2017 - Escape The Norm" "I like where you're going with this..."
I may disagree with the whole premise of this. I also don't discount the possibility that I'm easily duped or have poor cognitive abilities and am a sucker.
It's common practice for artists to generate random words in different configurations in order to draw new insights, inspiration and ideas.
Also, just because something is randomly generated, doesn't mean it's not insightful. How it is possible to objectively judge?
FTFA: "Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena". Even though I was told that this phrase was nonsense and randomly generated, I decided to think about it a bit to see if there was an insight I can draw.
Here's one: In our lives, we're constantly flooded with external stimuli. Text messages, advertisements, flashing lights, warnings, political messages, friends in crisis, problems at work, deadlines, all stridently competing for our attention (infinite phenomena). Personality flaws and weaknesses allow some of these to catch us and drive us in unhealthy directions. If we can work to fix our flaws (wholeness) we can have more effective defenses against the infinite flood of events pushing us and driving us to action (buy this, sell that, believe this, become outraged, donate, think this way, etc...). Becoming a healthy, mature, thoughtful person helps reduce or eliminate the effect that these external driving forces have on us (quiets). Ergo, Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
I don't know. BS? Maybe. Possibly. But also thought provoking. I think I like the random phrases.
Actually, I'm giving MS a heck of a lot of credit these days. It's a different Microsoft from what we here at slashdot are used to.
VS Code is brilliant. MS's actions embracing open source are wonderful. Azure supporting Linux is awesome. Windows 10 is a freaking amazing OS and for the first time in a long time the best consumer OS on the market (though I'm still partial to Linux on servers).
Microsoft has embraced JavaScript and NodeJS, and they are actively pushing the open web and standards. Edge browser has better and more advanced HTML5 support and ES6 support than Chrome!
Microsoft has a lot of history to overcome, but from what I see they are doing the right things and I think we should give credit where it's due and encourage the awesome new direction MS is taking. I never thought I'd say it, but I'm really starting to like MS, or at the very least taking a serious second look and not discarding them out of hand like I would have four or five years ago.
Actually, I'll probably be switching my whole team over to this once they add two things, 1) vim keybindings and 2) support for debugging node clusters
Why? Because it's lightweight, runs everywhere, is open source and works great. It supports node debugging well. It's a heck of a lot better than Webstorm, which we're currently using. Webstorm is nice but so full of feature bloat that all I see all day as I code is the little mac spinning rainbow as java slowly executes.
There are plenty of other editors out there, and other IDE options, but one thing that MS has always done well is focus on developer tools and ease of use. This seems to be the next iteration of that, but aiming for a minimalist approach with filesystem based "projects" and drastically simplified UI that works with most web developer's workflow.
I like it. Once it grows up a bit my whole team will probably switch over, and we're a mac/linux shop primarily.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
I've been encouraged by what I'm seeing in my local Radio Shack. I just dropped a couple hundred bucks in there, bought a Beaglebone Black, some RGB LED strips (with weather proofing), a nice little USB battery/charger that has enough umph to drive the BBB, and some other odds and ends.
Going to run over there today and pick up the "tv be gone" DIY project kit for a buddy of mine for his birthday.
Also lots of Arduino stuff. I also see on their site that they've been making a bit of an effort to have blog posts about controlling some of the stuff they are selling, but it's a far cry from adafruit or the other maker sites.
They still have a long way to go if they want to really compete in that market.
This document describes two alternative methods for an user-agent to
automatically discover and for an user to provide consent for a
Trusted Proxy to be securely involved when he or she is requesting an
HTTP URI resource over HTTP2 with TLS. The consent is supposed to be
per network access. The draft also describes the role of the Trusted
Proxy in helping the user to fetch HTTP URIs resource when the user
has provided consent to the Trusted Proxy to be involved.
The entire draft is oriented around user consent and transparency to the user... where is the problem here?
The linked article by Lauren Weinstein is very heavy on sarcasm, scorn and flippant one-liners, but pretty light on technical details. From what I can discern, her primary concern is that ISP's will force all of their users to consent to them acting as a trusted proxy or refuse to serve them.
This is pretty far fetched, imho. First of all, the backlash from the average consumer would be staggering. If, every time they go to their bank's web page, they get a scary security notice "do you want to allow an intermediary at "trustedproxy.verizon.com" to see your private data?" they answer, every time, will be "hell no". And if they are then unable to access their bank account because of this... well, that's not going to be a pretty picture for L1 support.
Second, the *last* thing most ISPs want is to have to deal with yet more PCI concerns. If they end up storing your cc number and ssn in a plain-text cache, that introduces all sorts of potential problems for them.
It seems like the primary use case for this technology is in serving media-heavy content that SSL screws up, like streaming video over ssl etc... so, it would allow caching etc for various media streams that really don't need SSL. And the user could make the decision for whether they want to do it or not.
This seems like a pretty smart thing to me, I'm not sure what all the hand-wringing is about. Maybe I'm missing something obvious?
A while ago I was also accepted to the glass explorers program. I was pretty excited at the time, and was planning to go ahead and get one. I'll admit to being a bit of a Google fanboy, though recently they've lost some of their shine in my eyes.
At the time, there were a few compelling reasons why I decided to wait, which I summarized here: Why I'll Wait on Glass
One thing to consider, is that along with the $1,500 price tag, unless you live close to one of the fitting centers, you'll also have to book airfare and hotel, which can be as much as the Glass itself, so that really raises the price a lot. At least, this was the case when I was invited to the program, it may have changed.
For those who don't like clicking G+ links, here's my full original post:
Why I'll Wait on Glass
So, I received my invitation to purchase #googleglass and become a #glassexplorers . Google notified me that I had 14 days to make my purchase and schedule a pickup date.
I've put a lot of thought into this, and decided not to move forward with the purchase. I'm outlining my reasons below, and I hope that the amazing folks on the Glass team can take this post with the spirit that it's intended: as constructive, objective feedback from a developer who is a huge Google fan.
When I first heard about Glass, I was gobsmacked. The notion of having a powerful, wearable computing device with an array of sensors, camera and floating UI always available to the user, with speech recognition and integration with wireless services - well frankly, I had trouble containing my excitement.
At the local bar, I waxed on (to annoying lengths, I'm sure) about how this was a revolution in technology. How it would change the world and the way we interact with it.
I shared my excitement with my family, and when I was selected as a #glassexplorers they had to pull me down out of the clouds.
I was busy planning apps that I was going to develop, I had visions of an app where I could say "ok glass, find my car" and a floating 3d compass arrow would appear and guide me.
I had visions of walking into my house and saying "ok, glass turn on the lights, lock the doors, arm security", and seeing an interactive display of all my devices. I would be able to say "ok, glass show front camera" and I would be able to look out of the security camera on my front porch.
I had ideas for interactive augmented reality games, where the user could scan the sky for alien UFO's and see 3d spaceships through the Glass display window.
I eagerly refreshed myself on OpenCV, preparing for all the computer vision awesomeness I would be able to develop (I'd already done some of this work on android tablets, using the native sdk).
With all of these visions in my head, I set out to begin development. Finally the new api was released. I sat down at my main development box, pulling up the docs, expecting to see all of the richness of the Android API plus Glass specific enhancements.
What I got was: Cards. A completely non-interactive API where I had to broker every request through a complex chain of servers where eventually, at some point, some static text or images may or may not popup on the user's screen.
I was actually in disbelief. I was sure I was missing some documentation somewhere. I poured through the docs, trying to understand what I was looking at. I felt that I must be missing something really obvious. From what I could tell, the amazing awesomness that was Glass, was limited by the API to being essentially nothing more than a SMS messaging system, similar to text messages on my cell.
None of my applications were possible. I couldn't talk to the accelerometer or other sensors. All I could do was go through a strange "add my app as a contact" process so that I could post text messages with some limited media to the user's timeline. That's it. Interactivity was limited to glorified hyperlinks that would post a me
That's true, however, there are two really important points here.
1) No one that I know of, no matter how far afield, follows the rules laid down in Leviticus, which was why I was so annoyed with the poster.
2) The fact that old testament rules aren't followed strictly is internally consistent. My understanding is that these old rules were superseded by the teachings of Jesus who was mostly all about not harming others.
Of course, the poster that I originally replied to is either unaware of this, or was specifically misrepresenting these things, which I felt it was necessary to call out.
No, just being revisionist and - once again - misleading.
1. Can I sell my daughter into slavery? Yes! [biblehub.com] 2. Should I avoid all contact with women during her period? Yes! [biblegateway.com] 3. Can I buy slaves from neighbouring nations? Yes! [biblehub.com] 4. Should I kill someone who works on a Sunday? Yes! [biblehub.com] 5. Can I eat shellfish? No! [biblehub.com] 6. I have a lazy eye. Can I go to church? No! [biblehub.com] 7. Can I get a haircut? No! [biblehub.com]
Yup, good book that.
Your phrasing, use of exclamation points, and flippant "Yup, good book that" were all clear indicators of your tone.
But not as a guide for living your life in the 21st century, which, again, is the position the OP took which I took issue with.
Saying something does not make it so. The OP did not take the position you stated. Your post was clearly intended to be derogatory and sarcastic.
Congratulations, the moderators of slashdot agreed with you. You sunk to the level of hipster group think and won karma points. Well done.
You don't need to justify yourself, you "won". I should have never wasted my time trying to help you improve your critical thinking and writing.
Please ignore my points, and carry on as you were.
No, I disagree. It was clear that the purpose of your comment was to score points by sneering at the Bible. It was clear that the OP's post was a joke, and poking fun at creationists. The OP was taking a sarcastic tone to illustrate some of the poorly reasoned arguments that are made by new-earth creationists.
You post, however was not that. You post cherry picked individual lines from the Bible in order to specifically misrepresent them, take them out of context in a sort of elitist, intellectually superior tone by applying current moral standards to a culture of thousands of years ago. By doing that, you treated an important book with total disregard and disrespect.
That was inappropriate.
You post was inaccurate, misleading and childish. It lowered the quality of the discussion.
Well, it depends on what assumptions you are making about me.
I never said I agreed with the things that I mentioned, or suggested that Leviticus contains a list of rules to live by, or what religion, if any, I ascribe to.
What I disagree with is the casual disrespect and misrepresentation that the OP treated the Bible with.
Regardless of religious preference, such an important historical document should be treated with more respect. Also, regardless of religious preference, it is a fool who goes through life believing that there isn't a great deal of wisdom contained in the Bible. Or the Koran (Quran). Or the Bhagavad Gita. I would defend any of those texts with the same fervor.
I know that it is cool to make fun of religions, especially Christians, here. It's a guaranteed way to score yourself some easy Karma (ironic!). In this case, however, I took exception to the condescending, disrespectful tone and willful ignorance of the poster.
Those points were specifically cherry picked in order to make a distorted point and to trash the Bible: "Yup, good book that"
It was done by applying current moral standards, two thousand years later, to a people, civilization and culture that were *vastly* different.
The poster made no attempt at intellectual honesty, and strictly went for "cool points". This sort of thing lowers the quality of the discussion for everyone. Even if slashdot tends to be something of a hip, liberal echo-chamber - most of us here value reasoned, intelligent debate. The poster didn't do that, so I (quite appropriately) called him out on it.
Ok, I try to avoid getting involved in religious conversations like this, but you are coming across as a typical ignorant elitist here, sneering down at things you clearly don't understand. We all get that you aren't religious, but that doesn't give you the right to present skewed information taken out of context. So, I'm going to completely waste my time here and present some *actual* information on each one of your points in the vain hope that in the future you will temper your snark.
What you aren't saying, is that at the time selling children into slavery was a common practice throughout much of the "civilized" world. This 'law' was put in to place to *protect women*. The reason why is that normally when a child was sold into servitude, they would be freed after a period of time. Since (by far) the reason that women were taken as 'servants' or ('hand-maidens' depending on the interpretation) was as second wives or concubines, it was grossly unfair to the woman to then release her from service after she had been used as a sex object for years. No one would want to marry her, and she was essentially screwed. To protect against that, this law was put into place saying essentially, that if you're going to take this woman on, you have to care for her forever, you can't just have sex with her for a few years while she's pretty and then kick her out once she gets older.
2. Should I avoid all contact with women during her period? Yes!
Again, you're totally cherry picking here. Leviticus rules of cleanliness were generally *good* things. At the time, they simply didn't understand biology, and sanitary practices were spotty at best. This was the origin of laying down some rules for sanitary practices, which is a good thing, even if they seem strange to us now. And by the way, Leviticus' admonishments were by no means limited only to women:
Leviticus 1-5: "Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: 'When any man has a discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean. And this shall be his uncleanness in regard to his discharge; whether his body runs with his discharge, or his body is stopped up by his discharge, it is his uncleanness. Every bed is unclean on which he who has the discharge lies, and everything on which he sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches his bed shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening."
This was relating to abnormal discharge, no one really understood STD's, they were just doing their best at the time. But great job completely misrepresenting Leviticus as anti-female in order to push some sort of agenda.
3. Can I buy slaves from neighbouring nations? Yes!
Again, you're totally misrepresenting the law here. A the time, this was incredibly progressive. Slavery was rampant and commonly accepted, to limit the bounds of slavery and who could be enslaved was a great step in the right direction. Considering that even the U.S. still hadn't worked out slavery issues as of only 140 years ago, applying 21st century morals to a progressive law created to put bounds and limits on slavery thousands of years ago... well, that's just childish.
4. Should I kill someone who works on a Sunday? Yes!
I don't even understand your point here. Are you saying this is still a problem? I mean, I agree - we need to stop the rampant slaughter of all the people who work on Sundays in America. Oh wait... you mean, this doesn't happen? At all? So, clearly it was a law intended for another time - a time that penalties were pretty damn harsh for just about any infraction. There's some question about how tightly this was int
This doesn't make any sense to me. Are you telling me that paying SS and Medicare are optional, that I have a choice in it? No? Then they are part of my total tax burden, just like military spending - and as a self-employed developer, I can tell you that the burden of paying both sides of SS is significant.
This sort of viewpoint of "well, those don't count because they have a separate fund" is the sort of thinking that has gotten us into this situation.
We have a spending problem, but it's not limited just to the military budget, and it is simply not true to say that the military spending "dwarfs" the rest of the debt components. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite.
This has a nice visual breakdown of federal income and outlay: http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Also, refer to the GAO's citizen's report for FY 2012: http://www.fms.treas.gov/fr/12... chart 3 is a nice pie chart representation of spending, please note that for FY 2012 HHS and SSA together ("entitlement spending") were 45% of the total federal budget, military spending was 21%, 30% if you include the VA.
Yes, we need to cut military spending and reduce our involvement in foreign conflicts, but that's just one part of the work that needs to be done. We need to reduce spending in all of these areas.
Just to escape from the politics for a moment, I actually ran into an interesting injection type attack against mongodb and php. The attack exploits the fact that php auto assigns certain variables to arrays, which when parsed my the mongo driver are interpreted as commands.
I thought this was pretty cool, except for the fact that the project I was involved in was *riddled* with security holes as a result. The devs didn't believe that you could do a sql injection with mongodb until I started logging in with their users in the dev environment using the above trick.
Yes, it really would. At one point just about every major piece of technology and science we have today would have been considered supernatural/metaphysical. Given the abundance of anecdotal evidence of "parapsychological" effects, it is completely reasonable to perform controlled experiments in order to evaluate whether those effects can be reproduced. That is the very nature of science.
It is also completely reasonable and scientific to periodically continue to perform those experiments as our tools and understanding grow, and to continue to ensure that the earlier falsification was justified and correct.
. If you're willing to entertain anything more than that then you're dealing with quasi-claims for which no amount of evidence can be used to substantiate or disprove them.
I'm sorry, but you clearly have no idea how taxes on small businesses work. There is no "loss" or any of that nonsense. You can do taxes in two different ways, either cash basis or accrual. Either way, you pay tax on what you actually earned. This is simpler with the cash basis. The thing you may be getting confused with is when business pay tax on accrual, which is where they pay tax based on "booked" revenue, rather than actual revenue. In this case, if the actual revenue doesn't match what the booked revenue was, they are able to make an adjustment so that they only pay tax on what they actually earn.
You seem to have a (fairly typical) liberalish distaste for business - based on your clearly uneducated portrayal of how business operate. If you think that there's some sort of incentive for a small business like a dental office to earn $116 instead of $167, you're very misguided.
Additionally, you also clearly have no idea how insurance billing and negotiation work. Insurance billing and rates are done typically off of ICD9 codes, and are based on UNC (Usual and Customary), which in turn is based of of a multiple of medicare reimbursement. The provider charges a multiple of UNC as a standard practice, and then will go through a fairly difficult and lengthy negotiation process with the insurance company in order to "settle" at an agreed upon reimbursement. In fact, this process is so lengthy and difficult, there is an entire industry in health care that's dedicated to doing nothing but this, and to handle these negotiations. Take a look at a company called NCN (Nation Care Network). They are an example.
Because of the difficulty getting reimbursed in a timely manner from the insurance companies, and the cost involved in these negotiations, the providers will frequently inflate the amount they are billing, with full knowledge that they will not be reimbursed for this amount. They do this as a negotiating tactic for the insurance companies. This is the high "inflated" bill you're referring to.
It is extremely rare that anyone would actually pay that inflated amount. In fact, the providers will normally give you a nice discount off of UNC if you pay directly because it saves them the expense and hassle of getting reimbursed from the insurance companies.
The problems with the healthcare system in this country are not a result of evil money grubbing providers, or even of evil money grubbing insurance companies. The problems with the cost of healthcare are directly attributable to the regulatory environment.
If you doubt this in any way, go do some research. Go look at the cost of healthcare prior to medicare/medicaid, and then the cost of healthcare afterwards. Even a trivial bit of research will show you the huge spikes in costs. These spikes in cost are a direct result of the command economy approach to price setting in healthcare, and the fact that these rate tables are used as a basic for UNC.
The notion that adding even more of a command economy and a harsher regulatory environment is going to somehow make things better is ludicrous. The idea that putting the same people who have demonstrated their willingness to systematically abuse power in almost every scenario where power has been granted... that these people are going to make all of our lives better... this is nonsense and everyone knows it.
This entire healthcare law is about one thing: power. Anyone who is intellectually honest will recognize that. The disagreement is with whether granting these sweeping powers to a bureaucracy will make things better or worse. I don't know for sure, but I have my suspicions. Or we could ask the flood of healthcare workers and doctors that are fleeing the profession what they think about it all.
I suspect we, as a country, are going to get yet another lesson in "the law of unintended consequences".
The mistake you're making here is failing to understand the difference between constant factor and asymptotic bounds. In computer science, algorithm analysis explicitly ignores constant factors like computer speed, compiler speed, language speed etc... because asymptotically they are irrelevant.
For non math geeks, what I mean by asymptotic bounds is the curve of execution time as the number of inputs increases. When the number of inputs is low, the dominating concern is the constant factor, but as inputs increase this quickly becomes irrelevant.
Consider this: let's calculate every possible permutation of a set of inputs. Starting with two inputs, [1,2] then it's easy - { [1,2], [2,1] }. Still pretty easy when we go to three inputs: { [1,2,3], [1,3,2], [2,1,3],[2,3,1],[3,2,1],[3,1,2] }, but when we go to four it starts to become more annoying, and by the time we go to 15 or 20, we're getting crazy with the possible number of combinations. That's because the number of possible permutations is defined by the factorial n! (a factorial is numbers multiplied in decreasing order, so 5! means 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1).
Therefore calculating the possible number of permutations of a few numbers is easy, but calculating the number of permutations for many numbers takes a long time. It doesn't matter how fast the computer is, I can simply add more numbers and I will quickly outstrip your ability to calculate it.
In fact, this is going to be pretty much true of anything that runs in higher order time ( O(n ^ x) ) because as the number of inputs increases, the time required to calculate it increases exponentially. As long as x > 1, eventually, no matter how fast your computer is, the constant factor improvements gained by your computer speed will be dominated by the exponent x.
Now, when you start talking about P and NP, things get more complex, but for simplicity's sake imagine that the class of algorithms that are P are things we can "put our finger on", or technically, those whose execution times are bounded by a polynomial. NP problems are even more complex than this, in that they can't even be bounded within polynomial time constraints. Factoring numbers is part of the NP problem space, and cryptography relies on this.
The exciting/terrifying thing about this news is the notion that we can take a problem from the NP class and make it P, and if this is the case it has profound implications.
"Web programming" is writing programs on or for the web. "Web design" is something different.
"Web programmers" are people who write software that runs in an amazing cross platform VM: the browser.
I'm one of them.
I know you were just trying to be cute with your comment, but you were legitimately called out on it because it is BS. It's best not to try to defend a bad argument. Just evaluate, learn, adjust your understand and move on.
Frankly, you're either grossly uneducated, or a troll. Either way you're showing your ignorance.
Just because you might know a little C or ASM does not give you the right to sneer at talented developers who chose different platforms. Go here and tell me these people aren't "real programmers": http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
Guess what: I code in C and asm, I hand solder my own boards. I write cross platform drivers for Windows and Mac. I'm reasonably proficient in probably every language you've ever heard of, from Clipper to RPG (on the AS400) to Java and.Net and I've been doing it for about 17 years now professionally, longer as a hobby. And you know what? I choose to spend 90% of my current development time in Javascript, both in the browser and in NodeJS.
Hopefully one day, if I work really hard and keep trying, maybe I can be considered a "programmer" in your book.
There's a mind-numbingly obvious solution to your problem here.
Become a customer.
It's very simple. Sign up and start paying for the services. I'm highly dependent on Google services, I run my whole business off them. It was an unacceptable risk to me to be locked out, or not have customer support, so I simply signed up and started paying for it.
The wonderful thing about a free society is that no one works by force (unlike statist governements).
If a consenting adult chooses to engage in a mutually beneficial contract and sell his time and service to another for an agreed upon compensation, that hardly fits your example of "capitalists have the right to the lions share of the fruits of others' labor".
The fact that a voluntary system of rewards, employment, creation, production and business opportunity is a superior system to leftist/statist "work for the common good" scheme should be obvious to anyone that can read English - because those that can read English should have read Animal Farm at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I guess I'm part of the idiocy then, I just bought one. I also owned the original surface book. I'm a greybeard, been doing this since TRS-80. Was linux guy for a long time till OSX was a better linux, then did macs. I only say all this to provide some context, I'm really far from being a ms fanboi.
The Surface Book devices are hands down the best computing devices I've ever owned. Not even close to anything else. And yes, I've owned and still own top-end Macs, top-end System 76 Linux boxes, etc...
Windows 10 is a delight. With WSL enabled, I have everything I want and need immediately available. The precision touchpad on the surface book is the only one I've ever used that's comparable to a mac, and works amazingly well. I set up three or for different desktops and four-finger brush between them, and three finger brush between apps in a desktop. This is better than the OSX experience.
The battery drain issue is overblown imho and experience. I played Divinity 2 dialed all the way up for hours and the battery charged, albeit slowly.
Additionally, even if you're getting a drain, it's not like it's going to ruin your day. We're talking about like 5-10% per hour or something, plugged in. I mean, you can game for a really long time at max-awesome without any problem. And guess what. When you take a break to eat lunch, the laptop will be fully charged again when you're ready.
I had the same concern before I bought it, and then realized that basically this is a non-issue for real, practical purposes. This laptop is lightweight, has amazing engineering and unique features, a detachable tablet, and can play modern games without really working hard.
Hell, I played Divinity 2 on battery *alone* for almost three hours. I've never seen a laptop that can do that. Ever.
Considering that I spend 10-14 hours a day on my laptop, the $3k I paid for this one is well worth it.
I mean, on paper the specs are great, but I've actually done projects with these things and they're seriously junk. They burn out if you look at them wrong. Additionally, they have a 1.8v gpio level, so there's basically zero chance that you can use any other peripheral without level shifting.
I've talked to a lot of other folks about them as well, they have a terrible reputation in the maker community.
And they're expensive.
So yeah, I'm not surprised. I abandoned them after a single project, like most other folks I know.
No, no. You're missing the point. Apple sales and revenues are in decline. They need to innovate, but they don't have Steve.
Conversation goes something like this:
"Crap. We're dying here. We need new ideas!"
"Sorry sir, we don't have any."
"Well, shit."
"Wait, I have an idea - what if we take away all the really useful parts of a laptop..."
"What the fuck? Are you stupid?"
"No, no hear me out. Then, Mac Book Pro 2017 will have a brand new super functional multipurpose button that let's you communicate to a running process that you want to exit out of the current activity... we'll call it, the iEsc - and run marketing ads with beaches... The All New Mac Book 2017 - Escape The Norm"
"I like where you're going with this..."
I may disagree with the whole premise of this. I also don't discount the possibility that I'm easily duped or have poor cognitive abilities and am a sucker.
It's common practice for artists to generate random words in different configurations in order to draw new insights, inspiration and ideas.
Also, just because something is randomly generated, doesn't mean it's not insightful. How it is possible to objectively judge?
FTFA: "Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena". Even though I was told that this phrase was nonsense and randomly generated, I decided to think about it a bit to see if there was an insight I can draw.
Here's one:
In our lives, we're constantly flooded with external stimuli. Text messages, advertisements, flashing lights, warnings, political messages, friends in crisis, problems at work, deadlines, all stridently competing for our attention (infinite phenomena). Personality flaws and weaknesses allow some of these to catch us and drive us in unhealthy directions. If we can work to fix our flaws (wholeness) we can have more effective defenses against the infinite flood of events pushing us and driving us to action (buy this, sell that, believe this, become outraged, donate, think this way, etc...). Becoming a healthy, mature, thoughtful person helps reduce or eliminate the effect that these external driving forces have on us (quiets). Ergo, Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
I don't know. BS? Maybe. Possibly. But also thought provoking. I think I like the random phrases.
Actually, I'm giving MS a heck of a lot of credit these days. It's a different Microsoft from what we here at slashdot are used to.
VS Code is brilliant. MS's actions embracing open source are wonderful. Azure supporting Linux is awesome. Windows 10 is a freaking amazing OS and for the first time in a long time the best consumer OS on the market (though I'm still partial to Linux on servers).
Microsoft has embraced JavaScript and NodeJS, and they are actively pushing the open web and standards. Edge browser has better and more advanced HTML5 support and ES6 support than Chrome!
Microsoft has a lot of history to overcome, but from what I see they are doing the right things and I think we should give credit where it's due and encourage the awesome new direction MS is taking. I never thought I'd say it, but I'm really starting to like MS, or at the very least taking a serious second look and not discarding them out of hand like I would have four or five years ago.
Actually, I'll probably be switching my whole team over to this once they add two things, 1) vim keybindings and 2) support for debugging node clusters
Why? Because it's lightweight, runs everywhere, is open source and works great. It supports node debugging well. It's a heck of a lot better than Webstorm, which we're currently using. Webstorm is nice but so full of feature bloat that all I see all day as I code is the little mac spinning rainbow as java slowly executes.
There are plenty of other editors out there, and other IDE options, but one thing that MS has always done well is focus on developer tools and ease of use. This seems to be the next iteration of that, but aiming for a minimalist approach with filesystem based "projects" and drastically simplified UI that works with most web developer's workflow.
I like it. Once it grows up a bit my whole team will probably switch over, and we're a mac/linux shop primarily.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
— HL Mencken
I've been encouraged by what I'm seeing in my local Radio Shack. I just dropped a couple hundred bucks in there, bought a Beaglebone Black, some RGB LED strips (with weather proofing), a nice little USB battery/charger that has enough umph to drive the BBB, and some other odds and ends.
Going to run over there today and pick up the "tv be gone" DIY project kit for a buddy of mine for his birthday.
Also lots of Arduino stuff. I also see on their site that they've been making a bit of an effort to have blog posts about controlling some of the stuff they are selling, but it's a far cry from adafruit or the other maker sites.
They still have a long way to go if they want to really compete in that market.
From the *actual* draft:
This document describes two alternative methods for an user-agent to
automatically discover and for an user to provide consent for a
Trusted Proxy to be securely involved when he or she is requesting an
HTTP URI resource over HTTP2 with TLS. The consent is supposed to be
per network access. The draft also describes the role of the Trusted
Proxy in helping the user to fetch HTTP URIs resource when the user
has provided consent to the Trusted Proxy to be involved.
The entire draft is oriented around user consent and transparency to the user... where is the problem here?
The linked article by Lauren Weinstein is very heavy on sarcasm, scorn and flippant one-liners, but pretty light on technical details. From what I can discern, her primary concern is that ISP's will force all of their users to consent to them acting as a trusted proxy or refuse to serve them.
This is pretty far fetched, imho. First of all, the backlash from the average consumer would be staggering. If, every time they go to their bank's web page, they get a scary security notice "do you want to allow an intermediary at "trustedproxy.verizon.com" to see your private data?" they answer, every time, will be "hell no". And if they are then unable to access their bank account because of this... well, that's not going to be a pretty picture for L1 support.
Second, the *last* thing most ISPs want is to have to deal with yet more PCI concerns. If they end up storing your cc number and ssn in a plain-text cache, that introduces all sorts of potential problems for them.
It seems like the primary use case for this technology is in serving media-heavy content that SSL screws up, like streaming video over ssl etc... so, it would allow caching etc for various media streams that really don't need SSL. And the user could make the decision for whether they want to do it or not.
This seems like a pretty smart thing to me, I'm not sure what all the hand-wringing is about. Maybe I'm missing something obvious?
A while ago I was also accepted to the glass explorers program. I was pretty excited at the time, and was planning to go ahead and get one. I'll admit to being a bit of a Google fanboy, though recently they've lost some of their shine in my eyes.
At the time, there were a few compelling reasons why I decided to wait, which I summarized here: Why I'll Wait on Glass
One thing to consider, is that along with the $1,500 price tag, unless you live close to one of the fitting centers, you'll also have to book airfare and hotel, which can be as much as the Glass itself, so that really raises the price a lot. At least, this was the case when I was invited to the program, it may have changed.
For those who don't like clicking G+ links, here's my full original post:
Why I'll Wait on Glass
So, I received my invitation to purchase #googleglass and become a #glassexplorers . Google notified me that I had 14 days to make my purchase and schedule a pickup date.
I've put a lot of thought into this, and decided not to move forward with the purchase. I'm outlining my reasons below, and I hope that the amazing folks on the Glass team can take this post with the spirit that it's intended: as constructive, objective feedback from a developer who is a huge Google fan.
When I first heard about Glass, I was gobsmacked. The notion of having a powerful, wearable computing device with an array of sensors, camera and floating UI always available to the user, with speech recognition and integration with wireless services - well frankly, I had trouble containing my excitement.
At the local bar, I waxed on (to annoying lengths, I'm sure) about how this was a revolution in technology. How it would change the world and the way we interact with it.
I shared my excitement with my family, and when I was selected as a #glassexplorers they had to pull me down out of the clouds.
I was busy planning apps that I was going to develop, I had visions of an app where I could say "ok glass, find my car" and a floating 3d compass arrow would appear and guide me.
I had visions of walking into my house and saying "ok, glass turn on the lights, lock the doors, arm security", and seeing an interactive display of all my devices. I would be able to say "ok, glass show front camera" and I would be able to look out of the security camera on my front porch.
I had ideas for interactive augmented reality games, where the user could scan the sky for alien UFO's and see 3d spaceships through the Glass display window.
I eagerly refreshed myself on OpenCV, preparing for all the computer vision awesomeness I would be able to develop (I'd already done some of this work on android tablets, using the native sdk).
With all of these visions in my head, I set out to begin development. Finally the new api was released. I sat down at my main development box, pulling up the docs, expecting to see all of the richness of the Android API plus Glass specific enhancements.
What I got was: Cards. A completely non-interactive API where I had to broker every request through a complex chain of servers where eventually, at some point, some static text or images may or may not popup on the user's screen.
I was actually in disbelief. I was sure I was missing some documentation somewhere. I poured through the docs, trying to understand what I was looking at. I felt that I must be missing something really obvious. From what I could tell, the amazing awesomness that was Glass, was limited by the API to being essentially nothing more than a SMS messaging system, similar to text messages on my cell.
None of my applications were possible. I couldn't talk to the accelerometer or other sensors. All I could do was go through a strange "add my app as a contact" process so that I could post text messages with some limited media to the user's timeline. That's it. Interactivity was limited to glorified hyperlinks that would post a me
That's true, however, there are two really important points here.
1) No one that I know of, no matter how far afield, follows the rules laid down in Leviticus, which was why I was so annoyed with the poster.
2) The fact that old testament rules aren't followed strictly is internally consistent. My understanding is that these old rules were superseded by the teachings of Jesus who was mostly all about not harming others.
Of course, the poster that I originally replied to is either unaware of this, or was specifically misrepresenting these things, which I felt it was necessary to call out.
No, just being revisionist and - once again - misleading.
1. Can I sell my daughter into slavery? Yes! [biblehub.com]
2. Should I avoid all contact with women during her period? Yes! [biblegateway.com]
3. Can I buy slaves from neighbouring nations? Yes! [biblehub.com]
4. Should I kill someone who works on a Sunday? Yes! [biblehub.com]
5. Can I eat shellfish? No! [biblehub.com]
6. I have a lazy eye. Can I go to church? No! [biblehub.com]
7. Can I get a haircut? No! [biblehub.com]
Yup, good book that.
Your phrasing, use of exclamation points, and flippant "Yup, good book that" were all clear indicators of your tone.
But not as a guide for living your life in the 21st century, which, again, is the position the OP took which I took issue with.
Saying something does not make it so. The OP did not take the position you stated. Your post was clearly intended to be derogatory and sarcastic.
Congratulations, the moderators of slashdot agreed with you. You sunk to the level of hipster group think and won karma points. Well done.
You don't need to justify yourself, you "won". I should have never wasted my time trying to help you improve your critical thinking and writing.
Please ignore my points, and carry on as you were.
No, I disagree. It was clear that the purpose of your comment was to score points by sneering at the Bible. It was clear that the OP's post was a joke, and poking fun at creationists. The OP was taking a sarcastic tone to illustrate some of the poorly reasoned arguments that are made by new-earth creationists.
You post, however was not that. You post cherry picked individual lines from the Bible in order to specifically misrepresent them, take them out of context in a sort of elitist, intellectually superior tone by applying current moral standards to a culture of thousands of years ago. By doing that, you treated an important book with total disregard and disrespect.
That was inappropriate.
You post was inaccurate, misleading and childish. It lowered the quality of the discussion.
Well, it depends on what assumptions you are making about me.
I never said I agreed with the things that I mentioned, or suggested that Leviticus contains a list of rules to live by, or what religion, if any, I ascribe to.
What I disagree with is the casual disrespect and misrepresentation that the OP treated the Bible with.
Regardless of religious preference, such an important historical document should be treated with more respect. Also, regardless of religious preference, it is a fool who goes through life believing that there isn't a great deal of wisdom contained in the Bible. Or the Koran (Quran). Or the Bhagavad Gita. I would defend any of those texts with the same fervor.
I know that it is cool to make fun of religions, especially Christians, here. It's a guaranteed way to score yourself some easy Karma (ironic!). In this case, however, I took exception to the condescending, disrespectful tone and willful ignorance of the poster.
Those points were specifically cherry picked in order to make a distorted point and to trash the Bible: "Yup, good book that"
It was done by applying current moral standards, two thousand years later, to a people, civilization and culture that were *vastly* different.
The poster made no attempt at intellectual honesty, and strictly went for "cool points". This sort of thing lowers the quality of the discussion for everyone. Even if slashdot tends to be something of a hip, liberal echo-chamber - most of us here value reasoned, intelligent debate. The poster didn't do that, so I (quite appropriately) called him out on it.
Ok, I try to avoid getting involved in religious conversations like this, but you are coming across as a typical ignorant elitist here, sneering down at things you clearly don't understand. We all get that you aren't religious, but that doesn't give you the right to present skewed information taken out of context. So, I'm going to completely waste my time here and present some *actual* information on each one of your points in the vain hope that in the future you will temper your snark.
Questions like:
1. Can I sell my daughter into slavery? Yes!
What you aren't saying, is that at the time selling children into slavery was a common practice throughout much of the "civilized" world. This 'law' was put in to place to *protect women*. The reason why is that normally when a child was sold into servitude, they would be freed after a period of time. Since (by far) the reason that women were taken as 'servants' or ('hand-maidens' depending on the interpretation) was as second wives or concubines, it was grossly unfair to the woman to then release her from service after she had been used as a sex object for years. No one would want to marry her, and she was essentially screwed. To protect against that, this law was put into place saying essentially, that if you're going to take this woman on, you have to care for her forever, you can't just have sex with her for a few years while she's pretty and then kick her out once she gets older.
2. Should I avoid all contact with women during her period? Yes!
Again, you're totally cherry picking here. Leviticus rules of cleanliness were generally *good* things. At the time, they simply didn't understand biology, and sanitary practices were spotty at best. This was the origin of laying down some rules for sanitary practices, which is a good thing, even if they seem strange to us now. And by the way, Leviticus' admonishments were by no means limited only to women:
Leviticus 1-5:
"Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: 'When any man has a discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean. And this shall be his uncleanness in regard to his discharge; whether his body runs with his discharge, or his body is stopped up by his discharge, it is his uncleanness. Every bed is unclean on which he who has the discharge lies, and everything on which he sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches his bed shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening."
This was relating to abnormal discharge, no one really understood STD's, they were just doing their best at the time. But great job completely misrepresenting Leviticus as anti-female in order to push some sort of agenda.
3. Can I buy slaves from neighbouring nations? Yes!
Again, you're totally misrepresenting the law here. A the time, this was incredibly progressive. Slavery was rampant and commonly accepted, to limit the bounds of slavery and who could be enslaved was a great step in the right direction. Considering that even the U.S. still hadn't worked out slavery issues as of only 140 years ago, applying 21st century morals to a progressive law created to put bounds and limits on slavery thousands of years ago... well, that's just childish.
4. Should I kill someone who works on a Sunday? Yes!
I don't even understand your point here. Are you saying this is still a problem? I mean, I agree - we need to stop the rampant slaughter of all the people who work on Sundays in America. Oh wait... you mean, this doesn't happen? At all? So, clearly it was a law intended for another time - a time that penalties were pretty damn harsh for just about any infraction. There's some question about how tightly this was int
This doesn't make any sense to me. Are you telling me that paying SS and Medicare are optional, that I have a choice in it? No? Then they are part of my total tax burden, just like military spending - and as a self-employed developer, I can tell you that the burden of paying both sides of SS is significant.
This sort of viewpoint of "well, those don't count because they have a separate fund" is the sort of thinking that has gotten us into this situation.
Your concluding statement isn't accurate at all.
The "mandatory" spending on entitlement programs dwarfs military spending: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
We have a spending problem, but it's not limited just to the military budget, and it is simply not true to say that the military spending "dwarfs" the rest of the debt components. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite.
This has a nice visual breakdown of federal income and outlay: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Also, refer to the GAO's citizen's report for FY 2012: http://www.fms.treas.gov/fr/12... chart 3 is a nice pie chart representation of spending, please note that for FY 2012 HHS and SSA together ("entitlement spending") were 45% of the total federal budget, military spending was 21%, 30% if you include the VA.
Yes, we need to cut military spending and reduce our involvement in foreign conflicts, but that's just one part of the work that needs to be done. We need to reduce spending in all of these areas.
Just to escape from the politics for a moment, I actually ran into an interesting injection type attack against mongodb and php. The attack exploits the fact that php auto assigns certain variables to arrays, which when parsed my the mongo driver are interpreted as commands.
From here:
$collection->find(array(
"username" => $_GET['username'],
"passwd" => $_GET['passwd']
));
you can inject using something like:
login.php?username=admin&passwd[$ne]=1
I thought this was pretty cool, except for the fact that the project I was involved in was *riddled* with security holes as a result. The devs didn't believe that you could do a sql injection with mongodb until I started logging in with their users in the dev environment using the above trick.
Yes, it really would. At one point just about every major piece of technology and science we have today would have been considered supernatural/metaphysical. Given the abundance of anecdotal evidence of "parapsychological" effects, it is completely reasonable to perform controlled experiments in order to evaluate whether those effects can be reproduced. That is the very nature of science.
It is also completely reasonable and scientific to periodically continue to perform those experiments as our tools and understanding grow, and to continue to ensure that the earlier falsification was justified and correct.
. If you're willing to entertain anything more than that then you're dealing with quasi-claims for which no amount of evidence can be used to substantiate or disprove them.
String theory?
I'm sorry, but you clearly have no idea how taxes on small businesses work. There is no "loss" or any of that nonsense. You can do taxes in two different ways, either cash basis or accrual. Either way, you pay tax on what you actually earned. This is simpler with the cash basis. The thing you may be getting confused with is when business pay tax on accrual, which is where they pay tax based on "booked" revenue, rather than actual revenue. In this case, if the actual revenue doesn't match what the booked revenue was, they are able to make an adjustment so that they only pay tax on what they actually earn.
You seem to have a (fairly typical) liberalish distaste for business - based on your clearly uneducated portrayal of how business operate. If you think that there's some sort of incentive for a small business like a dental office to earn $116 instead of $167, you're very misguided.
Additionally, you also clearly have no idea how insurance billing and negotiation work. Insurance billing and rates are done typically off of ICD9 codes, and are based on UNC (Usual and Customary), which in turn is based of of a multiple of medicare reimbursement. The provider charges a multiple of UNC as a standard practice, and then will go through a fairly difficult and lengthy negotiation process with the insurance company in order to "settle" at an agreed upon reimbursement. In fact, this process is so lengthy and difficult, there is an entire industry in health care that's dedicated to doing nothing but this, and to handle these negotiations. Take a look at a company called NCN (Nation Care Network). They are an example.
Because of the difficulty getting reimbursed in a timely manner from the insurance companies, and the cost involved in these negotiations, the providers will frequently inflate the amount they are billing, with full knowledge that they will not be reimbursed for this amount. They do this as a negotiating tactic for the insurance companies. This is the high "inflated" bill you're referring to.
It is extremely rare that anyone would actually pay that inflated amount. In fact, the providers will normally give you a nice discount off of UNC if you pay directly because it saves them the expense and hassle of getting reimbursed from the insurance companies.
The problems with the healthcare system in this country are not a result of evil money grubbing providers, or even of evil money grubbing insurance companies. The problems with the cost of healthcare are directly attributable to the regulatory environment.
If you doubt this in any way, go do some research. Go look at the cost of healthcare prior to medicare/medicaid, and then the cost of healthcare afterwards. Even a trivial bit of research will show you the huge spikes in costs. These spikes in cost are a direct result of the command economy approach to price setting in healthcare, and the fact that these rate tables are used as a basic for UNC.
The notion that adding even more of a command economy and a harsher regulatory environment is going to somehow make things better is ludicrous. The idea that putting the same people who have demonstrated their willingness to systematically abuse power in almost every scenario where power has been granted... that these people are going to make all of our lives better... this is nonsense and everyone knows it.
This entire healthcare law is about one thing: power. Anyone who is intellectually honest will recognize that. The disagreement is with whether granting these sweeping powers to a bureaucracy will make things better or worse. I don't know for sure, but I have my suspicions. Or we could ask the flood of healthcare workers and doctors that are fleeing the profession what they think about it all.
I suspect we, as a country, are going to get yet another lesson in "the law of unintended consequences".
The mistake you're making here is failing to understand the difference between constant factor and asymptotic bounds. In computer science, algorithm analysis explicitly ignores constant factors like computer speed, compiler speed, language speed etc... because asymptotically they are irrelevant.
For non math geeks, what I mean by asymptotic bounds is the curve of execution time as the number of inputs increases. When the number of inputs is low, the dominating concern is the constant factor, but as inputs increase this quickly becomes irrelevant.
Consider this: let's calculate every possible permutation of a set of inputs. Starting with two inputs, [1,2] then it's easy - { [1,2], [2,1] }. Still pretty easy when we go to three inputs: { [1,2,3], [1,3,2], [2,1,3],[2,3,1],[3,2,1],[3,1,2] }, but when we go to four it starts to become more annoying, and by the time we go to 15 or 20, we're getting crazy with the possible number of combinations. That's because the number of possible permutations is defined by the factorial n! (a factorial is numbers multiplied in decreasing order, so 5! means 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1).
Therefore calculating the possible number of permutations of a few numbers is easy, but calculating the number of permutations for many numbers takes a long time. It doesn't matter how fast the computer is, I can simply add more numbers and I will quickly outstrip your ability to calculate it.
In fact, this is going to be pretty much true of anything that runs in higher order time ( O(n ^ x) ) because as the number of inputs increases, the time required to calculate it increases exponentially. As long as x > 1, eventually, no matter how fast your computer is, the constant factor improvements gained by your computer speed will be dominated by the exponent x.
Now, when you start talking about P and NP, things get more complex, but for simplicity's sake imagine that the class of algorithms that are P are things we can "put our finger on", or technically, those whose execution times are bounded by a polynomial. NP problems are even more complex than this, in that they can't even be bounded within polynomial time constraints. Factoring numbers is part of the NP problem space, and cryptography relies on this.
The exciting/terrifying thing about this news is the notion that we can take a problem from the NP class and make it P, and if this is the case it has profound implications.
Is developing in C or asm writing a program?
Is developing in Python writing a program?
Is developing in Java writing a program?
Is developing in Javascript with NodeJS a program?
Is developing in C using NaCL for a web page writing a program?
If I take a program developed in C and port it to Javascript to run in the browser via LLVM/Emscripten does it cease to be a program?
Is this a program?
https://developer.cdn.mozilla.net/media/uploads/demos/a/z/azakai/3baf4ad7e600cbda06ec46efec5ec3b8/bananabread_1373485124_demo_package/index.html
"Web programming" is writing programs on or for the web. "Web design" is something different.
"Web programmers" are people who write software that runs in an amazing cross platform VM: the browser.
I'm one of them.
I know you were just trying to be cute with your comment, but you were legitimately called out on it because it is BS. It's best not to try to defend a bad argument. Just evaluate, learn, adjust your understand and move on.
Frankly, you're either grossly uneducated, or a troll. Either way you're showing your ignorance.
Just because you might know a little C or ASM does not give you the right to sneer at talented developers who chose different platforms. Go here and tell me these people aren't "real programmers": http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
Guess what: I code in C and asm, I hand solder my own boards. I write cross platform drivers for Windows and Mac. I'm reasonably proficient in probably every language you've ever heard of, from Clipper to RPG (on the AS400) to Java and .Net and I've been doing it for about 17 years now professionally, longer as a hobby. And you know what? I choose to spend 90% of my current development time in Javascript, both in the browser and in NodeJS.
Hopefully one day, if I work really hard and keep trying, maybe I can be considered a "programmer" in your book.
There's a mind-numbingly obvious solution to your problem here.
Become a customer.
It's very simple. Sign up and start paying for the services. I'm highly dependent on Google services, I run my whole business off them. It was an unacceptable risk to me to be locked out, or not have customer support, so I simply signed up and started paying for it.
For $5 per month, I have a phone number to call if anything goes wrong, and real customer support: http://contact.googleapps.com/?&rd=1
The wonderful thing about a free society is that no one works by force (unlike statist governements).
If a consenting adult chooses to engage in a mutually beneficial contract and sell his time and service to another for an agreed upon compensation, that hardly fits your example of "capitalists have the right to the lions share of the fruits of others' labor".
The fact that a voluntary system of rewards, employment, creation, production and business opportunity is a superior system to leftist/statist "work for the common good" scheme should be obvious to anyone that can read English - because those that can read English should have read Animal Farm at some point.