The Congress does nominally hold a lot of power, but it remains to be seen if they actually have the balls to exercise it.
Their problem is that they know full well that America didn't elect them. It elected Trump, and they just rode his coattails. Every single Republican in Congress knows that a lot of his constituents pretty much worship Trump, and if they see their representative as an obstacle to the president, they'll vote accordingly. Furthermore, they also know that Trump is very vocal when someone gets into his way, and loves pointing fingers at specific people and loudly demanding their heads... which is exactly what will make voters notice. So, they're afraid.
So far we have seen a lot of talk from them, but on the action front, they are all cow-towing. Just look at how it already went on the budget deficit. Or the tweet that killed their "ethics reform". It may be that Russia will be that one thing on which it'll be different, but I don't see any strong evidence to that effect so far.
The point is that the way election rules are, the resulting count does not represent the will of the people. It is by design, yes. But you can't look at it and say "counted that way, people favored Trump". The electors of the electoral college favored Trump.
As a Californian, I say Californians should have no right to vote in national elections until they prove they are US citizens.
That's fine, but any associated expenses then have to be footed entirely by the government. In other words, if you demand voter ID, then the state should be responsible for issuing such IDs for free to all eligible citizens, and in a manner that minimally inconveniences said citizens (i.e. no 2-hour travel to some DMV with lines that are half mile long, because it's 3x over capacity it can actually serve).
And yes, before you ask, the same should apply to concealed carry licenses.
There are more counties in which more people voted red than blue, yes. But this can mean 50%+1 vote voting red; and if you count it all as red, you ignore all those people who voted otherwise.
That's actually the biggest problem that Democrats have: the demographics that support them are clustered in densely populated areas, where they have huge but completely useless margins, thereby wasting votes (because once your guy got over 50% of the votes, every additional vote is a "wasted" one that doesn't change anything).
Almost, except you ignored the part where it wasn't about small vs large states really, but rather about free vs slave states (the latter were generally large). EC system achieved two goals that slave states demanded: first, it seamlessly incorporated the 3/5 Compromise into presidential elections; and second, it gave control on how to allocate those electors to the states themselves, so they could exclude any groups of people from actually voting.
Small states actually wanted a system whereby the senators would elect the president.
It's true, but it's completely irrelevant in the context of the original comment, which was talking about the "US people", not "US states".
And even then, you're wrong. It's still popular vote after all, just skewed in favor of smaller states, and with winner-take-all on a state by state basis (with a couple of exceptions). It's actually the latter that causes most of the discrepancy between popular vote and EC vote - if electors were allocated proportional to popular votes on a state-by-state basis, results would be much closer. Ironically, winner-take-all is not constitutionally required, it's just an inane system that states themselves individually came up with and are unwilling to change.
It depends a lot on the Russian in question. E.g. this guy is Russian, and was a prominent militia commander for Donbass separatists for a while. Note the flag he's holding on the first photo.
Here is how to do strings correctly: use UTF-8 and DO NOT BARF ON ENCODING ERRORS!
Let's just say that this is your opinion, and that it is not shared by the majority of developers out there. Which is why most mainstream languages today do not use this model (and some of them did, but migrated from it).
The simple reason why it's impractical is that many important platforms (Windows, OS X) don't use UTF-8 to encode Unicode for most of their stuff - so you need to re-encode, and for that you need valid UTF-8 input anyway. On top of that, it's pretty common to have non-Unicode file contents, and on Unix, even file names.
Writing reliable software is easy: if you know that your input is a text string (defined as something representable in Unicode), then use a string. Otherwise, use a byte array, but then do not expect your bytes to be readable text, because that is the guarantee that you explicitly abandon when you say "this is not a string". You can't have your cake and eat it too, and it's long past time that we started slapping you hard when you try.
If you disagree, that's fine, there are languages out there who cater to your crowd - Ruby is one example.
The language changed for one big reason, that being making strings work properly - i.e. without magic encoding and decoding, silently losing characters or worse. This was a much needed change for anyone except for those assholes who 1) use a language for which ASCII is good enough, and 2) don't care about anyone else, and don't care if their code breaks on non-ASCII locales.
Unfortunately, it was also a breaking change, but there was no way around it. And since they already had one breaking change, they figured they might as well clean up the rest of the language and the core standard library - which they did with great results.
As far as developers sticking to 2.7 - some do, true. And some people still stick to VB6, and keep demanding that Microsoft brings it back. I suspect the "Python 2 forever!" crowd will eventually end up in the same boat - we're getting close to a similar timeframe, at least. In the meantime, anyone who is actually following the ecosystem knows that all the major libraries and frameworks are now available on 3.x, most smaller libraries are as well or else have replacements (often API-compatible), and the overall trend is that 2.x usage keeps declining, and 3.x usage keeps trending up. So, painful as the transition has been, the community had powered through it, and reaped the rewards in form of a better, cleaner language.
R is an... interesting... language. Definitely lots of crappy points, but I think it's the closest that any language with a mainstream C-style syntax has come to being Lisp. In fact, arguably, R has exceeded Lisp in some ways - by making function arguments lazy, and making it possible to get the underlying expression if desired, it did away with the need for macros as a separate facility - it's just functions all the way.
And literally everything in R is a function call. Including things like conditionals and loops, variable assignments, function definitions, and even parentheses themselves (they're all just syntactic sugar on top of the underlying S-expressions).
This all makes some traditional "debug that, mofo" tricks more interesting, e.g.:
You don't have to distinguish between them while reading the code. Any Python 3 program that mixes the two is not a valid program, and won't even parse. So you can safely assume that whitespace "behaves" exactly how it looks, and disregard tab size issues etc.
And things being what they are, they'll probably pack him on a plane straight to US, so that Trump can present his head on the platter as his achievement ("see, Obama couldn't do that, but I did!").
It has been happening gradually even under Ballmer, but Nadella really kicked it into high gear and made it an explicit top-down strategy throughout the company.
Some parts of it aren't even readily obvious. For example, did you know that Win10 ships SQLite in the box, as a serviceable OS component? (meaning it'll get security updates via WU etc). So any Win10 app can depend on that.
Do you guys not understand that the country you live in, the country that provides all these technologies and services that you take for granted, was built on the premise that the free market works?
We do. We've also seen how well it "works" in practice back in the 19th century. Sherman Act was passed for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
The Congress does nominally hold a lot of power, but it remains to be seen if they actually have the balls to exercise it.
Their problem is that they know full well that America didn't elect them. It elected Trump, and they just rode his coattails. Every single Republican in Congress knows that a lot of his constituents pretty much worship Trump, and if they see their representative as an obstacle to the president, they'll vote accordingly. Furthermore, they also know that Trump is very vocal when someone gets into his way, and loves pointing fingers at specific people and loudly demanding their heads... which is exactly what will make voters notice. So, they're afraid.
So far we have seen a lot of talk from them, but on the action front, they are all cow-towing. Just look at how it already went on the budget deficit. Or the tweet that killed their "ethics reform". It may be that Russia will be that one thing on which it'll be different, but I don't see any strong evidence to that effect so far.
The point is that the way election rules are, the resulting count does not represent the will of the people. It is by design, yes. But you can't look at it and say "counted that way, people favored Trump". The electors of the electoral college favored Trump.
As a Californian, I say Californians should have no right to vote in national elections until they prove they are US citizens.
That's fine, but any associated expenses then have to be footed entirely by the government. In other words, if you demand voter ID, then the state should be responsible for issuing such IDs for free to all eligible citizens, and in a manner that minimally inconveniences said citizens (i.e. no 2-hour travel to some DMV with lines that are half mile long, because it's 3x over capacity it can actually serve).
And yes, before you ask, the same should apply to concealed carry licenses.
Counties don't vote, people do.
There are more counties in which more people voted red than blue, yes. But this can mean 50%+1 vote voting red; and if you count it all as red, you ignore all those people who voted otherwise.
That's actually the biggest problem that Democrats have: the demographics that support them are clustered in densely populated areas, where they have huge but completely useless margins, thereby wasting votes (because once your guy got over 50% of the votes, every additional vote is a "wasted" one that doesn't change anything).
Almost, except you ignored the part where it wasn't about small vs large states really, but rather about free vs slave states (the latter were generally large). EC system achieved two goals that slave states demanded: first, it seamlessly incorporated the 3/5 Compromise into presidential elections; and second, it gave control on how to allocate those electors to the states themselves, so they could exclude any groups of people from actually voting.
Small states actually wanted a system whereby the senators would elect the president.
When California was occupied, there was what, 20k Mexican settlers there? It was basically their frontier. Culturally, it was tabula rasa.
It's true, but it's completely irrelevant in the context of the original comment, which was talking about the "US people", not "US states".
And even then, you're wrong. It's still popular vote after all, just skewed in favor of smaller states, and with winner-take-all on a state by state basis (with a couple of exceptions). It's actually the latter that causes most of the discrepancy between popular vote and EC vote - if electors were allocated proportional to popular votes on a state-by-state basis, results would be much closer. Ironically, winner-take-all is not constitutionally required, it's just an inane system that states themselves individually came up with and are unwilling to change.
They were eaten by the same wolf as well, it's just that this part of the story didn't get told (because there was no-one to tell it).
The Left is rediscovering hawkishness now.
http://www.politico.com/magazi...
The boy did get eaten by a wolf in the end, though...
It depends a lot on the Russian in question. E.g. this guy is Russian, and was a prominent militia commander for Donbass separatists for a while. Note the flag he's holding on the first photo.
they are neither idiots nor ill informed by and large
How would you describe this?
And no, it's not just one voter
Here is how to do strings correctly: use UTF-8 and DO NOT BARF ON ENCODING ERRORS!
Let's just say that this is your opinion, and that it is not shared by the majority of developers out there. Which is why most mainstream languages today do not use this model (and some of them did, but migrated from it).
The simple reason why it's impractical is that many important platforms (Windows, OS X) don't use UTF-8 to encode Unicode for most of their stuff - so you need to re-encode, and for that you need valid UTF-8 input anyway. On top of that, it's pretty common to have non-Unicode file contents, and on Unix, even file names.
Writing reliable software is easy: if you know that your input is a text string (defined as something representable in Unicode), then use a string. Otherwise, use a byte array, but then do not expect your bytes to be readable text, because that is the guarantee that you explicitly abandon when you say "this is not a string". You can't have your cake and eat it too, and it's long past time that we started slapping you hard when you try.
If you disagree, that's fine, there are languages out there who cater to your crowd - Ruby is one example.
The language changed for one big reason, that being making strings work properly - i.e. without magic encoding and decoding, silently losing characters or worse. This was a much needed change for anyone except for those assholes who 1) use a language for which ASCII is good enough, and 2) don't care about anyone else, and don't care if their code breaks on non-ASCII locales.
Unfortunately, it was also a breaking change, but there was no way around it. And since they already had one breaking change, they figured they might as well clean up the rest of the language and the core standard library - which they did with great results.
As far as developers sticking to 2.7 - some do, true. And some people still stick to VB6, and keep demanding that Microsoft brings it back. I suspect the "Python 2 forever!" crowd will eventually end up in the same boat - we're getting close to a similar timeframe, at least. In the meantime, anyone who is actually following the ecosystem knows that all the major libraries and frameworks are now available on 3.x, most smaller libraries are as well or else have replacements (often API-compatible), and the overall trend is that 2.x usage keeps declining, and 3.x usage keeps trending up. So, painful as the transition has been, the community had powered through it, and reaped the rewards in form of a better, cleaner language.
R is an... interesting... language. Definitely lots of crappy points, but I think it's the closest that any language with a mainstream C-style syntax has come to being Lisp. In fact, arguably, R has exceeded Lisp in some ways - by making function arguments lazy, and making it possible to get the underlying expression if desired, it did away with the need for macros as a separate facility - it's just functions all the way.
And literally everything in R is a function call. Including things like conditionals and loops, variable assignments, function definitions, and even parentheses themselves (they're all just syntactic sugar on top of the underlying S-expressions).
This all makes some traditional "debug that, mofo" tricks more interesting, e.g.:
You don't have to distinguish between them while reading the code. Any Python 3 program that mixes the two is not a valid program, and won't even parse. So you can safely assume that whitespace "behaves" exactly how it looks, and disregard tab size issues etc.
And things being what they are, they'll probably pack him on a plane straight to US, so that Trump can present his head on the platter as his achievement ("see, Obama couldn't do that, but I did!").
Places that do it properly, mark the post as edited, and provide a way to access the edit history.
We have the ability to listen, and to parse what he says.
So no, there's no "perhaps" there. The guy is in direct opposition to all these values, and he repeatedly said so himself in so many ways.
In fact, his own Twitter is sufficient to make that conclusion.
What amazes me most about American libertarians, is that so many of you guys like Trump, and are willing to come up with excuses for him.
Which just shows how hypocritical you are.
It has been happening gradually even under Ballmer, but Nadella really kicked it into high gear and made it an explicit top-down strategy throughout the company.
Some parts of it aren't even readily obvious. For example, did you know that Win10 ships SQLite in the box, as a serviceable OS component? (meaning it'll get security updates via WU etc). So any Win10 app can depend on that.
It has been supported for a while now. The most recent version of F# tooling for VS also supports Core projects.
Do you guys not understand that the country you live in, the country that provides all these technologies and services that you take for granted, was built on the premise that the free market works?
We do. We've also seen how well it "works" in practice back in the 19th century. Sherman Act was passed for a reason.
Well China is one of the worst most oppressive regimes in the world.
Not even close. Many US allies in the Middle East - like, say, Saudi Arabia - are far worse.
But seriously, are you calling for war over China's human rights records? Why not Putin's? Why not Assad's?
The companies that try to do that, usually find out pretty quickly why it doesn't quite work out that way.
Well, or else the companies just pass it over to the customers, and then the customers find out.
And in the case of the United States government, the customers are all of us.