To be fair people can't be blamed for having that viewpoint though, as it's one that's been as much cultivated as a result of ignorance as it has Indian government and companies themselves.
The issue is that when India was making it's drive for companies to use it's outsourced call centres it's government and companies were making the case that all the staff in them were well trained highly skilled graduates. When customers get on the phone to them however it was not just an issue of language barriers, it was a lack of simple basic logical thought- for example, when I phoned Dell about a laptop that just wouldn't power up the guy at the other end insisted I must give him the error message on screen before he could do anything, and despite me trying to phrase it in countless ways that you wont get an error message if it wont turn on he continued to insist such that I had to hang up and get through to another person who at least managed to get past that point and handle a return.
So whilst yes I agree much of it is "they took our jobs" kind of ignorance, let's be honest, who can blame people for thinking Indians are stupid when their only experience with them are people are are extremely stupid and who they've been told time and time again are India's highly skilled graduates? That leaves one to draw the conclusion that India's education system is a complete joke and a degree in India is completely worthless so when we're told you can have highly skilled Indian graduates it's no better than getting poorly skilled Western dropouts.
But in reality it's probably something else than that- it's probably simply that the companies in question like many companies are using the cheapest possible staff they can, and which probably aren't actually graduates, or if they're obligated to be, are given some fake degree certificate.
So yeah I agree it's not fair to generalise Indians are stupid, but the Indian government itself deserves much of the blame for cultivating that viewpoint by claiming that some of the most stupid people you'll ever have to talk to are the country's best and brightest, when that simply isn't true.
Yes, but Louis Theroux's documentaries were quite good too. What told us more about the Phelps' in his documentaries were not the words said by Louis or the Westboro' folks but the simple emotions on the faces of these people.
It's pretty clear they feel genuinely insecure, that inside they have doubts about what they do, that they know deep down they're wrong. The looks on their faces, the hesitation when asked certain questions and so forth are more telling than anything.
For what it's worth this is what's great about Louis Theroux, he knows exactly how to put people in a position where their real feelings are pretty visible, even if the answers they give do not admit them.
Many members of the Westboro' lot look like they know they're desperate, isolated, and pretty uncertain deep down if they're doing the right thing, and many people have left their group too.
The only think they're achieving is making themselves more and more isolated, more and more lonely, and that's bare for anyone to see in their faces, their expressions.
Meanwhile it continues to power the backend of countless websites and systems you take advantage of day to day from your bank to your supermarkets stock control system to eBay and Google, to any smart features you may have on your TV or set top box.
And really, that's the beauty about Java, it doesn't matter if people like you care about it or not, it'll still continue to sit happily working away solving countless problems across the globe.
It's not even that, because of OFCOM reducing BT's monopoly over the years and the likes of Virgin growing their fibre network, South Yorkshire getting EU funding for it's own fibre network and so forth BT have been scared of having to actually compete.
As such they've basically said to OFCOM, look, we'll roll fibre out across the UK as long as we can retain a monpoly on it, and OFCOM has let them get away with it because it's the only way some areas will ever get fibre.
So it's really just about BT retaining it's monopoly, it wouldn't do this if it's monopoly wasn't under threat, we'd all still be stuck on dialup.
Market forces are making the growth of fibre inevitable, now BT's been pushed to face up to that it's doing all it can to ensure it has a monopoly on that too like it did copper.
If this is true then Facebook is most certainly breaking UK Data Protection Law.
A 3rd party cannot give Facebook permission to store personal data on you, that is a blatant breach of the data protection act. Only you can give a company permission for that, there are some exceptions (i.e. law enforcement) but Facebook would not in any way fall under any of these.
This just isn't true, WPF is still supported for what it was always supported for - classic desktop apps. WinRT is more focussed on Metro apps, but even there that's a boon for WPF developers because WinRT still embraces XAML.
Yes, that's why 4.0 is available. I know it's a ballache to port because they completely revamped it, but that's not a discontinuation, it's just a major change.
I think you missed the point. Even if they give customers a choice, if they offer a bad choice then customers will still hold them to account when they inevitably make that bad choice because the bad choice lured them with some promises of shiny new features that just wont work on their well out of date handset.
The problem is that even given a choice, customers wont accept responsibility for their actions when they make a bad choice, they still blame the carrier.
I don't disagree with that, I think it's a fair point - carriers should leave firmware the fuck alone. I just think there has to be a distinction between when a phone can be upgraded by a carrier and isn't, and when a phone is not worth upgrading by a carrier. I think the viewpoint many have that their phones should always be upgraded to the latest version no matter how old they are can lead to problems for carriers and consumers alike that many consumers aren't even aware of. It sounds corner but sometimes carriers are keeping that upgrade from you for your own good as many people discovered with the Magic.
To be fair everyone whinged and whinged and whinged about the HTC Magic on Vodafone in the UK not being updated from 1.6.
Then they updated it from 1.6 to 2.2 and it turned out that yeah the hardware really was a bit too shitty to support the new version decently. The same has happened with iOS where the oldest supported model tends to run shit with the most newly released update.
I sympathise with some as some phones really can and should be updated, but sometimes there's also good reason not to update phones too. I spoken to someone at Vodafone outside of their official work setting where they could be a bit more frank and he said they were damned if they did, damned if they didn't - by not updating they got tons and tons and tons of flak, but then when they finally updated the Magic they then got loads and loads of flak from people complaining their phone was slow, and couldn't run some of the newer 2.2 only apps very well, the net result being post update they actually saw a higher burden of complaints. I know Vodafone et al isn't blameless when it comes to updates, far from it, their messing around with the Desire was just silly, but hearing this other side of the story was interesting. There are very real concerns for carriers if they allow any old update on any old phone - because they provide the phone people go to them for support when things go to shit.
"but after the election both SPD and CDU were dismissive to the point of insulting those who voted for the Pirate Party. (Whose voters are more educated than the average of the electorate.) "
Political anti-intellectualism in Germany? What could possibly go wrong!
Er the drug trade isn't legalised in Switzerland - it's at best sometimes prescribed to addicts as part of programmes to get them off the drugs (which is true in other European countries), all that proves is that the US has really shit care for addicts, whether the trade is legalised or not.
That says nothing about how decriminalisation would increase amount of problems with addiction and the resulting detrimental effects on society of that, and your comment about evil bastards not being fuelled with drug money does nothing to change the fact they'd find other avenues of crime to fund themselves such as increased levels of people trafficking Europe.
Switzerland is also a tiny country, what works in a small country will work differently in countries that are 10 - 50 times the size.
This is why those studies are important, and this is why they have value.
Agreed, it's not like legalised alcohol causes any problems that put burdens on the health system and increases deaths by drink driving accidents and so forth or anything.
Seriously, it's not as simple as you think. Sure legalisation gets rid of organised crime but it creates other issues in terms of higher levels of sometimes fatal substance abuse.
Note that I'm not saying legalisation isn't the best solution of a bad bunch - it might well be - but so many idiots think it's a silver bullet and it's absolutely not. Legalisation just brings with it a whole raft of different problems instead. All that tax income and then some is just going to go on drug driving incidents, greater numbers requiring rehabilitation and so forth.
It's also not going to eliminate the cartels overnight, there are still going to be an absolute fuckton of very nasty people with more nasty weapons out there with a lust for doing some even more nasty things. You run the risk of having a situation where these nasty fucks are still going round murdering whilst simultaneously also having to deal with a greater burden of addicts, drug driving fuckups and so forth to boot.
There need to be a lot more studies - impartial ones - before any such step like this is taken. Thus far the debate is largely dominated by a contest between stoner hippies who want to have their thrill legalised, and prudish bores who think anything more than paracetamol is going to make the whole world instantly collapse.
One should note that even the famous Amsterdam, often used by those in support of legalisation as an example of how well things can work has recently clamped down on it to a degree because of the amount of people coming in, getting high, and creating costly and annoying problems. It's certainly not this magical panacea some thing it is.
Yes, basically it's just saying Microsoft is making it's tablets/phones like the iPhone in not supporting Flash, whilst all normal desktop browsers and Android phones will continue to support it - and most importantly - other plugins too.
"Most libraries I use are open source, reading documentation is reading code and comments"
Sorry, let me get this straight, when you have to work with a new library you take time out to read the actual source code itself and memorise the functions available? Seriously? That's about the most unproductive thing I've ever heard.
With intellisense you can jump straight into a new API and presuming it has used intelligent function names you can basically type code with the function name you'd expect the API to provide to do what you want and intellisense will pop it up.
I'm not saying that API documentation isn't important, and that it's not a good idea to read it sometimes to avoid unexpected issues, but in many cases you really can just jump in and get to work by just using intellisense, and besides, when you highlight a function with intellisense, the IDE tends to pop up relevant code comments alongside the function anyway.
People using intellisense aren't really doing anything different to you - they're just letting the IDE find the functions they need when they need them, rather than reading through a ton of code to find them and try and memorise them all. They're still learning those functions despite your claim to the contrary - they're just doing it in a more efficient manner than you are. They're getting stuff done whilst learning it.
"For some reason, every time I say this, I get modded down."
Probably because it's bullshit, although in this case you seem to have at least caught the attention of the anti-Microsoft lobby that mod up Microsoft haters no matter how wrong they are. You can't honestly say that if you've ever actually spent any decent amount of time with both IDEs and if you are a professional developer that has to get involved with things like unit testing, database integration, refactoring and so forth.
If all you do is write some basic programs, hobbyist type stuff then you're right in that you'll probably not notice the difference (although even there Eclipse is just that much slower and more buggy it's hard to believe), but if you're a professional developer and have worked on proper projects in both that use the typical professional developer's toolset then Visual Studio is simply years ahead of Eclipse. The gap widens even further if you're working with other Microsoft technologies like Team Foundation Server, and MS SQL Server. I understand many people here don't like Microsoft, and particularly the idea of Microsoft products tying in together so closely, but those arguments must be separated when objectively evaluating IDEs and when objectively evaluating them it's hard to see how you can realistically suggest Eclipse is as good as Visual Studio.
Eclipse has too many issues, it's slow, it's buggy, it's plugin system barely works often requiring multiple installations of the whole thing if you want to work with different languages and to top it all off it just lacks some pretty fucking useful features that Visual Studio has. Eclipse is somewhat more comparable with Visual Studio Express, but professional? It just doesn't come close.
The problem is Eclipse is often cited as the great saviour in the face of Visual Studio, it's the FOSS community's golden boy for IDEs, but even as a competing IDE it's not even the best. IMO things like NetBeans, JDevelop, and hell even Qt Creator as niche as it is have a lot of benefits that Eclipse lacks even, which is why when someone touts Eclipse as a competitive alternative to Visual Studio I can't help but think they're basically screaming "lack of experience", or "fanboy" because there are other IDEs out there that put Eclipse to shame other than just Visual Studio, and that would hence be better suggested as an alternative to Visual Studio.
Why does that require drinking the kool-aid? It's actually the truth nowadays.
Java has stagnated in recent years, not least because of the Oracle takeover of Sun..NET has kept moving at a better pace, and because of that it has left Java behind in a few areas. It also had the advantage of being built after Java such that it could avoid some of Java's shortcomings in C# - operator overloading, cleaner method of integrating unmanaged code etc.
In the early days Java was certainly still better anyway, but now? I don't think anyone with an objective viewpoint would say it is. Without a doubt Java is still nice, but it's now in a position of playing catch up, rather than leading the way.
"Because prior to Google buying the IBM and Motorola patents they had nothing to offer. Why would Apple (or Microsoft, or Samsung, or anyone else) let Google just use their patents when Google has nothing of value to offer them? That is just throwing away money. Now that Google has something to offer they are in a better position to make such a deal."
Yes, it's not that Google lacks really good patents, it's just that those really good patents are in things like search.
The issue is that companies are using patents to try and build a stranglehold on certain markets. Microsoft's long been using them to try and ensure the desktop OS market is theirs and only theirs, Apple has recently been using them to try and corner the cellphone market, and Google if any serious search competition came along would probably start using them there too.
None of these companies want to compete in their most lucrative markets, and that's where they are using the patents.
This is a real problem though, because it demonstrates how stupid the US patent system is- being a major player in a particular market means you no longer have to compete on your merits, you can just try and keep everyone else out with litigation.
What's happening in the cellphone market is that people just outright don't want to be kept out because they realise it's a lucrative market, and as hard as Apple tries, it's going to be forced into licensing deals in the end, just as it was when it tried things on with Nokia.
It's a fine example of how the patent system in the US works counter to what it was intended for, it's an excellent demonstration as to why it causes companies to decided to try and litigate rather than innovate. I just don't know how long it can go on for, as it's not just the US it hurts but the whole world as no manufacturer can shun a market as big as the US. The US needs to reform it's patent system now, not just for itself but for everyone, and even Europe has some work to do judging by the way it's been honouring Apple's absurd design patents that involve really nothing much more than rectangles with rounded corners.
"Most instances I've seen of geeks defending trolling have had their base the idea that people should expect it and that most of the victims of the trolling deserve it."
I've not seen much of this either, maybe you hang around on 4chan or something, but this isn't a common attitude on the more civilised sections of the web.
"They are moral equivalents and should be considered legal equivalents too."
The problem is, you're making a rather broad assumption here. People have been known to shout at people on the edge of suicide to jump off a building and get on with it or whatever with no punishment. Your assertion that someone getting in your face and insulting you would land them with jail time is false too, it'd likely not land them with anything more than a caution, if even that.
So if you think online activities should suffer the same penalties as real life activities then you're actually arguing that this guys sentence was overly harsh because it is much more harsh than the equivalent activities in real life would've netted him. Just to give you some context, in the UK you can kill someone by driving dangerously and get away without a single minute of jail time.
This guy was an asshole and deserved punishment, but that doesn't change the fact there's a question as to whether this punishment was overly harsh compared to equivalent real life crimes and other crimes, and whether this interpretation of the laws used to deal with him were a bit of a stretch of their original intention, and further, whether now that the law has been stretched whether there's a risk that it's too loosely defined such that it could be stretched to more borderline cases.
Again let me reinforce the point that I don't deny this guy deserved punishment. But I think it's naive to assume that the law wont be stretched further and further and there should always be scrutiny of these sorts of things, else you may find that even you've been guilty of what would then legally be defined as trolling yourself one day.
"his "slippery slope" meme seems to be the libertarian's favorite argument against any legislation, but how do things actually happen in the real world?"
Well they follow the slippery slope. That's kind of the point.
As I suggested to someone else as an example, the UK government introduced legislation to allow parliament to arbitrarily seize assets of terror suspects. This was then used in the financial crisis to seize the assets of pretty much the entire Icelandic banking system. This arguably actually caused the collapse of Icelandic banks because they lost so much of their assets in that single move.
It's not that the law was necessarily bad per-se, it's that the implementation was bad and ill-thought out. Had their been a requirement of judicial oversight or greater scrutiny of such orders then it may not have happened. This is all most people are arguing for when they bring in the slippery slope argument - that when you leave too much open to personal interpretation someone will inevitably interpret it in the broadest possible sense- i.e the British government deeming the Icelanding banks to fall under the classification of financial terrorists.
Laws that are so broad are abused, almost inevitably, it's sad that you're completely ignorant to this fact and believe it doesn't happen.
"yet magically Europe persists in being a place of open discourse, not a police state"
Yeah? I live in the UK where much of the worst arbitrary anti-terror laws were implemented. Photographers were getting their cameras seized for taking photos that were actually legal. People have been getting stopped and searched because the police didn't like the person in question. Councils used RIPA to perform covert following and spying on people for such simple offences as who hadn't picked up dog poo their dog had created, and to make sure parents lived where they said they did so they could go to the right schools the council wanted them too. These are three more examples of ill-defined laws being abused well beyond their original remit. The fact you think this doesn't happen is a really really sad illustration of the level of ignorance some people have of the problem - of course the police and government would never get things wrong, they're perfect, they'd never put self-interest above anything else! You keep telling yourself that. You probably even think warrantless wiretapping laws in the US designed for anti-terrorism operations were only ever used on terrorists too don't you?
No it just seems you don't get it either, which is odd, the concept isn't difficult and has been proven many times to be the case already.
This guy is an asshole no matter how you look at it, I imagine no one would ever see him as anything but.
But the point is, to catch and deal with this asshole, you make it possible to deal with people that really are "freedom fighters" or whatever in the same way. Each time this has happened in the past, this has been the inevitable consequence. A fine example was the British government's introduction of a law to allow them to seize funds of someone arbitrarily designated as a "terrorist" with no real solid legal process needing to be followed before that action was taken. During the financial crisis the British government decided to deem pretty much the whole of the Icelandic banking system as a "terrorist" and seized all their assets. Obviously there were far better ways of going about solving the problem than that and it was a rushed decision that seems likely to have made the problem worse in actually causing the collapse of those Icelandic banks.
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To be fair people can't be blamed for having that viewpoint though, as it's one that's been as much cultivated as a result of ignorance as it has Indian government and companies themselves.
The issue is that when India was making it's drive for companies to use it's outsourced call centres it's government and companies were making the case that all the staff in them were well trained highly skilled graduates. When customers get on the phone to them however it was not just an issue of language barriers, it was a lack of simple basic logical thought- for example, when I phoned Dell about a laptop that just wouldn't power up the guy at the other end insisted I must give him the error message on screen before he could do anything, and despite me trying to phrase it in countless ways that you wont get an error message if it wont turn on he continued to insist such that I had to hang up and get through to another person who at least managed to get past that point and handle a return.
So whilst yes I agree much of it is "they took our jobs" kind of ignorance, let's be honest, who can blame people for thinking Indians are stupid when their only experience with them are people are are extremely stupid and who they've been told time and time again are India's highly skilled graduates? That leaves one to draw the conclusion that India's education system is a complete joke and a degree in India is completely worthless so when we're told you can have highly skilled Indian graduates it's no better than getting poorly skilled Western dropouts.
But in reality it's probably something else than that- it's probably simply that the companies in question like many companies are using the cheapest possible staff they can, and which probably aren't actually graduates, or if they're obligated to be, are given some fake degree certificate.
So yeah I agree it's not fair to generalise Indians are stupid, but the Indian government itself deserves much of the blame for cultivating that viewpoint by claiming that some of the most stupid people you'll ever have to talk to are the country's best and brightest, when that simply isn't true.
Yes, but Louis Theroux's documentaries were quite good too. What told us more about the Phelps' in his documentaries were not the words said by Louis or the Westboro' folks but the simple emotions on the faces of these people.
It's pretty clear they feel genuinely insecure, that inside they have doubts about what they do, that they know deep down they're wrong. The looks on their faces, the hesitation when asked certain questions and so forth are more telling than anything.
For what it's worth this is what's great about Louis Theroux, he knows exactly how to put people in a position where their real feelings are pretty visible, even if the answers they give do not admit them.
Many members of the Westboro' lot look like they know they're desperate, isolated, and pretty uncertain deep down if they're doing the right thing, and many people have left their group too.
The only think they're achieving is making themselves more and more isolated, more and more lonely, and that's bare for anyone to see in their faces, their expressions.
Meanwhile it continues to power the backend of countless websites and systems you take advantage of day to day from your bank to your supermarkets stock control system to eBay and Google, to any smart features you may have on your TV or set top box.
And really, that's the beauty about Java, it doesn't matter if people like you care about it or not, it'll still continue to sit happily working away solving countless problems across the globe.
It's not even that, because of OFCOM reducing BT's monopoly over the years and the likes of Virgin growing their fibre network, South Yorkshire getting EU funding for it's own fibre network and so forth BT have been scared of having to actually compete.
As such they've basically said to OFCOM, look, we'll roll fibre out across the UK as long as we can retain a monpoly on it, and OFCOM has let them get away with it because it's the only way some areas will ever get fibre.
So it's really just about BT retaining it's monopoly, it wouldn't do this if it's monopoly wasn't under threat, we'd all still be stuck on dialup.
Market forces are making the growth of fibre inevitable, now BT's been pushed to face up to that it's doing all it can to ensure it has a monopoly on that too like it did copper.
If this is true then Facebook is most certainly breaking UK Data Protection Law.
A 3rd party cannot give Facebook permission to store personal data on you, that is a blatant breach of the data protection act. Only you can give a company permission for that, there are some exceptions (i.e. law enforcement) but Facebook would not in any way fall under any of these.
What makes you think that's not going to be the case?
Microsoft are still updating MFC for crying out loud.
"Now it gets replaced with WinRT."
This just isn't true, WPF is still supported for what it was always supported for - classic desktop apps. WinRT is more focussed on Metro apps, but even there that's a boon for WPF developers because WinRT still embraces XAML.
Yes, that's why 4.0 is available. I know it's a ballache to port because they completely revamped it, but that's not a discontinuation, it's just a major change.
I think you missed the point. Even if they give customers a choice, if they offer a bad choice then customers will still hold them to account when they inevitably make that bad choice because the bad choice lured them with some promises of shiny new features that just wont work on their well out of date handset.
The problem is that even given a choice, customers wont accept responsibility for their actions when they make a bad choice, they still blame the carrier.
I don't disagree with that, I think it's a fair point - carriers should leave firmware the fuck alone. I just think there has to be a distinction between when a phone can be upgraded by a carrier and isn't, and when a phone is not worth upgrading by a carrier. I think the viewpoint many have that their phones should always be upgraded to the latest version no matter how old they are can lead to problems for carriers and consumers alike that many consumers aren't even aware of. It sounds corner but sometimes carriers are keeping that upgrade from you for your own good as many people discovered with the Magic.
To be fair everyone whinged and whinged and whinged about the HTC Magic on Vodafone in the UK not being updated from 1.6.
Then they updated it from 1.6 to 2.2 and it turned out that yeah the hardware really was a bit too shitty to support the new version decently. The same has happened with iOS where the oldest supported model tends to run shit with the most newly released update.
I sympathise with some as some phones really can and should be updated, but sometimes there's also good reason not to update phones too. I spoken to someone at Vodafone outside of their official work setting where they could be a bit more frank and he said they were damned if they did, damned if they didn't - by not updating they got tons and tons and tons of flak, but then when they finally updated the Magic they then got loads and loads of flak from people complaining their phone was slow, and couldn't run some of the newer 2.2 only apps very well, the net result being post update they actually saw a higher burden of complaints. I know Vodafone et al isn't blameless when it comes to updates, far from it, their messing around with the Desire was just silly, but hearing this other side of the story was interesting. There are very real concerns for carriers if they allow any old update on any old phone - because they provide the phone people go to them for support when things go to shit.
Yeah, if you're a fascist.
Harper will have banned opposing political parties and declared you a subservient state of the US by that time anyway.
"but after the election both SPD and CDU were dismissive to the point of insulting those who voted for the Pirate Party. (Whose voters are more educated than the average of the electorate.) "
Political anti-intellectualism in Germany? What could possibly go wrong!
The 1930s called, they want their politics back.
Er the drug trade isn't legalised in Switzerland - it's at best sometimes prescribed to addicts as part of programmes to get them off the drugs (which is true in other European countries), all that proves is that the US has really shit care for addicts, whether the trade is legalised or not.
That says nothing about how decriminalisation would increase amount of problems with addiction and the resulting detrimental effects on society of that, and your comment about evil bastards not being fuelled with drug money does nothing to change the fact they'd find other avenues of crime to fund themselves such as increased levels of people trafficking Europe.
Switzerland is also a tiny country, what works in a small country will work differently in countries that are 10 - 50 times the size.
This is why those studies are important, and this is why they have value.
Agreed, it's not like legalised alcohol causes any problems that put burdens on the health system and increases deaths by drink driving accidents and so forth or anything.
Seriously, it's not as simple as you think. Sure legalisation gets rid of organised crime but it creates other issues in terms of higher levels of sometimes fatal substance abuse.
Note that I'm not saying legalisation isn't the best solution of a bad bunch - it might well be - but so many idiots think it's a silver bullet and it's absolutely not. Legalisation just brings with it a whole raft of different problems instead. All that tax income and then some is just going to go on drug driving incidents, greater numbers requiring rehabilitation and so forth.
It's also not going to eliminate the cartels overnight, there are still going to be an absolute fuckton of very nasty people with more nasty weapons out there with a lust for doing some even more nasty things. You run the risk of having a situation where these nasty fucks are still going round murdering whilst simultaneously also having to deal with a greater burden of addicts, drug driving fuckups and so forth to boot.
There need to be a lot more studies - impartial ones - before any such step like this is taken. Thus far the debate is largely dominated by a contest between stoner hippies who want to have their thrill legalised, and prudish bores who think anything more than paracetamol is going to make the whole world instantly collapse.
One should note that even the famous Amsterdam, often used by those in support of legalisation as an example of how well things can work has recently clamped down on it to a degree because of the amount of people coming in, getting high, and creating costly and annoying problems. It's certainly not this magical panacea some thing it is.
Are you sure? I was under the impression Metro was only optional on the desktop, but mandatory on phones, and possibly tablets?
Yes, basically it's just saying Microsoft is making it's tablets/phones like the iPhone in not supporting Flash, whilst all normal desktop browsers and Android phones will continue to support it - and most importantly - other plugins too.
"Most libraries I use are open source, reading documentation is reading code and comments"
Sorry, let me get this straight, when you have to work with a new library you take time out to read the actual source code itself and memorise the functions available? Seriously? That's about the most unproductive thing I've ever heard.
With intellisense you can jump straight into a new API and presuming it has used intelligent function names you can basically type code with the function name you'd expect the API to provide to do what you want and intellisense will pop it up.
I'm not saying that API documentation isn't important, and that it's not a good idea to read it sometimes to avoid unexpected issues, but in many cases you really can just jump in and get to work by just using intellisense, and besides, when you highlight a function with intellisense, the IDE tends to pop up relevant code comments alongside the function anyway.
People using intellisense aren't really doing anything different to you - they're just letting the IDE find the functions they need when they need them, rather than reading through a ton of code to find them and try and memorise them all. They're still learning those functions despite your claim to the contrary - they're just doing it in a more efficient manner than you are. They're getting stuff done whilst learning it.
"For some reason, every time I say this, I get modded down."
Probably because it's bullshit, although in this case you seem to have at least caught the attention of the anti-Microsoft lobby that mod up Microsoft haters no matter how wrong they are. You can't honestly say that if you've ever actually spent any decent amount of time with both IDEs and if you are a professional developer that has to get involved with things like unit testing, database integration, refactoring and so forth.
If all you do is write some basic programs, hobbyist type stuff then you're right in that you'll probably not notice the difference (although even there Eclipse is just that much slower and more buggy it's hard to believe), but if you're a professional developer and have worked on proper projects in both that use the typical professional developer's toolset then Visual Studio is simply years ahead of Eclipse. The gap widens even further if you're working with other Microsoft technologies like Team Foundation Server, and MS SQL Server. I understand many people here don't like Microsoft, and particularly the idea of Microsoft products tying in together so closely, but those arguments must be separated when objectively evaluating IDEs and when objectively evaluating them it's hard to see how you can realistically suggest Eclipse is as good as Visual Studio.
Eclipse has too many issues, it's slow, it's buggy, it's plugin system barely works often requiring multiple installations of the whole thing if you want to work with different languages and to top it all off it just lacks some pretty fucking useful features that Visual Studio has. Eclipse is somewhat more comparable with Visual Studio Express, but professional? It just doesn't come close.
The problem is Eclipse is often cited as the great saviour in the face of Visual Studio, it's the FOSS community's golden boy for IDEs, but even as a competing IDE it's not even the best. IMO things like NetBeans, JDevelop, and hell even Qt Creator as niche as it is have a lot of benefits that Eclipse lacks even, which is why when someone touts Eclipse as a competitive alternative to Visual Studio I can't help but think they're basically screaming "lack of experience", or "fanboy" because there are other IDEs out there that put Eclipse to shame other than just Visual Studio, and that would hence be better suggested as an alternative to Visual Studio.
Why does that require drinking the kool-aid? It's actually the truth nowadays.
Java has stagnated in recent years, not least because of the Oracle takeover of Sun. .NET has kept moving at a better pace, and because of that it has left Java behind in a few areas. It also had the advantage of being built after Java such that it could avoid some of Java's shortcomings in C# - operator overloading, cleaner method of integrating unmanaged code etc.
In the early days Java was certainly still better anyway, but now? I don't think anyone with an objective viewpoint would say it is. Without a doubt Java is still nice, but it's now in a position of playing catch up, rather than leading the way.
"Because prior to Google buying the IBM and Motorola patents they had nothing to offer. Why would Apple (or Microsoft, or Samsung, or anyone else) let Google just use their patents when Google has nothing of value to offer them? That is just throwing away money. Now that Google has something to offer they are in a better position to make such a deal."
Yes, it's not that Google lacks really good patents, it's just that those really good patents are in things like search.
The issue is that companies are using patents to try and build a stranglehold on certain markets. Microsoft's long been using them to try and ensure the desktop OS market is theirs and only theirs, Apple has recently been using them to try and corner the cellphone market, and Google if any serious search competition came along would probably start using them there too.
None of these companies want to compete in their most lucrative markets, and that's where they are using the patents.
This is a real problem though, because it demonstrates how stupid the US patent system is- being a major player in a particular market means you no longer have to compete on your merits, you can just try and keep everyone else out with litigation.
What's happening in the cellphone market is that people just outright don't want to be kept out because they realise it's a lucrative market, and as hard as Apple tries, it's going to be forced into licensing deals in the end, just as it was when it tried things on with Nokia.
It's a fine example of how the patent system in the US works counter to what it was intended for, it's an excellent demonstration as to why it causes companies to decided to try and litigate rather than innovate. I just don't know how long it can go on for, as it's not just the US it hurts but the whole world as no manufacturer can shun a market as big as the US. The US needs to reform it's patent system now, not just for itself but for everyone, and even Europe has some work to do judging by the way it's been honouring Apple's absurd design patents that involve really nothing much more than rectangles with rounded corners.
"Most instances I've seen of geeks defending trolling have had their base the idea that people should expect it and that most of the victims of the trolling deserve it."
I've not seen much of this either, maybe you hang around on 4chan or something, but this isn't a common attitude on the more civilised sections of the web.
"They are moral equivalents and should be considered legal equivalents too."
The problem is, you're making a rather broad assumption here. People have been known to shout at people on the edge of suicide to jump off a building and get on with it or whatever with no punishment. Your assertion that someone getting in your face and insulting you would land them with jail time is false too, it'd likely not land them with anything more than a caution, if even that.
So if you think online activities should suffer the same penalties as real life activities then you're actually arguing that this guys sentence was overly harsh because it is much more harsh than the equivalent activities in real life would've netted him. Just to give you some context, in the UK you can kill someone by driving dangerously and get away without a single minute of jail time.
This guy was an asshole and deserved punishment, but that doesn't change the fact there's a question as to whether this punishment was overly harsh compared to equivalent real life crimes and other crimes, and whether this interpretation of the laws used to deal with him were a bit of a stretch of their original intention, and further, whether now that the law has been stretched whether there's a risk that it's too loosely defined such that it could be stretched to more borderline cases.
Again let me reinforce the point that I don't deny this guy deserved punishment. But I think it's naive to assume that the law wont be stretched further and further and there should always be scrutiny of these sorts of things, else you may find that even you've been guilty of what would then legally be defined as trolling yourself one day.
"his "slippery slope" meme seems to be the libertarian's favorite argument against any legislation, but how do things actually happen in the real world?"
Well they follow the slippery slope. That's kind of the point.
As I suggested to someone else as an example, the UK government introduced legislation to allow parliament to arbitrarily seize assets of terror suspects. This was then used in the financial crisis to seize the assets of pretty much the entire Icelandic banking system. This arguably actually caused the collapse of Icelandic banks because they lost so much of their assets in that single move.
It's not that the law was necessarily bad per-se, it's that the implementation was bad and ill-thought out. Had their been a requirement of judicial oversight or greater scrutiny of such orders then it may not have happened. This is all most people are arguing for when they bring in the slippery slope argument - that when you leave too much open to personal interpretation someone will inevitably interpret it in the broadest possible sense- i.e the British government deeming the Icelanding banks to fall under the classification of financial terrorists.
Laws that are so broad are abused, almost inevitably, it's sad that you're completely ignorant to this fact and believe it doesn't happen.
"yet magically Europe persists in being a place of open discourse, not a police state"
Yeah? I live in the UK where much of the worst arbitrary anti-terror laws were implemented. Photographers were getting their cameras seized for taking photos that were actually legal. People have been getting stopped and searched because the police didn't like the person in question. Councils used RIPA to perform covert following and spying on people for such simple offences as who hadn't picked up dog poo their dog had created, and to make sure parents lived where they said they did so they could go to the right schools the council wanted them too. These are three more examples of ill-defined laws being abused well beyond their original remit. The fact you think this doesn't happen is a really really sad illustration of the level of ignorance some people have of the problem - of course the police and government would never get things wrong, they're perfect, they'd never put self-interest above anything else! You keep telling yourself that. You probably even think warrantless wiretapping laws in the US designed for anti-terrorism operations were only ever used on terrorists too don't you?
No it just seems you don't get it either, which is odd, the concept isn't difficult and has been proven many times to be the case already.
This guy is an asshole no matter how you look at it, I imagine no one would ever see him as anything but.
But the point is, to catch and deal with this asshole, you make it possible to deal with people that really are "freedom fighters" or whatever in the same way. Each time this has happened in the past, this has been the inevitable consequence. A fine example was the British government's introduction of a law to allow them to seize funds of someone arbitrarily designated as a "terrorist" with no real solid legal process needing to be followed before that action was taken. During the financial crisis the British government decided to deem pretty much the whole of the Icelandic banking system as a "terrorist" and seized all their assets. Obviously there were far better ways of going about solving the problem than that and it was a rushed decision that seems likely to have made the problem worse in actually causing the collapse of those Icelandic banks.