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Comment Re:Transparency (Score 1) 103

Because of gerrymandering, the polling station that was selected for me in my district is about 8 miles across a city in a location without a bus stop and the closest public transportation about 3 miles away.

1) Perhaps you could find some sort of way to carpool or even split a cab... what with the entire district having a reason to go there that same day. Not to mention political parties and volunteer groups all over the place running busses etc.

If only there were some sort of alternative like the ability to mail in a ballot... oh... wait. There is.

2) I agree with you gerrymandering ought to be criminal.

Comment swift (Score 1) 271

If there were one single language to distinguish yourself it might be Swift. it's currenlty apple specific so this will limit your platforms and it's not a sysadmin language. it's an application language. But like perl it is suited for rapid development for small niches like the other languages you know. So you could sell it on a first to market sort of basis that might be consistent with your other skills. The advantage is it's new and thus a level playing field for the short dinosaur arms of an over-the-hill 40 something.

Comment python white space (Score 3, Interesting) 414

Like most people I thought pythons enforced white space and avoidance of braces and elimination of semicolons was constricting. Then I realized how easy it was to read other people programs. Python used to be even simpler to read when it only provided one idioms for one job (avoiding a dozen way to do the same thing resulting in dialects). Now it's adding new idioms and genres so it's a little more opaque. But it's still easier to read than any language with comparable expressiveness. (Lua is refreshing for similar reasons).

Comment Re:Last sentence (Score 1) 228

Yep, I read it the other way.

The fact that the gender wasn't mentioned in the summary at all let alone the sentence he singled out; led me to initially assume he'd just assumed it was a boy. So I read it as:

I read it as:

  "A boy did this, so what?... why wouldn't a girl be able to?"

I realized as the thread developed that he meant:

  "A girl did this; why would we think she couldn't?"

And he originally replied to the thread himself essentially confirming this and also WTFing the fact that the gender he thought was in the summary wasn't actually present. /shrug. one of those cases where I wish I could at least edit posts or add an update to them after the fact...

Comment Re:Compelling? (Score 1) 244

because some instances below that cutoff would be dogs with the new OS and it's not worth their time to figure out exactly which combinations of hardware would work and which wouldn't.

So they publish their minimum requirements. And then if the user wants to try it on a system older than that or there is hardware in the system no longer officially supported by the OS, then that's up to the user. Windows

And even on phones, all you needed was the option to go back. Its not like there was any reason that you should have had to "live through that hell".

Comment Re:Stupid reasoning. (Score 1) 1094

The two halves of your sentence contradict themselves. We're not a welfare state, so there shouldn't be 'public policy' wage fixations.

That is not a contradiction.

A minimum wage is essentially a form of 'welfare.'

No more than regulations are "essentially essentially a form of planned economy"

They are; but the presence of some regulations does not mean free market capitalism is all gone.

The world is not black and white.

It's also a huge incentive for businesses to adopt more automation and/or offshore as many jobs as they can to places where there are no minimum wages,

Which is why civilized nations protect their citizens with import tarifs etc.

And yes, the TPP is an idiotic move that will further erode local industry.

Comment Re:Compelling? (Score 2) 244

Backward compatibility for both iOS and Mac OS X go back as far as the hardware itself will allow, and Apple is, for all its other faults (and they are many), a role model in this particular instance.

Not really. As 'far as the hardware will allow' is frequently that apple has decided to drop support for a chipset or io controller or something. And the old hardware would run have run the new software just fine if they hadn't simply dropped support for it.

You can't drop support for a chipset from the OS, and then turn around then say your OS doesn't run on it because the hardware won't allow it. Apple does exactly that all the time.

In other cases they've set completely arbitrary limits on old hardware, and I myself have on several occasions used 3rd party shims to get new versions of OSX onto older hardware that apple had decided was no longer supported -- and they ran just fine -- in some cases they ran better (as for a while OSX was becoming faster with successive releases (lepard to snow leopard in particular). And if the older hardware had been a high spec unit (with extra ram from the factory) or had aftermarket ram upgrades they ran just fine.

Apple certainly isn't the worst offender by a long shot. But they are hardly the golden boy here.

Comment Re:and it would only work with other apple product (Score 1) 244

Messages on the phone uses SMS, which works even on dumb phones

No, not quite. Messages on iphone CAN use SMS to communicate with other phones but that's about it. So yes a dumbphone can reason an iphone with sms, and the iphone will display the sms in messages and let the iphone user use messages to reply... but that''s it.

For example, what if the person you are trying to reach from your 'dumb phone' however is NOT using an iphone with an SMS plan? Or what if they are using messages on an iPod touch or macbook pro? These can't "fail over to SMS" to receive messages from an android or dumb phone. And since the android and dumb phone can't use messages native protocol they can't communicate.

I've been up and down this mess several times already. My daughters friends have a mix of hand me down iphones, ipod touches, and ipads that they chat on with messages. If I give my daughter an android, which would be my preference -- she would not be able to chat with her friends unless they ALL moved over to an alternative messaging app (such as skype), which would be difficult for her to make happen. (In some cases the kids are using a 'family' ipad; and would need their parents permission to even install another app... so the whole group is basically captured on messages and ios or lose the ability to talk to these kids.)

Still, Skype is owned by Microsoft, and his example is literally using Microsoft on Microsoft to talk to a Microsoft product somewhere else. It's a dumb statement.

Agreed his particular example wasn't great. However you can use skype on everything from smart TVs to blackberries to linux desktops. Yes, it is end to end a microsoft software product, and not truly open, but it runs on pretty much anything.

the only one who has not is the one with financial incentive not to (because they sell hardware).

That's wrong. Microsoft has finanicial incentive not to... they'd prefer you ran windows and xbox and windows phones; you might argue they HAVE to support ios or become irrelevant; but that doesn't explain their support for osx, blackberry, or linux...

Similarly, apple messages+facetime, by being apple only IS hurting it. Lots of people use it on their mac or ipad, but they all have to have something else installed to talk to the other half of the planet who isn't running an apple product. If messages+facetime was x-plat it could well become as ubiquitous as skype; and it would be a good halo product to attract people to the apple hardware. As it is, it's mostly within-family product because no large organization or heterogenous group of people are ever ALL running just Apple products. There's always someone with a Windows computer or Android phone... and usually lots of people like that.

Even in my daughters group; as the kids are getting older and starting to get phones -- i fully expect the 'apple monopoly' on their communications is going to end. Because as they advance in their teens they'll all soon have phones etc. And they'll have permission to install apps etc. They'll all but inevitably shift to hangouts or skype or something as a group. I can already see it beginning; and my daughters next phone won't be an iphone -- none of the upcoming handme downs are iphones so unless she get a job buys it herself but that's still a few years out yet.

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