REAMDE is why I will probably read his new book. There were several times (especially in the first hundred pages or so) when I was laughing my ass off. Neal Stephenson is a good writer. There, I said it. (Oooh, what a limb I'm going out on!)

He's less of a good story-maker, and I think people who complained 20 years ago about him not being able to end a story well, would probably say he hasn't improved. I'm not sure I was all that excited by the story of REAMDE either. So either fuck the story, or just enjoy whatever you can within it. But that aside, the guy has a wonderful way with words and throughout REAMDE I kept thinking "I've missed this guy," since I hadn't read him since Cryptonomicon. Just get him talking.

Because 9/11. Someone exploited the previous system once, so instead of thinking, we need to make expensive, radical changes.

I like all the questions in this thread. People, if you're going to start asking questions, just cut to the end and ask why have a lottery at all. They are a totally worthless idea. Every second you spend on thinking of how to "fix" their integrity, is a second you could spend on something much more useful, like thinking about how to make dog shit taste like chocolate pudding. Now let's get to work on the cocoa powder experiments, everyone.

If a photographer isn't holding their camera vertically, they shouldn't have a camera.

Go look at all those wonderful portrait pictures on Tumblr. What format are the vast majority in?

VERTICAL!

Fuck that. If phone makers are too incompetent to correctly add a camera which doesn't cut off the image, the fault is not with the user but with the technology.

The world does not exist solely in a horizontal plane.

Its particularly bad in Korean, where the words tend to alternate consonant-vowel-consonant with the consonants on the left and vowels on the right. It just ends up being an exponential explosion of possibilities without much branch pruning. Its also harder in agglutative languages than non-agglutatives, because you can't have a simple dictionary of all words.

But in the end it doesn't matter. If you actually use a keyboard, 2 features are must haves- the first is that you need to be able to type the occasional word. The second is that you need to know where the keys are, so you can type-swype efficiently. That precludes a new keyboard layout, as you know more or less where every key on a qwerty is- you don't on an "optimized" layout and you'll take months to learn. An alternate keyboard doesn't have that much time, it has a few hours max to get you to love it.

Disclaimer: I worked at Swype from 2010-2012.

Flow is Swiftkey's knock off of Swype. It probably has some differences in the algorithm that will make it better for some words and worse for others, but its just a knock off.

So trespassing since you were uninvited?

And yes, people who put flyers on door knobs are trespassing.

You have to have pretty strong regulations for patents to even exist. In an anarchy, you're allowed to implement whatever you want, without groveling for anyone's permission. So libertarians, if they super-concerned about avoiding being conflated with anarchists, have to weigh all the evils and decide which is the least bad. But it'll definitely involve someone's liberties being infringed.

Once possible decision as "Libertarian Tyrant" would be to point a gun at the patent holders' heads and say they're required to license against their will. My justification would be that they submitted the patented tech to the standards body, knowing that it would become a burden and risk on other parties' liberties. Doing that signals an implicit endorsement of other people using the tech, so the patent holder OPTED to sacrifice their government-granted monopoly.

If they don't like that, then they should abstain from offering their "forbidden tech" to standards bodies, and if they learn of someone else doing it, they should be should be suing them (and possibly the standards body too) for inducing infringement.

Another way to go, might be to just get rid of patents. There's already so much overwhelming incentive to invent things, that it's basically impossible to even prevent much less needing incentive.

It skews highly towards the websites users. Hardly surprising. But when you consider that googling almost any programming question will lead to an answer on SO in the top 3 or 4 hits, I'm not sure how you can avoid visiting the site at least once a day on average.

You have to hit it once. That deletes the entire tab. Unless you have your editor set to do something weird, like turn tabs into spaces.

Yet another reason not to use Python. Guido made a major fuck up there- if he was going to use whitespace as syntax, he should have made the type and amount part of the language spec. Not doing so has wasted more developer time than any other language issue I've ever seen.

It doesn't need to be built into the phone. If people find it useful, connecting via USB or Bluetooth would be sufficient. Then if people use that it can move into the phone in another 3-5 years.

Tabs were more likely to cause problems in the old days, when editors did things that were ridiculous like expand them to 8 spaces. Nowdays with everything configurable, it isn't much of an issue. The reason why the older more experienced people prefer spaces is that they learned to dislike tabs in the bad old days. In 10 years that argument will be dead with tabs winning.

Or the asshole cheats on her.

Speak for yourself. I find the improved productivity of easily asking questions and overhearing your team's conversations blows away the loss due to occassional noise. And its a hell of a lot more fun to interact with coworkers than stare at the monitor unblinking.