So while of course some element of it is PR, that is not the core reason as to why he did this.

And you know this how?

You can recognize a public figure's cult status when their followers start to claim they know what's in his heart and mind.

Rand Paul is a grandstander in the Barack Obama mold. He is sound and fury signifies fuck-all but lip-service to a dimwitted ideology that I wonder if he even believes. It's almost as if some consultant told him that the only demographic where he has a chance is bitcoin dudebros and so he has these little events to check off the box.

Right - but you know who didn't show up? Bernie Sanders (S-VT). He claims to be a civil libertarian but couldn't bother to join the other Democrats who came to support the issue.

I think we know where his masters are on this issue - he's deep into the F-35 fighter jet fiasco; MIC is where his bread is buttered.

Perhaps now they can bring back background play for mobile devices, so I don't have to stay on the youtube app to listen to music/podcasts/etc posted there.

This was the #1 most-requested feature on the YouTube app since it first appeared. Google *finally* released it - and it's the most expensive in-app purchase ever - you have to pay $120/yr to get it.

At the same time they changed the YouTube ToS to forbid third-party apps from providing the same functionality and aggressively started pursuing legal claims against the developers.

"Don't be Evil", 2015 skin.

Actually, the problem as you describe is that bicyclists are treating the signs as though they don't exist. They're not treating them as yield signs, they're ignoring them. Changing the law to allow riders to treat stop signs as yield signs would STILL have the described behavior be a violation.

*sigh* That's still nothing compared to being, you know, dead. I'm not much of a physical threat to you.

Also, I was taught when I was growing up that the laws of physics trump the laws of man - IE it's not a good idea to engage in behavior where I'm likely to be run over by a non-careful driver, even if I'd be technically in the correct(and them liable) by the law. I'd rather not be run over, thank you very much. ;)

... How? Of course, I don't live in an area with significant numbers of them. I avoid them just like I avoid cars. I'm continuously scanning for things to avoid, pedestrians are easy. Well, unless the crowd is too thick, but again, at that point I'm either riding elsewhere or walking.

On the generic tact, I'd think we'd see a lot more injury reports if cyclists were indeed a significant danger to pedestrians.

Well, you'll actually need to prove that the law is effective then, I guess. Because as you've mentioned, it's being completely non-followed right now. Having the cops enforce being not stupid for a bit might be more effective than trying to keep pushing 'stop means stop! Because bicyclists are ignoring stop signs and risking me run over them!'. I've already told you I'm not going into the intersection if I'm at risk of you running me over. I know quite a few riders that way. I'm sorry that you only remember the idiots, but I can't do anything about them.

Which is doubly annoying/funny because Google, at least, doesn't give people brain teasers.

Of course there is, but at no point have I (or anyone else I've seen in this discussion) suggested doing the latter just to make the code shorter. The point is that there are plenty of languages that can say in one clean, readable line of code what takes half an editor window in Java. I gave some typical examples in my reply to another post.

Right. The marginal cost of extra copies of information is very low. Unfortunately the initial cost of putting that information together may be extremely high, and if the information is never collected it won't be distributed either.

So we create an economic incentive to encourage that creation and distribution, effectively amortizing the initial development cost over all those who ultimately obtain a copy. This might not be the perfect economic model, but I'm still waiting for anyone to offer a plausible better alternative.

You can repeat these arguments as often as you like, but the not-a-lost-sale argument still contradicts basic economics, and the just-trying-it-out argument still contradicts overwhelming empirical data the industry has been collecting for years.

No, but I'm saying it appears to have relatively little impact on the bottom line of copyright holders. More importantly, so does vast amounts of empirical data.

Maybe you personally aren't familiar with higher order functions or comprehensions. However, millions of programmers are, and would read and understand those lines without a second thought.

Using filter in Haskell or a list comprehension in Python is as routine as using your for-loop is in Java, and the associated syntax is similarly familiar to anyone who's ever done a significant amount of programming in those languages.

Moreover, these tools are declarative, which means you can use them in languages that better control side effects for safety, and you can use them in languages that optimise based on that extra knowledge for faster performance, and you will be able to use them in the data parallel languages of tomorrow to make more efficient use of modern processing hardware. In other words, in languages designed to take advantage of them, these styles immediately convey more information than the imperative style required by your for-loop version.

Perhaps it was the filter function that confused you, if you aren't familiar with that particular terminology? If so, I would remind you that you just wrote a code example full of integers and an add function that has nothing to do with calculating the sum of those integers. (At least, I think you did. I notice that you missed out several lines of initialisation and type declarations for those variables, making your example code considerably shorter than it otherwise would have been if you'd actually written a like-for-like equivalent.)

I honestly don't understand how any programmer, whatever their preference of language, can claim that an expression that says filter (<10) items and means choose the items that are less than 10 isn't straightforward. I think you're just trolling here.

As for never being used, you're welcome to stick with yesterday's programming tools if you like. No doubt there will be plenty of need for programmers to maintain legacy systems for a long time to come. But tomorrow's programming tools will let us build bigger, more efficient, safer programs, and we'll be doing it faster and with fewer resources. If you're not familiar with these idioms yet, you might want to consider broadening your knowledge, because before long every 21-year-old kid who learned programming by messing around with JavaScript in their browser is going to be using them.

Clearly, the principal is an absolute goof. It's high school sports, for chrissake. I mean, I know it's Texas and all, and in Texas, high school football is sacramental, but geez. It's bad enough that public universities have become big-money football programs with a little school on the side, but can you at least pretend that high school sports is about the students and not about revenue or aggrandizing adults?

Let it go, or maybe next time the kid will post the pictures he has of the football coach snapping towels and playing grabass in the showers with the defensive secondary.

Here's what I've learned:

1) Being able to do something is good.
2) Being able to teach someone else how to do something is better.
3) Being able to convince someone to do something is best of all.

In other words, think about whether maybe you should move to management. Do you still really want to write code? I'll bet you've developed some skills over the years that would serve you well in management. And the most important thing to remember is, don't be the manager that you always hated.

Think about your future. Not just what you want to do today, but how you see yourself in a few years. I know it's a cliche that everybody gets asked at interviews, but you've got to be willing to give yourself an honest answer.

Good for you. The last time I saw a programmer do that was... also never in my entire career, actually. If your programmers have trouble meditating on a print-out of a language with syntactic whitespace, you might suggest they instead use any modern text editor and a macro/plug-in that makes mismatched whitespace show up in bright red. Then they can become enlightened, spend less time "meditating" like programmers who work with punch cards, and spend more time making useful software.

I doubt that there was any text editor available in 1927 that got tabs/spaces wrong when working with Python code. Take your pick.

The thing is, I think it is related to how easy something is to understand.

If I can express an algorithm as a single function of 10 lines then, other things being equal, that will be easier to understand than distributing the same algorithm across 5 functions each of 20 lines. You can see the whole thing at once, instead of jumping around within or between files. You don't have overheads of passing around and returning values.

Similarly, if I can express a simple bit of logic as a clean one-liner, while a verbose style requires 6 lines of manual loop/conditional logic and maybe a function wrapped around it, then I'm thinking about what that logic is doing and it how it fits in with the other logic around it while you're still worrying about loop counters.

Here's a version of finding all the items less than 10 in a list, written in Haskell, a relatively powerful language:

items = [1, 15, 27, 3, 54]
result = filter (<10) items

Here's a slightly more verbose version, written in Python, also a language known for being clean and expressive:

items = [1, 15, 27, 3, 54]
result = [item for item in items if item < 10]

And in contrast, here is the best Stack Overflow has to offer about implementing this sort of requirement in Java.

Spoiler: There are basically three kinds of replies. Some write out entire functions to implement the filter using a manual loop. Some use a third party library to do a more clumsy variation of the Python and Haskell examples above. And a few recent ones use Java 8 to do a slightly less clumsy variation of the Python and Haskell examples above. The clear trend is to try to get away from classical, verbose Java to something more powerful and expressive. Like Scala, according to the first comment on the original question...

Son, it sounds to me like you're ready to play Saint's Row.

Saint's Row IV is my jam. It's one of a handful of games I consider favorites. The story had a deep sense of humanity, forgiveness, ridiculousness and understanding. When older Shaundi learns to forgive her younger self (in the middle of a attack on a psycho DJ and his minions in which a dubstep gun is used), one of the deepest moral and human lessons in videogame history was on display: never hold a grudge against your younger self.

Saint's Row IV was made with such care and moral understanding, from top to bottom and with such terrific humor that it's a little bit of perfection. Everything from 8-bit platforming to 3D platforming to 1stperson, 3rd person, racing, shooting, fighting and obscene gestures are in the game. It was a wonderful kitchen sink gaming experience, and I ended up with affection for each and every character (including the villain).

During the final credits where they all do a Soul Train line dance, I actually teared up. 10/10.