Nonsense. The cat does not hate the mouse, the cat LOVES the mouse. It's delicious.

By me, a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-f...
"Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
    We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
      Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
    Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
  And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
  Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make contributions when they can so such automotive intelligences serve humane purposes better?
    If, for example, automotive intelligence was developed under some form of copyleft license like the GNU General Public License, then at least car owners or their "software mechanics" would be assured they could have access to the software in source form to ensure safe operation. What might be "street legal" in terms of software modifications might be a different story -- in the same way people can't legally drive with a cracked windshield or a broken headlight. For example, software changes might need to first be proven safe in simulation before being provisionally "street legal". But, the important thing is, foundations or government agencies funding code development could insist on some form of free licensing terms for automotive intelligence as a matter of public policy.
    There are many other areas of human activities that the exponential growth of technology will effect. Automotive intelligence is just one of them that is here now and which I am familiar with from tangential interactions at universities with people developing it. In enough time similar issues will arise for the software behind household robotics or intelligent devices that assist the elderly or handicapped. The IBOT wheelchair by Dean Kamen using complex software to balance on two wheels is just the beginning of such devices. Note the IBOT wheelchair was developed entirely with private funds it seems, so the reasoning in this essay does not apply directly to it. Also, in general Dean Kamen is a role model of a socially responsible for-profit inventor. Still, the issue arises of whether "Johnson & Johnson" should be funding such development, as was the case, as opposed to, say, the "Robert Wood Johnson Foundation", as was not, given the public policy issue of whether individuals should be continually dependent for personal needs on proprietary software. In either case it would be worth it to pay billions for such innovation, and the public will pay that in the end as a toll on for such devices.
    There is a real question here of how our society will proceed -- mainly closed or mainly open. It is reflected in everything the non-profit world does -- including the myths it lives by. The choice of myth can be made in part by the funding policies set by foundations and government agencies. The myth that funders may be living by is the scarcity economics myth. How does that myth effect the digital public works funding cycle?"

Yes. There are numerous reasons to "not fight city hall". But that doesn't mean you can't do it for a good enough reason. E.g., I use tab spacing at the start of Python lines. This causes formatting problems if I use idle, but to me its worth the cost. And I've occasionally had reasons to use a length terminated string in C...though I usually also zero terminate it. (IIRC the reason was that I needed to include 0 valued bytes in the string.)

Similarly you can use zero delimited strings in Pascal, but you need to write the support routines that you would need, and since current Pascal has a string type that isn't limited to 255 chars it they would appear to be rarely needed.

No.
Python is an open source project. Ruby is an open source project. Squeak is an open source project. D is an open source project. Racket (scheme) is an open source project. ALL have decent language documentation. And that was just a list off the top of my head. Being an open source project is not an excuse for lousy documentation.

Delphi had many great aspect, especially compile time. My wife and I put about six person years into a project together, much of the time working in Delphi. I knew (and even had taught at the college level C/C++), but she knew mostly Pascal. We did some work in C++, but got hit by the compile times (this was back working with PCs starting around 1995) as well as all the other issues writing in C++. Then we did some in Digitalk's Smalltalk/V, but got worried about lack of support for the proprietary version we were using (we could not have guessed that later is became a free-as-in-beer Smalltalk Express). Wish we had kept to Smalltalk though, as then we could have moved to Squeak a couple years later, and my wife and I really liked Smalltalk. But Smalltalk back then was also slow and had some other limits. So we moved to Delphi (the earliest versions, never moving to later versions beyond 2.0).

Here is GPL'd source for of our garden simulator in Delphi:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

GPL'd Delphi source and translations for two other applications (PlantStudio and StoryHarp software) is here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

In retrospect, I think maybe we could have made the C++ approach also work better by writing unit tests for parts of the code and compiling only them in small projects. And I think I'd have much rather have the code in C++ right now than Delphi as far as long-term portability, including now translating to asm.js for web browser deployment.

But, for good or bad, I made the decision a decade ago to port it, and wrote code to parse Delphi and spit out Java and Python (doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but you need to futz with the GUI stuff and some other changes). I only got the StoryHarp app working (in a limtied way) in Java, plus I got the guts of the PlantStudio drawing algorithm in Python for a test for the OLPC.

I'm moving more into JavaScript now, for easy deployment in web browsers, so I might modify those tools to do JavaScript now? But not sure it was worth it, given the rise of Lazarus and the fact that, generally, you learn so much from writing an application that if you were to build it again, you'd do it differently.

But, in any case, Delphi was overall a pleasure to work in as far as a compiled language. Speedy. Fast turn around. Good debugging (although some library bugs with memory leaks were frustrating in the early versions -- we used memmond and its memory leak patches, plus other patches I created and found for the Delphi VCL).

When Squeak first came out, I played with generating Delphi pascal for its VM to use for Windows, but after the Windows port came out, lost some interest in that, and also got sidelines by looking into Squeak -> Newton porting. In retrospect, I wish I had finished the Squeak to Delphi port and code generation tooling, and never bothered working towards a Newton Port as the Newton OS did not want to support any more C++ than small routines, the OS's event loop conflicted with the Squeak polling architecture, Newtons had too little RAM, and of course the Newton was to be abandoned. Meanwhile, Delphi (especially via Lazarus) is still going strong!

Also, unemployed people and "welfare bums" are the least likely to vote.

It's a two-step process. The first is a chemical that dissolves the proteins (still in their "cooked" folding), and the second is some sort of centrifuge or similar (they don't go into details on the device in the article) that subjects the proteins to very high sheer strain, effectively mechanically unfolding them so that they can then relax back into their natural state.

Not exactly a spice you can sprinkle onto your steak, but still pretty neat. :)

How do they handle the fact that different platforms require (sometimes vastly) different calling conventions at the assembly level (i.e., which registers are saved registers, etc).

Hard to read, plus poorly researched, plus didn't demonstrate that they are commonly needed, plus the fact that trying to jam everything into design patterns results in bad software, plus the fact that they don't really help programmers become much better......

of introduced microbes? Just mean reaching the same population density takes a few days longer... Granted, this is not Lake Vostok, so difference concerns may apply. And it's true that a smaller amount of bacteria introduced provides more time for the ecosystem to respond to it by eating it before it expands.

I enjoyed watching TNG but the script quality was extremely variable. X-Files had some bad episodes, but overall the quality of writing was much, much better. Jose Chung's "From Outer Space" is one of my favorite episodes of any TV show.
Mulder - "What did you do with Scully!!?!?!"
Jesse Ventura - "Oh, ahhhh... she went to get some ice..."

So true, sadly... See also: http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"However, the unexpected victories -- even temporary ones -- of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people -- the employed, the somewhat privileged -- are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us. "

Android 4.4 isn't really an update for me. Broken SD support is a deal breaker.

Wonder if cyanogenmod will backport the fix? Or is it time to switch from Dolphin to Firefox?

1. The article is about Britain, not America.
2. The US is not a direct democracy, but it is still a democracy.

That just raises another issue - why are you services and utilities so unreliable in the US? Here in Iceland we get hurricane-force winds several times a year on average - I've had gusts over Cat 5 on my land. Winter isn't incredibly cold but is super wet (all precipitation forms), windy, and lasts a long time. Up at higher altitudes you get stuff like this (yes, those are guy wires... somewhere in that mass). I lived in the US for a long time and had an average of maybe two power outages a year from downed lines and such - sometimes lasting for long periods of time. I've never once had a power outage here that was anything more than a blown breaker in my place.

It's really amazing what you all put up with - your infrastructure standards are really low.