You forgot Rand Paul.

Favors decriminalizing marijuana.
Wants to minimize our interference in other countries' affairs.
Wants to end the NSA spying.

I've been using Groovy for the past few years. And every where I can I try to use more of it.

http://www.groovy-lang.org/

The syntax is terse (no semi-colons if you don't want them), it adds a lot of nice touches (null is false, ?. operator), easy JSON and XML support, and yet it works seamlessly with the vast number of Java libraries out there.

Pair Groovy up with the Gradle (Groovy-based) build tool and you have a slick package.

I just got done writing a little utility with it. No class declaration or main(), Sql object that makes database interaction dead simple. It's a fairly trivial piece of code, but it looks lean and clean in Groovy.

- Jasen.

I'll throw air conditioning in there under the heading of "refrigeration". A/C has turned baking deserts (e.g. Arizona, Saudi Arabia) and humid swamps (e.g. Florida) into popular places to live.

We've been able to generate heat since the harnessing of fire, but generating cool took a lot longer.

https://randpaul.com/f/stop-ci...

"Therefore: I agree that the Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment, is non-negotiable and I urge you to Stand With Rand and oppose CISA."

"Between the stupidity of "leaders" in teaching, and zero tolerance insanity, homeschooling or private schooling my children looks better and better every day."

Homeschooling rocks. You can do everything from completely pre-canned video courses online to doing everything via cobbled together public domain content.

Of course, your child(ren) and whoever does the teaching must take to it. But if it works, it works quite well.

This does not prevent/deter the problem. The "government" pays the penalties - read tax payers, not the people who committed the perjury (police, prosecutors, judges, expert witnesses, etc.).

Unless there is a real and expected negative consequence to the direct actors, there is no incentive to stop.

(But if I were one of the victims' families, I'd sure want a few million dollars for the government's screw up.)

As terrible as this is, it has all the ingredients of a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie set up.

Who or what was on board that some nefarious power wanted eliminated? What leverage did that nefarious power have on the co-pilot to make him do this?

The simple explanation of "the guy wanted to commit suicide & take everyone with him" seems rather unconvincing. If that were so, why not crash into a populated area to maximize the damage? If it were an act of jihad, where is the call of glory to Allah & death to the infidels? (He knows the voice recorder is going, surely he would send a message of victory.)

I would expect/hope that people who fly airplanes go through some sort of psyche profile & background check. Hopefully something as common as losing a wife/girlfriend or being outed as homosexual or experiencing financial hardship would not be enough to push someone cleared to fly to mass murder-suicide.

We may never know.

You think the Apple watch should cost $34.95? Or do you mean the limited Edition $10,000+ one? The high end one is irrelevant when discussing pricing. It is purely a fantasy model for the 0.1% to buy. Like race cars by BMW or couture by fashion brands.

"The app's privacy policy prevents schools from identifying users without a subpoena, court order or search warrant, or an emergency request from a law-enforcement official with a compelling claim of imminent harm."

So if someone issues a death threat, etc. you call the police, they get a subpoena, and track down the idiot who posted it.

Once this happens a few times (in every locality where Yik Yak is used) word gets out not to do that. Or, Yik Yak and law enforcement are overwhelmed with subpoena processing for trolls. If Yik Yak can't process requests fast enough is there some sort of penalty they face? If Yik Yak corporate headquarters are out of state or out of the US, how would such penalties be imposed?

Or, signal to noise ratio gets way too low and the app collapses under the weight of trolls. Or the trolls enjoy trolling each other on it (4chan).

I didn't mean to imply that Mac OS's implementation was the best choice, only that it is/was a better choice than three letter extensions on the file name. MIME types are a more modern approach.

A post above suggested prepending MIME information on ALL files. That doesn't seem like a bad choice other than it breaks backward compatibility.

But I think we can agree that the current approach is seriously antiquated and problematic.

Agreed. There ought to be a "metadata" fork/portion of a file that contains the type and other stuff (date created, last changed, category, etc.). Relying on an easily changed three letter extension in this day is really stupid.

The old Mac OS - pre 10 - had a separate resource fork in the file that carried around what app created the file and the file type. I really can't believe that we're still using file extensions. The name of a file should be completely separate from the type.

You might like Groovy. http://groovy.codehaus.org/

Foo foo; - which creates a private variable and Groovy auto-generates getters & setters (which you can write yourself if you wish)

accessing the member variable bar.foo actually calls the getter.

Groovy also has an implicit null check

foo?.bar()

And many other syntactical niceties and enhancements over Java.