The thing that really makes me chuckle is the hypocrisy in the two statements I quote above. I actually think the entirety of your post is brilliant until the last couple sentences, where you go from making very enlightened points showcasing a different point of view to just being someone with a chip on your shoulder.

While filling your whole software shop with nothing by STEM graduates on purpose is nothing to be proud of, it wouldn't be a tragedy either. STEM degrees range from Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Physics, and even social sciences like Anthropology and Sociology. Thinking that you absolutely need an English major in there is just as silly as thinking an English major doesn't belong there.

To be honest I am personally giving you the benefit of the doubt because of how insightful you seem to be, but I think you went completely overboard with your last statements.

My Lumia 1020 has one, I was wary at first, but honestly it's not a big deal at all. (Having one, that is. Lying about it on the website-- not good.)

It also takes better pictures than my dedicated camera, which is only a few years old. I think it's worth the tradeoff.

I, for one, welcome our new, umm, overlords.

They won't see people switching to Swift uniformly. There are trillions of lines of code written in Objective-C, and programmers already know it and are comfortable with it. There are no tools for migrating code from Objective-C to Swift, much less the hodgepodge of mixed C, Objective-C, and sometimes C++ that quite frequently occurs in real-world apps, so for the foreseeable future, you'd end up just adding Swift to your existing apps, which means you now have three or four languages mixed in one app instead of two or three, and now one of them looks completely different than the others. I just don't see very many developers seriously considering adopting Swift without a robust translator tool in place.

I do, however, expect to see Swift become the language of choice for new programmers who are coming from scripting languages like Python and Ruby, because it is more like what they're used to. In the long term, they'll outnumber the Objective-C developers, but the big, expensive apps will still mostly be written in Objective-C, simply because most of them will be new versions of apps that already exist.

BTW, Apple never really treated Java like a first-class citizen; it was always a half-hearted bolt-on language. My gut says that they added Java support under the belief that more developers knew Java than Objective-C, so it would attract developers to the platform faster. In practice, however, almost nobody ever really adopted it, so it withered on the vine. Since then, they have shipped and subsequently dropped bridges for both Ruby and Python.

Any implication that Swift will supplant Objective-C like Objective-C supplanted Java requires revisionist history. Objective-C supplanted C, not Java. Java was never even in the running. And Objective-C still hasn't supplanted C. You'll still find tons of application code for OS X written in C even after nearly a decade and a half of Apple encouraging developers to move away from C and towards Objective-C. (Mind you, most of the UI code is in Objective-C at this point.) And that's when moving to a language that's close enough to C that you don't have to retrain all your programmers.

Compared with the C to Objective-C transition, any transition from Objective-C to Swift is likely to occur at a speed that can only be described as glacial. IMO, unless Apple miraculously makes the translation process nearly painless, they'll be lucky to be able to get rid of Objective C significantly before the dawn of the next century. I just don't see it happening, for precisely the same reason that nine years after Rails, there are still a couple orders of magnitude more websites built with PHP. If a language doesn't cause insane amounts of pain (e.g. Perl), people are reluctant to leave it and rewrite everything in another language just to obtain a marginal improvement in programmer comfort.

Obj-C isn't any better than C in my opinion. But, to each their own.

It is if you're doing any nontrivial amount of string manipulation.

I think the plant metaphor he was looking for was: "and the Maples formed a union, and demanded equal rights; the Oaks are just too lofty, we will make them give us light". Not a story that ended well.

I'm ashamed to admit it took me 20 years to make the connection between "Maples" and "Canadian band".

No, they're saying Apple switched because GCC's core wasn't designed in a way that made it easy to extend the Objective-C bits in the way that Apple wanted. And that could well be part of it—I'm not sure.

But I think a bigger reason was that Apple could use Clang to make Xcode better, whereas GCC's parsing libraries were A. pretty tightly coupled to GCC (making it technically difficult to reuse them) and B. licensed under a license that made linking them into non-open-source software problematic at best.

Here's my solution: AT&T can have their fast lanes and extort Netflix, but the. top of their monthly bill has to print "Of your $10/month Netflix bill, we are extorting from them $2 (or whatever) a month or we will slow them down. Also, we told you a particular speed for you in your contract with us but we are miserable, fraudulent liars."

> At least before voice chat you could close the text box or put it out of your
> mind. Now, if I decided to partake, I'd have to deal with 8-year-olds telling
> me how they fucked my mother in the ass and how she moaned

How would an 8 year old kn...say, what's your mother's address anyway?

Eh, Quake II single player had jumped the shark anyway, abandoning the fantasy monster model for a dreary grey-and-brownmetal sci-fi affair. Screw up the cool grappling hook so it's a mealey-mouthed humming POS. Get rid of rocket jumping because it's "wrong", then half-assedly add it back under protest with a hack rather than it falling out naturally from the physics. Turn the grenade launcher grenade from a cool thing that bonk bonk bonked around into a horrible orange sweet potato that bounced precisely twice then stopped for "easier placement".

Whoever was in charge obviously got lucky with Quake I in spite of their best efforts.

Here in Rome we don't fear our great generals. So let's just give one some emergency power to one to solve a problem scary to our democratic sensibilities. We can take it away later.

You don't need a reader though, you just need some patient geeks. Because the media is human-readable, it's just a matter of effort to recover the data. If the military really did back up a synopsis of modern science and engineering, one could imagine a future monastery full of monks patiently transcribing the works to scrolls for wider distribution. Of course, one could also imagine them mindlessly transcribing the pattern of dots with no clue as to the meaning of the holy tape, but that's people for you.

Interestingly the trademark 'aspirin' (and the trademark 'heroin') was taken from Bayer AG and made generic as part of the war reparations from WWI. Outside of the major WW1 allied powers, 'aspirin' is still a trademark of Bayer.

Estimated deaths for various future scenarios:

- Accidentally inducing an ice age (which can happen in as little as a year or two) from amelioration efforts: billions

-Successful amelioration efforts backing off GW, with attendant damage to economic dynamism, leaving us with 2050 tech in 2100: hundreds of millions to billions

-GW with slow sea rise but continued powerful economy: Baseline against the ungodly losses of the other two scenarios, but level 2100 tech with its marvels (consider vs. 1900vs today)

I recall this conversation:

Environmentalist: CO2 bad, mmmm'kay?

Me: Ya know, if CO2 is bad, we should get rid of bans of yard waste in landfills, and requirements labdfills biodegrade. Lawnmowing was a great sequestration method already in-place, before leftover 1970s innumeracy about running out of landfill space illogically gained sway.

Environmentalist: (has mental conflicts like Nomad after Kirk is done with it). No because CO2 isn't a very important greenhouse gas anyway.