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Comment Re:Yes. (Score 1) 518

> What's repugnant is to coerce a man in difficult financial position to sell parts of his body that are essential to his well being and survival.

This makes no sense as an argument. An open market legitimizes the ability to choose. The choice is still there NOW, without the proposed market (i.e. the choice is the black market today).

Comment Re:Short answer: no (Score 2) 400

> How about picking the best tool for the job, rather than holding a popularity contest? Too old-fashioned?

How do you judge best tool for the job? That isn't an objective question. How would I know if Ruby is the right tool for me?

The more useful question is "what does the tool offer" and Ruby doesn't have much going for it. If you are using a tool that uses Ruby (like Gherkin), you have a compelling reason to use Ruby. The cost tradeoffs, for integrating one of the many equivalent languages, usually results in the language of least resistance. This doesn't bode well for that language as the primary driver for adoption...excepting when the language has no real competition, as happened with ECMAScript->javascript in the browser.

You want Ruby/Python/Go to become the most common language and last beyond your lifetime? Get the major browsers to integrate runtimes for those languages. What happened to browser development? Instead of speeding up rendering by 12% I would gladly trade the ability to write and serve client side code in Ruby and have Mozilla automatically (with permission) download a runtime for it. Even if the performance sucked or the features were hobbled.

Comment Re:Obummer's exit plan (Score 3, Informative) 276

> And? Check the official vote rolls [senate.gov]. He didn't vote for it. His name isn't even in the list. Want to try again?

Please try to get the facts correct.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (also called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, H.R. 6304

The roll call is here:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00168 (vote 168 not 236 which you linked to)

His name is on that list from 2008. You linked to the extension vote in 2012...of course his name isn't on it as a voting SENATOR.
Obama's the PRESIDENT at that time.

Comment Re:A Responsible Economy (Score 1) 110

> Yeah, you really understand and care about what's happening in China. Hell, you'd fit right into the Chengguan, which you probably don't even know anything about without looking it up.
> GDP should contain movie production costs.
> What point is there on zooming in on x or y industry? Sure there are growth sectors in any country, but we're talking about aggregates.

The majority of this post is not on the point we were discussing. As I understand it, the topic was the relative fiscal responsibility of the Chinese government, in relation to other world markets or nations. I do not think you have demonstrated the opposite or even shed some doubt on it.

Comment Re:A Responsible Economy (Score 1) 110

Do you have any idea what the debt load is of the provincial governments? Do you even know that provinces and other lower levels of the Chinese government are taxing their constituents months, sometimes years in advance to try to maintain solvency?

So what?

Do you know that the statistics on things like the expansion of electrical power usage do not line up in any even remotely sane way with the CCP's claims of GDP growth and many economists believe that their rate of growth is now the same as the stagnant West?

The US has done quite a bit of magic (GDP now incorporates movie production costs? Do you understand what QE is?). While I can agree that numbers have been altered, I'm not sure it's relevant to compare 2 lies. that leads into...

many economists believe that their rate of growth is now the same as the stagnant West?

When you talk about "the stagnant west" I have to wonder what you even mean? The US is a different beast from the UK and Germany but similar to Greece in function, not location. A lot of people are wrong all the time about broad subjects so please be a bit more specific about differing opinions. I wonder what you mean by rate of growth? The steel industry (as well as most rare earths) has been dominated by China for over a decade, for example. I guess that's stagnant? The trade deficit in the US is obscene, mostly due to imports from China so I'm sure anyone you're talking about can at least throw out an industry sector where they are choked. Whichever economists you are referring to (just name some please?) I suspect they aren't saying what you are. I'm willing to read up on alternate theorycraft.

Comment Re:And half a dozen people .... (Score 1) 465

> You have 40-50 (possibly out-of-work) people who wasted maybe 10 minutes and a buck or two sending you a resume, or an hour composing a cover letter.

If you are applying to a Tech job and are spending any money, sending it by fax, or sending it by snail mail, you are wasting your own time (the vast majority of cases). That's not the employer's fault.

> All when you had a candidate you were happy with.

A candidate does not mean the person will take the position. That's myopic. A job interview is 2-way.

Even after a "successful" interview, things can come up that don't involve death. I have had a short listed candidate turn up on a google search (for his github) as having been arrested for child abuse the previous week.

This idea that an employer should put all their eggs in 1 basket for a given position, is irrational.

Comment Re:Brain Dead (Score 1) 159

In programming, our challenges includes some tightly coupled issues. Identifying and removing errors to large programs and keeping code complexity to a minimum. Strict typing usually eliminates a number possible errors. Unexpected autoboxing is one of them, depending on the strength of the type system. You describe adding a 0 to a string, which is how people think for a simple domain. A type is a domain. An int will (in most languages) not contain .01 nor 1i nor A. Representative values notwithstanding. So I understand your point, but I disagree that people do not think in types.

Strict typing, for the most part, increases notation complexity in naming (z = ArrayList[T,H,G] vs y=ArrayMap[L,P], ad nauseam) and an added layer of boilerplate conversion code/functions for moving between types explicitly. I'm really surprised there aren't more PHDs getting proper staticians to correlate this from the glut of Java code flying about. This is a tradeoff any time you trade compiler checking for the conversion code that had to be written to support the types being used. You have to decide if that's worth the cost of a programmer's time (let's not talk about the programmer's sanity). I think it's a great tradeoff, in many languages. Type systems aren't trivial to maintain in a language and I don't envy maintainers.

Some languages are still developed saying they don't have a strict type system. While I don't have an example for Perl, PHP definitely has a demonstrable wishy-washy type system, it's just hidden from most developers.
$z=1.5*2;
$y=array(1,2,4,5);
$t = array_key_exists($z,$y); // error! because $z is a float
Since you can't have float keys, where's the autobox there? Another function, array_slice, doesn't care and converts it to int.
At some point the compiler has to figure out if the value is representative or not. Every language has a strict type system at some level so, I have to disagree that it's brain dead to have one.

The question is, should it be a tool for the programmer to ensure code correctness or just a set of rules that usually ignore? One leads to, among other things, more robust and reliable large systems with an added benefit to prolonging the useful life of a programmer (old programmers usually end up in java because the compiler/IDE catches many problems) and the other path can lead to more rapid development, more intimate knowledge of the language to avoid behaviors like subtle bugs, and more flexibility in reusing code. Instead of a bunch of utility methods or conversion code for handling different possible types, you just use 1. I prefer languages without type systems because I primarily write and work on smaller systems, but I see the value in larger projects that use them. I'm not sure it's useful to call one side weaker than the other where there's no solid criteria for what's "best".

Comment Re:Too late (Score 1) 219

> A game that can be completed solo should not favor one type of class over another.

Er? Why not? The rogue is favored over the melee-only Hunter in WoW. It's almost impossible to balance every dynamic variable to be equal across classes. Why bother trying? It doesn't happen in a multiclass game very often that they are all equal.

Comment Re:The list (Score 1) 142

Please add the most important project: The Great Uprooting (massive Urbanization of the Rural population).

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Mark Sumner mentioned that there are already prebuilt massive silent cities that he has seen, awaiting the future industrial workers of China.

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