Hmm, well, I actually came here to make some sort of comment like that... are there no advocates for full transparency?

Increasingly we're living in a world where everything is recorded. Back in the old days you just had to tell everyone that "God is watching" to make them behave. It kinda worked (the Renaissance was pretty much started because bankers were trying to buy their way out of Hell by commissioning works of art for the church). These days with so much privacy, there's not really any incentive to do anything quite like that, and we sort of have an unbalanced arms raced between those who have the money to monitor everyone else and yet guard their own privacy and anonymity.

What if, say in a parallel universe or another planet, there was a society that just simply had full transparency? No pictures of our private parts to worry about, because, well, everyone has them. Everyone shares their browsing history, because, gee, you're into interesting stuff. No need to guard your birthday and SSN because, well, there's actually real cryptographic security keeping people from opening accounts in your name. And if they they did take anything (including the people in power), we'd know who it was and where it went and how to get it back.

I mean, I know this is Slashdot and all, but humor me here.

Heh, yeah, I'm surprised I haven't seen more Ruby yet in this thread, esp. with the proliferation of Chef and gems and rvm and other parts of that ecosystem to keep it puttering along.

For a language that seems to pride itself on its complete OOP-ness, there's so much syntax and different ways of accessing that syntax. I had wondered where all of the PERL masochists had gone...

In my limited experience wrangling with Ruby, it seems very schizophrenic... at once it's supposed to be very clean, yet it's so littered with syntactic sugar. The "best practices" guidelines always seem to be changing, so a common pattern one year will be an anti-pattern the next. There's a little cottage industry of dependency management that has grown up around it, so even as it has become something of a cross-platform glue language like PERL and python, it's such a pain to even maintain consistency among its own minor releases, so we have to use rvm gratuitously to spawn different ruby environments to run different "core" ruby utilities on the same box (chef, foodcritic, rubocop all needing different versions of ruby and libraries and gems, etc.). And it's so slow compared to its peers... for an automation language, I find myself taking a lot of coffee breaks while it goes out and does its thing, and of course that also means all of the code check tools like foodcritic spam me with warnings to do all of the little optimizations like converting my string objects into symbols, so much for the pure object-orientism.

Anyway, I have yet to have an experience with Ruby where it does something that impresses me compared to something else. It seems to be used to write templates for config files a lot, so I suppose that might be its strength. But even there, it seems to be a combination of the worst parts of other languages... all the indeterminate pieces of XSLT, more verbosity than XML, much slower and resource-hungry than other interpreted languages, almost as ugly as PERL, scattered package management in competing and overlapping gems since a lot of the base functionality is somewhat broken ( http://stackoverflow.com/quest... ), and yet seems harder to debug and less accessible too noobs than even compiled languages.

From my experience with Ruby, I'm not exactly sure why this language was developed, other than to provide job security for some devops types. Oh, and I suppose https://github.com/mame/quine-... is cool from an academic standpoint.

http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/noti....

should be

http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/noti...

Yeah, one of my roommates did something like this at Cornell U... took all of the core courses while enrolled in the Math & Applied Physics program (in the land-grant Arts & Sciences College), and then transferred to CS in the Engineering College which had much higher tuition. I think this kind of scheme could work well enough even at most other "high end" universities. Plus, the guy ended up with almost twice as many friends/connections (compared to most people... probably 100x compared to me :P )

well, if you're a normal person (and since you're on slashdot, you're probably not), if you search for cars once in a while, you'll start getting car ads everywhere you go on the internet.

When I started testing my employer's website, I started seeing a lot of ads for our/their sites which I never saw anywhere before. I'm not allowed to click on them, since that will cost us money.

Maybe the neatest thing was that I just missed my bus last Thursday, and spent a brief sprint chasing it down a few blocks to the next station unsuccessfully. While waiting for the next bus, I started poking around in my Nexus 5 and some random app popped up a full-screen ad for a taxi service asking "in a hurry?".

OTOH, I was browing Amazon for some wheel covers for my aunt's old car a while ago, and the "what other customers looked at after viewing this item" list had a fleshlight. I stopped shopping for wheel covers.

NPR had some article on how Target targets their ad mailers based on purchase history... They can tell by purchase history when people are expecting, and adjust the ads in their junk mail coupon books accordingly. Some teenager's dad got pissed off at them when they suddenly started mailbombing his family with baby products, and then apologized when he found out a few weeks later that his daughter was pregnant... but Target knew first.

Personally, I like what Google's been doing (and not doing) so far with the data they collect... as a nerd/engineer, a lot it just makes sense. But I'm not as concerned about my privacy as most.

OneBusAway works great for that kind of thing in the Seattle / Puget Sound region. Though I still use Google Maps to provide the best transfer schedule, OBA is then good for tracking if the busses are running on time.

Unfortunately, I found that there are some dead ones where the busses aren't able to check in for a while... So the system might start to assume that a bus is running 15 minutes late, but then the bus will suddenly check in as on time just a few minutes before reaching the stop down the road from me. So. Mrrr

We had a lot of good apps back in the PalmOS days. I used to use JPluckX / Sunrise to download a compressed image of the day's Slashdot using the AvantSlash filter. I could even download the front page of any URLs provided as links, so I could even RTFA or see the AC's goatse links if I wanted to. Plucker for palmos was instantaneous on navigating and loading links from compressed data, much faster than using Avantgo at going back and forth between links, which was in turn much faster than downloading crap from 3g networks at the time over a mobile browser, which was in turn so much faster than trying to use the Slashdot beta AJAX / reactive / adaptive / redaptive interface we have now that doesn't even let you use the "open in new tab" feature that modern mobile browsers have.

I could get virtually all of /. on my device each day, ready to entertain me while I was on the subway or even out camping without cell service. And I couldn't make any comments, so everyone wins.

Yeah, I feel badly for you young'uns, we had things so great back in the day.

Doesn't exactly have to be Old-skool... the best games (or franchises, even) will change the way you look at the world. Some of the essentials:

Simcity (4 is probably the "best" one, if you were to play no others)
Civilization (II is the classic version, though it seems like they got a lot right with V)
Ultima VII (runs well under the modern exult engine)
Sims (III, no expansions necessary. You can pretend it's an architecture program instead of a dollhouse, that was originally how it was intended)
EVE Online (do the free month, that's enough to get your fill of pretty graphics, frustrating controls, and spreadsheet/economy engineering)
Any top-rated FPS (if you've played one FPS, you've played them all, though some have better single-player stories, and others have better team play)
Portal (I, and then II)
Grand Theft Auto (III:SA is the best, though I've heard good things about V. All of them are nice little satirical time capsules, though)
Starcraft (II BW , and maybe III, just so you know what a nice RTS is like)

Here's my running list of games I want to introduce my kids to:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...

Obviously the only thing to do is to actually write a book about Amelia Bedelia's antics. Then all would be well with the world.

/ off to write a wiki article about how humanoid sexbots will free humanity from its chains

I had been using an HTC myTouch Slide 4G (doubleshot) , and the MTS3G (espresso) before that.

It was great, I would always win at the little online "pictionary" games since I could type out the answer faster than practically anyone else. Also, it was good for reading in a supine or other odd positions, because I could set it to only switch to landscape mode if the keyboard was slid out... it's a constant annoyance to me when other phones switch orientations because the accelerometer is giving readings it doesn't cope with well.

The MTS4G was not supposed to run Android 4, but thanks to CyanogenMOD... http://trumblings.blogspot.com...

Gradually, all of the apps on it got slower and less responsive, and I would gradually get rid of widgets and apps that would run into the background until I just had the bare essentials... Chrome, Maps, and Hangouts. But what finally did it in was that the SD card would get corrupted every time I let the batteries run all the way down.

Finally broke down and picked up a Nexus 5. The screen is big enough, esp. in landscape mode, to hunt and peck out the keys with reasonable accuracy. Unfortunately, Google hasn't made every app work in landscape mode, and some critical things (like the launcher and the frickin' Google search widget) force you to enter stuff on the tiny portrait mode keyboard. I think CyanogenMOD's Trebuchet launcher app was better with this, and I'm eagerly awaiting it to go stable on the Nexus 5 so I can switch over.

I've also been looking for a good Bluetooth keyboard case, but haven't found one yet. There are several good-looking ones for the Nexus 7, though. That would certainly scratch the itch for me. Of course, not many Android apps have good keyboard support, but they're out there... Jota+ , VXConnectBot, etc.

As an aside, after the last update to 4.4.4, my wife's Nexus 4 started getting noticeably less responsive too. Hoping it's just a matter of going through and clearing some of the Dalvik cache, and not because Google is (intentionally?) making older devices obsolete faster by adding in too many bloated features in their core apps :P

some guy was gushing about irccloud.

I don't really have that muchtrouble keeping track of IRC on irssi on my 24x7 server though. That makes me a dinosaur I guess.

Yeah, the Trek angle is sort of covered by "Engage!" , but this one is so much better.

And the parodies are priceless
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...