If you count the prices of the missiles launched at Israel, you'd have enough to get food to most of the Palestinians, to repair most of the buildings, to create medic centers, schools, ...

How could they repair the buildings, when the Israelis won't let them import building materials?

"Allegedly" is right. The level of rhetoric here is nuts: Mayday's stated goal is to change the way that campaigns are funded such that each person (voter) can contribute equally to the campaigns of their choice.

That's the exact problem I have with it. It's an effective tax raise, and what happens to the money raised? It goes to support candidates I might vehemently disagree with. To buy them TV commercials. I find that pretty objectionable.

I have no issue with Lessig's end-goal here, I think it's noble and needed. But the way he's going about it is awful, and I won't be contributing money to it.

I have - they should be e-liminated, not limited.

Ok. Fine. That works too. But you're missing the point.

The issue I have with this entire thing is they want to use *my* tax money to buy ads for politicians I don't support. If they have another solution to the problem that doesn't involve spending my money, well great. But that's not what Lessig is soliciting money for right now. He's soliciting money to (effectively) raise my tax rate, with the additional funds going towards political campaigns.

I also have to wonder how many people actually read their proposal instead of the feel good vagueness on the homepage... it seems strange to me that $5 million-worth of donors would actually want this. But maybe I'm just projecting.

The system is purely money-driven, doubtful if the idea behind MAYDAY-PAC can change that, but worth a try.

If the problem is, "money has too much influence", I don't see how adding more money into the system could possibly change that. But hey, whatever.

I have no problem with laws *limiting* campaign donations. If Lessig's campaign was aimed at that goal, I might even contribute myself.

But I do have a problem with the government taking my tax money, and giving it to some political candidate so they can buy TV commercials. That is what both of his proposals involve.

As for your aversion of using tax money used - where do you think is all that corporate money coming from?

Whether or not it *does* come from there does not change the fact that it *should not* come from there.

If he's successful, he'll take tax money from you and 300 million others and give it to candidates running for office.

If he's unsuccessful, you'll be a sucker and we'll all be a lot better off.

This is true. But it is not a weakness of the language

Yes it is. Programming languages are designed for human beings to use. If it's difficult for human beings to use them, that is 100% a weakness of the programming language.

I don't know what you think programming languages are for if not humans.

Human brains are finite. The simpler* a language is, the more likely the developer can fit the entire thing in his head and still have room for the actual problem he's trying to solve.

If your programming language is unusable without weeks of rote-memorization, it's a bad language. That's not to say C# or VB.Net are better languages than Perl; just that your argument to the contrary doesn't make sense.

The best, ideal, language would have near-zero cognitive load, so none of the programmer's memory is consumed for the quirks of the language and all of it is available for the problem being solved.

*) Simpler being defined as, "easier to fit in your head", which is completely circular definition but you get what I'm getting at I hope. I think nobody would argue that JavaScript is simpler than Perl, for example.

Hm. Ok, good point.

Then I guess the question is, "why the hell is this newsworthy?"

Alternate headline: "Guy Does Something 10,000+ People Have Already Done"

Ballistic missile submarines regularly spend 80+ days underwater, even during peacetime. How is 30 days a record?

That won't happen, because I'd never want to put some random dude's old leaky-ass battery in my brand new car.

Yes I know the batteries would be "inspected" by someone, but there's a huge trust barrier there when a $50,000 car can be ruined by a $50 battery swap. (Or whatever it ends up costing.)

This is one of those ideas that big-brained engineers love, but the general public will never embrace.

1) Microsoft doesn't dictate what controller icons developers use. If they happen to use Xbox 360 icons as the standard, that's due to convenience only. There's no conspiracy.

Similarly, whether the controller support is good or horrible depends exclusively on the developer of the game itself. The only component of the solution Microsoft writes is the driver, and I can verify the driver does the extremely simple job it's supposed to be doing.

2) This statement:

With the way MS forced the X360 controller on PC, it's no wonder it took them forever to make a compatible driver.

Doesn't make any sense. What does "Microsoft forcing the Xbox 360 controller on PC" (even assuming your conspiracy theory were true) have to do with creating drivers for the Xbox One controller? What is the causal relationship there? I don't get it.

It certainly doesn't help that development and distribution on Linux sucks ass, so porting to Linux is a huge time-sink compared to porting to OS X. Unless you pick a specific distro and *only* support that, in which case the Linux fans who yesterday were begging you to port the software are now bitching that you built it for the "wrong" distro.

Then your support costs run up the roof, because even in the "correct" distro people can install the "wrong" windowing system or sound subsystem or what-not, which becomes a support nightmare. So you pay more to port, then you pay more to support the port, then...

when you're done, nobody buys the thing anyway because "information wants to be free" and, shockingly, a community based primarily around a free-of-cost OS and making their own free clones of commercial products doesn't like paying money for things.

This stalemate isn't likely to change unless there is a major cultural shift in the Linux community.

Ok so you don't like the gun.

And that makes harassing and threatening this person acceptable because...?

A Tor developer? Being paranoid? Shocking!

No, I'm sorry, when I say "evidence" what I mean is, and try to follow along here, "evidence". Not anecdotes. Not scary bumping noises in the night. Evidence.

'The NSA has been pressuring free software projects and developers in various ways,' the group says.

Did they provide evidence for this claim?