Is it house trained, or am I going to find a pile of batteries in odd corners of my house?

Apropos of nothing, how does possession of a firearm in an illegal mail order business increase the chances of people being hurt?

Whether you use it or not, recursion plays an increasing role in our daily lives.

If it weren't for recursion, you wouldn't have that computer! Or that chair you're sitting on. Or that coffee...

So because someone is socially different they have to forego socializing and connecting with others?

One good thing about the internet is that it allows people to be who they really want to be - by actions, words, and accomplishments - without it threatening their personal welfare. One bad thing about the internet is that it allows many people to put undue pressure on the few who stand out.

If Facebook bridges that gap, so that our anonymous personae are always connected to our real selves, then we all become subject to enormous societal pressure. It'll be the equivalent of the "old boys club" everywhere and in everything we do. You mist be the right type, have the right behaviour or you won't succeed.

It will be impossible for (for example) a secret cross-dresser to hold down a job. I know lots of people in the scene who would absolutely be fired if their employers found out, and they take great pains to keep their private lives separate from their public ones. I know people who play LARP who are in the same boat; for example, a Connecticut supreme court judge and at least 2 policemen.

One only needs to go back 30 years (some of us can actually do that) and note how society dealt with homosexuals, non-violent deviancy, even communism and long hair. Even further back was how we (the US) dealt with the Japanese, although Islamics are probably in that position right now. If someone wanted to be heard without being identified as Islamic, shouldn't they be allowed to do that?

On the flip side, is it possible to create a program that replaces faces in images with other faces? If such a program existed, and if there was enough interest we might create a movement to make facial recognition unreliable. Sort of like how "AdBlock" extensions fought against advertizing, we could have a Facebook app that grabs random faces off of other pictures and pastes them into the "gay bar" image mentioned in the summary.

This is a troubling development. I'm not a big fan of government regulation, but I think there's a clear need for delineating the privacy of people who *want* to keep themselves private.

People who do not have an account shouldn't have to deal with Facebook's particular brand of evil.

No. Go with Fairpoint and avoid Comcast.

I live in NH (about 3 towns over from Hudson) and have used both. While Fairpoint is annoying, it's manageable and they don't fuck up too badly or very often. If you can manage your own computer configuration you can generally keep them at a distance and just reboot your modem once or twice a week.

Comcast is completely and totally interested in what you do, how you do it, and whether it violates their TOS. They will silently do lots of shit to prevent you from doing things, at random intervals. Also, Comcast oversells their bandwidth on what is effectively a shared line, so you won't ever get those "blazingly fast" XFinity speeds they advertize.

Comcast is "not a lot of benefit" for "whole lot of hassle".

Go with FairPoint.

The problem with "rich user experience" is that there are so many of them.

From the audio player app with graceful curves instead of square corners, the circle/bar (poweroff symbol) somewhere instead of "X" in the corner to close, shelves that open when you hover over a specific part of the app... you have to learn a new way of doing things, and it's only for that one app.

Download images from a camera or phone, but it doesn't identify as a "disk", it requires an install disk so that it appears as a separate something in the disk listing, at the end, with a different icon. With no "plus sign to open". And I can copy images from camera to disk, I can delete images from camera, but I can't "cut/paste" images from camera to disk.

The original "Mac Paint" was awesome because the icons represented what the program actually did. Flood fill was a paint can spilling paint, select (the icon) looked like the selection box, and so on. Now everyone uses different icons to mean the same things.

"Customize and control" is three horizontal bars (Chrome), or a gear-like thingy (GMail) a little arrow (Facebook) or a sometimes a wrench. It's not hidden under a menu any more, because customization is something we need to do frequently, of course. And menus are out of style, no more pesky named categories of things you might want to do.

Whenever a new app is installed, the user has to spend time rummaging around the system figuring out where everything is, and they have to do this for every application. There can be no muscle memory, and little or no reliance on previous experience.

(For a particularly awful user experience, install Anki sometime. And then try to work with it.)

The solution to every problem is to google "how do I do $action in $application", follow the obtuse and labyrinthine instructions, and forget about it. For Mozilla, it's always an obscure flag in about:config.

Most of the time these are differences for the sake of being different (a marketing advantage, apparently) - there's no advantage or utility or even consensus on what is best. Why is three horizontal bars better than a gear, or a wrench? Why does customization even need to be at the top level?

I realize that as a developer you want to provide me with a rich user experience, but there's significant advantage in making it the user experience I'm familiar with in my OS and in my other apps.

I can't help but wonder what our foreign readership, who view this site using google translate, thinks of the conversation.

Red AI's indeed!

I've been following with interest the debate about government-regulated taxis versus free-market Uber.

So far as I can tell, the argument for Uber is that it's cheaper, and the rides are nicer and more convenient, but otherwise it's the same service. In particular, the service has not been a statistically significant source of crime.

The arguments against are that 1) it's illegal, and 2) Uber drivers don't have enough (or the right kind of) insurance.

The first argument seems contrived. Up here in NH the Portsmouth taxi commission decided that Uber is a better solution, then voted to disband. (As the Free State project points out, "where else would this happen?")

And as to the insurance argument, the Boston Globe reports that "Passengers hurt in accidents often run into denial and evasion by poorly insured firms".

Uber is a good service, people seem to like and want it.

Are there any objections I've missed? Besides "predictions", of course(*). Anyone can predict anything and sound just like an economist.

(*) Predictions are invalid because both solutions are in play right now. There's no need to predict what will happen because we can just look to see if it's happening.

I've been over the article front-to-back and could not find anything about the operating costs.

The article *does* mention the projected prices and tiers:

In short, you're lying. The article says no such thing.

Secondly, your objection is the "broken window fallacy" and it doesn't apply to this situation.

Ask yourself: does your argument also apply to road and bridge maintenance? By foregoing the buildout and repair of roads, and by avoiding maintenance for bridges one could employ other people doing other town duties such as the fire station and police.

If your argument is valid for internet service then it's valid for roads and bridges, yes?

Also, you're relying on an emotional frame by referring to the money as "borrowed money". Borrowing and being in debt is baaaad! (But let's ignore the fact that all municipal projects of any stripe are built using borrowed money.)

Wow! $6,300 per subscriber is a lot!

That's... let's see here... $525 per subscriber per month.

Yikes! That's Huuuuuuge!

That's... let's see here... $52.50 per month for 10 years.

That's... not unreasonable.

Okay, internet access is more than the build-out cost, let's suppose it's equally distributed 50% amortization and 50% ongoing costs (bandwidth, maintenance, power, &c).

That's... let's see here... roughly $100 per month for 10 years.

How long is the system expected to last? Amortization is usually over a 20 year period.

That's... let's see here... roughly $50 per month for 20 years.

That's... not unreasonable.

And doing this will bring employment for a couple of people in the town, and having fast internet access might bring a business or two to the town to generate more tax revenue.

I love emotionally framed arguments. It forces me to stop and analyze the real situation.

The link above, "multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars", was somehow replaced. It should point to the Chicago schedule of Taxi medallion transfer fees.

Transfer fees are less than the auction costs of a medallion, but are still in the 6-figure range.

A lot of economists view and post on this board, so maybe one of them could explain something to me.

The libertarian view would seem to apply here: a capitalistic system taken out of the free-market model and run by well-meaning regulation to prevent certain bad practices. Taxi rides must be regulated by government, lest the rides become unsavory, price gouging, and unsafe. Taxi rides are considered a necessary infrastructure, and thus a natural monopoly.

(And to be clear, having safe, reliable transportation in a city brings a lot of benefits: tourism, visiting businessmen, and so on.)

Despite the well-meaning reasons for all this, the taxi medallion system does not live up to it's purported goals. Taxi rides are the subject of satire, sarcasm, and mockery.

Here's a typical first-hand report.

Taxi medallions sell for multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. The money is used to fund the regulatory system surrounding taxis, and one would *suppose* that with this much money available that there would be a lot of infrastructure keeping things clean, safe, and reliable.

And yet, taxis are neither clean, safe, nor reliable. Here's a series of articles from Boston on the situation. From those articles:

It's abundantly clear that the government-regulated, natural monopoly solution simply *doesn't work*.

So here's my question: It would seem on first reading that the Libertarian view, of "remove regulation and let the free market decide" is the better solution. We have two models both active in the same market (taxi medallions with regulation, versus app-driven Uber) and it would appear that the Libertarian model is better.

Why is the Libertarian view on this particular narrow situation not the correct view?

That's a fair point.

Thanks for the info - I'll go brush up on C++ again.

Perl's strength is that it's expressive. It's not a language which is easy to learn or which generates heavily optimized code.

In the demo phase, you're not really worried about performance. The goal is to have something showing as quickly as possible, and not worry too much about how fast it runs, or how much memory it takes. Overspec your demo system for the time being (ie - make it really fast and install lots of memory), and once you have a reasonable interface go back and recode it in a simpler language which can be more easily optimized.

Languages which are simple to learn (c++, for example) are generally not very expressive. You end up spending tons of time debugging issues of memory allocation, library interface details, and datatype conversion.

Expressive languages are harder to learn, but any individual line in the expressive language does a lot more. Since you are writing fewer lines, and since the fewer lines do more, you end up making programs more easily and in less time.

Yes, the programs will execute a little slower, but as mentioned, this is not important in the demo stage. Your productivity will be much higher. And there are lots of places where performance simply doesn't matter. Scripts usually fall into this category.

Perl was designed by a linguist, not an engineer. As such, it's harder to learn (it's got tons more keywords and context), but once you get the hang of it coding is much more efficient. The following single line:

@Lines = sort { $a->{Name} cmp $b->{Name} } @Lines;

unfolds into several lines of C++, plus a subroutine definition with datatype definitions. The following line:

@Files = <c:/Windows/*.exe>;

can be implemented using one of over a dozen possible library calls in C++, but is builtin in perl. You don't have to look up the library call interface specific to your system.

And note that writing unreadable/unmaintainable code is an aspect of the *coder*, not the language. If you disregard perl because "other people use it to write poorly" you are probably one of those people, in which case you should avoid coding altogether.

"Hi, I'm the lowest-level support guy, I've got this menu I have to go down before I give up and connect you to someone who understands your problem."

"Let's start. Unplug the modem, wait 60 seconds, and plug it back in. Does that solve your problem?"

(Several steps later)

"Okay, now unplug the ethernet cable from the modem and computer, switch it end-for-end, and plug it back in again. Does that solve your problem?(*)"

This is what I have to go through before I can talk to someone about their system bouncing an E-mail I sent.

It's a psychology thing. When you need to give someone instructions or ask for help or whatever, you have to communicate the situation and what you want done.

I've never had a problem with level 2 support, they understand the problem, ask some pertinent questions ("but you can otherwise access the internet OK, yes?") and fix the problem.

If the level 1 person continually misunderstands what you are describing, misdiagnoses the problem, or stubbornly avoids dealing with your problem getting angry is a natural consequence. They are wasting your time, and doing it on purpose.

It's OK to get angry at stupid, stubborn people.

(*) Not making this up. An actual Comcast level-1 support request.